leave your problems at the door

Prelude (explanation of the title page), The Scale:




I made 10 hours of time and a half today suffocating in a small hospital room with an innocent woman who thought she’d been rat-poisoned by a Wal-mart worker who followed her from Chicago because she’d won the lotto and the slithering Wal-mart lady was after her for the only four pennies she had left.
I took care of this woman but by “care”, I do not mean I bathed her. I did not help her with anything, really. I sat with her for 10 hours trying to keep her mind occupied on the cartoons; and off the clock or the window, or the thoughts in her head.
This is nothing new for me;
…Nothing new and not because I work there. I mean of course I’ve come across some crazy stuff in the eight years I’ve worked in healthcare: Thrown across rooms, bitten, kicked; punched; you name it.
That’s not what I’m really talking about.
In fact, being around those people takes me farther from my work and closer to the door where I left my proverbial baggage, next to the time clock.
And if we’re going to be brutal here, that old baggage is actually the thing which dragged me here to start.
At one time, yes, this was something new. Back then, (young and stupid) (audience nodding heads) I thought because I was so drawn to these people, I should help them somehow. I could devote my career to understanding them, their behavior; set up some nonprofit thing for other peoples’ old proverbial bags.
But now I know…
They don’t need some stupid .org, generously gifting 20 percent of proceeds to research (salaries of researchers). No psh! please… That makes them seem like monkeys or rats or something, minimizing them to their disease. I mean do we know these people? They aren’t monkeys. They aren’t that at all. They are actually far from foreign.
We, the “normal”, are just as screwed up and strange. It only so happens, I’m pretty good at speaking their language. or making their food,
12 deviled eggs
32 oz muddy black coffee
1/2 carton cheapest menthols
2 French bread pizzas
2 mg valium for a midnight snack
Let me tell you a little more.
I’ve been rather vague and when I am being vague on purpose,
I also tend to be long-winded. Forgive me.

Introduction, The Overhead Compartment:
My brother, who died when I was 12, suffered from manic depression, a life marked by season, pulled by weather… Inducing unmanageable moods.
Mike’s genes gave him this; brought down by his father and his father. Sadly, I knew very little about what ailed him, growing up. as a young girl, I don’t think I even knew he suffered.
When he died, I determined to know more. I wanted to understand this complicated mind. At the age of 13, I stumbled over a very enlightening book: Touched with Fire. It examined the dumbfounding link between madness and genius, citing case after case of remarkable people terrorized by voices and moods beyond their own power. While it was a bit too researchy and grownup for my pre-teen mind to wrap itself around, it also changed the way I saw the world and its aesthetics. Mike was a profound artist…could have easily been an architect, an engineer. He had these mystically detailed drawings…that just came up and out of the napkins he drew them on. his mind was magical, however troubled, as I came to understand.
And so are the minds of these suffering people…plagued with severe bouts of emotion, wretchedly damaging thoughts screaming at them and no one to turn off that damn noise. God, I’ve been there. Haven’t you? Not every day, I mean I don’t think rat poisoning is running through my veins but …I’m pretty sure I’ve seen some things that weren’t there a time or two.
Think about it
Well, it just blows me away…to live in this alt-reality. I wonder at what points in their lives they lucidly comprehend truth.
Or is it them who see perpetual truth, unwritten before us? Only explained in pictures, even those we don’t get. Truth so big that words are not heavy enough. colors they vividly impress us with, our knuckles pale for grasp. We fall short.
Chapter 2, Checked
My mom sat me down in the middle of a mall (where we’ve always shared life-altering conversations) one day and told me,
the person I thought was my (schmuck-for-a) dad actually wasn’t, and my real father didn’t know he had a daughter (which I later discovered was also not true, lol).
Before you jump up with an oh my god or what the hell…don’t worry, there was, in her well-laid defense, strong justification for the whitening out of facts.
Shortly after my parents split (never married), my dad turned out to be sort of a creep. One day she was at the mall in San Diego with toddler Mike. She tells me the whole time at the mall she felt followed…Looking around, feeling uneasy. At one point, she turned around and he’s right there, my dad, Joe.
But get this, he says to her;

Why did you follow me here?
(… uh… ….)
No … you followed ME here.
My mother locked the deadbolt after that day, even slept in her living room with a baseball bat.
Fast forward, 16 years later… Phoenix, the middle of another mall, my mother and I sat. In my hands, I cupped truth and irony (the irony, an entirely separate blog post lol). Months later, I set out to find this man, Joe. After all, he had the right to know about me.
After writing to several Pitkat’s (his last name) across the country, I finally found my father (relatives I’d apparently written to found him for me). He wrote me a letter. I knew it was coming, this letter I’d been waiting and hoping for…still checking the mailbox that day, it seemed so out of the blue. On yellow legal pad paper, Joe explained to me, he’d been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia when attending the University of New York, years ago (majoring in English and Art History…what I also majored in at the time).
Creepy mall story, finally made sense.
The Duffle:
The genius and magic once glittering around mental illness, as I perceived it, quickly faded into a murky hopeless pit with vacant eyes as I endured a year or so dabbling in father-daughter relationship.
Joe marveled me, nonetheless, with his fascinating talent of turning this tragic, deep, dark disease into something…almost, beneficial. Indeed, his mania seemed to get him a lot of things (leather couches, drugs in the mail) and out of a lot of things (prison, state hospitals, guardianship). I could never figure out if he was just manipulative or if the poor man was being told by several scary voices in his head to be this manipulative. Either way, being schizo had its perks, at least for him. Innocent by the name of his disease yet guilty by the genius behind the scheme. Every untruth worked to protect him.
And so be it, shit. If you have to live with shadows and the phone talking to you all the time, my God, have a beer. Ya know? Collect political buttons, blow a lot of money. Whatever. Take your drugs, get your government check. I can’t say I wouldn't!
It’s survival. There are these schizophrenics who seem to be in this state of survival, often. Like pigeons, they rummage and never stay in one place for long. They know they need shelter and cigarettes, food on occasion and all of these they’ll find because they have to. They don’t have the capacity to live in a society based on earnings; career; monetary success; picket fences. Money would never be their friend; in fact it would kill a dying man. And drugs don’t really help either because their mind is the thing which is already high.
In its raw, frazzled state, genius abounds and so in its natural wild, this creature transforms canvas to art. puts its stamp on life that says: THIS IS WHAT YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND. And we the “normal”, stand before it in pencil skirts and legal pads, criticizing a level of genius we know nothing about. (Written off simply, insanity) In museums and studios across the globe, we buy framed complicated concepts and hang them on our walls so that we appear more genuine and sophisticated.
Meanwhile sleeps the loon in its empty sea of padding, overmedicated, tamed by tazer now after the weeklong episode which finally manifested into the painting which you spent 7000 dollars on. But they’ll get better. They have lots of doctors blending precise concoctions of antipsychotics for the individual, an art itself. Somehow, these ungrounded spirits settle into their illusions…Befriending, if possible, the spiders and snakes, shadows and voices. Befriending the enemy, still never sleeping sound without its haunt.
The Claim
I don’t want to help them anymore,
but when I’m around them, as they should stumble into my rocky ascent, I want to know how they can help me.
So I always start with the universal truth: Art.
Do you paint, I asked the woman?
Her eyes lit up. It seemed to bring her the most joy in those ten hours; sharing with me, the beauty she creates – the light she’s made for her darkness.
I don’t try to understand anymore. I don’t have to know how she’s helped and why she’s here with me and not the other way around. I watch the clock as she watches cartoons. I look for the door, eager to claim my proverbial baggage, get the hell out of here.
Nothing new.
Getting the hell out got me here, watching the clock, the door. There’s no rat poisoning coursing my veins but my father’s blood taught me something. Mike’s suffering, the book I read, the dizzying list of illed people I’ve met, from it all I’ve learned. Winged things live in the most vivid spectrum; they live inside the rainbows we chase and we’ll never get that close to the truth. We don’t fly.

[shored]

these deserted searches
for the self,
drift as is compliant
with the tide.
these reverted senses
of whats good,
recovered by a comber
of a storm & shore collide.~

[training camp]

this evening is my first day on the job. the training trial period, sort of like life:
preparing
for some heavenly duty of sorts; a military nurse for God. The idea is to go
and pick up the wounded angels of Armageddon running along the front lines, (some dimension
prepared just for this) pulling them aside, relieving them of their armor.
i’ll take out my bag of tricks: God’s morphine and His tourniquet. Now and until then, he tells me his potions
are potent and his pre-hospital care is powerful … so i start with this. its small but its a start
and its taken me long enough to conjure up some sense of purpose.


you first have to realize you are small
your big plans are skepticism. your small ones, volunteer work.
your life is a resume; practicing in the mirror for the long awaited interview
i could be wrong but i’m not
i could be wrong but what if i’m not


i tucked in my polo shirt which i never do but they never have uniforms in extra small or even small, because uniforms were not meant to be customized or to fit. i tried to fit the profile, hair tucked away in bun, slippery nose with falling glasses.
i tried to look pressed, ironed, worthy. i go to open the cottage door (cottage is their term for
anything not plastered with stucco and pink paint; not uniform) but its locked. Of course. I knock and a woman twice my age but shorter opens the door, baring the same tucked polo, thrift store khakis hemmed, sliding thick rimmed glasses with question-mark eyes.

You must be the new girl.

yes, yes of course
in time with the persona.


you then have to realize where you fit
because some people learn best in quiet light,
others in do or die situations.
and God lets us figure that out
through one painted window at a time


immediately, i felt awkward, like an intruder. sorry. this was a quiet place with
musky, milk glass lighting; antique static. the living room straightened with old people in rows
of withered skin and aimless eyes. they don’t say hi or welcome me because they don’t know
me but they know that much. Dusty roses and muted green damask tapestry stuffed tautly
forming against their bony backs, paints a false picture. Fake flowers abound, the TV
is just on and a waxy wipe-off calendar blares pathetic goals for each day:

exercise, Thursday the 1st.
bingo, Friday the 9th.

Today is staring off into space with applesauce and Respiradol dried to corners of cracked speechless lips and blank daydreams shuttering only by anything familiar and nothing here is… but that’s not written on the calendar.


the next ambition is discovering falsity,
because where one hopes many doubt.
this will take a lifetime to sift through
but with earnest virtue you will.
if you love this, than you will.


she leads me into the medication room and in my loud young limbs and pin-tucked mouth, i ask too quickly:

what do you want me to do.

let me put some of them to bed and then i’ll show you around.

so i sat there observing, tarrying with the moments passing. is this God’s idea or mine?
i’ve already judged the room and my place in it: too fake. too boxy; plastic antiques. replicas of
comfort. its a shade too quiet for my age and i’m a tad too quick for their hands.
i can’t take it anymore:


Ya know i can help; i don’t want to just sit here.

well that one needs to be changed; she goes at the very end of the hall behind you on the right.
she’s pretty easy but use a high pitched voice, she likes to be pampered.


what is she talking about? i’ve never even held a baby. i’m too proud to ask. i reach for the cold clammy creature, walk with her down the hall. young and old, new and used. its sort of purposeful like Mary and Elizabeth; we’re fulfilling something… perhaps me.

last you realize small hands do big things
your place is where God puts it
The truth is in the moment, what you skim from the top of it.
i could be wrong but i’m not.
and we’re all just really practicing, aren’t we?

i caught on to the quietness. they live in dreams of things that made sense once. so i pretend
with her. its the only thing i could think to do. are we in the 40′s maybe? two young damsels
glorifying our best features in a powder room, fixing a loose hem, a snagged stocking:

here let me help you with that.
i fumble with the washcloth; well this is awkward. what? God i don’t know.

wait Hon’, umm..you’ve got a punch stain your dress.

Oh thank you sweetheart, she says to me.

Can you believe she said thank you? and here i am sweating and shaking trying to work with this discomfort: the interplay of dignity and delirium.

it wasn’t bad for a first day; i broke my own mold and washed the feet of God for the first time.~

[naked art]

written about a man and his art...someone i shared a day with once, touched my heart deeply.

with fists he 
claims the courage 
in raw configued art.
naked in front 
of spews of 
bodies, pointing at 
her painting.
with words he 
calms her dignity,
trashed by the
 ignorant mass.
jaded in front
of spews of bodies,
she can not hide
her face. ~

[soul eyes]

a patient choreographer for my thoughts,
words stage nervously; pli’e,
turn quiet to leap away.
dark rows and vacant misleading spotlights,
mistep and darken my toes; miss my deliberate limbs,
turn the thoughts away.
poor oh quiet director,
hums a pleasant Soul Eyes;
nods the head
bows the hat
and shuts away the stage;
good night you quiet dancers,
sleep for better bravery and
a quiet beautiful tomorrow.~

[ode to analemma]

I could not turn from her;
I fixed myself on the line between my reality and her light.
It was comforting to be loved
And to watch Love bend with light;
Ascend with grace; give life its shape -
Beautiful Analemma.

[lost]

game trails to hidden treasure.
one hand to hold the sun,
for relief; then measure and give the news.
another move:
this is going to be the last time, she said,
but she couldn’t admit the truth-

and we kept going.~

peaking

when the pinnacle of your life was escaping something, you tend to live life as if you've just escaped and easily find yourself caught up in trying to feed the rush of actually escaping. the past nips at your heels, you can't think beyond just taking another step...one more step thats all you know, box out everything else, just focus on the step in front of you...one foot at a time. when you reach a finish line or a wall, you get bored. your body is still triggered, it jumps by anything familiar to a chase. escape. run. it runs, it flees. at the drop of a hat. and when you find something good, when the finish line is better than the start and whatever the fuck you were running from, you jump. you just jump in place. because your body still wants to move, your heart still races but you know you've ran as far as you needed to go and so just jump up and down, jump for joy!! this is it!! you've made it!! this is the escape. life is no longer a reaction to something negative. but the act of something positive. and that forward motion, the light of positive will be the cycle which continues.

[127th Drive]

127th drive]

our hope is not here.
in my heart, i watch the
colors fade.
i wash your hard day at work
i mend your button
and watch your color fade.
your cheek will turn,
not fade; it cooks,
burns, it bleeds
and soon too hot to touch.
i mend your buttons
and wash your troubled day.
i stir pots for five
or six, then seven til close
to morning, ready for your
comfort, i prepare my best
peace with patience and
prepare for the fire which
will come cause you are home now.
your cheek swells as you
trance through the walls,
around the edges, lucid your
pace, the arms begin their
swing your skin anxious
it builds upon its layer of
cooking coals, a blaze, you
raise a fearful fist oh,
but not so quick -
just enough to empty any
hope i had for the day
i prepared with peace.
you press your strength
against my weak
limbed kindness;
my deep rooted patience
and brand me with your long hard day.
my one day off
from my days i wash the old people
but i wash you.
i wash your plate
your bowl, your socks, your boots,
your hate, your potatoes
and your meat.
i wash as i watch my color fade.
i sew and cook,
clean and hook
on to any hope i can muster
for the coming day.~

[schatz]

i have no mind
for the thickness in the gas,
spraying onto a child’s skin -
but i have the thought
that your alternative to the conflict
counts not for sin.
and if it did, i know
my God has forgiven
you, before the guards
who brought you there,
or the man who took your bribe.
in some brown and dingy
image, i piece up
the war you lived:
the hands that held you down;
the tattoo above his tongue;
and the marks of beasts he obeyed.
i try to uncloud what earthly will he had
to make you some sort of slave,
but these things are not known to me.
i don’t have the focus
for the picture, sitting in your mind:
it must come before most thoughts
and boil under others.
it must denature joy
and any hope you build for forgetting all of that.
and i guess for this life,
(a child looking both ways;
both ways are bombs)
i hope the chaos paused
somewhere along the way;
though only to return, once you began to think it wouldn’t.
if you’ve had to earn the quiet beyond your bones,
(for having nothing to believe in)
so be it;
but now its yours! this calm from Earth’s whole storm!
i hope Heaven makes a room for you thats all yours!
even if its just to polish floors,
rest assured, there’ll be no war:
no wooden shoes or embedded shrapnel to your limbs.
i’m sorry you did not have more happiness
but what calms you now will be forever,
so says our God who art in Heaven,
there, i pray you’ve found your way. ~
this was for my grandma who passed away in Dec. 04. She was an orphan in Nurnberg during WWII and as a young girl, offered her body to one of the guards to avoid the gas chambers. she lived a very promiscuous life with never much guidance and had it not been for my grandpa (an american soldier), I can only imagine her fate.

[same as one]

says words that never meant
God could be a pawn
but GOD would be the ____
we'd live upon
for where there is nothing, HE's there
like the nameless he is famous for a name we'll never know
and so its not to convince someone of something
but that through that something we could be someone as one; same as one.~

[jazz]

swing in, to the languid Monday night affair:
a romance between pandero and bass,
Rhythm and reason.
unexpected Time;
not to be forgotten but be listened.
the sense of a season,
steps in, from behind the Tap Root door:
Voice approaches microphone,
with closed eyes; and an understanding of what for…~

[irony & wine]

Don’t act like you don’t know me.
I eye you,
knowing;
and for what you’ve done you owe me
to just be fucking normal for once.


Don’t stare at me like that,
like you’re so San Francisco.
I know where you’ve been,
and there’s no gas lamps or disco
3 miles into shoveling snow -


There’s no… yah there was no.
Yah, you know,
about pulling back the throttle -
the last drop coursing down the bottle -
about the time the lights went out;
the doors shut, closed.
we discovered new outs in our fucked up pose.
dreaming just to live, dying just to love, or know how.
I’m learning but you’re still something I could live without.


like you now;
same as before,
just a longer neck, a sexier sway.
you found a way to sell what you couldn’t give away.
because the poor know enough about being needy;
but the rich know too much about being greedy
and so you stain the weakness in the glass
of the promises they make,
counting every crack as you watch their futures break -
promises they never should’ve made.


So I eye
the casual approach in your disguise.
I’ll not be fooled by your social glue,
or give in to what held my glass for you.
you dilute the pain,
but you’re just a sleepless night.
you don’t comfort me…
unless I’ve already given up the fight.
toast to the spirit of a seasonal night
the sparkle in the smile of an otherwise

practical light. ~

lamp for the path

shine on as flashlight in my tunnel, for this vision
align lights in this room just so
no flicker too irradic, no clouds to overcome its glow
the full moon this week tightened the screws in my timing; oiled its automation that i might understand,
how things must come to be
i’d be a fool to turn an eye, i know i would to the eccentricity with which the stars, however pale in my alaskan sky, ding the majestic chords to my life, soft mallots making melody. i’d be ignorant to deny the force of gravity…the tide, the moon and whatever other bigger things face me to this direction…
light is on me now; spot
solo
here
now
small acts build into the bigger thing
and every so often what seems small explodes into a transformation of the mind, magnitude off the charts…unknown lengths of satisfaction.
tragedy, understanding, peace and then joy.
~~~
once the beer room, twice the junk room…it had been the place to hide things which had no home. forming a long convoluted twist of things to do later on:
brew beer
boil jelly
knit a hat
have people over;
there was not even room to step.
an inch for the eye, the turned knob of this room revealed abandoned life. virtually, fulfillment tossed into a monopoly of the untouched.
but beneath all the suppression, vision had not yet escaped me. i even knew back in february what i wanted of that cubicle space. though smaller than the master bedroom, i had painted it a pleasant wasabi hue over the winter and it did not meet the heat of the rising sun. it had potential; it spoke to me and i couldn’t wait to speak back. anymore,
i am a sorter, jason is a hoarder and so into piles went our things. objects idenitified by their use, their color, their size…
under every nook and cranny, eagerly, i stole the crowding creatures and reestablished them into labeled sections of my living room, attaching each to a like-minded category. when all had been named and tagged, only dog hair and pennies remained. and even those, then were vacuumed up by my bagless hoover.
piece by piece, i arranged into this vacant space, filling in with furniture. placing with purpose, confident its alignment be necessary to the whole room. the bed, the bedside tables, the poppy art painting from Horchow, specific pictures, accenting pillows, linens. the room was complete in a matter of hours. swiftly, without concern or confusion….the room simply became what it should be.
~~~
the new beer room, now,
had a bit more challenge to is construction. not merely could it be a beer room, any longer…considering the junk that had eventually piled into the prior establshment. i knew i had to expand this idea of a dedicated room, and dedicate it to all our hobbies, our projects. make them easily accessible, eager, inviting.
and so it was done…over a few days, in an open-pantry style, our to-do list unmangled into an effective space with which to live them out. soon, we will have people over, invite them into our favorite things. our substance. our hearts now will be tangible to our friends, shared with our closest.
over those long, laborous days, though,
seeing this project through
much more was done for my heart than had been done in years. though i have found clarity and understanding in many things, these last couple days brought to me, beyond my own will or wisdom, the reclamation of my heart in its most unabused, unsubjected state.
you see, the upturning of boxes, invited me to explore these dust-laden interests, long-buried under heaps of wasted medium, purpose, expression unexpressed..muted.
as i uncovered my yarns, my woodburning tools, my paint, my fabric, my color…
waves of imagination ebbed and frothed over my thoughts.
and certainly,
this may seem the natural sequence that any ordinary person should follow when opening something left unopened for a good length of time. its true…i followed this story up to the catharsis of the end…i walked away from this experience renewed
but with something more, a double ending. and times that, as well:
for one thing, i recognized a pattern. instantly, it was, this discovery of rhythm, the discard of self so that what walks about in its given days, hours and nights, be void of any sense of soul, loving…mercy, compassion…the things which allow a person to thrive rather than go through the motions, unoiled hinges, chaotic behavior, misunderstood frustration. distance, static.
without meeting the needs of one’s heart, it can not grow. perspective does not cultivate if you can’t even catch the thoughts spinning through one’s head
or slow them down or hear them.
one box, in particular…long forgotten, pushed aside: an old army chest which belonged to my grandpa during the second world war. (there were two of them actually). he cared for these so much, he once had them dipped in oil before transport by ship over the atlantic. now, these oil-dipped crates, aged and worn, gave no notice of their former concern but the contents still maintained immeasurable value.
the innards of these boxes, locked away, i had misplaced the keys and mostly, wasn’t sure how much i really wanted them open.
but this day, i found the key and as the boxes could be used for other things, i knew it needed to be done. purposeful in my pursuit, there was not one star or one cloud hung in my sky which did not mean to be there.
on this full, unshadowed moonlit night, i lifted the lids of these crates,
filled, i thought, only with mystery, pieces of a puzzle which has never added to much. fragments of a death, a sullen 23rd of june some years ago: pictures, stains, intentions, handwriting analysis, ballistics, motive, means, opportunity.
i knew all this remained in the box, as it has for months and years.
but as i took each one by hand and lifted the objects from their casket, ironically i also came to discover hope. yes, an illuminated coffin also a discarded hope chest. a tunnel with one teardrop of light, enough of it to guide a focused heart. i discovered substance, which i only knew to be lost.
a piece of me, i could no longer smell. a piece of me, i could no longer feel, taste.
the lifted objects gave way to Mike’s sketches, his art displayed in the museum, pictures, souvenirs of something good, something quenching for thirst in me, dryer than a desert this deep yurning to sense him near, to sense me near.
and here it was, in my hands, videos from my childhood. pictures i thought been trashed. gnomes which he collected. yearbooks, sketches, awards…
i spoke out loud in this rotation of moment, philosophy leaning into tomorrow, night reflecting a glimmer of day,
“i will not bury you this way. you will not be buried, not your soul. your body has been buried, yes, but i will not bury your soul.”
and then i turned to me,
looking around at my crafts which had been heaped, buried alive under dirt and discard,
“i will not bury you this way….you are meant to live, i will not bury your soul, you are not dead.”
like a ritual, i took in hand the things which made my life a mystery and replaced them with care into one of the army chests (the other blending into the abstract idea of home). when all the mystery had been replaced, i looked at this and said,
“all this is suffering,”
my brother Alex taught me this, he is a buddhist man. what i said to this box, had not been a plan in me. i had no agenda, but it came from my soul. somewhere inside of me, i needed to let this go.
i needed to tangibly acknowledge the parts of my past which are suffering.
and in the same instance, glorify all that which even once brought me joy.
you can not, please never
bury that which brings you joy.
life is not worth living without it.
like dawn rising from a dream, like the roosters singing hallelujah to another morning come…i entered into a new day that night,
the lamp for my path, reignited, fueled. i am able to drive on, sinking into my motions, the soul sets itself at ease in these bones,
the fuzzy wake from meditation, i completed a long thoughtful breath and swiftly shifted gear.