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I love the beauty of language and collect words in the same manner most people collect seashells. I choose them for different reasons…and sometimes, not for any reason at all. It might be the way a word feels in my mouth or the ability to hold it in my pocket to serve as a talisman. Words sing to me, not unlike the songs of the Celtic mermaids; whose DNA has seeped into my soul’s blueprint. Writing is a gift I give to myself… a portion of something I write on days that live in me…a carbon copy of everything not shown. We all have an addiction and words are mine…I unleash them…nurture them and carve out their existence. It is my way of stirring up the sediment to sift out lost images of red…or blue.
Add a comment May 29, 2010
The Language of Music
I long for my native soil, with its familiar landscape, where we spoke the language of music. People didn’t hurt each other just because they could. We cherished our souls, it was the entrance into a morality that valued the mind of man and what he stood for. Honor and decency could not be bartered for gold. A man who discounted the measure of the human heart was guilty of murder. What is man without his heart ? Discarding a heart with malice and contempt was punishable by removing the soul of the accused, leaving him to live out the remainder of his days in an
empty wasteland of despair. He was filled with an anguished longing that could not be named. Every sensation and emotion were surgically removed. No heroic measure could save his fate, as he was denied courage, love could not grant redemption, as he lacked the capacity to feel, cunning couldn’t bring him back, as he lost the ability to reason. His sins sentenced this mindless, vacant man to roam aimlessly, never reaching a destination.
In my native land, the heart was the life’s muscle pumping virtue and honor into the soil. We were fueled by joy and love was the body’s oxygen. We could hear the flowers and everything was filled with such beauty, we wondered if too much pleasure might give us cavities.
The land is gone, the heart has become a useless currency. Man no longer seeks beauty, morality has been bartered for the vice of sultry skin, raped by green paper madness. The soul has been beaten down by the quest to feed man’s lust: an animal that can never be satisfied, because after his feeding frenzy, despair and shame make an appearance, creating a futile attempt to slay the dragon of degradation. Once the animal has been set free, the possibility of real love and true intimacy become an impossibility. The eternal hunger is now the DNA that courses through its veins. He faces the same existence as the man who discounted a heart, only now there are trails of fragmented hearts whose blood is embossed in the print of his sole.
It is this wasteland that leaves my soul in suspension, delaying the inevitable, reaching the signpost at the end of this madness, reading: ”Beyond this point lies nothing.”
Add a comment May 29, 2010
First Entry….Good Grief~
This emotional bloodletting is an assignment from my grief counselor. It is my first entry and words come hard when we take aim; it’s like reaching for something in the distance. These words are dripping from my mind’s saliva; soul stained. My body has been broken hard against the tile floor. I am out of sorts as if I am a tourist on foreign soil. It is difficult to breathe and nothing seems familiar. I am in a skin a size too small. I have lost my footing and my center. Every good thing I knew about my life is a lie. And the weight of loss has sent me to my knees. The power life has over an individual makes one bow to greater considerations and also has the marked advantage of slipping in like a thief in the night. It happens just like that…. you can be in the sweetest embrace of sleep, wrapped in a cocoon of hopes and dreams; and you awake with lies and despair. Suddenly you are afraid to surrender to sleep, you tuck yourself in tightly at night, weigh your body down with extra bedding for fear of flying off the face of the Earth. Certain that nothing will ever be the same, and it can’t be, can it?
Because the one person who defined me has left me blurred and in shades of gray. She hung the sun and moon on my crib, and applauded my small lights until they grew so bright no one could blow them out. She was at the top of every stairway I have ever climbed. Mom taught me how to laugh in every language and told me the only sin is denying the flight of paper airplanes. It was with her ears that I learned flowers speak of beauty of the world and that there are no guilty birds. I have lost the ability to hear the flowers’ songs. Morning is no longer a promise, but a sentence stretched before me like a plain white sheet. The red in my painting is covered in darkness. The gift of language has been taken from me. The laughter has died in my throat and my expansive heart has grown so small, I am afraid I have swallowed it with the laughter.
When I would leave for school, slumber parties or summer camp, Mom would say, ” kiss me so you won’t miss me”. I will never hear those words again and I will miss her forever. I have a favorite passage from Emily Raboteau: ” I love the the ocean of Portuguese in my mouth. My favorite word has no English equivalent. You hear it in all the bittersweet love songs. Saudade. A noun with the taste of rum-soaked lime. Loosely translated, it means ‘missing’, or ‘longing’. Longing is probably closer in meaning because it’s a word touched with loss. You experience saudade for something absent, something gone from you, something stolen or something that left, something close to your heart but far. You feel saudade for the haunting thing that has a hold on you, what blues everything you see. Perhaps Mother left so I would always have the saudade for her. So I could struggle into a name. So I could begin.”
Add a comment May 29, 2010
