Yours for the Taking

You can be tragic or daring

challenging me is not easy.

I have to be surprised or mesmerized

but you with your fatality and flaws

boredom comes easily, sweetly

but you can have it, it's yours for the taking.

I'm yawing and sending you up the walls

but I to want crash your castle down

make it all mortar, brick and rumble

because I'm trouble.

Step by step I'm crossing the bridge

and you're crossing your heart

trying to fend me off with words,

but words are empty without meaning

like a hexes without magic.

I'll be your curse if that's easier

and will keep you from falling apart

because I won't break or go to pieces

my life's already stitched and sewn

in a light you want to keep for yourself.

You can have it, its yours for the taking

I'm not afraid of being left in the dark,

hurt or shoved out in the cold alone

and you can't face life forward

it's safer to stay backwards

watching everything from behind

building your dreams up and down

teasing desperation with need

but its not me that you need

its hope and I have plenty to spare

You can have it, it's yours for the taking

Narcissus Longing

I stopped looking for sun risen love

and traded heat for the flickering stars

designed to skim across the twilight

higher than loss

lighter than heart ache

and deeper than him entering me.

Sex hadn't been a union of elements.

There was no volcanic betrothal candidate.

There was no flood of flirtation and mirth.

There was no wind stirring floral Ecstasy.

There was no quivering revelry

moving the ground beneath my feet

but there was me.

On fire, drowning, suffocating, crushed

under the weight of Aphrodite's Bridle

riddled by Eros's arrows not a Sebastian

no gracious, elegant Christian martyrdom

more kin to Narcissus longing to be loved

for himself, and not a perfumed perception

of conjured fantasy but this was me.

Of Dames and Princes

Many a midnight conversation have been buried underneath the lurid perfume of Stoli lemon drops and stained satin ascots over two titanic names, Dame David Bowie and his royal American cousin, Prince. Whether it is their sentimental music that drummed a wicked tattoo in the minds of my friends and myself causing us to unearth that queer little question. Who is the loveliest China girl under the Cherry Moon? Could it be the thin white duke swaddled in pseudo fascism or the religious sensualist who loved sexy? Who knew, I didn’t nor did they.

The origins of androgyny, and crossing gender predates all modern day musical movements of glam rock and punk funk. Ancient man has explored and periodically adored the concept for eons. Before any anthropologist could put a pen to paper and chronicle the slap and sparkle of culture, people have worn raspberry berets and dreamt the moonage daydream since the dawning of tribal man. Look at the Native Americans with their dual masculine and feminine Two Spirit shamans to the Samoan Fafafine who watch over the family and the Indian Hijra who bestow blessings over weddings and births.

In essence Dame, David Bowie did give the world something just as socially significant as marital well wishing and spiritual cleanliness. He gave the world an artisan’s perception of rock star glamor incased in audacious lyricism and underground fashion. Dame Bowie transmogrified the often scoffed stylings of mime, drag and homosexual artifice into something financially and creatively significant. He single handedly created entire movements through shrewd soul searching example being glam rock and the new romantic. Whether he is an original has yet to be found out. As I stated previously my sumptuous little readers in what continues to have my friends marking me a heretic is I doubt Dame Bowie’s credibility. In this day and age I feel the words, credibility, originality and honesty are all hallmarks to a by gone day. Surely, I am in no way saying that Dame, David Bowie is a charlatan to the brilliance brigade as he is unarguably brilliant. Though I scoff at the idea of saying he is the individual herald of androgyny. I will go as far as declare that he is the prime provocateur of panache and craft. Without him I dare say I would not have started my own tumble into the pool of pretty pretty. It goes to show you that television does influence the young. I remembered in the relatively bucolic days of MTV when there was music instead of faux celebrity reality shows there existed David Bowie as his alter ego, Lord Byron in the “Blue Jean” video. Awe, he was tinsel kissed and the epitome of euro cool. My innocent eyes fluttered watching his rail thin body posture while painted in various shades of Egyptian gold and film noir black. Gorgeous!

This was before the pocket sized American aristocrat Prince emerged from his spiked purple cocoon. Obviously there were similarities between the two. Both frequented hair salons, had an army of make up artists and swarms of buzzing worshippers at their feet. Where as the Dame Bowie selected ideal musicians and producers to construct his clever musical cacophony. Prince akin to Mozart, another man who adored lace and satin, played a wild assortment of instruments. Truly, we all have heard the myth of Prince being able to play over 20 instruments, some stringed, some percussion and some electronic. Please forgive me, I am not attempting to ordain one musical monarch as Godhead. Both men in my eyes hold the scepter, wear the mantle and the crowns of the auspicious artist. My goodness, Prince even created his own court of nobles, The Revolution, Vanity 6, The Time, Apollonia 6, Sheila E, The Family, Mad House, and The New Power Generation. The same can be said of Bowie reshaping Lou Reed on his “Transformer album, or his to attempt at rejuvenating Mott the Hoople with “All the Young Dudes,” his peculiar partnership on the Stooge's “Raw Power, Iggy Pop’s “The Idiot and Lust for Life” and his unique pairing with transexual sometime singer/ model Amanda Lear. The Dame Bowie and Prince knew that the unbridled energy that came from coquettishly crossing musical genres, toying with with gender norms. Which brings up the base question of what is gender? Male, female, the in between, is androgyny merely a fashionable pause in one’s pursuit to establish the self? Better yet is it a highly evolved state of assimilation? Perhaps, the Dame and Prince both unconsciously took the best of both genders and multi faceted sexual scopes and became the quintessential modern individuals?

I ask you this? Did Prince or his precursor walk the glamourous life and take up androgyny’s mask for prestige and wealth purposes? I would have to say no. Whatever fluid sexual states the two teased society with coexists presently within their personal lives. The Dame, David Bowie may not be the queen bitch in a crowd of scary monsters and super creeps but he has adopted the “stereotypical” mothering role to his wife Iman’s cosmetic/fashion mogul empire. Prince may have hung up his derrière exposing trousers yet he still writes, plays and produces his music in lacquered hair and eyeliner. They had the look and to my knowledge are still diamond dogs trotting through one giant paisley park.

My Grandmother's Eulogy

Pardon me if i get a little sentimental or saccharine but what I am about to say is the truth. I will miss my grandmother. Plain and simple, like herself. Granted some people may choose to shine, and burn the skies with explosive emotions, artistic ability or even wealth but my grandmother didn’t. She choose a slightly more delicate and elusive path, she shimmered, she glimmered.

Really, I am not saying she was shy, retiring or even sainted, as she wasn’t. My grandmother loved to gossip on the phone, critique people and dish her highly unique brand of stubborn advice to not just family and friends but on some occasions even strangers. Though just as stubborn and sassy as my grandmother could be, she loved equally as fierce. She devoted herself entirely and selflessly to those same friends, family and even strangers with such an ardor, such an intensity that it often left people blinded and unaware of what she had done.

She was complex, a duality but who isn’t? I remember how my grandmother and I would argue and hiss like cats and within hours we would find ourselves laughing in the kitchen having cupfuls of steaming raspberry tea and giant slices of apple pie with Andy Griffith or MASH playing in the background.

Again, pardon my sentiment, but my entire being is literally filled with glimmering recollections of her and through her I learned exactly what Virginia Woolf meant in saying, “You cannot find peace by avoiding life.” As in my grandmother’s life she showed me love, strength and “how to let the water roll my back like a duck” and how to never avoid or run from anything or anyone. In her passing, she taught me how to make peace with my past and look at people for who they really are, shining stars or glittering sparks in the dark, and not what we assumed them to be as my grandma was both. Like you are and I am, a shining star and a glittering spark in the dark but we shine, we shimmer and we illuminate.

Gorgeous Petit Webs

I had made a point of painting the sky in muted shades of blue rather than red. I took to lighting candles instead of fires under my feet or rekindling my heart. I didn't want to trouble anyone.I didn't want to trouble myself with theatrics. But the theater, the cinematic life is what people adore. They feed on drama, it establishes their worth. I don't need to establish my worth. I know it. I'm sterling. I don't need to be coupled during my suburban stay or date. Life has floral scented festivities instore with me. Grandoise galas filled with merriment, adventure and excitement not sweet stagnation. I'm done with the drearies, I'm done with the dramatists and frankly I'm over the oratorians.

Playing polite doesn't earn credit in the minds of co workers and lovers. It pacifies them, it sets a presidence of falsity. People want life to spin smooth comfortable webs of peace and tranquility. Disillusionment gives way to invention and invention creates gorgeous petit webs of diaphanous deceptions. This is not true if relationships both plationic or nonplatonic, familial or work are set on the sand by the raging sea. Break waters fail, mountains erode and iron oxidizes but life and love are limitless. Why label them with harmful terms and pin untruthful ideologies to the most elementary of things, life and love. They are both imperfect in their perfection like me.

Song Selection: The Myrmidons: What Color is Love

From Ink to Stars in Stories

Play the Role

Say the Lines

Go through Motions

Surrender or Slay

Take up the Mantle

Write your Credo

Ink your Heart and Skin

Dye your Hair

Change your Face

with Knives and Books

Live for Tomorrow

Suffer for Today

Speak The Truth

Live the Lie

that Money can Buy

in Empty Drams and Dreams

Walk with Stars in your Hands

Tread over the Clover Carefully

And Run fast, Run faster into the River

Meet the Monster in the Mouth

with Scales Balancing and Sparkling Spores

Stand Up

Grow Some Gills

Get Some Balls

But What of Feathers

Poultry, Prey or Predator

One, Two, Three

Father, Son and The Holy Ghost

Which is Believed, Blessed or Cursed

He or I or the Family History

That Speaks in Spikes and Stories

Thorned in Velvets and Marijuana Flumes

Excuses in Repition

that Don't Repeat but Prick and Pin Problem

on My Lapel like a Mottled Flower

That doesn't Die but Reconfigurates

Into a Brutal New Infirmy

Which doesn't Rape or Ravage

Only Callus's the Hands and Toughens the Heart

Corn Flower Beasties...

Nights are darker under the ebon wings of baying beasties and skrieking skelletal birds. Animals they are, subsconscious pretty monsters who help you shine your face silver. I'm tarnished, and the gold accents have shifted to glittery dust.

The slow eloquence of one's mind returing to the places where ivory boned birds battled for genderless oppession but what of the war worn beasties who fought on cornflower covered mesa looking for the elusive quality of love. But there were no anwers but numerous theories and we bottled them in cobalt and silver and threw them out to the ocean.

We laughed, Let them Fend for Themselves, when We could'nt? We were'nt brave, or noble. Yes we were hard, indignent,unrelentless, dreamy, fanatastically selfish but brave?

To be brave and fight, no, no, no...LEAVE ME ALONE...TO THINK....Let Me Go....TO DREAM....So LET THEM Go...

Let Them Go and Let Them leave...

Smashed Kisses, Webbed Mirror and Glimmering Ice Slivers, Avian Floral Malady.

All four blue and gold bottles are waiting for some to take them, decycpher their fogotten emotions and smash their kisses into perfumed pools of rubies and strawberry juice and waltz away to have someone's visions frostied and glimmer in waves of blessings and hexes.

Better yet, if I have my cloak on and a wand would I be able to bewitch this musical caccaphony into something that was safe, all polite in a box made by the precise hands of a house husband?

Have I come so far? I have tasted so many lips and learned their secerets, I have bed the ghosts of many generations and yet I see traveling, experiencing, books being writing and my wings unbound, unfurling.

Gallows and Crucifixes

I don't write for him. I don't write for you. I write for me.  I write for clarity and expression. Writing is the rare mountain side clearning where I lay naked on a bed of lillies and tullips alone. Selfish I know, but writting is the one place I can fly free without restraint.  I have never been a fan of bondage, restraints or cages. As mentioned in Breakfast at Tiffany's I put myself in my own cage but the shackles are off and the doors are open. However, on ink and on paper there are no doors only space, endless white pages. Blank papges where I instantaneously become both magician and warrior. I am a duality as my lunar sign suggests Gemini.

 

You might say thatboth those figures are lonely types but it is not true. Every warrior has a love to anchor themself too, whether it be a physical person or and abstract idea. The same goes goes for the magician, or the witch, their lover are the elements and the esoteric. I am a lover of the esoteric and the abstract but it does not mean I can't love the physical.  What is the word can't anyway. It is a simple little word dolled up with a lot of nonsensical letters like N and T.  The letter N is related closely to the "END" and the letter T in it's capital form looks like double sided gallows, in its lower case form a crucifix, both devices bring an end.  These are my truths and understanding of those letters. Theories, and truths change as something can mean one thing then and change at another time like the love. 

Love is universial movement and movement is motion, motion is energy and energy is eternal and eternity is everything and nothing. So is love,  you can love something with such fire and then crystalize it in ice, shattering it into splinters. Love is this, and that...

Song Choice: Lush-Monocrome

Rubble of Insecurity

Funny, how when life seems downtrodden we reach to something more intangible, even electronic like writing a blog. No one wants to collect their thoughts, organize their dreams in tight little boxes, but you have too. by doing so makes them leave the delicate stages of hope into something real, concrete.  

You achieve anything you want by becoming one with your element. I am fire, I am water, I am the wind and I am the earth. I can burn someone in a ring of flame or drown a memory, or escape on invisible currents of fear or bury someone in the rubble of my insecurity. But I am not dong that anymore. I am tying everything up neatly in bows and ribbons. Making life again, beautiful, elegant and simple. Life should not be difficult. 

I am still walking on a tight rope but I can't fall anymore. Like I said, I can fly. There are no demons in my cupboard, there  are no monsters under my bed, maybe a few of them have been tangled in my sheets. But nothing is out to get me or devour me unless I allow it. And if you know you hold the reigns, you direct the currents, really there is no stopping you on your pursuit to some special.

Trust me becoming one with yourself may seem more difficult than being coupled but it isn't. There is still a sense of surrender, allowing  your heart to open, your soul to unfold and your mind to unfurl all its miracle to the world. I got accepted into school, I paid my credit card off and next is moving.  Moving to San Francisco perhaps, or maybe I am moving to another level of consciousness or humanity. 

I used to say I did not care what anything thought of me and I don't. Now its time that I care about what I think of myself. I am the elements, earth, air, fire and water, complete, and exquisite, then again I always was, including uninformed.

Song Choice: Britney Spears-Circus (Tom Neville's Ringleader Remix).

Demure Confusion

I thought that one day my world would exploded in a stream of gliding white butterflies and white tullips. I hoped that my powder blue vision would blur to a shimmering pink. I haven't seen it yet. My sight has not been introduced to pink or golds. Okay, so I did not see those colors yet I  did feel their warmth once. A fluttering pink sparkle and delicate gold dust moved over my skin like a wave of licking jeweled colored flames. Try tossing a hand full of borax into a fire and it's green. A light pale green like leaves blushing before spring, That is how I felt with after a film with my"former other" on evening. The San Francisco  street was sleepy as most of the movie goers were still locked away in the theater wrestling with scarves and coats. We were not. We snuck out soon as the screen the credits roles. Down the iron fire escape into the nip of January's chill. He was off to his car and I to my cab. The fog had already roled in, the buzz our cocktail had faded leaving us in the stark surrender of mystery. Do I still have feelings? Can I love someone?

The cab pulled up. We faced eachother, and hugged. Our arms wrapped aroud one another meekly and we kissed. I tasted his words. I peeked inside in his soul and found that hope was not just on my lips, it was on his. His thoughts were sugared in a demure confusion. A confusion that was flickering in pale flames of green. Green like leaves blushing. Who knows but on that night we had a hope. And within that minor little minute, I spun. The kiss was merely two lips touching, but I tasted something green, green for growth, and green for hope. 

Hope is beautiful but you can't cultivate it like love. It is not a manicured garden filled purple perennials. Love germinates in souls, wild flowers. It's instinctual, fantastical, and nonsensical. It can can flood a heart in a flash or steal someones breath in heady perfume.

I remembered that today after my phone rang, it was him. My hand shook, spilling the rose wine on the floor, I never mentioned that I had spilled something. My lips were closed silently mumbling, "Do I still have feelings? Can I love someone again?" 

Song: Virginia Astley-Second Chance

Feral Cats and Lavender

"Dreary, dreary," said the morose catapillar before hearing the wind on butterfly wings.

The moments are building I know. The times are changing. I wish I could change too. Change into vapor, and ride on the chilly March winds towards the bay. Everything will happen, everything will unfold. I won't leap into the future blindly. I will not jump into a frying pan. I see myself winging it over the unrelaible Northern California sunshine. 

Funny, how different I feel when I'm there.  I breath. I fan the flames of my complications and quirks openly. Without care for offense or disapproval of family or perception of friends who have a strong definition of who I am. They're views of me are correctto an extent. We all project a fascade, right?

Presently, I feel there are very few who know the actual me. There are a few. But isnt that a typical statement that most people would say? I have to answer yes. Out of the hundreds of thousands of billions can one person say they know someone entirely. We all have secrets.

Secrets so dark that not even a torch could not illuminate them. I don't find the darkness bad in the sense that it is evil. People since the dawning of time have stated anything remotley dark was bad like skin, and hair color. If there was no darkness, how could one determine how beautiful a falling star was? Or without the night, how could we listen to a lullaby dreaming in the whispery moonlight?  Impossible I say,  so tonight from my window I will watch the trees bend heavy with rain and listen to the feral cats hiding underneath my lavender for cover in the dark and dream.

Music- Marie Laforet: Modinha

  

illness, fruit and silence

Illness can sort of take one on a dull side step to bad television. I found myself tangled in sweaty sheets with a stubbly face(my own) wondering why I could'nt decoupage my bedroom. Those crafty wizards on the home design shows make everything looks so entertaining, even crushed green velvet. Black velvet(not the song) is one thing if your Stevie Nicks, but crushed anything is just a tad too much for me except strawberries. When I was little I used to crush strawberries with a blue plastic straw in a frosted glass and pour my grandmothers lemonade over them. I loved watching the colors swirl around the glass,  and the seeds spin, it reminded me of hard boiled easter eggs. All strange hues and patterns.

Mmmm, I like strawberries, I like berries generally, I think they are one of the few delicate fruits that possess any sort of glamor. They are petite, look beautiful wet, aloof when frozen and strangely sexual when warm. They pulsate with an alien sensuality that belongs to dragon fly's wings, hydrangeas and starlit skies. Yes, I can get pithy. 

I digress, this virus has stolen my voice. (More pith)I must admit a part of me has secertly loved the notion of being mute, soundless. Call it a strange fascination, but when I saw the film the Piano with Holly Hunter I wondered why she would opt for human speech. She was far more intriguing when silent. Her voice was in her music, in the movements of her hands, how her fingers stretched, how her back arched, how lips parted, it was romance to me. That's romance to me, quiet, soft, powdery and passion is untamed, sharp, and raucous. Both are important, both are needed just in varied degrees. What that degree is I really don't know but I will.

Music: Mum-The Island of Children's Children