Fame puts you there where things are hollow.
John Lennon to David Bowie before Bowie’s mega-fame
Fame
Category: If We Came with a Manual
What I’m learning from yoga, massage, injuries, illness, maximal healing/health, interest and others that would be nice to have included if we were born with a manual attached.
Touch
TOUCH hands awaken stars in skin till our palms press peace deep as breath yet this snow-blind animal need for touch shared by grooming apes and dogs sleeping entwined is rarely about sex but instead our primal need to know we are not stones tossed out to sea as we breathe the same air molecules shared in this brief habitation of skin
Thank you to the editors of 5AM for first publishing this poem.
Forgiveness
Longest Night
In many traditions, this long night marks the end of the solar year, the final day of increasing dark. Tomorrow our days will lengthen and a new year begins, not by calendar, but by the sun’s time.
Here’s to the cycles and the richness of dark, the silence of snow and opportunities to reflect, to sleep, and once more emerge into increasing light.
May this year bring peace, more love, more ease and safety for all. HAPPY SOLSTICE!
Will doing this
…bring you joy?
Now
Whatever you need to do, do it now. The conditions will always be impossible.
Lap Pool
Plant Yourself
Look where your feet are planted, and bloom where you are.
Unknown yet variations by many
Trees
Years ago, my friend dreamt she was a camp counselor leading a group of children through the forest. She woke herself when she exclaimed aloud: “Trees are our friends!”
Frank Lloyd Wright, Stanley and I agree.
Taken
TAKEN
I’m haunted that it happened here. Thought this was a safe community. Yet Tammy took that woman’s diamonds, clothes, and almost took her life. She starved that poor woman under the guise of helping a shut-in. Tami helped herself instead.
Never met the woman even though she lived across the street. Didn’t even know she was there for the longest time. Nice home but I thought it was deserted—blinds drawn, never saw anyone go in or out. That is till after I heard Tammy tell a neighbor, “…poor thing…broke her hip…no, no children…needs help.” After that I saw Tammy walking a runt of a dog that trembled and skittered as she drug it down the street till it did its business then half-choked itself lunging against the leash toward home. I’d see Tammy go in around dusk and leave not much after with bags in each hand and always two more tucked under her arms.
I’m embarrassed I didn’t think about it till the deputy asked if I’d seen anything unusual. This was right after the woman’s son came. Apparently she did have a child and he fired Tammy and packed what he could in this tiny trailer hitched to his cigar box of a car. The deputy asked what I’d seen—wanted to know how often Tammy was there, if I’d noticed her wearing fancy jewelry, or how much weight my neighbor had lost the past few months. But all I’d seen was brown bags and that scaredy-dog and how skeletal that woman looked in her boy’s arms when he carried her to his car.
Thank you to the editor of Doorknobs & Body Paint for first publishing this piece.
Elizabeth Oakley Weaver 