river ballad
are you listening still
and for all these things that could have been different could you still forgive me even though we should have known better we were only kids we were only kids we’re still just children after all and that river still swiftly running our eyes were closed then and i’m afraid to open them now and all those pebbles under my fingertips are worn smooth under the caress of time and perhaps this is how we could heal and perhaps someday i too could be those stones you wrote about a lifetime ago infinite and eternal and immovable.
in december i wrote about blooming and in may i listen to the night bloom and if everything you ever loved about the morning was left there by the moon then everything about me worth loving was brought forth by you and what does that say about us now when i still look at those same stars with these eyes that have seen far too much and i wish we were still children i wish we were still just children one foot trapped in the past and the other already lost halfway to nowhere.
there is only nothing and everything and nothing in between.
mother i wish i could have been pure i told them about my petals and gold and the red red red everywhere and even now i wonder which place was the one of my becoming because the sidewalks have been suffocating lately and i can’t seem to reach the sky anymore. there was once a time where all i ever wanted was just to be wanted and to still be loved in the morning and if you had known my darkness then you would have been able to understand that there is nothing more hideous than what we hide underneath. star shopping used to be my favorite song and i’ve been trying to work on it i promise but i wish you could have known how much it took to make it to every morning when i hadn’t yet found a reason i thought it was love when i didn’t know any better and it was far too late before i prayed for you to save me. this way of seeing the world is one of infinite possibilities and what i’d been searching for had existed unnoticed and unseen and mother you ask if i’m answering with my real thoughts now and (how dare you ask me this) because i was once thirteen sixteen and twenty just a child trying on the shape of a new home scraped elbows and mottled knees and the twisted rictus between baby-soft cheeks too knowing for what i had yet to learn.
at my gentlest i’ve been telling you to just ask all along.
this might be atonement or penance or confession but this is all i have to give there were so many things i’d meant to say throughout all this time but when you’re in that state it’s hard to make room for anything new all those old words lodged in soft pink flesh clawing so i swallowed them whole i felt an avalanche in my esophagus but now it’s less of an upwelling and more of a cleaving like the swollen banks of the alpine river i hiked up with a thunderstorm at my back and i don’t know how else to show you that it’s always been this vicious inside and
are you listening now? are you listening still? have you been here all along?
(you have to know these words were / are / still for you)
ps,
i listened to this song a lot in senior year of college. it was nearly spring and i thought my life was finally changing for the better.
the lemons race went well. i think i still hold a lot of residual fear from driving and i was holding back during my time on the track but someday perhaps i’ll be able to fly free again. lot of emotion there and a long time coming.
i’m a little behind on writing my may journal. alot of emotion packed into this month, beginnings and endings and reclaimings. driving manual again, films, the car, playspace ending, etc. may last year is when i felt things tangibly start to change, and the piece i wrote then felt like the cusp of it all. i am still in search of ataraxy. i wonder where i will be a year from now.
see yall in the next! as always, with love <3
You, I see you breaking through here, growing heights and raking depths into your roots. Some pebbles stacked and banked now flow and clatter through the cracks, your scrapes and scabs and scars the tracks to shatter cataclysms, damming avalanches, from your past into your open plains vast and varied, separated and withheld not by your walls but by your endless windy freedom and the mists drifting infinite from your unfathomed falls.
Once I was walking past the gardens of all the little front yards, with azalea and orchid and kinder peeking out, I saw the bushes tamed and trees yoked with reigns onto a flying saddle riding empty toward the sunset dust. When I smiled, I knew at once, I was my mother’s son, I knew she listened forward toward the quiet springs which followed shape to shape to whisper, to fall and whimper their last drops, launch their cones to lonely groves and leaves to grovel in the dirt.
The walking past and leading roads then nodded smiles rosy in the air, where I found again I was my mother’s soul spun boldly out among the forests, ancient places, untouched brush and braid, the way she saw the lights which played between her plaidenning colors, something like a way which sees away and then back, in through the back behind the bark into another.
Once an early ataraxy came to me, like a floating seedling fluming cradled down the deluge of the downspout. Where I was walking, merely growing, towards turning gardens overflowing, I sung my mother’s song, my mother’s son expressly glowing blew fervescently along. To wonder, mother, are you listening? I knew once, I heard my mother’s listening, once I heard the here behind it all.