Thistle and Brilliant

Sweet Thistle, purple and
green. It looks almost
furry in the
brilliant
rising light. It
makes you want to
take it in hand,
despite all you know.

Muppets are such liars.

–Wren Tuatha

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I wasn’t born on a picket line, but I grew up there. My mom trucked me off to protests against Marble Hill Nuclear Power Plant and in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment.

Well, at forty-four, I’m living downwind from Three Mile Island and I never got the ERA. But the all-night bus rides, the songs, chants, buttons and solidarity I experienced as a child in the crowd are gifts that no corporation can negate. I learned about collective power, which I’m still practicing today as a fifteen-year member of Heathcote, my Intentional Community. But I also learned about my  personal power—not my power to always make governments and corporations listen and act responsibly, but my power to co-create culture with every little decision I make.

I co-create when I choose my toothpaste based on where it was made, under what working and environmental conditions, and with what ingredients. And I co-created nearly twenty years ago when I stood in the office of Louisville Alderman Steve Magre and experienced him looking me in the eye, telling me, despite documented hate crimes, that there were no homosexuals in his district. I told him the obvious, that I was a homosexual in his district. I let my goat poop on the City Hall steps and I didn’t clean it up. Compost happens. It was not my place to negate her co-creation.

So for a month and a half now, we’ve been going about our lives, agreeing to perpetuate the status quo, going to the store, working our jobs or looking for them, going out to dinner. Co-creating that life can stay familiar and comfortable, that this week’s soccer game or new set of tires or office conflict matters. We keep our schedules. And a couple of times a day we check in on the oil spill.

Clearly we have been benefiting from technology without truly requiring that we be able to keep ourselves and the planet safe. The marketplace consumes every new product offering without asking if it was made by children or slaves or whether it will make us sick or our planet uninhabitable. We just say, “Ooh, shiny!” and plug it in.

What now? This feels like an environmental 9/11 moment. After the planes fell, we mused at how things could never be the same. We wondered what would come next, not appreciating that what comes next comes from us, the co-creators of culture. So our collective rubber band slowly sagged back into our individual-focused lives.

I as a co-creator never got around to insisting that my government stop making enemies around the world in my name, while benefiting corporations. Let that one slip away, I did.

There’s an inherent tension between our (Western?) individualism and basing our choices on the common good, choosing to actually only take our fair share of the pie. If we really do that, what do our houses, neighborhoods, cities and families look like? Intentional Communities have been kneading this dough for decades.

Now, with the Gulf of Mexico on its way to being a dead zone, I’m standing still with the question, what comes next? What culture do I participate in today and tomorrow? Do I get in my car?

Of course, my personal responsibility for the disaster as a car owner doesn’t lessen my ire at BP executives and management. I want them to all go to prison, and not the civil one with tennis courts. I want them in poor people’s prison! Or better yet, I have a fantasy of helicoptering them over the middle of the oil slick and dropping them into it. If they make it to shore, I’ll wipe them off, if I’m not on break.

Yeah, that feels good. So will going to BP corporate offices in Washington, DC and chanting my head off! Several people on Facebook and on my path have questioned the usefulness of protests. The oil’s already in the water, lobbying to ban offshore drilling is more useful. Nice head talk.

Protesting has a logical, “head” component. Organizers are using strategy. But for the people in the crowd, the protest is a heart or gut expression. Let’s make room for those expressions, too, or they will find their own, less helpful medium.

My friend C.T. Butler, co-author of On Conflict and Consensus and Food Not Bombs and solo author of Consensus for Cities, is writing his memoir of the early days of Food Not Bombs, the decentralized international organization he co-founded with five other activists he met thirty years ago, while protesting at Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant.

I asked him what he thinks the point of a protest is. “Lots of things, networking, people get education around an issue. Participants experience the event and meet like-minded people. For the organizers, they get their message out, fund-raise, create mailing lists…”

“Does it change things?” I ask.

“No,” He states groundedly.

“What does?”

“Money.”

So if you need to let your gut do the talking for a while, join me by attending the protest in your area. While you’re there, get on a mailing list. Don’t whine to me about being on lists. This is important. Donate to organizations for those great lobbying efforts. I know the economy’s bad and money’s tight. I’ll bet you a month’s pay that BP is sparing no expense on their lobbyists right now, even as the spill drains their coffers.

And in those frequent restless moments, ask yourself and your friends, “What now?”

—WT

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Goose

Don’t send a soccer mom to do a drummer’s job.
Ritual demands more.
Vibe to the score, don’t police it.
Tune to the slipstream, don’t minivan it.

I am my mother’s allegory/alimony/mystery.

The mysteries choose wisely.
When I pulled the sword from the stone,
I left with the stone.

And my mother, ripe/right to spare me
the life of the poet queen,
had words in rows for the stone’s return.

Duck, duck, duck, duck…

Drumbeats fall like medicine;
Medicine falls in phrases.

Don’t let your mother book your gigs.
Don’t let your mayor paint your Madonna.
And, God, whatever you do,
don’t let the accountant write the play–
“Lesbian Mudwrestling Playboy Bunnies on the
Harleys of Hawaiian Midgets” does
not need to be done to death to be old hat…

I am my mother’s protest march.
No bullshit goes unmagnified.
No magnifying glass can lie.

And the press is not left enough, thank you.

Duck, duck, duck, duck…

Live your life like Jesus
but don’t send his groupies to Congress.
Their Bulging Bibles have whole chapters
missing from mine…

…Are we on the canary draft now, or the gray?

I am my mother’s politician.

One womb, one vote. And the
Mysteries choose wisely. And the
drumbeats fall like food stamps
in the wind. And the medicine falls like
empty stomachs that can’t vote.

Goose, goose, goose, goose.

—WT

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Now Blindness asks, What’s in a photograph?
That bending scent–your garden, ripe with dew…
Your softball scar! My gawky dyke giraffe!
Some laughter echoes, tracing down our youth.

The card’mom ghosts that clung to kitchen air…
House renovations–rainbow gingerbread…
The peachy rinse that clouded your roped hair…
Accordion folds…your grin, the sheets, our bed…

Apartments old and brittle; photographs.
So clingy to the touch…Prints left behind…
Your book unshelved, you cradle it–new calf.
Between the slips you visit wilder times

Without me. I turn off light’s waterfall–
Your skin my album…my state…sweet recall.

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This article was originally posted on wiselittleraccoon.gaia.com on April 2, 2007. —WT

Between looking for love and looking for close enough for the next hour, I certainly have read a lot of singles profiles lately. And it occurs to me that some of you could use the help of a writer like me. For example, everyone–raise your hand if you do NOT like watching sunrises and sunsets. Apart from getting up early, is there anyone out there saying, “...another sunrise?”

Here’s the next question: Who among you is dreading the next time you’re forced to walk at length on a beach? “Oh, God. There’s a beach ahead. How will I manage?”

Then there are the listings of qualities the seeker wants in a mate: kind, generous, compassionate, good listener, likes to laugh and have fun…Come on, people, what potential mate is reading this thinking, “Damn, compassionate again. And if only I were kind and generous we’d be a great match, but, oh well…”

I’ll write your profile for you. I bill by the hour. No hurt intended; I see heart in every singles listing. But not everybody has the gift of written gab…

It’s about how cliches feel powerful to the speaker in the moment but lose their juice at lightning speed on the way to their audience. I’m thinking of offering a poetry workshop again here at the Heathcote Conference Center. My first exercise is to open up an idea, wider than the cliche that makes it ordinary conversation, to see the unique poetic experience of that thing.

If a sunrise is cliche, then meditate in that sunrise for a moment. What are you doing? You’re drinking coffee. What do you notice? Random thoughts–you left your gloves at Brenda’s. How do you feel? Restless. Why? The sunrise has the power of a huge natural event, like a canyon fire rolling out its carpet on a California suburb. Something needs cleansing by fire…

But sunrise and fire are cliches. Gloves and coffee are specific poetic colors. Be as specific as seeds–A seed isn’t going to sprout an oak if it’s in a holly berry…

Here’s my poem that explores my thoughts:

Specific as a Seed

Specific as a seed,
not an oak if it’s a holly,
my next poem will break
your heart. You will
see a sunrise for the
first time and be still with
your coffee and your
breath. You will remember
the gloves you left at
Brenda’s. You will re-
member a poem on
film and our argue-
ment over my
pet chicken. You will
see a sunrise for the
first time as a
canyon fire, out
of control, and you will
buy a ticket home.

You, standing in my
yard, will be to me as
specific as a seed.

–WT

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Here’s a fun ditty nudging my poetry pal Jean. She works 80 hours a week at saving the world and seems to forget that writing is a lifeboat with room for all. I volleyed this to her years ago and challenged her to answer me. Here’s a reminder, you delicious workaholic!

While Jean Doesn’t Write

While Jean doesn’t write,
seditious phrases make their escape
to parallel dimensions where
mothman aliens hunt and gather them,
eat them silently and then
look through at us knowingly.
This phenomenon is entirely
Jean’s fault.

While Jean doesn’t write,
17 wars that we know of continue
like a second day of rain,
race relations in America harden into
pre-1970’s pessimism
and 2/3 of her neighbors fail to recycle.
Indeed, for every day that
Jean doesn’t write,
another Republican actor runs
for office.

While Jean doesn’t write,
her lifelong friends don’t change.
Her adult children do what they will.

—WT

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While I was writing the screenplay My Second Simone and developing the stage play Addah Belle’s Pocketwatch, I was consumed with the fires we all go through. I remembered the irony of this old poem I wrote about my mom. I say, “She would give a breast to be needed that way again,” and about a year after I wrote it, she had her left breast removed. I implored her to stop taking me so literally…

The Captive Fire

She tosses the yarn
and the kittens roll with it,
hitting the wall at the
propane heater,
its grill a cage for
the captive fire within.

She lets out a smile
but it swings back to her,
on a pendulum,
like a good smile,
contained in quiet play.

In the span of a sigh
the kittens will leave, cats,
echoes of the children
who fell, men and women,
from her breast.
She would give a breast
to be needed
that way again.

She snatches the yarn
and the kittens
settle for her shoelace
as she finishes the fringe
on her fourth grandson’s afghan.
Muted shades of
red, orange and yellow.

—WT

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By your watch laid on my pillow
I can measure the seconds it takes to
trace your face, your collar bone, relaxing.

But I don’t want to know.

I want your hands timeless when they
steady me, pivot me, surveying,
discovering territory unexplored for so long.

I don’t want to think.

Some tick of self checking might slide
in like clothing between us when we’d already
cleared that obstacle.

Let there be no measure of this.

Let me take your weight and rhythm on me without
comparison. Scales and justice can leave me
alone with what I need this once.

Hold me from inside. Levitate me.

Measure me alive, your lip like an inchworm across
my skin, there, there, there. Map me accurately.
I’ll surrender to your seconds if you’ll stay.

I’ll surrender to you in seconds if you’ll stay.

—WT

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In honor of National Poetry Month and the start of Heathcote Earthings’ festival season, a gemstone poem! Join us today at the York, PA Fairgrounds for the Pennsylvania Herb Festival, and at Spoutwood Farm’s Fairie Festival Friday, April 30 through Sunday, May 2! Kubiando!!!

Forty Different Jaspers

Spread them out.
Tickle and tingle and touch.
Candle and wash them,
ready for ritual.

The weight of a collection.
Pencil lapis and lovers.

Forty different jaspers,
obsidians, agates–
dyed Brazilians
in seductive slices.

Gaia seducing my eyes
with mottles and swirls,
my chakras electrical sockets.

picture jasper,
desert divination.
I see the landscape of
my thirst.

My amethyst pendulum,
swaying drunk. Smokey quartz
to see through darkly
at phantoms waltzing.

I am a stage, a yoga mat.

Apache teardrops,
volcanic glass at the
bottom of a cliff to
remember a massacre.

As if looking through
darkness to see a tear
were magic.

—WT

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It’s a brute and it’s abrupt,
concrete step, cold in summer,
4 a.m. Geneva. Sterile gowns are
being unloaded beside me.
I guess they’ve learned to leave
the grieving alone on this shift.

It’s the most complete thought I’ve
had in an hour. If I don’t take the next
breath, the next moment won’t have
to come, the one without you in it.

And I might go back upstairs, slide my
palm under your fingers like a plate, wait
for the quiver that comes, might come
if I don’t breathe.

Why isn’t everyone screaming their
heads off? Why don’t the floors
buckle and the walls bleed? I should
have stayed longer, held you longer.

Simone, Simone. If I mantra your name
you’ll freeze with me. We’ll think of
something. I’ll think of something.
The doctors will think of something.

I’ve made it as far as the loading dock.
Simone, if you’re not going to breathe,
I’ll have to. The baby only knows
breathing and screaming.

—WT

This poem is a character sketch for the dramatic climax of the comedy screenplay, My Second Simone. The story is set in Baltimore and Geneva, Switzerland.

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We’re all full of possibility and problem-solving at Hippie Chick Diaries, as we plan to collect and expand the best of the site into a book! This poem is a little ditty that plucks some images from some of my other poems, a kind of a meditation to focus…

Beget this Book

A stronger tea
will carry me.

I’ll pack my jingles into a
book you can carry.
I’ll collage the
cover with clippings of
Moldova in May.
A feather of timothy.
Yellow seeds and the
bowl that carries them
from room to room
without a plan.

If Jean doesn’t write that’s
more paper for me.
This requires a list or two.
Contents, format and an
editor’s consternation.

A stronger tea.
That’s what’s called for.
Stand next to me
and think of tea.

—WT

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