my tears are stronger than 100 miles of wild fires you started.

In my dreams

I finally summon all of me
Back from him
Back from the history

The sin that caused a great death within me
I summon myself back

from the stories he tells at 3am
My body back from his grip
My confidence from his weakness

My voice returns and my lungs expand
The breath he took is now back inside me
I take it all back
The spark that turned wild.
I’ve used my sadness
Cried tears of shame and bottled them up over time tucked them into my ribs my face my stomach and back
The anger aches to come out

That barren land

The wilderness you led me to

Thousands of days and you called it paradise
Just you and me
And all that wandering
And all that shame

The barren land is now dust and ugly

I can see it clearly
and finally when I walk away the plains they are my own. I reclaim my territory. I go towards a new land without him leasing me a stray.
I take back with my sorrow just like that

I take back my joy







I am painting over this with fresh ink
I’ll paint to erase what was once permanently in place




Some men paint you without even looking for the truth. They just want you to shut your mouth and indulge in the fantasy of themselves being great

All powerful

And I

They write you like they invented you.the physical the essence the soul of you. They will write songs and poetry to show you that they created you and then they except me to give them a gold star or my body bc of this. The will paint you with their eyes closed what your future looks like in oil on canvas they romanticize themselves loving me by possessing me to the point of a cartoon a romanced version of their perversions. The way sun doesn’t sting at first the way it taste sweet going down but slowly kills you after. He is always calling me a muse to justify what I am to him, simply a fantasy, a thing, a creation of Gods own image he can’t fathom the entirety of me so he never asks me about me he tells me about me. And never once does he notice I too am watching him watch me. And I allowed this to go on many times as sort of a science project. Being a muse is to be a well for men to draw from and in turn try and recreate what I am to serve them. Turns out there’s no exception for allusive secretive obsessive men. They aren’t special at all.In the meanest way possible they are average. All air. Like a parrot they echo your tone like a charlatan they promise you marvelous things. And to think a man could be so stupid to never once consider women are superior and see through this.generations past all the way back to Delilah, we’ve been knowing what you are.




I remember meeting men that weren’t like the users the charlatans. And I have memories of readjusting my posture slightly because although better than the last man. A man is a man. Like a boxer before his match I loosen my neck stretch breathe focus and decide if my opponent is worth it. Mostly it was just entertainment but years later it’s pure rage.
I was in love once

I never had to adjust a thing

I just was

And I will love him until I’m dead unless someone else makes me forget I even cried over him for an entire decade. rejecting each other like polite people taking turns. I don’t regret telling him I loved him 12 years later only for him to respond in silence



For new men I just think

Don’t look for me back there
You’ll find fragments of who I was and who you wanted me to be.



I want the man I am in love with because we know each others history




How can someone love me without knowing me all through my twenties?



How

the break in

Nothing feels normal and nothing feels safe

right before a breakthrough the universe decides to breakdown 

and the whole process of things breaking down

 like your life 

is painful.

I felt pain for many years and was sure i would never recover from it and many years later something lifted. less weeping. began eating.started speaking.found comfort in nature. rose from my death bed and tried...just really had a go at the idea of living again

The thing is-

You never recover

You survive and keep living until you are alive again.

You lay on the floor and wait for the lifiting

clutching a bottle of annointing oil and

like david

annnointing myself

expecting a healing.

healing to wholeness 

being whole again or for once

was at the top of the mountain

in the fantasy land of my mind-wholeness was it.

this winter my biggest fear came true

the irrational fear that you wrestle with all of your childhood and all of your teenage years and all through college and even after you graduate and people are now looking to you for guidance and counting on you to always be there person. there rational perfect person. 

A man came into my apartment with a butcher knife and held me hostage 

his plan was to take my life and 3 of my friends lives.

irrational to rational in one moment 

it shifts.

My father would lecture me as a child about my irrational fears 

I only told him because I had a feeling it was going to happen

this is when i was a child of course 

and the fears I went to my father about then are the fears that have come to life now. im not saying i spoke death over my life or willed bad to happen. in my spirit i always knew. 

i'm never truly surprised after a traumatic or violent event happens to me.

my prophecies from childhood coming to pass and my father still lecturing me on my lack of faith is the only thnig that suprises me. 

not the break in

or the near rapes

not the sickness

not the assualts

not the arrest

or the psyche ward

not the violence

or the demons faces i see year after year

just the lectures.

just the dissaproval

just the shame.

I lie to myself that I don't care.

I'm not ashamed 

you just trick yourself into it because

lying to yourself is the key to emotional survival.

 

Nature takes its course

 

When i feared you i never made fire

I needed no sign of life

For me to be safe enough to sleep 

For my heart to find its way to beat and not break not pound not ache 

And now that I am bright 

I am vulnerable 

To you 

The gathering kind

The stealing kind 

The violent types 

Creatures of the night 

Nature takes its course

Memory Like A Knife

Even if we love memory.
Even if we use it as a way to devotion.
Even when it’s not.
Even when we dragged it around like a block of light just to see if it lasted.
Even when it breaks. 
Even when we know it will break. 
Let me be shocked,
after.
sometimes in suffering we find ourselves. 

SNOWING IN FLORIDA

From the archives. 2011.

went to a clinic down in florida

went to a doctor who examined me naked

stood outside the hospital doors just standing

stopped asking questions because I'm just so sick of talking.

he: touched my stomach my chest my feet my thighs my mouth my ribs my knees my my hips my fingers my toes my legs my arms my face my head my ears my back my heart my shins my spine 

he: went through the entire physical without looking me in the eyes.

examination room was freezing cold

waiting room was crowded with anxiety bad smells common people it was also:

freezing cold.

noticing:

people were here to die,just dying

(i kept looking around desperate for someone clinging on to life the way i was)

some people out there just give up on living all together

you realize there is no pill you can swallow no song you can sing no vacation you can take no mouth you can kiss no fling you can have -no dress you can wear no smell that will distract no film that will make you laugh nothing you can bear to eat not one book you can read not a good nights sleep you can get- not a car you can drive no eastern remedy nor western plan you can be no art you can see no words you can speak no ship no sea just nothing nothing can help you sometimes and with this discovery most people I've seen just give up on living because the pain is just too strong its all just too much when everything goes totally wrong,real bad people just freeze up curl up and die on the side of the rode but

i was thinking : well...well..you see I'm already hurting so how about a little bit of self made shock therapy.

You see no one asked me if my heart was broken 

in hospitals they only check the beat.

You see i have felt responsible for ALL of this and then suddenly one day someone comes along with a PhD and tells me that its not all my fault,and then suddenly,suddenly...im free (er) than usual.

THIS WHOLE TIME: you were sick,and now i feel it and im so sorry i didn't feel your sickness for you. im so sorry i didn't hold you longer and cry harder. do you even remember me? do you realize what this distance has done for the bad and good of both of our lives?

THE DOCTOR ASKED ME WHY I WAS SO SAD-I SHOOK MY HEAD.

IT WAS SNOWING IN FLORIDA,IT WAS SNOWING AND I WAS DRAWING A BLANK

TALL PALE SLENDER TALL PALE SLENDER FEMALE FRENCH JEW CHRISTIAN

BLANK.

Rabbit foot memory

From the archives. 2007.

I was reminding myself

to stop looking at my watch

my hair was halfway up,quite dark

I kept spelling out the sen-tance

"get up,get up"

have I mentioned

I have remained.

yes,remained

quite,white.

avoiding the dark hallways

that host games

all through the night.

take yourself back to

summers

and hearts

that leaped

so willingly

take yourself back

to airports

and waiting to board

and leaving

and coming

and always leaving

and gingerale

and my phone is dead.

shoot.

and my phone..is.

now look at my face

have I not grown all these seeds myself?

now look down at your feet

you have been idle.

your hands your nose your heart your feet your face your hands your hair your ways.

now now now now.

look at my face

have you not known that I have only waited for you?

all these years and all these days.

ships rot,and shirts have lost their stiffness

around their colllar

around your face.

have you not known

I have only

ONLY.

‘07

Lola 

 As long as it takes
for my heart to find it's song

Sat on a rooftop

*From the archives*

Sat on the rooftop

new york new york

how i loved you from the start

the east was welcoming me

so long to the south so long to all my graveyards in tennessee.

two years

singing the same song

of love

what you sow you reap

and the harvest was

manifesting

all around

But then we broke

And he went west and I went east

I got a new boyfriend

A little too soon if you're asking me

you heard that i tend to end things before they end me

you have a yourself a girl

i heard about how you love her a little bit more than you ever loved me

And it was always supposed to be like that 

nothing can be the same

only in my greatest fantasy.

oh my god 

love wrecks up the pace

faster faster freeze

its cruel and its real unsafe

look what its done to me

it eats you from the inside 

then rots you from the out

lost the color to my face 

i felt it 

we lose our minds never know it

now its too late and they notice

i am the night that wont stop

 missing forever-dont wan't to be found

its not your right but go ahead

i was good for something once

teenage waistland

lost and not found

I’m too sad to tell you

and i get real accountable when i'm alone

he is my portion

I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall. I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me. Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. I say to myself, “The LORD is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.” The LORD is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him; it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD.

Lamentations 3:19-26 

stains

the gospel,

it stains us...

with blood you can't scrub off.

and trust me

the devil himself has taken a cloth

and tried to remove it from me himself

foolishly he's frantic
 and his loop has never changed
he will try to cover your eyes
with a blindfold a
welcome to your idolatry\welcome to the wandering

the carnal nature of lust
producing shame
always showing up is rage

that unholy trinity

uh

this is holy blood

wash away my sin,again.

The blooming

The west coast used to be steady

jan 25. the lunar new moon makes everyone feel manic/it's not just u
the bzzzzing you can't drown out is omnipresent.

Remember when moving Out West was the Ultimate teen dream fantasy?

Fast forward to the neon lights that you can’t outlast

Buzzing from the Mezcal and echos of empty drive-by shootings of encouragement

We're all doing great!!! Thanks!

Yeah, it glows.

The lonesome lows meet there new meaning

This kid is complaining there’s no room service in his motel he’s been living in since he arrived here in December

Pretty sure he’s Russian and that’s a thing there? Surly. He must not know? He moved out here to model which was honestly a good idea in theory. California is seductive to like, a lot of people. But his soul is too fragile for this place. He needs more home before he can become his own home. His heart is too fragile for these people who love new faces and fight to drain your purity and use it for their skincare routine. “Omg Samuel!” A monotone masculine leaning voice shrieks through the office “have you not tried this new serum?! Its black market Russian. So u know it’s good! it’s literally everything!

Burns at first. You’ll get used to it.”

Samuel shifts his energy all the way into himself

“You get used to it”

 He whispers under his breath

Just like everything.

The burning lasts forever

But you’ll get used to it.

“I closed the box and put it in a closet.

There is no real way 

to deal with everything we lose.”- Joan Didion

Isaiah 61:3 /
A crown of 

beauty for ashes, 

the oil of joy 

for mourning, 

The garment of praise

in place of

the spirit of despair

         

They will be called 

oaks of righteousness, 

the planting of the LORD,

that he might be glorified.

My shame is aged,moldy,heavy and it smells like an emergency 

the library flooded in 2003

the books have turned gangrene

Sadness I’m your girl 

Depression:

You are the fire I will walk through daily-and the flames will disfigure me but it will never kill me

As long as my heart beats-

This ceremony of extremes

On repeat you settle in:the dusty sun set, may allergies floating // breathe in grief 

The fear and the fire ok ok breathe 

I was 3 when fear grabbed me by the neck. It came at. night. The sunset was the terror.i fought with all my might.

I missed falling asleep.

Inside my seashell of psalm 23 

The hope that keeps us alive 

Is the belief that you will be free.

Steady and constant is the fear.Faithful and forever is the miracle.

The fire 

Walking out of the furnace

Smell is:sandalwood and Amber

LOVE ME TENDER

sometimes a man gets so sad he can hardly feel it 

anymore.

there were the years you waited for love-

aching 

and now you hardly think of it anymore.

sometimes you get so alone that it just makes sense.

in the past:

i needed you to feel

my loneliness 

for me

with me

just for right now

because the weight is too heavy

and its crushing me second by second

some men take it

and hand it back

some men feel it deeply

and hate me for it.

sick recognizes sick

hurt recognizes hurt

love me tender

love me, quick.

Is that why you stay gone?

I taught  my heart to do more 

than miss him

Trained it to beat 

a less desperate rhythm

Now my heart has gone rogue,

it prefers longing

So, I'll sit here and pretend 

that you're close to me

Is that why you stay gone, 

you don't want me to stress?

But you're blissing me, 

you're blissing me

He reminds me of the love in me

I'm celebrating on a vibrancy

Sending each other MP3s

Falling in love to a song, song

Maggie Rogers - Fallingwater

"i never loved you, fully- in the way i could.."

beauty for ashes

praise for heaviness

joy for mourning