You're like a scar on me now. 

I want to build a shrine on it.

Not yet to dry land

Did you really want to stay in that place? 

Content in your stance at the overextended halfway mark?

Is that where you thought peace would visit you? 

Is this the place you thought you'd find a long awaited exhale?

Could that really be the final resting place you'd choose?

Is your idea of heaven so compromising?

Now you're on the boat. You're in that storm. That storm everyone warns you about. The inevitable and juicy, life-threatening, emotion-amplifying, painful painful painful painful, delicious, dreamy yuck and sea-sickening place. The ocean of the present. Nothing to do but wait. Nothing to do but sit. 

Land is nowhere near. You are entirely aware of just how in the middle of it all you are. There are only two options: 

1. Jump ship

2. Endure

Jumping ship is sudden death and endurance is an extensive journey that involves some of the greatest suffering your heart has felt hitherto. 

So you're on the boat and you decide you'll stay. Living over dying. Even when living feels nothing like living at all. But you swore to yourself that no matter the yoking, the sweat, no matter the guilt, you'd stay afloat. So you do. And it works.

The horizon gleams and the Garden of Eden drifts closer each second. The land is promising, the air sweet. All salt has dissolved. Oils applied, fruit picked off the trees. Nectar dripping off your lips. You inhale. You exhale. Inflate. Deflate. Let go and become. 

"So this is the feeling? This is what I actually wanted? Is this the fulfillment of a fantasy sought after? Is this untouched and utterly purified inner peace?"

You died in the ocean but a woman waits for you at the apple tree. You have the feeling that the two of you are not separate. You look so different. You feel so far away from one another and yet somehow she looks at you like she completely understands it all. She knows of the deep, salt-ridden sea. She knows of the sting of the air. Her own face has met such an alarming sun. There is a rich history of the water in every pore she's got. 

You want to run into her embrace and yelp of the terror of the travel. Her comfort would make it all worth it. Just to have someone witness the fact that you made it out alive. You faced currants so deadly and abrasive and now you are completely purified. You have no words to say to her.

When you look into her eyes, you know that she knows everything. 

All you want to do is collapse and weep.

She places her fleshy palms on each side of your face and says,

"May you never compromise your heaven again."

You drink her water. You find your way home. You leave alchemized.

Did you really want to stay in that place...?

 And I am starting to think I am forgetting the age that I am

How small I am 

How much of a child I still find myself to be

I applied much meaning to that morning laying in bed with you

I can't recall the last time I laid with a lover and it didn't feel like the Earth was rotating just as it should

on the nose

Being a writer is writing every day. The itch to do so is present but I know why I ignore the tugs towards my pen. Sometimes I am afraid of what I am going to say. I am afraid that what spills out of me may be something I am not ready for. All the more reason to write. 

My House on the Sea

    One day I will have a home by the ocean. I will know sailors and they will drunkenly tell me mermaid stories and speak of the biggest fish they've ever seen with their own eyes and how God fuck damn it-it got away. Their biceps not yet prepared for the duty of capturing (and keeping) a creature quite so vast. 

On Wednesday mornings I won't work until three pm. The local morning market begins at seven am and no matter how many Tuesday nights I lie in bed and swear to myself, "tomorrow you'll get there right at seven" I will arrive at eight because that is just as well. I won't be mad at myself for always being an hour later than I promised because by the time I have this home on the sea, I will be much too old to be at odds with myself. Assuming all goes according to plan, I will stop being my own enemy somewhere in my early thirties (wishful thinking is saying late twenties). 

Fridays will be my workdays, but I will begin them on the sand saying prayers and holding my hands over my heart. Touching sea foam and believing in magic before I do a lick of work. Once I arrive here on the great timeline of my life, I will have learned that my best output of work conjures only after feeding the hungry child in me who needs the ocean-who needs hope- who needs drunk sailors. 

And then I will write. I will write for hours, and it will feel like seconds. I will work until my fingers twitch and rattle from endless typing, scribbling, crumpling sheets of paper. Later, I will unravel the crumpled piles and think, ''No- I can use this. Why did I give up on this thought?" Then I will crumple it back up and throw it away. I give myself second chances later on. 

When I have my home on the ocean, I will have my garden, too. I will have rugs that I love and possibly many material items I hold close to me. It will have taken my whole life to acquire each thing, and I will truly love every memory they evoke. These things will not reflect anything about me. They will just be my things, and I will likely never let a guest leave without taking something of mine home with them. What I will truly treasure will be exclusively internal. The love I have carried each year. The mosaic of emotional treasure.

Everyone will be my guru, and every step will lead me to the continued path of present delight. I will grow old, and I will give away all of my things. It will just be me and the sea and only the sea will remain. You can leave me somewhere in it. 

Door

When you love people they light up.
When you give them the pencil and say, "write whatever you want", you can see something morph and expand. You can see something grow. Something inspirit.
It's not simple being as you are with one thousand monstrous eyes constructing deluded ideas from the little they see. 

Those eyes don't see you in all your fruitful aloneness.

They don't see what you do when you get the world to yourself for a quick but bountiful moment.

So many people in my life have loved me like crazy.

They have loved me out of loathing myself. 

Those noble many have forced me into the honest to God truth about my nature.

Took my blinders off, whatever. They loved on me no matter the state I was in and 

so very many of them continue to do so.

When I was younger than the young I am now, I knew about the gaps in my life.

I knew where love was supposed to be felt and I could so assuredly feel that gaping space.

Wide open like a horrible, bottomless door. 

Creaky and damp. Like some radical but dormant love was there but waiting.

Always watching the clock and waiting for love to visit me, too.

Obsessively thinking love was busy braiding everyone else's hair.

I never expected anyone to find that omitted door and choose to walk in.

Choose to light a match. Decide that what's beyond that door isn't so vile. 

The people who love me are gurus in my eyes.

My teachers.

They do what I, at times, can not.

Forever shedding successful light on untouched lagoons of long gone clarity.

Cutting back the overgrown grass of self doubt and watering the good I've got.

The door in me gleams out toward skies, people, places. 

That is the way it is now for me.

People have the capacity to love you into the genuine truth. 

The truth that you are good. That you are nothing more than a simple human.

People have taught me that my nature can be simple if I get out of the way.

Can I keep it?

 There are days when I am a walking sensation. My laughter is more so cells jumping across my insides, joy bubbling over my tongue, than an equation in my mind being solved. Nothing is analyzed or technical. I am all feelings. All of the proper neurons connecting. Successful take-offs and landings. This can't be every day. On the other days-the ones across the street from those mentioned- I hardly visit my body. Everything is cognition. Child-like anger. Curiosity. Boredom. Euphoria. Whether I am feeling it all or barely anything, I know that each moment smells like a path waiting to be taken. Do good. Do wrong. Be here. Be somewhere else. Looking at things this way keeps life in my deep pockets and those mystic gates wide open. 

This weekend was what I thought it would be. Leisure was painted everywhere. Spending money. Regretting spending money but cherishing the food I ate. The things I bought. Happy to be alive no matter the cost. Happy to not be mopping floors, putting up chairs, cleaning a bagel container riddled with poppy seeds that did not make it to mouths. I love him so much I can not stop asking God if I can keep him. Instead of just loving him the best way I know how. God said the truth does not like to be held tight. I still squeeze it out of fear. 

Every day I tell myself the same thing: doing and being are two different things. I don't want to love him in terms of doing. I have got to be love for him and to him. I must be love with him. Is that holding too tight? I want to love him as naturally as nature allows me. Nurture vs nature. 

When I stepped into the visceral today, I walked a few miles. In my neighborhood I watched the cars speed by and I stopped to compare flower scents to each other. Each time I inhaled I held the mantra: I was not always here. Things were not always so serene. Be glad. A new creation in my heart are these places. The look of people. Different yet always the same. God, the artist. Repainting the same masterpiece and it never getting old. Even if they only change a nose. 

The point of life is to be living. Are you living? Are you breathing? Do you wake up every morning? You are already doing it. You are already doing what you ought to. I am alive and we live together now and it is holy. It is the way things are in this moment and I am happy.