March 2015

“I’ve been fucking around while you’ve been saving the world.” Robert Delong

I am ignoring my self-imposed word count today. I want this out.

I am not vicious or mean for fun or profit.

This post is neither fun nor profitable (yet)

Something bad happened.

I held an infant.

Quite pleasant for most folks. For me it was an exercise in terror.

Who the fuck sees an infant as a trigger for trauma…oh right, me.

Nope, not because of that. I have made peace with that.

Put me in a strip club, let one person say or do something untoward and I BECOME the Angel of Death raining down fire and brimstone like Loki in Dogma. Gimme sec, I must contemplate Matt Damon’s mouth. Ahhhh. Okay where were we.

Maybe not fire and brimstone, but I am viciously accurate with a platform stiletto, broke a nose. Choke holds, check. One time I launched a girl 10 feet (she was coming at me) and made many a man cry.

Treat me like shit in real life and I will take my shirt of so you can better see where to put the knife. And I will also give you my shirt.

Phone conversation 2 days ago
Me: Well of course I loved the baby. I watched him come out of her vagina and I looked after him every day for 3 months. Then she dumps this cat on me, an owl eats it in the middle of the night and suddenly I am the devil.

I then went on to explain how ‘I understand why she did what she did to me’.

Wait, what?

This girl invites me to her baby shower, an acquaintance from a strip club. She is 6 months pregnant, alone and starving. I swooped in and looked after her. I cared for her for 6 months, to the tune of 6 grand. And I understand why she cut me out of her life in the most vicious of ways? I can justify her still slandering me to this day, 2 years later, whenever my name gets mentioned?

Yup. That’s right folks. I get it.

Somehow ‘getting it’ and ‘deserving it’ became synonymous to me.

Putting my stiletto clad foot down right about………………..now.

No. nay fucking NAY.

Another prime example.

Young Un.

Even in proverbial death I managed to write him this flowery, candy coated obit.
(Bringing Home the Gold)

There was an aside at the end about how I left him better than I found him. Elaborating now.

It hurts me to say it. It reads an awful lot like ‘how I got used for 2 months because I allowed it’.

I failed to mention the loans never repaid. Him borrowing my truck which I put on the road 3 months before I needed to and paid the insurance on which was the chariot he used to escort his new girl to Niagara Falls, before returning it to me reeking of Axe body spray with a busted transmission. No remorse, just a desperate plea for me to ‘stay down’ in the friend-zone where he wanted me. All the better to use you my dear.

I failed to mention scrolling through his old Facebook pics (with him) and my realization he had severe and justifiable ugly duckling syndrome. He was a fat kid with braces and acne. Hadn’t been pretty long enough to see what I saw. The way I spoke to him, treated him and coveted him made his balls drop and he started dating an alt model closer to his age. Their kids are gonna take the best duck face selfies EVER.

I get it. Didn’t deserve it, but he is a kid and I don’t care anymore.

The other night I went out, to the same bar in which Young Un treated me like He had won the gold.  I meet this girl. Quickly put two and two together. Oh shit she’s friends with Bad Kitty.
I got ready to bolt. I can only trip down memory lane so far before I end up bloody and crying.

The war Bad Kitty launched on the man and wife was decidedly more vicious than the one she started against me, but she started it.

I moved her twice and bailed her out often. Second verse same as the first, just no babies.

I was Waiting for this stranger to rip into me. She didn’t.

She knew the truth, got used and betrayed in her own way. We hugged it out.

My nail lady had twins, got my nails done last week, she was there with the babies.
I finished, went to get my coat and ended up getting handed a fussy twin.

My first instinct was to shove it back at her and say ‘you can’t trust me with this’.
I fought the fear and he fell asleep in my arms.

Wow, that fucking cunt did a number on me.

I know why I do what I do. I cannot imagine being another way. If I see someone in distress, I literally have to help them. Bad Kitty’s was broke and broken, I gave her cash. No one else was looking after K___ and her baby. Young Un was stuck in a conundrum of shitty job for shitty pay with no light. I turned the light on.

I paid dearly for all three. I am fucking damaged for the good I did. I am scared and hurt. They paid me for my kindness by giving me this sinking feeling I am not worth anything so I run from people who won’t hurt me. I used Young Un as a human shield but that is a story for another day.

I still refuse to lose that part of myself.

What I need to do is start treating the world as my strip club, wherein I am an angel to some a devil to others.
Where there is a distinct line between right and wrong.
Where I have value.
Where I feel safe and powerful and where I know my worth.

I have never questioned the naming and claiming of the involuntary muscle in my chest to explain how I feel.

“It wasn’t until I felt actual physical pain when you left the room that I knew I was in love”.
Dangerous Liasons

I know the quickening, swelling, breaking, bruising and aching void that can only be described as a sucking chest wound. The center of my being lies in my rib cage. The bars are too far apart and heart is prone to slip out and sit on my sleeve, enjoying the view.
Oh honey, it’s not safe out there.

Certain lyrics, tones, words, songs thunder punch me in the heart. My body reacts.

She flutters, beats a staccato. On occasion it murmurs.

My heart is my last vestige of childhood, she never grew past 3 when happiness was clouds, flowers, sunshine, red winged blackbirds, swing sets and fresh baked bread. She still believes in fairies and an indescribable goodness, loves cupcakes, tiaras and sunsets. She speaks in that magical language that occurs between toddler and articulation. She hums and coos, babbles when she is excited. When she is lost or hurt she sends out a whale song, low moans traveling the vast oceans of time and space looking for comfort.

I read a meme a few months back.

“Find someone who loves the way you love”.

I simultaneously jumped back from my laptop and closed the tab, knocked my chair over and sent the dogs into a fit of barking. They were scared. I was HORRIFIED.

I will, on occasion, exaggerate for dramatic effect. This is not one of those times. I am being literal, in the literal sense of the word literal, which means that actually happened.

Terrified of being loved like I love? What the ever loving fuck?

I giggled a nervous giggle, righted my chair and posted (quickly) to Facebook, thinking ‘ha ha Universe, good joke.’

Oh wait, I need to add that to the list of things to ponder. In fact, that has to be the list. A list of just that one thing.

I pondered. At great length, saw the meme again the other day and sighed a contented sigh.

I think we need more words for love, in love.

Once upon a time, a girl walked into a strip club, the one I was working at. I watched her glide across the room, didn’t make eye contact or speak a word. Fell in love with her instantly. Loved everything she ever was or ever would be. It was months before we met. That first feeling I had was justified.

Work with me here for a minute. Here is why I think we need more words for love, a LOT more. I didn’t fall in love with her and want to fuck her or touch her beyond holding hands. You don’t fuck art.

I mean in a Namaste kind of way. The universe in me saw the universe in her, and recognized her as home, familiar, sacred contract, soul sister. Love. When I told her, she smiled and said she knew and felt the same.

She loves the way I love. Loves me like that.

She isn’t my only soul sister. I have a few. In no way do I covet what they have or what they are. My contentment comes from knowing they exist and their energy, which is compatible and recognizable to mine.

I think where my block and fear come from is this.
I have never been completely me.
I have never been loved, by a man As Is.
They loved what I showed them. I never loved me, so they couldn’t either. I would also become all consumed and lost in the person I was with, safer to hide behind them than to come forward and show myself and risk rejection. The fear of rejection is bred in my bones, if I could be misunderstood forever it would be better than being turned away for being me, it’s not real hurt if it’s not really me.

I am fucking over it.

Love is not some fiery passionate mess. It is finding home with another person. It’s looking at this man and thinking ‘you are my favorite’, and feeling that warmth back.

Dear heart, that is not frightening at all, it is the safest thing there is.

Ambisexual

Sacred creation

All loving

Reformer of instinctual liberation

Ambassador of the Kama Surtra

Hearts desire

Omnivorous nymph, embodiment of sexual perfection

Empress of empyrean stature

Naked mutable muse

Mother Mistress

Impious to some mundane masses

Nomadic lover

Debauched, daughter of Venus

ALPHABETIC PAINTING

by j.s. devins

for she whose name means princess

Sarah means Princess in Hebrew. Also ‘fiery one’, ‘discontent’ and also the Patron Saint of Gypsies.

I am those things.

I am in that photograph.

I am what was written above for me when I was 19.
I have no idea how he knew all of those things, we were never together. I was just a dumb, clumsy girl then.

That is what I saw. The general consensus of those who knew me when I was young is that I carried myself with some kind of terrifying grace. Tuesday’s child.

I am a magpie, a gypsy, I love all the colors, all things sparkly, I wander.

I am a water nymph, water is one of two places everything goes quiet for me.

I believe in fairies and ghosts. I think I am a fucking fairy which would explain my metabolism among other things.

I count crows and flip coins when I can’t make up my mind, but only if it’s important.

I spent a long time being angry. Hurricane Sarah is the rarest one of all, unless you are talking about me. I was a storm with skin. (BloodandFlowers)

I had a boss over 7 feet tall, he had to fire me after I threw the sharpest of tantrums, he said he had never been scared of anything like he was of me, in his office at that moment. I smiled, said I understood. I had my job back in a month.

That was in a time called ‘before’.

Now “I want people to hear a voice without hate in it”. ~ Pass the Light.

“Where were you?”
“I just got back from a place called ‘Say it, say it, say it. I said it.”
(Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip)

Writing is all I ever wanted to do.

Someone wanted to know who I am.

I can tell you what I am not.

Dead.

January 26^th 2009 I was driving my son home. We were in a near fatal collision. My 14 year old son pulled me from the wreckage. I overheard bystanders saying ‘there is no way anyone lived through that’. I corrected them.

He is made of rubber and was half asleep. Me? Saw it coming and braced for impact.

3 weeks later I saw two very distinct paths. Stay on opiates on the couch, get huge and live my life like that, if you can call that a life. Or get up.

I got up.

I fell.

I was a wretched mess. Truth be told I was a mess before I got mangled and crushed. I used to have these panic attacks that would turn my limbs into tree limbs, my hands into claws, if I wasn’t hyper ventilating I wouldn’t have breathed at all. Every vein would stick out, I quite literally turned into a twisted tree, solid.

The next 18 months were the hardest I have ever been through. I had lost muscle memory, actual memory, a huge chunk of my vocabulary. I was an angry ghost floating around making everyone miserable, even me. I locked myself in my room for 3 months and screamed at anyone who tried to come in.

I got up.

I left my husband and the farm.

Got scared, wanted to go home.

He wouldn’t let me unless I went to therapy.

I went.

2 kinds. One traditional, with this woman who was made of kindness. She rescues horses and she rescued me.

Another woman who spoke in tongues, put rocks on me and pried open my third eye.

I left them both feeling better than I had since I was little.

I fell.
Immediately back into an old familiar pattern. Abusive mediocrity.

Until one day, another 18 months later. This woman I hadn’t seen in a decade messaged me out of the blue. Showed up at my house, told me I had wandered off my path and she was here to get me back on it. She predicted the future, I believed her. She’s magical.

Here I am.

Gemini Wood Tiger.

40 times around the sun.

98% mobility, 90% vocabulary and all me.

Alone for the first time since my son was born, mostly.

Finally writing like I always wanted, someone 4 year old me would recognize and look up to. Fairy princess made of magic and love.

I still fall down, I just don’t stay down.

I have wings after all.

http://www.markryden.com/

When I was a teenager I would drop acid, hang out with my friends, go home and write trippy-teenage-angsty-drama-laden poetry.

Some of it wasn’t half bad from what I remember.

There was a drawer. Everything I Ever wrote, (dis)organized in layers, from public school until I was 15. I still have the dresser. The words went in the fire. Apparently the stuff on top was pornographic, funny since I was a virgin well into my 16^th year. Not funny ha ha. I admit to a little bitterness, there are ghosts and slips of the girls I used to be in here with me.

Took me 25 years to rise like a phoenix from the ashes of that funeral pyre.

I’m writing again, now is all that matters.

One thing I remember writing, (yes 25 years and I still remember), was ‘there is a rowdy tea party in my head’.

There is.

The Me I am now has dubbed them “The Royal We”. I stole that from a song (Silversun Pickups)

I am composed of 4 elements.

Logic.
It’s just Mine. Clean cut, flawless. Honed and sharpened over 40 years of grinding against the illogic of others. Forged in the fires of right and wrong.
“Logic stepped in, wearing the shining armour of truth and slayed the twit with two words.
“I know”.
Logic flashed a sunlit smile, confident and infallible”.
My logic is diamond encrusted and I wear it like a crown or wield it like a sword, depending.

Ego.
Freudian fo’ sho’. What I want, what I am. The masks I wore. Ego is mutable and well tamed by Logic and time. For most of my life not a lot of outside thought was given to what I want and who I am. She got buried under everyone else’s ego. Not anymore. And the masks? Just decoration now.

Oh heart.
Dear sweet heart. Think Boo from Monster’s Inc. always in pj’s and pigtails, forever 3 years old, speaking in that candy-coated jabber no one understands but it pleases our ears.
Mostly she walks around with her blankie and colours.
On occasion she wails, sounds like whale noises.
Then sometimes she turns into the Stay Puff Marshmallow Man and lays waste to New York, accidentally. She’s just so big.

And last but always loudest, Vagina.
Imagine a teenage girl. Temper tantrum after temper tantrum. Also, she is always STARVING. Sometimes we feed her just to shut her up.

Fear, Doubt, Hope and Angst used to sit at the table with us. Bunch of fucking assholes, always spitting on the good cupcakes and letting the tea steep till it was bitter.
They hid under the table, everyone but Logic sneaking them crumbs.

Angst murdered, Doubt thrown into a fire. The locks have been changed Fear and Hope gaze in the window.

The remaining 4 rarely agree.
A lot of their time is spent trying to coax Heart off my sleeve, back to the safety of her blanket fort.

I see very clearly now, from the head of the table, diaries spread out before us that every failed relationship was a result of leaving one of me out of the equation. I never bothered to hold out for “He Who will Appease Us All”.
It’s no one’s fault. Ego had a 40 year identity crisis. And we had already met Him, he was just over in another time zone, being married and shit, yet somehow having full custody of Heart. That has been amended. Heart wants, we abide.

Case and point? Young Un. That was ALLLLL Ego and Vagina.

St. Anthony? Ego had slipped into a coma, like Sleeping Beauty, surrounded by an impenetrable wall of thorns. We were lost without her.

Pimp Daddy. That was Logic standing alone, stubborn, can’t recall why. Trying to be a grown up I suppose. Yuck.

Sunday. Closer. Logic, Ego and Vagina all concur. Heart smiles at him but keeps colouring and humming to herself.

I had an Epiphany.

United we stand, divided we fall. (Aesop)
Fuck, united we fall harder.

Twice the Council has voted unanimously. Giving rise to the 5^th element.
Love.
That is all I really am.
Love walking around in human form.

Less like Milla Jovovich and more like Mother Mary. The way the Catholics draw her.
Our Lady of Lust, Grace, Serenity with our gargantuan glowing Immaculate Heart.