A Malcontent

     I see it now. And I know how it must look to you. I am a religious fanatic. A terrorist. A kamikaze, here to lay fuses to our melded hearts.

     I stand with the explosives stuffed in my book bag and observe the half-hearts leeching the life from one another. It is a wicked circle; the first taking of strength and weakening when the second reaches in to take back what the first has stolen.

     Outside, politicians protest the decision they think I haven't yet made, saying this is how it's always been and is worldwide. They insist the two hearts make each other stronger. But in the silence, here alone to view the gore of their joining stitches, I see that our hearts are crippled. The bonding threads ooze. The blood is infected. They are mutilated. Unable to love.

     And so I unzip my bag and lay the explosives on the seam of the hearts, like an offering to the God I still believe deemed these two beating wounds should meet, to tear them apart.

     Ducking out from under a rib, I emerge into society again and am accosted by the crowd’s noise. With the remote in my hand I shout over them.

     "I am a freedom fighter  in a holy war. And  I  regret  nothing."

The hearts detonate.

I dreamed of us

I snuggle between a semi-automatic and the rise-fall of his chest, staring at the porch light as it’s eclipsed by figures outside our hotel room. I roll over and shake his arm, “Honey, there’s an army outside our window.”

His eyes open to send a sleep soaked smile my way. He tugs me close, fist in my hair. “It’ll be alright, baby,” he speaks. I breathe him in, like a sedative, until he shifts and sighs, “Use the grenades, okay?”

Humming, I nod and rise. He watches my oversized tee sway around my legs as I exchange my semi-auto for two grenades from the suitcase on the dresser. One in each hand like breakfast oranges, I walk to the window, open it. The roar of the hoard, their paint slicked stench assaults me. I pull the pins, flick the grenades out, shut the window. Dust plumes in the hotel parking lot. The dull thuds, the collective shriek rings, sound stirring the air like church bells provoked. He raises his arm, welcoming my return. I cuddle in and drop the grenade pins on the pillow beside his tousled head.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bag1gUxuU0g&ob=av2e 

Okay, so now here's some poetry

Sad Title-less Poem (it's sad cause it doesn't have a title, not cause it's a sad poem...in case you were concerned)

I will bludgeon my brain with understanding until it is malleable as cookie batter rolled out on my kitchen counter, anointed with flour and nibbled at by tiny saliva slicked fingers until my mind is a sticky sheet of impressionable goo that I can place on your skull and mold to your crevasses and idiosyncrasies.

How else will I truly know you?

Babysitting Ani

I choke on destiny

like unexpected tears

as she explores

the metal rings of my spiral

notebook with her fingers,

commenting in that foreign language

everyone adores and ignores.

She turns it over,

wrinkling it, slaps it, feels the spiral again

and sets it down

by her dimpled feet

which rotate circularly

as she discovers

dulled play keys to gnaw on,

drool slipping down the key ring.

blooo fishes

There are blue fish that hide in pairs behind the lids of your grey eyes that slip to shut when she is close to keep the fish safe.      Perhaps those fish were burned by a past kiss and spent their days in a hospital bed far from your grey eyes.      Balms healed lipstick marks on their purple skin ‘til blue scales shone again and the fish returned to watch behind the lids of your grey eyes.    Their spines skimming your irises’ surface, the fish leap forth to glean the light that lives behind the lids of your grey eyes.

Not Poetry

     Black leather boots percussed the rooftop cement in quick succession. Just one pair. The laces of those boots flexed uncomfortably against on the calves of the sun browned boy as he pushed across the scraper. His lashes pressed to his cheeks, eyes tight shut, he neared the building's end. His heels didn't touch the ground, toes pounding only. They found the foot-tall ledge without pause. He leapt.
     Wind changed it's natural horizontal course to exclaim at him, gusting vertically past his ears.  That boy sucked it in and blew back. And he, beyond all rational explanation, flew.

Had a dream that there were two hills; one with an old sandstone house that looked to have grown from the out from the side of the hill, and on the other side was a magnificent and angry tree. The tree was twisted. It had been cruelly pruned in a crippling manner. The rocky valley between the two hills was full of groaning winds that made the place mournful.

I felt as though I belonged at the house. There was a warmth somewhere in its seams that met my heart. My family did not own the house but someday it was within the realm of possibility that we might. For now a housekeeper ran it. She was a gnarled, impolite old woman with a bizarre pink knit sweater. I say gnarled because she looked as though she had been grown out from the hill as well. Her back was hunched and knotted, as if roots had sprung from the small of her back and over the years grown up over her shoulders.

My father and I stood on the hill opposite of the house and admired it as the housekeeper hobbled out of the house, down into the valley and then up the hill to the tree. I didn't pay her any attention but the wind kicked up as soon as she crested the hill. The place moaned and creaked in the wind, great gusts that forced me to cling to the hill for fear of sliding down the rocks.

I looked up to see my father shouting at the woman "Don't pick those, you're making it angry!"

She was picking small red berries that grew at the tree's trunk, right below it's branches. The tree was, indeed, angry. It swayed violently and I realized that the wind and the groans were made by the tree itself.
The woman was not listening to my father, and across the hill, the sandstone house rattled. I then knew that the tree's roots stretched all the way from this hill, to that, and were holding the house in the hill.

"Stop it!" Called my father, "It will eat you!" I ventured closer to the tree.  The woman continued to gather the tender berries in her pink sweater. They oozed crimson juice when she touched them.

In the next moment, I was my father, screaming "Stop making it angry. It will eat you!"

Then the woman was gone. Swallowed. The valley was quiet and still. The magnificent tree regrew its berries in front of my eyes. The sandstone house stood empty.
I woke up.

I wonder who it is I am meant to be.

I close my eyes and see the branches of a tree as paths. I see nerve systems stretching out. I see a root system, and feel compelled to choose just one single strand. But I cannot foresee which branches go where. Which nerves end sooner than the others.
Then I wonder, what if I am not a single branch, but a trunk? What if I am not a solitary nerve, but a brain. What if I am not one root, but a flower.

We graduate from high school, and our relatives, friends and acquaintances all come to us with the same question; "What are you going to do?"

I am a writer. An artist. A gardener. A cook. A teacher. A traveler. A lover.

How can I tell you what I will do? To do so would be to tempt fate. To limit myself. To limit God. When he is finished with me, I will not be able to count the names I will carry.
Destiny is something greater than our plans. My hope is greater than my logic, which I am thankful for because I've never had much logic to begin with.

I cannot tell you. Because I do not know.
I do know that all the paths, every branch, nerve and root, they make us stronger.

A Post-Nicaragua Post

I am heart sick. I'm almost positive it is common place to feel as such when a person's heart and mind have been stamped with moments in time that may never leave them, ever.


The world is so big, you know. And I feel I have no guarantee that I will ever....I don't know...I feel as though I will travel a lot in my life. And there are so many places to go....But I won't allow myself to think that. I won't, that's all there is to it.

Changing subject.
I prayed for this boy on the last night. He looked around my younger brother's age. I prayed for God's protection in his life. Prayed that he would seek God before he sought anything else. I prayed for whoever his wife will be. I prayed that God would order his steps and grow him up into the man he was destined to be.

ugh and it is so frustrating to try to describe this to you. there are no stinkin words. and this is when i hate writing, when it just falls short. i can't translate it. I cannot tell you how it felt to know that i was there to witness a glimmer of God's love for this kid. To be privileged enough to speak words of destiny into his life. To be part of his story and His story.

I cannot tell you how it felt to have the image of a tear rolling down his cheek pressed into my heart like some surgical stamper with supernatural ink.

I just can't. It doesn't translate. And I wish to all the wells of goody-goodness in the world that it did. And I wish I knew why it doesn't. I so wish I could just open up my chest, press my heart to yours and share it with you.....maybe i wouldn't feel so stinkin isolated then. It almost sickens me that I have to keep it to myself.

I finished praying for him and there was a hand on my shoulder telling me we had to go. We weaved our way out of the weeping crowd and someone spoke in english saying how unfair it was, and colors and shadows whooshed by. We were in the airport heading home.

Is this what postpartum depression feels like? I feel like I was torn from something amazing. Something that was just beginning. I want to see it grow.

I heard a few different people say that this trip took 9 months for a leaders to plan and was therefor not unlike a pregnancy. And like 2 days before we left I had this dream that I was really, really pregnant. I was huge. And the dream continued all night. I would wake up and fall back asleep and have the same dream that I was about to give birth at any moment. And I know a lot of people think dreams are really hokey, and you all have my permission to make whatever you will of this, but I was talking to the girls on the team and several of them had similar dreams around the same time.

I think that this trip was the birth of something in Nicaragua. I think maybe that's why it hurts so bad. Cause the baby is all the way down there. In good hands, but still really far away.

And my team. I miss all the sisters I suddenly gained on that first night. On the first or second night after we got back home, i woke up in a NyQuil induced stupor and tried to figure out how all 16 girls were sleeping in my tiny room. Then I woke up a bit more and realized that my room is in Omaha, not Nicaragua and that all of my team were home in their own beds.
And thusly I am separated from the only people who understand what happened down there. Who I don't have to translate to.

This morning I woke up and couldn't find my ipod....Sheer panic, sheer bloody panic. I tore through the house overturning throw pillows and moaning. I growled and gnashed my teeth and interrogated my poor family as to the whereabouts of my beloved ipod and then felt stupid because I went the entire duration of the Nicaragua trip without my music......But! It is rather different here. There's nothing to do, really. One must resolve to create stick people from sticks on the front drive or sing to the african violets in their shoes, or stare at the deck ceiling until you've located the hornets' nest in a crack, just there, in the corner....And these things cannot be done without the proper reinforcement of music. That's just how it goes.
Ten minutes later I found my ipod. Everything in the world was a bit sunnier.

Since we've returned I've pretty much been listening to the same song on repeat almost the entire time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EIeUlvHAiM
it's gorgeous and oddly fits how I feel right now. Since I am separated from what i love, I have this single-minded determination to work my behind off till I am able to return to it. Today I signed up for my first spanish class ever in which I shall attempt to atone for all those years I idiotically took french because I thought it sounded like elvish. *shakes head* Sometimes, I am the queen of dumb.
But what's done is gone and all I have is what's before me. Therefore, I am gonna kick butt in these fall classes.
I feel like Ivy in The Village, going through Covington Woods, to go the towns...I think it's time to watch that movie again.

....this is all coming out some much more lamerrrr than it sounded in my head.
I wonder if I am loosing myself in translation.
I have so much more that needs to escape but I can't seem to remember it all and I'm having enough trouble accepting the sad quality of what I've written already....oh well.