There were those potted plants out front, just like I saw them when I left your home for the last time some years ago now.

You were not home.

Just as well.

I don’t need your presence to still feel the fear that sliced through me that soulless night.

I gave myself a tour- the one you never gave me. And beyond this dreamscape of your bedroom I saw blackness. Because I cannot imagine a “normal” home for you.

That would make you human. And I've been demonizing you for years.

Besides, how can you forgive a demon?

You can’t.

So I visited your home and tried to see a home where a human lived, one with flaws but a capability for goodness.

And there you were, so fucked up from war and weary of the world that you turned to writing and women. Two loves you held, but were never humble enough to admit that you had anything to learn from. Only arrogant enough to believe you had more to give (knowledge) and much to take (sex and accolades).

So is it any surprise you found a kind faced girl, with big blue eyes to wet your appetite and fill your ego?

Is it any wonder that it is easy to hate you more, thinking of you as human, because that would mean you can choose to do better, but you didn’t?

You chose to show me darkness, not even letting me see the man who carefully, gently cared for those beautiful potted plants out front.

The ones that have mocked me in my nightmares ever since.

Tie me down.

Take the vines between my thighs

braid your hair with your treachery.

For these vines were never mine.

I did not plant them here.

And yet... oh how I let them grow.

You are a blight in human existence that I wish to extinguish, wish to kill.

For I am neither good nor evil.

I am just as without within as you are without in all respects.

Maybe that is why you can wear my shame like a necklace rather than a noose.

Oh how I wish it was a noose.

How I wish you were not here.

Never here, never there,

Never near me. Never to touch me.

But most of all,

Never in me.

Never, never, never.

How is it that I can feel all at once too much and not enough?

I am like a cup filled to the brim

but when you try to drink from me,

There is nothing,

nothing at all.

I feel the changing weather of my emotions.

Sometimes, the forecast is unexpected

and showers on me mid afternoon,

and I didn’t bring a raincoat.

Sometimes,

I can dance in the rain,

Until I can’t.

Until I don’t know how,

because it is rain I’ve never seen.

I don’t understand why I let the warmth of other suns

comfort me more than my own.

I wish it wasn’t a warmth I wanted,

That it didn’t feel like new and old

wrapped up in a blanket

to hold me on those lonely nights.

And on those lonely nights,

when the call of anyone's name but my own

stills the emotions rioting for attention,

I cry for a warmth I’ll never have as my own.

Searching for any body to leave my soul’s storm behind.

She came to me then,

brown skin under warm heaven.

"Not much longer now,"

She whispered. Eyes a deeper

brown. "Soon, we will be free. Yes."

We ran in moonlight.

There are only stars to see

us. Limbs pushing north.

Once there, we will never sleep

with whips cracking in nightmares

She threw in her whole world when she asked for a miracle... 25 wishes to be exact.

She took a "penny for your thoughts" and ran with it. As in she threw it down here.

I look up many times a day and usually only see hands from where I live down here. Living in a wishing well has not always been the plan... I definitely remember wishing to be set free and somehow, someway found my soul bound to this damn place.

I see her face peaking down at me. No one usually sees me... her eyes widen and her face goes away.

"Well, goddamn" I thought, " Did she just see me?"

I see her again, coiled black ringlets on pale skin and pink lips.

All of sudden, I taste it... I haven't tasted anything in 100 years, but I cannot mistake the metallic clang on my touch. Yes, a quarter but with it is the inexplicable taste of a human emotion I haven't tasted since I made an unwanted home down here,

hope.

The woman, or girl I cannot tell from all the way down here begins to yell, "Hello there, are you okay? Do you need help?"

"Oh honey," I thought. "If only you knew."

She waits a beat and then yells down again, "Hello can you hear me?"

No human has seen me, so it feels a bit incredible to me that I get to actual use my voice after all this time. My voice is a scratchy baritone as it floats upward.

"Well hello darlin;, can you actually see me? Did you throw in the quarter just now?"

Her eyes widen even more, I imagine she looks like a frightened doll at this point with her eyes bugging out from shock.

"Um, well yes, but I mean I don't think that is something to worry about right now, do you? You are obviously stuck, are you hurt?"

I had never had anyone ask after my wellbeing in quite sometime. I take a breath. I guess this is round 2 for trying to get the hell out of this wishing well prison.

"Oh little one... you have no idea..."

I shoot upwards finally free and stand before her. I know how I must look in short brown hair under a cap and a 3 piece suit.

Her gasp lets me know she is as confused as she has ever been, "But you, you," she looks from me to the well, eyes a steady green searching my own for answers.

I can definitely provide that and then some. "Well darlin', you asked for a miracle and by golly I think you got one."

Her second intake of breath has her gasping for air as she takes a step back, her black hair seeming to shine even in the moonlight.

"This is going to be fun," I think to myself with a smirk. "Now, let's begin shall we?"

_______________________________________________

To be continued...

Come Spring,

all things will be made new.

Eyes that have not seen, will now see.

Smear the mud of man on eyes that have only ever wanted to be useful.

Take the light/life and imbibe it fully into me.

For I have only felt but never seen beauty

until Spring came...

and all things were made new.

What if someday never arrives? I have been thinking a lot about control. The illusion of it and the safety in it as well. The helplessness that ensues when you finally realize you cannot control everything or everyone.

My friends lost their baby this week. They are the nicest people and this was their first baby. Delivery was for this week... then my friends and I get a text. They lost their baby. A girl. They had decided to not find out the gender until the due date arrives.

What do you say to that? I pray, I know not everyone does but all I can think of is, I will pray for you. I don't know what else to say. Maybe that is okay. Maybe sometimes there are no words. there is only the action of being there and sitting with your loved ones in their grief. I cannot begin to understand and I can seek to understand but only when they are ready and wanting to share.

But I still sit with this feeling of helplessness. I think because of past experiences/traumas in my own life having control is became the source of safety. If I can control my relationships, if my romantic relationship do not progress, or if I don't date at all, I am safe from harm. But what a way to live huh?

I hope one day I can give up on this illusion and sit with the helplessness that ensues. Would that mean I finally embrace what being human really is? Is that what being a human is?

So I sit here on my couch, going between crying and numbness. I wish I could do something, I wish for a lot of things.

So if someday never arrives, what will I do to make sure my life has meaning?

I will write,

I will show up for my loved ones,

I will accept the unacceptable fact that you cannot heal the world with a broken heart... or even a whole one for that matter.

--- Poem time---

Poem for your thoughts?

coins down a well with no ending

if there is no ending where do we even begin?

Come to the wishing well darlin'

throw in your hopes and dreams

and I will throw in mine,

maybe our bound forevers

will become bound together

maybe we can finally find the "more"

that was always present but never seen.

Maybe, maybe maybe,

I guess that is the whole point of a wishing well now isn't it?

------- food for thought---

If food was a time machine

I would eat my Nonna's pasta until the day I die

which would be prolonged by the fact that I will travel back in time

see the eyes of my young Nonna, hard and determined

a nurse with broad shoulders and a stubbornness to boot.

Who stood toe to toe to doctors, protected her older sister fiercely

doesn't matter she was older, my Nonna would never let anyone trample over her.

As I get older I wish I had that sort of toughness that grit. I think in some respect we all wish that we could different from our current selves. Sometimes i think it is such a fickle feeling. I wish I could just enjoy the me in this current moment.

I suppose wishing is a good place to start.

So many thoughts, if I were ever to become a poet, my book would be 3,000 pages long hahaha... but really it would be more long winded than having a conversation with me. I like to turn the attention on the person talking, sharing a little about myself but mostly hearing another the other person, mostly letting them speak. Usually this is pretty easy to do, other times its as if they know what I am doing. I am not saying I am not an interesting person I just don't like talking about myself all that much.

Oh well would you look at that perfect timing as I write about myself... my time is up hehe ;)

Someone once asked me why I write.

I wondered with careful curiosity.

Taking apart ink that had dripped into my veins.

I looked inside capillaries and saw the needle of words

sequestered deep into my being.

How do you answer a question

when you are not whole without it?

This mode of thought?

This transportation of feeling?

So to answer the question,

I write because

I am without

if I do not.

Without zest,

contentedness,

accountability,

and most of all

expression.

I write because without it,

my feelings balloon

into an ominous creature of doubt.

And there is nothing more fearful

than being in the unknown

a l o n e.

Sometimes,

I feel like I am on the back of a pick up,

tossed about like a piece of cargo,

falling out the back with many clangs and lots of yells.

And then, laying in the middle of the road,

I watch the rest of cargo safely tucked in the

flat bed of the truck moving toward the horizon,

carefully placed and organized just so.

And all the while,

I watch the truck drive away.

And I don’t run after it,

because I know

it will not wait for me.

Grief is such an odd thing to me.

Yes an emotion,

yes a memory,

yes an event,

yes a physical ache.

So a "thing" is really the only way I can describe it.

It is water one day, soothing your insides with memory of a loved one that used to be.

Then ice the next moment freezing any hope you had in your heart that today would be less painful.

That at least for today, you wouldn't want to join them.

I met death when I was 12 years old at my cousin's wake.

He was 21 years old.

My aunt Cecilia stood by his casket, carefully combing her fingers through his blonde hair.

I was terrified, stuck to my chair facing the casket.

My aunt saw me, saw the terror and waved me over.

As she thread her fingers heartbreakingly slow through her son's hair, she whispered, "When you touch his hair, it is as if he is still here."

I think that was the saddest sentence I had ever heard, and to this day I think the same can be true.

Because hair is dead, it has always been the most unalive thing about humans, and yet it was not cold marble when you touched it.

It was, as she put it so simply, "... as if he [was] still here."