Why I woke this Morning

"Il mondo..."

There was a soft song coming from the sheets of my grey and white bedding that is oh so beautiful. I was exasperated with the wanting to hear another person next to me that found this song as ridiculous and enchanting as I do and so Jimmy Fontana was awake in my bed, almost underneath my pillow and singing his heart out in the early hours of the morning.
It was sweet to hear his voice but even more so to imagine waking someone up this way--Jimmy singing his song and I placing the device of it on the stomach of my lover only to see his eyes slowly peel awake at such a commotion. Then to his confusion as to what and why an Italian man is singing into his chest, I will laugh myself into merriment for such an opportunity as this--to be alive and loving someone enough to wake them up just to be awake and happy with me.
What a dream I have to hold on to. (As surely I mean to accomplish someday.)
I am now going to create a playlist of all the songs that make me feel love passionately and I must admit I am ever so pleasantly exasperated to be alive and almost in love right now.

"Oh, il mondo..."
Thanks Jimmy. You're a real slice.

-k.p.

May 30th 2016
9:06AM
Monday Morning birds are chirping and there are blueberry skies ahead of me.
"Il Mondo" by: Jimmy Fontana (Singles Collection) << the very best.

c.d.

My heart is like a scratched vinyl
stuck on the song of you.

-k.p.

Jackie & Wilson

Someone to care
someone to share
lonely hours and moments of despair
to be loved, to be loved
oh what a feeling to be loved

Someone to kiss
someone to miss
when you're away
to hear, from each day
to be loved( to be loved)
to be loved (to be loved)
oh what a feeling to be loved

Some wish to be a king or a queen
some wish for fortune and fame
but to be, truly, truly, truly loved is
more than all of these things

Someone to kiss
someone to miss
when you're away to hear, from each day
to be loved, to be loved, to be loved
oh what a feeling to be loved
to be loved (to be loved)
to be loved (to be loved)
oh baby, what a feeling
to be loved

-j.w. 

band aids

I go through triple a batteries like band aids

because when my world feels cold 

and I lay down with my hands still cold against my chest

and the sounds around me no longer make music from their melodies

that's when they come on 

the soft cushions like a soft kiss against my ears.

A rush of music 

a tug of something inside of me finally ripping at the sadness.

 It's always there to elucidate the pain.

 Make it real. Make it some how less. 
Tape of the melodic music holds me together
wraps around me tightly like the arms of God. 
How can that be?
I wonder too much as I pull the headphones closer
and hold the music tighter
feeling somehow safe.

-k.p.b. 

3:23AM
Tues. 
2016

Hurts So Good

Do you ever just get so excited to be alive and to feel such warmth radiating within you it's almost too much to take in at once? Are there thoughts that you run to that make your heart race happily and your mind dance itself into passionate twirls, spools of ribbons twisting around your heart and soul and rib-cage? I feel so excited right now. I don't even know why, and yet I know exactly why. My dreams are so beautiful. This life, breathing, waking up from a sleep just to feel that this life is infinitely better than most dreams you've been trapped in before. I feel this palpable anticipation, this utter wanting of the sweet arrival of a dream that I know I will have. How is that possible? How can I really know if a dream I've dreamed so long, so hard in my life, is coming for certain? I guess, no, I know, God is watching over me. I know He hears my prayers and feels the vibration of a song my heart displays every day. He hears my pleas and wants to help me, always. He knows what is best, but for once I feel as though I can receive something I want that is in unison with what He also wants for me. What a wondrous and incandescent feeling this is. I feel as though I'll see my dearest twin sister soon enough. I feel as though I will find love and love will find me and I have this sudden innate optimism for life and the wonders it will bring me. All at once, I feel infinite.
I am so in love right now, it could be sickening to those who don't understand it as I do.
I'm so happy. So, so unbelievably happy on this ordinary day filled with extraordinary miracles and emotions. Thank you God, for this beautiful life, for my precious family and wonderful earth with which I am inseparably apart of. Thank you, always. How I love you so.

-kiersten p. benson

If you ever want to be in love...

I can't stop this overwhelming desire to kiss your face and steal every piece of you with my innocent and lonely hands. I want to steal your hiding places, your favorite songs and simple smile. I want to scrape away the pains you feel. I want to toss your darkest memories to the hungry wind and peel away the scars you think have become you. I'm not waiting, I'm just saying if you ever want to be in love, I'll come around and warm your cold lonely hands out of their confusion. All I feel is the warmth your heart brings me. I want to feel it all the time, to press my beating heart against yours and watch the way they chase each other into beautiful madness. I can't get over you, James Dean. I don't understand where the ceaseless thoughts about you come from and why they can never leave me, but I do know they make me happy, even when they make me sad. Even when they hurt me, I'm happy.

You don't even understand the willingness I have to fall in love with you and let you be in love, if you want to. I could hold your hand forever, in this moment, happily plagued by the thought of you.
You are beautiful.
You are wonderful.
You're a dream I can't wake up from.
I haven't even kissed you before and I know how happy I could be with you. I don't need much to be inspired--the world inspires me just by existing. Kind of like you.
I know I'm quiet. I know I don't say as much as I ought to. I know I stare at the thoughts I wish I could say long enough to keep them silent. I know I'm a terrible wallflower petrified by the thoughts I wish more than breathing I could let escape me. But if you could hear the things I'm too afraid to say, if you could feel the way my heart races when I think about you let alone see your face, there's no way you couldn't understand that I love you. I love you purely, innocently, whole-heartedly. Some may wonder how that can be. How can I love the boy who is miles away probably drifting his thoughts upon tides of other girls, other places? Different faces that don't at all resemble my own? I guess I believe in a better world. I guess I believe in a love that deserves someone special, someone who watches and understands, listens, more than they speak words or breathe air. I guess I'm seeking for a love that is seeking for me too.

Is it true? 

Can two hands really find each other through the dark empty air between them? 

Can love really be mine someday? 

I truly believe that what Rumi said is true, "What you are seeking for is seeking for you too." So can it be? Can I seek someone truly and purely and hard enough that they will do just the same for me? These are the things I think of when I'm driving in the car and the sun is soft and rosy in my hair and cheeks, and the world seems soft and slow and sleepy all around. Birds sing and my heart sighs softly with them as thoughts like these begin to pillow my everyday thinking. 

Today I fell asleep on a thin grey couch that was long and narrow even for my tiny bones. I was as asleep in house that is not my own as I could be (which of course was not at all). As I slept and let the echo of a nostalgic song rumble within me, a thought so gentle overwhelmed me: I imagine I'm actually asleep for real on this very grey couch, eyes shut into a daydream of a world I do not know, a better world where I am not hurt and lonely, and suddenly he is there rumbling my foreign world into reality, where he kisses my cheek, slips his arms around me tightly like a letter threatening an escape to the fierce wind, and he wakes me up to a feeling of peacefully being wanted. Then it hits me--this is what love is like. It's like the act of falling asleep and waking up are the same process. It's like the fine line between reality and dreaming is disintegrated and the act of breathing is shared between someone other than yourself. 

But I'm a head of myself, as usual. Just seeking for a day that has not come, not yet anyway. 

I guess the point of this post is an invitation really to you, James Dean. If you ever wanna be in love, if you ever want to know what unconditional love could be like, if you ever want to be woken up on a thin grey couch while you dream of a better world, just find me. Say my name softly. Sing my favorite song in the kitchen to yourself. Kiss my cheek and I'm already there. It's that simple and that courageous. What do I honestly know about being in love other than it's truly the only thing my heart yearns for and simply cannot live without? What do I honestly know, except that I love you?
What do wallflowers really know?
-k.p.b. 

(Inspired by: "If You Ever Want to Be in Love" by: James Bay; "Just Hold On, W'e're Going Home" by: Drake)

tunnel songs

He spoke a step above a whisper. The girl's eyes were wide with curiosity as his soft, but powerful words escaped him without restraint.
"They say there are songs out there that are so beautiful you cannot hear them through your ears. They say songs of that sort just drift through your bones like a tunnel. They echo. They scrape against your bones in a delightful manner and nestle themselves within the walls of your heart. Then you find yourself singing that song for weeks upon weeks, whistling it when before you weren't even a whistler. Do you believe it?"
He turned his dark eyes to the girl still fiddling with her long and tangled braid, as if to find her weeping by his prophetic revelation. Instead he grabbed her hand for a moment, ceasing her incessant fiddling and watched her sad posture depress into a heap of elegiac fabric. The tops of her eyelids were shiny like the gloss of black on her long, long eyelashes. Her cheeks were red. Something wasn't right.
"Well?" He half shouted in the dark.
Her slim shoulders slumped ever so slightly as no reply wandered from her lips.
He sighed.
"Look, " he began quiet, quiet as a bird before the sun has stretched, "I know you understand what I'm talking about. I've seen it within you before. When you think no one is watching you turn your headphones on and wake up your whole disposition--your bones, your braid, your face, everything--with a song. You walk around for hours, sometimes retracing the tracks of your mind you thought were empty and you listen. God only knows what you listen for, but I can see it in the scrunch of your eyes closing, in the slow of your breath and the stolen moment of drifting out of reality to some far and wild place. Sometimes you bite your lip, maybe to remind yourself of pain, to remember you're still alive. I don't know. Other times you're eyes are wide open looking far past whatever material is before them. You cry. You smile. You let the folds of your face fall into the face that is really yours. Your real, real face. I see you when you think no one is watching and you look like rain is falling on your face every moment you turn those blue headphones on. You look like you're actually living. Is that not what you live for, rainy girl? Can you not hear the music I am speaking of?"
He could see her posture shift from angry to sad to nothing at all. She wasn't happy, she wasn't sad. Perhaps she is both? The boy did not know.
Suddenly, a slight shift. A smile. Her eyes were no longer on the floor but falling into his deeply.
Her voice was scratchy for a moment, bruised on the first few words she whispered, but jumbled into sweetness as the words escaped, "Do you really think I'm pretty?"
The boy was red. His heart beat louder than the words that tumbled from him, probably much louder than he meant, "What? Didn't you hear what I just said?"
Her cheeks were ridged from her smile tugging harder at her lips.
"Sure I did." she replied softly. "You said you watch me when I listen to my music. Who would do that if they thought I was ugly? No one watches a human for that long if they think they're ugly. It just doesn't happen unless you're insane. Are you insane boy?"
He couldn't stop his heart from racing, but he couldn't answer her question either. If he answered or if he remained silent he was revealing something he didn't want to within himself.
He coughed.
He rubbed his nose.
The girl liked it when he rubbed his nose.
"Look, girl. I recognize a believer when I see one and you, " he blushed again as his eyes scrambled away from her, "are a firm believer in something. I can feel it. You reek of it. Won't you tell me what you believe in?"
His words were desperate. As if he'd been waiting to hear her speak all his life. As if she decided not to tell him whatever it is he was looking for, he would die. A part of him would die if this girl didn't speak about herself, about him. About something from her jungle of a mind.
He waited.
His heart raced on still.
She trembled. Something slipped from within herself. A tear choked itself from the weeds of her eyelashes, but she didn't move her small hand to wipe it away. She just let it drip and slide and puddle on her lips. She didn't move until the boys lips rang soft and small against her cheek, her ear, her hair. Slowly he slipped his gentle hand into her hair and tucked it snug behind her ears as he'd always wanted to do.
She smiled through her tears, making rain upon her beautiful face.
Her heart pounded too. It was quick as butterfly wings and the sound of summer on the grass.
"You want to know my secrets? You want to know what makes me find my tunnel songs?"
He fell close to her as she spoke, not wanting to miss a minute of her soul peaking from within her chest. It glowed. How it glowed so brilliantly when she talked he didn't know whether to shield it his from his dark eyes or simply go with it.
His heart still raced madly.
He simply went with it.
She didn't even see it when she talked. All she saw was the rain.
"When I'm lonely, I turn to one song. One song that doesn't make me 'feel better' or block out the feelings of loneliness, but rather explodes all the feelings I felt too numb to feel before I began listening to it. I listen to one song that is soft and fierce and honest. It is sad as it is happy. Somehow both at the same time. I listen to it fall into my eardrums and trickle down my ribs until it reaches my heart. Then I stop. I turn it as loud as I can allow myself in that moment and I just listen to it while I can feel it. I can feel it so badly it almost hurts. But it doesn't. It feels...clean. Simple. Marvelously alive."
The boy was quiet as he dare asked, "What is it? What do you feel?"
She sniffled for a moment, fiddling with her braid once more. Her eyes were almost closed again and how the boy wished she wouldn't--wouldn't stop, wouldn't close those precious eyes, wouldn't look down at the ground as if she wasn't worthy of looking up.
He also wished so fiercely she wouldn't feel so sad all the time. He could see it when she was asleep, her head bumping softly against his shoulder in the car. The look of pained sleeping tortured him. When the wrinkles on your face are drawn from sadness more than joy, that is when he knew you didn't sleep like most people do. That is what he saw when she slept. When she slept she looked like a heavy weight was being conflicted in her mind rather than the dreams of peace that should be flooding behind her closed eye lids. She should look younger when she slept, but she didn't. She looked alone.
The girls fingers were devouring a piece of paper he didn't even notice was there before. It was in shreds on the floor. It looked like petals from a flower; a little girl deciding if a boy loved her or not.
His fingers tangled up in hers. She stopped her fiddling once more.
"I'm sorry." She whispered through the tears that fell on her lap. "I don't know how to stop."
He pulled her head into his chest and allowed her to hear the sound of his racing heartbeat. It was the bravest thing he'd ever done.
She could feel it too.
"You want to know what I feel when I hear a tunnel song?" They were quiet. The boy could only stare at the girl in a wide complexity of emotions. She had to pull herself away from the distraction of his enthralling heartbeat as she finished softly, "I feel like this."
In her surge of bravery, she sat up and looked at him for a moment, both blushing in a rosy cloud hovering all around them. Her teeth sank into her lip in innocent nervousness as she placed her pale hand over his loud metronome and fell softly and sweetly in love with the way her heart plummeted into her stomach and flew back up into her chest like a wild song bird as she felt it. She felt the reason for his living.
It was her.
The boy felt brave.
"What's the name of that song you listen to? Your tunnel song?" He whispered it perfectly quiet and loud.
She was a little afraid, but not of him and not enough to stop the words that were already coming from within her, "My deepest secret is--it isn't one song. My tunnel song is whatever song holds the most truth for me at the time I am listening to it. It's the song that is the most honest and the most beautiful to me. It's the song that hurts me while it heals me."
Suddenly the boy understood.
It was like a reckoning of childhood and sleeping, only he was fully awake while it happened, understanding her. She was still a mystery in many ways, but the greatest thing about this moment was the boy feeling like he understood her perfectly in some small or huge way.
one.
two.
three heartbeats.
She was alive.
Without a thought of what would happen if she didn't hear him, without a care if he should live or die if he said it, the boy's voice grew from his heart and echoed through his throat as he exclaimed,
"If you're lonely, lonelier than you can ever bear, wake me. I don't care where you are. I don't care what time it is, what is making you sad, who is there, who isn't there--wake me. I want to hear you. I want to hear everything about you."
In some small way, between the beginning of the boy speaking and the end of all his words, the girl thought she heard him say, "I love you."
She was right.

...
(part I)

-k.p.b.

2:47p.m.
may 12th, 2016
thursday


*my "tunnel song": Wake Me by: Bleachers (as of right now, in this moment of time)

"All I Want Is Freedom...And You Always Beside Me."

I want to be painting!
I wish to be writing right now
expressing
writings from the heart
and no where else.
I want to be chewing on the
disturbing thought of
reality
and insipid notions of what life
ought to be
in the eyes of those who deem themselves most worthy
of favoring us with their opinion.
I wish to be far away in a place
my eyes can feast upon and digest
the interest of others
and the euphoria of a culture or a few
made new to my eyes.

I wish to be daring
bold
and unafraid!
I wish for wings that
could taste the bitter wind of rain
and snow
and unharvested secrets.
I wish no more to be left alone
with the loneliness of myself
stuck
afraid
empty of life
and found wanting.

I wish to hold your hand
dear friend
and little else
a part from
painting
writing
reading
life
and music.

That is all I wish.
That is all my heart calls for on this
insipid moment of
essay writing
and unchallenging
patterns of thought.

That is all I want.
Happiness.

-k.p.b.
April 25, 2016
3:03PM

My Mother

If I know what love is it's because of you. 

If I've stopped to taste the beauty of a flower or the stars or the rain, 

it's because I once saw you do the same. 

If I've fallen asleep with a smile and a dream of what my wondrous life could be, it's because you told me how. 

If you've ever wondered if you're perfect

If you're beautiful

Or exquisite beyond words, 

It's because I've written this poem and only now told you just how true it is. 

You are lovely. 

You are beautiful and exquisite beyond words. 

You are kind. 

You are my mother and that will always make me sing. 

If I know how to sing

How to love

How to live

It's because of you. 

-k.p.b.