• My Brain On Crack

    Drifting

    I think this is what they call flow. Either that or I can’t be paid to care about much. When I say care, I don’t mean care. I mean get my panties in a twist. And that just isn’t happening. Nope, I’m afloat on the Wonder Barge of Life. Somebody up ahead (it might be me but I can’t be bothered to get up and go look just now to see for sure) is poling us gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily. And along the sides of the stream I see the things we slowly pass, but I’m not grabbing for any brass rings these days. It’s okay just sitting…

  • Experiment,  Ho, Earthling!

    Just Like An Ordinary Day

    I have lost my pendulum, or it’s conveniently misplaced, so instead I decided to use a pendent I wear sometimes (when I can remember to put on jewelry). It’s a ceramic disk that hangs from a black cord. The disk is green and blue in a Celtic design and I can almost remember where I got it. Ireland? Maybe. Anyway, I asked it if it would stand in for my pendulum, which I rarely use anyway but prefer to use over my Tarot cards, which I never really got into despite having the beautiful Robin Wood deck. The pendant said yes. My questions tumbled out in a heap, and the…

  • Magical

    Not Alone

    The room was spare. The single bed, covered in a mauve quilt, was pushed against the wall. A gray and white stuffed dog sat atop the nearby dresser. A single, empty chair filled the space next to the bed. The woman lay on her back with eyes closed and mouth open, her body slight under the quilt. Her breaths came hard, ragged, with spaces in between. The sound of her labors filled the room. We quietly arranged ourselves on chairs we had brought for the occasion, facing the woman in the bed. She kept on with her breathing. One of us whispered. “We’re here to be with you on your…

  • Ho, Earthling!

    Oh, Haiti

    Like many people whose eyes, ears, and fingertips are connected by the vast Interwebs, I heard the news of yesterday’s devastating Haiti earthquake via Twitter. 7.0. OMFG. I’ve been in a 5.5. I know that 6-point-something is pretty damaging. Every point-something is a factor of 10 in magnitude. So this 7.0, in a country where most people are painfully poor and (I imagine) live in the kind of rickety shack housing I’ve seen elsewhere in the Caribbean, is huge. And it is. According to what little I have read (and I avoid TV news like the plague), 100,000 people could already have died. And the inevitable deaths from disease due…

  • My Brain On Crack,  Write Like You Mean It

    Snowed In

    Last week the flurries started. They really began on New Year’s Eve, the day I drove away from a warm heart and to a cold empty house that I wanted to fill with all my wishes for the coming year. Wishes full, I lay down at ten minutes to midnight, not realizing that the standard way to bring in a new year around here is with all the leftover July fireworks. Someone even torched a minivan just a block away that night. I’ve considered torching minivans myself, and might have had I ever actually owned one, but likely not as a way to bring in wishes for the coming year.…

  • Magical

    Dead Boy Emerges

    The boy looks at the woman lying ragged in the hospital bed, her breaths coming like rocky chunks of asphalt, filling the room with the out and in, out and in. You are not of me, he said. I never came from you. The woman, restless, moves her legs from side to side in her sleeplike state. Can’t keep a sheet on her, the nurses had told the boy. A chasm yawns in the space where her legs met. Sagging flesh swims there, shapes and color. The boy looks away. I never came from you. A nurse bustles in with some supplies. A breathing treatment, she says. To keep her…

  • Poetry Slam

    Longing

    I long to travel where my body cannot go; through doors and walls and windows to unseen worlds of dizzying possibility. I lie awake, willing a single silver cord to emerge from my body like an astral umbilicus. At the mirror I chant I AM and wait for the reflected worlds behind me to unfold like petals after a spring rain, worlds that will swallow me into nothingness. One day I will scream for an hour so shards of my shattered heart will break my brain into halves and I will disappear between them. Float away, Self, I whisper in my dreams that follow me like twisted shadows. Float away…

  • Blame Canada

    Vancouver Redux

    Late last year (snort. I crack myself up) I went to The Land Up Over, also known as Canada. The Great White Something-or-other. (NOTE: There was no snow. None. Also no polar bears or igloos. Damn.) I hadn’t been there in FIVE MONTHS, which is odd considering its ridiculous proximity to me, something like 30 minutes. From my house. To the border station, where I get (politely, because this is Canada, after all) invited inside to discuss my “situation.” This time, I was helped by a 5-foot tall guy with a French accent, who shrugged Gallically at me when I said I might be staying there 10 days or so.…