if I avoid the unsightly, the inappropriate, that negates the bulk of my living and leaves me straining in falsetto. damn the unseemly.

I get stuck. the only way i know to unstick is to approach the very moment in which i reside. so i do. i drag myself down the aisle. pulling one more box from the shelf, the smallest yet, i trudge the cart-rolling trek back shamefacedly to the register. i am sure i still blush at purchase and think with each passing month it is my last.

but no. NOoo.

george is here again, sitting with me in my mom's chair. i rock wedged between the big open windows of the hermitage and its fireplace. his presence, not that comfy. with his added weight, the wicker bites ridiculous patterns into my rump as i wait his leave. i hate his visits.

i distract myself with the thumbing of my keypad and the muffled morning rain thrumming on the metal roof. from here, i see that the leaves are beginning to clump, cling and mat. i rock; it drizzles; i bemoan the visit. still, hunting for distraction, i damn yesterday's rotten log with its belt busting force decommissioning my tractor's mulching blade. now i will have to work up the words to ask mr. bushee for a lesson in belting my banged up red babe. i am hard on my tools and toys, haranguing them to work in irregular ways. as a she-child, i did not get the useful learned lessons in machined mechanisms or their care. frankly even now, the shop bought fixetties leave me wanting. the red babe, my bladed beast, has returned from the shop more broken than not. whaaat? i paid work earned money for these repairs. they alleviate her nonfunctionalness, but bang and break something new every fricking time--broken fender, dangling head light. grrrrr. superficial i suppose, but my hard wear exasperates their bangs and breaks -- front face plate recently gone as the broken fender caught hold and ripped free from a limb clutching branch. admittedly i only forked over a hundred bucks for her, a divorce trophy from some poor souls' split.

my mind wanders back to george. how can it not, as he asserts himself with a fierce, unforgiving force. bastard. try as i might to avoid his impinging, he arrives with foreseeable frequency. here but a few days then gone again for twenty six. his nature, damn cyclical. only now has he begun to slow, stutter, and wane with the wear of age. why must he come for these excavations with his little cutting, barbaric detissuing knives? i bleed each visit. damn bastard. a week early from his habit, he sits with me in this chair. sit still, rock, he cramps me. this fall he has toyed, failing, fluttering and fluctuating in his visits, as though to leave me. i am ready for him to be gone. i yearn for the flat lake calm that will settle with the absence of his hormonally driven storms. perhaps i will be less of a woman in his wake. i've premourned his leaving for sometime -- fretting my fading femininity. he has had his damn stay for near thirty nine and three quarter years! i am ready for him to be gone. bastard.

i suppose menopause will be his unseemly boxless bitch. perhaps she will linger longer.

disremembered

the wind stops
my gait slows rhythmically
while the sun dappled canopy
whispers to nothing
i swing to an ever slower stillness
the groan of rubber soles speak the absence
with each foot fall awaiting a
single delicate trickel of sun hinted sweat
to slide on the threshold of spring
my mind recoils from the dis remembered

the four legged beast plunges off course

and the leafy fodder rustles
freeing from the moisture's cling
and the wind catches the loose tendrils
escaping the warming of my hood
the rhythm of each swung gait
a slowing pendulum
when the crisp breath of morning whispers
would you turn
would you come
if called a name not your own

the light rains come

the scent of dirt displaced. kicked up.
a dry strength crusting
in these long stretches of flat
not a land for living
but mere awe
for the passing through

2012 day 2 | here AND there noggin traveling

I am here and there
and the work keeps shifting and sliding around in my head
my binary self wants to cast off
the this or that tomorrow thinking
and choose one but not both
make for now here
to hell with functionality transport and what the next moon brings
the counter, make for tomorrow
as my "barren plains..." exhibit encroaches
banging incessantly at my door
prepare to answer I must

my cognitive self
is trying to weave the two together
into today tomorrow both
my emotional reactive self
is daunted with unattainability
so I blend cajole coddle
with my cognitive self
quietly and gently texting my reactive self
addressing her fears and ongoing dauntiness, "oh sweet reactive heart, your dauntiness is real but not true."

and so I slide about
here AND there
with ideations of fabricated chairs resurfacing in my noggin
my reactive self concurs
in all her normal dauntiness
but she likes these ideations
warming up to a certain
doability

so the mundane ramble, a poem of sorts, of a year ago begins to finally visually manifest within the field of barren plains of back turned could have beens

---

I dissolve my fabricated chairs

I have this table
bare laid built of soul
one where I repeatedly
in my recesses
draw those I love

I have them here
against their spoken wills
as I awaken I latch on to their stay
naked in heart speaking pleading
I hear my own whines

they pushed back a bit ago
not righting their chairs
nor to draw up again
yet their memory flattened
I strap upon these seatings not their own

this morning with usual effort
i dissolve these fabricated chair seatings
with straps of intimate mind musings

i set afresh the table
spilling it with sun risen scents
of just turned soils
i glide my hands
furrowing rich long runners
where water from spilled crystal seeps still
and the sun's glance splinters gracefully
across the richness piled warmth

i flare my nostrils
with the fertile ripeness
await in acceptance of unacceptance
listening even now again
for the ever drifting scents
of the emergent

i dissolve these fabricated chair seatings
with my hands deep amid turned soil
again

flat on my back

flat on my back
with the rich blueness ebbing in
out I roll
curled inward
with the scents of morn floating over
under I stretch
upright in motion
with the salts of work flowing
trickling, clinging
down I bend

in my flattened ebbing, curled floating,
uprighted flowing, trickling, clinging
bended i gently undulate with the waves of my internal workings
in a wrestling of unacceptance
outside of my touch, my sway

I hunt the splintering horizon of tomorrows
building on forward rocky steps
hindered by yesterday's tethers
or balanced

a revisiting of my mfa design grad thesis (not boring)

really surprisingly not a boring thesis. much of it already exists in various forms on the initial portions of this blog (back track to 2006). it reminds me both of where i've been and that it is time to more fully embrace where it will lead me.

different would be nice.

oh. what to do. what.
this way. that.
which is forward. which is back.
is it a giving.
in or up.
perhaps better.
at least different.
different would be nice.

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong...-Robert Frost.

there is a window found in time
its threshold in which one must pass
to embed within the structure
of a living breathing enclosed community

if for whatever reason
whether a soul puddling that leaves one limp
or a clash of big and smallness that levels one but not the other
the stalling of the leveled, the limp, before this temporal threshold
silenced and opaque the windowed portal will become
inaccessible

---

unedited ramble

what is the relationship of writing to making; making to writing; both to thinking, being?

turning

the subdued rich earthy hues flourish as the greens are slowly swallowed by the waning light with its crisp breath

it's so quiet I can hear life tic

cloaked in my black turtleneck
its weave warms instantly as the
sun's dapples, having fallen
between the limbs, strike

everything relaxed
I hear the tic of an occasional
winged callings across silent currents
spindled legs hum quietly yet frenetically in unknown languages
the rustled leaves shift during bushy tailed foraging
loud and louder still in the burst then again again

an intrusion of the ebbing stream
cedar panels echo with repetitive beatings

assuming a small flitting winged pecker
I rise, with a silent stalk to the edge, cornering MY shelter, i shoooo him off its protective facade.

MINE. not yours.
human cognition, fear, and thus possessiveness take over the moment
darn again

the glancing blows that strike deep

i speak of my hermitage for months on end
he speaks of himself as hermit

right
why would either brave the waters
let alone seek any form of tribe
right as usual
in that stark painful way

perhaps to glance across
the surface and submerged of other
seeing their beauty and wounds
but the primitive intimacy
of belonging with another

there were no sharks
only the glancing blows
that strike deep
cutting rivers of red
seeping out across
the barren plains of
back turned could have beens

the unmendables

regularly, daily, by the moment
and then again
must i re-release
the unmendables
the ununderstandables
the unrelationships
the unundones
from that which lingers
within my inner flows
of heart and mind

I re-untwist the way
they weave and braid
through my soul

these fibers
really aren't undoable unravelable
they are to twined to my being
to who I am
to resist this is to unaccept
what is just so

so i learn to hold loosely the
compulsion to un the unnings
i open my grip
let them hold their own course
leave them as they are
embedded in who i am
they are now simply
a part of the myriad
from which I am made

to tug on the fibers of the uns
undoes me
unlives me

---

perhaps this is what John Middleton Murry meant when he said, "for a good man to realize that it is better to be whole than to be good is to enter on a strait and narrow path compared to which his previous rectitude was flowery license."

perhaps? I still must think on this one because used as license, it seems flawed; used purely, it seems truth and sometimes even stumbled upon erroneously, it can mend.

Location:Villa De Matel Rd, Houston, Harris, Texas 77023

I dissolve my fabricated chairs

I have this table
bare laid built of soul
one where I repeatedly
in my recesses
draw those I love

I have them here
against their spoken wills
as I awaken I latch on to their stay
naked in heart speaking pleading
I hear my own whines

they pushed back a bit ago
not righting their chairs
nor to draw up again
yet their memory flattened
I strap upon these seatings not their own

this morning with usual effort
i dissolve these fabricated chair seatings
with straps of intimate mind musings

i set afresh the table
spilling it with sun risen scents
of just turned soils
i glide my hands
furrowing rich long runners
center points of this table within
where water from spilled crystal seeps still
and the sun's glance splinters gracefully
across the richness piled warmth

i flare my nostrils
with the fertile ripeness
await in acceptance of unacceptance
listening even now again
for the ever drifting sounds
of the emergent

i dissolve these fabricated chair seatings
with my hands deep amide turned soil
again

I am the old woman

I find I am the old woman
with a loosening of my hands
I sense and recognize the rocks there in each
I've been slowly plucking my collection free
from my swollen knobby rock worn pockets
I intimately attend to why each was
gathered, stored, held, and on occasion hurled
closing my eyes,
I feel the where and the why
from which they came
some I understand
some are still lost to me
but they are from my pockets my collections
one by one as I am able
I lay them down in a quieted silence
I step forward
making room to release more behind me
as my lined path becomes evident

on an occasion I still catch myself hurling

just yesterday
her name not even known
I threw one at a "primadona"
when she stepped away 
she would not know it was me
when she felt its blunt thud
but the person who stood by me
watched my arm with its force
perhaps they now are afraid
I have a stone for them as well
I can not get my stone back
I cannot erase the view
or the minds re-call
this time though I instantly recognized
my unexpected hurl for what it was
not soon enough to catch myself
before my fingers released
so now instead I gently look at the internal need
from which my action sprang
awe, my heaved stone
had nothing to do with the "primadona" primadona-ing
and everything to do with my own insecurity
about being labeled "man hater"
I gave a lecture on 1970s feminist art movement
oh I was feeling unsettled, less than,
i have been working hard on not having relational hurts
transfer as gender generic land mines
working so hard to let relational hurts be
just what they are and
between only those which they lay between
so in my hypersensitivity to a phrase such as "man hater"
I heaved a stone simply to say
dang it feel better kathy for at the least
you're better than her and her "primadona-ing"

I would like to see feel recognize the propulsion
for my stone collecting and throwing
before I collect before I throw
I don't want to collect or throw, hurl or even toss
my collection and hurling is a kind of unliving
so as in my art
where sensitivity and working with not against
my materials is important, a type of inward listening
I move toward being sensitive to and
working with the material and identity of soul,
and gently I bend and set down another stone
with hopes to not pick it up again
I really am the old woman
with a loosening of my hands
I still sense and recognize the rocks there in each
and slowly I lay one down
living a little more deeply, listening and awakened

and i see that the name he'd written
there in the sand by my bared feet is my own
it is still whispered
living even in the breath of the wind
my Beloved