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Vignette
Wails in the spotlight
Date, weight, time—here I am world
Wonder in my eyes
Creature of the wind
Conch shells and fairy tails mend
Unkept promises
Disillusion
Student loan and car payment
Is this really it?
Finding peace of mind
Cultivating vibrant paths
Actualizing self
Final curtain call
Reminisce of multitudes
Winter white goodnight
Cat
A cat loves in whiskery ways
A cat plays in clandestine chase
A cat hisses to say, ‘I don’t play’
A cat zooms when the human sleeps
A cat calls bird with chitter-cheeps
A cat says ‘you’re family’ with a slow blink
A cat is a pawsitive companion, to be sure
For even when it rains, a cat, does she purr
Migrations
I am going to make a confession, which you will find difficult to believe, but humor me.
I have never kept a Journal.
Incidentally, I just learned that a crankpin is also known as a journal? Fascinating! that is the load bearing part in the crankshaft of an axle. In mechanical complexity, briefly, it has something to do with distribution of Stress. Fatigue causing breakdown, and I know from my Civic DX that you can drive with a broken axle, but not for very long, and should it give out, it would be potentially a fatal crash. That a lesson from years ago. Mercifully everything held up on prayers well enough to trade-in. (Incidentally, my DX was named Kocioł, idiomatically meaning "Chaos.")
Of course, I do carry a notebook. For as long as I can remember it is, aside from my calculator watch, my only accessory. But I have been adamant about not-writing.
My father kept a journal. In the most traditional sense, and it was locked. A thing of beauty, though on the outset nothing more than that everyday spiral ring single or multi-subject schoolthing. When I say it was locked, I mean no one could read it. His handwriting, so distinctive, was in a sort of cursive all caps, and in Polish. And whatever was in there, was by that barrier, safe. Not that I would dream of prying!! I did not. And he felt no need to hide. So, it sat on the table, open, an artifact of Intellect, his Pride.
What I am getting at is that a journal or diary is intensely private.
My sister kept a diary. She wrote practically under the bedsheets her thoughts and feelings about her tumultuous relationships. She fretted over who was mad at who, and with good reason. There was a lot of apologizing, retracting and redacting. Torn pages. Life must have been tough. Internally. I only can say so, again most definitely I would Not dare to pry, because she told me. I asked yes. And even when I didn't. She was so proud of her writing, an accomplishment applauded by elders like a learned trick, that she would occasionally read something aloud and watch for full effect. Adjectives. Flowers. Feelings and colors. Certainly, I listened, and it confirmed for me. I would Never keep a diary.
I would blush in private in horror.
So, what the devil would be in my non journal? well, I compromised. I kept a list.
Occasionally, I encrypted something in the corner, if the date were significant for it. But having capsuled some wording, within a few years, it was a code accessible only as a hieroglyph. If I could not decipher by surrounding doodle, date or to do list, I too could no longer read it. I could read my drawings, though in detail. I could recall for a considerable while after the intense emotion and surroundings that went into those marks. Drawing helped me figure out what I was trying to say... with that said, I have not drawn in years. I have, mostly, lost track of what I was trying to communicate.
I cast no judgement on Silence, nor empty space of margins.
Speaking has been difficult. When I was little, and growing up, I was periodically told that whatever I said sounded like poetry, and that to me sounded so foreign and complicated, and pompous that I'd rather bite my tongue. But I've grown to enjoy the words in my mind, and when I mention now that I write "all the time," it is simply that I script in my thinking, in invisibly personal conversations, parts that sometimes find their way to paper, but mostly, which grow wings and fly South without commitment for coming back.
They do from time to time. Like today, they are here again-- in afternoon shadow.
Cruel Summer
Once upon a cruel summer
I found you, a shimmering
shell on the beach.
You locked eyes with me
From then on
We would walk and talk about nothing in particular
Kept dreams in my pocket I gradually turned out for you.
Those days of my youth
Are rose-colored by the lilt of your laugh
The crease of your dimpled cheek.
That stupid thing you said that had me bent over dying.
The day that you told me you’d love me forever.
Should have found a way to bottle that up.
It’d sell like funnel cakes at the fair and remind lovers of when finger brushed hair, tight embraces and sucking faces was the only care.
Cut to—the smell of your skin on mine.
A remnant of the night we shared.
A keepsake of how we breathed, chests heaved, bodies wreathed.
Do you still think about the way you twirled me in the rain?
My clothing clung to me and you said, “You’re so fucking pretty, it kills me.”
I kissed you so hard I tasted blood
but you just carried me away and we made love.
Once upon a cruel summer
Walking and talking about nothing in particular.
Those hot nights of my youth
I bet you miss them.
I know I still do.
Uninhibited and Free: a Reminiscence of Childhood
An uninhibited child during the summer is free.
I remeber when I was a kid I would go up to my father and say, ”I’m bored” and he would scowl and tell me to read a book or something. When my child suffers from boredom, I’ll say, “Good, that means you‘re on the precipice of genius.” And, I was. My sister and I invented games we’d play for hours. My imagination boomed like fireworks on the 4th of July. I didn’t start feeling restricted until I was older, “wiser.” I had lost some of that imagination that fuled my childhood. The sweet, opulent fruits of my boredom shriveled away with each new responsibility. Sometimes I can still feel her spark of ingenuity, seeping through my fingers, grasping for that freedom of thought I once took for granted. I believe you know what freedom is when it’s lost. Freedom was the days I would spend at the beach where everything that mattered was the here and now. Shells shimmered under a translucent wave and I was in love with life which I swallowed in gulps after swimming for hours in the sea.
Fearless novices are free and children are the epitome of novice and if encouraged—fearless. I cringe when thinking of all the ways in which parents restrict their child’s freedom when they plan all their activities, shield them from failure, and hover too close. Imaginations’ embers stifled by a parent’s fear; it’s ironic how the best of intentions can produce the worst results.
I think freedom is relative for everyone and is best captured by a feeling, a feeling keenly missed when lost. Where there used to be seemingly endless amounts of freedom, now in adulthood, there are glympses. I work and I spend my freedom well. I saved for a year to venture to Ireland to be enchanted by her folklore and gaze upon rolling hills dotted with white sheep. I wait until the weekend to go hiking and lose myself among Douglas-Fir, Pine and Spruce trees. I wait until the end of each day to see my love come home and feel his arms around me. When we’re bound to the things that keep us alive and whole, is that freedom? I go back to the beach of my childhood, mostly in my mind, wherein I find the purest form of freedom.