sidewalk scribbling

Sunday morning dawns tentatively, gently, like a mother with her fingers on the curtains around her child’s bed in the hospital.      The market square is deserted – last night’s revelry discarded like clothes at the beach. Broken glass from friendly bottles of yesterday catches the sunrays, breaking into spots of rainbow.  The trash cans are overflowing, there are stains you don’t want to identify on the cobbled stones of alleys, dried rivers of joy that cannot be contained in a human body.  A few unashamed pigeons peck away at the remains of late night burgers, cold fries, sticky mayo, brown vomit. The sun suddenly breaks free of the clingy, gloomy clouds and there is a break in the gray – the blue of the sky almost golden with the sun which is but a blinding smear you can only look at with your eyes closed.  It lights up the fragile leaves that stick out plainly on the branches of trees.  That is just how Autumn is – a tragic ma...

September 16 They are insidious creatures that hide in my pillowcase, crouch behind my ears, hang on to me with their nails digging into my scalp, tiny deep blue imps, conjured in times of idleness, times of distance, powered by the insecurity that courses through my veins. They carve messages into the walls of my brain, paint my emotions a heavy gray that overwhelms, drowns, dives from my heart to the bottom of my stomach, billowing further down my legs, disappearing and leaving a deep vacuum, an absence like a whirling vortex, a black hole that drains me of energy, rationality, thought, that drains me of me. It is like being kidnapped, overpowered, blindfolded and thrown into the back of a moving car, like being shoved into the corner with a vise around my head so that I can’t turn away, can’t see the light filtering in through the curtains behind me writing messages of love in the dusty script of sunrays, so that I can’t see the signs of love that float around quietly, wai...

October 24 When I sit on the door step of my little balcony, I sometimes feel like a baby giraffe because my legs seem too long and gangly, my knees too knobby. The step is like my meditation spot. It is not particularly comfortable but usually when I am perched there it is quiet, and peaceful. It overlooks the alley and yes, there are the dark green dumpsters but there are also a lot of trees, tall, short, round, full. As Fall slowly packs up to leave, the bright yellows and reds are darkening to a rustier orange, more moldy brownish, and the wind has been flying around crazily, shaking the boughs and branches, making the leaves fall. There are two trees that I am likely to notice when I first look up from my knobby knees – one is sturdy with many branches and these days alive with tiny bright yellow leaves, the other is really tall and all his leaves are gone, its branches are skinny and bare. Today was the kind of day my eyes settled on the sad tall tree. The other da...