change, change, change

do you ever get the feeling
that your face has changed?
not because you can notice,
(the same way you can't notice
when the kid grows
an inch),
but because sometimes
you feel yourself smiling,
your forehead releasing, like
shoulders, when someone reminds
you to relax,
and suddenly it seems
that all the worst kinds of wrinkles
you've been chiseling into your dreams
are being quietly erased--
making way
for the kind of grace
that grows age like
honor-marks
wisdom-words
laughter leaving your lips
tumbling into a room of
youth, needing more than even you
the reminder that this life
is not meant to kill you
while you're still awake.
no, in this life, after darkness
comes the day
and even all those changes--
even they, will change

The Imperative of Kindness

Kindness
by Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
     purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.



~~~~~~~~~


For you, in case you're waking up with a certain shade of sorrow day after day, as I've been, for longer than I care to admit. 

To our collective courage, our small acts of self love and care, and kindness that travels with us wherever we may go... eventually, this is a kindness we shall know.

your art

he told me

when i told him

that i can't bare

to make any more

dark art

when i told him

that my heart

couldn't handle it

he told me

to stay longer

nothing only gets darker and darker

stay through

to the light

it's right

underneath

that pile of grief

don't fight

where you are--

it's your art

all the world

dear sun,

in the end,

is there always a rush

to do what we must

to see all the world

as beautiful?

The Object of Art: Wild Writing by Oscar Wilde... and Me

the combination

of your profile

and oscar wilde essays

today

has me writing fantastical

poetry

and pretending 

like i don't care

that love will 

kill me

100 times 

before i die

~~~

The object of art is to stir the most divine and remote of the chords which make music in our soul; and colour is indeed, of itself a mystical presence on things, and tone a kind of sentinel.

But remember that there never has been an artistic age, or an artistic people, since the beginning of the world. The artist has always been, and will always be, an exquisite exception. There is no golden age of art; only artists who have produced what is more golden than gold.

Of course it is difficult, but then art was never easy; you yourselves would not wish it to be easy; and, besides, nothing is worth doing except what the world says is impossible.

When Art surrenders her imaginative medium she surrenders everything.

~Lecture to Art Students, by Oscar Wilde

The proper school to learn art in is not Life but Art.

Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it come into existence. At present, people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. 

~The Decay of Lying: An Observation, by Oscar Wilde

I don't regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience. I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb. But to have continued the same life would have been wrong because it would have been limiting. I had to pass on. The other half of the garden had its secrets for me also.

To regret one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.

It is tragic how few people ever 'possess their souls' before they die. 'Nothing is more rare in any man,' says Emerson, 'than an act of his own.' It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

~De Profundis, by Oscar Wilde

the most radical

and original

works

i've ever 

birthed

were leaving my husband

and driving out 

to my lover

with nothing

but the unknown

a pair of blue jeans

and a tooth brush