I will not update my blog again until late this Thursday. Even though Stefano is totally nervous I am going to insist that we take a picture of the two of us together in our non-sweatpant-clothing before we leave for his university on Thursday. :-)

new family.

Today I made this drawing for Stefano's aunt because it is her birthday. We are going to have something GREAT for dinner tonight. I love being here. I feel completely loved and at home with Stefano and nothing has ever felt so good.

The unwieldy Apple.

Here is Apple (Stefano calls her his furry daughter). She carries her toy dog Pluto around in her mouth with his tail across her nose and she just stands there and looks at you like, "What?" and she looks totally silly and I love it. But she will not take Pluto if you try to hand him to her and if she is holding him in that funny way where his tail looks like a silly moustache across her nose and she sees you coming with a camera she immediately spits him out and acts like she has never even met him before. I am still determined to catch a picture of her with him... somehow. This morning Apple came into the dining room and she had a part of a newspaper in her mouth and she was running under the chairs and I was trying to get her before she ate the paper and Stefano's mom was trying to catch her on the other side while shouting in Italian and laughing. And she had us both going crazy. I love this dog.
I had to post a picture of Apple today because neither Stefano or I are fit to be photographed. We just sit around in sweatpants and he keeps going over his thesis while I draw. We will both be SO HAPPY when Thursday has come and gone and he is finished.
Today I had my therapy over Skype. It was just as hard as it always is but it is SO MUCH BETTER to be able to just go into the other room when it is over and sit next to Stefano and hug him. It is SO much better. Every morning I wake up here I still feel just totally relieved to be here. When I wake up Stefano has already been up and working for at least two or more hours. Then I sit in his really nice sunny warm kitchen and drink coffee. Then I grab my sketchbook and go and sit as close to him as possible without being on his lap. I feel so much better when I am here- I feel like during my therapy today I was able to talk about things that are normally almost impossible to tolerate and even making my art is easier. Sometimes my work is so violent and/or descriptive of the past that I am not able to finish drawings I start or sometimes even start a drawing. I have been able to sit near him though and know this is 2008 and my dad is about 5000 miles away and I am more than safe and so I feel less scared to write and draw whatever I want. I will start to take more pictures and post them here soon.
When I was here last time I 'missed' my return flight and so we had to buy a new airplane ticket. A one way ticket was more expensive than a round trip ticket so we bought a ticket for me to fly home and to return on the 24th of this month. The point here is this: I have no return ticket yet. This makes both of us feel better. :-)

Italian.

Yesterday Stefano's mom picked up half the items in their kitchen and said the name of each object in Italian. I think I remember 4 words. Although I AM able to count to ten in Italian now. I have never learned another language before. I am just trying not to get too frustrated.
No photo today because Stefano has my camera and I do not know where he put it. Right now he is reciting what he has to say on Thursday and I feel like I can not interrupt unless I am bleeding profusely from an appendage. He is extremely stressed out and is working a huge amount. It will be GREAT when Thursday has come and gone. It is hard to see him worry so much. I am just glad I am here. Ugh. It is really hard to watch the person you love struggle and feel like there is nothing you can do to help. All I can really do is just sit near him while he works.... so I am going to go back to that now. I will try to locate the camera tonight. :-)

WONDERFUL!!!

I am in Italy with Stefano. :-) It is WONDERFUL WONDERFUL WONDERFUL. I got here last night right around 9pm. As I was traveling here I felt like I was heading home and when I saw Stefano I knew I was home. I am so happy and excited and grateful to be here- it is incredible. The trip was long (24 hours) but it went incredibly fast because I was so excited. The first flight (I flew to Zurich and then Zurich to Rome) was interesting because we had such extreme turbulance that I had my first "OMG. I am going to die." airplane moment. And I have never been scared about flying- so that is to say it was pretty bad. Once I got to Rome I took a train to Stefano's town. The second the train stopped I hit the button to open the door and I jumped out and THERE HE WAS!!!! YEAH! I apologize for all of the words in all caps and all of the exclamation points but it is just SO WONDERFUL TO BE HERE AND I AM SO SO SOOOOOO HAPPY!!! :-)
Stefano is going to graduate in four days. He is studying and reading and rereading his thesis. He is quite nervous. Luckily it is almost over and then he will be able to stop worrying. Then we will be able to just sit together and stare at each other and smile. :-) Right now he is studying and I am sitting approximately 1/4 of an inch away from him drawing and reading "Italian for Dummies". Yikes.
Anyway- so I made it here and I feel better than I could even begin to describe. I will try to write every day and tomorrow I will try to post a picture or two. :-) I am SO HAPPY that I am here! What a relief it is to be right where I belong.

Arrivederci.

My next post will be from Italy. I love you Stefano. See you SOON!

"La-dee-dah." Oh Lloyd...

In 29 hours I will leave for the airport and in a mere 53 hours I will be getting off a train and jumping into Stefano's arms!! :-) This morning I was talking about how completely excited I am and I was really lucky to get this picture of Lloyd. I was just able to capture the look of excitement on his face as I was talking about my trip.

The worst thing I can imagine- I hope it has already happened.

Today is a hard day for me. I had therapy yesterday but since I will miss my Friday session I am going to have one more session tonight at 5pm. Yesterday's therapy was hard. I mean- all of my sessions are hard but yesterday I talked about something that was so painful it has taken me more than four years of therapy to begin to speak about it. So yesterday was rough. Now today I go back for one more session. The thing that is helping me get through this is knowing that in just a few days I will be with Stefano. I leave here on Thursday evening and will be with him 24 hours later. I will be with him soon and I just keep thinking of that.
Today is hard not just because I have one more therapy session but because four years ago on this day the person (P.) who helped me to find my therapist- four years ago on this day P. took his life. This happened just a few months after I had started my therapy. It was terrible, it was a nightmare and I felt like I was not going to be able to survive it but of course I did. P. was divorced and had two daughters who were 11 and 15 when he took his life. His older daughter S. was an artist and we had a strong connection. S. was extremely close to her father and when he took his life S.'s world quite literally turned upside down. The last time I saw S. was about two weeks before her eighteenth birthday. She was in a psychiatric hospital (she had tried to take her own life several times) and was about to be moved to a different one- supposedly one of the best in the country. I had not seen S. in a long time and we were happy to be together- even if we were in a visiting room in at a psychiatric hospital. She showed me her drawings and we talked. She was really excited about the fact that she was just a few days from eighteenth birthday. After that night we emailed a couple of times and then I did not hear from her for a while. I wrote her an email asking her how she was doing, how had her birthday been, etc. Two days later I got an email back that just said: "Please call me at this phone number." I called the phone number right away and it was the telephone number of S.'s aunt. She told me S. was dead. Thirteen days after S. turned eighteen she had committed suicide(in the psychiatric hospital).
Losing P. was painful but losing S. was tragic. It was beyond tragic- but I have no other word for it. So that is what the tattoo on my fingers means quite literally- I love you P.S.
It is still extremely hard for me to accept her death and the 'anniversary ' of her father's death (today) is really just another terrible slap in the face reminder that she is gone and it really makes me sad beyond words.
The world will never know what it lost the day she took her life. But I know.
I go on and make art for both of us.

untitled (sketchbook page)

"Goodbye, Radio Girl"

This is a poem that my friend Betsy Wheeler wrote. It was originally published in issue #16 of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking, & Light Industrial Safety.

Betsy Wheeler
Goodbye, Radio Girl

           for Kate Hall

Your pink sweater— how it fits.  Your questions—
their wings, and their whys.  All of this is remarkable
but what we remember most is the way
your eyes went there and there. Your questions
and the bees acting like ladies on lunch.
Lucky bees and your questions are numerous.
Here is an answer held to my chest.
How about all this sunshine— it makes your sweater
seem all candyish and lamby.
Eyes up here, Radio Girl.
The most memorable part was the sheer number of all of you
out there and your fluttering hands.
How many of us there are.
Next question.
Her sunglasses are a reflection of your faces
in the crowd, her highlights, yes.
Come here a moment and mind the steps up.
It's like a moving picture but everybody's smoking and nobody's eating.
Laughter, sure, but mostly in the lower registers. 
Mammalian.   How'd those bees find us again,
I'm sorry what did you say?  The answer to that is sometimes
but I wish it was never or always when they open the snack coffin.
I've forgotten my name but I know my place.
Your earlobes, Radio Girl, they seem important.
Or is it your mouth. Your pink sweater.  The way you fit here in floral.
There's a story here and I'm feeling ready to tell it. 
This is the way of the tribes.  Before we were here
we were elsewhere and where we are going is next,
so, Goodbye, Radio Girl! Goodbye to your holdings, our voices,
the bees and how they swarmed was the answer.

Lloyd is going crazy.

He is obsessed with Daisy. I like her too so we end up looking at her blog once a day.

I also want to note that the title of this picture is "Pink Lady". I love it.
One more thing: Daisy is also an actress (not just a model) and here is a great film she was in.

untitled

If you give a cat a pillow.

Two days ago this pillow fell off my bed and onto the floor. I just threw it on top of the blankets and Winston jumped right on it. HE HAS BEEN THERE FOR TWO DAYS. He only leaves the pillow to eat or use the litter box. He is obsessed with the pillow. He is completely happy though.

mixed media

Quick note.

I am ending the artconstellation contest but I wanted to thank the five people who wrote something for it on their blogs: Pinoy Entrecard, A Strange Life, My Mad House, Origena, and Jessieh Speaks. Thanks to all of you.

sketchbook

untitled (1.16.08)

The Bunnies & 'Cut Woman' drawing.

Here are the dogs that I have been taking care of for the past nine days. I don't know how it started but I always call them 'The bunnies'. She has FLAME ears, he is difficult to photograph because his fur is just so black, here is a drawing I made this morning after a nightmare and I usually have therapy on Monday's and Friday's but I have to have my session this evening instead of on Friday. I am (as usual) anxious as hell about therapy, but I am pretty happy because in 211 hours I will be in Rome! See you soon Stefano!

a poem by Noel Coward

Nothing Is Lost

Deep in our sub-conscious, we are told
Lie all our memories, lie all the notes
Of all the music we have ever heard
And all the phrases those we loved have spoken,
Sorrows and losses time has since consoled,
Family jokes, out-moded anecdotes
Each sentimental souvenir and token
Everything seen, experienced, each word
Addressed to us in infancy, before
Before we could even know or understand
The implications of our wonderland.
There they all are, the legendary lies
The birthday treats, the sights, the sounds, the tears
Forgotten debris of forgotten years
Waiting to be recalled, waiting to rise
Before our world dissolves before our eyes
Waiting for some small, intimate reminder,
A word, a tune, a known familiar scent
An echo from the past when, innocent
We looked upon the present with delight
And doubted not the future would be kinder
And never knew the loneliness of night.


This poem was on The Writer's Almanac today. I first read it a few years ago and I really like it.
I am leaving for Italy in nine days and there is SO MUCH TO DO before I go!

A few days before Frida Kahlo died she wrote in her diary: "I hope the exit is joyful - and I hope never to return - Frida"

Stockholm Syndrome: "describes the behavior of kidnap victims who, over time, become sympathetic to their captors. The name derives from a 1973 hostage incident in Stockholm, Sweden. At the end of six days of captivity in a bank, several kidnap victims actually resisted rescue attempts, and afterwards refused to testify against their captors."

The cute cat picture trick.

I really am posting this picture of Winston because what I just posted below this in combination with the fact that I have therapy tomorrow has me literally feeling sick to my stomach. So here it is- the oldest trick in the book- the cute cat cover up one-two. Highly effective I think.

sickening: I am worrying that people might be 'put off' by this post.

Today I updated my post about the artconstellation contest by asking people to include a link to the following site- HPP Earth: International Domestic Violence Information

You do not have to link back to this blog, mention this blog or say anything about this contest in your post to be included in the contest.

The statistics I posted here are from: http://www.gmu.edu/facstaff/sexual/brochures/WorldStats2005.pdf

One more statistic: Chances that you have never met a victim of abuse: ZERO.

Yes, I blog when I am in Italy.

When I was there in September we went to Florence and here is my favorite picture from that trip. When I went back two months later we stayed in Stefano's hometown the entire time. If you look in the November 2007 archives you will see a bunch of pictures of Stefano, his wonderful dog Apple and a very happy me. I hope we can afford to go to Venice for a day (if we do I will take a lot of pictures) but if we can't I don't care; I am happy to be able to just STAND next to Stefano. We will be able to travel more once I am moved there.

Today I found this great photo of Sam.

Sam died on Christmas Eve and I still walk around the house expecting to see him and then feeling sad. I found this great photo of him today and I was really happy about it. I took this right after he was shaved and this is the best picture that I have of him because it is actually possible to see his face. That crazy little expression is just exactly what he looked like. I want to just yell I WANT SAM BACK! Loss feels impossible sometimes.

carnival

There is a huge carnival in Venice from the 25th of January to the 5th of February and Stefano says it is incredible. We might go for one day when I am there. I have never been to Venice so I was excited about the idea but then I found these photographs from the 2007 carnival and now I am REALLY excited. It would be so great if this was my last visit and the next time I go I do not have a return flight. Stranger things have happened I know...

holding me down.

A week ago I was having nightmares every night. Now the nightmares have stopped but I am having these terrible 'body memories' and the thought of being on a bed almost gags me- literally. I have been sleeping less at night and then taking one or two naps during the day. It is still hard for me to even close my eyes when I first lay down but it is easier to do it during the day.
One of the things my father used to do was to choke me. I used to draw a lot of human anatomy into my art and so I just wrote off my obsession with the larynx as just some part of my 'weird interest in anatomy'. I have talked about it a lot in therapy but it is one of the things about the abuse (one of many things) that I feel almost obsessed with. This is disturbing too because today I was talking to my doctor about being obsessed with one idea and then realizing I am focusing on that idea to avoid some other terrible thought. Anyway- My father used to choke me and the basic thing was this- he would rape me and hold me down with one hand. It is really painful because I have a very early memory of him doing it to me when I was about four years old. I guess I could dissociate from a lot of the physical ways that he abused me but the choking was hard to dissociate from. I could have the sense of not being in my body- not even having one- but he would hold me down and I realize now that he was crushing my larynx with his enormous hand and it was like a knife in my throat. It is so sick and so sad and so painful to think about any of this- but I remember being terrified- terrified of my father, of what he was doing and then of the fact that I was almost unable to breathe. But then I remember this other feeling- the feeling I can only describe as a strange sort of relief. He used to suffocate me until I would pass out and it was this terrible series of events beginning with him raping me and then he was choking me and then it would start to be really painful and then I would start to have trouble breathing and then the sharp pain of his hand smashing in my throat was almost unbearable and then I could almost breathe not at all- and then just for one or two seconds I would feel a huge relief- right before I passed out. I remember him choking me and I remember thinking to myself that if I could just hold on and get through the first scary not being able to breathe part and then the pain and then the more pain and then the less able to breathe part- I remember when he would start to hold me down I would try to be really calm and almost just hope it would go fast to the passing out part. Or I would have a big bloody nose from him crushing my throat. It is so hard to imagine and it is so hard to let it stay for even a second on my mind in any kind of clear way. I can see the whole thing from outside of myself and I always think now- "But I must have been so little". And of course I was. My first memory of him choking/suffocating me is from when I was about four years old and so I see myself- small- a four year old is a small person and then he is on top of me and he is huge and weighs so much more than me and is so much larger than me. If I got a bloody nose while he was still 'on me' I would of course not do anything. I would just lay there. Blood going over one cheek of my face and I would wake up the next morning with a huge dried circle of blood on my pillowcase. I can only describe my mother's attitude about it (the blood stains) as 'annoyed'. And she took me over and over to get my nose cauterized but what a mystery to her! The cauterization never seemed to help! There was one small bathroom between my bedroom and the one where my father should have always been with my mom and I always wonder now- always- where did she think he was all of those nights and was she really sleeping? Now I feel sick I and I will call S. soon even though it is the middle of the night in Italy and I will wake him up and I just need to hear his voice to be pulled out of all of these old memories and then I try to close my eyes and imagine S. sleeping right next to me. I will be going back to Italy on the 24th of this month- less than two weeks. I am not sure exactly how long I will be there- between two and three weeks. I hope the next 12 days go fast. I need to hug S. and be hugged by him. It is silly but sometimes he squeezes me really tight and picks me up off the floor and it makes me laugh. In that moment when I am laughing or even now when I am remembering just how it feels- I know the past is far away from me now. I know I already did survive the nightmare. Now I just have to tolerate allowing myself to know about all of it. As my life gets better it is easier to take in. But it is always sad. It always makes me really sad. I hope that one day I will be able to think about my childhood and not sob.

fixed star

n. A star so distant from Earth that its position in relation to other stars appears not to change.
Its movements can be measured only by precise observations over long periods of time.

The first contest in Artconstellation contest history.

The winner of the contest will receive a shiny plastic Powell's Books gift card with a picture of a little astronaut on it (please see above) with a value of $60. This is how you enter the contest:

1. Write a post on your blog that focuses directly on the issues surrounding domestic and sexual violence (i.e. the lack of awareness, the misunderstanding of these crimes, the fact that most of these crimes go unreported, the shame that society places on survivors).

2. Please include in your post a link to the International Domestic Violence Information site (www.hotpeachpages.net/index.html), a link to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (www.rainn.org) and the telephone number for the National Sexual Assault Hotline (for people in the United States): 1-800-656-HOPE or 1-800-656-4673.

3. Leave a comment here letting me know where I can find your post or send me an email at artconstellation@gmail.com.

Contest deadline: February 14, 2008, the winner will be announced the following day. Please spread the word about this contest and thank you for entering. (NOTE: If you do not have a blog but would still like to enter the contest please email me your submission and it will be included.)

Mr. Picassohead

I think I am addicted to stumbling. This is fun to play with and the gallery is great. This is a great way to find images. Here is an incredible photograph. Here is a short video about an amazing artist. And here is the work of another interesting artist.
And a picture from NASA of the earth at night.

For: Fritter ;-)

Finger Shadow - video powered by Metacafe

36 seconds

Glenn Gould plays Variation 5 of Bach's Goldberg Variations (BWV 988)

sketchy cats (2008)

"The great enigma of human life is not suffering but affliction." -Simone Weil

colored pencil on paper (2008)

just back from therapy

Actually I just got back and calmed down enough to be able to type. It was really painful. But it was also good because I know I am making huge progress and my doctor told me that he is proud of me and that I am doing a good job. That helps. My mind always gets totally overwhelmed by all of the things from therapy and I get tired and sad. If I can not function very well or get a lot done today- oh well. I feel like I have done a week's worth of work and it is only 11AM.
I am dog sitting for the next week and I really love the two dogs I am taking care of. I am going to do the whole 'back into my pajama's' thing and then curl up in bed with the dogs and take a nap. This afternoon I will take them to their favorite park and let them run around. The park is great because it is large and filled with all kinds of dogs and it's ok if I don't feel like talking because most people are a little put off by the fact that I am still wearing my pajamas in the middle of the day. That's ok though- I would probably rather talk to a Jack Russell than their owner anyway.

before I walk out the door

Everything in me wants to just let myself put my pajamas back on and get back into bed. I want to hide under the blankets with an anti-anxiety pill, my favorite pen and a sketchbook. I have therapy in 35 minutes and although I know it is completely pointless to even say this- let alone think about it for more than 24 hours- I really do not want to go. I never want to go really. Unless something difficult has happened and I am struggling over it right in that moment. It is so much easier to go in and talk about some problem I am having in 2008 as opposed to going over pain from the past. I want to cry and hide. I think about how impossible this whole mess seems but I try to remember how far I have made it already, how much better my life has become, how good my life is now... But I still don't want to go. Even though I know that to keep going forward is the only way to get out of this hell. Healing is painful. It feels impossibly painful. I will try to write again later today or at least post a drawing. Off I go... psychologically kicking and screaming all the way.

pbgv.

There are a thousand reasons I love you.

I told S. one night that I had always wanted to shave my hair into a mohawk. Nobody had ever supported this idea. He said he thought it would be great. He told me he thought I would look cute. I think I will wait until we are married. See you in 18 days my love!

not a sublte metaphor

The photograph of this drawing is not good but I don't have the drawing anymore. I was unhappy when I was making it and I just kept working and working until it became so black in the middle that it is almost impossible to see the head at the center of the drawing. I had put it together in pieces- starting one drawing and then another and then taping them all together until I was finally working on the whole image and all of the parts were coming together. I hated it though and one day I took a tiny pair of scissors and cut out the woman's face in the bottom left corner of the drawing and threw the rest of it away. Unfortunately before I got into therapy I destroyed a lot of my work. I did not know it at the time but I was trying to explain something about my violent past. I could not even look at it though and I just wanted to cut myself free from the mess and throw it away. I am surprised that I took a picture of it.

When not in Rome. (Back to the black.)

This is my Thursday night, pre-therapy, I want to cry, I feel like I am going to be sick to my stomach post. To the right are three pictures that I took tonight when S. and I were on Skype. It helps me to see us smiling and laughing because I am reminded that some parts of my life are really good. But before I go into the not great parts of my life that are making me feel nauseous right now I just wanted to mention that the reason I am wearing my crazy hot pink cat hat in the pictures is just because I was cold.
If it is hard for a non-dissociative person to fully understand dissociative disorders then it is just a sick joke of nature that a person who actually has multiple ways of thinking has to try to grasp it. For the first few years of my therapy as the memories of the abuse were just starting to come back to me I kept saying that I felt like my whole life had been a lie. That is not really how I feel now but maybe I can explain that another time. It is just that I have lost my entire original family. And it is just weird to lose an entire group of people like that. It is like one day they all just died in an accident; but it is not that. I mean that is the feeling of it- they were my family and so many of my memories and ideas were connected to them. Now I am trying to recover and I do not have connections to any of them.
My father used to rape me and he would threaten to hurt my mom or my sister if I fought him or tried to do anything to stop him or to tell anyone. And like something from some terrible book that I would never want to read; when I was young (while he was raping me) he would threaten to kill my cat. If I tried to stop him- I mean. Anyway- I still live with a lot of 'kid-fear' that my father will one day come after me and hurt me because I am telling what really happened in our family. That fear is just one of the many many issues that I have to try to resolve through my therapy.
Anyway- my mind jumps around. I know everybody probably has some of that- but it is more like my mind just switches off. And then back on again but I have lost my thought and suddenly have a new one. And now since I wrote about my father threatening me I have totally switched around in my mind, lost my thought and am crying. I cry a lot. I cry more than anyone else I have ever known.
Before Christmas I was upset: I was worried about the holidays and all the sad feelings I might have and the fact that I have no connection to my 'original' family anymore. I was also worried because I knew I would not see my therapist for two weeks. Of course the two weeks are gone and now I am terrified about going back. It's not that I haven't thought about all of this mess from the past over the last two weeks- far from that- I was sad around Christmas and even though I spend 98% of my time hating my 'original' mother it was hard because this was the first year that she did not even send a Christmas card. And then on Christmas Eve one of our cats, Sam, had a stroke right in front of everyone and had to be put to sleep that same night.
So the two weeks off from therapy have not exactly been a 'vacation' and it is not like I ever get a break from my mind which runs overtime and has more than one thought at a time. Usually I call S. as soon as I walk out of my therapy and most of the time he has to tell me that he can't understand what I am saying because I am crying so much.
I have been writing and deleting and rewriting this for almost 90 minutes now. Now I am just going to stop myself. I know this post is totally choppy and not organized in a good way and maybe does not make perfect sense- but neither does my mind.
On the nights before therapy- when I am really scared and upset- I always come back to this Winston Churchill quote: "If you're going through hell, keep going."
Here is a drawing that I made about my father threatening me.

'my mind and my heart move with all that move me'

The Ball Poem
by John Berryman

What is the boy now, who has lost his ball,
What, what is he to do?  I saw it go
Merrily bouncing, down the street, and then
Merrily over—there it is in the water!
No use to say 'O there are other balls':
An ultimate shaking grief fixes the boy
As he stands rigid, trembling, staring down
All his young days into the harbour where
His ball went.  I would not intrude on him,
A dime, another ball, is worthless.  Now
He senses first responsibility
In a world of possessions.  People will take balls,
Balls will be lost always, little boy,
And no one buys a ball back.  Money is external.
He is learning, well behind his desperate eyes,
The epistemology of loss, how to stand up
Knowing what every man must one day know
And most know many days, how to stand up
And gradually light returns to the street
A whistle blows, the ball is out of sight,
Soon part of me will explore the deep and dark
Floor of the harbour . . I am everywhere,
I suffer and move, my mind and my heart move
With all that move me, under the water
Or whistling, I am not a little boy.

*There is a great recording of John Berryman
reading this poem himself on "Poetry Speaks".

a favorite poem

On a Maine Beach
By Robley Wilson

Look, in these pools, how rocks are like worn change
Keeping the ocean's mint-mark; barnacles
Miser on them; societies of snails
Hunch on their rims and think small thoughts whose strange
Salt logics rust like a mainspring, small dreams
Pinwheeling to a point and going dumb,
Small equations whose euphemistic sum
Stands for mortality. A thousand times
Tides swallow up such pools, shellfish and stone
Show green and yellow shade in groves of weed;
Rocks shrink, barnacles drink, snails think they bleed
In their trapped world. Here, when the sea is gone,
We find old coins glowing under the sky,
Barnacles counting them, snails spending slow
Round lifetimes half-awake. Beach rhythms flow
In circles. Perfections teach us to die.

Less meme, more paint.

Until today I had never received a meme tag. Today I was tagged by four people. Thank you to everyone who tagged me but I am not much of a meme-r. Instead of continuing the meme-ness I am going to just invite everyone to make a little painting here at the top of my blog. It is fun and it is what I did tonight instead of meme-ing.