How to Unhammer

Is it sexist to think a man should be able to build something
At least a relationship
At least a life

But you couldn’t build lasting trust
And you couldn’t assemble furniture
That came with instructions
An entire 8x10 booklet
With numbered steps and illustrations

And you always said I was the one who needed to listen
You would scream in my face
Unaware of the jet black irony

Besides knowledge of literary devices, here’s
The ultimate difference between us:

When I say “listen” I mean, hear me
When you say “listen” you mean, obey

Lake Superior Redhead (from fall)

Sweetest Sagittarius, ever mysterious
Physically insatiable, emotionally unavailable
All I ever wanted was to keep you
Or keep you up all night talking

You said you wanna talk highs and lows
Well lo and behold, even without to have and to hold
We’ve still had some of our own
And my drama might not up to snuff
With some of your other skinny starlets
But I did always give it the old college theater class try

Let’s whisper about the night I stood on my bed screaming
In the most whiskeyed, tearful tantrum
A manic twenty-two year old had ever thrown
I think a threw a pity party every Friday night
Remember when I cried “don’t you wanna be with me!”
At you, aloof, turned off
In the battered doorway

I’m sorry to this man

Let’s pass notes about the sunlit mornings
I spent lying on my back in your white sheets screaming
For the hottest carnal joy
Because of you, so present
And closer than a ghost
Inside me deeper than a daydream
That I would never want to share

I’m not sorry, to this day

Passion was never the problem
The devil’s in the details and I swear that it was some form
Of magnetic black magic that held us together
Or rather
Kept pulling us back into that
Abysmal utter mess
Of tangled legs, twisted sheets
Smeared lipstick at 3 am
Mascara tears running away
Stealing your jeans, losing my rings
And the way we loved
My messy morning hair, and the way you used to make me
Glow like the most wicked, breathless, wretched angel

You Scare me like my Favorite Holiday (from fall)

When the final act of the summer
Bleeds into a fair weather fall
That was always our time to shine
In between twilight and midnight
In between rock-hard doorways
And loose-leaf autumnal, burning
Red poetry

My untrusting hips caught like a calf
Between the protective barbed wire
Of your calloused hard-working hands
The faint beating of my heart as silent
As every held-breath in a horror movie
Intermingling of fear and butter and salt

A Halloween murder mystery
Two victims two villains
Too many times to count
How intensely you ravished me
We never carved our names into an oak tree
That I know of, but God damn
I can leave notches in your bedpost like nobody’s business

I wanted to be the queen of your damned
Handmade headboard

I wanted your Giants jacket draped over
My pale shoulders, instead of
The weight of the world
I wanted to have everything
To know everything
But I didn’t have a clue

I’m sorry, it was me who killed this
Miss Always Right
With a body like a revolver and an attitude like a lead pipe
In the living room in your work boots
That careless killer smirk
And wearing nothing else

Black and White (from August)

I thought I was done writing about you, maybe

A sonnet here or there or a love poem for our wedding

But never for this ice you injected into the something

Borrowed, something blue, of my veins

But I was the one who held up insides over head

Guts gold sparkling like a championship belt

But delicate as a tennis bracelet

I presented the slender palor of my inner arm 

I said hey slim, pick your poison and plunge whatever 

Fatality into me you please 

And maybe I’ll die pretty 

We’ll always have downtown Austin, we’ll always 

Have the modem art museum in Denver 

We’ll always have this home we built, even

If it wasn’t always 50/50, even if sometimes it was 1950 

And I was so tired of trying to do all the housework by myself

While simultaneously inventing feminism

I should’ve made you carry me over the threshold

The way you made me carry the team 

To think, out of all the doormats in all the world

You walked into me 

Wolf vs a Lie (from August)

So this is how it feels
To feel everything, to feel nothing
To feel something with no name
Something that we rename

To turn our backs on our shared decision
To bleed a red ink incision
Down the heart of a vow that was supposed to feel
Everything, that was supposed to fill everything

Your cup runneth over while mine was always
At least half full, I had so much to offer you
But you would rather shout it from the top
Of the processed food chain, you wannabe
Fucking alpha, that you have so much to offer the world

I will stay stationary, white knuckling
The whites lines of this stationery
With white lies you make a folly of our fidelity
And my loyal consistence, my empty mirror existence
You make me a fool and an immaterial witness
My fangs are no longer the sharpest tool in the shed
I can’t fix this, you take and you take
But isn’t there something I can take to heal
This ad nauseam still sickness

The sweet little girl who never dared breathe “no”
With pale pink lips and a big black bow
Let the phone slip, let’s pin a split black ribbon
To our overcoats

I Used to Rock

I was dragged out of California and into Austin, Texas at the beginning of my young-adult social life. It was amazing to exit the petty fishbowl of high school and enter this whole other world of nighttime and flashing lights. I loved the loud-ass music that cheered me on to dance until 2 am. This was a kind of heat and energy that transcended time and space. So when I hit Austin I was ready to burst into new clubs resembling the ones I had just left in LA. But even if I could find a club, who would go with me? It seemed hopeless. But that all changed when I finally became friends with the shyest boy in the world.

Dating my boyfriend when I was 19 threw me into the open arms of a viciously warm group of punk-hipsters. Whatever they were, these kids loved music. Every member of the friend group seemed to be in at least one band, and before I knew it, I was invited to tag along to a million little shows. This was the shock to my system I had craved. Hard and fast and loud, and I reveled in this rebirth right in the eye of the storm: the mosh pit.

Moshing is living with all five senses on overdrive. It's a marriage of rage and mirth that could never exist otherwise. It's a pack of unruly and vehemently autonomous people moving as one body. One extreme part of a communal whole, a mosh pit feels the way we were always told church would feel. One night when I kicked off my vinyl red stilettos to dance a little easier, someone came down hard on my tiny foot. To this day I can still see the hazy shadows of where that massive bruise once lived. I love it.

Heat and energy. As a manic depressive who was yet to be diagnosed, it makes sense how much that meant to me. A safe place for me to move my body brightly and violently as my mind moved. I grew and left that friend group, but they opened my eyes to truth behind this town's nickname, "The Live Music Capital of the World." When Zac and I first started dating, that's we would do- invite each other to shows. One night I really wanted to see Comeback Kid, and he had never seen them before, or moshed at any hardcore show before, but he was right there with me. I wasn't a girl that was easily impressed, but man, I was impressed. I hardly remember the show, but I remember his smile. And the very simple fact that I mirrored it all night long.

There used to be a venue called Red 7, and it seemed to be where rock lived. I took my best friend to a small show there the first time she came to Austin. I saw The Adicts there, and moshed until my feet hurt, and until my arms hurt from everyone's spiked-jacket-shoulders. The venue is now called Barracuda, and is where Zac and I saw Russian Circles on Saturday. What happened in the years between those two shows is awful, but minor.

Zac and I weren't together, and I was instead dating a complete idiot. I really wanted to see Cold World, so this guy took me. He never wanted me to do what I wanted to do, didn't see why I would mosh, but I broke away anyway to go dance in the pit. He didn't come with, of course. I was jamming, having fun on my own, but someone in there collided with my face, a little too much. I remember being alone on the floor, trying to answer questions, and an employee trying to put a bag of ice in my hand. Later, homeboy was like, you probably got a really bad concussion (YES), I probably should've taken you to the hospital (YES).  What a winner.

So flash forward to this Saturday, I'm there with Russian Circles on stage and every blood cell in me is pounding to the overexcited beat of my heart. Part of me, habit or instinct, feels the need to be out in the pit, but part of me knows I'm happy to be safe, and comfortable, even if it means I'm in the back. It was overwhelming happiness: to know that with Zac's arm around me, I could close my eyes and feel the music & bang my head without a worry in the world. But also, when the music got more intense and I got more intense, that I could dance and jam in my own little space and Zac, nor anyone else, would judge me. There doesn't have to be a moral to this rant of a story, but if there is a moral, it's that literal metaphor: I got to close my eyes and experience all the beautiful things I wanted to experience, because I was there, fully present, and leaning on the best partner ever. I couldn't be happier.

at Red 7, January 2007

You Are What You Love

Have you ever thought about why you love the things you love? Recently I thought about why I've always loved ballet.

Ballet is beautifully strict. Each position and movement is either right or wrong. It's graceful, but so incredibly rigorous. But that austerity was always a huge comfort; I loved it. Every time I changed into my slippers and entered the classroom I entered a world where I knew what to expect. I knew who, and how, to be. In my teenage years, as life got more tumultuous,  I found solace in the discipline of ballet. Everyone had to follow the same rules, and everyone did. And in those days, I don't think I ever felt safer. When I stared at my reflection in the mirror, I saw a hard-working machine: full of severity, and devoid of self-doubt. That is who, and how, I had to be. When there were so many shaky moving parts in my life, ballet was my one constant. At some points, maybe we love what we love because we need to.

I don't really talk about why I quit ballet towards the end of high school. Because its not the happiest of stories. What happened is, my dad moved out, and my mom, my sister and I all had to start working. It was hard enough getting a ride to work with all of our busy schedules, so you can imagine how difficult it was to get a ride down to the studio. Was this my passion, yes? But it took so much time and money and it just wasn't working out. Luckily, I was able to get into theater at my high school, but I still missed my clockwork routine of dance. I missed the mirrors and my black leotard, the serene silence in between each track of classical music. I missed those rules, that safety. The hardest part in retrospect, is that I had to leave ballet at a time when I probably needed it the most.

All of this has a lot to do with my relationship with dance. I've always loved it, needed it, but stayed away in my adult life. I've told myself, that isn't me, that isn't for me. Yes, there are far worse aspects of my life associated with guilt and regret, but those feelings definitely loomed over my old love of ballet. But in the end, love is what brought me back to it. Zac and I were watching Mr. Robot, and two of the girls had a secret meetup in a chic downtown ballet class. Longingly, I confided, "I wish I could do ballet." All he said was, "What's stopping you?" That night he encouraged me to look up a ballet class. Told me it was okay for me to want this, that is was awesome for me to want this. That I, (a classic INTJ) don't need to over-analyze things, or overthink things when I should be feeling them. We love what we love because it makes us feel warm and fuzzy, or powerful, strong, and free. And when all that love is doing is boosting your life up the ladder of happiness and health? Then DO WHAT YOU LOVE.