learning to love ghosts (oh my).

a lot of times being haunted has a tone that makes me shiver. but i'd rather give my ghosts credit for being reminders that keep me standing tall.

everyday the sun gives me has built upon those it rose upon before, stacking towers wrought of lessons (some more haunting than others). should i shy from those ghosts i'd be spun, forever twirling in flat tires & wretched lines & water logged days. my ghosts make appearances to remind me of the moments that have made me progress, be them poltergeists or angels.

my history lies in my ghosts' chests, and i pray to be haunted til my soul soars with theirs. i will keep them as master, and i as their forgetful servant...at least when i remember that i am nothing but a composite of quartz that shines with my victories and ash that grays my stumbles.

to my ghosts: your spirits keep my feet light...haunt on.

overflow.

i read once "be like the fountain that overflows, not like the cistern that merely contains."

i think these days i'm beginning to flood, and i'm spending days lost in laughter & contentedness, mostly at the hands of humans i adore & their words & their stories & their light.

just now that hand rolled cigarette & the clouded night sky & my after-thirteen-hours-of-work-porch-lounging made me see i've learned to overflow. i overflow after whiskey nights when my mornings are robbed by unexplained laughter & river plunges knocking some hangover death off my haggered corpse. i overflow when i try to take naps in salted sunlight, & sleep can't catch me & i dream up sweet faces. i overflow when i wander through the so many i've come to adore, despite differing coordinates & rusted friendships & months spent astray.

my life is drenched in memories that make me gush. it might be beachside lightening dances followed by raindrop filled flor de caña & juice. & it might be a drive nearly four-times-too-long & remembering that the road less traveled usually means good things. or any of the other absurd things that make my heart rise and my blissed mouth curl.

i overflow for those that have made my belly ache and my soul swell, be it in acting as my breadmaking master or newest mortal combat rival. i'm falling in love with the people the world has brought me daily, both in durango present & old dream past. today i am a fountain, & i'm predicting more fountain days to come.

mi patria.

i remember the first moment that my timid feet met foreign soil (or i guess foreign airport concreted earth). i remember the taste of the thai air and the smell of the bangkoked world. i remember wishing for my own bit of language & markets & beaches that helped me know who i am.

i remember being asked what my culture was when i sank into cuban sand and soaked up varadero breeze. i remember being wordless, and aching for some sort of colorado salsa to answer the rhythms of their freed hips or some bouldered cuisine to challenge their cassava dreams.

now i can remember when i realized that i can create my very own cultured existence.

my culture is dancing til i'm salted and red by face. my culture is baking yams with a bit of yeast & flour. my culture is plunging mountain streams/rivers/lakes with their snow melt shock. my culture is whatever i decide to say it is each day i wake.

so now i know that my patria is mine for the making; never will i identify with fast food chains and semi-trucks and monolingualism, i'll keep dreaming up something more interesting.

shapes

why is it that we grew up with all these square ideas that master who we become? i don't want to change my shape so i can fit into such a rigid puzzle. i don't want to be what everyone tells me i am. i don't want to just make expected sounds, i don't want secret bits of myself locked up in hidden safes.

i want to escape the lines and draw myself with curves and waves and dots and stripes. planting myself into a world where i am nameless and faceless has made me realize that i can be who i want to be. i'm creating myself, having left all expectations of who i should be and what i should say and where i should walk and how i should dream packed away in forgotten boxes in a 334 mile-from-here basement.

these new windows where all can see in and i can see out probably means i'm meeting myself for the very first time. to hell with squares, i'm pro-oval.

days

i'd always heard about this thing called the present, the place that we're supposed to live rather than whispers of the lucid past or screams of the drifting future.

but i'd always found myself so locked up in my head that the present sailed by while i basked in previous aches or drowned in the wicked coming. then suddenly my being changed gears and now that last tick of the clock and the one that most likely will be are irrelevant and the current direction of my step is the only thing weighing on my brain. it feels good to not think so much.