I am really tired. Have only slept a tiny bit for the past three days. Yesterday (was it yesterday?) i was disgusted to find myself leaking tears and of course I wrote that on facebook because I write almost everything there. And to my surprise it had a response that was kind and compassionate, but it was from the person causing me to be sleepless. Now, being tired I should have been silent but was I? No. I basically alluded to hm being the reason for my sleeplessness which I did not explain and which of course when reading it sounds quite snippy which was not my intention but only to say it is dangerous territory (at least for me) and possibly destructive. I don;t BLAME him for my feelings, but if those feelings have not changed in all this time I really don;t see that they will and why come off sounding like a nut job. Worse is the recognition that I probably am a nut job if really only in regard to this situation. so...I am so tired, but I feel like I owe an apology or an explanation which puts me right in the position of talking about it that strikes me as quicksand. I think it may be kinder to seem rude and unappreciative of the overture which I am not, but better leave it seeming that way than try to explain what my POV is. Anyway, the bad feeling may keep me awake still. I don;t now but I sure hope not because I am getting erratic due to lack of sleep

All of my energy goes in one direction. I cannot for the life of me understand that or what to do about it, my usual response is to act like i ignore it, which is ridiculous but I do not see the value in doing anything else. It makes me feel like I am a marlin fighting on a hook for YEARS. I do not understand. i do not know what to do. What good is this?

one of those days.

I seem to be in a period of trying out new and different. And I am loving it! The poem I posted was from one part of one day on my first ever trip to Catalina (and Environmental Science lab, cracks me up) But omg it was fun. It was fun even though my creaky falling apart body couldn't DO everything. I did go kayaking, also for the first time! LOVED it! I have a date locally to go not-this-Sunday,-but-next with one friend and unscheduled plans to go with another friend.

Yesterday was another first. There is a performance component to my Poetry class and yesterday, for the first time in my memory I "performed" a poem. Outside. with people watching. And wind blowing and a very rude fountain that kept trying to swallow my words. With a microphone that I need some intimate time with if we are ever going to appear in public again, which we are. My classmates, wow, some of them are wonderful! I sucked but it was still sort of fun and I am looking forward to trying more new things.

Back to the ES trip (I slept on the Queen Mary! I also accidentally groped my roommate in the middle of the night because I navigated in the dark to the wrong bed but even that was funny) I saw dolphins and sea lions and garibaldi and bald eagles and a red tail hawk. I touched sharks and rays and all manner of invertebrates!

Did you know that there are laser pointers so powerful they will pinpoint stars in the sky and can possibly disrupt overflying aircraft?

I also found new music, Flight of the Concords which made me smile.

Night Boat

Old pier wood creaked and groaned as we amble-danced in the yellow  circles cast by our flashlights- pale reflection of the glittering, pure-bright  scintillations gleaming above in softened obsidian sky. The chug-purring launch bounced softly in the current. We streamed in  took a seat along the sides.  In quickened laugh-talk,  anticipatory, we jabbered our way into open water. Lanterns illumed the sea on either side of our craft, luring a lambent chum of glowing plankton,  drawn like watery moths-  A silver shape sliced an angle across the water! Then more,  schools of silvery squid slashing the borders of light, quick sentient missiles. “Shhh,” Preston, our leader, shhh’d us “I heard a sea lion over there” As she said it, I heard the sharp blow of expelled breath. Subdued, we waited. “Look! …There!” Something gray broke the water Then rocketing, rolling  toward us, unbelievably fast snatched a squid and sped into the dark. It must have dove deep, the other side of the boat never saw it.

I got a good, close look- the barreling body rolling joyously in the hunt It came again! Then again! We were all standing, straining to see. Reluctantly, I yielded my place to a person  from the other side and then, suddenly, there were three! They streaked beneath us repeatedly till the captain finally doused the light and steered us pier side. And, after- After the lab where we squinted over fresh plankton slides watching microscopic monsters devour each other, I thought of those playful, happy sea lion faces, how they moved so freely, orienting themselves Independent of gravity it seemed. How they live without pockets  or oppressive politics. I was glad I got to see them Before Fukushima radiation spread across the sea- Our unreturnable gift to them.

Shake the Box

(with gratitude to Bruce)

For desperate days now I’ve petitioned for poetry

All I get is the image of my Grandma’s strawberry smile-

The one that rivals Mona Lisa for mystery, but twice as impish

So I say,

 “What about you grandma?

Shall I tell the day you packed us up in The Grey Ghost,

old silver Cadillac with the showy fins

and like a shark in pursuit

followed that biker with a fishing pole sticking up

all the way to the beach and left us there,

me, barely pubescent, and in a tank top?

I burned to blisters shunning the smelly leather jacket offered

by a kind Hell’s Angel.”

I always wondered how you spent that day.

How about the time I splinted my lover’s spectacularly broken finger

with a quarter teaspoon and a yard of ripped up rags

in the middle of an anonymous night

after he really punched that guy

for saying something nasty to a street woman he cared for.

For days, he discreetly searched the paper for news of a body,

But she died first.

Antoine. That was her name.

“Shake the box,”

my current lover says.

And he plays Burroughs and Bukowski,

Ginsberg and Kerouac for inspiration.

I think, Baby, do you really want me darker than I am?

My box has a rich tumble

But it’s all stuck inside

Not wanting to be shared.

Not now.

Unrequited love laps up against

the joy of driving an old green schoolbus

on deserted Wyoming roads- making love and pie-

and Pink Floyd, the flamingo, not the band.

Disney Eyed Dudie, my most loyal dog gazes adoringly at me

from a bed four pads thick to ease his old bones.

He’s shrinking and most steps cause him pain but neither of us wants to let go.

Certainly a poem in that.

But not now my recalcitrant brain voices say.

I have nothing I can get on paper

But plenty in the Swirl around me.

Last night, I asked the Muses and do you know what I got?

Dream of a one legged mummy

In the ordinary opulence of some American house.

A mummy who knew lighting.

What kind of dreck is that, I ask you?

My Muses are only rarely serious.

Roll the bones, shake the box

Just live.

LeAnn Cole

It's almost 5pm and I am so groggy! I attribute this to what felt like an all night dream last night. Do your dreams ever feel like physical labor? Not just physical either, but emotionally harrowing as well.   My person centered dreams are usually about one person. Occasionally, other people, sometimes people I have not physically met, so I  should more correctly say my ideas of people (but even with people I have met and know a long long time is it ever more than my ideas of them?) anyway occasionally other people come in for starring or supporting roles but by far the most regular person in my dreams is someone I have not seen since I was 21. Since it was a primary relationship failure that made me wish, and past wishing, think I should have died when it happened, considering the felt impact to my life then and the subsequent assessments... I wish I could just, as I see some people do, "get over it" I am particularly impressed by one friend who recently broke up with her boyfriend of 8 years but stills lives with him, preserved the friendship and is happily dating. That astonishes me.
I have approached my pain from every perspective I can think of.First I wondered why this is the event that defined the high and low in my life in such an ironclad way. Other people would, I think, be more deeply affected by other things that have happened to me such as sexual molestation of me by my father, the tyranny he imposed on our family, his total lack of meaningful positive interaction with my brother and my mother's condoning of the molestation and the tyranny and the way he broke her. Those would be more normal things I think, to be broken over than simply not being valued by the person I loved most. Commonly, people say young people in love don't know what they are doing, that they need experiences to grow, there is plenty of reasoning, some good and substantive reasoning, to expect young relationships to be temporary and to be learning experiences. I accept that. It just wasn't that way for ME and when I finally (FINALLY) saw the difference in valuation and understood that he wanted to move on I tried to do that with the minimum of pain to him as possible. I however, felt mortally wounded and have walked like a zombie ever since. I've had just two meaningful, real relationships past that time (I expected none, was amazed to find myself in the first one after 15 years of nothing to do with anything like "romance" ) But the second of those subsequent 2 I am in now and this is with a man who loves me and is loyal and I am sort of permanently emotionally reserved. I can't get close to him really. I hope this relationship lasts till we die but if he were to precede me in death I would not embark on another relationship with a man. The perfect image for it hit me  while I was trying to think up a poem for my poetry class but I have not been able to write the poem. My grandmother was a wonderful gardener. I remember this from her years in CA and when she moved up to Santa Clara I came up to see her and we planted some fruit trees for her orchard. She had a peach tree and those peaches were the best I've ever had in all my life! I would go pick them and eat them there in the sunshine, peach juice running down my arms and chin like a drunk person in a swoon of ecstasy. The were unforgettable.  After she died, this house was vacant for a couple of years and when I moved into it I went out back only to see that a 40 foot pine tree had crashed down on the peach tree and broken it about 2 feet from the ground. It would send up attempts at branches and those made me sad. When Bruce moved in he cut it down level with the ground, but then it would send suckers up. One seemed promising and I dreamed that with a little time and care I would have those same good peaches again, and it would bloom and form tiny fruits and I pinched them off to give it time but after years when I left some on they never became ripe whole peaches and the sucker never became a tree. So I feel like a sucker. Some impulse of Life sends out little runners but really they are ghosts. I remember, when I was "with"" Miles so wanting a child, his child. There was no commitment between us, but i did tell him my wish and I would spend time with my legs in the air after having made love hoping and hoping. I never thought it WOULD happen though because there was the time when I was with that first love that I thought I WAS pregnant and he adamantly did not want to be a father then. I did not know what to do but finally decided i should have an abortion because I had no independent way to raise a child and was still under parental control (which seemed a lot more serious then) After i made that decision i prayed with my whole soul to the same concept of God that I prayed to give me a forever connection to that first love that if I did not have to kill my possible child (You just magically whisk it away more or less) that I would give up the right to bear a child in this life. I've always thought it amusing that a God I don't really believe in granted me these two wishes, but I did not have to have an abortion. And there was no child with Miles. Sadly I had given up on the idea of a child for a whole slew of reasons. My current love (who I think would be a wonderful father) does not want a child. And I really do think a child deserves 2 committed parents. Also we are poor and neither of us have the energy for a child. So.... of course it would be that one day in the bathroom my body expelled this pure white packet the likes of which I had never seen before. I believed it was a miscarriage, but no insurance so I didn't pursue it. Why? Too late in any case. But i mourned that possibility. When I took my phlebotomy course we went to the lab and saw all manner of things. Cancers and body parts and then a progression of ended pregnancies preserved in jars. That pure white shape was exactly what i had seen in the bathroom. I lost all strength right there and literally slid to the floor where I had to sit with people murmuring concern for several minutes.
I know I've written about this stuff before. Probably ad nauseum. But it keeps on coming up and up and up and i spend nights in dreams like last night that leave me wondering why? Have i not processed this in every conceivable way it can be processed? Have I not understood that it is not a cause for anger and since that decision of "no" was the most honest wish of a honest heart (just a heart constructed very differently from mine) there WAS no better way for this to have gone. It's not a matter for anger, though certainly for pain. Why again did this event make the top and bottom measures of my emotional life? (And it has, nothing has hit the high of it and nothing has even approached the low, not even the deaths of people I loved very much or the end of my relationship with Miles) And nothing ever will. I know this in my bones. But, since there is no closure or healing or any of those things possible I wonder why I spend these nights and many many many many daylight hours going over the same thing. Inasfar as acceptance is possible i think I have accepted. Why the self torture? That I do not understand. why didn't my parents mark those boundaries? I was able to move past anything they did and while not to the degree previous, still love them. And ah that brings up another question. Do I still love him? I do. It was like a permanent amendment to my soul on sight. Would I ever choose to be in a room with the dynamic, living person again? Oh I think not! I would not want to find out that that lower limit might indeed be expanded! And I have the little composite living inside me which is more real to me than most people. But the parents? I think that was healable because underneath it all I believe they both really love(d) me.
Mostly I don't even understand the dreams. I can't remember most of them eve the very long intricate ones like last night well. I know they WERE long and intricate mostly by the exhaustion I feel afterward. But if there is a soluable mystery in my life i would like to know WHY I must somehow still seek some sort of connection. That i don't get. People's personalities direct their experiences and I know that if some parts of my personality were different so would my experiences be. For instance, when the Eternal Sunshine of /a Spotless Mind came out I thought, aha! there is a sliver of hope. But I am who I am and I soon learned I wouldn't choose to erase the memory. ( I have, in the event of reincarnation should I ever encounter this soul again, PLEADED with myself to run like hell!) but I wouldn't erase what already transpired. Nor, can I even say he wasn''t worth it. And that would be worth another night of troubling thoughts right there. Hope it's not on the menu in the near future. I really need to SLEEP.

That said and all this silly, murky yucky stuff written for unknown reasons I will now take back the Redbox movies and go get some doughnuts for my Sweetie Boo. And feed the cat. No poetry was written today. I was just too tired.