"When we die it ends. Until then we are all tied up." -L Montano
"I'll never understand why I write what I do as I do" -K. Acker
did i poet every day/ every waking hour/ i wanted to make something that mattered -M.B.
Dear Chris:
We get lost. A year ago.
July 26, 2016 (at my father's house): "silence holds us like a bridge/ i can 't cross/ so i gather my words where they stay/ unspoken/ think i came to writing/ to survive/ from disappearing
July 29, 2016 (breakfast w/ Dick) "what lies between us/ the space we keep safe/ i tell you everything. anything./ what does it matter if you care not/ who i see or what i do"
August 5, 2016: "dear love, this was the day you left me/ we went to the beach/ you flew back to Arizona/ we didn't cry or say good bye/ the world turns on/ insignificant gestures/ what makes a thing desirous/ you hid from me all of our time together/ but we mirror/ i hid too"
I wrote my lover two letters when he went to rehab:
in one letter i spoke of rain & our love/ a lifetime/ in the next i was saying good bye b/c i wanted to be the one to say good bye first/ seeing how you were the one leaving
It's true: strangers walk into our lives and they rearrange us. They pull us apart and put us together.
I started Basic Programming thinking I would talk about infatuation and desire and obsession. And by the end of the summer, I started Volume II. And I spent my time in deep meditations. I went to Kali and gave her my name. I burned fires and threw everything in. I counted 108 steps down in the underworld where Inanna showed me how to hang my skin on a hook. I laid in meditative sleep healing each part of my body. I chanted and moved energy and learned the names of each aspect of the subtle body. I wrote spells. I dream walked. I stayed in the space between here and there and I waited for each veil to lift. I went to the bottom of grief. I gave up knowing. I stopped taking the medication. I met the Empress who laughed and in a cottage, a trio of women who knew the way to the crystal city. I spoke with the dead. I watched my mind unfold. I became unplugged and panicked. I asked for help to be pulled back to shore. I went too quickly and then I learned the way to go slowly. I read the cards. I watched as it all fell further and further away. My brother reached out and touched me and when he did the entire universe was there, like lifting up the edge of a rug. I went looking and saw beautiful things. That is how I finished the book. I learned to read my programming.
I guess if you go far enough out-- you realize in the coding, it's all ones and zeros. There is no Dick. But there's also no us.
I forgot for awhile that making art was supposed to be fun. I am trying to find my way back, Chris.
I have been gone a long time looking for something I hid away to protect in this life. I found her. I like how in interview magazine, you said: "I'm really committed to telling the truth in writing. ... I think that's what writing does. It tells the truth about something."
Art changes us sometimes more than other people. Other people can be the door though, can't they? We walk through and nothing is ever again as we knew it.
And here we are now. in the menstrual hut. a trio of women, with the keys to the crystal city.
Love,
Megan
