Having a meta moment, I sit crouched outside the bathroom door opening up to the backyard, seeking shelter from the firm sprinkle of rain, and sneak a cup of coffee and a cigarette. My children–my progeny–are still asleep inside the house. I don’t want them to see what they already know. I smoke–sometimes, today anyway. Shame and secrecy, they are the byproduct of the perception that mothers model what they want their children to do and be; they distort intuition. Isn’t it better to be the canvas of a human painted with flaws illuminated?
Maybe it is the product of a Southern California rain on November 1st, a clearing of the long-settled dust of many months, but I am acutely able to watch myself watching me. My crouching self–avoiding and inviting the cool, clear drops that promise to enliven with a crisp penetrating sensorial incitement and also punish with its shivering collateral damage of the body’s heat colliding with the steely shrapnel of the cloud’s burst–battles the storm that is me at this moment, ambivalent and aware of the torture that self-division inflicts. I watch the watcher that projects the image of a writer at work–thinking, sensing, anguishing and yearning.
At this moment, I am not a writer. The bloated title comes, historically, with a delusional job description: write the self. But producing self–whatever that means–in words is terrible and writ with horror, even as it is mundane and ministerial, the process a struggle of expression and impression. Which sentences will crackle, crumble onto the page, and will they make or give me sense? Am I controlling the craft, manipulating my readers to go where I want them to go? Hardly. I drive the machine even as it marionettes me. The parcelized being of person and persona is a schizophrenia that refuses medication to ameliorate symptoms of the madness that is creativity and desire, perception and reflection, subject and object. I gaze at the gazers.
They stare back. But each placed word on the page paralyzes me with its uncertainty and finality, each a declaration of intention that slithers past the page and is collected by greedy eyes waiting to filter, covet and reformulate me in the conceit of collusion with them. The bound nakedness of that truth evokes a howl of self-righteous anger and vanquished surreptitious surrender. Maintaining possession, control, gives way to the inevitability and yet the desire to be roped, imprisoned and silenced, and therein lies the eroticism of writing, which has always captivated me.
Words that pour, violent ejections from the loins of the abyss, are urgent and unconscious. The onset of these emissions are unpredictable even as they are inevitable expulsions evoked by exterior impetuses, events that seize all that has ever been known as life. Jail, for example. Imprisonment causes a vacuum of words with which to reproduce a reality. However, if not too long, the sentence (time) can pool the river of artifacts of the taken-for-granted daily distractions of driving, feeding and sleeping, still its flow to near evaporation, to a distant shade of memory, so that when released, the force of the cascade into the stream of the overground is formidable and unrelenting–impossible to swim to safety. I had no choice but to write then.
So how does one go back to jail when the fount runs dry and the words eke out painstakingly, letter by letter? How to not merely reproduce and occupy but inhabit and transform that space inflicted by powerlessness is where this morning’s meandering mistress muse takes me, as she often does.
Surely what we do–what I do–purposively, what I enact and deliberately create in and are imposed upon by the world, will summon up the cell. If I confine myself to others’ expectations in order to silence the gut-craving screams to be alone long enough to hear my own voice, the words may once again spill from my ears and eyes. If I convince myself that there is no other path but the one I am on, which is fated, inevitable, and irreversible–limiting my career choices, feeding the money hunger, slaking the pleasure deficit with sweets and sex and the many, many mindless patterns of performing an existence–really focus on that doom, perhaps then I can float the rapids of rhythmic type-tapping onto dry-land highways of unending sentences.
Tedious metaphors incarcerate. This miserable musing is nearly over. The irony of enslavement and freedom is the parody that we enact in fantasy scenes of the mind, bedroom and theater. Creation (and sometimes a helluva good orgasm) is born in the suspension between these two states–my banal conclusion. The only question left to answer: do we let others watch?
Some might call you a rapist. I know you thought yourself one long ago, but funny how that doesn’t matter now. You were an enrapturing Minotaur, as graceless in body and limb as you were fluid in serum tongue, like mercury measuring my heat.
I was an older child (who looked like you), as you were too in retrospect, only much older than I though not so today. You merely sketch the outline of adult now in your busy importance.
Back then, you taught me heavenly hurt love, called me Lady, read me the mythological scenes of poetry penned just for me, the words mere song seeping into my uncomprehending color-less imagery. It might have been Frost or some other celebrated required reading poet; I know not now and memory is a poor substitute for imagination, but I knew there was magic and I was enchanted–lying on your cot, head cradled in the tee of your forearm and elbow, both of us facing the opened pages held fast above our upturned eyes and the Beatles Rubber Soul album playing “Norwegian Wood” softly below the bass hum of your words.
Staring at the mind-image that was you while in my basement bedroom reverie, I later wrote you letters of teenage wonder and blossoming wander lust and…just lust. Truth is, we were narcissistic flings, a trip into fantasy backpack floats through alpine crests of European mists, of narrow cobblestoned canals and sweet Portuguese Porto, a tent, a station, a kiss, a forest fuck, all for the flavor of black and white romance in tender hearts of sweet meats and fleshly oats of breakfast cereal dreams.
credit: cdn.inquisitr.com–cheating husband’s mistress set on fire
They came in the middle of the night as they do
crumpled in a catatonic somnambulant stupor,
stone cold molded to mrsa laced cell benches,
floors with black mold splotches scattered and
mad banging blasts of batons and bitches’ yells
through bullet proof windows looking out and into
the overcrowded bodies shivering and fetalized
in various states of dress, undress, partial dress.
Picked up without warning, no warning but panic
and running from parties, trips to the supermarket,
dance halls, bedrooms, hangouts on the streets,
of pink, purple, green, magenta or ray blue ratted
hair, tattooed arms, legs, faces, and necks, pierced
faces and breasts, rotten and missing toothed,
blotchy skin pimpled, bruised, track armed, skinny,
bloated S/he’s from teens to terminal, mid to low.
And they slept for days, awakening only to the yell
for meds, health checks, court, chow, count or call
but barely scraping their hides from their sheets
for the shouts, curses and kicks of their cell mates
to get up and out or get t.v. rights and room taken
causing everyone around them to suffer more while
the days on end of motionless moaning sleeping
keeps on blacking them out from the painful blame.
It’s just like those left behind, on the streets, and
in the car–their kids, their dogs, and their wo/men,
their mothers they abused, their fathers who left
their sisters and brothers they don’t even know of–
some of them learning how to get high at 9 years
when dad or mom showed them how to burn even
and how to smoke it until it made it all smooth cool
and smell like the chemical resin burning off wood.
Those around them suffer while they sleep and
awaken to too much lost time and commotion
until they emerge day after day after day then on
to a slowly formed former human participant–
mother, daughter, sister, wife, partner and mate–
who smiles, cares about others and herself to
protect those she loves and comforts strangers
in a sisterhood of sorority chat, slights and H/er.
And just when their skins clear, their hopes appear
they will go back–to the streets, to the madness
to pimps and scams and stealing and ever to H/er
their mistress, the one they all know and sell for
their soul, their children’s, mothers’, fathers’ and
partners’ and mates’, all for H/er–what no one else
can give, the thrill that only their mistress gives
then takes and takes and takes and takes and takes…
Fumes of the extinguished fire lingers filling the room with scents of wax and burnt wick.
The smoke, though invisible to me in the dark, reminds me of your thin figure, your fire.
Your sweet aroma of earth and leaf, tobacco leaves damp and smoldering, beckons me
and recalls your soothing sedimented richness through my blood, surging in my veins.
I had my first taste on the elementary school playground seduced by smoldering cool
you were when introduced to me by a school mate, someone you just met days before.
She wanted me to know you better, so we met by chance secreted on the very edges
near the woods and the hill, closest to the shady space of the field for the most privacy.
Since then, we have been friends, sometimes lovers, often thought bedfellows for life.
There were times when I had to let you go poison and pleasure someone else’s bed.
Many years went by when I merely longed for you, craved your touch, your taste…smell.
When I had my kids I didn’t want you around, denied that I ever knew you, needed you.
But my desire for you never left completely, and when I would see you around, I knew.
I would always love you, always wish you were back in my life, so comforting and calm.
Though, you come and go, drifting into my days after I have begged you to come back
then begged you to leave, give me my healthy peace, my independence, oh my mistress.
I cannot be who I yearn to be, full breath me, flexing into the wind and the drawing in air
not with you in my mind, my heart, my veins, my throat, my mouth, your scent reeking,
making my clothes, my fingers and my breath smell like you always wafting in before me.
You’re no good for me and I will never be free of longing for you, controlling you always.
Mistress C, I cannot commit to you, even with what you supply, stress release and repose,
and commit to the other side of me too, the one united with the rest of the respiring world.
For you are no good, kill me with your alluring touch of my fingers, mouth, face, and hair,
my mistress addiction who constricts me like a boa, my lungs, blood flow running freely.
Disease me not, be gone and beguile some other unsuspecting foolish follower of the flame!
Slow sipping coffee on a pre-work, getting-ready-for-it morning break, she looks out the window onto the busy street. The soft drizzle powders passersby with a glint but there is no sun to reflect the shine and create jewels of these busy movers, so they merely look dusty wet.
“I work at a mindless dead end job,” she thinks as she sits and stares out the window, the people now in bas-relief, mere objects of her unfocused gaze.
“The repetition of breaking down and building up the frozen yogurt machine, it’s the same mechanics every day of draining the yogurt, both bins of the machine, in plastic four-gallon buckets, lugging them full and heavy to the refrigerator, running water through to flush the yogurt from the moving parts inside, wiping down the yogurt bins with sanitizer, unscrewing the faceplate of the machine, pulling it out along with the mixing blades and the crank shaft, and then stripping each of those down to their basic components, washing them all methodically, drying them just as methodically, greasing them back up, putting all the pieces to the basics on again, re-assembling them into the machine and finally pouring in the yogurt and turning the machine back on. It’s mind-numbing.”
Two young girls, perhaps late teens, walk by animatedly close to the window, their pink, teased out hair bobbing before her at eye level as she sits high on a pine stool tucked in close to its matching table. She is momentarily re-focused on the street activity, removed from her reverie.
She senses she has five more minutes before she needs to hit the road and off to work, giving her enough time for prepping and opening up the shop for the day’s business. She looks at the tree trunk of a clock seemingly growing above the serving counter on the other side of the cafe to confirm her suspicion.
The decor is eco-earthen hippy with its unvarnished pine tables and chairs and natural, charcoal wood-beamed ceiling, autumn colored table cloths of deep rich dark chocolates, rusts and oranges, and leafy printed matching napkins. The coffee is organic and the pastries vegan. Los Angeles.
“But there must be a reason for me to continue working there. I could quit any time. I should quit,” she continues. “I have a Masters degree in Political Science. It’s humiliating. I could wait tables and make more.”
Approaching her table now is the smiling young waiter with the heartbreak haircut, romance and freedom spelled in its asymmetry, long locks below the left ear sweeping from short shaved up right side of his head. His eyes are rich deep espresso gleam, his smile a thin lemon peel twist.
Holding a mini coffee pot, he asks, “Do you need a re-heat?” as he smiles that twist to the corners, exposing pleasantly symmetrical square white teeth. His entire face smiles.
She cannot help but smile in rejoinder–slightly, the corners of her mouth marginally upturned while the rest of her lips remain in repose. “No thank you.”
He moves on past her after nodding faintly in her direction, the smile still installed in his face fitted out for it.
“I’m sure his job is mindless too. He seems intelligent, something in his face and eyes, his hipster clothes. I wonder if he is staying in it for money or because the schedule fits in with his school schedule, or a second job, or perhaps he’s in between careers, has criminal charges pending or is helping out a family member,” she muses. “No, those would all be me.”
Swiveling her head slowly toward the window again, her chin re-installed onto her folded up fist like a podium, she watches the people-wave rushing by. So many colors, shapes and pace of the life-passing-by street, a whir of stewed up cells, ions, protons, all the biospheric material.
“I think I have to learn something there, something about patience and process,” she ponders, immediately looking down on the three healing cuts, one deep and aggravated on her thumb and the other two older and more superficial on her index fingers.
“When I drift, let my mind wander from the immediate task, the immediate step in the process, steps as unforgiving as instructions to fixing a computer software problem, unmerciful in its unwavering necessity for methodological exactitude, I get hurt.”
A skateboarder threads the lull in the ever-marching morning mania, only two groups of three people each to skirt around.
“I have to be present and faithful to each movement in this mindless operation. Otherwise, I miss something or do it inexactly, which causes something else down the line to malfunction. Or I try to rush bending the plastic blade coverings over the metal blades, so that when my fingers force them into the tuck of the fastener, I brush the top of my thumb over the blades and catch the sharp edges for a painful skin divot.”
The smiler returns and deliberately places the bill down beside her elbow planted atop the wood and ingratiatingly near-whispers, “When you’re ready,” and he’s off, leaving the suck of air that follows him from the heated room’s palpable atmosphere of coffee particles and central heat from shared street-lined shops dust.
She opens her purse and reaches in a pocket without looking, pulling out a few singles and a five in a grab fist of money. She looks at the singles, realizes it isn’t enough and lays the five down on the check, looking for brown eyes to meet hers in the unspoken code of near departure.
She lifts her thrift-store faux leopard skin lined trench coat as it drapes across the stool on the opposite side of the table, and fits her shoulders inside the arm holes, wearing it as a cape. She swings her purse strap over her left coat-covered shoulder as she walks to the door and opens it, looks out onto the busy street, first glancing left then right, as if she were expecting to cross traffic safely. Stepping out the door onto the sidewalk, she turns right, quickening her pace to meet that of the masses, even though no one is immediately nearby to keep pace with her.
“Back to the rock pile. There’s froyo to be served to sweet craving, self-deluded folks,” she sighs as she heads briskly down the now wetter sidewalk.
“What did you say? You whispered,” she says softly raspy-tinged returning from a lull in vocalization. They are relaxing now in exhaustion-peace, under the blankets, warm, woolen and wet with sweat, cum, grape seed oil and Pink lubricant. They have been lying together like this for a long while now stilly on the edge of slumber.
Her face is half under the blanket nose to chin, while her eyes rest slits to the air, mouth twisted into her lover’s shoulder molded to the contours of shoulder and nape of neck.
“Oh, I love you too, baby.” She tucks her head further under the blanket so that her eyes are now covered and closed.
“I think I have always loved you.” She says it out loud and the muffled words resonate in the stifled air as she thinks about how that’s true and not true. She is sure there was a time when she didn’t love her, didn’t even know her. But she experiences her like a roundness that encircles her whole being from before time til after its cessation. She can’t put the feeling to words, articulate the depth or expansiveness of such a knowing. But she continues to search for words, foggily, as she lies there inside the growing humidity of breath, body heat and dissipating oxygen supply.
She thinks, “It’s like a light…. Hey, a light! I can see a light, yes. Wait…” She is stunned. Her breath pauses stuck on the inhale for a long 5 or 6 seconds. Her eyes widened in astonishment, her mouth an anguished “O” of recognition, she tears away the blanket in a swift swoosh, cutting the warmth of the now suffocating air and razoring it with a cool streak of newly realized air, fresh from the surface where her love lies now awakened by the sudden explosion of motion….
credit: bdb3b8.medialib.glogster.com
Serendipity. I was writing about shame the other day when a friend emailed me an article by Jeanette Geraci titled “Unwanted Arousal & Sexual Shame,” appearing in elephant journal on August 7, 2012, with the subject line, “Shades of You.” A reliable source so I read it.
In this article, the young female writer struggles with the shame of her fantasy life, one comprised of debasement and humiliation. The shame, she explains, quoting from Carolyn Shadbolt’s “Sexuality and Shame,” is “the result when the inner meets the outer,” referring to the inner fantasy life meeting societal expectation and the inculcation of “…moral edicts about what is sinful, the chastity of women, the sanctity of marriage, the moral degeneracy of homosexuality, the superiority of male heterosexuality, the deleterious effects of masturbation, gender roles, sexist imagery, biological determinism and so forth…” which form and influence consciousness and sexuality (Geraci quoting Shadbolt in the above-referenced article).
With embarrassment, Geraci admits she is aroused by debasement, images of the female form exposed and humiliated, something she confesses as uncomfortably anti-feminist. She reveals that her former therapist echoed popular social attitudes and normative constructs–as well as the writer’s inwardly adopted critical “voice”–that self-debasement, anti-feminist self-loathing-laden imagery was evidence of illness; she even feared she was a “demented pervert.”
“Reading” her, it occurred to me that she was in a three-way relationship with herself, her fantasies and societal dictates: she (subject) gazed upon her mistress (object), which was arousal, fantasy or desire, both of whom/which (Geraci and her desires) were seen/judged (subject and object) against societal norms, and in this triple gaze, she found shame.
I have to admit my friend was right. I identify. I also enjoy deep, dark, delicious and salacious fantasies about masochistic debasement, cages, leashes, whips, confinement, exposure, humiliation…sure. I have a rich imagination, always have. Why these fantasies? I could psychoanalyze and conclude that my life and my ego-produced self-idol as an overly burdened, overly responsible, overly worked mother, lawyer, daughter, teacher, sibling, community member and leader are the cause.
My life-long focus and long hours spent working for others, trying to solve their legal problems, carving spaces in young minds for some critical thinking and civic responsibility, volunteering my time to build others’ dreams and financial success, care taking of husband, children, parents and siblings (the go-to volunteer and legal advisor) needed counterbalance–a place of rest and surrender commensurate with the output and idol of my own making just shy of martyrdom. Extremely responsible people require extreme fantasies of complete irresponsibility–maybe.
So I could say the body/mind needs balance and self corrects. I could say I have guilt that I believe I need atonement for, something that happened in my childhood and has been buried. Perhaps it was growing up in a Jewish family (enough said) or being sexually molested by trusted family members. I am no psychologist and can only rely on what I have read and heard anecdotally throughout the decades to understand the possible effect.
But I am not going to concede my fantasies as deviant or the result of psychological trauma and therefore unhealthy. When asked about my theories as to the origin of my masochistic arousal, I have often responded that I thought my fantasies allowed me to safely dabble in the taboo. Long before me, Freud wrote that the taboo has a complex position in human lives. He defines the taboo in Totem and Taboo as a concept that “diverges in two contrary directions. To us it means, on the one hand, ‘sacred’, ‘consecrated’, and on the other ‘uncanny’, ‘dangerous’, ‘forbidden’, ‘unclean'” (75). So the taboo is extraordinarily both profane and sacred, the apogees in the unconscious.
I recall reading that ancient societies created taboos for organizational purposes, when heredity and genetics were unknown, from pre-psychology days. They served practical necessity: living in tribes where birth defects were observed or jealousies endangered lives led to the conclusion that sleeping with a sibling or parent should be a no-no. Survival of the tribe and society depended upon it. The numerous generations since have swallowed without questioning such practices or forbearance of behaviors deemed taboo, behaviors inscribed in flesh after so long.
However, it is in the human spirit to test limits, to yearn to know all there is to know, even what has been proscribed. There are those who need to go further or deeper than others. To complicate matters, in Judeo-Christian influenced Western societies, the bible with its begats and siblings procreating to get the world kick started confuses matters even more.
So many airy filaments to tie together, all invisible floating conflicting inflections of morality out there in a culture, in the consciousness of a culture. I have never thought of my fantasies as abnormal. Nevertheless, I have not wanted to share particular details of them to lovers or friends because I have a strong need to be liked and respected. Perhaps that need is an offshoot of shame, a byproduct or the source. But I never thought the having of them was wrong. I always knew that it was society’s prerogative to judge but that did not make having those fantasies wrong. That did not cause shame in the having.
I think the biggest reason I didn’t share my fantasies was to preserve that treasure trove of the deeply private, simply for the keeping. It is the deepest layer closest to the core, layered upon semi private space to the all too public space of daily life.
I was gifted time with my daughter today, my sorrowing baby with a broken heart, her first at 15 and 1/2. She reminded me of the beauty of aching sadness. I took her to the beach rather than school, and as we sat on the ridge of a small bank of sand overlooking the ocean, two dolphins slowly passed by, swimming leisurely, sometimes in sync, sometimes not, but they cruised the shoreline easily. She seemed to know what it meant.
There is texture to a day when the sky and the sea are only a few shades apart. Despite the subtle sameness of the two, the horizon is in sharp relief. The outline of each tittering tern or gull is charcoal black.
This was the backdrop of my soft discussion with her, both of us on the edge of tears for the pain, holding back the overwhelming flood of feeling, the sublime, the knowing that there is something more, as I spoke into the horizon of what I knew about staying with someone who pushes you away despite his needing you, the nature of depression and feeling.
There is a pain that measures and balances pleasure that reaches perfection. We need to go where there is no holding back sometimes–we practice the path in our dreams and fantasies.
I never felt that I wanted to live out all of my fantasies. Some are going-solo utilitarian, some are sexual enhancers, some I don’t want to experience and some I do. The striata is based on acceptability to myself and society, yes. But there are so many communities within which to be accepted, one to fit every fantasy one could possibly have: bdsm, bestiality, scatology, fetishism, necrophilia, you name it. There are societies of all flavors of the erotic or pornographic. The key is to uncover, recognize and deconstruct the “normative” voices in your head. Undoubtedly, some fantasies, if enacted, would injure me so survival instinct and pain threshold define my boundaries.
Trite, but we all come to this subject of fantasy with all that we have been and all that we are. The internet teems with those who have weighed in on the subject of so called “deviant” fantasy and arousal, professionals and lay people alike. The consensus seems to be that such fantasies are “normal” and instrumental to a healthy sex life, improving, enhancing and enacting sex with them in the safety of a relationship or the mind.
Unfortunately, it appears Geraci did not have the benefit of internet assurance and validation, or a bereaved daughter to show her the horizon on an overcast day. But she figured it out nevertheless. Her conclusion to an intriguing subject and a touching vulnerably written piece is that with age and support she learned not to judge herself and that others should not do so either, not on one’s sexual cravings and arousal source; she concludes that all is fine so long as no one gets hurt. Of course, the self is a someone, and I bristle a bit at Geraci’s title after such a conclusion. “Unwanted arousal” still implies a critique based on social mores. She apparently wants her arousal and to not be judged for it, enough to work hard to un-sublimate it, discuss it and defend it.
Arousal and shame have a rocky relationship. It’s like society and the police, necessary evils we want, support and hate–hate that we need them. They impinge on our freedom and remind us that we are susceptible and un-free. But anarchy is less predictable. We trade off. Our fantasies are trade offs too. We keep them to police, uncover and secure our socio-genetically formed psyche. But we also need them to give us, some of us, pleasure and rest, profound desire–and a rich sex life. They teach us who we are, ever mediated in the gaze.
A natural corrollary or perhaps foundational exploratory precursor to the analysis of sex and shame is anthropological and historical–the taboo.
I remember reading Freud ‘ s Totem and Taboo as an undergraduate Comparative Literature student. Thought bits have remained with me in the succeeding decades since that first read and have returned with the advent of my current meditations on sex, shame, arousal and discipline, the text, though ancient by modern standards, warrants another look.
The following excerpt begins a delving deeper into that relationship, which I will continue in fragments as they multiply and mature:
Chapter 2: Taboo and Emotional Ambivalence
2.1
Taboo is a Polynesian word. It is difficult for us to find a translation for it, since the concept connoted by it is one which we no longer possess…
The meaning of taboo, as we see it, diverges in two contrary directions. To us it means, on the one hand, ‘sacred’, ‘consecrated’, and on the other ‘uncanny’, ‘dangerous’, ‘forbidden’, ‘unclean’. The converse of ‘taboo’ in Polynesian isnoa, which means ‘common’ or ‘generally accessible’.
p.75
It may begin to dawn on us the taboos of the savage Polynesians are after all not so remote from us as we were inclined to think at first, that the moral and conventional prohibitions by which we ourselves are governed may have some essential relationship with these primitive taboos and that an explanation of taboo might throw a light upon the obscure origin of our own categorical imperative
2.2
p.86 Anyone who has violated a taboo becomes taboo himself because he possesses the dangerous quality of tempting others to follow his example: why should he be allowed to do what is forbidden to others? Thus he is truly contagious in that every example encourages imitation, and for that reason he himself must be shunned.
But a person who has not violated any taboo may yet be permanently or temporarily taboo because he is in a state which arouses the quality of arousing forbidden desires in others and of awakening a conflict of amibivalence in them… The king or chief arouses envy on account of his priveleges: everyone, perhaps, would like to be a king. Dead men, new-born (page 87) babies and women menstruating or in labour stimulate desires by their special helplessness; a man who has just reached maturity stimulates them by the promise of new enjoyments. For that reason all of these persons and all of these states are taboo, since temptation must be resisted.
Held in breath there is yet the wind about her.
She stands with a sway and walks with stillness.
I want to change her shadow in two steps two.
But her gait is slippery in her foggy wilderness.
She waits her turn to pass me without a glance.
Her sleek is smoke and stale beer and wine.
Some reproach her the time of day she sleeps.
But I wake to find her near me disinclined.
Not a chance I have to make her see my eyes.
She travels past herself while others wait to see.
Will she pick up and leave the road she’s on?
No way to swim the future disappearing sea.
She left me there on Venice Beach note-less.
Friends we shared asked about her last steps.
I had no answers to give but to shrug and blush.
Her story mystery lives where she’s air’s caress.
In the gaze of the other 