try not to distract me
I'm busy believing in gravity....

breathe deeply, exhale slowly
       make room for joy

demons...........

 

he feeds his demons well

alone in the dark

preparing for war

says he craves peace

but finds battles in

every encounter

warring the world

a world he created

black upon black

alone in the dark

he feeds his demons well

 

 

 

 

six words....

touch me with more than skin

Drenched........

summer walk

stolen from a

travel day 

bench under

a leafy canopy

not quite enough

umbrella to  shelter

us from a

sudden downpour 

your plaintive cry of

“I’m getting wet…”

precipitating

a  squelching dash inside 

walking yesterday

I passed the spot,

remembering

how you fussed about

your hair

your shoes

your clothes 

patted  the tree that

had offered shelter

smiled and wondered

if etched in its bark, its limbs,

its rings of counting time 

there would be

a blip of memory of the day

two people took shelter

and he was such a girl

 

 

 

unhooked.....

a flame burned

out, not through

 

grooves of entrenchment

dug, then left behind 

like lines

etched onto glass 

cool to the touch

but still rough

around the edges






Happy to be part of dVerse Poets Pub 88th week of shared poetry GO HERE FOR MORE
 

Sharpened pencil.....

In the last year or so I've been doing a lot of speaking and teaching, and haven't been online much shouting "I Edit! I Edit! "

Wanted to take a moment to remind everybody that I LOVE to edit and am available for hire to edit anything from a query letter to a piece of flash fiction to a full blown manuscript.

Give me a shout if you have something that needs an extra set of eyes -- I keep a full jar on my desk.....

Visit my editing website HERE 

 [you know you want to] 

Human Instruction Manual .....

Smile / open your heart / say what you mean 

[ Repeat ]

Matters of the heart.....

So much love has poured into my life in the last thirty days.  I can’t even begin to express how grateful I am. People have been coming out of the woodwork to lend their healing intent to me.  If you’d asked me at Christmas what I was doing on Valentine’s day I would have probably told you I didn’t think I’d be here. 

From the last week of December to January 14^th  -- I felt like I was standing with one foot in the grave.

I went January 2nd to the funeral home to make my final arrangements.  I found out after I was sitting with the funeral director for a while that they would have come to me. I hadn’t even considered that.  I just went on a day that I knew I’d be able to be upright for an hour or so and walked in and told them I was dying.

I think I can pinpoint the exact moment in that next hour where the seed was planted to decide to stop believing that my life was about to be over-- and let joy flood back into my heart.  I’m pretty sure it was at the moment when the lovely, caring and compassionate woman who was sitting across the table from me started discussing “the body” – I’ll tell you what – when you’re “the body” that’s being discussed and you hear things like “the body” will be washed to prepare it for cremation – something goes “click” in your head and you start scrambling to dig yourself out of the hole you’re standing in.

That might sound weird, but I’m inordinately fond of my body, and I’ve always been selective of who sees it naked, let alone gets to wash it down.  I think at that exact moment, when I pictured myself laying on a slab, either being delicately and respectfully bathed OR being hosed down with a giant fire hose like an elephant – both of these things flashed through my mind while she was talking – [and I’m sure you can add other scenarios to these depending on how macabre your sense of humor is] I decided nope, not going to do it.

I stopped being ready to be dead.

But here’s the funny thing.  It took me another twelve days to do anything about it. I went home and went through all my papers, organized photos for the funeral home visitation, emailed details to the funeral director that I hadn’t had with me while we were drawing up the arrangements and then spent the next days just waiting for my heart to stop beating.

Then I woke up one morning and decided to reach out. I've always believed that the universe is a remarkable thing filled with wonders that are beyond our human understanding. Learning to be open to the gifts it has to give has been one of my greatest lessons. I teach that lesson regularly, but I had never reached out into that vastness and beseeched something for myself before now.

The response has been overwhelming. I’ve been basking in healing intent being beamed at me from the most remarkable corners; spending my days standing in love that feels like warm sunshine.

This is Valentine’s Day, a day traditionally set aside to discuss matters of the heart. Well, I’m happy to report that thanks to all the love and joy that has been pouring into it -- my heart is measurably better. 

I'm told that it's medically unexplainable -- shouldn't be happening -- but to keep up the good work. I still have a long row to hoe, but I know now that I'm going to heal. I also know that my life will be forever changed by recent experiences.  I'm beginning anew, and I feel like this next chapter in my life is going to be a hum dinger. 

Thank you all for helping to manifest my miracle.

 

 

 

"Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin."

                      -Mother Theresa

 

The Power of Intent.....

I believe in the power of healing intent. 

On Saturday I lay on a table and had twelve gentle and kind folks lay hands on me while beaming healing into my body. When we were done I looked up at them and thanked them and told them that looking up into all of their faces looking down on me recalled the memory of laying on a slab in the Cleveland Clinic while a doctor stopped my heart back in 2003.

On that day, all above me I could see faces looking down, but those faces were the faces of students watching a procedure done on a patient. The difference in the faces of the people encircling me on Saturday was that they were the faces of people who believe in miracles.

I’m currently in need of a miracle where my heart is concerned. Traditional medicine has done all that it can, now I need to rely on the most basic of human medicine – healing intent.

In the last few years I’ve learned that it’s ok for me to lean on other people from time to time. Not only ok, but deeply connective, deeply human. So, even though going public with a health concern isn’t really my style, I’m taking a breath and making a public request for people to think of me, beam good thoughts at me, pray for me ---whatever you want to call it -- all those things are bursting with healing intent; and  I believe it can work to heal even the most dire of situations, because I’ve seen it work.

I’d like to ask anyone who reads this to picture me well, healthy, brimming with life and my body being at work healing all the cells it contains.

Currently I have this quote on my bathroom mirror:

“Why should I be weary, when every cell of my body is bursting with life?”  ~ Rumi

That’s the thought I’m holding on to, and I believe that the body listens to every word and thought it hears and responds accordingly. So I’m not going to dwell on what’s “wrong”, I’m wrapping myself in loving thoughts,  tipping  my face to the warmth of healing intent and becoming well.

 

You should see what I can do with a couple of coconuts.....

There's something really satisfying about pulling a butter knife from the drawer and having it make the same sound you hear on tv when a sword gets pulled out of a scabbard .....

Burial at sea......

I found a corpse in my bed last night. I went into my bedroom, turned down the bed and went back into the bathroom for a glass of water. When I returned there he was, dead as a doornail, lying on my pretty green and white striped sheet. I stood and looked at his pitiful carcass for a minute. Then I got nostalgic for Max. If Max was still alive he would have taken care of the body for me.   

Max and I had been together for five years, but then one day I found him floating, bloated and dead, no obvious marks on his body; he’d apparently just given up the ghost.

I heaved a sigh and picked up the deceased with two fingers.

It seemed such a waste to flush the freshly dead and still juicy midge down the sink, but hey, with no Siamese fighting fish to feed it to, unless I felt like a little extra protein in my own diet, it was the only circle of life thing I could think of to do.

Help Wanted.....

If anybody sees an ad for a cheerful fairy -- send me an email.
[I've already got the wand and wings]

walking wounded ......

 I dreamed I lay

 flat

 Gasping

A crowd of the

curious looking down

on me

My chest –a gaping hole

a spear run right through it 

I woke with a chill

sweated out hours

later dancing

to zydeco

in the festival heat 

Mid afternoon,

browsing stalls

hot, sweaty

smiling  - oblivious

to my peril

the crowds part and

there you are

Arms open, saying come

here 

Your chest to mine

arms tight around me

soft words

kisses exchanged

at parting 

People turn to look

as I walk away 

Drawn no doubt by

the squelching sound

of the sucking chest wound

reopened by a blunt embrace

--happy to be part of the anniversary celebration @dversepoets

harvest...... flash fiction

I always knew I was different, even as a child. People would look at me and see what they wanted, then take it. I’ve been plucked so many times that you’d think there would only be a hollow shell. Hair and freckles holding the bones together.  

Somehow I always refill.  But it’s gotten harder lately.

Probably because I’ve been doing it for so long.  I’m old, so very old. Pyramid old, horse and buggy old, before the internet old. And I’m tired. It takes a lot more energy, a lot more food to replace what’s taken.  Not sure how the universe balances that on the ledgers. There must be a give and take set of books. Bound in calfskin, the spines embossed with precious metal.

When I was young the give volume was fat and juicy, audibly humming with energy, but now in my mind’s eye it sits cracked and peeling, dry and fragile cowering on a shelf next to the take volume, its pages oozing out of the cover like overfed slugs, excess charge arcing out and grounding willy nilly like lightning on any handy metal surface.

My spark is almost gone. And it’s no wonder.  It’s been ages since I’ve felt the wind on my face, or had the bone melting pleasure of lying on the ground in the sun; the earth thrumming underneath my spine, refilling my well.

When he caught me, he hid me away.

He was a hungry man. Hungrier than most.  Full of ambition. Full of need. I was blind to his plan until it was too late. Millennia of studying human nature and still I was trapped.  Walled up. Sealed in.

I sit in my prison and watch the people below. Cars busily buzzing by, taking their drivers and passengers to who knows where. Purpose driven lives. 

I know he’s coming today. I can already feel the pull. This visit will be the end of me. One last harvest before my fields lay fallow, and dust returns to dust.

Jane Scott....

I met Jane back in the seventies when she came to a teeny library I frequented to discuss some of the biggest rock bands of all time and how influential Cleveland was in the music scene.  I think the library was expecting a full house, but the audience turned out to be a teenage me, one of the librarians and a bemused elderly gentleman who just wandered in for the cookies.

Jane didn’t care. She entertained us full throttle and when she was done, she sat down with me, pulled a bunch of grainy candid shots of the Beatles traveling on a plane out of her purse and proceeded to tell me about being with Jimi Hendrix when he bought a car.  I think that was the first time I ever wished I could crawl into somebody’s pocket and live there.

John Soeder [The Plain Dealer’s Pop Music Critic] posted an article online today announcing that The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame dedicated a statue to Jane this afternoon. Describing the statue by Cleveland sculptor David Deming John Soeder says:

The statue is slightly larger than life, with neat details. Scott's beaming likeness has a concert ticket pinned to her jacket, as was her wont. Her bulging purse includes a jar of peanut butter, because she made a point of carrying peanut-butter sandwiches while on assignment. And in her notebook are written two questions that she often asked the musicians she interviewed: "What's your favorite color?" and "Where did you go to high school?"

Jane was a really interesting woman and not a bit afraid of being who she was 100% of the time.  If I thought they’d let me, I’d go into the Rock Hall and stick a post it in her notebook – I’d thank her again for the candid Beatles photos I took home with me that day, but I think the more important thing I took home was the idea that you can choose how you want to be regardless of the situation. 

Jane never felt like a fish out of water, even though she was sometimes twenty to thirty years [or more] older than the rockers she was interviewing. She loved her job and did it with style and heart for fifty years. There’s a really lovely piece she wrote when she decided to retire called in part “Jane Scott, witness to rock history….” , but another piece written about her called “Forever Young” really resonates with me. She was a grown up, but she wasn’t afraid to feed the child inside.   Gotta love a woman like that.  

Jane Scott statue by David Deming unveiled at Cleveland Rock and Roll Hall of Fame July 5, 2012
[image from cleveland.com]

Read more about Jane Scott [May 3, 1919 - July 4, 2011]   here and here

knot yet....

every time
I get to
the end of my
rope 

I remind

myself that
a rope has two
ends

The Armpit of a Monster..... Flash Fiction

Jason wasn’t opposed to humans as a race, but he found that some of them had peculiar ideas.

Just because he was nine feet tall, covered with blue hair, had a large spiral horn placed squarely above his third eye and occasionally rampaged through the countryside gnawing on things when he was teething, they called him a monster.

When left to himself he enjoyed nothing more than extruding playdoh hair from his playdoh factory and assembling elaborate hairdos onto hollowed out gourd bird houses. To date he had four titmice couples and a wren family living in his little avian condo coiffure community.

But narrative causality being what it is, he was sometimes interrupted in his peaceful pursuits by the directional whimsy of social human intercourse in the form of conversation. Being a monster, even a reluctant one, came with certain responsibilities. The human mind had constructed Jason to fit into a particular fictional niche, and he was bound by Monster Law [paragraph 4, subsection 1a] to fulfill the monster fueled fancies of any human imagination within a twenty mile radius. Gremlyre the Ghoulish had the next twenty miles and he was welcome to it. There were two twenty four hour coffee shops and an experimental theatre group in Gremlyre’s territory --and between the writers, the actors and the insomniacs he hardly had a moment’s peace.

Jason had constructed his own home near a university of science, after carefully testing his little patch of earth with a whimsy dowsing rod.  Even with such forethought he was still occasionally the victim of the capricious nature of the human psyche as students wrestled with their baser instincts during the nocturnal hours of free wheeling dream filled slumber. Jason was periodically pressed into service in the wee hours of the night to dangle a scantily clad screaming co-ed over his gaping jagged toothed maw, only to be kicked in the kneecap by some pimply faced lothario coming to her rescue just in the nick of time.

But those random incidents, though irritating, somewhat  paled in comparison to the raucous party that had been taking place in Jason’s left armpit for the last two days and nights. He had braced himself for the transformation from his normal nine feet to a gigantic sixty feet as his keen and directionally adjustable ears overheard the pot induced conversation that had caused the outbreak of human teenagers now partying in the exceedingly enlarged smelly hollow of his normally peacefully quiet, yet incredibly furry appendage. As Jason listened open mouthed, the first voice had said that he wished that there was someplace that the over eighteen, but under twenty one crowd could go to legally drink instead of sneaking off into weird places to party. The second voice, after a long drawn out inhale had asked if he meant someplace like a monster’s armpit. Then there had been a lot of giggling. 

Jason sighed. He hoped the inebriated partiers passed out soon, since Rule 6, provision 12 stated that he was then allowed to evict them from their purloined perch.  He thought he’d be able to skim them out with a rake. Once they hit the ground they would evaporate back into the ether from which they’d been created. Too bad the smell wouldn’t go as easily. Judging from the retching sounds, it looked like Jason was going to have to go over to visit Gremlyre in the morning to borrow his neighbor’s power washer. Then he would probably come home and treat himself to a long soothing soak in a hot bath. Going from nine feet to sixty in under a minute hurt, no matter how well you braced for it. At least he’d been outside this time.

Jason sighed and shook his head again as he wedged a couple of shrubs into his ear canals in an attempt to get some shut eye. If this was how the human under twenty one set behaved while consuming alcohol, Jason didn’t know how the university put up with all the noise. Birds were ever so much easier to house, and when they regurgitated their meals they had the decency to do it into the mouth of their babies. As far as Jason could tell adding alcohol to human teenagers was just a damn noisy waste of underchewed pizza.

WHO has some holiday spirit ...... ?

Gotta say this holiday season has been a rough one for me.  It takes a lot to put a damper on my joy but the last couple of months have been filled with too much death, near death and just basic not enoughness. So this morning I got up with a headache and decided that I’d have a wallow in my misery day. *laughing* It wasn’t going so hot, what with me being inexperienced in the milieu, but I was giving it the old college try. Then I got my mail.

Oh.  My.  Gosh.

I got the sweetest card from my friend Jerry wishing me a lovely holiday and hoping that Santa brought me everything that my heart could desire.  I smiled and thought to myself that Santa might have his work cut out for him this year. Next I opened a card from Lauren.  She had prepared me for it by calling and saying that she had made me something that made her giggle with delight and she couldn’t wait for me to get it. So, I should have been ready….but I wasn’t. I actually hopped up and down with glee when I saw the front of the card.

This little owl is so adorable that I can’t decide what part of him I love the best. If it comes right down to it I’d probably go with the boots, but the tail, the hat, his FINGERS and his smile are all up there in the top ten.

After I laughed and laughed, I called her and left her a voicemail telling her how much I loved her little wintery gift of owlish love.

I hung up the phone and reread Jerry’s card. I’ll have to ask him if he put in an express order or something cuz it seems like Santa might have come a couple of days early for me this year.

Copyright Lauren Carpenter

[You can find out lots more about Lauren --including confessions about her overwhelming love of  owls and other woodland creatures-- here]

Money well spent.....

Gina reveled in the rented trumpeters announcing her every dramatic entrance, but about half way through the day she decided it would be even more fun if she left the house.