A pink-bellied dove waits for a thunder storm

This is as natural as it gets
minus the unnatural light.
My eyebrows are getting a
bit bushy, I think, the left one always sits a bit higher. The eyes – I always see my mother, the pillows under when we smile. When I got my haircut on Friday, she cut off all my highlights. She said, maybe you should go darker, and I said, yeah, maybe I should. I forget, stripped down, how dark my hair is/has become. 22 years ago, I was a white blond.

Last night we were up until 3 am. I hope it doesn’t show, maybe it does. I can’t think much today or of anything useful, sleep and beer and too much food. The laughter, the orange light. Illegal fireworks boomed on either side of us. C let a bottle rocket burst from her hand. Held the stick, Pat lit. Laughing “I want no part of this,” I said, except I did and I did and I was. When the firecracker shot out sparks in her hand, she nearly blew out of her dress, scared shitless and tumbling over with the chair. Sometimes among friends, you do things you’d never think you would do. We were *ahem* safe, all fingers were intact.

Carlos and I talked about the blog. Carlos, the Carlos who said Fuck the waves in the Outer Banks last year. He’s my secret web-elf and this whole site wouldn’t be possible without him and a few others who speak CODE. He said sometimes I write about things that make him uncomfortable, but he keeps reading anyway. And that makes me think I’m on to something – I want to talk about things that shouldn’t be talked about, at least with me – the personal, the confessional – ever since I was young I felt the need to give. I felt a need to share, deep down, those are the real things, the things everyone feels, but don’t give a voice to. I think that’s why poetry found me – an art form that requires my honesty, my truth, my voice real and naked without all the blush. As strange as it sounds sometimes, I think revealing myself in such a way, as vulnerable as it, helps me embrace the unspoken parts of myself, the parts I want to talk about, the parts that need my trust.

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This should have posted earlier. Caught in the drafts. I’m adding a quote from Allen Ginsberg:

“Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.”