Iris

In your iris lives a bird,
and every time she flaps her wings
the light shifts in your eyes-

green yellow burn.

I want to free her some day,
release her into the wild but your
eyes, oh your eyes they


are a cage, my forest is
in your gaze. 


There is a river
some where, far away,


when you drink from her
a song about a girl and a bird
murmurs in your blood


and for a moment you freeze
and your disbelieving eyes
green yellow burn


find me-


I wilt like a
violet in the sun. 

Marissa Nadler

Her's is not a voice, nothing so ordinary as a voice will suffice. 

Let us map stories on our bodies today. This is the the place I kissed you. I kissed you in my head. Your arms reached around, your fingers sunk into my hair. We came apart like a sand castle sinking in a wave. We sank to the ocean floor. Parts of us there, remain.

But this is in my head. You know, I never step out of it.

When we meet, I shake your hand, give you a hug, perhaps. I never look at your mouth for too long. I know if I did, I would see the swell of a wave rising and you and I, riding the crest.

Exhaustion

Always, always I am my own undoing. Stuck I have been, as one hand pulls the thread and the other desperately tries to stitch things back together. But this time, I am too tired to even try and make them speak to each other.

Writing

I falter
on this quill
of insanity.

Out of your mouth

fly birds

with tiny beaks,

enormous wings-

they drop dead
at the foot of my
cave.

I do not scream,
I do not know
how to mourn-

only light candles
at their grave,

a flame
to flicker
           
my grief in

and out.

On astrology

"See? See? You have been on a long emotional journey!"


"Because you're an Aquarian!  And human..."
                                                                                      Nandini

Whitney

As more people speak about her downfall, I choose to focus on the memory of the first time I heard her voice soaring in my head, when as a child I hid beneath the bed so I could watch The Bodyguard.



¨I was so weak to him, I was so weak to the love¨
                                                                              Whitney Elizabeth Houston
                                                                               (Aug 9, 1963 - February 11, 2012)

Poetry as protest

I see protest as a genuine means of encouraging people to feel the inconsistencies, the horrors of the lives we are living. Social protest is saying that we do not have to live this way. If we feel deeply, and we encourage ourselves and others to feel deeply, we will find the germ of our answers to bring about change. Because once we recognise what it is we are feeling, once we recognise we can feel deeply, love deeply, can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy. And when they do not we will ask ¨why don´t they?¨ And it is the asking that will lead us inevitably to change.

So the question of social protest and art is inseparable for me. I can´t say it is an either-or proposition. Art for artś sake doesn´t really exist for me. What I saw was wrong and I had to speak up. I love poetry, and I loved words. But what was beautiful had to serve the purpose of changing my life, or I would have died. If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That is the beginning of social protest.

Audre Lorde

Muse me mute

I want to talk of the sun
burning beneath my feet

and the blood clotting
around my toes-

who knows what spreads
across these skies?

I am only a mute muse
tucked between her lines.

But new lovers you know,
they always find a way

to enjoy a kiss and a sigh
beneath a setting sky.

Weep.

Tomorrow is a new poem.

Naiveté

The bump on my head grows larger,

people call me charming, 

they pull my cheeks 

and pat my head.

The wall knows better, 

understands the indignity 

lets out one big guffaw,

it knows I'll be back here again.

I am doomed to be called naive for the rest of my life. No other adjective is used as frequently to describe me. On the bright side, I get to pretend I am as cute as Mr Bump. 

Your hands,

like white lilies nodding
while you spoke

Watching them                      
                          rise and fall
I fell as they fell,

sighed
            as one petal,
one finger lifted,

and lay briefly
on your mouth-
   
        a lily wooing a rose.  

Tinydancer no more: A new chapter

Whenever I get sentimental and therefore verbose, I run to my other less read blog and write posts that disregard things like brevity and the reader's patience. This time however, I thought I'd exploit everyone here and address the abrupt change in my blog's name (which doesn't really feel abrupt to me) I've been having these bizarre flights for the past months. I've grown tired of the blog and have wanted to close it down, have felt like I'd outgrown it, that it was more restricting than liberating to write here and so on and so forth (do people still say 'so on and so forth'?) And it was horrible.

I floated the idea for a while, with my friends both online and off, a lot of them expressed sadness and some confusion. I was flattered by the former and a little silenced by the latter- I couldn't explain it to myself. Truth is, I needed a reason to continue writing here and for me sometimes that means writing at all. I started writing with this blog. If I stop writing here I find it hard to imagine writing elsewhere. So why did I come back? Or rather, why didn't I leave? This is a hard one and I have no idea. But I knew that if I stayed then I'd have to make some changes so the space felt more like me. And I just don't think that's very tinydancer-ish anymore. I think I've been holding onto the title for a while now only because I wanted to hold on to the spirit with which I first began the blog when three years ago I told my first and only reader (for a year at least) that I'd started a blog and that I was going to write.

So this is a farewell of sorts to tinydancer though she's always twirling inside me. Nothing is going to change drastically here. Some of what I am studying (psychotherapy with an emphasis on psychoanalysis) will find its way here and I think that is also partly why I feel the need for a change. As S keeps telling me, this is the new chapter and there are sunflowers blooming in my garden (hidden jokes much?)

"One day a former analysand asked me: Why do you write? The question took me by surprise: it was not one I had ever asked myself. Without thinking, I answered: As a testimony... However, all this would not have constituted the right reply. I should have said:"I write because I cannot do otherwise... I feel hardly free to write or not to write...In each instance, the agencies which compose my psychical personality, as Freud says, converge towards the same goal, which is imposed upon me rather than freely chosen"

Andre Green (On Private Madness)

Why wait?

Mouths full of cheap
                        wine
Let me kiss,
drink
           them in.
       
Why wait any longer
for
      the real thing?

Yes, feminist

So you look at me,

all the while
             Freud, Marx and Mitchell
step out of your mouth.

Is it them, wound around
             you, or your voice on wine
that make my eyes glaze over

and the little crimson river
spreading on my cheeks?
            

Epiphany

¨ You are naive. And you do not trust people¨
                                                                                            -S


People who know me well might get why this feels revelatory. They have never been put together. 


Also, I have too many S(s) in my life.