Is this insomnia?

Happy birthday Frida Khalo. What, genuine goddess, kind of weighted advice would you give to me in such little words. Your words you painted..The ones that revealed your heart, open and dangling; had them sown into fabrics generations later, had them resonate through time and space and still confronted with question as if language no longer existed, and only in them one finds the puzzles of the stars and death still.

Now they stream. How do you calculate the speed of the internet? How could I explain to you what powers we have now. You don't even know it, but your selfie is all over my and my closest friends' world, and I imagine you cringing, and drinking, and crying, and celebrating all at once the elaborate possibilities of the artist today.

I send you my sleepless questions through the air hoping that maybe what I have come to learn about thought, matter, and physics could be real. That maybe we'll be shaking together in this weird line of history from either fear, or shock, and still wanting yet another drink before another reach of a pencil.

Would you come marching with me? Would you tell me to turn back the 170 miles I have only a few hours ago driven and dreamed through, announced my biggest goals out loud to- felt my heart again in a flurry at the thought that, yes, it could all be possible if you actually believe in something outside of your self.

But somewhere in all that clear, innocent, prayer there comes an incoherence- so enveloping that one is stunned and left without the desire for dreams, the desire for rest, or sleep, or dare I even say peace.

Dear Frida- I would turn back to Oakland, but I haven't a degree for which to provide me a "proper" job. I would turn back to Oakland but I haven't the means to keep my own bed there, my own stove to share my food with others, my own easels or instruments for which to keep my wordless prayers amassed.
I would turn back to Oakland but every time I am near home I fall in love all over again and in me grows both courage and a deep, harrowing fear that I may go through everything I never thought I could again.

Can I be more honest and say that for so many reasons I retreat to nature so flexibly because in this current society, I trust nature and animals more than I do some of the people I share my blood with. More than I do some of the people I have exposed my heart to, more than those I have spent so many words on just to feel like the language we once shared is now obsolete.

In my head you are stern and lovely. Fierce but vulnerable always to your spirit and the parts of you that ache for a type of love that only you and them will ever know.

You are with your brushes and no bullets. No glass broken, only vases near you filled with flowers. Only fires atop white wax held by you hands, illuminating all of the fallen souls' and yours and mine and everyone's path.

In my head you are with them all marching. You are with the people in parade, in protest, in accordance with their thoughts which fueled their blood and limbs to gather and stand before the testament of so-called time, singing out one big idea in unison that for some reason, not all the earth can yet comprehend.

Would you call me a coward?

Should I paint?

Should I scream?

Should I try to sleep again?

I left befo re the news reached my mind. I checked out of the city before I knew.

Happy birthday, Frida Khalo.

Please, forgive me.

In peace may they rest

May the strings of death tie life into the end of my skirt tails
may they rope together fragile necks,
tired from moping
hold them upright,
tease them with the thought that someone may feel their pain,
unnoose them
loose
and scare them back into themselves
into their muscles
to run forward
like new calves
into an empty field
this is an honest attempt at prayer
may the guild of abscenses
be filled with new flesh
may the flesh be wild
with hairs extended outward
still able to articulate
what it is
to feel new
and emotional
nostalgic
crying
and happy
like mad
at the same time
You sad songs, you will be written
like lost lovers
as they hang in the air
like clouds of smoke
may people inhale
what it is to be you
at  a time like this
and breathe out again
enough for you to keep on running
may your finger tips be kissed
by angels and aliens
singing every song
you ever ailed to
one after the other
letting you know
while you fly past the bodies of earth
that they were heard
by them and i

The lies it told

Many writers have stated that their first forms of writing came about through the lies they told as children either in letters to nobody, to their teachers, their friends, of some exaggerated feat or torture from home, or to their parents about how good they have been that day.

The first time I forged a letter was in second grade. I practiced my mother's signature over and over again and about once every other week I would get myself out of class to go climbing up trees down the street by exclaiming that again my awful teeth required another visit to the dentist or that the next day my actually damaged tonsils would be due for yet another examination, or that we would be leaving town that Friday for a family event- anything to get me out of class and into dirt. 

The short stories came about the next year. I'd read and collect inspiration from dirty comics in the book section at Tower Records, before it acquired an actual tower, was one low level, and classically video-rental-spot-periwinkle with carpet instead of wooden floors. I'd hide in a corner of the store and read them wide eyed learning about things most of the kids in my town wouldn't even know existed until they were about sixteen, maybe older. I met a guy recently who didn't know a cervix was smaller than the actual vaginal cavity until I just told him a few weeks back. To say I grew up fast would be an understatement.

Weird Aeon Flux influences musings and celebrities. The ones I thought I was supposed to look like when I was older. Of their cars, parties, strange affairs, missing pets, dysfunctional families that seemed normal but had hidden secrets like of the dentist who wore high heels behind his wife's back. A story that went missing from my collection when I was nine.

I wrote of lies at a very young age. 

Mostly I wrote depictions of what I was surrounded by.

Then they became me.

Eventually I would blame my pen. It would go scritching and scratching in front of my sleep deprived or pilled up young face for hours through the night dreaming up what could only be fantasy for all of these things I was supposed to have done by the time I was twenty-five. By now I should have shaved my head in Japan three years ago having spent a winter in the mountains living among monks. I would have started only one business and it would have gotten me all the successes I would have wanted to accomplish had I kept making clothes after sophomore year. I should be another three languages deep, including Mayan, and I would be living in a big loft in a brick building around Howard, downtown- tall ceilings, grey cement walls, baroque railings that didn't serve a purpose other than to distinguish what each part of the space was dedicated to. A big open shower with sheer curtains in order to never hide the body from sight, lots of plants, no tables, just shelves and books. I imagined the books would be stacked over  the shelves and be like shelves and tables themselves holding up my various cups of wine, tea, ashtrays, coke mirrors, make up holders, places for pens, ink, money and objects I would happen upon in the street or spend a couple dollars on.

The pen did it for me more than any friend.

That's probably how I've gotten so good at leaving all the time.

Those were lies that actually kept me going- the ones I would write in the rain, sick and sleepless not knowing if I could get another free train ride home. They weren't lies but attempts at making what I was doing bigger than it seemed. It made drawing, writing, playing music, hallucinating, and being awake for several days straight more bearable. To know that someone, somewhere lived like this and maybe one day I would too. 

This, now, is the part of my life that resulted from a lie I couldn't live out any longer. I couldn't lie about it now because it doesn't matter. Like the average citizen in the U.S. I am broke right now, a little bit depressed, still dashingly hopeful, and constantly searching, constantly looking for something that won't lie to me, tell me that I have to settle because it's more realistic, or easier to do.  Something raw, exposed, piercing, cracking a bit at the edges like a well used desk, and frank- hurt and all.

I've never liked it too easy. I've got to get bruised a little. I've got to feel like I am working for something other than just four more walls to contain me- like this shit wasn't handed to me because I was born into it or because somebody might get a good couple months of brass tacks fucking- but perhaps grinding still the potential of my ever-aching hands for a long letter I will write myself later about how actually surprising life has been without having gone through all the lies, with the ones I've felt like I have had to tell, or maybe the ones I fucked through, like the ones I am trying to shake off now. 

Still, I write made up lies. They are hidden in my work like clues kept in boxes, little words, or weird blogs. Mostly though, they are not my own. My own are less frequent, always adjusting, exposing themselves bit by bit,submission after submission, into something very open, very embarrassing, but completely myself. It will happen again. But it's okay, because at the very least, I am still writing like a writer. I'm lying like a liar and loving like a good little lover should.