love
I don’t think I ever gave you the map
But you know exactly how to navigate
An explorer
You speak winds
And you spy my North Star
You mark my terrain
With such certainty
You hand me your binoculars
And I see things I haven’t seen before
You hold my hand
And lead me to places I have never been before
I feel dizzy at the summit
It is so high
It is so beautiful
You wrap your arms around me
So that I won’t fall
Or perhaps
We are about fall
Together
We have been known to each other
Somehow
Somewhere
We must have
Why else can you move me like that
How is it that my breath animates you
And your gaze warms me
While my saliva quenches your yearnings
Your fingers walk my trigger points
And I am open as are you
A gateway to forgotten known
Where we once knew how to
Step lightly in eternity
Expanding and contracting times
Our lines blur as every part of us
Vibrate on the frequency of...
The waves gulping us into their bosoms
Sea
See?
We are our own ancestors
We are ancient and modern and everywhere
I see you seeing me
You see me seeing you
Or is it that I see me seeing myself?
Does that even matter?
Light gently pours through the window
Dilutes the darkness pooling in the room
NYC glows at night with I don’t know what
I hear sirens afar
But stillness hums on my eardrums here
You are caressing the canvas
With your eyes
With strokes of the brush
Paint dripping from the tip
While you contemplate the shapes
You stand in the faint glow
Tall and beautiful and vulnerable
It is two in the morning
My heart fills up with something
That feels like ocean
I reach for you
Then you me
Palmful of flesh in our hands
We are nourished by the warmth
And by the ordinariness of it all
It has been shuttered
More times than I care to remember
I glue all the pieces back together
Every single time
When the light shines through it
It is beautiful
Ray of light bouncing off of the cracks
And that
Takes
my breath
Away
Is that blood on your lips, you ask
It is your fault, I say
Each time I think of you,
I have to bite down on my lips
in this suspended un-reality
we caress our dreams and wishes
bathing in bliss
love is easily consumed reproduced then
it is wasted
we are wasted
cause just because
it seems fragile
and its beauty makes me uneasy
so i drop it
time and again
and once more
it somehow makes sense to me
this madness
i do not want it to shatter but
if it does
it would probably be
sadly comforting
but it is resilient
solid
and i unhold my breath
just for the moment
once again.
i wish to love you
the way i love the sun
with casual disregard
occasional gratitude
totally taking it for granted
with blind faith
that it will alway be.
People don’t change and that has been my experience. And that is a good thing.
Yes, we can make superficial changes and modify our behaviors. We can learn to eat better and we can adopt kinder responses to people and situations. Our viewpoints can shift and grow and we can learn to do things better and accept more and tame our impulses.
But in the core of core, we remain the same person. What moves us and, more importantly, what makes us rigid almost never budge. Our most protective instinct is like a core of the Earth that spins and determines the general workings of who we are. I don’t know for sure what shapes our basal m.o., but I’d say for 99.9% of the time, it’s like the black matter that refuses to be modified.
Almost everyone disagrees with me when I say this; many will also say that I’m so pessimistic. That’s cool. But I find it more peaceful and loving to deal with other people with this perspective and accept each person as they are with no expectations for change. You have two choices: you take it or you leave it. I want to be accepted and loved just the way I am. It’s hard for me to change things about myself even if I really want to (and these are superficial things!) and even if I try really hard. It’s not fair for me to expect this of others when it’s this hard for me. And I don’t want others to expect that of me. That’s too much and that’s not fair for anyone. This is especially true in an intimate relationship setting.
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you know nothing and everything about me
you don't know how i take my coffee
nor my best friend's name
but there are moments
you move me like you made me
you reveal hidden switches
and teach me secrets about me
my boundary blurs senses sharpen gravity disappears
we expand infinitely contract instantaneously
and time floats lazily sheltering me/you here/now
Honesty is so tricky.
It sounds like a virtue we all should strive for yet most of us don’t know really how to handle it. People speak as though they do value the quality/action yet it is often explosive and controversial and it can turn things very quickly.
I think about this alot. Partly because I’m in a position where I hear people says all the time that they’d rather hear an honest opinion. It’s been my experience that it is not true. Not at all. Very very very few of us can handle honesty. I’d like to think that I do; I’d like to think that I handle it with patience. I don’t like hearing about myself or that I have done something less than righteous but I’d like to think that I at least sit with it. It’s always rough, though.
I think deciphering the motivation of each case of honesty is helpful. Is it meant to hurt me? Is it meant to help me? Is it coming from a place of love? I also need to check myself: did I ask for things that I’m not ready to hear?; Am I too proud to open my ears?; or did I just want to be affirmed and I was passive-aggressive about it?
It has happened to me quite a number of times that I was told to give an honest opinion and then I opened my mouth only to realize that I was supposed to give them their expected version of “honest” opinion. This happened more times than I’d like it to happen. I am very weary when people ask me for my honest opinion. Because they don’t really mean that. People wants to hear what they want to hear and everything else is dismissed.
simply to sit across from each other to share
a meal stories smiles laughter
and some photos that you can never find on your cell phone
to drive in silence side by side
surrounded by the night
large orange moon looking out, for what it seems like, just us
to be in the space as me as you
not needing a touch a kiss nor embrace
because we are caressed by you me we here
to fall into sleep with the warmth of not your own
Like two happy children
my skin warming up to yours and yours cooling down to mine
to say good morning and making it a really good one
talking about nothing and everything while doing something else
and like a glimpse of can be.
you called me from Uppsala
hey
how are you, ma?
good, you?
your voice traveled the wire
and mine traveled back
a little delay and echo
i thought of the distance between us
and then of what does not concern time nor space
it is snowing
midnight has come and gone
i sit with a little lamp
snow is eating the sound
i can hear it
and i think to myself
how i love my children
it is so cold
it is so warm
i feel everything and
i realize nothing matters
the moment i cease to exist
i am the happiest
Photograph by Ingrid Hertfelder
Roy was a guardian of being.
Just like flowers, trees, winds, and a puppy. He said, “Universe is moving right on time with us. So move on.” He was always in the moment. All he dealt with was here and now.
It sounds wonderful but it is hard to go through life in that way when everyone else around him wanted more than that moment. People wanted friendship, association, love, relationships, hoping for a bit of crumbs in any shape or form… which created the need for past and future; which created necessity for remembering and planning. Roy was not that person. He was always only in the moment. Hard and sincerely. In that moment, he meant everything he did; he meant every words he said; he felt everything he felt. There was no lie or deception in that. But because the rest of us don’t know how to deal with that truness of being, he had to lie and deceive and manipulate, so that he can somewhat sustain a facade of being a human and move through this world in flesh.
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I can't smell it
I can't touch it
If I try to grab it
It will escape through my fingers
Teasing me with memories of it
It is not meant to be seen
I can't taste it
I might have heard it in your
Voice
But I can't say for sure
I feel it
Though
Strongly
Deep within
It ties me to you and
You to me
Its flow
Excites me
Frees me
Upsets me
Saddens me
It insists on its presence
Like a little child then
It withdraws
Making me
Doubt my sanity
I've been pregnant
With agony
For a long long time
So long a time that
I thought my baby turned into
A great stone
It pressed me
Inside out
I dragged my feet
Everywhere
My stone baby was
Not warm not soft
Rough and sharp
It scraped me
Inside
It won't let me
Forget
Exquisitely heavy deep
And hallow
the thing is
it has to be exactly
the shape the feel the odor
substitution never
never
suffice
I curse freely in front of my children. I have been a potty mouth all my life, in Japanese and in English, and most likely I will continue to be so. I saw an Instagram quote saying, “Libras are fluent in at least five languages: English, Profanity, Sarcasm, Truth, and Love.” Yes, we are.
For the first fews years after my kids’ were born, I thought maybe I should stop or at least curve my cursing. I sort of tried; but it would inevitably pop up here and there. Old habits die hard. Then I had a second thought and I stopped stopping.
I told my kids that I will keep talking the way I always have (including cursing and what not) and I personally see there is nothing wrong with that: however, they are not allowed to curse. Not until they are 18 and they are out of my house and making their own money. At that point, they can express themselves however they want and accept the rewards/consequences of their choices. Until then, I told them that they are not allowed to curse anywhere because if they do people are going to think that I’m a horrible mother and some child protection people will take them away and put them in foster homes and they won’t live with me ever again. They were pretty young but they understood that my threat was not entirely true, yet, they got that I meant business.
It has to be high to be low
There has to be left to be right
If you keep walking East
You will end up in West
You can’t taste sweetness without
Salty bitter spicy
So you open your arms wide
And you just take it
Take it all
Because it is all the same thing
One can’t be without the other
Sadness and joy do not sit at the opposite ends
You gotta have depth to achieve highest high
You can only grow with the roots that dig this earth
There is no line between love and hate
Thick or thin
One can morph into the other
Just like that
And sometimes it hurts so good
It is all the same
So you just take it
As is
Because it just is
Because you just are