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How many bright white moons have I missed looking down at clumsy feet, just hoping they get me home?
How many sunny days have I spent brooding in the basement with the curtains drawn?
I know we're built to walk and watch for movement but I always just want to lay down and close my eyes. And how dare I?
The world aches for recourse, repair, yet somehow I dare
Like a child who revolts against the only one who cares
the baby cries unaware
eyes fixated on the bright lights
heart fixated on the promise of something that could nourish
How many bright green leaves have I missed lingering in between these insulated walls?
Scrawling some crude rendition of plants, my hand grips the pen like a branch
ink vines crawling onto lines of paper, sound waves blossoming off the steel and nylon strings
mind fixated on the flower
heart fixated on the promise of something that could nourish
I go digging for tubers of poetry in desk drawers and mining for it in my heart just searching for something lit up and familiar, my eyes gaping but blind in the dark 'cause seeing ain't one act by one agent, it's a mingling of some freak phenomena. It's a rendezvous at a point and on a wave between the world and your eye ball and your mind fixated on the bright lights
heart fixated on the promise of something that could nourish
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The heartbreak is everywhere, it's under my fingernails and stuck in my pores. I scrub and scrub to no avail, a slow bath of hopeful words. A spring of fear bubbles up somewhere on our small garden plot, and they uprooted you as a seedling, they mistook you for a weed. So many small splatters of green, like paint stains, resilient where they had chosen to nurture the fragile, the fruiting, the weak. The young chubby faces in the faded photograph, hand-me-down clothes, in lunch line from recess, seen through the bars of the school gate. There's a current of anxiety, it's in the groundwater feeding our roots and leaves all these years, until we're made out of that fear. They couldn't tell what you were without that bloom of character, but would it even have mattered to them if they had seen more than that small splatter of green? Just a paint stain on their canvas so clean and so plain. A spring of trust bubbles up somewhere they never thought to plot. And god how our roots have been so thirsty. And we backache who we are by the fence over by the briar and their garden bed dried up, clay, clay everywhere. Young thin faces in digital photographs hand-mended clothes cross legged and serious, seen through the blooms of our irises. There's a current of genuine honesty, it's in the groundwater feeding our roots and leaves, just a few years. I want to grow out of my fear.
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We go out walking under the waxing moon
our pupils growing like black holes in bloom
the trees are our history the forest is full of stories
we'll never forget, even when we're in the city
There's so much tension and so much subtle ugliness
as millions of people wake up for work and dress
launching the attack, the missiles commute off to work
Trains full of people who don't talk or look up from their books
What kind of stories will we have in the end?
The pictures flow through me to the memory puddle up in my head
Where are those warm rooms we stuffed ourselves into with friends?
I felt so safe there but we all scattered in the wind
I'm so sick of reading, keeping up with symbols and rumors
I want to touch what means something to my life and world
place my hands on it, break or fix, embrace or shove
lay my eyes on it and know it by hate, or know it by love
I go out walking under the waning moon
darkness increasing in my heart and mind and mood
out in the stillness, I know tonight I must decide
what is my place here?
With my roots ripped up, I'm thirsty all the time
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I don't have a crystal ball but if I did it wouldn't tell the future
but I'd have a fistful of sloppy notes from studying the past in the crystal
I'd see us in there trying not to break 'cause we believed the lore
that taught us we were fragile things, as if we didn't have a core
I'd see us in there, shattering, glass bark ground to powder
cold air hits the heartwood and the sap flows
wants to stick it back together
Then comes the sculptor of the past like a lumberjack
he's got a chainsaw to make you an ice swan
with a pretty, long neck and you'd be melting quick unless you substance resists the form
crystalline trees, songs fall like leaves and I never knew you until your roots were under my boots that bumpy bark reflecting my thousand eyes detecting that I never knew you until the heartwood and sap shown through but that took a break in that cloudy, crystal skin
and it takes us breaking until we see we do grow again
and this grove is quaking aspen shimmering and shaking with the music we're making hearts fluttering and breaking
faking a million smiles I tried shaking you awake
flaking a million times and making sad mistakes
hurting so casually you were flirting with the pain
learning nothing from it and so it is all in vain
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You got a spirit that wants to give in, fully surrender, but still hold up your chin. I got a nature that understands the need to improvise when you shoulda been makin’ plans.
But I wasn’t calling you an idiot, can’t you see my soul hitchhiking down the street from it’s busted chariot?
No one could build a temple in which they could hide from decay,
And no one stops for broken spirits in this day and age.
You swing low, you swing so low.
The only romance I know is under the canopy, where I learn something from the alder trees. How the wind seduces them right out of their seeds and the big ones watch the little ones come up in the shade by the stream.
The hottest I get is a smoky fire and it’s a busted-chariot, wood-burn pile.
With the oak and the alder and the fir-gotten dreams. And the cedar needle crackling to tell me a consoling story.
You swing low, you swing so low.
Come here and look directly into my eyes.
I wouldn’t do you like that, I couldn’t if I tried.
I look in yours and you’re a hundred million miles away.
High in pride’s chariot, the wood will burn in regret’s flames.
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Letters written by frost bitten hands scrawling something I'll never understand. Something cold and cryptic, desperate and descriptive and unplanned. Folded up and tucked into the dirt, like a seed that wants to crack and blurt out something living. But the winter and the biting cold keeps you dormant like a thought untold like writing no one can read. And the scarlet runner told me all of this in the later fall. And the scarlet runner wanted me to keep it quiet after all.
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The morning screams at me in voices of wind and chimes and clattering noises says, "wake the fuck up kid. you've been sleeping like you were dead."
But the night only whispers. I freeze my ass off and try to listen
Says, "loosen up kid. you've gotten desperate and rigid."
And I can only feel grateful that anything I am is lucid of wakeful
so cheer the fuck up kid, lately you ain't even spirited.
We got longing like falling and laughter that shatters
so stay while I tell how we fell off our rockers into the water
but fortune has it so somehow we still float
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8. |
In Some Cryptic Way
04:01
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I cannot keep track of them. If I could I'd live on bended knee, I swear.
All I did would be for them 'cause I'd know it was for me as well
We're all tied together in some cryptic way
but always hungry for change I feel the tug as they pull away
we've learned to lose our expectations
and just trust that we'll figure something out, something like joy
we're just borrowing tools and language from a culture we want to destroy
we're all tied together in some cryptic way
and our true feelings are the ghosts haunting what we had to do and say
but was there a time when a place meant something more than hust a page in a book of days
and how much time could I spend reading, but the book moves on in the pack of a stray
I've read of times when there were places where the rivers and mountains, like family, had names
and in our dreams we saw their faces and felt their heartbeats in our veins
'cause we were tied together in such a clear way
when so entangled and enchanted, why would you ever pull away?
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Bee Sahatji Portland, Oregon
Bee Sahatji is a Portland, OR based songwriter and a member of Portland bands Strangeweather and Aradia. Former member of Riot-folk Collective.
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