NYE 2008

 

Entering the New Year without fear of the unknown beyond!

days come and go, but my feelings for you are forever

I miss you.
I miss the inky blackness, the abraisive smell of beer, the rough tips of your fingers
I miss your rich, thick handfuls of hair, your slim dark body.
Your muscular back, the low slope of your nose, your breathtakingly beautiful eyes
Your thick lips
The almost unlikely native
Your body curled in the beachgrass
Rare steak
You handle me, my body as if I were a feather
Make the worst decisions
Fatal mistakes
Hold my face in your hands so hard I want to cry out
The music stops, the crowd fades away and we are facing each other
A moment of chance
The hood under me buckles
A muffler in the night
A baby cries, and you are gone.

fingers

 

lily pond in winter

 

imported from 2007

[protected post] Nov. 4th, 2007

* 8:58 PM

the asskicka
I don't want to own my past. I don't want to sift and feel and relive the memories in my mind, in my heart. In my nose and in my ears when I smell stale beer and cigarette's, and hear sad wailing Patsy Cline or Bob Seger. I look back and feel so much sadness for the lost little girl that grew up watching out the window for someone to come and save her. For someone to come home and feed her. For someone to give a damn. I should have been put in a god damned foster home. I don't want to see the pictures of my mothers ex-husbands, our sad little existence in tackily decorated party halls, ashtrays on table, holding prized bottles of tequila, cognac. I am lucky to be alive for the shame and humiliation she put me through, the lies, the deceit. My inheritance of her disease of the mind, her inability to feel appropriate, to covet and cherish my relationships.. my thirst for self destruction.. my hatred. My addictions, and my ridiculous pride. The battle against nothing. Shadows of whispers in the night.

I put you away, memories. I'm just not ready to deal. It can be fiction for now, for my own protection.

Dehli 2 Dublin feat. Kytami in Cumberland Nov 28th/2008

 
Kytami. She owns her electric violin, she wears it she is one with it. Under her jaw she soothes the strings, she saws them, she bumps them. She feels the thick bengal beats and she moves her body. I am mesmerized. The crowd throbs and jumps to one beat, one sound, perfect harmony of the sitar, the violin, the electronica. Syncronicity! Oh the joy! One perfect marriage of sound and Sanjay hits the stage like a bomb, sets off the whole room. Dehli 2 Dublin takes on the room, conquers it, and brings it back down. We chill, calm, feel the vibe and learn it all over again. The peaks blow my mind. Bongo drum beats in sync with my heartbeat and I am alive!

winter thorns

 

Do they hurt as much in the spring?

Taken with him, what he's taken from me

I was raped.

In a gas station bathroom one night after using the washroom. In a small town a 'friend' knocked on the door then pushed his way in when I answered it. He shoved me hard against the sink,, pulled down my pants and forced himself inside of me. I couldn't look into the mirror in front of me, my face pushed into the glass, a fat lip.

He died a few days ago. I heard his girlfriend found him hanged in his home. I wish I knew more details, I only learned he was bipolar and stopped taking his meds after he and his girlfriend got into a fight.

My heart stopped when I heard the news. I feel tied to the death in a couple of different ways. For one, he too was struggling with a messed up head. For two does that mean I could forgive him for what he did to me? Finally, does this close the case of my rape? Can I let it go now?

The sky opened up tonight as I walked down the hill towards my house. The stars were our and the air was clean and I was on top of the world.

seedling

 

Video killed the radio star

 

My favourite great nephew. Ok, maybe my only great nephew, but still the cutest. A.k.a Mar's best bud: King Karter. I'm framing this for Momma's birthday Sunday.

Squamish

The mostly dark town of Squamish in the eyes of a 7, 8 year old.

Childhood trauma, drama reigns supreme in this case, and my memories are muddy, blurred or missing. I do not pretend to believe that my memories are true, as they could very well be fictional answers to the unanswerable. A child's mind creating fantasy for the sake of protecting itself.

I know that I acted out though, I remember clearly doing things I could not even speak of now.

But part of me wants to console the child left behind, at the skating rink, in her skates to tight her feet were numb. I want to cradle the child that packed a backpack with snacks and left to find a new home, only to become terrified at the edge of the trailer park. I want to stop the child that tried to light the couch on fire. So very badly I want to comb her hair and feed her. Cover her ears from the screaming, the crying.

I didn't take her pills, why would I? She is frantic, racing about, emptying drawers, her purse lay strewn across the dinner table. In my face again, her face is turning red, she is angry with me. Phone calls, the day turns to dusk and she is spent. Where are my pills, Shanna-Marie? I wish I had an answer for her, so that she would let me be. She only needs me when something has gone horribly wrong. I sense her fear. Enter the male. Thin and angry and smelling like Rye Whiskey. It's his turn to interrogate me. A harsh cold slap across my slim little face. It burns from his rough skin. They are always the enemy.

A few years later I would have taken her precious pills, and eaten them all. For now though, this child, is lost and unable to provide an answer.

The smell of booze, the smell of the carpets in a bar where smoking is permitted. I remember the smell so well, as a lot of my childhood was spent circling the bar. My mother, the cook, could slip in and out of the bar, stuff me in a corner. I would draw pictures for the customers, eat greasy fries. Always in my own world where darkness reigned and sunlight came from the occasional stranger or when my brother came to town.

My brother. So animated! He told me stories, joke, took me everywhere. He was brilliant, funny and sang beautifully. I remember driving with him everywhere. He saved me. He may not have known at the time that I absorbed his darkness. I learned that my deep insides of horror were normal and felt by all. He cried too, I remember, the night that he arrived at the hospital to gaze down at our critically beaten mother. His sobs, his body shaking. The dried blood and ambulance lights. What came next is blank for me.

I remember the dog bite, clean through my hand. Like most of the time, I was uncared for, roaming free like a wild thing. A German Sheppard snapped and caught the soft part between my index finger and my thumb. My hand swelled up and ached. I needed tetanus, a metallic taste in my mouth.

I remember many of the different townhouses along our complex, as I must have straggled into most of them. The stifling heat inside the valley of mountains. The neglect.

The train would cross town on two ends blocking traffic in or out of the city centre for what seemed like hours to a young girl. I would sit in the gloom of the backseat of the New Yorker, without proper windows to open, watching smoke curl from the mustache of my step-father.

Children should be seen and not heard. I was neither.

Fading like a Flower

I took the kids out to the gravesite last weekend to say hi to Grandpa and Papa. The sky was overcast and I got some great shots of the various stages of decay of the graves, as well as the fading silk flowers that try so hard to live forever. I was struck with the melancholy of the irony: mourners, filled with love, place bright, beautiful silk flowers. The do last for a long time, but eventually the colour starts to fade, the become unassembled or actually start to fray at the edges.

The graves are the same, even though methods of burial have obviously changed over the years. Once tall, haughty stones, they have lost their importance as they sink, and lean. The sealant on the stone gives way and the actual concrete starts to deteriorate. Some grave beds were actually caving in! Not a safe place for anyone, let alone my children.

I kept them in the van against their protests, and drove from line to line, scrutinizing the dates, the flowers, the state of decay. Who takes care of this place, anyways? I wonder . I may even make a half-assed attempt to figure it out. In the meantime I have a quirky and moody collection of various states of silk deterioration. A perfectly normal way to spend the afternoon...

Or not.

It's ok it's alright

Oh pears. Rough skinned, mottled unsightly shaped fruits of the barren tree. Rising above a leafless branch, at least twenty of these golden globes sprout, as an afterthought. Jen's farm land is overrun with bears too, at this time of year I realized as I sat halfway up the apple tree looking down and the huge pile of fruit-poop below me and the claw marks, half eaten apples on the branch in front of me.

Fall is a time for joy. A chance to reminisce of a summer past, a chance to prepare for winter. Cooking, family, education. For me, however, Autumn marks the descent into winter. Endless rain, passionate storms, and a biting frost. The ocean will swell and rebel, the fields will flood. We will undoubtedly go broke before December and my Mother will try to call. Tug-of-war with the children and the ex, and finally the heartbreaking need to be accepted over the holidays. My heart beats fast and panicked and I drink too much Irish Cream in my coffee. Constipation.

It's not all bad, this time around. I am now on Rispiridone and Effexor and each day I feel a little more useful in my quest for success in this life. I am balancing, for now. One day at a time. My perfectly patient doctor praises the little things and I will too. I am not the gasping female languidly morbid on my psychiatrist's kidney shaped couch, I am the rallying protester outside the office.

Fire it up, fall is here.