LOVER

Did you do brave things with your life today

THUNDERWOOD

My father, Fleet: Korean War, fighter pilot, Chickamauga Cherokee & Scottish, a real sonofagun. He wasn't a great guy but he had loads of charisma. I'm definitely his daughter, even tho he didn't know me and didn't wanna. 

It cracks me.up, we make the same droll face. He did awful things and abandoned me. What was his trauma? That made him a traumatizer. Ancestral, for sure. Sigh. I wish he would've been my dad, I could've really used a dad. 

The wolf, the rabbit

Just spent an hour trying to break up a fight between 2 teenage boys. The web of violence around them is intricate and generational (I know because we talked and talked and talked). The pause is only temporary, and one or both of them might be dead tomorrow, or next week or next year. I want to destroy the system that produces the culture that produces this for them. I want them to have every opportunity and privilege and joy, I want THEM to lead the world, not be mired in violence and trauma. But the world has failed them. A knife, a gun, asthma, and threats of dads coming to kill. And all I can do is put my body between them and talk the way I wish somebody would've talked to the bullies who tried to fight me (they all lost), or my mom when she was beating me (she lost, too). To be a voice of calm and reason and love against the tide of drama and anger and fear. I feel sick, like crying and puking, because what I absorbed is so ... sad. 2 grown men stood across the street, watching passively, I had to yell at them to get even 1 to come over, and he was NO HELP AT ALL, taunting, shaming. Toxic masculinity is a plague that hurts us ALL. This world breaks my heart over and over and over. But then maybe, just maybe, something good will happen. After the victim got safely home, I walked a mile with the one wanting to throw the punch, talking in the shadows, listening. Kudos to that kid for enduring me. He is a wolf in this world, and I understand. I've had to be a wolf, too, and still can. I want us to be able to be rabbits. Something bigger than me has got this, and also sometimes you have to be the one to wave a flag

Either.Or.Neither

If one day you woke up 

with the dark inside / in every body there's a door

of light, heavier than you might

imagine - a path

runs through it and

the song won't last - if only you could glimpse

what's behind the opening, at its heart only

patterns - 

 

Now wing

now dirt

now food

now bird -

unprecedented risk, ordinary

risk / maybe it's only forgetting

that keeps me alive

as someone I met in a dream / vast

promise. Maybe it's forgetting 

 

that keeps a life whole, maybe

remembering

thinks it can live on air

while forgetting lives

without oxygen. I can't know

better or worse/maybe words

can act as tethers, with air they can burst

into flame -