Last Chance for a Slow Dance: The Art of Savoring All of that Which Undoes Us, or, In Praise of Light Pt II

Up early for departure.

I love road trips in that you can't do much but ponder and reflect en route to the destination.

I did that last weekend.

I'll do that again this weekend, albeit a different mode and in a different direction.



I miss the line of your eyebrows.

I miss how your eyes would widen slightly, and a smile would spread across your face when something was askew. I loved the seriousness of your face.  Even when you were mad at me, I wanted to laugh (and sometimes I would and you would get even more mad) because I find your face so loveable.

Little ALF laugh chasing your cat around with a toothbrush.


The other night I went to meet a friend at a bear bar so that he could drink and I could eat limes.

I had a person ask me if I'm trying to get over someone when I wasn't responding to their flirtations. In that moment I had this memory of me and you starting to make out in my car close to one of your favorite bars and you sliding all over my seats because I had just cleaned them and that McGuire's shit is slippery. You laughed at me about it. I laughed, too. I smiled and laughed that little laugh that is almost a cough that happens at memory.  The person asked again, but I just held their eyes and said nothing.

If they have to ask, they should already know that nothing is going to happen.








I'm going to leave you with a poem by Anne Sexton that has taught me something different each time I have read it, the majority of my life.

be well; be loved,


k.
[title: Last Chance for a Slow Dance is a Fugazi song title]
[image: Fleurs (1994) Edouard BOUBAT (1923-1999) ]

Admonitions to a Special Person (A. Sexton)

Watch out for power,
for its avalanche can bury you,
snow, snow, snow, smothering your mountain.

Watch out for hate,
it can open its mouth and you'll fling yourself out
to eat off your leg, an instant leper.

Watch out for friends,
because when you betray them,
as you will,
they will bury their heads in the toilet
and flush themselves away.

Watch out for intellect,
because it knows so much it knows nothing
and leaves you hanging upside down,
mouthing knowledge as your heart
falls out of your mouth.

Watch out for games, the actor's part,
the speech planned, known, given,
for they will give you away
and you will stand like a naked little boy,
pissing on your own child-bed.

Watch out for love
(unless it is true,
and every part of you says yes including the toes) ,
it will wrap you up like a mummy,
and your scream won't be heard
and none of your running will end.

Love? Be it man. Be it woman.
It must be a wave you want to glide in on,
give your body to it, give your laugh to it,
give, when the gravelly sand takes you,
your tears to the land. To love another is something
like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall
into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.

Special person,
if I were you I'd pay no attention
to admonitions from me,
made somewhat out of your words
and somewhat out of mine.
A collaboration.
I do not believe a word I have said,
except some, except I think of you like a young tree
with pasted-on leaves and know you'll root
and the real green thing will come.

Let go. Let go.
Oh special person,
possible leaves,
this typewriter likes you on the way to them,
but wants to break crystal glasses
in celebration,
for you,
when the dark crust is thrown off
and you float all around
like a happened balloon. 

In Praise of Pulses

I woke up this morning having had two and a half consecutive sex dreams. One, with a person I recently met and barely know, one with a person my mind created, and one (here's the half) interaction with a person I dated perhaps six years ago who I still see from time to time that didn't involve sex at all, but rather, a very sexually charged interaction.

He was at a party full of our professional colleagues. He was there in one of his tweed suit coats, a scholarly tie, and his close cut, neatly trimmed beard. It was dark in the room, which looked to be a gymnasium or a rented hall. The attention on him read as his birthday party, but the electricity in the air read as holiday high end work party. For some reason, he had been told to close his eyes and that he would have to be able to identify people by their voices. He was laughing along guessing everyone quickly and correctly, all the while smiling.  The crowd had spread out away from him as the game dissolved- heading to grab another bottled beer or plastic cup of punch from across the room.

I knew he didn't know I was there, and there were only two or three people still standing around  him not really paying attention. He stood there, his eyes still closed, still smiling waiting for the next person to identify.

I step up behind him, my stilettos giving off their sturdy, hollow clicks upon the floor as I approach him.  I don't say anything but, instead, press the front of my body against his back. I feel him stiffen a bit and jokingly say "Okay, now who is that?" but I don't respond. Instead, still pressing myself against his back, I reach around and slide my hands down his forearms almost to his hands, run them up his stomach to his chest, place my hands on his shoulders and turn him around. I put my cheek against his cheek, hold it there for three full breaths, then tilt my head back and to the side to expose my neck, leaving it just under his bottom lip.  I want him to smell my cologne being heated with the place upon my throat that pulsates the most. With his eyes still closed, he turns his face and mouth towards my neck, breathes in. Recognition washes down his face.

He smiles, some combination of memory and arousal and his cock against his pants and trying to keep things PG and good humored, waiting for me to say something as the game rules state.

I turn slowly, so that he can feel the turn on his body, and let my stilettos walk me back through the crowd, the echos of my heels getting further and further away until I am out the door.


k.

P.S. Last night taught me that talking to strangers can lead to the most beautiful angels materializing to help you do exactly what you want to do. Here is to rare and necessary magic.

(image from roserum tumblr)

When the Bough Breaks

The past three days have been one of the most amazing/healing stretches of time than I have had in a long, long time.

It is no wonder that I woke up this morning feeling completely different.

I woke up feeling free of some things that have weighed on me for about three to four years.

Holy crap does it feel good.

Here is to abundance in love and light.

It makes all of the difference in the world.

And now?

On with enjoying the magic that some people just don't believe in.

Let's do this.



k.

Illustration: In Bloom- Herbarium by Nicolas Come aka Sinpiggyhead via genetic-freak tumblr)

Vision and Beauty

Last night was incredible, peaceful, and perfect.  I woke up with my body wrapped in thick ribbons of silver, white, and a gunmetal blueish gray.  How I was wrapped was beautiful and slow and adoring.
A slow cocooning of beauty around me by the most gentle of hands. Healing. Gorgeous. New. Timeless.

(pause)

I've been reading Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination by Robin D. G. Kelley, again. Reading about the power and importance of the imagination on both individual and social movement levels.  The importance of being able to imagine and look for the future while in the present.

A friend of mine recently posted a memorial/celebration of life post having to do with Grace Lee Boggs who recently passed. My friend who had had the opportunity to be in a series of conversations with her wrote "She told us that she fights for justice with her grandmother in mind, not because she was political woman, but because its important to remember time a hundred years back and a hundred years forward."

I keep thinking of this.

And, in thinking of it, it brought me back to Freedom Dreams because of how closely it relates to what it is about. (It, of course, is no surprise that Kelley mentions Boggs in his book.)

Anyway, what I'm thinking about this morning were some things Kelley wrote about imagination and future vision, and of poetry and poet philosophers and the part they play in creating the imagination that is needed.   Here are three excerpts:

""What presides over the poem" [Aimé Césaire] writes, "is not the most lucid intelligence, the sharpest sensibility or the subtlest feelings, but experience as a whole." This means every thing, every history, every future, every dream, every life form from plant to animal, every creative impulse -plumbed from the depths of the unconscious. Poetry, therefore, is not what we simply recognize as the formal "poem", but a revolt: a scream in the night, an emancipation of language and old ways of thinking."

"In the poetics of struggle and lived experience, in the utterances of ordinary folk, in the cultural products of social movements, in the reflections of activists, we discover the many different cognitive maps of the future, of the world not yet born."

"For Toure [poet Askia Muhammad Toure], the "movement" was more than sit-ins at luch counters, voter registration campaigns, and freedom rides; it was about self-transformation, changing the way we think, live, love, and handle pain."




be well, be loved, be thinking forwards and backwards all at once, and together.

-k.

(image: from the editorial photos from the short film Slumflower)