I miss my hometown & summer will never again meet us on neutral ground & tails are pulled like magic, from the broken bodies of lizards. No one will ever know why some things don't take their time in moving from one place to the next. It just happens. The moving too fast to allow the missing. But I miss and keep missing & all I remember is the before, but maybe that has nothing to do with now, and everything to do with home. If home is defined as a place you've built good memories in, the only home I've ever had is becoming left over sketches of a poem that may or may not make a tail of all that's broken. Someone once said that missing is a virtue. And so the missing will have to make up for the absence of normal summers. But I'd trade this poem and virtue, to stop anyone from missing what a home use to be. #HLP

I'm learning the difference between a secret and a lie, and I'm learning that secrets can destroy what it means to be human. In an effort to encourage my communication and to destroy secrets among us, I've been sharing my therapy sessions, in the way I know best, so far.

• • •

Falling in love with Mondays because she has a way of returning to me the time I've lost, in bits and pieces, and it only takes an hour each time.

I prefer to walk while retracing the hour that I gain. It's easier this way, to remember the things we wanted to say but didn't, and the things we should have said, but left them to "the next session."

The thing about getting to know therapy after thirty two years off and on, you learn to read faces, energy, secrets and lies. And therapists have secrets too.

We talked about missing things that we don't have. That we've never had, or that we very momentarily had. And how everything that makes me happy today, reminds me of those things.

Secret #1 : I wasn't suppose to forget.

We spoke about bodies in peace. A body without the deafening highs and crashing lows all at the same time, the oscillations - physical and sound, without the immediate and dramatic biochemical response of our bodies interaction with ourselves, after inappropriate amounts of sleep. We spoke about bodies without conflict.

But this is not my body. My body wants me to stop keeping secrets, my body wants me to know it by name.

Sometimes we feel everything over and over again, because that's what being alive feels like for us. We can be scared of the outside - the confrontations between two, the conversations that end with someone walking away upset. The screaming and yelling and pushing and pushing. Until someone gets hurt. It's scary, the outside. And that's not where I belong.

But I learned today that this is where I live. But it's not a place I visit, or somewhere I call home, or something I look for. There's an entire city that makes a home in my body. The environment, landscape, and culture that sleeps, wakes, and plays inside. The screaming and yelling and pushing and pushing. It's the comforting confrontations with ourselves. Over and over again. Until they become not so comforting oscillations - physical and sound. And there's always a hurt. And this kind of screaming doesn't leave room for a conversation. And I don't want to know you, if it means we'll not be able to tell each other everything in the world that might make us feel everything, over and over again. I want to know I can be sad with you. That we can be sad together.

There are places for us, the ones who since children have carried cities inside of our bodies. Places where we can find room for conversation. That friend we call home. That place we call sun. Where we sleep, or just listen to the silence outside of our city, another home. The river. And where we only think about today, and no worrying about our next hour or next Monday.


​

Dear fellow feminists, gentle women and men of color,

I need your help. I understand the process of voting. I understand the need for policy and structure and spending for structure and for this semblance of democracy, in order to make a more perfect union. After all, it is getting a little bit better for so many of us folks that aren't defined by the white, male, heteronormative folk who decided to re-found this place brown blood has called home for thousands of years.

I understand this process, so I will be voting this year. But not for President. But I want to vote for a President. And as a feminist, I'd love to vote for a woman. But. And there are so many but's. Help me understand why anyone can vote for someone who is willing and ready to push the big red button.

I no longer believe that war, in the way it's defined by our administration, is necessary or even helpful in promoting peace. Who's kidding, I never believed in war for anything. There is no other righteous excuse for war other than the purpose of promoting peace or exterminating evil. And even those excuses have been proven to no longer exist as excuses to spend 3.9% of our GDP on defense. That's $596 billion, which is triple the second highest nation in the world (quadruple if you go by the other report), a part of which is used to murder [innocent] civilians, usually brown civilians, and a part of which is used to create policy that destroys lives across the world. Interventionist policies that have shown to nurture femicide and rape culture - across the world.

And the candidate who is least quick on the trigger is, as an alternate or second to war, very much an advocate of sanctions, which has sometimes been known to do more long-term harm than war.

And to be okay with war
is to be okay with military
is to be okay with a police state
is to be okay with collateral damage
is to be okay with the
[fill in the blank] industrial complexities that make this country "great again"
and again.

Why and how is there a politician worthy of making this okay for anyone, how do our feminist-blooded brown bodies, histories, hearts and minds make this all okay, under the theory of democracy. How is any of this okay, to vote for? I want to know what good justifies the illusion of democracy , when history (and future) knows we can exist without being oppressed, without being owned, and without the need for voting for a President.