The Boxer

The colors are brighter

When your bright red blood

Gets splashed against the monotone

I met a boxer at the bar

He asked me to look at his nose

‘cause it’s been broken 3 times before

You know I can relate

I’m the shadow boxer type

My opponent knows my every move

Faces me dead on – fierce

Every time I look in the mirror

He showed me his scar

The one below his jaw

Made me want to circle around the ring

Doused in gasoline

Waiting for someone to light a cigarette

 

I keep bracing myself for the next big thing

He keeps destroying his body

Over an elusive victory

My left arm wrestles the right

And I keep thinking I want to take him home tonight

I want to share battle scenes

‘cause I like his crooked nose

Despite everything

I need a strong opponent

Can he handle my blows?

Takes me into the ring

Just to practice sparring

Practice becomes the real thing

The colors are brighter

With our blood

Splattered against the monotone

But this time I won’t be alone

No, this time I’m not alone

Taking the Leap: Leap Year 2012

“People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition.  We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult in a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.”

-Rainer Maria Rilke

Full excerpt here.

I’ve been meditating on Rilke’s words a lot.  People do have a tendency towards the easiest path.  We tend to like what we are good at and build up those strengths while neglecting our weaker skills and compensating with our strengths because it’s easy.

Crow Pose

I’m horrible at yoga.  (I know, I know, how can anyone be horrible at yoga?  It’s the most noncompetitive form of physical activity in existence, but I am!)  I’m awkward and completely lack the grace that most yoginis have when flowing into poses.  Sometimes I still confuse my left with my right, I fall out of balance and my crow has repeatedly kissed the earth and not in a good way.

So, clearly, I should become a yoga teacher, right?!  Totally!

I can never just wade into the water and gradually go in; I’ve got to dive in each time.  As such, I just handed in my expensive nonrefundable deposit this past week towards a yoga teacher training certification program – equivalent to getting a Bachelor’s in Yoga and now there is no going back.

Back in February, I thought about how 2012 is a Leap Year and then I stumbled upon this Leap Year project site and wanted something to contribute.  I think this is it.  My training begins this September and goes until my 29^th birthday in February.  I’ve done some pretty wild things in my life from living with wolves to fasting for 40 days to being a full time solo wanderer unsure of where I’d lay my head the next night, but I have to say I think this is the scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life.

I’ve never been much of an athlete and my relationship with my body, though it has evolved thanks to my yoga practice, has been a tumultuous one.  Committing myself to teaching a physical practice to others is incredibly intimidating and scary, yet I absolutely feel it is the next step in my own personal evolution.

I’m diving into the difficult, wrapping myself around my weaknesses and hoping to come out of this a better human, or in the least, knowing my right from my left.

"Death and Romance: Riddles of our Lifetime..."

People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition.  We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult in a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.

Rainer Maria Rilke

To love is good, too: love being difficult.  For one human being to lover another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.  For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.  With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered close about their lonely, timid, upward beating heart, they must learn to love.  But learning time is always a long, secluding time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far into life, is solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves.

Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate?); it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become world, to become world for himself for another’s sake.  It is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.  Only in this sense, as the task of working at themselves (“to hearken and to hammer day and night”), might young people use the love that is given them.  Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must save and gather for a long, long time still), is the ultimate, is perhaps that which for human lives as yet scarcely suffice.

Whoever looks seriously at it finds that neither for death, which is difficult, nor for difficult love has any explanation, any solution, any hint of way yet been discerned; and for these two problems that we carry wrapped up and hand on without opening, it will not be possible to discover any general rule resting in agreement.  But in the same measure in which we begin as individuals to put life to the test, we shall, being individuals, meet these great things at closer range.

The demands which the difficult work of love makes upon our development are more than life-size, and as beginners we are not up to them.  But if we nevertheless hold out and take this love upon us as burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in all the light and frivolous play, behind which people have hidden from the most earnest earnestness of their existence – then a little progress and alleviation will perhaps be perceptible to those who come long after us; that would be much.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

Letters to a Young Poet

Beauty Marks

She’s wearing that little black dress

You said she looked so beautiful in

Though she never believed you then

She examines her body in the mirror

Bruises all over her arms; a scraped knee

She’s a mangled tigress

In a sea of picture perfect kittens

Wearing fancy party dresses

Their little bodies in tact

She doesn’t wear shoes

She can’t run in at any given moment

She examines oceans of flawlessness

Only to stare at the scar beneath her chin

The motorcycle burn on her shin

She’s earned every single stripe

She consoles herself; licking wounds

‘cause domestication’s for the tame

She always colors outside the frame

She’s learned to scan every room

For any movement resembling her own

Still she’s only met a couple with that wilderness

A few with a will too strong to harness

Like her, they’re hard to hold onto

Disappearing when the night wind blows

Endangered species learn to be unreliable

A heavy adaptation to ensure their survival

So she stalks her loneliness

Balks at the emptiness

Learns to sit still in the darkness

She seeks a hunter

Someone of her kind

Not to tame her

Not to maim her

Not to capture or contain

But maybe to see the beauty

Outside the frame

For now in her little black dress

Waiting for the night’s wind to move her

Finally believing she too, is beautiful

Through the scars and the marks

Each indicating from where she came from

And how far she’s come

After all,

Her hunter will know her

By her stripes

We Found Love in a Hopeless Place...

I was out with some friends hitting up various nighttime establishments.  At the end of the night, I wound up at this upscale lounge; the type that has bottle service and the women’s skirts barely cover their behind wearing shoes they can barely walk in not to mention dance in.  Not my type of joint, generally speaking, but a kind stranger handed my friend and I a vodka cranberry each as we walked in so we thought we’d go with the flow and make the best of it.

That is until I went into the restroom and overheard the conversation.  Some young woman was discussing getting her third boob job and I looked at the bathroom attendant and whispered into her ear: “I’m so sorry you have to listen to this bullshit all night.”  She chuckled and I went back upstairs.

I found my friend and then the exit and as I am waiting for a cab the bathroom attendant comes out and she thanked me for what I said; that it was hard to hear these women complain about their lives sometimes and that her best friend just lost a baby yesterday and that she was just so tired…

All I could do was hug a stranger on some street corner at 2:30 a.m. as my only reply. 

The Chicago Project: Biking Naked

Ah, Saturdays in the summer.  How I love you.  This summer I’ve been keeping my weekends as clear as possible if only to fully enjoy the freedom of the moment.

This past Saturday I enjoyed what some might say is ultimate liberation – baring it all in public.  After letting the wind blow me from Pilsen to Ukranian Village and then to Edgewater Beach I biked back to the West Loop to participate in the best bike ride of my life…naked.

Okay…okay…so I wasn’t completely nude, but close enough.  I also wasn’t alone; there were hundreds of us and possibly a thousand closing down the streets downtown biking naked.  It was thrilling, scary and absolutely joyful to see people’s reactions to us biking down in the buff.

Things I loved:

• All the body positivity surrounding the event – participants weren’t there to judge your body – you felt accepted no matter what you looked like
• So many different people from various walks of life: old people, young people, big people, small people, black people, brown people, yellow people, tattooed people, white people…just wow. 
• “Less gas; more ass!” chants (even though I feel so crude swearing in chants so I obstained from actually chanting the word “ass” in public)
• Feeling my bare skin against the night wind
• All the body paint, creative masks, costumes and boomboxes attached to bikes

Things I didn’t like:

• When a guy strikes up a conversation with you by saying “nice bike,” you’re not really sure that he’s looking at your bike…
• All the people on the streets taking photos.  I almost yelled at them to just experience the moment with us rather than constantly try to capure it, but I didn’t.  It must have been the lack of liquor in my body.

So I was a little shy about taking my clothes off at first and biked a little less than half the ride with my tank top still on until a beautiful burlesque boy starting talking to me as we biked together.   “You should take it off,” he said.  “Really?  I dunno…”  “Yeah, you’ll feel so free and good, just do it.”

I did do it. I removed my tank top and revelled in the moment.  If my mother could only see me now (nope, she just gets to read about it) :)

I laughed a lot, smiled at people and felt so much joy at being the highlight of so many people’s  crazy weekend stories.  I wasn’t going to go home to call my friends to say, “You’ll never guess what I saw today!”  No I was going to tell them: “You’ll never guess what I did today!”

Poetry to read to your lovers

You can thank me later. ;)


I don’t want to seduce you
I want to love you
I want to fill you with me
As though you were the pages of my journal
I want to draw my poetry
All over your skin
I want to spend my nights
Breathing you in
I want to fall asleep
In the crevice between
Where heart and clavicle meet
I want to sing you all day long
Feel your skin touching mine
From dusk until dawn
I want to kiss you until
We are 4 sore lips
Hearts pounding; minds asking
“is there anything
better
than
this?”
I want to love you so completely
That every other woman you meet on the street
Could never hold a light to me
Sweep you into a whirlwind romance
I will be the gentlest tornado you’ve ever seen
Lifting you 40 feet off the ground
While you look me in the eye
Never noticing your distance from the earth
Our dance a weightless one
I will love ALL of you
Graze my lips over your scars
Know the darkness in your heart
I promise I’m strong enough
To keep you safe and sound
On the earth or 80 feet above the ground
I do not fear space or time
So long as you know
That you’re mine
When the fiercest winds blow
I’ll let you look up my skirt
I will make your heart flutter
Pure joyfulness at each batting of the butterfly’s wings
I want to explore you
My never-ending labyrinth
I’d stop and smell the flowers
I wouldn’t jump at shadows
Because no, I don’t want to seduce you
I want to love you
God please give me the wisdom
To know the difference