My Fleetwood Cadillac is, for all intensive purposes, a tank with leather interior.

Externally, it is indestructible with two scars: 1) a cracked parking light from months ago when my mother dented a man's side door in a parking lot, and 2) a scratched side mirror from last week when I demolished someone else's by taking a corner too quickly.


Internally, it is the perfect road-trip car, if the engine itself were stable enough to manage long distances. Instead, we frequent the drive-in and pretend it is a sofa.


I am worried that I am the opposite of my car: a soft-leather exterior that cannot afford itself protection, and a tank of an interior who has hardened prematurely in order to compensate.


I would rather be the mirror of my car: an exterior of a woman who can take care of herself, independent, strong, able to be the anchor in the midst of a torrent,
but internally soft, caring and full of trust, protected enough by my substantial exoskeleton.

I do not have, or know, the language for I need you yet.

Black crows circling up above
crying out, do you hear that sound?
I never thought it'd come to this
paradise raised to the ground

Sometimes I don't sleep at night
I hear the wind in the morning trees
I wonder how my child will fair
with wars and bombs and thieves

The thunder has begun

Some are blind but choose to see
lies into the truth they weave
some put their trust in Faith
Some say I don't believe

Each man unto himself
there an island in a raging sea
with a boat to anchor or sail
of the two, which will it be?

The thunder has begun

A storm is gonna come
A storm is gonna come
A storm is gonna come

Who's the one that watches you
who says your rights are wrong
when preacher and the judge are lying
a change is coming, it won't be long

We may have burned the bridge too far
we may have run ourselves too far.
When you look in the mirror, friend
what is it that you want to ask?

The thunder has begun

Dear father when you left me here
you lay your head in eternal sleep
you told me that all remains
Love is all we have to keep

The thunder has begun

A storm is gonna come (find a heaven, find a shelter)
A storm is gonna come (find a port, find a harbor)
A storm is gonna come (find a friend, find a lover)
A storm is gonna come (find a sister, find a brother)



This entire song is worth just the last four lines
A Storm is Gonna Come - Piers Faccini

The stressed syllable is the one anguished between regular words found

in the bowels of the dictionary,

sitting on the shelf of a deceased man's legacy.

"It was finally when I was telling only the truth that I was telling the most lies." - Nietzsche

Billy, the magician I met this weekend, says: Always telling the truth is actually omitting... it is not rendering the relative quality of truth. Not everyone can accept the truth.

Some people would die.

And here I am, thinking honesty was the best policy.

I am learning phonetics, as though it is a new language. See below:

Olivia wrote a vilanelle the other day for our Poetry Workshop called "The Artist".
It is about the many, universal variations of how people react to art, with distancing, perspective. It is about the empathy of an individual subject, of wanting to protect or sympathize with the artist.

"I watched the artist slowly torn." - Oliv

This made me grab hold of a variation; of the "I" as defensive on behalf of the artist. Which led to the following sketchings:

Let me buffer the delivery of reaction.
I will scour the newspapers and cut out the reviews, so you will hold up windows instead
until you are ready to hear them.
I will hold them until that point.

It reminds me of the scene in 'Finding Neverland' when J.M. Barrie's play is a flop, and his maid cuts the reviews out of the newspaper, so that when he is sitting on the park bench and unfolds the paper, we see his face through the outline of the absent article. What love, what empathy. What care.

I feel as though there is a plethora of information today, nearly none of which I can effectively make sense of, especially if I want to keep these posts relatively short (but why value brevity over clarity?)

Chronologically...

My dream last night: Alex with younger brother (Adam?) who comes home drunk. You are angry, but I take him from you, give him care, put him to bed. He asks me why you and I are back together again. Do I know, he asks, that you may not be enough for me? He starts to evoke his drunken opinion, I tell him to keep it. No one expects to break another's heart, I say, you can't forsee it... unless they've always meant to break it. I will keep this, I tell him, the possibility that he may break my heart again because he is what I need at present. Anything else, I say, I don't want to know.
Your older-younger sister is upset at drunkness, at broken bedtimes, at lost routines... commands in order to hold onto here dwindling sphere of influence. Younger brother & sister - twins hide behind doors. Did I imagine the brother twin? The younger sister brushing teeth downstairs until I come to find her: "You know you can talk to me, right?" and the 9 - 12 year-old tidal wave spills; her older sister gets more angry where she should become softer or more able to retain compassion. Where are your parents? In the absence of the parents, this girl needs an older woman, to speak to, confide in, verify her 10-year-old sanity. Put down your toothbrush, stop taking care of your older brothers. Does your older sister exist? Or is she the premonition of who you will grow into? Don't let the weight of care, of this responsibility, age you too heavily. Do not become stone.
I reach in while I still can; as an outsider, your eldest brother's girlfriend, the novelty of my presence something you can invest in liking. Let me take advantage of this. The older, perhaps imagined, sister is Jessie? But what is your name? The faded dream cannot even afford me a first initial. Sarah? Gracie? Perhaps the twins evolved from older forms of Cameron & Gracie (two twins I babysit), except you, the girl, stem more from my sister, Mathilda, when she speaks to older-sister-familiar-not-residential me, the novelty of not living together. You, the girl, stem more from me.
Maybe I hold my own hand, spill my own tsunamis.

I woke up and got out of bed after getting in & out of bed so much in my dream. When I got back in, you had rolled over. I wanted to pull you back, to say: I am cold and dreamt of sadness.

My alarm went off too early - you came back across the bed to wake me up. To which I said: I was cold, and had a bad dream. When I came back, you were futher away & I didn't want to wake you.

You pulled me in & brought me back. And again, conscious this time, I missed my alarm.
A small sacrifice for the warmth of comfort.

I like words with slant rhymes -- words that remind me of each other, without an easy rhyme or reason.
Examples:


- combat and comeback - Cameron and cameraman
- paper and waiter


(Sarah: Those last two rhyme.
Me: Paper and waiter? No they don't.
Sarah: ... in my head they do.)


Addendum:
Drew Bear: "What about 'Walter the waiter who wastes water'?"



"Perhaps people like us cannot love.
Ordinary people can -- that is their secret."
- Hermann Hesse, German poet

Introduction

Thoughts, poems, scribbles, sketchings.

Somewhere hidden in maps of my personal cartographies.

Something more public than the modes I have been trying.

Something for those I do not see, or speak to, nearly often enough.