i gladly lay beneath you
i wear your blood with honor
it glistens on my white skin
like moonlight on the water
just lay me down here easy
and let your choice flow o’er me
i wear your blood with honor
like scars of precious battles
and every drop, it burns me
tattoos and marks forever
i wear your blood with honor
and ever me your banner
upon the leaping windsong
i wear your blood with honor
upon my face, my soft skin
i wear your blood like medals
…You move on
when your heart
finally understands
that there is
no turning back.
— J.R.R. Tolkien 
i pull on
my stockings
soft and black
and i think of you
in the evening
i sit by the fire while
the teakettle sings
and i think of you
i pull up
my covers over
my sleepless visions
while the stars shimmer
shaking behind rainy cloudweeps
and i think of you.
i pull on
my silk blouse
it’s yellow and blue
and i wonder if i’ll
ever be good enough
and i think of you.
i have so much
to give you
meadows of emerald
skies of pure opal
red heart so true
soul of soft pink
and my
thoughts are just you
thoughts are still you
and i think of you
and i think of you
| — | Jean Genet |
***** ***** ***** ***** *****
and women?
dreams?
what are dreams to women?
who work while it is day
and watch in darkest night
o’er all the sleeping dreamers
and their slumbering sight…
and what about me?
I, who sit and think
in the night’s
encompassing embrace.
I do not dream of grandeur
but watch in nights of dark
and I think about nothing
that thing impossible
distinguished from what is
and thus having being
in what it never is
and never can become…
I think about nothing.
the ice is silent.
silent and perfect.
silent and perfect and blinding.
the silent
perfect blinding
ice.
the fire sings
sings and dances
sings and dances and sees
beyond
the singing
dancing seeing
flame.
see them twine
ice lacing flame
flame licking ice
heating and cooling
drips in drops
of unity.
i promise you
my love
though ice
ascendant rules the day
fire will win
in The Day
and thawing come
and passion rule
and only water
here remaining
…I have lived into this…thank you dearest one.
“I want to fall to sleep with you,
and I could care less
whether it is in
layers upon layers
of clothing
or only our skin –
all I really want is to wake up
not knowing
where I end and you begin.”
– Beau Taplin
If I should walk into the sea
and find a bed soft, sandy-wet,
and there lay down, there, lay down me
would you reach out with your heart-net?
I’d lay aside my evening gown
of gossamer and pure moon beams
and let my feet find pathways down
beneath the waves to swaying dreams
that shimmer thru the quiet deep
and beckon me with promise made
If I lay there still, would you keep
my heart inside, every debt paid?
We share a bed upon the land
and swim there in the waves of night
Ah, but in that bed beyond the sands
Will you there be my sweet delight?
Do Justice. Love Mercy. Walk Humbly.
Love, Charissa
the lone swan
flying across
the face of
the moon
like a tear
falling to
the quiet
lonely lake
below
my
heart
the swan
the moon
the lake
and you
forever
gone
…for the first time in 37 years…
my opinion is unchanged.
“I realized that I walk briskly because I feel that if I look very busy and send the message
that I have a very important reason for being in this space, perhaps men around me will think
I have a right to go on my way un-harassed, untouched, un-bothered.“To be a woman in public is to be on your guard, all the time.”
— Yusra Amjad, Why do women walk so briskly in public?
When I got home that night,
I noticed the smiling jack-o-lantern
in my front yard was crushed.
No October Orthodontist could
ever repair that ruptured smile
so crooked at its best, and simply broken, now.
I thought about our last talk,
jack-o-boots flying over hob-nail heart
and guttery scuttery candle-hopes flicker-fade
over cooling coffees neglected in the heat
of the moment, where carving knives were wielded
underneath the punkin-spice latte scents, and those blades
sent us reeling like Cinderellas at midnight
our heart-mice flying from Ichabod and his boots
and those words which left us out front, crushed.
***This was written to a poetry prompt…the first stanza***
Source: Samhain Eve by Laurie Byro | Melissa Shaw-Smith
This poem is mind-blowing.
I am reeling in its double-back and dream parallels…
what is dream what is awake what is mental what is result
of so called treatment what is what is what is
samhain eve
You won’t want to…dig deep.
But you should.
It’s that good.
This quote…
“Your worth
is determined by you,
and with no need for
an explanation to anyone.”
— Wayne W. Dyer
Here is the problem for the person who struggles with self-worth issues:
If you see yourself as unworthy and worthless, then you are doomed. And I have heard it more times than you can imagine…”well just see yourself as worthy and you will be”!
That works as well as the last time I saw myself as a billionaire
No…the water
is not dirty
or polluted or
even stagnant.
It’s just cloudy,
this water, cloudy.
It was clear and warm,
luxuriant and lazy
but quick-like, to pull you
in and then lay you
down easy and gentle
and snug.
But you
never came in
so my desire,
that unknown
cloud unknowing
leaked out,
just trickled away
around me
until the pool
was cloudy
and thick
with my
longing want.
…because you are blocked! Giggles!
“Cancer will block you as a Facebook friend, immediately cross you off
their Christmas card list and then assign a ringtone to your name so that
if you call, they can ignore your call AND get the satisfaction of ignoring it!
All this followed by a hasty retreat into their shell to sulk because
that’s where crabs go to nurture their hurt feelings.”
they were caught here, frozen
before the icicles fell
before the snows all melted
before the laughter faded
before the tears unfolded
before the digger shoveled
before death walked unfettered
they thought this moment
would last forever again
and over again,
and sitting here
i cannot tell
if I am the snowball
or the thrower
or the moment
hanging in static
time stood still
It’s the season of harvest and fruit,
the culmination of that brown sweat
shed in summer-shimmer sheets
and red-hot ribbons that somehow
twine around roots and snake up
trunks and push out thru branches
in the swollen tender tips of twigs
become blossoms become
fruit…ripe…heavy.
The real mystery to me
is why nobody picks these
crimson circles crisp and crunchy?
Why I stand here full and verdant
fragrant and feeling fine,
and not an apple plucked or pulled?
I cannot pick myself.
I cannot harvest that which
is perpetually out of my reach
but is only one ladder away
from anybody who hungered
for those apples bobbing
on the swaying branches.
But I am used to that, being
a feast for birds and bugs
and winter worms in the cold,
a fermenting hearth in a frosty night
under the stars so bright
and dancing and the wind
still caressing my unpicked branches.
those marks,
a series of slashes
joining a smatter
of dots and blobs
and curves arcing
across regimented
lines fixed in space
and speaking of
time and tone
indecipherable to
the common eye
and singing
of sublimity
in a master’s mind
and playable only
by those filled
with the desire
of the ages
| — | S.Plath |
What’s it like, on the grey seas
in the silver wind, with sails
so green and full and billowing?
Skimming swift and dangerous, light
on the waters while the crew scrambles
‘neath that Captain loud and bellowing?
Stinging spray by facefuls founting
up from waves slosh-frothing, faithful
and fateful leading cross the edge
to horizons promising much more
of the same and something different,
something different, too.
| — | Sei Shōnagon, “The Pillow Book” |
| — | Anita Krizzan |
But the issue of abuse is more subtle — more invisible — and more than all the above.
Abuse does not arise in a vacuum. A healthy mind does not (need to) abuse. Abuse is created of trauma, and it is the traumatized mind which abuses. Whether to externalize, bury, escape its anger and frustration — the abused mind must purge it’s hurt in some manner, or risk being broken, split apart by it entirely.
But the troubling fact is this.
We have created an abusive society. We have normalized, regularized, and routinized abuse. We are abused at work, by the very rules, norms, and expectations of our jobs, at which we are merely “human resources”, to be utilized, allocated, depleted. We are abused at play, by industries that seek to prey on our innocence and literally “target” our human weaknesses.
And now we are abused at arm’s length, through the lightwaves, by people we will never meet, for things we have barely even said. We live in a society where school shootings are the rule, not the exception, where more people will have taken antidepressants than not…and now one where nearly everyone will have been abused on the web…for a random, off-hand, throwaway comment, an idle thought, something trivial, unremarkable, meaningless.
Source: Why Twitter’s Dying (And What You Can Learn From It) — Bad Words — Medium
I wanted to press that quote, pulled from a longer article that is fantastic in describing what happens on social media…
…and online in general.
The web is one gigantic megaphone, and one person with a point of view and a platform can do incredible damage to any number of other people with what they write and how they write it.
I myself have experienced this…where an article was written about me, about the most private and personal and painful things in my life and placed on display in the service of a personal point of view.
I didn’t recognize the person that appeared in the article, even while I remembered the things alluded to…and remembered the rich tapestry that surrounded them all…a tapestry comprised of the things that happened and the things I remember and the interpretation that is placed on them by so many players in the tableau…
I was horrified as I read the comments on the article by complete and utter strangers who had now decided that I was a certain way or a certain thing, simply based on these words made public, and while those words are utterly authentic as a representation of the thoughts and judgements of the writer they were abysmally inadequate in giving any genuine insight into the gestalt of the history that had been lived.
I was despairing…thinking of how the place of publication did Zero due diligence in fact checking or vetting or even giving me the common courtesy of a warning that they were going to take a small facet, one side of a terribly complicated issue and wave it in the air like a besotted banner of click-bait and titillation.
I couldn’t help but imagine the consequences should this have happened to any other number of people I know in my situation, and the yawn and blind eye turned to just another transgender suicide…
And more than anything else? I knew that deep down inside I would have done nothing to stop the writing from happening because of the writer’s need to tell the story and tell it the way those eyes, that heart and brain lived it.
The issue is not the telling of the story…the issue is the megaphone and how it is choking itself on its own abusive streams.
Contemplate the things this author points out, and consider your own interactions with social media…and know that there is a better way.
Do Justice. Love Mercy. Walk Humbly.
Charissa
©F.G.M. – 2015
Source: The Third Path – Poems & Poèmes
I simply have to press this.
My brother in Poetry is amazing…and he is right.
And if you have no idea what he is talking about? Move along, move along, nothing happening here…
open me to new ways
of looking at old wounds
without examining them.
give me grace to recreate
loving space and mercy great
for childhood, home and family.
nourish me, here, I belong
and have a place to call my home
me…I am my home now…and so is She.
and old familiar fretty ways
so curious and strange
may they grow cold with un-use.
no more shall I be trapped
in ancient fear and panic
a creature of their whims
but asking Them to help,
to break that siege on me
and lend Their power pure.
I know now,
there is another way,
kinder, gentler, simpler.
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
– T. S. Eliot
It’s been said
that some people
know the price
of everything
and the value
of nothing.
even nothing
is something
so what
does that
make me?
When you lose the rest of everything
and the curb merges with the gutter,
wander on down the grey road
in the weak darkness, thin and sorry
for its skinny powers.
Like you, it has been stripped
and hollowed out by pillars
of strange orange man-made lights
that pulse to rhythms eldritch
and out of whack.
Turn left at the golden arches
and meander downhill toward
that weedy field of thistles and look
beneath its frosty veil for the path, no…
the part traversing that bristly mane
low and lurking deep in the foot
of the silent graveyard speaking so insistent
of what it cannot say.
Head to the pylon, pushing thru the wild roses
and brambles and you can find me, sleeping and still,
swathed in brilliant reds that have been infected with
the sicknesses of too much and too little.
Cast-off Goodwill wannabes swaddle me
in the mangy light so far away from even
Bethlehem let alone a stable, and I struggle
to stay beneath the thready stream of thin sleep
doled out to me like penitentiary-gruel
to dulled-out dwellers in the dimness
that masquerades as just desserts deep-deserved.
Feel that moist air clinging to your cheeks
like my fingers used to cling to those faces
cherubic and innocent and unaware of the plague
awaiting outside the place we all used to live.
Smell that rank faint scent that lives only
at the foot of graveyards and only creeps
out in the dead of night…and take a deep breath,
for that breath is your inheritance now, in this
long first night in the fake wilds beneath
the petty-coats of this town but no longer with
a place to call home, or even a cover to keep out
the creeping dread of realization that this will happen
over and over and over and over and over and…
you can curl up behind me and we can spoon and
maybe our touch will lure the moon over
the crouched hump of the bridge that sings once
in a while with the passing of scrabbling
metal beasts scurrying thru this place
on the way to nowhere.
Or if that small comfort is too slow and uncertain,
trek across the creek and look under the bridge
by the trestle beams so dark and still and
certain of their strength.
They sweat in cold beads
and if you stick out your tongue
you can trap a few drops there and here
that will cool your ravaged hot throat torn
with such thirsty longing for what used to be…
and if you stick out your arm, well then
swift flows the river current for those
who would brave the rapids and ravages
of those waters.
But then again, you may as well
take the shortcut, up the twisty hill
and lay down amidst the still stone angels
and the lumpy skeletal headboards
amidst the sighing dead awaiting
for the Rising Morning…
I live here now, in this red infected light
of lone loss and dewy violet memory and
I’ve learned to thrive off things despised,
I’ve learned to sift the dregs and love
the cast-off lees and living here
wrapped so warm in Autumn Leaves
and with The Least of These…
I think I prefer authentic life even
in light somewhat diseased rather
than the full on blind brilliance
of that time past asleep in true light
but wasted light streaming on by
while my eyes were shut and sealed
and my heart full of things I knew
that just weren’t so.
Wander on
down the grey road,
for I am waiting
here.
there is always something
some thing that stands
between me and the fire
and casts a shadow that lies
on my face, a caul, a veil
it’s been called mask
and I bat at it, swat at it
the ninja master of
when you walk face-first
into spiderwebs
you never saw
but flail to no avail
to claw away this veil
(the caul)
me and my desire
(the fire)
and the thing
(whatever fits)
between me and the fire
me and body
me and love
me and longing
i cannot get to it
(the fire)
so i can dive into it
(and burn and burn and)
so instead i move sideways
around the thing and to the water
that waits for me placid, peaceful
yielding inviting thirsty
for me
it will drink of me
it will be one with me
it will give me itself for my body
it will marry me
(not just the idea of me)
and the flowers will sing
(they float)
and my dress shall dissolve
and my veil shall away
so that my breath
and my body
and the water
at last
become
one
“The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy,
which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today.
The whole future lies in uncertainty.
Live immediately.”
— Seneca
“Night. The stars and the moon impassive, undisturbed, eternal. A little of their impassivity flows into me. They are consoling. They reduce the intensity and acuteness of human sorrow. I feel less strangled, less oppressed.”
—
Anaïs Nin, from The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 3: 1939-1944
***** ***** ***** ***** *****
impassive?
Impassive?
ha!! HAH!!
and undisturbed
never, forever
stars are not
undisturbed
and impassive.
they sing
they dance
they cavort
they shout
they occupy
the space between
time
and
eternity.
and don’t even
get me going
on about
the moon!
Night is
the occasion
for the moon
and the stars
to heal us.
Dearest Darling…
I would choose you…anytime, everytime.
Again and again.
You are the best forever.
“Her mindset will raise your children.
Not her body and good looks.
Choose wisely.”
I saw this quote…and I thought about the things that have been hurled at you this last year. I want you to know that the only choice that really matters is the one I made, and that I would make it again, as many times as I had it to make.
You are the person that I loved, and love. It was your SELF…your way, your mind, your heart that I wanted wrapped around any children I had…and I still think that you are the cream of the crop and a fabulous mother.
And you’re hot too!! Lol!!!
Love, me
Clouds overhead, grey, full,
breaking, gathering can’t decide
which direction they are going,
whether they are hunkering down
thick and juicy or simply socializing
in a vaporous convocation that is all
twisty twaddle and no rushing rainfall.
It doesn’t matter, really. No, really.
It doesn’t matter, because in either case
the sky is constant behind them,
skimming the tops of mountains
and the troughs of wishy-waves
briny and stretching to the spines of stars,
The story of clouds is just pages turning
in The Big Blue-Black Book of Sky.
I lay here on the rock, below both
(the pages and the cover) and I feel
its hot rough rocky tongue against
my burnished sweaty salty skin and I am
slick with the sun’s caresses and drunk
on the wind’s soft moaning crooning
trickling down my throat into my heart.
I bury my cheek into the rock
and its unyielding solid comfort
so tharny-steel-brown and white
and let the wind pick at the drops
of sweat on my skin
and the bits of grit
that the rock gave me to
hold me there and grounded.
Beneath that blue-fade black sky reaching, touching…
Beyond those jumpy clouds roiling, fulminating…
Stretched out on that rock reeking of sun and surf…
Wearing nothing but the sun and the wind and my sweat…
mmmmmm…
I close my eyes and clench my thighs
and cling to stark unyielding comfort
fiercely present and I sing…and I know it…
that rock…there…has been and will be
and in its arms I can be clouds or sky…
or just the wind singing of it, picking at it
for stoney steady souvenir kisses
and pebbly tastes of its embrace enduring
And then I knock and then I melt
and start to flow tangy and hungry
all around and over the rock
and I become conformed and shaped,
imprinted, and tattooed beneath
its scratchy touch and I am
changed and owned…
I am marked
wherever I go
whenever I go
it will go with me
that rock unchanging
in the contours
of my heart
even though
it is still
solid and
unchanging
There.
Ima go ahead now,
pick up glowy embers
radiant and stinky
with the fires of days
long past…pick them up
with new hands and tender
soft flesh that has never
known shackles and chains,
calluses, rough edges.
Don’t gasp, they can’t hurt me!
I’m alive now, and wreathed
in grace and I’m shrouded
in mysteries of mercy
falling on the hungry
hard flames of agony.
See? There they are…
the remnants of him,
gone at last, and frankly
I don’t miss him at all,
in the slightest, and really
all I had in common
with him was this body,
“Guffaw of the Universe”,
but not him, nothing
in common with him…well
except air, we both breathe
air…well, I breathe air, but
he doesn’t anymore…breathe.
And I don’t miss him.
It was my knees that began to ache
from bending over, my hands that
occasionally encountered some
stinging or biting insect of one
kind or another, my muscles
that would cramp my
fingers and hands
from relentless
weeding and
digging.
Yet,
taking
notice of
this process
made me more
aware of my own
tendency to desire
the convenience of giving
up when things became difficult
and seeking a shortcut in the process.
we simply must face it,
we are on the brink
of loss blind as wind
and empty as death.
but loss is a gift
when you think about it
it gives us some space
and cleansing tears too
it gives sacred questions
pathways to the center
and old maps long lost
to ancient deep wells
distraction is gone
what’s left to distract?
we can burrow deep
under blankets of dark
and holes in our heart
that nothing can fill
but pure love and light
shining in and out
so now we can go
out into the world
and carry these things
to all who are hungry
for true things not false
beneath blood and skin
and deep in our bones
the true love of God
| — | Charlotte Brontë writing to a friend who had been kind to a man she thought was married, only to have him fall in love with her because he thought she was flirting (letter dated April 2, 1845)
“…some pragmatical thing in breeches might take it into his pate to imagine that you designed to dedicate your life to his inanity.” –19th century sassiness is delicious |
really…REALLY?
we are here, this place bleeding out arterially
black blood cells fused from antique plants
and dainty dinosaurs and precious people
deemed damned
and all we care about is our artesan chocolates
and our tan designer bedrooms that match
our pocketbooks in fashion and depth
damned dumb
wearing our fedoras, sporting our beards (of every kind)
and dreaming a whole country gentrified by Bushwick
the coolest of the hip and the hepcats’ litterbox
dumbed down
as it gets hotter goalposts shift and redefine
sauna and authenticity to fit profiles across all media
except streets bleeding violent red screams of dying ‘saurs
down dregs
we snort privelege like cocaine and serenade
our drunken oiled selves with bad karoke to past themes
of Happy Days and Good Times and Holiday Road
dregs drunk
we reek of our carousing self-colonization spirit-displacement
we dizzy ourselves with ironic nods and imitation-perfection
that obscures the fracture…THE FRACTURE
drunk dashed
running thru it all no sense of self
disinherited by us and our need of approval
manufactured in cell phones and selfies
dashed dim
we are here, this place of escaping
necessary work to heal the deepest wound.
we are here to resurrect our capacity to care
dim dead
to tend each other…each other’s space and culture
history and place…and own our own self-loathing
and heal our deepest wounds and griefs
dead dealing
we are here in opportunity to recover finally
from all our shame and triumphs, renounce our history
and live authentic life of no unlawful gain
dealing diamonds
we are here…now
and as to tomorrow
we are…?
When light fades in upside down slow burn
that looks like sunset when it’s actually
just God’s Hand on your heart
Their dimmer switch of love
spinning round on and off…
brighter…not-so-bright…dark.
It’s in that plenary dark it seems
like love gets lumped together with
some lesser things indifferent to
light, and trumped by passions fading,
passing, dressed like love but there
beneath the pomp and circumstance
they lurk…contempt and loathing
lingering like endless expectation-fogs
of timid cold perfection leaving
just the loss of warmth
withholding cleansing cold.
When love is dialed down, dimmed to death
within the dark in that slow fade
and one swift moment final…and then…
there it is when you discover
in the flipping that the one you love is dead
or dying in your heart that’s aching
for a dawn that’s never breaking
and your edgy flesh is melting
and the burning in your throat
is draining into every vein
inside the pulsing sack of pasty skin and flaccid muscle
and red blood gone white with grief…
and day it doesn’t stand a chance
amidst that endless drone of hope
distressed and impotent before
The Hand that keeps the lights turned
dim and distant
and all you can do is wait just wait
for brightness to return, slow, rising
up painstaking there beneath…
your heartache heavy…lumpy…
quicksilver mercury mercy
glowing faint, insistent, slow
becoming wonder rising but
indefinite and vague and blurry
your heart shaken shifted stirred
and torn apart and all that’s left is
love and breath
the dignity of daring to love
greatly, fiercely, full and found
in faith
that love and breath
alone remain
Charissa's Grace Notes 
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