Weary traveler:
We have been down this road
so many times before, you and I.

Will you keep making the same mistakes
you have?  Will you keep twisting that
proverbial ankle  of yours in those same
proverbial pitfalls you know so well?
Sure, “the devil you know..”
the saying goes.

But just how many times will
you let this devil twist his
hands around your feet and
keep you rooted in those
same muddy trails that
you helped form?

You’ve run to the edge already,
my friend. You landed yourself
at the shore of a place where,
let’s be honest here, you don’t
 know where you are. That’s ok.

The waves will eventually wash
away all the steps you took to
get here, and the choice to
remember or forget them is yours.

So, stop. Be still. Calm the
fervent chatter in your head
and take my hand.  You have
felt so lost to me, I know.

So, stop. Breathe. Let yourself
find the cool, green, shining
space in the center of it. Hold
yourself there. Breathe in again.

I’ll be there. Waiting. Ready
to take you to perhaps a
more worthwhile trail.

My infinity lacks
loops. Instead of
that continuous pattern,
twirling and intersection
once and always. No, none
of your nauseating twirls
here. Mine has other repetitions.

My infinity is ripples.
The same repeated waves,
beating against the shore:
never ceasing, rhythmic and
smooth. The ripples follow
one another, a soothing
hand caressing my back as I sleep.

My infinity is soft, steady,
the grazing lines disappearing
and then returning to graze
the shore again.

I didn’t mean to fall off down the mountain.

It’s silly, but I was so taken aback by
the stunning view and the sense of
unfettered possibility before me that
I forgot to focus on my footing and over-thought
the simple process of one-foot-in-front-of-the-other
(also, apparently of how-to-stand-still).

So, I tripped and fell, my hands thrown up
in a burst of surprise before I realized that
my center of gravity had been completely
flipped on its head and I was tumbling down
the mountain scape. My shoulder hit the ground,
a rock dug in, and my body immediately curled
into a fetal position: my arms protecting
my head and face as I tried to minimize
the damage of moving that fast at a
speed I could not control.

And my poor little body bounced and
twisted— my knees scraped and bloody
and my arms covered in bruises. At one
point, though, the sound of my body against
the ground became a rhythm: thump, thump,
thump. The chaos turned into a kind of dance
and in a few moments I found my breath and
saw a log in my path. I used the gravity and
power of my fall with the strength of my legs
and flew over; my back arched away from the
ground like the curved arabesque of a pole
vaulter’s. I hit the floor again, but
this time, it felt planned. It felt controlled.

And on the way down, I found grace.
I found the grace to fall into chaos
and do my best to adapt. To turn the
pain into a practice and the unknown into
a kind of power that I surprised even
myself with.

And on the way down, I found strength.
I saw obstacles in my way and, instead
of continuing to curl into a defensive
position, I used them to propel me forward
to the rhythm of my own tumultuous but
beautiful dance down the slope.

And on the way down, I found joy.
The fall was the closest thing to
complete weightlessness and flying
that I will probably ever feel and,
while scary and painful, it is a moment
that no one can take from me.

So, when I finally skidded to a stop at
the bottom, with my shoes caked in dirt
and my body covered with the scrapes and
bruises of the obstacles I didn’t see
coming (or just couldn’t avoid), I wiped
the mud out of my eyes, pulled a twig out of
my hair, and smiled.

From @USCedu Professor Dana Gioia

New Year’s

By Dana Gioia

Let other mornings honor the miraculous.
Eternity has festivals enough.
This is the feast of our mortality,
The most mundane and human holiday.

On other days we misinterpret time,
Pretending that we live the present moment.
But can this blur, this smudgy in-between,
This tiny fissure where the future drips

Into the past, this flyspeck we call now
Be our true habitat? The present is
The leaky palm of water that we skim
From the swift, silent river slipping by.

The new year always brings us what we want
Simply by bringing us along—to see
A calendar with every day uncrossed,
A field of snow without a single footprint.

Dana Gioia spoke at my brother’s Stanford graduation, and now teaches at USC. His poetry has always spoken to me. Lovely

From Out The Cave
by Joyce Sutphen

When you have been
at war with yourself
for so many years that
you have forgotten why,
when you have been driving
for hours and only
gradually begin to realize
that you have lost the way,
when you have cut
hastily into the fabric,
when you have signed
papers in distraction,
when it has been centuries
since you watched the sun set
or the rain fall, and the clouds,
drifting overhead, pass as flat
as anything on a postcard;
when, in the midst of these
everyday nightmares, you
understand that you could
wake up,
you could turn
and go back
to the last thing you
remember doing
with your whole heart:
that passionate kiss,
the brilliant drop of love
rolling along the tongue of a green leaf,
then you wake,
you stumble from your cave,
blinking in the sun,
naming every shadow
as it slips.

Apples and Oranges

I remember  when I had asked you
for apples and you gave me
oranges. I was so angry
at you in that instant (despite
the complete childishness
of it, (I still love oranges
and it’s not like you
could know what I craved)
and how silly I knew it
made me look) because  I had
wanted and maybe even expected
apples.

Then I realized that apples
are, maybe, not always  best
(they can get tainted-wormy
(yellow fruit-meat
splotching to brown) and boring,
to be honest) and that
sometimesthe imperfections
of an orange (the hard skin you
must peel through (you use a
knife and I, my teeth) and
the almost forbidden tartness
of their flesh, each golden bulb
of juice dripping on my tongue)
are what make eating
them all the better.

So, now, I stand before you
in the pure new-morning light,
naked of orange-judgments
and stupid apple-idealizations. 

I promise I will try,
as changing as I am,
to have my hands open and take
whatever it is you are willing to give

-2007, edited 2011

Flying and Falling

Is there a name for the moment between falling and flying?

The split second where your
body feels absolutely weightless,
but you are unsure if the experiment
was actually a success, or if your
wings were wax and you had no clue.

Is there a name for that feeling?

When the anxiety of failure
is perfectly paralleled by
the elation of hope, and the
contradicting emotions pull
at your stomach in a way
that is completely nauseating (yet
utterly fantastic)?

Is there a word for that?

There should be.

There are far too many intangibles
to try and describe a life on the cusp.
No one gives that place a name— it
cannot be found in any other normal
life stage (except, perhaps, listed
under “awkward,” or tagged with
the label “bad choices,” or
consistently sloppy-stuffed
into a file folder marked
simply, in scattered scrawl:
“Shambles”). When we try and
describe, it comes out a mish-mash;
the childish babble of words
and explanations that try to wrap up
an emotion that has yet to be properly
encapsulated.


And in retrospect, it will probably
all seems silly; we will look back
with bemusement that we were
so naive to think that, at a time,
there was an actual choice, or
that the choice even mattered.
How could we have been so naive
as to think that, in the end,
our lives were so important that
this one moment of seemingly
meaningful change had any real meaning?

Still, when that feeling, the moment
of complete unknowing (when
the world is at your feet and it could
open up and swallow you or maybe,
just maybe, bloom blossom-sweet
under your toes), is a
sweet reminder that there
is something to be said for
the raging, confusing, dramatic
audacity of youth.

- 2011

That ending needs work. But I liked the concept.

Crashing Pines and Open Wounds

I am the broken sea of all your doubts,
the empathy to all your words.
I am a churning, burning, swirling fear
unable to do more than hear
because my tongue’s swollen, the speech is slurred.

I am the crashing pines of ending worlds,
the sunburned sky in desert heat.
I set the trap and took the bait
but bloody hands are all that remain
to remind me of the things I shouldn’t keep.

I wished one day the sea would part,
the pines would grow and things would start.
You never said that it would break,
yet that doesn’t soothe the constant ache
that sits and stews and smarts.

So, I don’t know, maybe wounds do fade
or I’ll learn to live with them someday.
But until then I’m open-palmed,
ready for you to drop the bomb
then turn and walk away, unscathed.

I’ll be your broken sea and windy skies.
I’ll be the cracking wings on which you ride.
and when it breaks and my wings cave
I’ll shrug and just accept my fate
and dry my eyes, because the winds have died.

The winds have died.

Written originally in 2007, edited Aug 2011

I’ve been writing a ton while in HI. It’s been nice, but what I was working on this evening felt… unfinished.

In an effort to be more creative and post more, here’s a bit of poetry I edited this afternoon. I wrote it four years ago (eep!), when I was playing a bit with song writing. It’s not great, but I love some of the imagery in there. The original is on my facebook if we’re facebook friends and you want comparison (which I doubt).

The bird fluttered
out of my mouth and
flew from tree to tree, but
finding nowhere to land it
flew back and perched upon
my open, shaking palm.

We made eye contact for a moment,
the all-black eye of the bird
seemingly cold in that instant,
and I was overwhelmed with that
adolescent-kind-of-heartache; the
kind that sweeps all over and
that you never want to believe
you will stoop low enough
to feel.

I forced myself to look back
again, and the bird cocked its head
as if to say “Really? I flew all
that way and this is what you give me?”

Then, it flapped its wings and re-perched
on my shoulder. It softly nipped
the bottom of my earlobe and I
understood that the discerning eye was
warm as well, and the perhaps
the bird was better off
with me.

At some point, though, the thoughts swirled together to a singular pin-prick in her mind. A silver-second of clarity, it was neither complicated nor particularly profound:

It is okay to want something more.

She focused on it, wrapped herself in it, and held it up as a shield of strength.

It is okay to want something more.

And, after two days of stillness, she got up—picked herself up— and slowly padded to the door. She was ready to speak now.

- Excerpt from Comfortable Silence, 2011

“A silver second” is a phrase that pops up pretty often in my writing. I think it’s because I tend to focus on “moments” rather than the bigger picture, which gets me into trouble in life and narrative. Also, I have a penchant for alliteration for which I am often mocked.

Anyway, I spent most of Comic Con writing and reforming myself. I spend most of today in my apartment, being quiet. I’d like to hope that, though I at some point (drunkenly) deemed this a “summer of bad decisions,” I’m really working to break old habits and regain the good ones. We’ll see how it goes.