sidewalk cracks and in betweens / life in a web

whew how the spirits of places guide our ups downs inspirations despair! been back 2 weeks in portland, bopping around writing hammering gardening dancing petting cats drawing pictures making epic dinners telling stories giving gifts.

hey you, wearing your nihilist craziness anxious ambiguity like a crown of clover buds and yampah roots, let's walk together behind the goats and watch their buttholes open and close like portals to another world where pooping is easy for everyone and we can digest much more of this world without being poisoned!

here's a question: what do we do with the products of industrial civilization and the industrial food system?
here's a question: how do you call yourself back home?
here's another one: when was the last time you did something unpleasant or hard for someone you love?
and: what plants do you use eat interact with daily?
and: how are you feeling this shift into august in your body, rhythm, state of mind?

hum, these days for me have been some HARDCORE HANGING OUT
which is also sometimes organizing & planning for the life and world i want to live in
i want for future children to live in
that i was called into being to help make
family-making without gettin wholesome
keeping my goodness and magic woven with nastiness and perversity
dancing out rhythms of place and being and priorities
drawing out maps of desire and walks

pshaw let me suck on your liver
taste the bloody dandelion root
drink milk-blood smoothies like i don't believe in the circuitry of disgust
raw testicles like the most special and most easy to put in your mouth
activate your third eye
touch your bones to help you remember their knowing
"your body evokes my body" we danced this
we danced slapped poked spun pushed edged this into being

what comes easily is not always because it existed before
but flows into existence because everything was ripe for its birth
already known and remembered even as as the most new just-imagined

ROOTS. BONES. MOVEMENTS. REWILDING. IMAGINATION. THE aRT wORLD. DROP OUT. AT HOME. ALIGNMENT. TENDRILS. LEARNING. BREAK. BUILD. WALK. SING.

an outline for stories i'd like to tell:
i. walking delicately in a web of beloveds / polyglamory and lessons on boundaries.
ii. moving from homelessness to homefulness.
iii. after death.
iv. nihilism and goat herding.
v. lessons from the hoop / dancing between the wild and the city.
vi. faeries and witches.
to be continued.

leaving soon to be moving again, back to the woods to the olympic peninsula to wandering to revisiting. lovin y'all like summer.

midnight mooning, here's the list

1. woah, it's going to be okay!
2. "you should know that even though all things are liberated and not tied to anything, they abie in their own phenomenal expression." (Dōgen--this is actually very comforting to me)
and
3. "as for cities--they are (to those who can see) old tree trunks, riverbed gravels, oil seeps, landslide scrapes, blowdowns and burns, the leavings after floods, coal colonies, paper-wasp nests, beehives, rotting logs, watercourses, rock-cleavage lines, ledge trata layers, guano heaps, feeding fenzies, courting and strutting bowers, lookout rocks, ad ground-squirrel apartments. and for a few people they are also palaces." (gary snyder in the practice of the wild which i am reading and really enjoying right now)
4. idleness and mystery and stillness and the full moon and curiosity are so important. i am stepping off my ambiguity pedestal and toward desire and fire and water and the steam and smoke where they meet and walking mountains and being on the internet at midnight seeing my memories and loves and desires reflected back in a thousand tabs--oh silly but sometimes true-feeling this tool of the modern world, of our increasingly visible subconsciousnesses--i believe in german transqueer radical radio and rilke and bread and work and magic and new tattoos across knowing flesh and pain and slowness and quickness.
5. things have been rough lately and often hard. in a knowingly privileged and marginally unstable kind of way.
6. of place: wood floors. the altar moved to the next room over. it is night and the neighbors are doing some kind of loud popping project in the garage and talking about race on their porch. the walls are red and i ate a tiny plum that dropped from the tree in our front yard. there is an herb spiral and kale plants and lots of tomato blossoms. the cherries are dropping in neighboring blocks and yarrow in flower. raspberries are out, gold and red! and salmonberries! and strawberries too! and oregon grapes not too far (not that those are nearly as tasty but still). it has been sunny off and on, rainy occasionally, gray here and there often, warm but never quite hot per se, the doors are open here in the day and closed at night--it is chilly but i will sleep outside tonight.
7. STRANGERCAT i will write a poem about you soon.

i can walk barefoot, i can

hi friends, hi sneezing cat.

i have been spending a lot of time in my house, it is quiet quiet here. i awake to the sounds of quiet voices and coffee grinding and when i get up i can play loud music and dance around half-naked and there is no one home, or so i think--cats wandering around doing their cat business, books lying luxuriating waiting to be read, worlds and jars of beans sitting quiet.

i am not sure what i am doing here sometimes,

sometimes i am not sure

i watch the sun slink around

the moon's fingernails grow

last night i saw a dance show about love by hand2mouth

it was called "something's got ahold of my heart"

it had four parts--greatest hits, stories, dance, concert.

i did not see my kinds of love there.

there were lots of old songs, lots of dissonance and interruption,

people dancing to adele on their headphones while old love songs blared loudly

straining in opposite directions with their arms clasped around each other

very few kinds of unmediated moments.

i thought, i could do this or something i'd like better.

i'm not sure on days like today if it's still winter, it is so sunny and warmish outside. am i in california?! i'm pretty sure not

cause things aren't free

most things

except for bike rides

and because over and over i find myself surrounded by people

mumbling about fermentation and their sourdough culture and soaking grains

and their gardens and occupy

and buying eco-friendly cleaning products

and their cool co-op whatever

and their new diet where they're not eating any of the bad stuff

geez

portland

i have been in clownface more often than not.

sometimes it is a mask, sometimes it is to say

"yes i am here and i have interiority and you can feel strange sitting by me"

at new seasons the cashier giggled and averted her eyes

i imagined that it was because i am jesus christ

yesterday when i was in bed

masturbating

i imagined i was huge huge huge, sitting atop buildings

someone was getting me off with a wrecking ball

bouncing off my clit

i was talking to my mom yesterday about polyamory and said something like "i return often to something you said when we were kids--like 'why does it hurt you for that person to have that [crayon, experience, new toy, etc.]? it doesn't hurt you.' she laughed and said, 'eliot, people and hearts are different than boxes of crayons!'" but then she got it too. she is a good carrier of reminders to not be so hard on myself.

i want a break from taking a break

i am ready to work really fuckin hard

stop having my heart and mind be the source of all of my hardnesssss

i want to get my hands dirty

feel things growing slowly

stories that run with blood and hair

water the only thing that stagnates

here's a little piece of crap i wrote on a piece of paper when i was in a car a couple weeks ago.............
driving through Santa Barbara oh my gosh
so much yucky California
whiteness sunshiney pueblos palms,
the sunshine here poisons,
it rots, spoils the heart
with entitlement
and self-satisfaction
fermenting

I'm not bitter,
I'm pissed.
that all these motherfucking white people
look at this land and see paradise--
sun, salt, surf, tanlines, SUVs,
colonial walks,

This state, and all it promises,
a sick joke,
only made more disturbing
by its reality
---------------------------=============+++-

back in oregon now and indeed my California Cough is gone... plagued me for weeks.!
im here in portland feeling as uninspired the likes of which i have not felt in months,
wtf? why am i here?
i am bleeding,
bleeding as of last night,
i find that my emotional template during these weeks (these irregular, when are you where are you i need you blood when when, weeks) shifts to joylessness
ugh
i dont even know what i stand on
i have not danced because it is winter, because people like to dance at night and i like to sleep with the sun
that is my excuse
this life does not work,
the life of living in a kitchen and listening to music, dancing singing,
getting on the computer to look for homes,
and getting sad
nope nope nope
when i see wy'east (mt hood)
or the moon moon
look at me from over there i say
hey
what?
oh
fuck





can i please be grounded enough to speak to this person from my gut
to be here with my heart
and say hi

and can i also be crazy fucked up enough
to glue feathers to my ass
strap on my heels
and burrow into the soil?

nailed

and being the last to leave this time, after sacrificing leaving to the great fire at samhain.

that has meant: sticking around to see what happens, fighting my desire to leave prematurely, to make casual exits and smoke a cigarette on the way home, admitting when things feel really good, maybe trading rhizomes or roots or budding fungal networks for beloved light burdens and roadsnaxxx.

right here right now

soon headed to the bay

trading newfound comfort challenge falling-into for pilgrimages in the name of family

to return and to be returned to

and the integration of all selves isn't always comfortable

but i'm convinced there's something important in it.

yesterday i found a cabin in the woods and tried to get in through the chicken coop.

i have admitted that the moon is important.

i have told the sun that i miss it when it's not around.

i have come to remember cold fingers and cold toes and the pleasure of layers.

i am ready for something.

maybe that's all,

the mirrors in my life are shrouded for the moment

i trust that i am doing okay.

i repeat: our community is strong and resilient.

i repeat my prayer for strength and clarity.

i repeat: you are loved and needed

cause what i put out keeps on coming back

so i will collect my things, pull them out of boxes and cracks in the sidewalks

and put a shim in my heart to keep it cracked open

cause that's how the light gets in

may's a-flurry

home-to-home!
i left oakland on sunday night, after two weeks of preparation--bike building (spend FOUR HOURS tuning my front derailleur and now it mostly works but of course when you load a bike up with like 50 lbs of shit everything is a little different), packing, repacking, saying goodbye, sweeping my room so someone else can live there and call it theirs. i kept telling teresino they could move stuff in while i was still there but i think they needed to wait until i left, until the room was really empty...but they still came by every day to water plants and give me a big hug. we had a kind of thing but it was all very ambiguous and so when we said goodbye they gave me some quizzical looks but i'm never sure how much to make a summary story and how much to leave things open-ended, allow our stories to develop separately...
anyway,
after my goodbye party friday night (packets of stuff in tin foil in a fire, hella drunk kids from fancy house) i kinda disappeared, running around and helping build a chicken coop and celebratory beers for everything.
sunday i got an amtrak up to eugene
kevin helped me pack up my bike at the station, hung out on the tracks talking about hot mess and dreams and travelling and king cobra
i slept most of the way and felt bad about it cause the view was so beautiful--the starlight line i think--ate hummus and that funny gjetoast scandanavian cheese
woke up in eugene, packed up & took off!
i rode about 50 miles that day, starting around 1:30 and through lots of little towns and big fields...i managed to get lost only in the small cities (eugene then albany then hella lost in the outskirts of pdx)
constantly amazed that my bike was holding up, heavy as fuck with all of these things i thought i'd need
thrilled at first to have occasion to be eating granola bars and wheat gluten jerky and emergen-c for every meal
mostly excited to be on the open road
i biked around albany like 4 times and a cute girl at a coffee shop gave me a consolatory italian soda while i looked for the way out. finally found the bridge out of town and contemplated pitching my tent on the golf course, then instead asked some folks if i could camp in their yard and got 2 compassionate "no's" before someone said "yes."
hunkered down with "the some of parts" by t.cooper and a black butte porter...
after i was asleep some cops showed up with shiny lights and inquisitive faces asking what i was doing there; after i said i had permission they proceeded to ask where i was going, coming from, how long since i'd left pennsylvania, if i went to school, if i finished school, what i studied, where i'd lived...what what what. i was still mostly asleep and confused but eventually they left.
next morning (yesterday) started out at 7, biked about 110 miles! thought it was supposed to be only 90 but i got lost in lake oswego (wow i hate suburbs and cars wowow). the hills got worse (literally, topographically) as i got tireder and the worst stretch was near wilsonville, probably 60 miles in, 20 miles on a curvy road with lots of speeding cars and NO SHOULDER. once some bros in a car swerved and screamed "get the fuck off the road" and that shook me up, made me want to write "share the road - i don't want to die" on the back of my panniers. or i dunno, put up some guerrilla signs or something. such entitlement.
so! i made it to pdx exhausted, displeased with the city after arriving through its suburbs, now up in the north-northeast with bernard and c80 and other folks in a sleepy smoky beautiful house for a couple days till i head up to washington. i'm excited to get back on my bike and feel that freedom of movement.
love to all!