A Place to Sit

His black hair sprung out from beneath his patchy red baseball cap and was matted with grease to his shoulders. His lower lip jutted out, revealing a row of rotting teeth. His baggy gray shirt hung slack to his knees for it had barely a body to cling to, and his shoulders were more like wire hangers fro, the dry cleaner than organs of flesh and blood. The tongues of his high tops were pulled up past his ankles but the last thing I wanted to look at were his feet, because if I focused on them, I could feel in my own feet the absolute sacrifice that every step cost him. But then again, staring at his face was not an option either because in his dark eyes, I saw in behind them a thousand more darknesses, knowing that every morning for him ushered in one more day of misery. And yet gaping at his wiry body made me hungry with misery and so I had nowhere, absolutely nowhere, to look, and yet my eyes absolutely could NOT look at anything BUT this man. And suddenly and ashamedly I realized I was grasping, no clinging to my purse for fear that by stealing it, he would make me a pauper in a red baseball cap trudging aimlessly and painfully through a park in the middle of France.
I let go of my purse as he slowly past and he didnt lunge for it. He didnt even look at it. He just winced and stayed on his straight course down the path to a fountain in the middle of the park.
I wanted him to take off his shoes and dip his blisters in the fountain to reprieve him if only for a moment from the oppressive pain and heat of shoes. But he didnt. He just looked so immensely grateful for a place to sit.

I hate that society has made me afraid of a man that was just looking for a place to sit.

Being a Sea.belt

I am the seatbelt
For the adorable demon
With the merciful pacifier
Not exactly fulfilling its covenant
To Pacify.

Yet I feel the childs
Laugh in my hands
And my lightmare becomes
a goal worth fulfilling
To Dream.

The conductor sounds his call
From Front to Caboose and the child
Tries to unbuckle
My hands to satisfy his unfulfilled dream
To Explore.

But I am too busy
Exploring the need of safety
To allow the child to jump and grow.
I am too selfish
To pacify my own dream to explore.

Because I want to do the growing.

Ireland

Currently I write from Ireland, one of the most beautifully green places I have ever been. We rode out bikes around the island of Inishmore while it rained continuously yesterday, and we rode up to a cliff that basically looked like it was at the end of the world. I peered over the edge while lying on my stomach, feeling electrified and terrified and alive as I stared the idea of death in the face. It inspired this poem (Please be patient with my extremely amateur poetry. It's not good but I am learning).

Dangling
The cliffs of indecision
Careful patterns of disgust
Mingled with mountains of moss
That accidentally make you a better person.

To peer down is to scream
To climb upwards is to terrify
To jump off is so suddenly appealing
So you rush forward and hurl with the force
Of the stars that scratch your throat as you pass.

And yet you hesitate
For fear that it hurts
When you've hit rock's bottom
With body so separate except you're still
Beating heart that longs for one last breath.

And it hangs mid-air
Still beating but you've jumped!
You've decided to fall of the edge of the world
With the hopes of becoming that better person.
While the organ dangles bodiless and continues to beat.

Today we are in Dublin. We went up to Sligo to visit the grave of the poet William Butler Yeats, and now we have been exploring Dublin. Tomorrow we will head over to Trinity College. I hope all of you are well. I appreciate all your feedback on my work, and would love to hear your updates on your life as well.

Your Hands!

Please please please for a class assignment, I need you to tell me about the greatest accomplishment you have done with your hands!

Thanks!

These Hands, Those Hands, His Hands

So this is a long one, but I am making this the theme of my trip to Europe, for those who are interested. It is very much a first draft so I am looking for any and all feedback.

These hands. Those hands. His hands.

 

These hands. These wrinkly old grandma hands. My cuticles spend their time in a constant state of disrepair, red and pointy, abused and patchy. My fingernails are jagged from the grinding of my teeth against them. Sometimes that teeny patch of web in between my fingers dries out and I have to give special lotion treatments to that area in specific. I have more lines on my palm than a map of the streets of New York City. Elaine Zick once told me that I have the ugliest hands that she has ever seen. I haven’t forgotten that comment. I remember it when I look down daily at my prematurely aged hands, and I will remember it when I am trying on wedding rings one day. There is really no doubt about it. I have ugly hands.

 

But these hands are my hands. They wear a ring that my father made out of a quarter. They have written novels. They have dug holes in my mother’s flower garden and planted Zinias every Mother’s Day that I can remember. They have held the hands of boyfriends, and best friends, and nephews and nieces, and all the world’s most important people. They’ve attempted playing basketball. They’ve failed several tests. They may have flipped someone off once too. But they have also held the fork that fed my frail old grandpa peas and carrots in his last month of life. They have held onto a priesthood holder’s arms as he dunked me into the water to save a soul. These hands are my hands, and ugly though they may be, they at least mean something to someone. These hands mean potential.

 

Those hands. The hands of the baker are confident as he kneads his sturdy fingers into the bread. His fingernails are meticulously clean though lightly dusted with a layer of flour from index finger to wrist. The lines on his palms that could once read his future are now blurred by burns that only speak of past. He is missing the top segment on his left pinky finger.  The spots of age are beginning to form, but they are merely spots of wisdom. Those hands are ripe with wisdom.

 

Those hands send his memories into the wheat that he sells to his consumers. Those hands represent the love of the honey that he weaves into the dough. Those hands have waved goodbye to a wife and daughter as he boarded the bus to Poland. They have shook in fear and trembled in the cold beneath a tent that scarcely kept out rain and didn’t keep out the sounds of rampaging war. Those hands held up a soldier, allowing the O negative blood to leak all over his hands as he hoisted this man to the nurse’s tent. They have pulled the trigger that fired the bullets at his neighbor. These hands have held his daughter’s cheeks and told her that he was home and that he would never leaver her again. Those hands are his hands. They vend the bread that sustains my life. 

 

His hands. Soft and open at all times. His hands. Splintered with the efforts of his labors as a carpenter. His hands. Weathered with time and experience, but the opposite of leathery. His hands are strong because in them, he has held the weight of the world. They bare imperfect scars of ultimate perfection in the middle of his palms. His hands are the ones that yours crave to hold the most, but they have already held my metaphorical hands that have fed my grandpa. They have held my metaphorical hands that have flipped someone off. They have held those hands that have killed a man. His are the hands the hands. His hands represent sacrifice. His hands are the bread of life.

 

These hands. Those hands. His hands. These are the hands that make up the human existence. In my exploration of hands in Europe, I hope to weave a journal that I can hold in my hands.  

Download Shaun Johnson - Think About Me

The Biter

With fingers clenched to quench my vice.

To just give in would be so nice.

I will bite my palms, not once, but twice.

Will I succumb? Just role the dice.

Its Masochism I cannot bare.

The urge to nibble is always there.

Strips of pain my teeth will tear.

It's just too late, I do not care!

With slowly dwindling fingernails.

I have hang nails to rival males.

With little stubs instead of finger tails

To the Addiction God I give my hail.

For my mother, on her birthday.

A List of Lists

I'm sitting here missing my boyfriend and watching a thunder storm while a rat crawls on top of and occasionally nibbles at my feet. On my lists of never-before-nows, I have to say that this particular "now" goes near the top. I've also never before now been in Rexburg, Idaho, but I HAVE been in the Hinckley Building before, which is strange because there is one in Provo too. This Hinckley character must have been a popular guy. 

I find it ironic that my journey to such a big place begins in this town so small. For those of you who do not know, I will shortly be boarding a plane and heading over to Europe, something that I have been attempting to do for a semester now, and am finally accomplishing. It feels like longer. It feels like a lifetime of waiting for Europe has now culminated in these final moments, and of course I am feeling nothing short of inadequate and unprepared. I'm feeling very kindly toward America, even Rexburg, as I brace myself to leave it. I will admit that there is just the teensiest bit of apprehension present on my Current Feeling Lists as well.

I have a List of Lists as I prepare to leave, starting with To Do Lists, To Pack Lists, To Buy Lists, and To Become Lists.  But as I list the qualities of exactly who I would like to become and exactly what I would like to become on the Big and Fancy BRITISH LITERATURE PILGRIMAGE, this particular list seems woefully incomplete. At the very top and strangely to bottom of this list as well is that I would like to become "Sierra Robinson." What a silly thing, right? I am, of course, already this Sierra Robinson character, and yet becoming her is at the very top of my list of lists.

I hope you enjoy the process as I write to discover precisely who she is.