Love Hobos (the Real)

My dirty dirty heart
Keeps watch under the bridge
Waiting for things that don't belong to us, but,
Feeling entitled anyhow.
Because you bring the things.
You smuggle them
right to my feet
to my hands
to my heart
to my mouth
all the things I shouldn't take
the things you shouldn't give.
We, greedy, life-is-short and
sweetness is here.
Now.
We, thieves in passion.
We,
(there is a we). We,
who have snatched a place to put our things
here, under the bridge.

In my travels
With my dirty dirty feet
Shredded nails
Aching arms
Head like a Jack-o-Lantern,
     bruised piñata for a heart.
You walked beside me
taking me in with your eyes
blinded by the sun in my hair, and...
(I saw it before you did)
Silently you pledged to bring me things I needed:
The bits of you that were rattling around in the hollows of your eyes
In return for the pieces of me that were bleeding out into the sand.
Your touch would stop the bleeding
My eyes would see through the places others missed.
Thus, in our unspoken contract
You bring me morsels, which we both devour
To sustain us
Greedily, without remorse.

We, the love hobos,
Surviving on each other
Will breathe for one another
Unapologetically
Between heart beats.

Te me estás saliendo

Te quise
Pero ya no puedo
Estoy como la que ha comido mucho helado
Me duele el estómago
Quien me manda?
Se me hiela la cabeza
Tengo náuseas

Te quise
con dos manos llenas
Pero de qué?
Primero de pétalos
Después pollitos suaves
Entonces aves blancas
Luego arañas
Serpientes
Venenosas
Hormigas picantes
Clavos sangrientes
Aceite hirviendo
No me quedan más que los huesos con que quererte
Y esos no sienten ya.

Te quise
Pero me heriste y
Ni cuenta te diste
Cómo mala fruta
Que empalaga
Cuanto buena sabía
Ahora se me está saliendo
No vuelvo a probar.

The Rot...

I don't know why but I felt this one in Spanish... May lose some of its music in the translation... Translation below the Spanish. 

Todo en el mundo se va pudriendo

No se escapa

Ni la mosca ni el árbol

Ni las montañas

Solo que el tiempo de pudrirse puede ser corto 

O casi sin medida

Pero en esta naturaleza

Todo llega a pudrirse

Hasta el amor

Que florece con belleza

Y, un día, sin darnos cuenta,

         Comienza.

Los besos se vuelven débiles

Sin fuerza del alma

El sexo, si existe, es como una máquina

Que se prende y anda sola

Y sabe cuándo acabar

Y te miras en un espejo y vez

Tu cara que brillaba

Le falta illuminacion

Y así se va...

Poco a poco

Machitando

Hasta que un día

Buscas por toda la casa

En el safacón

En el baño

Debajo de la cama

En el ropero

De dónde viene?

Ese olor tan acrido y pungente?

Se te abren los ojos y caes en el sillón

Boca abierta

Somos nosotros

Nos hemos podrido

Y ahora 

Que?

           A cerrar los ojos 

     y a olvidar.

------------------------------

Everything in the world succumbs to rot

Nothing escapes

Not the fly nor the tree

Nor the mountains

It is only that the time to rot might be short

Or immeasurable

But in this nature 

Everything will rot

Even love

Which flowers with beauty

And, one day, without our notice

       Begins.

Kisses grow weak

Without any soul behind them

Lovemaking, if at all, is a machine

You turn it in and it goes

It knows when to stop 

And you catch yourself in a mirror and see

Your face once bright

Is no longer lit

And so it goes...

Little by little

Fading

Until one day

You look through the whole house

The garbage can

The bathroom

Under the bed

The closet

Where is it coming from?

That acrid and pungent smell?

Your eyes grow wide and you fall into a chair

Mouth agape

It's us.

We are rotted.

And now

What?

       To shut our eyes

    And begin to forget.

------------------
   

Love Hobo

Blooming cherry trees adorn the river
A holly bush houses interesting guests
Outside, a warm breeze shakes clouds of dust
Into a swirl

Balloons of plastic bags float above
A celebration of city refuse.
Not-so-still life in the trailer park
Beneath the bridge.

Strawberries discovered outside the shanty house

Are softly whisked away by a delicate hand. 
They disappear behind cardboard.

The city alive with blaring music from cars
Coming from the lower deck of the bridge.
Summer, when the city is most filled with hope and energy

But the smell of decay and rot is the strongest.
Here by the river, 
Ice cream offerings bring a kind of peace.
The holly bush lady smiles 
A Buddha smile.

Coolness arrives in reds and oranges 
Whose reflection along the nearly still water
Are like Van Gogh and Manet
Wavy waterlike trees, or treelike water,
Either way, the view is priceless
And the sweet lady sings,

“I left to follow love 
and this is where I'll stay.”

The lady of the holly bush rejoices at her fate.

Now the city has turned grey
As if life has passed it by.
The dirty river iced
The trees a white delight.
The lady sits in residence inside her holly hut.
She has herself some company
And they're huddled under coats.
An impossibly large blanket is covering them both.
They sit with foreheads touching
Looking comfy as can be,
and the lady smiles aside and says to gawking me,
"I am a love hobo, darling."
And with that she nestles her head
into her bearded love.
My lonely heart and I walk back
Smiling, a thing with wings.

Bandaid 2

my life's a mummy
maybe yours is too
but my mummy beats your mummy
it's bigger and scarier
most of the bandages are falling off
some are so old they're black
you'd never know they were ever white
many of the bandages are oozing blood
a couple are freely bleeding through like waterfalls of cranberry juice
if cranberry juice fell from a waterfall
(this thought comforts me at least a little)
the free bleeding bandages are the worse
then there are the tiny ones that were supposed to only stay a short while
they were covering teeny scratches that started to deepen
and now they are wells of tissue deep to the bone
covered by tiny little baby bandaids
(this would be laughable if the wounds weren't festering)
my mummy sings though
it sings to forget that it lives
it lives, my mummy (a kind of life)
bandages are all that keep it going
do not look upon it in daylight
your eyes will need bandaging too
and why should you suffer my fate? 

Surrender

Today I surrender.
To what has been calling to me since yesterday.
Gravity too heavy on my shoulders.
Knees too weak. Feet of gelatin.
Head like a boulder.
I surrender, floor.
You have me, all of me.
I belong to you and the dust mites and the creepy crawly things,
To the grain of wood that will soon be embedded in my skin.
I belong to you and your cold cold embrace.
May you not lose the strength to hold me up
As my salty corrosive tears drench your planks.
Soggy like an old ship's deck.
If you fail, we fall together.
You and I, dear floor.
Right down to the basement.
There we can surrender to the cement.
It will take considerably more tears to soften it.
I believe we can lie there peacefully as long as we like.

When things fade...

It's the day after Christmas. This year I felt oddly Christmas-y. The past few years I've not felt the spirit at all. But this year I put up a tree and a couple of wreaths and some lights. I wrapped gifts with gusto and even listened to some Christmas music of my own free will (jazzy Xmas). I enjoyed my friends, I appreciated my husband despite his bah-humbug attitude and I loved my family for being. I even didn't dwell on the fact that I really am not making enough money doing what I do and that my "career" really is a glorified hobby if you look at it on paper. Truth be told, I feel like I've wasted my life away and have very little of monetary value to show for it. My husband is talking about early retirement and says I'll have to start making more money and I'm terrified because I don't see how I'm going to do that. Yet... I have this odd sense of well being. I ask myself why.

I fell in love again - with life. I decided that life is too short to spend it agonizing about the things that aren't, the things that should be, the things that should have been, the way things were supposed to turn out... what a waste of energy. You just do. It may sound like an oversimplification or even irresponsible. But I don't want to spend my last good 10-15 years not enjoying myself. Yes, I'm now of an age where I know my body maybe only have another 10 or 15 years left of health and vitality. Who knows? Maybe I don't even have that much time left? Maybe I'm a ticking time bomb and time has started to count down quickly unbeknownst to me? I just don't want to spend whatever time I may have left being sad about the things that aren't.

So I took stock of some relationships that aren't being properly nurtured, through no faulty of my own. I made the decision to stop being sad that this person or that person isn't making more of an effort to be present in my life. If they can't see the value of keeping up the relationship then I need to focus on the people in my life who are actually making an effort. And I need to decide who I want to spend time with. Who are the people who fill me with joy and a sense of peace and well being? I need to be clear about who those people are and then I need to nurture those connections. I will stop twisting myself into a pretzel trying to make sense of people whose actions do not match their words. If you're not present, you're not present.

I will also spend more time in places that make me feel happy. My surroundings have always mattered to me. I feel calmer and more peaceful when I'm surrounded by beautiful. And it doesn't need to be much. It could be the one clematis I planted in the backyard or it could be the bed being made up and being neat for once. It could be me sitting on a rock in a park staring at the trees on a fall day. Or watching the waves touch sand while I read on the beach. It might even be me curled up in my favorite chair with a good book. Whatever it is on a given day, I resolve to really enjoy it.

So I say good-bye to the things that I have allowed to torment me. The people I have let zap my energy and steal my sleep. I will let those things go. They're already fading quickly behind me. I see road before me. Some of the terrain will be rocky and perilous, but the light is ahead of me leading the way. What's behind me is already fading. Fading into the dark.