Riotwalker

Partly because there are people who were once very familiar with my poems, mainly in Chicago, who have not heard me perform my new piece,
Partly because I haven’t typed out the piece until now, and because of my excitement of the way it looks and reads in print,
Partly because I’m worried I don’t know how to write when I have my life together, and I want to post something beautiful anyway,
Whatever the reason, I hope you enjoy my newest spoken word piece, Riotwalker:

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riotwalker

If Chance calls, tell her I’m out watching Nostalgia.
He keeps putting photo albums up on the news stands and
can’t seem to keep up to date. He doesn’t know why.
Just like Jealousy
doesn’t know why locking his lovers into chastity belts
never extinguishes the flames from his cheekbones.
They should get together.
Let’s try and keep ‘em away from Pride though,
’cause that guy,
he strips off the skin from Self Esteem, wears it as a costume
and that kinda shit grosses me out.

And as for Hope…
Ouch.
Me and that flaky bastard have been playin’ phonetag
for over two decades and sometimes
I wanna give him up.

Which reminds me of Attachment.
Yeah… Attachment,
who cries things like TAKE ME
TAKE ME, BABY, TAKE ME ’cause,
I’m not whole without you.
I would be if ya cut out the W
but I know ya don’t have scissors for that kinda stuff.
He says it with Persistence.

Persistence,
is taking the anxiety of a mother who can no longer help her son,
stickin’ it in a printing press and stamping it
over, and over, and over
onto back issues of faith.
And folks, I hope it’s not too late.
‘Cause I keep tryin’ to talk Suicide out of himself.
He keeps jumping in front of cars on the freeway
but they keep dodging him and
they’re scared, too.

Because Fear
walks the way riots do,
Molotov cocktails for biceps and a chest like a bulletproof vest,
windows fall with his footsteps and I heard him comin’.
Because I was caught by Truth in a desert full of pillows.
She gave me oceans,
carefully crafted from bags of the bolts and nails
it hails when the clouds shutter for us,
but that doesn’t change the fact
that I’ve been trappin’ thunderclaps in my pillowcase.
I’m savin’m for dull dreams,
for streams of unwatched thought,
for the knots
that bundle up in my torso every time I think I’m not enough.
I’m fucking enough.
Yeah,
Love told me so.

She tied together every character of this song with a chain,
each link being a different moment I actually showed up for.
It’s how I stand before you,
so wrecked and shaking in my nervousness I freak.
It’s just that lately Confidence has been singin’ me to sleep.

i.am.becoming

tenderness (TEN-der-ness) noun.
1. a tendency to express warm and affectionate feeling
2. a pain that is felt (as when the area is touched)

Come here.
Sit by me.
With every contraction my muscles make,
I want you to move in closer.
It’s a tough razor’s edge to walk
to let you rub my insides
without my insides giving in
but I’m ready to learn to walk it.
Push me out there,
like a chick outta the nest
who never knew what these awkward limbs were for.
If it wasn’t so cheesy to use the word “flying” I would,
but the truth of the matter is that I’m learning
the language with which space holds me and

it holds me well.

call me out

People are complaining about my recent lack of posts. For this, I apologize, and feel compelled to explain. In accordance with vows I’ve recently taken, which I’ll not go into right now, I’ve been forced to look deeply at my intentions in every action I take. I am now ready to step back into writing, but only after thoroughly investigating my intentions in doing so. Therefore, I am making a request, and giving any readers the right, to call me out if, with my writing:

1. I am bringing you into my drama needlessly.
2. I am babbling about my own misery or excitement, without an evident reason.
3. I am sloppy with the feelings or beliefs of others (this includes: CEO’s, Hummer Drivers, Texans, Enemies, Factory Farm Employees and Owners, and Everyday Assholes)
4. I am manipulating you.
5. I take that one back, I’m allowed to manipulate you into enlightenment, if I can find a way to do so.
6. I am being contrived
7. I am trying to seduce you.
8. I am being unrealistic with myself about the nature of reality.

Thank you. There are comment boxes at the bottom of every post.

there are children carving poems into their family trees, and I am still lonely

For the nights we’ve stood hunched over, drenched and sticky in our egogames,
For the hairs pressed between the pages of my journals in the shapes of words saying “Remember that time you gave in,”
For the clouds of smoke we puffed out and called Truth, only to watch ‘em disappear,
For the year
that we all spent tryin’ to chip the paint off our walls, lookin’ for that color we used to love so much, only to find it is ugly and out of date,
For all the hurricanes we tried to catch with butterfly nets,

I am takin’ the leap. Double-back-flip into a cannonball I’m takin’ the leap.
‘Cause I heard there is a mother, whose blood type is lonely,
and a father, with the anger of an eight-hundred pound wolf,
but they gave birth to a daughter who only blinks once an hour,
she’s so caught up with this world. I think she’s holding us all together.
All I can give her is my breath though,
and same goes for Maria.
Remember Maria? She was the janitor at your high school,
dancing with her paint brush on the gymnasium floor when no one was lookin’.
I think she’s holding us all together.

To be continued.

strange love (or: how I learned to stop worrying and love people truly)

A black cat crossed my path today, but I feel untouchable. It’s funny the way things work sometimes, the way a heart, completely exposed and raw and touched by the coarse and sharp edges of this place can feel so protected.

I found a catch in everything I’ve ever done. I found a catch in all the glowing parts of my experience. It’s that once they have all come to fruition, I have to give the fruit away. I find protection there, too.

winter dathün

Just so y’all know, I’ll be on retreat and unreachable until January 12th. Happy New Year!

unconditionality and naïveté

I can think of nothing heavier than an airplane

So chapped and windburnt you’d think she had freshly escaped a frozen desert, so polite and safe in conversation you’d think she was lying (she was probably lying), she raised an eyebrow at my educational background. They always do.

I won’t go like them. I don’t know how I’ll greet my burnout when it’s comin’, but God knows I won’t go like them—with white knuckles, grabbing so tightly on to what I’ve always taken for granted.

I couldn’t stop watching her knee. It was shaking so violently. Her knuckles really were white as she grabbed her husband’s hand as if to tell me one of them had a deep fear of flying. I couldn’t tell which one, but everyone on the plane was getting nervous at that point. Every six seconds, the window switched from being completely filled by Chicago, to being completely filled by the sky. All the heads bobbled in unison as we hit the hot air pockets or whatever gives a plane turbulence. I don’t understand that kinda stuff.

She was so convinced we were gonna die, and I couldn’t stop watching her shaking knee. We were comin’ into Chicago like an earthquake, like it was Bring Yer Kid To Work Day and the pilot was lettin’ his son land it.

I looked at her ear, her 60+ year old ear, and I wanted to lean in and say, “Forty-five percent of plane crashes happen during landing.”

I looked at her ear, her 60+ year old ear, and I wanted to lean in and say, “You’ve always done the best you could.”

I said nothing.

I can think of nothing heavier than an airplane,
I can think of nothing less likely to fly.
-Saul Williams

gaps and lack thereof

I found ten Buddhist books in a box this evening from when I was naïve. I don’t think I was naïve I think I was right. They all make sense to me now, at least enough to trust what brought me to them in the first place.

The TV’s blaring downstairs. No one cares about your intimate relationship with your tenth, fourteenth, sixteenth years, you’re pathetic.

I found a crumpled picture tonight, with the woman who took my virginity’s letter on the back. She said a good picture of her is rare, Facebook begs to differ or maybe I’m lonely.

I found a dreadlock tonight. It was the only one I didn’t throw into the wilderness, sitting in lotus in the Animas Valley, chanting for impermanence.

This evening I found a dried rose I couldn’t get rid of if I tried. I hate flowers.

I found a cap tonight. The kind of cap that goes on the top of an eyedropper. When I was sixteen I threw it into grass after taking four drops of acid. Two weeks after that I was discovering Buddhism as a result, and I was smoking a cigarette in the grass, and I looked down and I saw the white cap. It didn’t look as much like a tooth then and I became obsessed with sanity.

I’m obsessed with sanity. That becomes clear as I stumble across more photographs of all the people who I’ve been drawn to in my life. I only understand now that I’m drawn to their sanity. It holds me like nothing else can.

The gap was filled tonight. The story is complete. I am grateful.

pit stops for humble people

If you’re ever driving along I-80, and the Nebraska plains have painted your upper eyelids with lead, and your ass is sore, and your back’s got pieces of scrap metal in it, hold out just a little bit longer. On the north side of the interstate, right by the west exit for North Platte, you’ll see a metallic, bullet shaped diner beneath a pink neon sign reading, “Penny’s Diner.”

Go there.

Let the waitress take care of you. She’ll call you things like “sweetheart” and “honey.” Smile big and tip well, and the rest of your trip will run smoothly.

things I tend to do in open spaces

1. The designers of this place got it all wrong, ‘cause they put walls between us, and the doors in those walls have locks in ‘em, and the locks work and there’s too much damn space in here for me. I get vertigo from it. Give me somethin’ smaller.

2. I hope you don’t mind if I throw pieces of what you’ve given me into space like rice at God’s wedding, ‘cause I’d feel selfish if I kept more than even a breath of it for my self.

3. Oh, ya need space, ok. Yeah, I get it. Me too, actually, I was just about to say that. Umm, it’s just that lately I’m jealous of the space that you occupy, ‘cause it gets to hold you like that. When I’m drunk, I still dream of you and in the dreams you’re saving small children from falling chandeliers and things.

4. From when I was younger until not so long ago, I often felt that I was wasting everything I consumed, including the space I occupied. I no longer feel this way.

5. I’ve got better things to do now than chase you, but still I still chase you. Okay, I don’t chase you. But a space has been made now where the book of us is standing like a tree right in front o’ me and I can’t help but want to climb it and hang from its branches.

Let’s tie a rope there and make a swing.

right now

vote

of detachment and of broken things

There is a priest. When he leaves confession he doesn’t feel release. He leaves with a stomach full of broken promises, and of broken dreams and they’re sharp as hell. Exception after exception after exception after exception we are lured further from the blood of this place.

Let me dive in.

The world is bleeding for us, and I’m sick of us never even showing up. I’m sick of us always expecting, from all the world’s strong spots, while its weak spots are screaming, crying for our eyes.
We are pushing and pushing and pushing at some kinda roof, and we don’t know how to break through. Folks, I think that’s how we’ll break through.

for a pair of antlers

My 18-wheeler has a circus act in back. When the road stretches big, n far in front o me, n my eyelids get weights tied to em by the lashes, I’ve got Juna there. Juna, the queen o the pitbull underground, queen o the truckstop microyard, queen o the road kill. Juna keeps me goin sometimes.

The freaks only leave the trailer for their shows. They can setup a tent quicker than I can shift a gear. They shift gears quicker than I can pitch a tent when a college girl’s in the passin lane. They covered my truck in lights. At night she looks like a goddamn circus herself. Every edge n corner’s got a light on it. The sides o the trailer’ve got all kindsa crazy carnival shit on em. Oldstyle carnival too. I like it, even though the other drivers always point n laugh bout it. The only time I found any troubles with the freaks is when the deer came.

Buck. Big one. 16-pointer. Late at night, everything’s a deer. The bushes are deer. Rocks are deer. Abandoned cars are deer. The deer picture cries wolf too many times, n when you see a real one, you barely react. Barely at all. So this 16-pointer’s ass gets taken out by my grill. His whole hind legs missin, scattered and splattered all over I-25. We painted half the goddamn freeway red.

The thing was a beauty, still alive, wailin n shit. Juna found a chunk of his leg and just gnawed all happy on it. I went over to her to give her a pet n think what to do bout this buck, when the latch to the trailer opened. They never came out ‘cept for their shows, so Juna n I were curious.

When one o the freaks, Mr. King Clown, saw the deer, you wouldn’t believe what he said. You wouldn’t believe it. Still with smudges o paint on his face, sweaty from bein in the trailer, he said they needed the buck’s antlers—horns he called em—for a costume.

This is reservation land, I told him, ya can’t take pieces from a dead animal. A goddamn crow could fall outta the sky into your lap n you’d still hafta call the phone number. They usem in ceremonies n shit.

He didn’t listen. Mr. King Clown can never listen. He walked right up to him to grab his new horns. The buck was still wailin so I went to the cab to grab my buckknife. Didn’t wanna do it, had to though. I’d done it before, but never this crazy. Never even close.

I did what I had to do n closed the latch for the trailer. I found the paper in the glove box with the Indian number on it. Toldem where the two bodies for their ceremonies were. Juna puter head on my lap. I pet er as we drove on along the stretchin road in front o me.

a chain is there

hesitation dropkicks me sometimes

boulder

I like the wailing of the trains at night here. The horns bring me back to my bed, back between my sheets, with the pillow holding my head, back from Chicago, from the girl, from travel plans to Mexico.

The train horns bring me back to Boulder when I start dreaming again.

of dandelions

Lately I’ve lost my ability to turn my shoulders cold. My eyelids have become transparent and my breath has been big. Lately breakthroughs break through my skull with the frequency of Dandelions. Labors are fruitful and the thunder claps in time with my pulse. There’s been a loss of knowing.

Allow space for vulnerability kept falling off my tongue onto my dishes the other night. It’s a phrase of no certainty, no affirmation. It’s not about knowing how things will turn out. Fucking forget it. There’s nothing more capable of holding us than the huge goddamn space of uncertainty above us.

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1. Saul Williams says: When you’re open to it, vulnerability is power. I agree.
2. I handed my apartment keys to strangers with directions once. They were paid full time by a millionaire to meditate all day. They were raw foodists, and prepared us raw breakfast every day they stayed.
3. When I was in high school, I went to a raw food refuge. On the wall in the oven-lacking kitchen, there was a painting of a Dandelion. Next to the Dandelion was the phrase: Only a weed ’till you know what to do with it.
4. I’ve heard stories from dozens of people, saying they could only truly grow after losing everything. Since then I’ve been waiting to be swept off my feet and briefly die.
5. When you know what to do with the weeds that block your growth, when drought hits, when a flood comes, you find power in vulnerability and open.

haikemistry

let’s explore by foot
with a notebook
taking pictures with our pens

what I’ve been up to

things dictionaries don’t know

There are times when Thank You is not enough. There are times when you’d have to paint a picture or something instead, but most of us don’t have the hands for that kind of thing. Sometimes you can order words in a way that provokes what you are trying to express, without being a dictionary and, if you’re lucky, you’ll actually say it when you need to.

Before I left Chicago, it was “I choose you.” “I choose you” saved me from a lack of self expression, from a lack of genuine gratitude. Now, it’s “I’m glad you’re here.”

I’m glad you’re here.

stirrups too specific

Strike this lost kid across your corduroys for fire.
I’ve been lookin’ for reasons to burn, anyway.
There are activists sleeping between my ribs,
and teachers in the back of my skull,
but no one can strip off their facepaint like I can.
So sew me a wash cloth,
without thimbles,
so that your blood may be interwoven with my vehicle.
It’s not your job to tell me how to do it.
It’s your job to tell me why.
Tie the reasoning around my pointin’ finger,
call it a reminder.
I’ve worn blinders since my leash broke,
I’m waitin’ for a kick in the sides,
but I’ve crafted stirrups too specific
for your feet.

soft spot

How often have you turned away, because you feared you might discover something terrible about yourself? How often have you been willing to look at your face in the mirror, without being embarrassed? That is the sixty-four-thousand dollar question: How much have you connected with yourself at all in your whole life?

-Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

I’m lettin’ it sink in now. I’ve spent too much time in the head, catching up with this place. I wandered for almost three weeks, losing my point of referance as a person completely, just before building an entirely new one. I’ve decided I’m always going to move like this, it makes the transition more genuine.

Last night I finished my Shambhala training with a Pulp Fiction twist in the Main Shrine Room of the BSMC. Tonight I’ll hang out with the teacher of the program, which will most certainly be an adventure.

homeless frontrange days 14-18, and home in the frontrange days 1-7

When I arrived at the Shambhala Mountain Center, my legs were twitchin’, wishin’ to be tied sideways, back straight and breath big. Four days later, I would again be greeted by rain in Boulder. It always rains on my first day in Boulder. But the sun was awake when I arrived at the land. The grass on the path was obnoxious it was so at ease. As soon as I got out of my car, it was my clearest instinct to stay. So I did for days.

I walked the path with cheeks stretched to the Stupa. There is no religion for the way you feel in front of a monument like that. Inside there were two women sitting. They were creating air in the room that hits a bloodstream fast.

One of the women turned out later to need a ride to Boulder, on the same day I was driving there. She also turned out to be starting at Naropa with me. She also turned out to be moving in next door to me. She also turned out to be amazing, and we’ve instantly become close friends.

The way things have fallen into place is uncanny and auspicious. The adjustment has been smooth and disorienting all at the same time. I’m excited more than anything else to dive into a rigorous world of contemplative learning. Orientation week has been interesting, to say the least. There has been laughter, tears, meditation, boredom, screaming, dancing and lots of good smells.

homeless frontrange days 6-13

Tuesday. Picked up sister and father from Denver International. Drove four hours to trail head. Hiked a mile and a half to our first night’s campsite.

Wednesday through Friday. On the trail, including too much rain and three 12,000+ foot passes in 24 hours. Arrived in Glenwood Springs Friday night, to be greeted warmly by an anxiety attack no doubtedly sparked by culture shock. Watched, despite my aggressive dissagreement with the host country’s genocidal tendencies, the ridiculous opening ceremony for the Olympics. Slept poorly.

Saturday. Back to Denver. So as not to over-extend my welcome on a friend’s couch, checked into the Denver Hostel. The most run down, rough edged hostel I’ve ever seen, but very warm and reminded me of home, complete with roaches. Hung out with a Ukranian who I scared with my climbing antics on the fire escape. Slept poorly.

Sunday. Wrote a lot. Tried to nap, but Russian is a hard language to sleep to. Why couldn’t my roommates be French? While gathering things in the Hostel to go to the Mercury Cafe’s poetry slam, a former Denver team member checked into my dorm. Talked lots of slam nonsense. Rode bikes with friends through Denver rain (smells way better than Chicago rain) to the Merc. It was the youth slam and those kids knocked my socks off for three rounds. Slept poorly.

Monday. Checked out of the hostel. Wrote a lot. Finally sent about six thousand emails I had been meaning to send. Found out my old best friend lives in Evergreen. During my endeavors to get there and back, got lost twice. Wrote a two page poem in about fifteen minutes, while getting wired at Cafe Europa. Off to celebrate with friends. I hope I sleep well.

blue on black

I was six years old when I rubbed a black crayon thickly onto a piece of paper. I then picked up a blue crayon, and in curiosity rubbed it over the black mark. Being able to see the blue over the black, I sat back, content with my own genius. I had done it, at last. I had proven the white coats with microscopes wrong, and discovered that blue is darker than black.

I sometimes still feel like it is.

It’s funny, beliefs shift faster than the clouds these days. People shift faster than beliefs and, often, it’s hard for me to catch up.