Woe and Lush

These stripes --

The French of Parisian cafes

Dotted with errant brushstrokes, littered

With old men, wrinkled, napkins

Lined with sketch and lyric mixed.

Indian in the cupboard, you

Swing your guitar at lovers.

Your chords--

The airy breeze of shanties

Propped up against my sabal palms.

Let roads go where they lead, and I’ll

Return again to trilling birds. The song

Is the goal – the lush is in the psalms.

The voices rise when tended to,

The whispers hush and fall to moan.

And sometimes the voices sit in silence,

Sitting close, together, electric; alone.

And by a breathless sea, dark,

Rough chopped and foamed,

The nymphs of quiet youth shed light

And hide the want. Bury it in sand.

Feeling otherworldly

And for a moment my fingertips

Have lost their memories--

My own skin is a foreign entity--

A stranger to be known and hushed, the sensations of

Lightest and softest magnolia blossom of touch

Against skin-- with lights that grow and diminish together.

Hands that move, that belong to me and do what I say,

With nailpolish chipped and cracked like mine...

But these fingers are new.

They are someone else’s hands,

A woman that I don’t know.

Hands that move fluid like black ink

On paper, lifting and twirling in

Loops of words--

Fragments.

Verse Versus

 

Thank you, to whomever it is

that anonymous thanks belong,

for making the scratching of pen on paper

sound productive by default

so I can look like I am working when I am really

indulging last night’s thoughts and leftover bits of song;

of elbow patches on worn professor jackets

made of woolen tweed.

Lecherous, indeed.

Thanks to you for useless business meetings

that would be a waste of time except for

this sacred stolen opportunity

to withdraw, to leave my body here

and scratch my way back to lasers dancing

on layers of oak branches and their leaves.

Now back, I am relieved.

Thank you for the Mason-Dixon line that separates

the frosty numbness of my unprotected spine

from the golden-hazed warmth of the fire on my legs,

and thank you for the bodies sitting close

and leaning in,

for the words said under breath

to light my ears and incite sin.

Thanks for the ability to lay back

my head in solemn ecstasy,

my every breath a prayer wrapped in grins

and soaked in guitar necks next to me-

thanks for what this might begin.

I will not thank you, however,

for another entry into the annals of the bittersweet,

as if I needed more disdain for desks.

I already knew that elsewhere there are wooden decks

that lead to marshy water streets -

you didn’t need to rub it in.

You really didn’t need to remind me

of art farms and babies sleeping wrapped up in our poetry

with lumbering canines drinking sips of stolen wine

choosing my feet to slumber under – mine.

But thanks nonetheless for name-dropping peers

and multi-colored mason jars hued by Belgian beer.

Thank you for a row of twenty-somethings children

dangling drunken feet from docks

too skinny for things like mortality

or ticking hands on time bomb clocks.

Just like the water

I become something different in the water. 

My arms are stronger, capable of pulling the combined weight of me and my watercraft. 

My senses are sharper, tuned in to the sights and sounds around me.

My soul becomes visible again- if only slightly discernible through drops of water falling from my paddle.

And as the flask of whiskey is passed around, 

followed by the heady scent of earthy smoke,

my body warms and whirs to back life.

Chicopit Bay

10-13

My words are a little sticky this morning, syrupy with resin from Friday night’s sport.

There’s a lot built up in my fingertips, a lot of semi coherent thought and globules of miscellaneous emotion to sort through. I feel like a mermaid and a watchdog and a little girl, all at once. I feel like femininity incarnate, but also masculine and commanding.

A late summer wind is picking up, not to the level of “problem” yet but just strong enough to kick sand on my sheet, just strong enough to create a rush of miniature roar in my ears as the wind dips and glides around my earphones.

Sometimes there is simply too much to process all at once.

For instance, the water and its constant shift of color 
and the tree that grew tired and slumped over where it stands, 
leaning an arm down into the cool stream below.

The tiny soldiers in trisections of exoskeleton, 
mean-mugging me with menacing mandibles
as they brazenly march onto my blanket.

Sunday Mornings

10-7

More words to come, I’m sure.
I have none right now to describe the glimmering orange and algae greens that surrounded the brown docks this morning as the sun shone through the Medusa-tressed tree above us.

None to tell you about the ceiling of graffiti and the cool stone that surrounded you and I as we sat and explored the stretches of contentment and ease that lay within our minds.

 A friendship; a shared memory.
An understanding of inner workings

Doing the Wrong Thing

9-5

 Now, with belly full and mouth warm with Indian spices, I feel in a place of writing.

I feel I need to verbally capture an experience I had this weekend, am experience of gliding watercraft powered by my own newly muscled arms. The experience of venturing into previously forbidden territory, the feeling of exploration that gave me that Conquistador’s high. The feeling of unlocking a little known secret.

Kayaking is a wholly joyous experience for me, to the extent of uncontrollable giggling in the aftermath of a capsize, my own capsize, head sticking out of the water hiding my flailing limbs that cried out in a panic that directly opposed my laughing face. Once I was out of the water again and my body’s small amount of visceral terror [alligators - spiders - snakes] had subsided, I realized that I laughed because a capsize had been my worst fear for the day.

My worst fear, realized, and it was no big deal.

I have emerged on the other side of a weekend positively filled with kayaking as my friend called me up in need of a kayak companion - and who am I to say no the whims of the universe? Such is how I found myself in a small plastic boat paddling up the river next to dolphins under the Matthews Bridge, such is how I found myself swimming with barnacles under a dock. Such is how I found myself this weekend. I found myself stiff with sore shoulders and arms, slightly burnt and more than a little bronze, feeling like a warrior goddess of the deep.

I was unprepared for the emotional response that grew strength and blew through me after such a seemingly slight event, but Tuesday night found me sobbing into my husband’s arms. It seems like with every passing week a little bit of conventional-Keri is chipped away in the process of becoming the Keri that I want to be - the Keri that wears sweat-soaked tie-dye bandanas and lives for the outdoors - and in this process a little more of my tolerance for “the system” goes with the debris of old-me. The result of this is that I feel alien around some of my friends, definitely around my family, I feel insidious hippie-thoughts creeping in during otherwise normal activities...

As somewhat of a tangent, I have felt myself incredibly drawn to the song "Doing the Wrong Thing" by Kaki King. I love instrumental songs that still carry a load of emotion, especially when given a title to guide the thought trains while listening. 

Doing the wrong thing. What can that mean for my life? Doing the wrong thing - this phrase resonates within me strongly at the moment because I am slowly understanding that my life will never be the cookie-cutter life that everyone in society wants me to have. I will never be a good girl that sits quietly and never has an opinion, I will never be the perfect mother or wife or American Citizen (TM) that says the pledge and watches football on the weekends. I hate the mall, I hate commercials, I hate plastic life.I want a yard full of chickens and cloth diapers on the line to dry, I want naked babies and wooden toys. AKA, as far as my family and culture is concerned, "the wrong thing."

All I can think of is getting outside where there aren't any corporations.
No one trying to sell me anything or make me feel inferior,
no one trying to convert me into being another plastic American. 

Boogiewoogie Doogiewoogie

9-21

Every now and then it is nice to shirk all responsibility, to blow off work -
To go downtown at 3pm on a Friday -
To listen to jazz and scribble in my journal, fueled by Chamblin’s white bean and spinach soup.

To watch birds spread little wings
To watch clouds dance around the sun

To put a dash of cinnamon in my tea.

To watch fathers holding
the tiny hands of daughters;
Men with dreadlocks at waist length
engaging future men in handshakes.

 
I want to hear the music that the man at the table next to me is making. I want to be surrounded by music at all times. I want to answer the question “do you dance?” with “a-woogie doogie boogie-doogie,” eyes closed and fingers snapping.

Exploring Hart

9-15

And so I sit on the banks of Jacksonville’s original landmark, 
here before the need to mark land and here, indeed, before there were people to do the marking.

I am sitting here underneath the Hart Bridge on a pile of concrete chips yet I could not be more comfortable.
What is this place, that has been here for centuries, that will linger after I pass?

 

I am sitting here alone pondering the existence of ‘ancient’ and ‘future’ and how they overlap onto my ‘now.’
What did this river look like a thousand years ago? Were the river grasses dotted with tiny snails then, too?

 

Burro

8-29: Intoxication at Burro

And, well, this is a strange mixture.

And I don’t know that I ever anticipated that the soft guitar would lift me this way, would send me off. The change in genre was a swift one, switching from packs of young men screaming and punching their way into musical oblivion...to the sweet delicate girl with her fingers perched in practiced positions on dusty silver strings.

I am spending the next few seconds embracing the puff of air that rushed over me as you slipped past, leaving perfumed wind in your wake. The sudden coolness spreads like frozen wildfires in a flash over the whole of me, and I am dumbstruck, helpless to move or breathe until that instant spell of yours is broken.

What a feeling it is
to see men where once
there were boys

What a feeling it is
to feel the beauty
in all of this noise

Earphones in, Pencap off

8-29: written in Chamblins

Do you believe in the hype?

I want to say something;
I got something to say.

I want to tap more into my subconscious. 
I want to hear the things I know, the things that are buried in the Security Clearance Only vault.

Now this... this is a place I like to be.
Earphones in, pencap off

I really want to believe that there will be time for this sacred ritual in the later more matronly days of my life.
Will my poetic heart survive the suckling youth?

..Ok even I rolled my eyes at that.

...I’m also curious about that constant stream of self-deprecation and stupid jokes I’ve got going on. It gives me cause to wonder how many hours of “family friendly programming” I sat through before I had this infomercial style of language memorized. How long it took for all of the rimshots and plastic laughter out of a can to work its way into my ways of thinking.

As if even in my most private of pages I am unable to take off the microphone. As if I’m always addressing someone with these coffeeshop capitulations.

It’s an interesting thing to note how, in many ways, I am the product of everything I hate. Do I hate it so much because I know there’s not a single part of my personality that hasn’t been affected by this giant monolithic plastic television that I hold with such hostile regard?

Of course I can’t explore that train of thought without remembering that, in all actuality, I’m pretty in love with myself, about 80% of the time... and logically it would then follow that I have to love my corporate overlords that so carefully designed who I should be and what I should like.


Cue brain explosions. Jesus Christ. Fuck you, logic. Fuck you and the weird alleyways of thoughts you lead me down.

*sigh*

Well... I suppose that if I had to have a manufactured life (joke is most definitely on me)... this isn’t such a bad one to be stuck with.

I choose to accept the food from
the hand that feeds
and also to bite
and rip

I have to say that I am most proud of myself when I prove that TV is not necessary for my life. That moments with only the slightest bit of technology are absofuckinglutely delightful.

On that note... why do so few people create anymore? I’m talking an everyday kind of creation, an expression. It’s strange to be strange, I guess, at the heart of it all.

Little Talbot

8-11


It is hard to focus my pen on the paper before me.
Little notebook, you have no eyes so I will use words to describe the scene that I am witness to.

Imagine if you will the Spanish moss dripping down from the oak trees drenched in lichen. The shade created covers our campsite, but allows the Florida sunlight to shine through in pockets of warmth. The perfect temperature is created and two oddly sized human beings have perched themselves at a picnic table.

Gypsy music waltzes through the tented canopy and across to the fire pit where seasoned onions and green peppers are roasting over an open flame.

Imagine the contentment contained in such a vision; imagine such a holistic happiness.

Watch as two humans, desperately in love and so very happy, watch as they doodle and scribble in notebooks as the insects sing all around them.