Leaf Song

To be in love again. To love my own self in the world without self-consciousness. I am who I am. To languish in the nascent, soft leaves of spring and let the laugh lines embrace the corners of my eyes. To stop all words and revel in the light of the body's own language.

I stomp my foot and feel the impact echo deep in the muscles of my leg. It is a kind of ecstasy. I swim, holding my breath tight and low in my lungs - delighting in the autonomic nervous system's insistent call. Urgency of cells, veins, bones, joints. Vast demanding desire of the mind. I touch my fingers to my lips, pondering the softness, firmness, fullness.

I turn and look. There is always something lingering just out of sight. A spirit of spring, a vernal coquette - blithe, fleeting, and bright. I blink my eyes against the radiance of the sun. I am dazzled and blind. I am bound to stumble. I transcend the fall.

Falling In With Fire

Sing to me the old ways. Sing to me a song you used to know. Sing to me the forgotten, revenant melody and send it echoing across dark alleyways, under bridges, into sewer tunnels. It is a sentinel, a flag - tattered remnant of human life - that flutters and flaps in the night wind. It beckons, traces the earlobe, caresses the throat with icy fingertips. A siren croon that lulls toward an inevitable ending.

A new song begins. Bloodsong. The pounding, striving heart of captured prey. The rhythm that arches and aches, clutching the life between each beat. A rhythm ebbing, then somnolent, crushingly brief. The surprise decay, the astonished last gasp of fading night.

The finality of shoe heels on pavement. The finality of silence. The finality of the coming light.

Resuscitate

Old Posts as New Posts - I am freaking out today. I thought this was pretty.

Maybe I was dreaming. He was with me. I could not see his face, the lines and angles obstructed by some unwillingness of mind. There was light and the soft scuff of flannel against my face. A sense of falling, a settling of limbs as into deep sleep. My hands folded together, supple, but skittish as birds. My cheek rested against his chest, my shoulder notched into the crook of his arm. An interlacing of curves and angles, the merging of frames. We fell together and fit. This gave me a sense of peace.

I measured his breaths with the weight of my body, delighting in the elastic expansion and contraction, lulled by the sea rhythm. The breath is the life. I rested content, fathoms deep. Was I home again?

I bathed - standing in the open. I raised my arms and felt the icy lash of water, the cool, solid platform of slate beneath my feet. I scrubbed and shook out my hair. I sputtered and turned, splashing water into the leaf strewn air. He stood nearby, a half-smile on his water flecked face. A face I couldn't really see but only sensed. I felt no embarrassment, no fear. It crossed my mind that I had something to do with his unhappiness. And yet he seemed.....happy. Do I dream? Am I home?

B Minor

"Half of all our lives are spent, encouraged by embarrassment...." Matt Pond PA

A man walks into a room. He is unknown and unknowing. A cypher of veins and sinews, synapses and molecules. Heart pounds, breath accelerates. He is someone (gasp), oh, he is no one at all.

A man walks into a room. He is no one at all. The play of light, molecules dancing, air breathed in and pushed out, a taut stream of superlative sound. I open my mouth and say.......ten words. I say ten words to this man. I say nothing at all. Mumbled courtesies, fumbled inanities. He is not for me. But I am filled with a sort of pride, a kind of awe for having opened my mouth.

A man walks into a room. He is everything, he is distracting, he is beautiful (gasp, oh!). He is nothing at all. Bones, sinews, veins, joints. Water, light, feeling, sound.

Foreign Press

I've been dreaming about Australia. Or rather- Australians. Dreaming something strong and deep, warm and bright. Been dreaming brave and out loud. Dreaming beacons of light that flicker and dance and never go out. Been dreaming beautiful eyes, intelligence, vigor and art. Mostly been dreaming of losing myself to that unknown land. How can I see so tenderly, so passionately, a thing I've never known?

To my Aussie friends (actors, musicians, poets, dancers) - you are the stuff of dreams.

Spanish Harlem - Smoke Signals

From the archives of my old blog - ah, summer.... I must learn how to write again.

She looks into the mirror and sees that she has become....beautiful. Whether her right eye is bigger than her left, whether she could lose ten pounds, whether her nail polish is chipped or she is getting laugh lines around her eyes, she sees it. Something about the dark softness and luster of her hair, the sheen of sun and sea on her skin, her deep set, tender eyes, the angle of her collarbones as they slope towards the curve of her breasts, the fullness of hip. Men notice her. Not boys....real men. Men who understand something beyond the mortifications and triumphs of their own adolescence. Men who know something about women. They watch her when she is walking, when she is dancing, when she is simply standing, listening to them talk.

She lays in bed, completely alone and whole unto herself. It is quiet. She remembers his hand upon her bare shoulder, the pressure and duration a kind of question, the flash of her eyes and smile a kind of answer. Though they met only a moment before, exchanged barely a dozen words, they have reached an agreement. She marvels how acquiescence, how articulation, how the necessity of "yes" fades in the light of the body's own language. She muses how "yes" does not mean "definitely."

She lays in bed alone, whole, quiet. She reflects on the sensual memory of sharing a cigarette. The way her slender fingers flared out when she reached for it. In love with the grace of her own hand. The way her palm grazed his knuckles roughly as she took the glowing ember from his fingertips. The sweet and wrenching intimacy of placing her lips around the filter. She tasted the aura of his lips, teeth, tongue. She inhaled, holding the smoke deep and taut for a long moment. She exhaled, squinting her eyes against the sting of smoke.