Kiss

It's strange to me
that once
all lovers were strangers.
Their kiss
was once a new sensation;
Their touch a map unknown
and unfamiliar.
But in a quiet moment
of watching them kiss, tangled
up in each other's bodies
I see a sensation known, familiar, comfortable.
And I wonder what it takes
to get there.
They seem so certain
of their touch; so conscious and fulfilled.
Their hands know
where to go and how to rest gently
as fire.
When will I be there? I wonder
if I ever will.
I wonder if I'll be a map well worn
to somebody.
A book well read.
A favorite drink, song, poem.
What will I be
to somebody?
I hope that I am known.
That is my deepest wish.
I hope I am touched
and with one hand against mine,
understood.
-k.p.

May 9th, 2017
11:39pm
Tuesday

On the Poetry of the Universe

“Night was come, and her planets were risen: a safe, still night: too serene for the companionship of fear. We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us; and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence.” -Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre 

This old heart of mine

This old heart of mine,
Still hurts.
Every niche, nook, drawer, untucked clothes and shadow of it
Aches.
A dull, ferocious aching, too.
The kind that makes you stay up stumbling through the night savagely, hands outstretched and weary,
Trying to find an answer through your blindness.
I am not alone.
I have one friend and my books.
But the trouble with one friend and books is she isn't always there and the books eventually end.
And when they end it hurts.
It hurts so badly that you stumble through the night
Aching to be whole again.
Aching to read it for the first time once more--
Where things were exciting and new and beguiling.
But now the feelings settle, sequester in your mind and puddle in your heart nostalgically and all you can do
Is ache and reminisce and keep looking.
Keep searching for the next book to catch you and your friend to come home
And things to work out.
Always, to work out.
-k.p.

April 6th, 2017
Thursday
2:00pm - still in bed aching in a full and vicious hangover of a book (the best book the whole world) and waiting for heaven knows what.

Reader, I Married Him

“I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you—especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame.”
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
(In honor of finishing one of the greatest novels ever written, finished in the in between dream-state of the lateness of night and the earliness of morning.
What sweltering pains and deep passions fill my heart, until, if those words read once again, these feelings will surely  overflow in a river of conscious experience and beauty.
Thanks be to God for allowing such words to penetrate my heart and for the the brave, clever, indescribable woman who wrote them--Charlotte, thank you. I sense a true, unequivocal kindred spirit in you. I owe you much. -k.p. )
5:36am

Stay Alive

"The gears won't turn and the leaves won't grow."
I didn't want us to be those people that love each other for one measly moment and then after time slips through us, through our veins and our bodies, we forget the sound of each other's names rolling off our lips sweetly. We forget how much our love was once so strong and beautiful and happy.
I didn't want to forget how kind and extraordinary you once were and I didn't want to stop my wanting and my pacing and my loving. I didn't want to be disgusted or repelled by every last thing attached to you and your soul that was once so bright and beautiful.
But I've been waiting all my life to feel a heart keeping time just as mine does. I've been waiting all my life to feel alive by someone else, that feeling that makes you stay alive and know the dawn is coming and I can open my eyes, and know I'm going to be okay. I've been waiting all my life to be loved too.
I didn't want us to be strangers, but it's what we are. We are strangers to a love that has been dead for years, even though we've only known each other for shorter time than that.
You seemed like such an eminent, innocent, marvelously distressed idea to me, years ago. But now I see you are nothing of the kind. You are empty of love for me along with many things and I am sorry that it ended the way it has.
But as it's always said when things like this happen--
c'est la vie. 
That's life, my friend.
And it keeps going.
You do whatever just to stay alive, sometimes.
And sometimes, you stay alive because you want to.
Never forget that both ways are important, but one, one day, will set you free. If you let it.
"[There] is a truth and it's on our side. Dawn is coming open your eyes. Look into the sun as the new days rise."
Dawn is coming, they say, open your eyes.

-k.p.

March 23, 2017

Drink Water From Cups (part II)

The lights fell around us until we were encased in a gentle darkness.
I could feel the stream of fibrous light from the film projector moving across the screen like wandering water intertwined with sparkling sunlight. It moved like a dance across the smooth fabric. It dazzled my senses completely.
The dark room smelled faintly of buttered popcorn and cold water on my tongue. Hushed voices. Soft whisperings around filled my ears with tension. I could sense a gravity of Kenz, all moving, silent and irreproachable; a sleeping beast, I thought it. Whatever it was, it seemed meekly confused, yet undeniably present.
The French film flitted across our faces beautifully, but a darkness, heavy and delicate settled in my heart in anxious hunger to devour it. Or, at least, be free of it.
Kenzie was in pain. I could feel that much. I knew her well enough to care, but I guess not well enough to take her hand and squeeze it gently, telling her everything would be okay, as I knew it would be, with perhaps, some time. But I didn't do that.
I should've.
I don't know what's wrong with me sometimes.
The words "le vent nous portera" are sewn along the bottom of the screen and I wonder what they mean, as with many things.
The music plays softly, lullabies of foreign words and exquisite imagery. I can't help but give into myself, being pulled by the tender fingers of its melody, lost in a wasteland of beautiful eminence.
The film ends and all the while through it, I remember sipping cold water slowly from my cup and sensing Kenzie doing just the same, but very differently. Very differently indeed.
I guess what I'm really trying to say with all of this is, I don't want Sunday Morning to come and the thought that I sipped my water tentatively rather than squeezed her hand or shed a tear or something for her--creep into my heart and fester there all the Sundays after.
When a human being feels things deeply and lingers there, what are you to do?
I'll tell you.
Sip your water from cups, but grab the blasted hand and know that life is infinitely more than the cool water you drink that gives you life. This is life, here in a hand, a heart, a friend. Know this and you shall live.
Of this I know.

-k.p.
7:29pm 3/22/17

Drink Water From Cups

Sitting in a peaceful Vietnamese vegan restaurant, named All Chay,

there is a massive plant spilling from a pretty printed pot, that hoists a chubby Buddha that makes me think about life.
It makes me feel calm having that plant in the center of the room, at the center of all things.
I see Kenz trying to figure out the precise wording to a complicated text.
I hear strangers murmur amongst themselves in a lively fashion.
And here I am.
Listening to the delicate clinking of silverware and smelling incense and glorious fresh food
and I'm wondering about life.
I'm wondering why I am here and not so many other places.
Yet, through the string of many thoughts, I feel content here, thankful and free.
But now something has changed.
Kenz has come back upset and tells me she needs to make a call.
I don't know what to tell her, but she's gone.
I stare at the room, at the lights and the smell that is visually around me.
She comes back and it's wrong. The phone is wrong, her face, the way my heart suddenly swells in anger.
I don't understand people.
The strangers no longer murmur, they shout. They scream and squeal and drool vituperative words from their pointed lips.
I'm angry.
I slosh our pho soups in a paper bowl and hastily we dash through the doors, myself struggling to keep up. She walks so fast and I can tell her hands are shaking.
Clumsily I fall behind and spill the murky broth on the car floor and desperately dash back into the restaurant to fix it.
I come back and she's talking and while she's talking I'm scrubbing and scrubbing pitifully trying to fix it, but with every lilt, every hesitation in her voice I stop. I scrub. I pretend not to be searching for the little voice inside the phone, but the scrubbing keeps stopping and I keep going.
I listen.
I scrub once I know I've listened too long and my heart swells again, a tumultuous rage of waves.
The soup still sits on the floor even after I've scrubbed it; there's no way to fix this.
There's no way I can.
She jingles her keys in the space of silence and I sit here typing away when I should and shouldn't be listening.
I should care.
I do care.
I care too much and I want to remember this moment because somehow, somewhere within me, I am told this is right and I will learn from this night.
Everything, every last drop and pile and niche of my life right now feels so strange and so exquisitely designed, pulling me somewhere else.
For some reason, I sense the poet Rumi, near me now, beckoning me with the wisdom of all the universe, yet here I am occupying my body and soul in a little red car, trying to be better.
Trying and as always failing.
As I am,

as all things are--
an effort.
-k.p.

8:26pm Tuesday
March 21, 2017

Frown

Do you ever look at yourself and say,
I am foolish and
clumsy and silly.
These are the strange faults of myself
and aren't they lovely?
No, you don't.
You don't see them, the beautiful faults of yourself, and what a tragic waste you are when you can't see past the end of your long, long nose.
Who cares if it's good looking?
Who cares if it curls just right at the bottom and smooths itself into a handom circle?
I don't.
I care that you see yourself for what you really are, what I also really am--
a beautiful, faulted human, full of life and mistake that is dusted by the everyday ordinary and showered by the everyday extraordinary and wonder--
because I choose to be. 
Look at how you see yourself
and ask yourself
why you don't see yourself
for what you are
rather than by what you see.
Me?
I read too much and not enough.
I drown out all too much as well. My headphones are attached to my body.
I find bare feet unattractive most of the time.
I see beauty in a faulted face and crave the laugh so unappealing and atrocious you know it must be real.
Sometimes I'm a bad listener, terrible even.
I never get sufficent amount of sleep.
I'm a music snob, along with fashion.
I don't eat olives or cashews. In fact, I despise them. 
I don't favor the cold chill of spring down my back or the dying breath of a summer's night fire.
I sleep with my fan on--all through the night.
I often find myself wishing I could speak every language or at least one another one.
I miss my sister. So much.
I'm anxious by the sea.
You know what else?
I see you.
I see you even though you don't want me to and
you know what I really see?
I see a lost boy
pretending he is man. 
A small child,
wishing he was something more than he is and professing such delirious nonsense, I know it must be true.
I see a scared child in your eyes
and that is how I see the goodness in you
that you hide so well.
But not from me.
Never from me.

-k.p.

I saw the books

I saw all these books
                and I thought
so this is what heaven looks like
and I am right on the edge of it.

-k.p.

Stuff we do

SINKING FRIENDSHIPS

We're swimming in the blue
Nigh misfortune: Unlively like a glue
My eyes are soaked all way through

Our sinking friendships
We drown them all

I'm singing a sad tune
Is this all I do? (Ooh Ooh Ooh)
Is this all I do? (Ooh Ooh Ooh)

We should all wear two lifesaving layers
We should all wear two...

No one knows you, till it's over
You know no one true, till it's over

Is this all I do?
Is this all I do?

My lips are pale blue
My shivering half-moon
My last night's lost tune
It's the end of the end of the end

Our sinking friendships
We drown them all

I'm singing a sad tune
Is this all I do? (Ooh Ooh Ooh)
Is this all I do? (Ooh Ooh Ooh)

We should all wear two lifesaving layers
We should all wear two...

No one knows you, till it's over
You know no one true, till it's over

No one knows you, till it's over
You know no one true, till it's over

Is this all I do?
Is this all I do?

Jónsi