terrible: sleeping/waking/sleeping/waking

Being raped by the dream man on the dirty side of the motel land was less painful than seeing her.
I was getting used to picking around the crusty dilapidated surroundings, trying to find a safe place to stash my few possessions
Squatters wandering like Thai dogs, homeless wolves.
Unending despair, heavy like a sopping wet down comforter, speckled with mold, stained with human markings. All this was bearable.
It wasn't until She walked out of the space and over to the picnic table that I snapped.
my heart ripping aching thudding tearing uncontrollable achey longing sadness despair
She spoke to everyone but me 
my eyes were like a cat on a bird, pointing. She never once glanced my way
everything inside me wanted out of the skin case/ i wanted to hack off my limbs/ to decompose, to begin to feel nothing/ for once
to represent the hallow that I felt.
Mom tried to say she didn't matter and why
I defended her viciously
It had been years since I saw her and she was older now, and a transman, 52 years old with a 14 year old daughter.
None of that blunted the sharpness of how hard I wanted her to want me again. It's an indescribable ache, a thirst like maybe you'll die of dehydration.
I feel numb all over my waking body. I don't know how to be awake and my sleep is too often the situation above. My body wants to cry all day like the springtime rain.

be the same.
try to act like soil, then see.

I am inconsolable
I am perpetually heartbroken

we are here to make and tell stories

My mind wanted to to race about it:
The  familiar man sat down in a chair in the brightly lit room, his face etched in my brain... where does he work? Is he a chef? What does he know about me? Is he married to a colleague?
I tried to be honest, say real things
while fighting the racing questions, pounding like rain on a tin roof
what does it matter? who cares??
a face you cant shake

I am LISTLESS these days.

overflowing inspiration passes though me like a giant undertow
electricity that would send it into action is sizzled out by the dense water.

A balloon held underwater
a small fight

the cycle defeated. Inaction. a numb heart. clean hands are the worst.

I am home and can't get rid of myself.
His naked body breathes like a machine in the dark room- it is thick with sage stench and it reeks like locker room armpits and the hills of Ojai
soil and dust
the bushes white under the sun
at night glowing in your nose in the cool air, the sky would be powder sugar sprinkles on black velvet
MILLIONS of white stars spilled
delicious untouchable

his high blood pressure concerns me, i think about the pressure in the body, the temperature, the chakras spinning, all the lives and stories of the soul layered in there
sleeping

At night I close my eyes and instantly pictures appear and stories unfold
tonight wood carved zebras then screen prints then animations of them all black and white and stripey jumping through the pass into the next time or page. I get a rush of last nights dreams: Not yet packed to leave in the morning with everyone- still a twin bed made, stuff in the closet, on the shelves. Not enough bags or time or wherewith all  to complete any of the packing.

In Hollywood there is a bird store Poni took me to. They had a pair of birds in one cage with a handwritten tag that said INTER-SPECIES BONDED. A Parrot-let and a Parakeet. My heart a blaze.
It is impossible to describe how I love the inbetween. How I want to live my life inside the waterfall
Not in the cave behind it
not in the body of water in front of it
just inside holding both
without language without a shape of a cave or a body
shapeless
moving
unable to draw an outline or hold it

My heart was on fire
staring at the two birds knowing their love is real
I feel cut in several ways, slices stacked so heavy that being this person is pressurized

everything and nothing
 is the most accurate way to say it.

This soul has been places I am not interested in remembering
I feel woven into millions of human stories and I feel absolutely alone in the darkness with the sage smell cool in the air, alone in a body you don't want in a life that seems wrong.

How on earth did I end up here? With this story, in this conversation??
What I was after was being the sound of foam crackling white as the wave slowly pulls back in
What I understood was the stillness of rock, the layers of the earth under the crust, held with gravity in a silent ball, dark.

I know I am getting older and my body says make a baby, so I realize a soul wants a body to live in...
but after my experience and all my questions of accuracy, I am thrown

It seems life has the tendency to be a domestic abuse situation
thrown into a wall, a smashed cheek bone and busted lip
and then the Parrot-let and her lover...

I am not bored with my life
I am overwhelmed beyond reason
I am paralyzed in a human body
I am awake at night like this, about to leave to the places in dreams I can never describe
where "I" dissolves in the inbetween

the jogger

My sister said she was too tired to jog today
I said "yeah I know what you mean, for the past couple years now I have just been
too tired.
I used to know what the forest looked like, everyday
 what gate to avoid
I would run in the middle of the road trying to keep the PTSD at bay
jumping out of my skin with each barking dog, a panic attack lady jogger
a person desperate to find sanity in the woods

Yeah- perhaps a few years of sleep....
I think the jogging was a way to wear out the mania swirling inside me like a storm drain gushing, like a frenzied heart on speed
reeling

Today- I eat white pills tinted yellowish
white pills tinted peachish
pills with food and water, pills before bed, pills that make me sick and sleepy.

In bed I close my eyes and see the forest, the certain tree that I marked my run by, it's roots and a silent prayer. Always the same. you will be okay.
breathe.
 you are alive.
In bed I convalesce. My curtains are drawn, held under a stack of blankets. My skin and eyes want the darkness.  My birds are morphing into one another, becoming the same color, creating the same mannerisms and behavior.
I realize I am becoming more and more like my stuffed animals, jammed up against the wall, slipping into the crack of the bed. All day quiet, fluffy white in the dark room painted pink.

homeless house

This knife sits much smaller in my hand

after so many years, the weight of it has lessened, shifted

the curve and massiveness of the handle is dwarfed by my adult fingers

hand, forearm, eyeballs.

the knives, pickles in a jar, sturdy cans of SlimFast, 

his kitchen stuff makes me remember.

I haven't seen these butter knives or the sharp ones with the red trim in over fifteen years. It's unbelievable that these objects still exist- artifacts
 not carved out of some false memory of my childhood-
imagery burned into my cells
 embedded in my bone marrow by some fantasy transfusion

in fact true.

here. spreading butter, cutting bread and meat in his house.

Seeing them now I feel relived

I feel bewildered.

my same heart thumping still

only certain dishes can be used here, the squalor the wreckage is wearing a thick coat, 

privilege

the infection infects itself insular breathing it's own hot breath back in

a stale hot cycle.

                             our existence is too terrible 

our eyes 

I shower scrubbing off the turpentine workday. 

My skin is older

a stranger in the tragic tub shaving adult legs

hands and feet with black nail polish, a woman notices 

the water pressure- the architecture of the bathroom

it reminds her of being poor, being a child, having thick long ratty hair

wet and cold down the child back

put my head in a laundry bag and shake it

cover it in cotton ball fuzz

numb buzzing around my nose, inside my teeth. my ears hum.

I am wet in the water 

   I try to remember outside of this space

I say the word  

      
           human 

out loud.

I try to morph the piece of trash child into the shape of a human woman

I feel bewildered.

I feel homeless in this house.

sleep. just go to bed, leave the woman body here

I am in the bed at seven pm

being lucid in this place is the ultimate nightmare

So Many Years

a familiar suffocation

it is this that make 

Settling

 and 

    Survival 

run rampant.

I hear coyotes

I close my eyes and go to them

a guest at my fathers

horizontal again

like so many times before the terror takes over the blood, the organs, seeps in the bones
a stew of adrenaline.

fight or flight fight or flight fight or flight fightflightfitflgtflitigiftt

heart is pounding, breath is audible, it's cause I am under the covers and it's hotter here, take your head out
relax, let the sweat on your face dry, go to bed like a normal woman your age and forget this ever happened.

forget it.

Outside this window I can hear the air. In the darkness bright orange fruits, ruddy avocados hang heavy, they are cold at night, they sleep like human hearts, heavy, pulling, alive in the blackness.

Raccoons run across this roof. I hear their little feet above my head. I am hungry for dinner, but I will stay here, horizontal till sunrise.
It's the feeling of being skinless, chicken meat raw, without the skin, fleshy, wet and structureless
that's about as human as it gets here in this house. Pushed up against the unstable mountain side, with citrus and cacti and wildflowers. A house shell that holds one man, eight surf boards, one motorcycle, five automobiles and years, decades of sadness

the mud slid before, once killing three sleeping people here. Right here where I am laying
 horizontal now.

have you ever held a bird in your hands with it's wings flapping so violently
you think they'll just snap off?? It's scary and urgent and messy.
my heart is like that too:
a dead skinless blob of bird
and
a live desperate flapping of a bird

it's dark and i can hear everything outside the lightweight door.
fumbling, delusion, hopelessness

in the Hollywood Hills

my birthday.
a little gift to enjoy.
a dead phone in January.
one long silence

a sadness spreads over my heart
a pancake spreading out
up against the hot hot edge
a hard ending

a hot heart
edges and lines
smoking
in the morning, all day, at night
slow burning

a birthday gift- alone.
to be seen,
looked at looked at looked at


always alone in the end
you can learn to enjoy this
            length

 the day unending
punctuated by pills & water
a steady silence
coffee and crying
you can wait it out, a steady silence

holds a heart
 still smoking

the terribleness of wanting: 2 examples

I sleep till 1pm or later, it's pouring rain outside, the day has been happening in this wet action
loose change exploding from a pocket
the quickness outside

Pulling myself out of bed
a painful transfer from one world to another, but she comes with me, actually, they both do:

I was washing my favorite painted china as the rest were urging me to hurry up, the plane was leaving soon. We had days of travel ahead of us. I packed like a wild beast, there was no newspaper to wrap the delicate objects in, they all ended up together, messy and vulnerable.

Earlier I was fiending for her.
She could not tolorate human touch and hated the motion of kissing. All she was after was emotional intimacy. Too bad the only way I knew how to approach her was with a body...
I lured her into a tub with a wrap around curtain, she melted in like a mermaid back in water, sliding into the full bath with an invisible human body. Her flesh hard- like a plastic dolls, not so much breathing, with like,
pores.
She/He came because of the story and the poetry that was unraveling in the house dialogue. Everyone on that floor of the old rickety house with too many doors and too many kittens running around scratching, had something to say about this story. Once a roommate even showed me his cell phone with a picture of Manuela with her bright blond ponytail taken in the Swiss alps. He told me what she thought of the subject.
I said she looked beautiful up there. Glowing.
Also Gloria who moved to SF had ideas about it too. She was still dancing and had more information now, even in SF they all held her like a member of the home, her opinion counted.
They knew why I was there could feel the ache
the whoosh of housemates knew I was in love with him/her and knew that she/he wouldn't let me in. Just this conversation. This was where we could stay.

So I was shocked when they slinked into the tub,
I saw the barrier- that invisible confusing inanimate body- outside of androgyny and even humanness.
None of that even registered in that  dream moment.
            it was just the words between us

amazing feelings
to be so close
and their deep dark eyes and a head of thick hair,

listening

their skinny hands explaining a thing, like a skeleton finger dance.

achey


In the shower I was covered in flour and bits of dough were happening too with the water and steam and the love sickness grew and began to overflow, out of the old tub,
set in the center of the room
on the top floor of the old wood house
 it poured out like rising dough, pushing though the windows like a slow pastry tragedy.
 Expanding, unending.

In my waking life writing this I feel the word "asexual" was being experienced and understood,
unfortunate to my dream heart.

She/He wanted to wrap their words with mine, weave them in and out of the pages in my brain, see them layer and bend, create a new story,
love, true cognitive love.

My fleshy body baking project just reached for her/him, without knowing, without ability to stop. my nerves wanted to feel skin to skin, heat, a body alive.
Each time they recoiled and retreated. I was left with this mess of soggy paper, ink transferred to my naked body, pages stuck and peeled like vending machine tattoos.
So much more.
Crawlspaces that lead to the past and future that all the characters kept jumping in and out of. I tried to avoid the smaller spaces in the dream.

At one point they shot a music video , I was in the trailer behind, the doorway was lit up, the only source of light all around. I layed on the floor inside with my teal high heels in the air, they were like trees, architecture in the space, this pose seemed safest and the least obtrusive.
a fair amount of time in these dreams was spent trying to not get in the way,
cause damage, my bodies natural impulse's where so powerful,
 I had to put myself into spaces to try....

sit in the corner

think about what you have done
I was washing the china and Jenny came up behind me, out of nowhere, I didn't turn to look at her, she just whispered in my ear. She loves me, she still loves me.
with wet hands and without turning I said still I loved her too. At that point in the dream I was not crying.
That's a first in these JH dreams.

Regardless I woke up carrying both of them inside me, like a kangaroo pouch attached to my heart.
I am up now, feeling super handicapped, I have too much weight in one place, my body is off kilter and the whole system has to overcompensate for this deformity. I am top heavy and being vertical feels like such a struggle. I just want to crawl back into my cave bed.
Ask Gloria and Manuela what they would do...

 when everyone they love is impossibly absent, how to cut the chord, how to look-
and learn to see
and                        want        a different kind of human.