Conversations Among the Ruins

I am way out west lately. Southwest of the southwest "Town" - It isn't a city it hasn't hit me that way yet, hit me on a freezing street of drip puddled ice on my skin / when are you

hey when are you coming home? It's a spin mass head warp of time zone fill/ hit the meeting get into the circle drink coffee light the marlboro/ I never know how to spell that word luckily the pack is always next to my key pad.

Briefly, you were my lover. It was on some astral realm far off into the desert where we spun in some cages hanging from a fire spitting elephant, holding hundreds of people and us, tangled up in the wire of the cage. I chased you forever and imagined an imaginary life with you, picked you up off the strip at three a.m and let my wife crawl into bed with us. I passed you two of my favorite spheres and when you left, you left, farther away than I thought you would go. I felt you forget me and get occupied with other people places and things. I did the same.

And today is your birthday; you thought I forgot about you, let you blow away in this valley up into the Rockies. I laugh to as what are you now 22? Twenty seven right? Today is your twenty seventh birthday?

"I taste like twenty seven." We laugh before I blurt out after an awkward silence that I met someone, and you get silent and choke out "I'm happy for you. That's important."

And the world spins as a place now where I respect you differently, where we talk of our playa family and I tell you that everything, no matter what, will be alright. You sigh out an unconvincing noise of forced indifference before I say

Hey. I love you. You are my family. My fam-il-y and you matter. Not like moop, like matter, not out of place in my heart.

Today I painted. To the point that I accidentally spray painted my white tattoo yellow, so we'll see what happens. I have space and drop cloth and giant canvases and ideas.

I'm sleeping less and working more and today this man I'm stupid in love with turned to me he said

"Someday somebody is going to randomly discover your art. They are going to be affluent and powerful and you'll be an over night mega success. It'll happen just like that."

So I stood there, staring at him, a cigarette in one of my hands, a spray bottle of yellow paint clicking as I shook the other.

It's been one year since I started painting canvas and I do it for the head fuck of it all, in order to create something that I utterly hate for a period of time until it turns into something I love. Much a symbolism of my own self. In one year I have painted thirty nine pieces, and I have thousands more. Ideas, that always turn to something different. It's life in a square in a nutshell.

I have a dull migrane and I'm too lazy to make another pot of coffee or set my alarm for 7:09 a.m. I'm obsessed with this crystal castles track and in this quiet dark I know I need to sleep but I've been thinking

a lot lately

about how fucked up it was when I first moved here. But I made it through. I made it through and here I am.

HL

Why

do the

people

that I

love

the most

turn me into

the sharpest

knife

with the

most

blood?

Yesterday I went to Lake Mead and threw popcorn at the biggest fish I have ever seen in my life. I was

laughing in this sun that was waiting for us to get out of bed, for my head to get off of your chest as I

read to you from an old worn out Rod McKuen book (step into the warm.) It took me three hours to get

the matts of near dreads out of my hair, and you didn't care you just busied yourself on the phone with

your daughter, one of my favorite people and one of the only people to ever surprise me with a solar

dancing flower for Giles. I went to a meeting to tell a girl that she is beautiful and to give another girl Rose Quartz

and smoky quartz points, and when I left I got to go back to you, where we get too deep into conversations

to walk away from each other to make the coffee and you show me the pictures of your family as they all

grew up. The puppy boxer and the brilliant red headed cozims of spirit, your children, when they were children and

your hair was long, like Rapunzel and honey, and coffee cream and silk fire.

We named this black duck the Murder Duck at that lake and you kissed me in that ancient sun as dozens of pound sized

fish lazily swam next to us, we were present enough to notice their scale patterns and personalities. It was an armada of seagulls

and fish, ducks and even my favorite, the lone awkward twitchy black bird, the beautiful misfit, that the rest of the bird species

avoided, but clearly had a more complex strategy. His black feathers looked like rainbow oil in that sun and we slowly ran out of

popcorn and bid our armada for those moments goodbye.

The sun was blinding and we talked about love and planets, muddy lines and how I send my mom pictures of plants so she can

tell me what they are. I can feel how truly special you believe my mother to be, I feel it in the morning in the way you look at

me and see my whole life as I dance around the room to classic rock, trying to find my cowboy boot, the one covered in that

desert dust because I kick up as much dust as possible onto them every time we walk around the middle of fucking nowhere

together, making it somewhere, because

I bought those boots in the heart of Chicago three years ago and swore to them that someday I would wear them with a life like

this life.

I went to work today and got promoted. I have a big girl job now with big girl hours and I work for somebody that believes me

capable of things like accounting and packing a lunch for myself. This week I was asked to speak for an H&I panel, to go to rehab

institutions and

tell

my

story.

"You will save lives because you saved your own."

I had looked up at the moon, ancient as the sun, laughed, asking what the fuck do I wear? Not thinking of the beautiful misfit

black bird I would meet the following day, with the darkest suit that shone the most in all of it's complex brightness in the

ancient staring

sun.

It is 6:45 in the morning and I'm smiling at the orange mountains.
It's a water colored painting as I drive west on the 215, the smog and sprawled skyline of Las Vegas fifteen miles off in the distance below.
It's a ying yang of love and hate for me to this day at this daylight hour. When the sun just cracks it puts my head in a place of that eerie morning feeling, when I hadn't slept and the onslought of sickness was starting, when I'd be driving, unable to find my cigarettes or lighter or sunglasses or any relative form of who I chose to exist as. Only I have slept, and I'm not clattering my Jameson induced brilliance in my head, I"m wearing a baseball hat and sunglasses and pajamas and mentally checking off the invoices I should get at work in a few hours as the brilliance of this desert fills my skull and I sip my coffee.
I won't down two bottles of water and six advil and I won't be throwing up my puffy face as quietly as possible at work today. Nope. Just for today, not today, or the past three hundred and forty one days for that matter.

But it is 7:00 am in Las Vegas and that means many things to many people. I catch sight of it from the distance, a silver Mazda 6 smoking down the east bound side of the highway. The car is going well into the hundreds and I watch with muted horror as it loses control and hits the median, does three complete three sixties, hits the wall on the other side of the highway, and, in a crushed metal shape of an object, stops.

There were no other cars and as I gazed out at the mountains I, for the first time, got to instantly, like a stab wound, feel fortunate for a way of life in which I walked away from. I got to walk, when so many are carried out in stretchers, coffins, or worse, stuck.

I trip a lot that Im twenty seven and "sober" makes me a fucking alien. "But I have the rest of my LIFE to be boring!"

But would I have the rest of my life? And am I boring? Likely not, and not at all.

I get home, through the parking garage, up the elevator, to my front door, and into my house. It is still dark as the sun hasn't hit at the radius of my windows yet.

Sitting on my balcony I light a cigarette

so the sun doesn't have to see it all

they way I had to see it

all the

time for

all that

time.

I go through the edges a lot lately.
The edges of my ten million recounted stories. I see myself, thin with black hair in a matted fur coat in a mini mart on Belmont & Sheridan, trying to use a payphone but I didn't have any change, all I had was a card. I kept dialing the numbers on the card, spinning, spun, thinking to myself

"Where the fuck is the red line. That way, or that way. What way is the lake? Where is Lake Michigan?

What
way
is the
lake

and what
way
is the
subway?"

I don't remember who I was calling because I didn't know at the time. Just somebody. Anybody to tell me how to get to the red line.I don't know why now and I didn't know why at the time. Had I looked outside I would have seen the lake. It was right in front of me. The red line a block down the street. I had grown afraid of taxi cabs and subways alike, so I would put on my walkman and walk through the alleys, no structured idea as to of where I was coming from or going. I don't know where now because I didn't know why at the time.

I didn't have any change but I was nineteen and had you asked me I would have told you I'd already seen everything in the world and over my dead body would I ever see my twenty first birthday. Sometimes my tweaker friends would promise me we could go to the dollar store and six days later turn to me and say

I wasn't fit for a place of that structure, that I'd make it look bad. I would wait that long. Just for somebody.

Once he brought me to some suburb and put me onto the Metra because after three hours of taking a chain saw to the engine of a car in a garage I started to whine that he was freaking me out and the smell was making me sick. I had no idea if I was going into the city or out of it. No idea what way the lake was, which direction. I had no change, and I had no direction.

It was passing out in an alley in the industrial district one night and eating lobster in the presidential suite at the Penninsula hotel the next, sitting on a grand piano because all of the furniture was moved to one side of one of the rooms so we could try to do back flips into every pillow, cushion and piece of bedding in the six room suite and hiding all of the drugs when some guy in a bee costume almost broke his neck at 7 in the morning.

I was nineteen and I didn't have any change for a pay phone, and fuck pay phones, because I"m still here, the lake is somewhere else that I'll never have to be by again, and pay phones might as well be put on desplay in history museums. I have a fairly fantastic view of what direction the city of Chicago is to me now, and it's East.

Two thousand miles
east. I can't see it

but sometimes

no matter what direction I"m in
I feel it.

It's a mixed bag
to say the
least.

Happy
nineteenth
birthday,

onion
ring.

I'm sure
happy that
you exist.

You & your
valley friends

of care
bears,

armed with
.22's, stacking up

your own sections
of chairs in
NA meetings,

calling it
death row

as you all
eat the
cake your

years
earned,
whispering

like
girls wearing
hard knock

tattoos
instead of

lacy
dresses.

My crop
of flamingos

in faded
leather
bombers

riding
Harleys
sitting on

death row
with

cake
sure

teach me
a lot

about
living,

the
laughing
part of

that,
mostly. I never
really

got to
be
nineteen. But

maybe
someday.

It is

a nice
hope

to have, and

a nice
hope

to see.

I wake up
under my rainbow
bed spread, in a

beautiful room
full of color
the sun

streaming in.

I stuff my head
under
a sky blue pillow.

Yes. My Bears
are in the
playoffs, against

the Packers; the
biggest rivalry
in the Midwest.

I want -5 degrees,
a three course
dinner, mac and
cheese

and snow.
Michelle would
burn appetizers,

I would cuddle
with boyfriends
screaming

obsenities
at the calls
with my father,

decked
in navy and
orange. Football

represents
all of the
living rooms

I loved
the people I
love

in. And today
is the biggest day
of the fucking

year. I have
no plans

just a lap top
my coffee
cigarettes

paint, and a
television I can't
bring myself

to turn on
to mute the
quiet.

I

think about
you

all of the
time. I

wonder what
you think about

before you go
to sleep. I

wonder what you
look like

when you leave
for school.

I imagine, that
you wonder
the same things

about me
too. I wonder
if you

trust
how much
that for
always

I will
love you

and that
no matter
what

in the whole
entire
universe

I am right
there. You are

an eight year
old that

is saving all of
the money in
your piggy bank

to go to
Chile.

You are
mezmorizing
and the most

beautiful
person
on this

planet;
the greatest

gift
I never knew
how to wrap

because
the only paper
was my

stomach. I
wonder if

you get like
I do

in crowded
rooms, where

they make me
nervous and I
take myself

somewhere
else. To a
place

where it's
easier, and
full of

ecstatic
life. It's the

place in my
head

where I think
about you.

Every
single
day. I

get to
have that.

My life is
an unusually
placed

scrap book
on this
planet and

because of
you

so many
pages
are simply

beyond
extraordinary.

The plus side of never going to art school but making art anyway:

I'm a whore for cheap shit. Here is a short list of things I have used in my paintings -

SPRAY GLUE
glitter
clearance spray paint
deca podge
smashed potato chips
cigarette butts and ashes
wal nuts
macadamia nuts
potpurii (this will be brilliant. I am so excited to do this project. Gold and burnt umber and baby blue hellooooo)
sugar
flower

I paint with plastic gift cards and chopped credit cards instead of brushes
drywall
cigarette packs
popcorn ceiling foam
silly string
coffee grounds
troll hair

beads
yarn
hands
did I say spray glue?

I don't have the money to go to Blick and spend $20 a tub for gloss/ resin sand/ matte mediums, and I'm in a fucking mood if I'm at Michaels' actually buying an un used canvas. Whenever I use a high gloss medium I end up covering that layer anyway. The acrylic canvas that I paint is generally made up of un numberable layers.

So I use
toothpaste and
all sorts of variations above. When

I paint I don't think about

anything.

So what comes out
to those canvases
are the layers and layers and
layers and layers of

the place
that I get to
go

when I don't
have to be
here.

It is nice to know
within those layers

how many other
places
there really
are.

I met half of the New York crime family that moved and took over Chicago in a Kinko's with Antoinette today. I was editing her head shots for her lecture and the man stopped me by grabbing my arm and said

"Are you from fuckin Chicago? What are you doing with Sam's daughter?"

Thank God Antoinette charmed me out of that one. She feeds me an awful lot lately, tells me she'll teach me to cook so my men don't leave me when somebody younger and more attractive that knows how to cook cooks for them.

I sit in a Starbucks and laugh with her over all of this, her gloss head shots covering the table. She catches my wrist, which is slightly out of my long sleeved jacket.

"Awwww what the hell did I tell you?!?! The DRESSES." She yells as people turn to watch.

"Antoinette. When I get there, to those dresses, I

will wear them. They will not

wear me."

I have been thinking an awful lot lately about Heather K. Her husband shot her in the head a week after I decided to stop getting fucked up as a recreational activity. She was sexy and vivacious and out of respect to her beautiful family I won't put the line I just wrote up here up here. About the image of her on that day in that dimly lit room, the black speck on her forehead above her eyes.

Heather's picture sits on my shelf, it was her prom day. It could be a regular photo but her burial prayer, time and date of services is on the back. I wake up every morning lately and pick up that picture. I wrote letters and letters and letters to her family. About the impact of a woman that had such beauty without the snobbery that comes with the territory.

Heather fills that dress perfectly in her picture, a woman at seventeen, wearing a dress that isn't wearing her instead. I remember clearly silently, for a half hour in that dim room watching photographs from her life, her friends and the baptisims of her children, drunk nights and happy nights, listless nights smiling with friends, with the text as the credits being to make sure to tell people in your life much you love them.

And I get lost in those funeral processions sometimes before I catch myself and keep living instead. I kept fucking living man and that's all I have to offer, and I did it in a way, finally, where my teeth aren't chattering out nonsense in a trailer park in Indiana at 9am and I'm not crying over people screaming in the distance in a house I grew up in.

"I dug a six foot hole to my friends casket and stuck a cement squirrel in it." True life.

Sometimes I wish I could just say it all, it'd be so much more interesting for you to read.

Mostly I'm thankful that today, I don't have to say it all. Because I don't have to think it all, either, and that just shuts that noise the fuck up, and that is a beautiful thing.

I could have never imagined the person that I am today, and I hope I can't imagine the person that I will be in the future. I said to my friend, who was going to meet somebody in LA,

"Well. He is this man. And I love him. He's a lot older than I am but I don't care. People tell me it's weird. Do you think it's weird?"

And he laughs and quickly says to me

"It's you. We both know how much weirder that has gotten."

And I light a cigarette, inhale, exhale, before I sigh and say

"Aaahhhhh. You're a motherfucker, and I love you." Before I hang up

every phone, catching sight

of my wrist

that won't ever let a dress

wear me.

I'm self centered.

So I'm about to write how

I don't have growing pains, I have growing pains/ yes. That are amputations. They are pains growth, but I don't grow a few inches/ no. I straight jacket myself to a chair and saw off my limbs. After that I don't grow, I free fall for a while until I morph. I am growing into what I already know, the only catch is is that knowing it

is bloody and it stings. It alters me. Every mirror in this place that is mine is shattered. Creating cracks, you never know who those cracks will end up touching.

I live in a high rise. It's fucking beautiful. My giant balcony has a fake palm tree and wicker furniture on it, and the sun pours into my house at seventy degrees on this January afternoon. The view is lush landscaping that costs thousands of dollars a month to maintain. This is normal to me, a person that used to sleep for ten days straight like it was normal. Shit sure flips when you do the work required to crash, burn, cut yourself up and walk on in order to free fall and morph.

I lay lazily on my back on my contemporary yet child like Ikea rug, lazily smoking cigarettes at around two a.m. I have met somebody that I love, and getting to know that love requires fairly limited sleep at first. We would sit in my closet talking until six am.

"I have always been parilyzingly terrified of zombies. When I first saw dawn of the dead I didn't sleep for months. Zombies shift my spirit, they move me, because they are very real to me. One day, my mentor casually mentioned that the Zombie archetype represents a man without a spirit. Just very simply she said that to me, and it rocked my world. Because I am very afraid of the absence of spirit in myself, as well as others. Zombies are a visual representation of that.

I am aware that I live in fucking zombie land out here. This building has solid security with guards and fifty cameras twenty four hours a day, and there is a reason for that. I live between the strip and the Hard Rock Hotel. On every single side of this building is weekly living. In Chicago, there are projects, and straight ghettos, that are segregrated. You grow up knowing not to walk into those places, but in Vegas, those places ooze out all over. There aren't sections of poverty stricken crime and desperation. There is simply the strip, the rest, Henderson and Summerlin. I didn't understand that weeklies are the equivalence of projects out here, and on every single side of this building, there they are. I live in the "rest" and the strip leaves me aghast and exhausted, I've been there three times and I live within one blocks walking distance.

I am not judging the poor I am speaking on what I see. Gas station attendants getting shot and murdered a block from my house, a man getting tazered until he puked in a parking lot, bodies either dead or passed out on street mediums, and mostly, the total absence of presence in every single person you see walking down the street here. The only difference between here declared disaster zones such as Haiti is that here our Government cares what it looks like and in this country there is "choice"

This is zombie land, and I am safe in a monitored high rise, laying lazily on my back on my favorite rug smoking Marlboros. Las Vegas is a place that people come to in order to abandon their spirit, this city cashes in and survives on that fact. Do you ever take a good look at what you see around here, and more so, what you don't feel when you see it?

I literally live right in the fucking middle of millions of lost souls. I want to photograph people on the street but I don't want to get beaten with a jug of great value juice from Wal Mart filled with cigarette butts from a stolen shopping caet for asking. If I'm walking down streets here it's with a pink switchblade in my hand. Call me judgmental, I call it smart and aware, and doing what I need to do in order to save my ass and not just my face.

This planet is a place of duality. Imagine a place where duality doesn't exist. You've been there you just don't remember. I moved here, thousands of miles away from my home and everybody I love, to find myself in the rooms of recovery and because I believe

that from an energy stand point, the desert is the greatest planetary filter. Imagine how your energy loops around you all day, it loops into others and theirs loops onto you in a circle. You pull people in and they pull you in too. But if you go to the open desert and loop your energy into it, the desert totally filters your energy without any other components. It is a pure filter, one of the last and greatest gifts of Gaia, our Mother Earth Goddess of whom we have all abandoned.

This is a place with the most zombies, the greatest absence of present spirit and the brightest, but the most sacred of exceptions, and those exceptions are the bright beams of human light that I see in the rooms every day I decide to show up. Even when I don't show up, they are there, walking their path.

Sometimes I sit out on my balcony for hours and just stare out at the landscaping. Within the concrete walls of the parking lot and structure of this building it is as if the rest of the mess of Las Vegas doesn't even exist. But I can see beyond the walls, what is out there.

Clearly, because I fully existed there. I know what's down there, I lived it for quite a while. I am right smack in the middle of all of that, living in zombieland, a sacred

exception.

I don't have growing pains, I sit in chairs as I saw off my limbs. Losing that zombie flesh.

In two and a half weeks I will take a year of sobriety. I'm shy about it. I talk rarely with anybody outside of my program about my program because it isn't anybody's goddamn business and I know well and clearly how I viewed the rooms before I started going into them. I have no problem being judged as a psychotic drug addict, a wreck of a mess, but it's hard for me to wonder how people identify with who I am in recovery. That sterotype of a bible thumping chanting God head with NA tattooed on my chest that I read about in so many of my favorite novels for so long. It feels like twenty fucking years since I've had a drink, truthfully,

but it feels like I learned how to know myself, and love myself, and make solid decisions and live this afternoon. It's funny how that works I guess, and not funny, and tragic, and beautiful, and it's been a really long disasterous road. But it's my road, and it's clear today.

Seventy five and sunny,
HL

Don't get me
into your heart

I am glitter
rat poison that

gives out
one thousand
vouchers for

pain like rainy
days. In the clouds

Where is my mind/
fuck. Wait. My sottered

wrist hurts
on this key pad.
Because I am
glittery

rat poison
magic. It took me
six spellings

of poison
to spell it
right.

I am too
much throw me
a wedding and

throw me up
into your own
rotting flesh

in the morning,
when I promised you
I'd only be

expensive powder
that covered
your flaws. As long

as I'm thinner
I guess/ so yes.

I can't sort my
head theres
a sort of a

gold brick of
fear to
sell off in

that. To the
candy lipstick
in a vintage
store

where I fell
into the shelf

and shattered
every container

to the floor/
are you worried?

I don't want anybody
to worry for fucks
sakes

I've lived through
so much shit that now

I"m finally living.
In a dress made of
un lit

bottle
rockets.

That might take
me everywhere

or to nowhere
but under

the dirt
coating my
boots.

So pass the
match and
pass me

out in comic
strip bubble gum
stories of

my
truth.

I actually
need to leave
the house

right now.

I don't know
why, but I

love
you all. Each
and every
single

one of you.
And myself
and my life

and all of those
hearts
that I watched

bleeding
my glitter
too.

I woke up at 9:06 today with some distant memory of waking up at 8:07 and shutting off my alarm. Flying out of my bed I sort through piles of clothing on the floor, cake my face with a swift palm of foundation, throw up my hair and go downstairs, empty coffee cup in hand.

Mornings.

Not my favorite.

"If somebody would have told me that I wake up at eight am every day I would have thought they were fucking nuts. Not sure I would have believed them."

"If somebody would have told me a year ago that I wake up at eight am I wouldn't have believed them either."

Antoinette walks in. "I brought you and Linda cake." She sets down a ten pound chocolate bundt cake. I ask her if she had fun with her guests this weekend, and thank her again for inviting me to her dinner party.

Mr Bright comes in, still wearing his sunglasses. I can see in both him and Antoinette, the beauty of their youth.

"Little Girl." He has taken to calling me that this past few months instead of the Black Widow he had prior addressed me as.

"Grace and I saw your twin over at Times Square yesterday. She looked like you, talked like you, we were laughing and staring at her."

"And how was that?"

"She was beautiful but she looked and dressed like a slob. Didn't know how to dress or do her hair"

I stare at him, shifting my gaze slowly to Antoinette as she speaks.

"It's funny, that you are so pretty, but you don't know how to be. You don't know how to dress or do your hair. I wonder, a lot, if you'll ever grow into that. At least you are pretty anyway, despite yourself."

My lip starts to quivver so I ball my fists instead.

"Have both of you always been so fucking rude?"

is all I say. Neither of them say anything.

"Because you are today and I was just wondering if you've been that way all of your lives, and why you have to be that way to me. It isn't any of your goddamn business nor is it up for discussion how I look and dress. But thank you for the imput."

I walk out
of their silence.

Seven years ago I would have charmed them and robbed them blind so I could go get high.
Three years ago I would have said nothing, walked out of the room, cried, and had a meltdown over a spilled drink at a later date.

Today I just stare
and wonder

how old somebody has to be
to realize how young

their judgements
keep them, and how old
they make me sometimes

when I walk down the hall
to cry and freak out
about, as always

what I look like
insatead of how I
feel.

My mentor taught me to share my writing. It is how I started writing, so I could hand her giant stacks of paper in her office every week.
She told me yesterday she has stopped reading my blog because she doesn't want to watch my life decisions. More notably, a person that I have chosen to love.

But I'll write anyway. Differently, I guess. I am sad today in this seventy degree sun, so far away from the sky, like the winter

should be.

I'm over here deep in thought about you. I don't know how it came to me. I was just sitting here, lost in this track, and thinking of you, at Christmas with me. How I had to say goodbye to you, and how I cried into all of the art supplies you bought me, because I know how

every time you see how other people fill with other people, how empty you feel.

I want to call you right now and choke this out to you but my pink cloud of the lately has turned to a thick film of self isolation. I want to write a poem about a filthy sweaty hallway filled with kids under 21 on drugs, spun out on the floor. The walls crumbling and I'm stomping through, high as the rest of them but stomping like a hurricane in a pair of combat boots. I want to be the girl in the black dress and giant shoes, stomping forward like a bull but I can't re write that shit because I

was on the floor with the rest of them. In my edited image I start throwing buckets of black paint and putting my hands to my ears to cover my own screaming. In the picture I take a baseball bat and beat the walls down, beat that hallway down, the dark filthy sweat, and the sun streams in but I'm too busy screaming hysterics to notice. The passed out kids in the dozens on the floor don't even look up to notice.

"This whole city is a shell you know. From a builders stand point. It can all be ripped out in a month and re concepted. That's the point. Everything you see here is a shell. It isn't real. It is all concept, synthetic light, lighting up concept."

I am screaming in this image because I am alone in a room of people that are asleep. I look thin enough and dressed well enough but no matter what I throw or how much light I create nobody notices.

Zap out picture I think back of you, how I need to beg you to come to burning man because you are going to find the family you've always wanted and when you walk

away you aren't going to feel a void of how it isn't for you. I need that to happen for you because I love you and you deserve that.

I had another eyeball razor burned with ink into my flesh yesterday and I am beginning to question just what I have done, because I am seeing too clearly and it's too overwhelming for another

pot of coffee. I'm supposed to be writing on my experience strength and hope, a three piece sonnet, about my beautiful daughter and her family, and my roll in that story.

But I'm in my head smashing everything I see that never existed instead.

Clearly I remember
when I was around
seven or eight
maybe

eleven. My
childhood friends
loved to

pick on
each other,
and I

loved
swimming.

I loved to
swim
as much as I
did because

I didn't
have to hear
anybody

talking
when I went
under water.

I could just
lay at the
bottom of
the pool,

in total
still
silence.

I learned to
ignore that I
couldn't breathe

because the still
silence
was worth it

to me.
Floating
not
breathing;

just still
quiet. I wonder
if I'll ever

get up
off that
floor.

I smile in his
direction, my
heaed cocked and

turned to the
black
and white
checkered
floor. I'm not
sure
why I

woke up in
Barstow
last week.

Sick and
obsessed with
tattooing an

all seeing
eye
to my left
wrist.

I think maybe
I need a fourth
eye and it will

be the first of
many pyramids
of ink
on my

skin.
Tonight I
just smile
at the floor,

thinking of
every possible
thing
I won't be able
to do

because of my
wrist. Antoinette
always says

"You are
going to fuck
up the dresses
you will wear

someday." Maybe
it's reckless
abandon; who
knows.

But I am happy
in this tattoo
shop, in the
neon lights

wearing old
dusty
cowboy boots

and a

white
feather
boa, having
a day

where for
dinner
I
marker

colored
paper plates

with a child
in a hot pink
wig. I am

on the
edge
sometimes.

In a leather
chair, feather
boa, and a
gun

burning
my smiling
flesh.

I lay on the bed with my head at on a pillow
He lays opposite, his head at the foot of the bed.

I'm having a conversation about
some party
in a loft or something,
somewhere, it was
dark.
People were dancing but
I was laying
on the ground,

with my boyfriend.
I was as sick with
bronchitis as I was high and I
didn't know which

was going to kill me that day.
But I knew it would be
one. I simply couldn't breathe.

"And anyway though. That's
what we did you know, like,
a party from Wednesday night
to Tuesday

night. Wednesday I'd
try to go to school. I can't say I
lived much of anywhere during
those months because the

parties went to the next
parties; no sense in going
home to change or any

of that. For years after that
you know; I thought I got so
ok. So straight. But.

The clubs were from Thursday
to Wednesday night too.
It was years later and I was

doing the same thing,
only I thought I could
breathe so it was all

ok and I didn't
end up on the floor/ as much.
So yeah. That's what I did."

I sit up and so does he
we look at each other,
I giggle.

"Which was what?"

"I had an eight year
fucking party for myself.
Thank God it didn't go any
longer, that choice. The choice

of dying on a floor, without
a reason, that acceptance.

It was stupid but
necessary. Today I feel
everything I see.

I'm not saying what I see
is always the right
way to see it. But I feel.
Like the sun in my bones

and the rain on my
skin, and the way

that I sit in a room.
On furniture now,
without a drink in my
hand. Club life is residue
to me.

It makes people too
synthetically shiny,
and it's robbery, and my

arms wouldn't ever
be acceptable in
those sorts of shirts

anyway. Especially
when I started to look
like my eight year

party." We laugh softly
I sip my

coffee.

I stare out at the desert and for miles all you can see are mountains, sand, and Joshua trees.
"I love this track." I say
as I turn it
up.

"You know there was a time where I didn't know how to feel
anything. So I had music to feel everything for me. Music
is actually one of my greatest loves, a double edged
sword

because it's easily written off as art
in a constant ego crisis in order for that art to
actually go
anywhere. But it felt for me
when I didn't know
how. It was my religion, it was
everything, but now

I can feel, and when I have the music to
feel too, along with me,
not for
me,

it's all pretty
beautiful, regardless of
a lot of things. Do you

understand
what I'm saying?"

I take my eyes off of
my hand in his and up

into his eyes.
"Actually, yes
I do."

"I thought you
might."

Lazily I turn my head back out the window, back to the
sand and mountains and Joshua trees. Out the window I say
slowly

"You have a case of
Dr. Pepper in your
refridgerator."

I pull my lower lip with my index finger
thoughtfully.

"You are a diabetic."

I watch the sand and the mountains and the Joshua trees.

"And you have a case of Dr. Pepper in your
refridgerator."

"Yep Rocks I do."

"I am sorry
I didn't think sooner
to understand
that."

Don't save me, as I'm too alive for such an act.

Yesterday I found myself in California, in a quiet suburb sitting in a pickup truck, getting grouchy. Grateful for the coffee in the cup holders, the crystal spheres in my lap, Roi and Kalliope, staring out at houses built in the fifties in the dark.
We're about to go into a house and this sort of thing makes me nervous.
"It's ok, they're love people."

I've been hearing this a lot lately and it's been true on all counts. But I still fidget.

I give him a look and get out of the car. He has taught me to be overly conscious of the places I am walking into, to watch the door and both of our backs. When I don't know what I"m walking into I get uneasy. So that said, we walk, him nearly coaching me up the sidewalk to act like a non neurotic, I stepping carefully into the yard as I mess with my hair.

She walks up to me and I like her immiedately, as she reminds me of Jami with different glasses and less of a voice. She hugs us hello as we walk into the kitchen, into a cozy house that smells of the dinner she is cooking with Green Bay Packers logos everywhere. I'm comfortable and suddenly calm. My eyes fall to the refridgerator, which has a report card on it. Sharna, the woman cooking dinner that greeted us, smiles widely while she holds her hand up delicately to the report card, which says things like A+ seven times next to words put together like AP organic chemistry, AP geometry. I smile.

Fluidly I walk into the living room, as if I have been here hundreds of times. In front of me on the couch is this gorgeous sprite of Earth energy with a math book and scores of notebook paper spread out around her. She finishes the problem before she looks up and as she does my eyes meet a pair of the most sparkly eyes I have ever seen.

"HI Honey" Harmon yells to her as he bear hugs her. She laughs. "Kaitlin, this is Heather. Heather, Kaitlin." We hug and for a moment she reminds me of everything in my life that equates to brilliance, aka my sister. We sit and discuss fairly random aspects of life for a while.

"Oh and we went to Charlie Browns. What a tweak fest! I filled a bag of rocks. It took for fucking ever because I balance them on my fingers. If they balance on my fingers, they stay."

Kaitlin smiles "I love rocks" she says quietly. "Yes yes. Since she was a baby. It's crazy." Her mom says.

"Well alright."

I dump the bag of the new rocks I picked.

"Rocks aren't possessions. I want you to take as many of these as you like, because they are yours. Just go through them, don't be shy. If you want them all, take them all. I want you to have them."

Gingerly she starts sorting through the dozen. I can tell she is shy about it so I don't watch her I watch the two happy rotweillers having sex in front of me and laugh.

"I'm going to go to the car and get the spheres to show her." I tell Harmon, but he insists on going to get them, so we sit there.

He carries in Roi. Roi is my total Aura Recharge rock. He's a softball sized smooth sphere of pure calcite, with different color variations that resemble the moon. I've slept with that sphere every night for a year, as it makes me happy when I wake up and the sphere is warm, and I am warm, as it is a pure energy charge. Roi is also the name of one of my spirit guides that follows me, as are Kalliope (quartz sphere) and Jasper (Zebra Jasper stone.) I aquired Roi from people that call themselves the Guardians of Nature, and I do not sleep without him, ever, period. I will be half asleep in a stupor and up rummaging around my condo trying to find him.

She saw the sphere instantly. I watched her crystal eyes follow Harmon as he handed it to me, and as he set Roi into my hand I watched her eyes rest onto my hands. I hand it to her

"That's Roi. He's Calcite and very special. I sleep with him every night. We keep each other warm and it's really important."

We all continue our conversation about elsewhere and otherwise. Kaitlin has stopped looking at the other rocks, she is in a seeming daze gazing down at Roi, and all of a sudden I was filled with dread because I fucking knew.

We all keep talking and I glance over at her every five seconds, as her gaze down at the sphere has not broken. I turn it over and over and over in my head. "Rocks are not possessions." I whine to myself that I can't GIVE AWAY Roi. "Self, that's Roi, and Roi is mine, how will I sleep?!?!"

I started staring at her, trying to tell her to look up at me, but she didn't. Dammit. After about ten minutes of careful, child like consideration, the kind where you try to justify keeping your best friends barbie when you know it's rightfully hers and whining to myself, I take a deep breath and say

"Kaitlin. I sleep with Roi every night because he needs to be warm. It's important that he is cared for and kept warm. He is very special." She looks up at me and with a soft smile nods her head up and down.

"Will you keep him warm?"

She looks up at me again, confused.

"Will you take care of him and keep him warm? If you love that sphere it will love you back, but you have to love it and it has to be warm at night. So will you keep him warm?"

It isn't registering to her.

"I want you to have him. He just picked you and it's important for you to keep him for a very long time."

She doesn't believe me she just stares at me.

"Are you giving this to me?"

"I am. I want you to have it."

"DUDE" Harmon yells.

Quickly Kaitlin nods her head. "Ok good."

"I am fucking tripping you just gave that to her. Kaitlin Heather loves that rock."

"And now the rock loves Kaitlin, and me, and I love both of you. It's good for the planet and someday, when you're older, you'll pass him to somebody else too. This sphere- " I show her Kalliope but she can barely take her eyes off of Roi

"was just handed to me by somebody once too. She was my first rock I ever got, and she helped me through a lot. It's an important thing to always pay forward when you can."

So Harmon trips that I gave her Roi for a while and I trip on Kaitlin tripping on the rock.

For the next five hours we all hung out she never took her eyes off of that sphere. I kept looking at her and hitting Harmon in the arm quietly mouthing "look" at her looking at the rock. Once she was on her cell phone, only because she was googling "calcite" Sharna wanted to hold the sphere too and I just sat there, watching this mother and daughter hold the sphere in their hands together, staring into it, marveling.

So anyway, don't save me, I'm too alive for such an act.

Lately I have everything so I'm ok with possessing less. Today I road motorcycles in the California desert, made sand angels at a truck stop, and loved my life, because for the first time, in all totallity, it is officially

in session.

Sometimes I
drive down
streets you've

never touched,
a blank gaze
for a stop light

my head just
says

"Motherfucker."

I never took
the time to care
about myself
enough

to hate
you. Maybe
it's the way

you've never
touched these
streets, this
air, and what

I would give
to be like
them. Or

possibly the
way
she asked me

why you weren't
there
when she
was

born.
With a wide
eyed

innocent
look.

Likely, it's in
the way, that
after all these

years, I
defended
you. I carefully
painted you, and

how
I realized
that I didn't
do it
for her, but
myself.

I didn't say
"He's a
dumb
motherfucker

that liked to
hit me and
never cared

about you." I
said "Honey
he just wasn't

as old
as I
had to be."

I would
scare you
in the way

I gaze
at
stop lights.

Driving down
the streets
wearing a face

you'll never

touch.

Sitting indian style on the rug in the middle of my condo a lightbulb goes off in my head,
so I stop reading all of my poems out loud to say
"Lets make
coffee."

Making coffee is exciting. I get lost in it, pitch black cream no sugar, looking for cups in the glow of the kitchen because they're all dirty.

I don't give much of a fuck that I spilled acrylic paint all over my favorite rug on earth. It looks like living to me. Living where I'm making art and reading endless chapters of Bukowski out loud until the sun comes up.

"You know it is wonderful that you call me brilliant and beautiful ten times a day. It is wonderful because I believe that, and it is nice to hear, not because I only believe that because you say it."

I tweak out sober with you at thrift stores, you stare at me with coffee in your hands as I throw paint with no direction as to of what I'm doing in three seconds, ten days or fifteen years, and I slowly speak out every flash back that comes to mind.

The lightest light and the
darkest dark.

I don't care about picking out clothes or what I'm eating or not eating because I'm sitting on a living room floor with two beautiful children making candy necklaces from their kit. They brush their teeth for bed in tights and heels, pajama dresses holding pom poms and I do not apoligize for how alive I am in all I see.

"In the morning I will make you a key so you can throw paint."

For a few hours we plan our sculpture, it will be massive and sturdy "You can't throw cement. Well you can. But there are other options."

We walk the rock store for hours "None of the spheres feel like Kalliope." "Because they aren't. Kalliope was Homer's muse and when the day comes that I'm reading you Plato on a beach somewhere far off from right now we can have a laugh about this bone desert cold."

We spend a lot of time driving through the middle of nowhere except the most vast, incredible scapes of desert scenery human eyes could ever find and

I'm at a point where I can give away every possession I own, because the only aspects of them that matter is that they are a part of me and I want to give that to others.

Thank you for being good at knowing me. I don't expect many people to understand but those issues aren't my problem. I try to live my life based off of love, empathy and respect it

drowns out
judgement.

Current obsession:

Jack Johnson
makes me
nuts. I've never
been that

calm but
this morning

his voice
and guitar
play through
all the
windows.

It's like

the painted walls
in this house.
Soft color
in the morning,

they cook
breakfast
calling each
other

baby.

And their
babies
wear fake plastic
high heels,
drinking

juice from
princess
goblets, with

their new
pom poms
under the table
they yell

"Good morning
Heather." Like
a song. They

tell me of
their trip
to toys R us

their mother
shows me her
new dress as

she hands me
a breakfast
plate. It felt

like
hearing a
song
you've heard

for years
for the
first

time, where
it isn't
irritating

because the
warm
calm of love

in a little
house stuffed
with framed
pictures and

breakfast,
simple new
dresses and

kids ecstatic
for their
toys is

something
attainable
to me

today. Because
Jack Johnson
makes me nuts

but sometimes
in life
there are

more
important
focus
points

of captured
relativity

for every
bending
prizem.

"Yeah that was the
night where there
was this warehouse
party

and there were like
riots a bit and
some people ended up
dead.

The next day
it was freezing and
my favorite sweater
was in the

pile on the floor.
There was so much
blood on the floor;

somebody had been
shot or beaten with
something. I'm not

sure. He was tweaked
out just sweeping
and sweeping and sweeping
the floor and I was

so cold that I went
to the center of
the room, picked up

the sweater and
started to wring
the blood
out of it
so that

I could put it
back on.

After that I
fell asleep on the
cracked

frozen
floor. I always
hated that
warehouse.

No matter
how much blood
I couldn't ever

get
warm."

He had insisted
that he get a
cat.

I was pregnant.
"You're just
pregnant."

The cat
slept on my
neck

suffocating me
we named him
Sebastian but
called

him
Ash because
that's what

we would have
named our
child.

I was suffocating
in a doctors
office

trying to drink
orange
syrup because

I was pregnant
and he
insisted

that he get
a cat. I don't
remember

if I ever said
that I was
allergic

because
had I
he would have just
gotten
two

instead.
I was choking
and choking and
choking on

that syrup.
Eighteen
alone in an office
where they

slapped me to
find my vains.

I hate cats and
orange syrup and
mostly

the person
that got that
stupid cat and

left me there
to drink that
thick orange

liquid. Choking
back tears
in the stale

January
air.

They turn around and
stare at me,
chicken nuggets

in hand.
Two pairs of
amber eyes, the

youngest says
"Hi." Sharply.

A goddess
mini fairy
person at her
four

years I
wave
hello.

"What are
you doing?"

I ask them.
"Eating
lunch."

I've always
loved kids that
take lunch
for granted.

Want to
play
cooties
with

us?

The other
minni
goddess
fairy

says to me,
her eyes

fixated on my
cootie key chain.

So I put
down my
coffee and

play a board
game on the
floor.

They show me
all of their
shoes and

back packs,
jewelry and
a few other
toys, all

colored
brightly, like
the sun

pouring without
apology

through every
window.

I"m over here
on the second
floor in a sun

dress,
blow drying
the orion I'm
painting.

Throwing
spackel out of
a starbucks

cup.
I am spray
painting flowers
and

stumbling out
of this
skin. Tripping
daisy sober

garden turn
it
up. The creative
shit that comes

out of me right
now is difficult

to
accept.

"You are not
looking at it"

She would tell me
for ten million
moons.

My living room is
a dance floor and
an art studio, a

dining room
feast of coffee
at midnight and

mentor,
I see it now that
perfect whole
sense and

it was worth
the wait.

Tomorrow
more ink
for my left

arm. I woke up
in California
needing to

sotter
an all
seeing
eye

onto my
wrist. I look
forward

to that
pyramid
of these

moments
never

coming
off.

"I just wanted to call you and tell you I'm staring at a cheese stuffed crust pizza. It's just me, my rug, that pizza, garlic butter sauce, both laptops, all of my art supplies, a few canvas, both easels and a 2 liter of Dr. Pepper in the middle of it all in between my indian style legs. This my best friend, is meditation."

"You have the goddamn straw straight in the 2liter don't you?"

"That I do. That I do."

"And how is it?"

"Well. Fuck the painting right now, I just realized the pizza doesn't have any sauce on it, the garlic butter sauce is real garlic butter. You know I need that Pizza Hut processing but I will not order that without so I got generic. If the call drops either the call dropped or I brought too many jack n the box cups of spray paint into the house. Either way I'll call you back and either way, I'm perfect."

She laughs my favorite laugh in the world, her short sudden one.

__________________

I answer my doorbell. In front of me stands Antoinette. She shoves a giant bowl of chicken soup into my hands.
"It's a bit weak usually I'll put some whiskey in my soup for the sick ones but eh. I know you wouldn't eat it that way and you need to be doing that.
She bats my hip with her frail hand, turns and walks away. Yelling down the hall
"Did you paint that horse?"
"No"
"Oh. Because I was going to say GOD it's Gorgeous."
"Nope wasn't me."
"That surprises me."

Leaving for work this morning I scan the rocks, finding two rose quartz minerals. Last week Mickey gave me a bowl of seashells from his bathroom because they reminded him of my daughter and he thought I should have them. Antoinette had been perched at my desk and said "You got those from Micky." "Yes." "If you hold the starfish for a long time it will calm you down."

I held those two quartz at Luke's funeral instead of crying because they are so strong. Today she sits in my office

"Antoinette give me your hands.

I place one in each of her palms, keeping them connected to mine.

"Thank you for the love and the soup and for being you. I didn't have a thank you card so I wanted you to have these guys."

"ROSE QUARTZ!!" she yells. "I can't have rocks a lot because they spark around me and get too hot."

"I can imagine. Spark away."

She hugs me, which is highly unusual, and nearly skips out of the room, both of her palms in tight fists, for a different reason, for a nice change.

_____________

"Oh I wanted to tell you
that I opened that hostess
fruit pie we got in

Bakersfield with one
day left until the
sell by date and

it was infected
just like that
711 where our feet

stuck to the floor
and you burned my hand
putting ice into your
coffee from the soda

machine. And I have
flesh wounds you wouldn't
ever see

like that bubble gum
tiled pink
cracked broken

murder shower in
Barstow. Where I
sat on the

bathroom counter
writing a note
in the
steam.

I dont know if I'll
ever live a life again
where somebody

pulls me out of an ihop
parking lot to an
apartment complex
across the street

in the desert cold
just to touch the
roses out front and

I've never sat
on my floor until
dawn

reading somebody
that wanted to hear
it
every poem

I've ever
written but

as I was saying
the fruit pie
looked like

a dinosaur egg
from that land
before time

when the only time
was the
land that I asked
you

if you remembered
when the sun
always

looked like a
sunrise.
But anyway.

I'm happy
we forgot
to eat

that infected
prehistoric egg
looking

hostess
fruit. And
I'm happy

that you
burned
my hand

on an ice
soda
seven eleven
machine because

that is
real and
today I am

too.

My ears keep
popping to my
spastic throat

it's a few sizes
unflattering.
The coffee is
hot the

windmills in
the valleys say
hello. I went to a

place where everybody
remembered
my name.

They had french
bulldogs and orange
trees and they

told me you are so
young and
beautiful.

I ate cheeseburgers
for
breakfast

in the middle of the
high desert at a
bar that looked like

a scene from
fraggle
rock.

People danced and
sang and made me
laugh so hard that I

didn't care
what it made
my face look like.

I sat on curbs and
watched people
jump from airplanes
while eating

snicker bars on the
concrete. I didn't
match and I didn't
care and

my grandmother
quartz ball, Kalliope,
cracked into a million

inward pieces when
I placed her in the
snow

in the middle of
the desolate
mojave
desert.

I climbed rocks
and gazed at
mountains and I

didn't know
I could ever feel
this

alive.
Cracked
from the inside
into a million little
new

rainbow
pieces

alive.