1. Requiem for a Summer

We work like slaves all year for this – a moment in the sun, blinded in gold, past sinks into present tense, the future does not exist. For this golden moment we believe this is true, and it is. But we fumble forward like ants, knowing that this comes, only to pass. For what is life but working towards that perfect moment, working and waiting and then watching its glorious demise; not-quite-touching; satisfied not in its attainment, but in its promise to return.
It could stay like this forever, half empty or half full – both, like always, but shiny, old and new. Your body aches for sleep, but sleep is such a waste of time, and when it comes it comes like sickness and you wake up wrapped in wet sheets, struggling for the surface, birds circle overhead, teasing you with their effortless soaring.
Then the leaves turn gold, and fall.

2. Arriving

Stars danced for me on Saturday Night
More people meeting and feeling
More people staying and leaving
More Thursday night madness and drinking and thinking
Revived
New Minds
Feeling like there may be a place in the World for You
After All.
The voices of critics or reason or authority
have been reduced to typing and Circuitry
2000 miles away from the faces, the sorrowful past, “the sorrowful Midwest”
A girl who forgot her own voice
A girl who listened to it all for
Years that could have been Days
and days that could have been years.
A girl who remembered her voice when she left,
Who spent the summer with spirits and demons
Which lead to meeting, feeling, staying, leaving
No longer afraid of all of the voices
Echoes from within, echos from meetings, echoes from the Trees
Heidi tries to put out my fire.
And I hit the Power Button
Power and Reality
Money and Power and Reality and Truth
But I define their meanings and roots
Planted firmly in new soil.
I am not perfect.
Heidi can still tear me to pieces, armed with Words.
But aren’t some words malleable?
I think so.
This Power has to be taken, earnings eventually arrive when they’re ready for you, when you’re ready for them.
And I take what is Mine, wearing boots made for walking
Made for meeting and feeling, taking or leaving
Trusting.
Cautiously naming the meetings and new faces and calling them Friends.
Basking and contentedness.
But Heidi’s words remain my Skeleton Score
Scribbles on a basement floor.
2000 miles away.
After All.

3. Not Manic but Believing

Not manic but believing
Serpentine tears and make-up smears
That water can’t wash off
So I must get my own hands dirty.

Not manic but believing
This place, there is no Heaven
Nor a Hell, only my Own Belief
My Alone Belief – there is no other kind.

Not manic but believing
Each of my scars are Ophelia’s
And they tell stories that few will ever know
Tattoos with a razor blade, trying to dismantle this Body.

Not manic but believing
Bodies that break down and return to the Earth
I know, it’s not my time, stop worrying
No finding without getting lost; Trees that play Tricks
Not manic but believing.