chiming

this is a repetition, i think, but i just want to mention: i really like this, i like this very much, i really really like this very very much.  

Planes

You are on a plane. 

I am on a plane. 

There are many planes where we find each other. 

None of these are too far away from each other, and like those stars that were once in contact, they still influence each other. 

This is either the simplest physics or the most complex. I can't tell which is which.  

And it doesn't matter what I think about it, because thinking is not the same as knowing, and you know what I know and I know what you know. 

It is easier to be able to get away and out of your head when your head is happier.  

And Orion is rising in front of my head. 

And right above my head is a full moon, in an eclipse that we can't see here.  You might see it from where you are. 

And I can't think of anything that I'd like more than to be getting off a plane with you and a cold fall New York wind is hitting us both at the same time. 

Distance does not matter even though my skin will disagree. 

The dog ate the trash but did not eat the hammock.

That hammock where we lay under the moon and looked at where we are. 

And the night before you put my hands on your head and said you can feel the moon, it's in my head.

All of this is in our heads.

And in our hearts, even though they try not to explode from containing all of this.  

It's better to just let them spill, and let this get messy.  

It's not really that messy.

It's Daphnus and Chloe playing in the garden. 

My father would have liked that play.

He would have liked to see it, or liked to hear me tell him about it.

I would like that.

He's on another plane and it feels very far away.  

His body is here in ash, some hair, and in scientific experiments that he would like to look up on YouTube. 

And I think he misses being in his body even more than we do, which is more than I ever thought possible. 

All of this tells me, it's good to be inside your skin, loving the one you love, and that part is very short.  

Touching and being touched, inside the skin.  

It's very short. 

And even a lifetime isn't long enough.

All of this tells me, we're very lucky. 

We always talk about that. 

How lucky we are.

And knowing that is a very good place to be.

A good place to being and end a day. 

I am in love, and I miss my dad, and I miss you being here. 

And everything you say about stars, that we come from stars, is right.

We're so much more than we think we are. 

And when I touch eternity through your skin, matter starts to matter, it matters very much.

That death, this love, broke me.

And I've never been more complete.  

Three months

3 months ago I was looking at two small bags on my floor, this is what I would have with me when I was in Berlin, there wasn't anything I needed, nothing more than this.  I like to have large and momentous things happening all the time, and it's never enough, but this was enough. 

The next day I had four things. There was lunch with Steve and then there was a short trip with my parents to the hospital and there was this coffee with someone I always kind of admired a lot and then there was a dinner with my roommate and that was all.  Nothing would overshadow what was about to happen with me and these two bags, this adventure ahead, I was clean and I was clear and nothing would interrupt this, a spiritual journey across the seas and it would all be art and French cigarettes. 

Two days later I am in an airport in Paris and I'm shaking like a leaf because nothing was going to work out how I planned, I was stuck in a city that has a language I couldn't even pretend to speak, but I was shaking because I was about to turn on my phone and I thought hm this might be a very important moment.  I was going to read your letter back, and it already had so much weight, it caught me unawares.

I had an inkling there was weight because, a day before, when the plane lifted off from Phoenix, I was thinking about my father, and my daughter, and this Heather.  And when the wheels lifted, my lip started trembling and I was surprised that I was crying so hard.  The father and the daughter are easy to understand because they are the pull on my body to stay in one place, and the other was impossible to understand because I didn't know why because I think it was because I thought I was in love already and that didn't take any time at all, but of course time doesn't exist.

The day before was the day that felt so heavy and light all at once.  I told Steve about Heather and it sounded charming and sweet but my father was already so heavy and I needed to see my daughter one time before I left, and my father walked into my house, he hasn't seen my house in a long long time and he told me to keep traveling like his uncle Leonard and to have fun.  Oh and the night before, Sue told me to write where the fear is.  Lots of advice from elders.  

And then there was that coffee with that Heather, a moment which has been covered extensively already, but worth going back to because time does not exist and that's when I learned that for the third time in my life maybe.  And all I want to say about that is that she had these blue eyes and she had this black dress, and she still has the eyes but the dress changes, sometimes three times in an afternoon. You have to change clothes a lot when you are covering so much ground.  And becoming so many people at once.

And in an afternoon when I hadn't scheduled any time for anything momentous, I accidentally fell into: a place that smells like home; a whirlpool that doesn't hold me back but pushes me forward; a burning ring of fire; nothing less than a perfect love story, one that I had recently decided was not for me any more, one that I more recently decided was the one that was chasing me as hard as I had been chasing after it.

And we can move forward from there, six weeks later maybe, and the three I had in my head on the plane were together in my parents' living room, and I wouldn't believe it if you'd told me that an hour later this Heather would be touching my father's feet. And a week after that we would all be together when my father was shaking in that chair, an hour before he was taken to the place where he would die.  And two days later we would be there right after he had died.

In between a coffee and a death there are a thousand adventures I can't tell because they belong only to us.  And between a death and a moment like this, there are a thousand more.  I won't tell the details of the hundred times you can fall in love with someone over and over, sometimes there are rivers and priests making blessings and sometimes there are conversations that are full of shooting stars and mad faeries and sometimes there are cold trembles and sometimes there are those soft embraces after just two days apart and sometimes it's so much like the best love stories in movies and books and plays that it seems impossible to be living inside of it and not watching it from somewhere else.

And if I was younger, I might have thought that I couldn't live with two things at once, my biggest grief and the kind of love story that most people don't get every lifetime. But I'm not younger, and I'm not torn in a thousand pieces, and I know It can happen, because it's happening to me.  And my soul is wide open, even though there are moments I want to hide somewhere else, but I haven't wanted to be in another body in a very long time.  If three months is a long time.

It's just long enough to be turned all kinds of inside out, and put back together so I can see myself as the perfect half of a perfect constellation, completely in love and completely and utterly loved from the inside out.  It's just long enough to learn that grief comes from love for another human being, and love comes with a sweet grief for an identity that doesn't fit any more, and these things, these mysteries, have to be worked out inside skin, skin filled with stars and goddesses and ghosts, bodies of water that contain more than even heaven would allow.  

This is a love story. And that's how my favorite love story starts.  

My dad

My dad died at 745 this morning (Wednesday, 5 of September). Since Monday, we've been sitting with him and waiting.  It finally happened when it was just my mom and my uncle Jerry and my mom's best friend, Ginny. I wasn't there. I wasn't supposed to be there when it happened.  I think he wanted it to be just between him and my mom at the end.

When I walked into the room, I threw myself on him and kissed him everywhere and cried a lot.  

We all express things differently, and I don't know if it matters too much what we do, as long as we're there. When we're there, the energy goes where it is supposed to go, and our small actions don't add or subtract from that energy at all.

I have been thinking about this more and more lately, that these things, or maybe even most things, are guided by an energy that we think is large, but it's larger than we could ever imagine.  And it guides us to do what we are supposed to do.  And plugging in, knowing secrets, and being connected, those things only make it easier to find our own flow within the cycle. But the cycle will go on with or without us, and we're not particularly special, just lucky. 

There was this moment, where my mom was lying over the bed, with her arms around my dad, holding him.  And Heather, the woman I fell in love with in an hour before I went to Berlin, was holding me.  She looked at my mom and my mom looked at her.  She says my mom looked straight into her eyes.

A recognition.  

This thing that happened to me when I met this man, more than fifty years ago, I see it happening to you too.

I can't imagine life being as beautiful as it is. 

I just can't imagine.  

something shiny and new

i haven't written here in so long, i've been writing, but not to you, i've been writing to someone who has been reading what i've been writing and it's just for them.  it's nothing personal against you, it's just how these things happen.  but i want to mark this, this is the last night in this house, the place i lived for a year, and getting ready to move to a new house (one i used to live in a long time ago), and it all feels a little strange.
there are things going on that are making my heart hurt, things i've talked about a lot before, but now they are much more terrible, and all of it will be well and is well and has always been well, but it's going to be a rough time ahead.
there are things going on that are making my heart swell, it's too big for my chest to hold, and if you ask her she would tell you the same story.
and i think i might get a dog, but that doesn't have anything to do with her, except that she'll be around the dog a lot, i think and hope, because she'll be around a lot, and this is why i'm so happy lately, and also why i'm walking with this unbearable grief lately in a way that makes it bearable.
things are being re-arranged, all the male roles have to be reconstructed, i have to learn how to be this thing that i am, but differently than the generations that did it before (and also, exactly the same as they did it before, because repetitions are sometimes part of something larger, and i am born into this world to be a part of that, too).
we get to be the thing that represents our pattern in the fabric, and we are also the thing that makes rips in the fabric for the next generation to jump through.
and love makes us fearless enough to be all of these things at once.
i'm not telling you anything secret, and not telling you anything new.  i miss writing you, but i don't miss that feeling of being lost without a map.  even though i don't know where we are going, and don't have any idea about the destination, the map is on the body, and the marks on my body are made right here, and right now, and this is where i get to live, and it's so nice to see you here, too.  

love/ephemera

installation performance love ephemera
dont forget this

Tremble

The plane rumbles and my lip is trembling and I wonder why and the wheels leave the ground and my eyes are wet and I can't keep my lip from trembling, there are three people I can see in my head, a father, a daughter, and someone I just started to think about yesterday.

not yet

out the door, these things...3 advices...
sue--put magic in the normal (about my writing), go where the fear is, go where you haven't got a clue, your metaphors are easy habits for you...
steve--the only thing that matters at all, that makes any difference at all, is what we think about ourselves...
dad--the bottom line, make sure you have fun...
x

everything else

if i were going to try to tell you everything at once, it would still be just like that, just like how we are talking, except it would be faster, and except you would hear slips of the tongue that lead places where nothing is supposed to fit, but everything would fit there.  if i were to let everything spill, it would fall in so many directions that there wouldn't be enough flowers to cover over the stains that it would leave on the counter.  but i would try.  i would gather flowers and place them on the counter, in the shape of your body, because i want to cover your body in flowers.  if i ran out of metaphors, the world would open up (like a clam) and there would be that nervous moment in between things, in between flowers falling from our mouths (because in this scene you are saying everything at once as well, of course) and that moment that marks the beginning of solid, shivering, naked things, things that fall out of my mouth onto my chin.  and i would tell you a list of all the "i want to's" and it would begin with "turn you inside out" but that would be wrong.  and it would end with something very close to "i want to put my mouth here, and i want to just wait and see what is going to happen after that."  as if i didn't know.  because i don't know.  because this isn't written anywhere just yet.  and there would be some moments where i would stop doing anything and start to say something, something like, "there were these two worlds and one was leaving and one was coming, and you slipped in between the cracks," but before i could get two words out you would interrupt me and tell me to stop.  and i wouldn't understand why.  i wouldn't understand why i was supposed to stop.  because i would think that i was about to say something important.  something that was more important than what you wanted to interrupt me with.  i wouldn't understand.  because i'm really that stupid.  but then you would convince me.  i think you would convince me.  i think you could convince me to stop.  because there's something in you that hasn't happened before, something that tells me that if i could start by telling you everything at once, everything that happens after that will be things that have never happened before, where no one's been before, and there wouldn't be any stencils to show us where to draw, and there wouldn't be any guides to tell us the way, and there wouldn't be anything on earth that could stop it from happening to us.  

here's a whole play

this is the whole thing.  you can't see the ritual bits because they are in the dark.  the moments when you see dark were when we were all getting possessed by spirits of the dead, moving furniture with our minds, and teaching audience members how to naturally release the opiates in your brain so that you hallucinate, and how to attract sexual partners within 13 minutes.  secrets!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ0UcegRs2M&feature=c4-overview&list=UUrWDq4gTEeHq7XK13kni3BA

In between lines

Not here nor there, in this land of mothers of an old ghost of an ocean, in that place where my fathers were born, already missing this father, and saying goodbye to the father I am, every piece of cloth on the floor of my crowded room is something that a father used to wear, and nothing that any of us need any more. We all get older, but even ghosts change their minds about the right way to be in the world. These clothes are complicated texts.  

This thread is a line to connect me to the place I was, and I have a means of drawing myself back to the images of all the people I used to be.  My favorite company has always been in the company of exiles, even though I have a home I can point to, and even a house where I grew up discovering that the sight of a woman in tattered clothes could drive me mad as a dog on a night with fireworks.  I have traces of first dates somewhere in a drawer that I'm afraid to mark, just in case I die unexpectedly and my loved ones might find it, and scratch their heads and wonder why I kept such strange souvenirs.

A blue earring, a tag from a pair of underwear, a vial of perfume, and a concert ticket that's curved with sweat. Ones I met when I was in between one thing and another.

If I didn't keep these objects close, I would write about them obsessively, trying to capture them as if my pen could be a decent camera.  What I lack in discretion however I make up in metaphor.  This one thing can stand for a whole I can't put into words.  And the most touching things are the ones I don't even try to capture, they move to extreme close up as soon as I think of the perfect first word, and by then I've forgotten the word.

This is no time for new objects to puzzle over, and after sleeping alone for the better part of a year, I can tell this was the right decision.  Between here and there, you're better off traveling light, with very little that can be lost, and nothing that can't be replaced.  Except.  Except.  Except.