Thought Scraps @ldeyling-blog - Tumblr Blog

This is feeling. He pulled my hand under his little face smashing it between chubby cheek and pillow, stroking my fingertips with his. His hot little breaths grew shallow and even as he floated away from me to the place where no one can go. There nobody is telling him to put his feet on the ground or use his hands gently; he is crazy and free, the king of all wild things. Or not. Maybe there he is the sweet boy his teacher is always asking him to be. Maybe there his man-sized emotions fit into his 2.5' body and he never explodes. Here they do not. And he explodes all the time. But now he is still and my fingers are beginning to tingle because toddler heads are heavier than they look. I won't move my hand.

griefxaddict

When the apocalypse hits we’ll be listening to Billy Joel records, drinking the most expensive whisky we can find.

Me and you, and the zombie apocalypse (via giraffevader)

I love the strangers.

I love the rooftops and the hole I had to climb to get there.

i love the cables and the inappropriate corners of building jutting into too large intersections.

i love the sound of the train under this window; it shakes the entire house like the fabled but oh-so-real 'quake. Twelve times a night I can pretend it is the end of the world.

#SF stranger than i

A strange phenomenon occurs around the word “tear.” It is in a constant crisis of ambiguity, holding two meanings with nothing but context to lend it identity. Even now you cannot know how I mean to reference it. There is an old test meant to tell whether your heart is a violent or an emotional one based on your initial interpretation of the word “tear.” But, my immediate reading changes with my heart-stance. Maybe I was more violent at seventeen than I am emotional now. Maybe the test is crap. Yesterday it said “tear” and the day before it said the other “tear.” In life, tears often lead to tears whichever way you want to read it. Maybe violent hearts and emotional hearts are the opposing sides of one coin defined by a word with a double meaning. Maybe it's a metaphor; passion switches from the one to the other in half the blink of an eye. Paradox deepens a flat world. “Tear” has a rough life; I feel for the little word. Today it reads both at once. “Tear” must be tired. It should take a nap. And a shot.

#take a nap #take a shot #uhappy pardox

That time with the strangers.

Roco, the security guard, did not approve of the window sill as my choice of waiting place. He was polite about it. I asked him the craziest thing he’d ever seen in that store.

He said, “Well, this one time I saw a woman sitting on the window sill.”

I said, “I think I hardly count as a woman.I’m really kind of baby.”

He said, “Oh honey, ask any man and he will tell you that you are a woman. My name is Roco.” He held out his hand. I took it.

"I’m Layne."

He asked about school and I told him I am a writer. From there we wound our way through literature, beginning with Ayn Rand and winding around the many Russian writers whom he admires and I generally ignore. He told me about the ones who died in Siberian exile and we marveled at the books which are their final reaching grasp on touching humanity at life’s end.

As he passed me on the street half an hour later, Roco called, “State St. is just full of beautiful women today. Merry Christmas!”

“He stole my line!” someone said. I turned to find a homeless man who told me that was exactly what he was going to say, but that I should still believe it even though I heard it first from a man with a badge. Men with badges are always taking things from him. It was his birthday last week and he wanted me to know that. And that he was “very inebriated.” He stared at my hand a full two seconds before shaking it. His name is Mark and he had to catch a bus, but he wanted me to know that if anybody ever says anything to me, I should just tell them that Mark thinks I am beautiful.

#stranger than i

Because you sensed it. Because you felt that it could be there, really and truly. Because we were, but we weren’t, but we could have been.

story scrap...

There came a day when a boy who was nearly a man rounded the bend of a hill into the view of brazen branches and a small but bustling village on market morning. He’d followed a finch from far away with no thought but to catch it. What to do with such a bird after capture, he had not considered. The bird and the boy wound their way through the crowded market flitting over puddles, ducking carts of apples and being generally shooed by merchants. The boy lurched for the finch, who was feeling safe as she caught her breath upon a fencepost, but a shift in the wind sparked a golden glint in the distance; the glint captured him. He did not even see the finch fly to freedom.

rootsthatclutch

W. B. Yeats

ldeyling-blog

#pilgrimsoul

pieholers-blog-blog

Pick up the sword, Share the guilt. To cross the sword Just grab the hilt. A he and she who cross Will surely shed some blood: One grabs a coin to toss, One falls where other stood. Live to tell the tale Both in even match. In an oblong duel She will fall, he catch. Must wonder why, Over her frame, - it hurts to die - He played the game.

One of them used to watch the way her straw-colored hair flew out the window in the rear view of his VW bus. She had a weird habit of collecting dry weeds and arraigning them in mason jars. He loved it. Once he told me he thought it was so cute he could just crush the jar in his hands. I loved his eyes when he was watching her.

The other one married her. He has dull eyes. My private opinion - those eyes can't hold enough of her at once to even try to love her fullness. When I think of her now, I wonder what he thinks about her weeds. And if she ever thinks of the one who watched her.

Kaleidoscope Soul

I am the girl with a burning heart.

I have words like a waterfall and

in my eyes are sights unknowable;

dimensions and years and souls

have left their portraits here.

Within my caverns are warm

hearth fires, splitting earthquakes,

raging holocausts, and forests of mist.

I will not hide. I will not run.

Unrequited is an ugly word.

Pain will not snuff me out.

I will emerge. And I will be free.

#burning one #braver #lionheart

No, it isn’t better for a passing comment that is not an apology. I’ve never hated any spot of weather like I loathe the East Coast snow that has prolonged your presence on this continent.

Lakeside Candle & Soap Co.

There are candles burning at my bedside tonight. The window is ajar so that I can hear the rushing wind. What a stormy season in Santa Barbara. James Taylor is singing about Carolina and my mind is wandering. It takes me back to another stormy season - five, maybe six years ago. High school, I drove to the Lakeside Library and laid reading outside in my white truck, parked under the pepper trees. A wandering spirit overtakes me when it rains. I wandered that day, climbing trees and talking to strangers. My restless feet took me down the street, past the post office and into the Lakeside Candle and Soap Co. on the corner of Woodside and Main. I meandered through, touching everything, smelling some, talking to Bobo, the parrot who occupied a man-sized cage in the corner. I was enjoying fairy illustrations on some greeting cards when the tallest man I've ever seen stepped in from a back room and introduced himself as Tomas (TOH-mas). He was around thirty-five with broad shoulders and a disproportionately small head. We shook, his massive hand engulfing mine. Over the next hour, Tomas told me his story - how he had dressed as a monk for a book report in elementary school earning him his nickname (what his real name was, he wouldn't say) and about his two-year-old daughter. We talked about God and about Lakeside and about my literary aspirations. I bought a candle that day; round with a colorful, stained-glass pattern. I went back to visit Tomas twice after that. His shop closed before the end of the subsequent summer. But that candle is burning on my table this night, and I am thinking about that stranger who is, in a way, my friend. "Everywhere, in every town, in every street, we pass, unknowing, human souls made great through love and adversity."

-Frank Borzage "Street Angel"

#stranger than i

thedbldee

Penmanship Poetry #24

"I’m gonna stay 18 forever"

There will be an end to this. I will not spend the remainder of my life feeling this way. My heart will change, my life will shift and this will end. I will be more for it. Everyone will be more for it. I will not run.

“Can I give you a New Year’s kiss on your forehead?” he asked, apprehending me on the first staircase landing.

“No, thank you, but hug me dearly!” is what I should have said. Memories in skin linger long after memories in mind have faded. I wonder when I’ll stop feeling his lips on my face.

When my twice-mended heart broke a third time, the kindly Almighty gave me a new one. Unbroken, it still loves. The power of process, miracle ever found in the middle, is yet in my favor but a blow like this moves me backward about four spaces and six weeks.

He looks kindly on me but is foolish and selfish in expression. To hold me nearby but not to have me for real.

Two A.M. is no time for quick thinking and I will apologize for being darling about sweeping aside my bangs and proffering a kissable forehead. Undiminished, if my friend had prized my heart above his own, he’d have kept the opportunity from me. A sob escaped before I reached the second landing. I cried in the new year.

Limbo

...that place between dreams and awake where Tinker Bell is in love with Peter Pan, in between the most real kind of living and the odd sensation that this is not my life, between what I can touch and what my spirit is exploring (sometimes without even telling my mind), between the memory of my imagined picture of life here and they way life is here.

Stripped of the barricades I had built to hide behind. Pushed from my place sure footing. Transplanted to a world where my last name holds no sway. Asked for every single thing to which I once clung to impress. Asked for every dream. Life course altered. Lurid sheets of false identity torn away. Stripped of even the ambition to be ambitious. No rights. No glory. No assurance of recognition – ever. He doesn’t want to share His fame with me. He gave me His life and He wants mine. Moving through my days encapsulated in the moment after the Almighty asks me for my life and I’ve given it. The struggle within that moment is very clear, very sure; so painful, but thus easily pinpointed. What do you do in the moment immediately after? How do you live after the all-encompassing, “Yes, Lord,”?

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