Category: dark thoughts

I Am Here but Peripheral

I Am Here but Peripheral

I have no importance here. I try to talk to everyone. But no one talks to me. When I join in conversation, I feel their disdain. I have nothing authoritative to say because I am not an expert on anything, they say. Look it up, they say, with a slight sneer contorting their lips.

When I explain that my education and experience and research gives my opinion authority, I am scoffed at.

When I talk I am ignored or am made to feel foolish or am misinterpreted

I sometimes feel loved but that changes moment by moment. I reach out to embrace. I have been told not to embrace. I embrace too much. No one reaches out to embrace me.

No one consults me and if I offer the wrong advice, words chastise me.

No one tells me where they are going nor if they are going.

I don’t feel welcome at the table.

I ask all the wrong questions. Words and looks say I sound stupid. I have been told that my questions are stupid.

Sometimes none of this is true. Sometimes I want to run away.

I am not needed. I am peripheral.

All Hallows Night (Morning)

The night when souls wander freely is fast approaching. The sky is clear and in this chill morning I can even read the constellations. Lights in sickly orange and violet shine eerily from rustling bushes and the withered, brittle leaves falling sound like footsteps following stealthily close behind. A black cat steals silently across my path, but I am not startled; I look behind to see if I am still alone in the black stillness. My gaze reaches out for the lone street light still beyond my rapid shuffle through the dark street. Was the crack in the wall always there or is it opening just for me. Finally. .. the bus. “Good morning, how are you?” “Great”, I say, as if nothing happened.

The Reminder: A Night-time Visitor

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I live alone in a large house. I sleep on the second floor just over the garage, with windows facing the street. I have been in bed for I don’t know how long.

I feel (or can I see?) something is coming in the window. My worst nightmare is about to happen. I’m going to be robbed, raped, maybe killed.

I’m paralyzed. I can’t move. I’m wide awake; I’m asleep; I’m dreaming. Something dark is coming in the window. It’s on the bed. A tabby cat is swirling on top of the covers. It’s huge, big and not entirely tame. I touched it and it disappeared from under my hand.

My heart is beating so loud, I can hear it. I feel cold. I want to move but I want to lie as still as I can. I pray this is not really happening.

Then I feel something larger get into bed, under the covers. I can’t move, I can’t scream, I’m terrified. It’s long, bony legs and feet touch mine. It’s naked. I try with all of my strength to talk. I keep trying to say, “Who are you?” But all that comes out is a croaking sound. I am slightly on my side, turned away, so I can’t see it. I try with all my might to turn over. I try with all my strength to talk but still, only raspy, throat grating sounds come out.

I don’t want it to touch me but it’s feet and legs are trying to rub against mine. I make one last effort to roll over and succeed, but too well. I find myself lying on top of a dark figure. The teeth are brilliant white and he/she is so dark that I can’t make out whether it is a man or a woman. I know it is human and real. It is in my bed and I’m staring into a face that I cannot see. But my body, I cannot roll off.

I finally am able to say, “Who are you?” It responded, somehow because the voice was not coming from the mouth, but it clearly said, “The Reminder”.

The next thing I knew, I was lying on my back. I was again, paralyzed. I felt the cat again on the bed, swirling on the bedsheets. I reached out and it was, again, a giant cat but this time it is orange and in an instant, it disappeared as before. I fell immediately to sleep as though dead not waking until late morning.

When I awoke “The Reminder” was so strongly embedded in my mind, I cannot shake it to this day. I have never been so afraid, even though I don’t believe it was evil nor did it come with mal-intent.

I think about this visitation every day and wonder what it means. What am I to be reminded of?

In response to you, dear voter. It’s not even close to all I want to say.

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This post is in a short response to a Facebook post made by a friend. I won’t include it here but suffice it to say that it released a floodgate of words. This is relatively unedited, so you will read redundancy and ill-composed sentence structure, but I couldn’t care less.

Most of my readers enjoy reading about my misadventures and I am well aware that when I get serious, my “likes and comments” plummet. That’s O.K. I will continue to spout off when the mood strikes because I don’t want to stand silent when our voices are needed. And our voices need to be raised right now.

The post had to do with whether or not your opinion of people changes based on who they support politically. It suggests that it should not. This is my response to, first, the poster and then to a friend of the poster, who agrees with the premise of the post. The name has been changed to protect the innocent.

This is easier said than done, xxxx. The fact that a person would vote for someone who is a known racist, a misogynist, a liar, without empathy for the poor, who is homophobic, anti- immigration, anti-Muslim, etc., and continues to support such a person, says alot about that person who you consider to be a good person and worthy of your friendship. I have friends and family who support such people and I don’t believe I can still hold them in respect or in a close relationship. I choose not to associate with people who hate or support those who hate and are a danger to the health of this planet. I will take a stand against it and cannot look into the eyes of others who can tolerate for the briefest moment those who don’t stand against it be they acquaintances, long time friends, or family.

My comment was not meant as sarcasm. I cannot stand with others who vote for a government of hate, warmongering, whoremongering, scaremongering, and that is spending money, 25 billion dollars, on a wall, and increasing billions on the military, increasing coal mining, oil drilling, dismantling the EPA, using our SS monies to continue wars that serve no one but only to fill the pockets of the already rich, who lie about everything… the list goes on and on. For me to continue in a relationship with someone who supports “not my president” and his band of criminals would be like me saying, as Trump did about the white supremacists and neo- Nazis, that there are some fine people among them, that those who support them are fine people. That would be ludicrous and hypocritical. No. If one hates like he does and supports his policies and refuses to see what damage he is doing, I do not, cannot, see them as who I thought they were. I see them as what they are, in collusion with a would be dictator and so much worse.

I won’t compromise. I didn’t say I voted for Hillary. I didn’t mention my vote. Our history is bloody and I’m not just talking about the U.S. Genocide, oppression, inequality, injustice, xenophobia, are what characterize the human race. Power corrupts and an oligarchy we are. The constitution was written for the benefit of the white landowner. America was built on the backs of slaves and indentured servants, on the backs of the poor and dispossessed.

From our first steps on this continent, from England, Spain, France, Portugal, we have been trailing blood from our hands and feet. We continued the bloody wars that were taking place in Europe, fought over land and resources and we have never stopped. If you want an eye opener, simply read the basic facts on Wikipedia on the US history of war. Peace, freedom? For who? At what cost? What a joke!

The American dream has never been and will never be. It is an illusion created while we were sleeping. Ask a native American, ask a Black man or woman, ask the working poor, ask the homeless, ask the deported, ask the refugee, ask someone in prison on charges of marijuana possession, ask the dispossessed who can no longer afford rent and even less, buy a house, a car or take a vacation. Ask a single mom who has to choose between paying rent or buying food, ask a promising student who can’t afford college… Ask, ask, ask some questions. Then ask whether 25 billion dollars should be spent on a wall when our roads, highways and byways and bridges are crumbling. Ask why we need billions more spent on the military? Could it be because we are hated around the world? Could it be because the government is afraid of civil war if they take our Social Security, our health care, our homes, our land. Have you read why there was a provision for a militia in the constitution? Read it and weep.

Trump isn’t and never was a politician and he’s ignorant and selfish and worse. He’s just the fruit of the horror that we as a country, a white nation, have sown. Take a good look while you still can. And weep. Weep because the human race, at its core, is homicidal. We have devised ways to finish off life on this planet. What an accomplishment. Way to go guys. Let’s see which homicidal leader will start the final war. Let’s see what unregulated chemical manufacturer will pollute the last of our drinkable water and fertile land, what under-regulated oil company will drill and frack away our oceans and lands, what plastics will clog everything including marine life and forest dwellers.

I could go on, but I won’t. Read it for yourself. I don’t need to school you. You’ve heard it all before but you refuse to open your eyes. There’s no way that the will of the people prevails. Never has, never will.

Rise up people and face the torture chamber, the lynching rope, the chopping block, imprisonment, the firing squad, the reservation, or banishment, if you’re lucky. Many already have.

Rise up if you dare. Fill mass graves. Fill the newscasts and newspaper headlines with your death. All this while the rich line their pockets. Do you think they care about you? Why would they, except as you serve them? You answer that question.

New Year’s Eve Musings of a New Year’s Eve Anti-Climax Long Ago

It’s New Year’s Eve, 2017. I’ve been sleeping in my chair. I just moved to the bed. Everyone is sick here. Hannah and Enora are in a terrible state; they’re in mortal combat with the flu with body temperatures over 100 degrees. Both have painful coughs. Neither has eaten for at least two days. Ancel is at his dad’s New Year’s party, meeting with his friends for an intense game of Dungeons and Dragons. I made a delicious dip but no one wants it. I drank a huge glass of fresh orange and lemon juice with rum and I guess that’s why I fell asleep. Big, big exciting night approaching.

This is nothing new. If I had somewhere to be, it would be a miracle. I’m usually disappointed in New Year’s Eve, anyway. I’ve never been to a party. I’ve never shared my life with anyone who’ll stay, up. I can’t tell you how many years I’ve watched the ball drop in New York City, watching TV while huddled on the couch alone, while Jack slept in the bedroom. And me? Wondering if the rest of the world was dancing. I’d stay there watching the entertainment, then I would dejectedly drift into bed wondering what exciting time I had missed. After thirty some years with Jack, I really never got used to not celebrating the leaving of one year and the coming in of another.

Once I met Ramiro, I must have been out on New Year’s Eve. He wouldn’t have stayed home. He was a young Cuban man. A tremendous dancer with an unquenchable thirst for life. Why can’t I remember? I can’t remember. I’m sure we were either out dancing at Andrea’s Cha Cha’s Club or at Guave and Natasha’s house where there was always a party. Maybe that’s why. Maybe it was because we were always out dancing or at a house party.me-ramiro_1996-1

My saddest New Year’s Eve was when the Gregorian calendar turned to the year 2000, my first year without him. After three years, it was over, but it was a slow death. He wouldn’t come home. I had been too mean. A menopausal mean. The worst kind of mean. I didn’t know what had turned me into a dissatisfied screaming ‘jeemy’, and he had decided that if I kicked him out one more time, he wasn’t coming back. This was the last time. Though I begged him to come home and though we still loved each other, he was cold, like a stone. My pleading was useless, so I moved on. I tried for eight months. I dated others, but I wasn’t forgetting. I made plans to leave Portland to try to start over. To try to forget him. If he didn’t know where I was, he might leave me alone, might not call, might not come over every night.

So, I moved. I didn’t tell him where I lived. I house sat for Casey and Karen while they went to spend three months in an ashram in India. That should do until I left for Tallahassee, Florida having accepted a graduate fellowship at Florida State University. I would start winter semester. I decided to leave in December so that I could take the train to regroup, to try to pull myself together. While staring out the windows, I watched as each state flew by. How much farther away could I move while staying on the continent of contiguous states. How many degrees of separation would it take to get over him?

I planned to stop in Nogales, Arizona for a couple of days, to visit my good friend, Mary Beth. Mary Beth had traveled with me to Mexico. She had spent days and nights with Ramiro and me… cooking dinner, bringing sacks of food and liquor to the house, dancing and laughing and loving the nights and days away. After Ramiro left, she spent days, nights and weeks trying to console me but I was sick nearly to death from heartbreak. Between Mary Beth and Tannis, I didn’t die, though there were days that I couldn’t breathe. I would arrive in time to spend New Year’s Eve with Mary Beth and then on to Tallahassee. Good plan, I thought.

In those months, I never stopped crying. Mary Beth met me at the train station where we caught a taxi to her apartment. I came as she had left me months before. I was lost, but she was kind. We dropped off my bags and caught another taxi to the restaurant/bar where she worked. She was going to have to work on New Year’s Eve, she told me. I was going to be alone. This was what I dreaded. We bought liquor, then stopped at a taqueria where we gorged on tacos. Then back to the house where she dropped me off so she could head back to work. I busied myself cleaning. listened to music and felt miserable.

The next day we crossed the border to explore Nogales, Mexico. We ate, did a bit of shopping and then home again. I was terrible company. A broken record, a swollen-faced gargoyle, a fountain of salty water and grief. Mary Beth was strong like a giant sequoia tree. She never would have fallen prey to drowning in sorrow. She knew her strength. She had left many loves behind. I wanted nothing more than to drown. New Year’s eve came.

I was home for the evening while she worked her shift. She had moved away from Portland months before. She was always wandering. She had closed her eyes and dropped her finger onto a map. Wherever it landed, she decided, would be her next move. She packed up, got on a bus and rented an apartment as far south as one could travel. She settled on the Mexican border. The front of the apartment faced south with a view from the depressed US town of Nogales, Arizona, to its sister city, the even more depressed city of Nogales, Sonora, Mexico. The kitchen’s plate glass windows ran along the full length of the south side of the building, looking across the border, a wall of steel, into Nogales, Mexico.

Nogales-Wall

As night began to fall, I stood at the windows. I wasn’t hungry. I was beyond lonely so I would wait for Mary Beth to get off work when the bar closed. There would be no buses. Taxies would be few and far between. Her plan was, as it was every night, to walk home, alone, keeping to the gravel shoulder along the highway. She walked towards the border, for miles and miles, to reach her apartment. Never afraid.

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I watched fireworks and listened to gunshots, watched the flares and the blue and red flashing lights of police vehicles and wondered what Ramiro was doing. At some point, I realized that bullets could come through those windows and kill me, so I spent the evening crawling around on the floor between the living room and the kitchen, standing just long enough to make another drink, hoping the walls were thick enough to stop a bullet. What did I know? When Mary Beth got home after a night on her feet, we drank until 4:00 in the morning, listening to ballads in Spanish. I needed to leave to catch my train though the sun was hours from bringing the light.

night in Nogales

The scheduled taxi driver refused to wake, so we drug my suitcases through the black streets; I was carrying $600 in cash, all the money I had to start my life on the panhandle. I was paranoid, hung over, or more likely still drunk, but still, I had to catch the first train out of Nogales. I was running to Florida but really, I was trying to run from my broken heart.

Eighteen years later, I’m still running from that broken heart and New Year’s Eve hasn’t gotten any better. I don’t cry anymore and I don’t watch the ball drop alone anymore but like all the new year’s eves in my life, I wonder what I should be doing.

If I Were to Make God 

If I Were to Make God 

If I were to make god, he would be terrifying, his eyes would be red and glowing like embers.

If I were to make god, his hands would be claws, his hair would be flowing out behind him against a rabid wind, his feet would be cloven, his teeth would be sharp and pointed and he would go after evil and evil doers in every corner of the universe.

If I were to make god, he would not be tolerant, would not be full of love and compassion or be patient with evil. No, not for a moment.

If I were to make god, he would tear faces, arms and legs off, he would create havoc, he would scare even the most callous of men.

If I were to make god, and he was all seeing, all knowing, all present, all powerful, he would not allow for children to be pent up in closets, shaken, slapped, burned, nor dogs to be on chains, people to be starving, and our species to be so hateful.

If I were to make god, he would be too busy cleaning out the temples, the churches, the synagogues to have time to count every hair on every person’s head.

If I were to make god, he would to be too busy getting rid of the money changers, the whoremongers, the warmongers to see every bird that fell from the sky.

If I were to make god, then you would know what love is.

Whoops!!! Don’t Press Send.

A relationship can be hard, confusing and maybe a girl wants to text a friend to get some advice but that text goes flying through the airwaves right into her partners mail instead… things can go from bad to worse. Even some quick tap dancing, back stepping, doesn’t work. Then it can do nothing less than get real.

Her:
We’re not solid yet and I’m not sure that I want to be. When I’m with him, I’m not sure and when I’m not with him, I’m not sure. What is one to do? I don’t like it when my mind is filled with thoughts like these. I like to be settled. Oh well, this is what I’ll have to live with until my mind does settle. It’s a lazy Sunday, I’m doing a little bit of this and I’m doing a little bit of that and a lot of nothing. This day will slip right through my fingers.

Him:
We’re not solid yet. Who are you writing to? Are you writing to me in the third person?

Her: starting the tap dance…
Yes.

Her: fake, schmarmy smile…
Just some thoughts.

Her: quick but faulty thinking…
What should I do?

Him:
You blew it again.

Her: Pleading innocence…
How?

Her: blame shifting…
How can we weather the storms if you think I blew it by expressing myself to you? How strong is our love? That weak?

Her: guilt tripping…
Why shouldn’t I think that we’re not solid yet when you can say things like, “You blew it again”?

Him:
The things you say makes the relationship weak. I was just planning to see you tomorrow for breakfast, lovemaking, bookstore, supper, dog walk, conversation, but the things you say chase me away. Do you think I’m going to come tomorrow after your immature statements are made? Yes, you blew it again. And we needed time to work things out and have a lot of fun. This is not fun having these useless discourses. They get us nowhere. I’ll contact you in a few days or a week to see if you can get your shit together.

Her: blame totally shifted…
That sounds like we’re on pretty shaky ground, wouldn’t you say? Doing this is what makes me wonder. I don’t want to expect this kind of rejection, but I do. But if this is what you want…

Him:
What you wrote at 1:48 today made me sick. Why did you write it? Read it again, read it again and again – – why did you write that? Did you write it because you felt that way? Made me feel sick. How do you think I’m going to respond to that? And what are you trying to tell me… that we are through? That is the only way I can interpret what you are writing. OK, I get it.

Her: Wow! That was weird. Now what? Let’s get serious…

Good night old-man. For now, you’re stuck with me… Me and my fine ideas and changable feelings I want to share with you. Go ahead; don’t talk to me for a few days, a week… go ahead, but we’re somehow hooked up together in heart and mind because we keep trying. Take all the time you want… get mad at me. Do what you have to do. Have your little tizzy. Get over yourself. Let me say the words I’ve got to say. Stop countin’ and judgin’ the times I blow it… the times I disappoint you. Go on with your rigid rules and expectations. I’m right here. You want to have fun, so relax. Call me when you love me for me and free me from what you want me to be. I’ll be singin’ and dancin’ right over here where you left me.

Good night. Sweet dreams.

The Sinister Morning Glory

I see the clouds on the horizon and the sun setting lies below and its rays reach out to touch down on the earth one last time.

The morning glories are all that are prospering in my garden and they weave their web, laying out tendrils that threaten to devour and choke out all that is around them.

The garden is hopeless. It is nothing more than a bed of morning glories. A metaphor.

It will end up at the end of the season, laid over in a nasty wet, slimy black web that has stunted its growth and hindered anything else from growing.

It is only poison now that is the anecdote. I cannot plant anything new. It will rapidly be taken over. The morning glory is a sinister plant.

It reproduces prolifically and displays the most delicate of flowers that bloom in the early morning sun and sleep in the afternoon.

They shine as a soil stabilizer and erosion prevention but oh! the wickedness they birth.

It lies waiting in the cold wet earth all winter; it needs no sun to flourish and the more you break it and pull it, the more it grows.

When you till, it only groans in joy and ecstasy knowing that it will grow from the tiniest broken shred.

It cannot reach to heights except on the backs of others and everything in its path must lie prostrate or support its upward thrusts.

One has no choice. I feel its oppression even from the warm sheets of my bed; at night they even grow. The fragmented stems are growing, even in the wheelbarrow beneath my window.

I may stay for hours on my knees in front of them and pull at them if I wish.

I may rip them from the stems of all of my plants but they mock me from the far reaches of the garden. I will never be able to touch them with my scratched and bleeding fingers.

My hands are stained and torn from trying to grab at them and they twist and turn in one one another in a warp and weft and ropes of vines just under the surface of the soil.

They are peeking out through the garden wall. They hiss and twirl in their hideous dance.

I want to give them a surprise party and then shock them in their joyous glee and spray them in the nose, eyes and mouth with something toxic.

2003 April 20

My Eyes Will Not Soon Close…

It’s nearly Christmas Day. This is the night that many believe that the king of the universe was born and that a star led wise men to a manger where this king was made flesh and that this king came to save mankind with a promise of eternal life. This is not my mythology. This is not…

But this is a night; some say it is a holy  night, a sacred night. It is only because we believe it is. I can feel a power out there in the cold night. I can feel a heavy energy. My eyes will not soon close in sleep. My heart will not soon cease to ache.

My small, insignificant being desires that everyone, in this night, sleep warmly, sleep in love, sleep in the arms of a benevolent Earth. But my desire means less than a teardrop falling from my eyes or from all the eyes in the world.

There are those that sleep the deepest of slumbers  below the rubble of a bomb shelled city where only fragments of their bones might be found.

There are those who cannot sleep because of the hunger eating at their belly and the bellies of their crying children.

There are those who will not sleep because they have no love, those no one has ever loved, where the scars of a million wounds have healed only to be opened once again day after miserable day.

There are those who will not sleep tonight because they lay uncovered, bare where they float between the pavement and the coal black sky, without a shred of cloth to cover their shivering, aching body.

There are those who will not sleep tonight, who quiver beneath their covers, for fear of what ugly, painful words will be hurled at them, what fists, rocks, knives, guns await them tomorrow because of meaningless differences between them and others.

There are those who will not sleep tonight, because of a million, trillion reasons too horrible to mention.

Those that I love are nestled beneath piles of cozy blankets tonight. Those that I love still anticipate the morning. Those that I love have not experienced hunger, terror, homelessness, chaos, bone-chilling cold, fear, hopelessness. Shall I beg the king of the universe that they never do?

What kind of world is this where there are those who live with blessings and those who do not? What kind of world is this where only some experience the joy of the season and others do not? What kind of world is this?

My eyes will not soon close in sleep nor my heart find solace on this, this holy night when it has been told, the king of the universe was born on earth.