Nightmares

Saturday morning.
which turned into saturday afternoon
I sat motionless and silent on a bed different than my own
in a place unfamiliar but I was supposed to call it home
supposed to fill it with new memories, tuck my comfort zone around the edges of the doorframes
and trace smiles into the pillowcases while I slept.

but those smiles were hiding
suppressed by enough turmoil in my recent history
to make it feel like I had a tornado in my chest where my emotions should have been
so I sat in the eye of it, where everything was calm and I could be content with being numb.
and I learned that the center of chaos loves the sounds of vowels.
loved me when I sat and looked around with my eyes at the inner edges of the eye
breathed deep to let out a sigh
full of the times I almost said goodbye
to four different people i know
in the last two months
and I was the only reason why they didn't go.
the world came at me so fast and i just wanted to set the speed to slow
less rushing past all the beauty just outside my windows
less phone calls from people I loved who were about to be harmed by their own hands
less hurries, less worries
less times feeling like i didn't belong.

and I tried to make a home in the middle of the storm
only to realize that the second half of it had yet to hit
so I shouldn't build a home, but a bunker, or a fort
made of security blankets and pillows without smiles
because the nightmares wouldn't go away.
they would steal my composure and almost stole my sanity
I would wake up unaware of where I was
convinced that my sister had just died,
or my father and I were victims of a new plague
that someone I loved had gone missing
and I couldn't do anything about it.

My soul was screeching like a banshee, trying to get out of my chest
but I shoved it so far back in myself that it fell of the edge of my mental desk
back where it could collect dust and mingle with other things that i've lost or forgotten
like how to be myself
a multitude of life lessons
or how badly it stings when you have to say goodbye.

so it makes sense that it found a way out through my subconscious
it found a voice when I had lost mine
so that saturday morning turned afternoon
I immersed myself in spoken words
poetry from all over
and I watched video after video after video
I re learned all the lessons
I felt the pain I've been trying to hide away because goodbye isn't really goodbye, it's more of a see you later when our paths cross again
and I remembered who I am.

the edge of that tornado hit me when I felt the rhythm in the poet's voices
remembered that as a little girl, I found that rhythm
rode that beat with my arms that I thought were wings until my shoulder blades were tired of trying to reach something so out of reach
but I craned my neck to stare at the sky and imagined I was a crane
I felt that flow of words, flowing out of my head, flowing out of my pen
it is in that universal one, two, three, four
that I found a home
that I find a place to belong.
right. here.

Honeysuckle kisses

So the other day I performed a poem called "goddess" and there's a line in it that goes "she has honeysuckle kisses from seashell lips", and my friend Andy Tran came up to me afterwards and asked where he could get one. I texted him a few days later, and this is the conversation that unfolded:

V: I figured out where you can get honeysuckle kisses from seashell lips. You can get them from letting her laughter dance on your lips like bumblebees that spend too much time near the sea because they want to know what it's like to fly along the horizon.

A: But what if I'm afraid to let the laughter in? You see...i'm bad with commitment. I've made some terrible choices in my life that I've got to live with--the kinds that cant ever be remedied, not even with honeysuckle kisses or dancing bumblebees. Not even with the raw touch of the ocean breeze. You could, spend a lifetime trying to convince me otherwise but it won't work. Trust me...I've tried. Cuz when the laughter fades, it'll be me..not you..stuck with the sounds of what could have been haunting my dreams at night.

V: Who's to say that the same ghouls don't haunt my dreams after floating through yours? Maybe I've just made my mind into a river scene that's so beautiful, no one wants to see what's at the bottom of the river, so I don't show them. They don't want to see the twisted curls of metal that have begun to rust or the layers of watery dust that have permeated the cracks of all the baggage I don't want to be carrying anymore.

A: I've swam through enough of these stories-- shallow and deep. I've bent metal bars with bare hands and watched as they dived into river waters just to show her how easy it was to sink. She said she wanted to try it and so we jumped. And that's where she left me. A place where the sun never shines. Where the rain drops get so cold my bones refuse to dance in them. Not because they can't, but because my heart tells them the pain isn't worth dancing for.

V: But sometimes you have to leap into the space between where the air and the ocean meet to feel what it's like to fly. Just for a moment, before you realize that you have to spend an eternity with your wings clipped, feeling the gusts of wind under your feathers but know you can never be free. Those moments of pure exhilaration- those are the ones worth living for.

A: I've found plenty of things worth living for but I have yet to set eyes on something worth dying for. Now I've been told that means I'm not fit to live. But I'm ok with that. You see, I've never seen eye to eye with social normalty. Give me clipped wings and I'll soar to eternity. Distance myself from this world of negativity and flourish...on my own.

V: I have never seen eye to eye with the roles I was supposed to fill. I was too high up in the trees I climbed to be wearing the glass slippers of poor self image that were made to fit my feet. And when I got down to the ground, I was too busy kneeling in the dirt, staring at fallen leaves to slip into the ballgown of feminine grace that has been hanging in my closet behind all my other skeletons ever since. So I grabbed a thicker skin made of out the iron edged gleam I was told appeared in my eyes and asked the goddess of unfulfilled stereotypes to bear with me.

A: I used to think it was destiny. That I was destined to be a hero...catching self esteem suicides that would throw themselves from treetops. I was not their good fortune, I was their miracle. Their second chance to learn how to fly. But all the while I was really just waiting to find that girl with the honeysuckle kiss. They told me she was in need of a hero.

V: Honey sits on her lips because it balances the bitterness that rests on her tongue. She's been tasting it ever since she realized that her hero decided not to give a damn. She became her own hero and her own Atlas, carrying the weight of the world atop her entire spine.

Imperfection

This world is imperfect.
it is chaotic and messy
it likes to break you and throw obstacles in your path
that will make you stumble
make you question yourself
make you say things like "I didn't ask for this"
or "why me"
or my personal favorite, "this isn't fair."

no, it's not.
life isn't a fair
it's not a ferris wheel ride that you can expect to take a ride around and end up in the same place as where you started
it's not sweetness on a stick, dipped and deep fried if you request
it's not flashing lights on a july night

This world is the aftermath of an explosion
nothing is where it should be
just mayhem and destruction
pieces of shrapnel strewn in the street
buildings toppling over
forever increasing entropy

but if you can look carefully enough
or you wait long enough
you'll see the tip of something green
poking through the rubble
if you can train your eyes and your mind
you can see that this world isn't perfect
but that doesn't mean that it's not beautiful.

Redwoods

Sometimes, I feel like a hundred and twenty year old redwood tree.
I have seen seasons come and go
I have felt a thousand rainfalls flood me
and basked in the sunshine of countless summer days
I have had so many birds nest in my branches
and squirrels skitter among my roots
I have seen children playing, growing, maturing
until they bring to me children of their own

I am no stranger to the humming insects
whose lifetimes are so short
they appear as a short cymbal crash in the rhythm of the forest

but for me?
I am the low humming bassline,
a long bow drawn across a cello's strings
a vibrations that you don't so much hear
as you feel in your core.

I have pulled everything I needed from the earth below me
combined it with the warmth of the sky above me
so that I may stand here, tall and upright
arms like branches outstretched
always straining for something just out of reach

so if you cut open my skin
and a trickle of sap oozes out
you glance in and see rings
circles and layers from the years I have spent in this green world
Don't be surprised
It's just that most times
I feel like a hundred and twenty year old redwood tree.

Procrastination

There is something so daunting about a blank word document.
especially when I have to write something for a deadline.
Some kind of biology paper about the research I've been doing
where I've been spending all my time when I'm not behind the mic
or letting the world wash over me
smooth all the jagged edges that have a tendency to appear whenever the order in my life is torn apart

and I know that my fingers know how to fly over the square silver keys in front of me
forming letters
forming words
forming sentences
forming ideas
forming thoughts
forming the entire summary that just feels like it's stuck in my head
and I can't properly translate it.

So I lose myself in my social circles
indulgence in facebook and text messages to other friends who hate blank word documents just as much as I do
skimming through my music, saying that I'll start once I find the right song
I'll write once it feels right

but there are so many other things that I want to say
so many other dances on my keyboard that my fingers want to partake in
so I feel restricted
structured
straight jacket bound into producing something useful
proving that my mind has been engaged for these last 9 months of school
that my head has been pregnant with ideas i'm just waiting to give birth to
letting them develop until they're ready to stand on their own
supporting them until they've been properly raised and can be alright in this world out on their own

but I can't get my mind to tell my neurons in my brain to electrically shock my muscle fibers to start the translation of information that is stuck in my head due to procrastination.