born

Wind wafts through the window and onto my son's bare skin. He has kicked the covers off, and I breathe in his sillhouette in the light from the streetlight on the other side of the wall. His chest rises and falls steadily for awhile and then catches and I see that he is crying.

I have been singing him a song. "This is the first song that I ever sang to you," I whisper, and he nods.

And then, "When you were born, you were tiny and perfect," I start, and tears leak out of the corners of my eyes and onto the pillow that we are sharing. "You were clean and bright. You looked at me right away."

I know in this moment that he remembers, even if he doesn't know it yet. He was there, present like we all were the moment that we saw light, all on our own individual days. Some of us were born under moonlight, some in the sunshine or in almost complete darkness. Some of us were born under fleurescent lights.

But we were all born. And all of us carry those memories, and maybe if our own mammas were in bed telling us the stories of our own perfect fingers and toes we would weep as well. Knowing that we are never loved more than we were at that moment.

The moment before we were afraid to be loved.

There is so much love, here in this place.

neighbors on Mcgregor

There are children everywhere, but the ones I pay the most attention to live in a house behind mine. They appear like ghosts over the fence, shouting words that I struggle to understand. Their eyes are small black pebbles, shining like fire in the sunshine.

My daughter hears their voices and runs outside but by that time they are gone... vanishing like raindrops disappear into the earth.

Nothing until nighttime, when I sit out on the back stoop, reading a book; my fingers cold enough that I can barely turn the pages. On nights like this I hear doors slamming and their mother yelling and I try not to listen.

Oftentimes in the morning a White man visits and pushes the children on a tire swing in their backyard. They laugh and then the White man vanishes as quickly as everything else does.

Then, again the children wander like ghosts and I turn my head toward them, sometimes walking to the fence to peek over it, witnessing their little world. This muddy playground strewn, like mine, with pieces of plywood and broken toys.

This is it, I speak to them. But not all of it. Not forever.

A Baby Named Bear

Two weeks ago a baby was born into my hands, and a mamma was born in her husband's eyes and I was born again, like I am born every day.

Except this was a special day and in this baby's dark dark eyes I saw my own reflection. And in the dark dark water I saw my own reflection. And I was speaking and hearing my words.

"I love you," my eyes were saying when they looked into his, and in speaking these words to him, I opened my mouth to myself. And in my mind I named him, so I kissed him and gave him to his daddy while his mamma came back into her body.

I want to open my heart so that he can see inside.

God,
Keep a space for this child

stoop thoughts

Thinking about men who scour my yard for cigarette butts. I walk outside sometimes and these men are there. They look at me self consciously and I want to talk to them. They quickly stash the butts in their pockets and pick up whatever they are carrying and walk away, disappearing into the night.

"Wait."

I speak to them in my mind, and my head feels like it is going to explode. I talk to them like I am praying, like I am writing a letter.

Father, Brother, Lover, Warrior... whoever You are,

I sit here humbly, in front of a house that I do not own. My front stoop is covered by a carpet that is almost worn through, stapled to wood. The windows in this house do not open and sometimes I feel like I am in a prison. Carpets are filled with coffee stains and there is almost no light. At night time I sit out here to remind myself that life still keeps moving.

I watch you because you are a reflection of me, and I am not afraid of you. I wonder if you have ever known love, and want to tell you that I have not ever known real love. Most of the love in my life has been painful and now I sit here with butts on my lawn, wondering if it was worth it. If it is still worth it.

Take whatever you want. Sometimes I can't feed my cats or myself and I want to go far away from here, somewhere where I don't have to fill anyone's belly or heart with something that I don't have. Here, on this same stoop, I look at flyers and feel like I exist in a separate universe from these things. I live in search of feeling, experiencing, because I don't know what else there is. Everything else seems out of reach.

I wander sometimes too, but never far from here because something always feels unfinished. I wander and trip over toys and books and chairs, and my world is like a maze...an obstacle course. I almost never find my way; instead I sit down wherever I am and search my mind for what to feel. Sometimes I cry, but sometimes I can't, so I think about the eyes of a little boy whom I have never met, and tears run down my face. Sometimes I clear a space on the carpet and look at the ceiling.

I want to tell you that I am a woman who hangs by a thread sometimes. That I am disconnected, lost.

I want to invite you in, show you who I am, that I am nothing more than you are. My pockets are full of butts and flowers from other people's yards, and I love you.

Guatemala -Then and Again

Walking down into the valley, the streets are littered with people's lives, garbage.

Another day is done.

A man struggles to mount his bike, upon which many pounds of material are strapped, protected by a black trash bag, protected from the rain that pours on all the people who are trying to find their way home.

Behind him a small boy walks, shoeless and dirty. His dusty cheeks smile as he kicks an aluminum can, and his mother watches him with tired eyes. She balances a basket on her head and he reaches for her hand. The baby on her back looks on, past the garbage and the rain and his eyes are not fighting anything. He plays with his mother's hair.

An old woman sits crouched in the corner, beckoning for me to come to her. Small withered hands reach into a woven basket and pull out a lifetime of colour, so much colour that I wonder why we are ever needing anything else... this is all there is but it is beautiful and generous and I smile.

Behind her another old woman carries a pile of wood, held by a sash that pulls against her forehead. She is crying, and it is heavy, and her hands are also full.

I look down at my own empty hands and feel the sun on my hair, which is free to wander, pulled toward the sky. The sky is cloudy and it's eyes are angry, reaching with infinite hands, down to an earth that has been built and rebuilt.

Always shifting, the land hums and sighs, never quite settled.

Lovers sit in concrete bowls, tangled like the roots of ancient trees and I hear laughter beside me. Their eyes look past me to eachother; there is no one else around.

The men stumble home, following the shadows of lanterns and candlelight, and little boys are close behind, noses running as quickly as their tiny feet.

I hear these sounds and smile, knowing that to some this land is as familiar as anything could ever be.

bus love

People sitting on stoops in front of houses where all the windows are broken

Some people sit inside of houses with no broken windows and I realize that

Freedom comes in all kinds of clever disguises

I keep my eyes open every second of the day

A man walks in the middle of the street, unaware that the bus follows him like a rabid dog

Another man gets onto the bus, talking loudly to everyone. The people stare at him like he is an alien

Some of them shake their heads. I turn down my Ipod so that I can hear what he is saying

I try to make eye contact but he will not look at me

His hair blows in the wind from the open window

Sometimes when I take the bus I close my eyes because I don't want to see anything.

Sometimes I look down at a book that I can't concentrate on, or focus on the music I am listening to.

But most of the time the bus is my muse.

A lot of my questions about life are answered on the bus, and when I have no questions sometimes I sit by a window, open it, and feel the wind on my face, pretending that I am somewhere else.

Sometimes I pretend that I am traveling through time.

I love the bus.

laundry day

"It is incumbent upon us to understand everything in the universe."

Understanding

Connection

I am sitting in the laundromat, listening to the same song over and over on my head phones.

Thinking about poverty, about how we all experience poverty in different ways. There is a man sleeping in the corner, I can see him in my peripheral vision; I have been watching him. The air around him is viscous, thick with the smell of alcohol and sniff. It is leaking from his pores, travelling with his blood, fuelling him for another day... another kind of sunset, a different kind of dawn.

When people walk by he opens his eyes and pretends that he is not sleeping. I watch him struggle to be comfortable in his chair, in his skin.

A woman walks in, alone, with ten or so garbage bags overflowing with laundry, huge sunglasses covering her face. She is anonymous, she keeps her head down. She reaches into her bags and pulls out her life, mechanical and grey, and I have to look away.

And my clothes spin and spiral beside a child whose mother is talking quietly on a cell phone. The child rests languidly on a chair, hypnotised by the humming lullaby of a world of machines.

Outside a man kicks a peice of garbage down the sidewalk, something that I remember doing when I was a child. His face is hidden by a hood, his own defense against the assault of a bitter winter wind. He too is alone.

There is a werewolf, a shapeshifter, at the pinball machine. His face is scarlet with frustration as he shouts at the glass in front of him.

Fuckin thing, he says, over and over again. In his mind someone is taking the one thing that he has left.

Poverty.

I think about a friend of mine who sits in her big house near the river, wishing that she was somewhere else, anywhere else. I think about her children, tucked snug into their beds by a mother and a father, surrounded, like this child beside me, by machines. I think about my own children.

The machines hum and help us sleep; without them there is the noise of love, we can hear our own hearts beat. Too much blood, we think, and feel faint. Flesh and tissue, liquid and energy. This is too real.

Poverty. We are all impoverished. Right now I am deprived of touch that I am craving, and the man in the corner is waiting for sleep. The woman in the sunglasses seeks invisibility and my friend, in the middle of all the noise, is praying for silence.

I dig into my pockets for another quarter.