this morning my choices were to either stay in bed weeping and watch crap television or to get up and go really go so I hopped in Sweet Lime and headed for H&R Block because the last time I did my taxes myself I ended up being randomly audited and even though I got $283 back that time it still makes me nervous truthfully going to H&R Block (or any goddamn place in the ever forever where I must interact with norms) makes me incredibly uncomfortable because I am on Social Security Disability and my disability is invisible (most of the time) so I always feel compelled to explain to say YES I AM CRAZY BUT DON'T WORRY I DON'T BITE HAHAHAHHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAAAHAA NOPE NO BITING DON'T YOU WORRY ONE LITTLE BIT H&R BLOCK LADY YES I'M SCREAMING BUT THAT'S NOT BECAUSE I'M CRAZY IT'S BECAUSE I HATE TELLING PEOPLE I'M CRAZY OKAY WE ALL GOOD HERE CAN WE JUST GET ON WITH IT THANK YOU AND HAVE A PLEASANT DAY ETCETERA

after that brutal hour and it was brutal because I made the very nice tax lady extremely nervous and she was all sweaty and shit by the time I left taking two pens (free) with me I got in my car and then BECAUSE GETTING MY TAXES DONE WASN'T STRESSFUL ENOUGH!!! I drove to the mall closest to me which just happens to be the mall where a mass shooting occurred in 2016 to buy myself a bra THE WORST POSSIBLE THING FOR WHICH TO SHOP IN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE but my Coobie bras no longer do anything but smash my boobs into one tiny middle knob on my chest and the mall is very small I would use the word dead but my inner critic barked there for a second still there are maybe three stores and an eyebrow threading kiosk in the whole place the whole entire empty echoy mall I made it to Macy's found a bra and was back in Sweet Lime in under ten minutes I've lost so much weight because of sick I am down two cup sizes and the bra I bought today has air in the cups because they don't make child bras for old women so I'll have to cram some socks in there for filler

after that I came home then ate some yogurt then I drove the other direction to Home Depot for no reason at all I cried all the way there driving 70 mph (the speed limit I only add on account of my lead feet) in dumping cold rain then I turned around and drove back home

Orlando is dying

The Surfer is gone and he is staying gone Orlando is his cat my cat too but his mostly she is 18 years old she is down to about 4 pounds barely eating she doesn't seem to be in pain and she licked some yogurt off my finger tonight her time is near and my son won't come home he can't handle that and his uncle's cancer all of it too much so I am tending to her and if her time comes I will do what needs to be done while my darling son waits with Uncle Dennis in hospice

I made her this little blanket after I made my big blanket she spends most of her time in front of the fire now it's heartbreaking

goodnight for now Darklings

love

Today since nine this morning I've been sitting here at the adult computer in an actual comfortable chair yes it is one of my kitchen table chairs and yes it took me over a year to figure out the fact that I could carry the chair right here and sit my bony butt down and start typing

I have been gathering notes for Queer Wing-ed so far I have 115 pages of  notes (whittled down from 167 pages) all typed up clearly this introduction will need more extreme whittling it might appear untoward to certain editors if the introduction is longer than the actual manuscript itself unless I  can find a press willing to work with the whole damned thing as a hybrid (there is a press oh yes in my mind who would who would hello press! can you hear me?)

it  was extremely foggy at the beach this morning and raining weather as per usual the buffaloes were in their yard close to the road there is also a chicken in a pen in a yard who is completely black with a white cap of feathers he is spectacular I have named him Andy Warhol obvs.

I ate yogurt for breakfast and half a garnet yam for lunch and have yet to die

I am so excited to be a writer again
it took me a long time to gain enough distance from Henry to be able to edit these poems and notes without feeling inhabited by him
it took a very long time
it took such a very long time that I began to think I would never be able to go back in and I haven't even parsed the stuff I wrote on my Queer Wing-ed blog (yes I have a secret blog sheesh I have about ten of them now) nor have I yet to open my Henry Overflow folder

I guess I'd do that now
it feels good to be writing in a fever again listening to Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited and Mahler's 4th Symphony because even though I write write in total silence I am in a different brain when I edit and music is my heaven

in today's mail these fabulous Queer Wing-ed stickers if you'd like me to send you one leave a note in the comments

oooooo!

hello Darklings!
Hello!
I feel as if I've returned after an extremely long absense

Love

Today a white tailed sea eagle flew right past my head as I was digging in the dirt my breath stopped in my throat I once had a golden eagle fly in front of my car at Lake Crescent both times two times lucky to have seen such wonderment such feral beauty

(obviously not my photo because it isn't fuzzy)

erased

I finished my two week daily punishment dose of Miralax yesterday and today I started in on the two tablespoons of ground flaxseed that the same gastroenterologist "prescribed" meaning he told me to buy it so I had to buy it online because here on the island if it isn't available at the Bait & Tackle then it's DEAD MEAT if you've never had ground flaxseed I can tell you that it is not delicious and also that I put the two tablespoons into a bowl of my own amazing vegetable soup and the flaxseed formed one hideous lump of horse feed a nightmare floating kettlebell of fibre a freakish dumpling a moribund tennis ball etc tomorrow I will sprinkle my two tablespoons of ground flaxseed on some good old Terrible America sugary yogurt

I have had a good week meaning I felt great until today what with the horrifying soup incident which made me literally thick as a brick thank you Ian Anderson

yesterday I drove to Bellingham which is 44 minutes away from Summer's End and 44 minutes away from Vancouver BC if I keep driving north I drove there to visit the Alaska Ferry because I had read about it once back in the olden days when I still knew how to read and was curious and yes indeed the ferry travels to Alaska it's a 38 hour sailing and I can sleep in my car or rent a cabin though I think Sweet Lime is probably more comfortable than a cabin on a ferry but still it can get me all the way to Ketchikcan for $1,000.00  I used to have $1000.00 but then I bought a house and beds and a table and furniture and etc so now I don't still I think it would be a superb summer vacation don't you?

during my drive to Bellingham I saw snow geese congregating everywhere the males' small bodies and whitewhite feathers their long elegant necks and black feet and beaks they are stunning the females such a soft gray that I just want to hold one against my face I also saw a great blue heron striding along a creek and a hawk trying to carry a large rat into the sky the rat was fighting the hawk kept wheeling down spiraling then swooping up then wheeling down again but eventually the hawk won I drove so far up the mountains that I was enveloped in cloud then drove down again to the water

I think my stomach problems which have plagued me since I was nine years old are in part the result of getting punched in the stomach so often as a girl I was the punching bag of a family full of angry people also when I was nine she i.e. You Know Who started giving me her diet pills which we called Black Beauties to stop my breasts from growing to keep me small to keep me like a tiny dog she could groom and torture

this was not where I was going to go with this post I actually came here to write that I had three poems anthologized recently poems I barely remember writing and also to report that I have finally for true figured out how to string my Henry poems together finally finally and after "The Procedures" I will start sending the manuscript to publishers editors and so forth

sidetracked and now I must supine myself and let the glob of hay in my gut do its goodness

Good night Darklings
Did you know yesterday was David Bowie's birthday?
Did you watch the biopic about his last five years that was on the telly?

Love

banish the lesser

Put one finger down put the next finger down then begin again put one finger down put the next finger down. This is how to be a writer in case you have forgotten. In case your foot froze and fell off inside your boot and all you thought about was pain day after day. In case a child somewhere near you a grown child you loved died and you didn't get to go to the funeral. Begin. Put one finger down put the next finger down play the keyboard like a drum until your fingers bleed. In case you hear several fire engines just up the street on a Sunday morning in case you are getting divorced and moving to another house a haunted duplex with injured children living in it and your freshly minted ex-husband lets your feral cat loose a cat named Fledge named from C.S. Lewis's "The Magician's Nephew" a cat small in size but wild in imagination out the door and gone in spite of many warnings about being careful with the cat and you never find her even though you go to the old house the old neighborhood at three in the morning every day for weeks calling her name sobbing her name even though you put up posters Fledge never reappears because she doesn't know where her new house is. In case you realize the loss of your cat is much worse than the loss of your husband who had been lost all along. Put one finger down put the next finger down then begin again write it out make order of the Senseless World and Terrible America by putting one finger down and then the next in case your brother has a child he never gets to see in case that child is challenged from different from the start in case the child was born in a dank town then whisked away from your brother or you were whisked away and so you never knew each other put one finger down and then the next do it if you want to be a writer if you ever want to be a writer in case you were raped in front of your own goddamned house in a stranger's car put one finger down and then the next this is how. you. do. it. This is how to write. Open your mouth outside on a wintry day and see if birds don't fly out any kind of bird see if they don't fly right out on your plumed breath riding your breath like a Robert August surfboard. Cover your ears and open your mouth to hear the birds talk one to another in whispers. This is how to do it. One finger at a time moving forward over the waves that's right now get up and scream your fool head off. One finger at a time.

Photo by Page Loudon

Epiphany.

I walked for miles along the beach yesterday and discovered these tracks that started up in the forest went through an entire still standing house then out of the house and into the water clearly there was never a train there I think perhaps it was used as a logging road a skid for the cedar forest that was so heavily depleted before the community stepped in and preserved all of this my son came home this morning and I made him walk for miles along the beach to take this photo to photograph this portal

all of this

afterwards I came home and worked on my dumb blanket (seriously I really have to learn more than two crochet stitches I'm 9/10ths of the way finished and I'm bored with it) then I swept my kitchen floor then moved all the chairs into the outer outer room then pulled the table to the center of the floor and scrubbed said floor with vinegar and water by hand one towel washing one towel drying but that's not what's on my mind today I am thinking about trees and birds about trees vs. forest how first there was forest and then there were trees then there were specific trees and the forest became larger and deeper and smaller and more intimate as I learned each tree then discovered the faces in trees the trees that look like dragons or dogs trees that have vaginas and teeth this is all so prosaic so I will skip the bird conversation for today

dumb blanket plus Jupiter whose birthday is tomorrow

my endoscopy and colonoscopy are now scheduled for February first both will be done at the same time and I will be completely anesthetized thank bog because my last three colonoscopies were extremely painful because I have a tortuous colon apparently my colon has corners and windowsills and knobs and candy canes and cornices instead of polite slopey slewy curves and loopages

I got a manicure yesterday and wrecked it today as I attacked my kitchen floor so it goes I don't know how to address the birds but an owl flew past my bedroom window this morning and yesterday I saw three bald eagles and two great blue heron as I walked the beach  see giant hawks everywhere I look the snow geese have returned to the island to show themselves to the tourists birds great and small and great lovely lovely

floored

I am scared to death to find out what's wrong inside of me scared shitless (literally) goodnight for now Darklings

Pax

muddling through

Raging loneliness lonesome lonely radical aloneness continues. Certain music makes it worse. Mozart definitely. Romantic or thoughtful movies or movies featuring an animal. One or two poets wreck me every single time. I know it’s me it’s my doing it’s my entirely fault. I accept the breach. Every Friday night late I put on my best silkies and fanciest shoes and prettiest dress and I make my hair full and satin I check the mirror my god I look beautiful and vibrant I look at my front door my telephone I look at my car outside with its brand new perky flywheel its fragrance I look at the computer the names and numbers hidden inside I go to my bed after that and crawl under the covers shoes and all and pleasure myself then smoke an imaginary cigarette in a deep sinkhole of lonely and cry hot animal tears and sometimes I sleep and sometimes I lie awake and consider doing it again on Saturday.