The sweetness of this World, and what we have made.

I wish drugs didn't exist.
I wish people understood that there are consequences to their actions -
that you could sacrifice a momentary high for the rest of your life.
I wish people thought about the ones they could be leaving behind.
I wish the ones I loved weren't selfish enough to sacrifice their brilliance just to 'feel good.'
I wish they could be high on life -
and feel all the goodness life offers us every day, and that, THAT was enough.
I wish I never had to experience the pain of loosing someone too young,
someone who was just as brilliant and special as all the hearts they left behind.
I wish in the moments before shooting up, or smoking it, or snorting it, or tipping that bottle [again] or what'ever your drug of choice may be that you saw the faces of the ones you loved - hurting - because you are destroying the person they know and love.
I wish love and life were enough to destroy all the pain and ego that made us all make bad decisions and reach for substances.
I just wish we could all 'play it safe' and respect this gift of life.
I wish my love was enough to save them all.

Blood bath

Just keep holding on
to your plastic eyes.
I'm painting your face
with the words under my breath.
Hidden behind the bar lights
you'll look fine.

Burned by your eye contact

-Shallow embraces fogging picture frames
-Glasses 3/4 full, taken from the last days at the seaside
-Day dreams lounging in your living room
-Burnt sienna with a touch of alizarin crimson speckling the bathroom tile
-Bedroom masterpieces
-Leftover footsteps still echoing out the back door
-Little girls hearts left to break.break.break.

Coming home

I've mentioned it before, but I recieve daily meditations from my old church back in Detroit, and today's meditation really 'hit home' for me. It talks about goals - and we all know I've been quite the goal oriented over achiever throughout my life. However, have I allowed my path towards achieving these physical gains to get in the way of my path towards my spiritual self? The meditation reminds me that I have been blessed with the freedom to CHOOSE my path towards happiness and choose the goals I see most rewarding in my life, but more importantly reminds me that it is not the DOING or the monetary/status gain I will obtain from achieving these goals that will feed my soul like my awareness and presence with my own Beingness and oneness with the universe can. Freedom comes from enlightenment, from freeing myself of the physical 'things' that only temporarily fill the voids in my life, and becoming more peaceful; more aware of my present moment - not just from achieving one unsatisfying goal after another, because that will never feed my soul like being aware of Your presence can.

In this bizarre land swarmed a host of colorful artists

Where all time stands still
and the stars seem to fall just to frolic the streets during the day.
I am in need of the romance of theses streets.

I just want to disappear

Daily affirmation

Dear God,
I appreciate Your constant presence.
Thank You for holding my dreams safe and sacred.
Even when I had given up on my dreams, you never wavered.
Thank You for always believing in me.
Thank You for calling forth the very best in me.
Everything I need flows easily to me from Your limitless supply.
I share generously and lavishly as I am directed,
knowing that there is enough of everything for everyone.
I open my heart and mind to the Truth: Everything that the Father has is mine.
I accept with a glad and grateful heart.
Thank-You God.
Amen

Love like the disco

You gave her tulips,
I got daffodils.
You took me to San Fran
just to dance
in the fire.
Watching
my sweaty palms
loose grip.

Dark, yet lovely.

A couple of years back, a mentor of mine told me that I was "dark yet lovely." Over the years I have thought deeply about this idea. Knowing that I carried baggage and pain - the dark cloud - but also knowing that there was light and love inside of me. At the time I could not recognize my loveliness, but knowing that someone I admired could see it, inspired my curiousity to explore the possibility. As I've confronted my pain and darkness, and become more aware of my ego - I have also become more aware of the light inside of me, inside of us all. I am no longer affraid of my infinite potential, of my loveliness. I have become more full of light and love than darkness. I have become more aware of the love in others and my ability to bring out their inner light by sharing mine with them. In Your eyes, I'm perfect. I'm golden. I am light. I am love.

Dancing with cadavers

I'm writing your name on loose sheets of notebook paper and they're burning in to the night sky
Crimson, white, black
The patterns of the velvety stars are all that align my nerves with realty
While the swines are the only ones to ever understand your filthy hands more than I did
I'm washing my mouth in the river
And making music with the currents
Asking mother earth to forsake your soul

Tea time

-Big hat
-Thrift store prom dress [probably from the 50's]
-"Wild 'Bout You" pink lips
-Strand of pearls, from the garage sale in Port Huron

I'm coasting on your rays

Once again
I feel the p e r p e t u a l need
aching in my wrists
to push away anything "good"
sneaking in to my heart.
I complain about being l o n e l y ,
but I have knit my own blanket of loneliness
and I am smothering myself in it.
My head is in the c l o u d s ,
but my heart is in my hands
I am pulling on the strings
watching it s t r u g g l e
I can't stop myself
I love to HATE this game.

Freak show!

Ohhhhhh - I am obsessed!
Good luck to my girl Mags who just got an interview with these talented ladies!





Cushnie et Ochs F/W 2009

I do it every day

Love sets us free.

You're perfect, as it turned out

And if we had brought our passports
I would have
made synchronization notes for the sounds,
which were taking the northern route
to the mainland.
And when we would open our eyes
the artists would've been seen -
seen as threats
to society.
Held accountable
for creating the chemistry
of the real world.

In a black hole

And if I had good balance, I would've protected you from the sun

Led by the Wompanoag tribe
raging on
for over a year
3000 indians
600 colonists
DEAD.

Eventually he too was killed
and the victorious colonist sold his wife
and children
into
slavery.

She was a minister's wife
kidnapped by an english man
held captive for 11 weeks

And like the Greek Fates
She knit the fabric of individual destiny
of a classic American text.

Steal my records

I'm in love with a man I don't even know.
I'm in love with his words, his voice, his energy.
We dance in my empty room every night.
His soul and I, and a bottle of red.

You're such a gentleman like that

Yeah, I miss you...
more today than yesterday,
but less than I will tomorrow.
So once again,
we'll sit in our corners,
picking our scabs,
waiting for the pain to numb the nostalgia.

In some fantasy of mine

I'm just one of those girls
who never got over
her first love
and I can't stop
writing poems
for your bloody palms
laying limp
on the mattress
in the spare bedroom.
I guess I'll always
love you...

Religiously unreligious

Allison: "I'm a Christian"

Some kid: "Do you eat meat on Fridays?"

Allison: "I try not to eat at all."

You'll never understand

Remember that one night I stayed at your place, because I had no where else to go and I needed somewhere that felt "safe?"
I tried falling asleep while you were out, but your bed felt so empty without you.
I don't really remember how I fell asleep, but I eventually did.
We always use to "fight" over who had a more comfortable bed... I never wanted to admit it, but I think I liked yours better than mine.
I felt you come home that night, and you tried to be quiet getting in to bed with me.
It always felt safer when you were next to me, it always felt like home in your arms.
Still, today, when I think about you... about us - I don't even realize it, but I still smile.
I'm smiling right now.

Nouvelle addiction

Post Secret France!






Aussi, sil vous plait ecoutez: "Ryan Adams -"Blossom"
C'est la chanson du jour!

Bonne nuit. xo

Purification

All the evil karma, ever created by me since of old;
on account of my beginningless greed, hatred and ignorance;
born of my conduct, speech and thought;
I now confess openly and fully.




Believe nothing, no matter where you read it,
or who said it, no matter if I have said it,
unless it agrees with your own reason
and your own common sense.

70

My teachings are easy to understand
and easy to put into practice.
Yet your intellect will never grasp them,
and if you try to practice them, you'll fail.

My teachings are older than the world.
How can you grasp their meaning?

If you want to know me,
look inside your heart.
-The Tao Te Ching

The road of adventure.

We do not go round a circle (of existence).
That is an illusion, just as the cycling of the planets and
the stars is an illusion. We move along a spiral track.

We're off to Vienna

Just a typical walk home from class with Mags...

Mags: "So I want Billy Joel to put on lipstick and kiss me somewhere so I can have his lip print tattooed on me."

Me: "I just want to see Billy Joel with lipstick on."

We've got a job to do, and this is it

Today I realized, most people - even when they've seemed to hit rock bottom - continue to spend more time trying to solve everyone else's problems than really taking a minute to realize what a huge mess they're sitting in. Why do we all try to run away from the problems we can solve for ourselves and try to play heroin to someone else's story? Because the truth is, the only mess we can clean is our own.

Voyage Insondable

Sailing away,
deserting our dwellings
Our friends
Our family
Our enemies
Our lovers, too
Entrons ici en territoire inconnu

Plummeting
towards the abyss
Discouraged
Abandoned
Nostalgic for comforts,
for stable ground.

Winds propel
Waters agitate
Dampening our spirits
Hardening pieces
of our souls

Falling
Tumbling
Plummeting
An insignificant spec
on the horizon

Paralyzed beneath veils
A silent cry
like a darkening crescendo
Locked on the line
time draws neatly for us
Entrons ici en territoire inconnu

Fred Baby

Sometimes, I just miss having a best friend...
someone to laugh with,
someone to dance with.







"I'm like cat here, a no-name slob. We belong to nobody, and nobody belongs to us. We don't even belong to each other. "



Where's my "Fred Baby?"

And I'm dancing as if I were in the woods with you

I'm back to reading "The New Earth" [by. Eckhartt Tolle]. I had to take a little break from it and start living in my state of awareness, Here's a little juicy morsel to kick your morning off that I found pretty powerful...

"The ego doesn't know that your only opportunity for being at peace IS now. Or maybe it does know, and it is afraid that you may find this out. Peace, after all, is the end of the ego. How to be at peace now? By making peace with the present moment. The present moment is the field on which the game of life happens. It cannot happen anywhere else. Once you have made peace with the present moment, see what happens, what you can do or choose to do, or rather what life does through you. There are three words that convey the secret of the art of living, the secret of all success and happiness: One With Life. Being one with life is being one with Now. You then realize that you don't live your life but life lives you. LIFE IS THE DANCE, AND YOU ARE THE DANCER."

You hold me without touch

I forgot how much I loved this song/video concept.
Ya dig?

High, neighbor!

Dom: "I'm so proud of you Ali!"

Phil: "Why are you proud of Ali?"

Dom: "Well look at her!"

Phil stops and looks me up and down with his stoned eyes...
"Why because she's sober?"

"Well aren't you cute!"

The next month is going to be such a wonderful learning experience for me.
I can't wait to take it all in, and be working on something that I'm truly passionate about again.
I'm already getting so inspired and motivated to work my ass off.
I feel so grateful and blessed for this opportunity, I don't even know how to express it.
I just really appreciate someone so talented, and someone who I admire and respect as an artist, giving me the opportunity to work with and learn from them.
I'm probably going to say "Thank you" way too many times, but I don't even care!

Here's to a month of hard work!
Ciao. xo

It's a brushfire spreading, feeding as it moves

Tomorrow is a big day for me.
[I'm crossing my fingers & toes!]
Time to prove something to myself
and gain some confidence once again.

Meet me at the North Shore

Get in my pocket
and fly away with me,
little dove.
The sky is so blue today
and the winds tastes so sweet.
Get in my pocket,
we will travel these cerulean seas.

207

I found a short story that I wrote for my creative writing class my sophomore year in high school. I re-read it for the first time since I wrote it and turned it in, and it definitely brought a few tears to my eyes. I have come so far from the naive and scared little girl I was, but I am glad I have put so much faith in the universe around me, because in fact, as I predicted - the journey has been epic, and I hope it continues to be filled with surprises. I feel so infinitely blessed.




The first time Cat walked through that musty low-income apartment hallway to number 207 she knew she’d be coming back again, and again. Even the chipping paint of the once white walls, that now seemed to be a slight shade of yellow, seemed more exciting than the varsity football game the rest of her so called “friends” were at. They would be drinking their cheap vodka out of water bottles, praying to not get expelled from school, while she drank her just-as-cheap vodka out of a red plastic cup wishing the night would never end.

She felt safe in that crowded little apartment not even a mile from her own home. It sort of excited her to think what her parents would do if they found out that their fourteen-year-old daughter wasn’t sleeping safely at her best friend’s house, like she told them earlier, but at an apartment owned by four guys over the age of eighteen. Not to mention how would they react to see her playing beer pong with the skill of a college frat boy? Or to see her flirting with guys who should see her as nothing more than “jail bait?” And that’s why her parents thought she was sleeping at Allison’s house for the night, and not her eighteen-year old friend Greg’s newly rented apartment.

At some point in the night, after being greeted with an anonymous “Heyyyy!” from the already budding group, she found herself the center of everyone’s attention. The mixture of liquor and heavy beats from the live DJ broadcasting on the radio always seemed to summon her hips to some sort of modern tribal ritual. Even if there wasn’t music playing Cat would have still kept her hips moving to some deep rhythm inside her soul. A few random bodies slid up to her and swayed with the habitual movement of her dance, always making sure her free hand had a filled drink in it. She knew the power her still slim hips had over those older boys’ straying minds but it didn’t really matter to her. She had one guy in mind, and he was the only one whose straying mind she cared to seduce.

Mark made the pit of her stomach turn over, and under, and inside out. He was in a band and didn’t even start becoming attractive until after the fourth or fifth shot. In this case, his looks weren’t her concern, it was his skills that kept him on her mind. She always felt like she was the one in control, that she was the one using him to get what she wanted, or at least he let her believe that. In her mind “a girl has needs too,” and he definitely knew how to get the job done. Their relationship, if you could call it that, was nothing more than in-the-moment drunken hook-ups. They seldom even talked outside of their intoxicated lip locked moments.

As much as she told herself she didn’t care about him, it still bothered her when the music stopped and she saw that scenester girl, with her stupid black studded belt and pink Converses, sitting on his lap in the corner of the room like she was something special. She was holding Mark’s drink and whispering something into his ear, and he had a smile on his face that she’d never seen before. The music was still playing, but she couldn’t really hear it anymore as she walked from the center of the room and sat down squeezing her way between two unfamiliar bodies on the couch. She could feel the color quickly fading from her face. She tipped her head back and let the last swig of cherry vodka slide slowly down the back of her throat, numbing the anxiety on its way down.

“Cat, what’s wrong?” screamed her best friend, and “homeowner,” Greg from mid-conversation across the room.

“Oh nothing! I’m just a little nauseous. I need some fresh air, that’s all,” she said trying to cover up her look of disappointment in the girl on Mark’s lap, that she was positive he had picked up on.

She pushed her way through the obnoxious unknown array of bodies, which seemed to have flooded into the apartment uninvited, to the sliding glass door of the balcony. As she stepped outside she caught a glimpse of her disheveled reflection in the glass door and concluded why it wasn’t her sitting on Mark’s lap. She looked like hell! As she stood on the frozen porch, watching the winter blow, with only the glass door separating her from the party, the cold seemed to sober some inner riot inside of her. Cat lit the palmed cigarette she bummed on her way out and balanced herself on a single chair. She sat beside the fake Christmas tree, which awkwardly sat outside over a month after this year’s snowless holiday, and questioned what she was even doing here.

She looked down through the cracks of the four-by-fours of the two-story balcony to the first floor patio below her. Her view was distorted through the small cracks, but she could still tell a small child must live there. The sprawled collection of brightly colored plastic toys seemed to be forcing her to recollect a childhood of riding with training wheels, shiny pink ribbons and a basket for her “big girl makeup” through the neighborhood while chasing boys with Barbie dolls and threatening to apply lipstick to their faces if they put snakes in her sandbox again. Cat tried to remember the last time her parents doted over her like they did during those years of pigtails and sent-home tests with the letter “A” written brilliantly across the top. Her short-term memory couldn’t seem to recall the last time her parents said anything along the lines of “Good job,” let alone suggest that they were proud of her.

She ashed her cigarette over the ledge of the balcony and leaned a little too far forward on the chair, losing her balance just enough to remind her of the amount of alcohol she had consumed in the past five hours. The ash floated two stories down turning a brilliant orange to a pale yellow until it burned lifeless into the darkness of the quiet winter night. As Cat went to take another calming drag of nicotine, she noticed not only that her hands were now cold, but they were wet. Minuscule molecules of water had formed into what would become the first snowfall of the season. Closing her eyes she not so secretly wished for a morning worthy of the title “Winter Wonderland,” and all the excitement it brought during those same years of pigtails and sent-home tests ornamented with that prized “A.” What did that “A” stand for anyways? Amazing? Astonishing? Astounding? Admirable? Advanced? What did it matter now as she sat isolated from her friends, who didn’t even seem to notice her prolonged absence, nothing seemed to matter now besides the cold wet dampness accumulating on her hands.

Cat closed her eyes because she didn’t need to look at what was happening at her fingertips anymore, the sensation was becoming even more vivid and stimulating. It was like her skin was falling off like clothing. The small droplets of water were accumulating into snowflakes and melting leisurely in her palms. Her pores seemed to be drinking the water and transferring a wave of alertness through her intoxicated limbs. Cat opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue, like her five-year-old self would do, until her tongue felt stiffened by the below-zero temperature. The wind was whispering forgotten memories through her hair as the snow melted the comfort of years long forgotten like awkward moments through her dampened clothing. A distant voice breezily echoed, “Cat, we know,” over and over as her hair got tangled with the force of the blizzard wind. All she wanted were the answers and the security she heard in that distant voice that grew closer with confidence in each passing second.

She stood up on her chair, trying to pinpoint where the voice was coming from. It seemed nearly feet away from the balcony, as if the wind was breathing passionate answers on billows of currents towards her perched figure. It continued to grow closer and closer, “Cat we can tell you,” and so did her desire to reach out and grab the voice, to shake from it what answers she could. Putting all of her weight on her left foot, she strategically placed her right foot on the balcony’s railing while steadying herself with her hands. Making sure she was stable enough, she lifted her left foot from the chair and placed it softly on the railing, pairing it with her right. Slowing lifting herself from a stooped position she deliberately stood up, raising her arms to the snow-weeping sky with a growing smile of satisfaction spreading across her once apathetic face.

Now this was the experience she had come for, this freedom. She was on the edge of finding answers to so many questions that kept her awake night after night. She forgot about the booze, the “friends,” Mark, her disappointment, and everything in that dingy apartment behind her. Cat stood on the balcony looking up into the night sky and imagined what life would be like months from now, a year from now, ten years from now. “Cat, have faith in me,” and Cat reached out to the voice that was nearly two feet from the balcony railing, and fell into the swirl of the season’s first snow not caring where it took her but trusting it would be epic.

Waging wars to shake the poet & the beat

Kings of Leon - Use Somebody

I love everything about you that hurts

I want my picture taken.
I want someone to take an honest portrait of me.
Something real.
Something tangible.



"It's a lie. It's a bunch of sad strangers photographed beautifully, and... all the glittering assholes who appreciate art say it's beautiful 'cause that's what they wanna see. But the people in the photos are sad, and alone... But the pictures make the world seem beautiful, so... the exhibition is reassuring which makes it a lie, and everyone loves a big fat lie."

Voyagez la monde!

Another reason why Maggie is [one of] the best roommate, ever...
she's always making me laugh!

M: Who's passport is this?

A: Mine.

M: Where's it for?

A: Uhhh... the World.