Secrets

I've changed.

Somewhere in that period of stability and sameness things were shifting under the surface. A butterfly metaphor, though trite, is apt. In fact, a butterfly metaphor has been repeating itself lately. Th eother day, surprising even myself, I said in frustration, I have the gift of intimacy with people, and they open up to me, and I love them, and then they love me back, but in a standard way. What's the standard way? he asks, and I say, like a butterfly in a jar. I've never been one to chafe like this before. Restrictions bothered me, yes, but kinds of love? Things that come, originally, from a good place? Oh, well. Changes.

Sometimes, by Nine Days, has long been a favourite and significant song of mine. Sometimes you gotta set free what you love just to bring it back. There's something I want to say about freedom, but I don't yet know the words.

Today I came home from work, gardened at Juggler's for an hour, and put together a dinner for Juggler and my brother: bbq chicken and steak, mashed potatoes, and salad that includes a bunch of weeds from the garden (unplanted greens, perhaps? Chickweed and the like, you know). I feel impressed with myself.

For the last two nights I've slept with both CrazyChris (or CrazyChris or CrazyChris) and Bob (or maybe Bob or Bob (photogenic bastards, aren't they?)) in my bed. Chris is in a bad way right now, and I've predictably fallen in love with Bob, and part of the changes in my life involve being almost more community than individual on occasion. I'm a part of something, and that something involves Chris to an intense degree; when I say he's my twin, as I've been doing verbally for shorthand, it isn't too far off. This is why I love my life right now: it's set up so that I can be hanging out with Bob and say, hey, I'm gonna grab Chris and bring him here for the night and he says, should I head home and I can say no. That is so, so important to me; to have people coming into my space, and welcomed there, and to be able to share with whom I please. You know, I get to decide who has to stay out, and the answer can be: no one that I love. Or the answer can be: everyone.

The thing that's emerged in me is my community-self. I have been lonely lately; lonely while away. I realise that no one person, and really not even many people, can fill this lonely space. What fills it is a group that is more than the sum of its parts, a group that I love within right now. That thing is so important to me; more important than any one person for certain.

Ack, dinner's actually ready now. More later. Much love.

Pretty

Leaflets
5.

The strain of being born
over and over has torn your smile into pieces
Often I have seen it broken
and then re-membered
and wondered how a beauty
so anarch, so ungelded
will be cared for in this world.
I want to hand you this
leaflet streaming with rain or tears
but the words coming clear
something you might find crushed into your hand
after passing a barricade
and stuff into your raincoat pocket.
I want this to reach you
who told me once that poetry is nothing sacred
---no more sacred that is
than other things in life---
to answer yes, if life is uncorrupted
no better poetry is wanted.
I want this to be yours
in the sense that if you find and read it
it will be there in you already
and the leaflet then merely something
to leave behind, a little leaf
in the drawer of a sublet room.
What else does it come down to
but handing on scraps of paper
little figurines or phials
no stronger than the dry clay they are baked in
yet more than dry clay or paper
because the imagination crouches in them.
If we needed fire to remind us
that all true images
were scooped out of the mud
where our bodies curse and flounder
then perhaps that fire is coming
to sponge away the scribes and time-servers
and much that you would have loved will be lost as well
before you could handle it and know it
just as we almost miss each other
in the ill cloud of mistrust, who might have touched
hands quickly, shared food or given blood
for each other. I am thinking how we can use what we have
to invent what we need.

- adrienne rich, from 'Leaflets'