writing-for-catharsis

[writing-for-catharsis]

Baby Blue and Barbed Wire.

I am not the sum of my parts—

Rather, I am an experience

A work in progress

Ever reaching

For that tender leaf to unfurl

To hold me in its arms

and tell me

I am whole.

[writing-for-catharsis]

My art all too clearly reflects my serotonin levels.

[writing-for-catharsis]

But what if you just, like, slept?

What if, in the lengthening night

You remained closed?

Every intrusive thought need not be a whole bloody parliamentary hearing.

[writing-for-catharsis]

You forgot something.

W h o o s h.

Old papers from dusty mind files

Spitting

A L L

O V E R.

A fired up meat computer

Overpowering the worthless bag of bones attached to it

All I did was go to bed.

And made the mistake of shutting my eyes.

Then I worsened tenfold open.

My TV static eyesight in darkness

Clouded in a sea of sparks

And making pattern out of nonsense

A figure here and there

The demon in my doorway

Doing nothing, but i n c h i n g closer.

[writing-for-catharsis]

Shifting curtains

Lights beyond lights

I see in glassy heights, this soaring

cloud in

fractures along a broken wall, along the city spires and

Fall

ing

As night wraps inward

breezy love-walks

hand in hand

So much space and little between them

As they l o o k into eyes

And leave little grooves in sand

How the city beats its heart

beneath dark blue blanket

muffled, amplified

so full and empty

Pulsing

through fractured glass

and orange lamplight

and blue mist

And sings across water

into night.

[writing-for-catharsis]

Pain is not the ruthless one.

She only grazed you to reach at purpose.

It was Numbness who came to you last night.

And spread out like a blanket over bones

The hypothermic chill that shortly shakes and shivers

Then stops.

And then you know the heavy warmth that brings oncoming slumber and internal anesthesia.

A soft song

A ringing in the ears

The void you fill long after the silence.

[writing-for-catharsis]

I do not belong in my memories.

That was not me.

It is not linear.

I exist here.

Only here.

And everywhere.

It is both a single moment, and eternity

where I lie here,

in my bed

with a pillow between my arms and

between my legs

and between each hemisphere of brain

I forget, here

every sun dried afternoon

every silvered sleep

I dream

without rest

and tug the between pillow

and squeeze

hard enough to feel

my own ruthless apathy

the surrender

It is not linear.

I exist here.

[writing-for-catharsis]

Spring Thaw

by Gordon Gilsdorf

Most things die reluctantly, clinging to the life they know, like snow trying to hold the land far beyond the middle of March. How can it know that April will not have violets without warm rains and that surrender is the only way to inherit the earth?

[writing-for-catharsis]

pretty shitty how baseline human activities like singing, dancing and making art got turned into skills  instead of being seen as behaviors

so now it’s like ‘the point of doing them is to get good at them’ and not ‘this is a thing humans do, the way birds sing and bees make hives’.

[writing-for-catharsis]

9/29/19, 2:30pm, Boston, MA:

I saw the man jump into the fountain, making no splash and having never existed at all.

. . .

One hour earlier:

I heard the delivery boy in the line outside the store, sharing philosophy and scripture with the old men. They spoke of salvation. I wondered if salvation filled the belly as it does the soul.

Two hours earlier:

I fed cracker crumbs to the birds under the shadow of Trinity Church. I lamented that I could feed the birds but not the old man bathing in the fountain.

The day before: 9/28/19, Somewhere in Ohio

I jogged through the night air and I took in the life unfolding around the block. Men gathered in a golden lit garage to drink and let their wives clean up their dishes without recompense. The young girls down the street in their homecoming dresses and curled locks were playing games in the dusk light, giggling and calling up to their friend’s window above. I breathed steadily, my dog trotting beside me as I turned the corner and wandered back to my own small grey dwelling.

. . .

9/29/19, Boston, MA:

I saw the man jump into the fountain, making no splash and having never existed at all. I cannot say whether I imagined him or not. Not even the birds saw him go.

[writing-for-catharsis]

Iron sharpens iron.

When I learn to pick up a spoon instead of a knife,

When I scoop the world to myself

(Or myself to the world)—

I learn to fill up and empty

Without cuts

Without resistance.

Today,

I can chew on the Fear

The Anxiety

The Disappointment—

I can taste my own bitterness

In its entirety and momentary-ness—

and swallow without a lingering presence.

Tomorrow,

I may forget the spoon again.

But desperation always leads me back to the drawer.

All knives rust.

[writing-for-catharsis]

Log entry of 2/4/20

Space jams and hooligans

I’m a rocket on a racing track

Can’t hold back

Like a burning ball of matter

How about a ride on this comet?

Spinning through a sea of stars and on it I can see a smile in the corners of the galaxy between you and yourself

You’re a nebula of thought and feelings

A mass of restless hands and feet

And a racing mind beneath the cool of the surface

But am I really listening?

Or does this frequency flatter me?

You’re an equation just like everyone else

But there is something in this trajectory

Where I find myself stalling

Long enough to hear a heartbeat in the void

You’re a slow burning star.

[writing-for-catharsis]

“Nobody looks like what they really are on the inside. You don’t. I don’t. People are much more complicated than that. It’s true of everybody.”

— Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

[writing-for-catharsis]

This IS America.

Knees on neck

Cries for a mother

Bones crushed by a mob at the door

As I shut my eyes for bed

I do not sleep.

Just an instant replay

Blood curdling cries of the boy in the uniform

Pleading with the horde

Crushing him behind the door

The uselessly calm voice of a mother

“You shot him sir. You asked him to show you his wallet and you shot him”

Holding her child and staring down the barrel of a badge and gun.

The enemies in each are the same.

Lies. Hate. Racism.

The news anchor tells me I am numb.

So he rolls the tape.

And I am easily broken.

Out of duty,

I force the images to my eyes

Weeping is the easy part.

My soul is screaming.

DO NOT TELL LIES OF FALSE EQUIVALENCY.

Black Lives Matter > Confederate Flag

Equality > White Supremacy

Hard Truth > Conspiracy Theories

Target Store ≠ Center of Governance

“Stop Killing Us” > “Hang Mike Pence”

“I Can’t Breathe” > “Tell fucking Pelosi we’re coming for her”

This IS America.

This is not new.

Just on the internet.

Remember this moment.

I hope to gods this is rock bottom.

I will never forget the hopelessness

That awoke in me years ago

And hasn’t left me since.

I will never forget these darkest moments.

While people drop like flies in overcrowded ICU’s

While we survey the carnage in the streets

When the failure of centuries hits us at full force

While we lie in our beds

Desperately searching for sleep

Finding nothing but the instant replay

The insurgence of our pain.

“We were good people…the government did this to us”

I cannot sleep.

The screams.

All I can hear are the SCREAMS.

I CAN’T BREATHE

Mother!

MAMA!

Please

please…

This is America.

[writing-for-catharsis]

Ooh ooh lemme give you two!:

I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six. - Dylan Thomas, A Child’s Christmas in Wales

I remember these lines because they so perfectly capture the nature of memory and particularly childhood memory. So soft, so sweet and a little sad from the distance of them :’)

The other is an E.E. Cummings line:

nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

This is from one my favorite poems, somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond

I just love the way Cummings does with words what I do to painting. Deconstruction, abstraction. It’s word abstraction, which opens up the meaning, makes it all encompassing. It taps into the concept of connectedness. The greatest illusion of this world is the illusion of separation (yes I pulled that from Avatar the Last Airbender because why the fuck not)

what is one line of poetry/writing that lives in ur head rent free please share i would like to know 

[writing-for-catharsis]

In Search of Our Grandmothers

The old women like to ask me to dance

And as I flutter around them they cast coins at my feet

For a moment, we are with it

That re-memory, together

Summer festivals where we are the barefoot gals

Gold bangles on banjo strings, sipping wine from clay and laughing through the wood smoke

Merry as the night is long, long after the men are gone, stolen by the slumber of bloated bellies

And when the moon silk pulls away

And the dance is done

I collect my coins while they clasp their beads and linger on the last note, humming low and landing slowly as the last lily petal from a grandmother’s fingers.

[writing-for-catharsis]

Poem of 1/30/20

Blue

And black

This blanket full of holes

That wraps itself around my bones

And calls me by my name