u just can't win

There's an old song by the J. Geils Band called Love Stinks
that has lyrics that ring so true with so many:

You love her
But she loves him
And he loves somebody else
You just can't win 

Yeah, Yeah...Love Stinks.


I was having a little barbershop conversation earlier, and I've learned a lot in my years of cutting hair and pouring drinks and livin' this life...u just can't win.  Why is that?  Why is it that it is so difficult to find reciprocated love?  There always seems to be such an imbalance.

He loves him, but he wants a girl...but he doesn't really know how to talk to girls.  And the girl who adores him just happens to be in a man's body.  "You can't help who you love" he says.

And then there's him...him who loves him, but that him is married to a her.  I'm sure he loves her, but.  That brings in the question...Why is it that someone can love someone enough to marry them, to spend days and nights with them, but feels passion for someone else?

I wonder...Are men incapable of combining lust and love?  Do they confuse lust with love?  I read something not long ago about the male brain, how if it feels compassion for say a woman, then its desire nodes don't light up...and if it feels desire, the compassion leaves the brain.  whoa.  how's that for core differences?  Of course the scientific journal worded it with greater precision, I'm just giving u the summary.

Then there's her, who is a him, who loves her, but she loves him who is a her.  Follow me?  This isn't as simple as gender differences.  Male/Female yadda yadda blah blah.  I'm talkin' 'bout love here.  It really doesn't matter how someone identifies themselves.  What matters to me is.......

WHY IS IT SO DIFFICULT TO FIND RECIPROCATED LOVE?

I want the kind where you feel both passion AND compassion mutually!

Nature must have some sort of hand in this.  But shit damn!  I want the Romeo to my Juliet AND the Juliet to my Romeo in one package!  You Dig?

Damn.

ReallY?

500 years later and you ask me "Why the sad face?"

New Age Nostalgia - Poem

A Poem by Colette

This is like a conversation between 2 sides of the brain from past and present, can be read from top to bottom or as 2 separate poems--1 left aligned, the other indented.

New Age Nostalgia

He wants to take me to a strip bar

He hasn’t even taken me for coffee

I have been a deliberate coquette since I was 4 years old

I sat next to a neighbor boy at the piano, watching him tap

the ebony and ivory keys

I tackled him, to move in for a kiss that was not received

He doesn’t know how to deliver affection

He doesn’t know how to play...with me

I played cars...with boys

Climbed trees...buildings

I have been a boy girl since I was 5 years old

He wants me to send him raunchy photos

He wants to believe his dick will bring me closer to God

I went to mass with my mother

Loved her more than any Lord that could possibly exist

Believed in her love, questioned everything else since I was 6...

When my Me’Me’ died

He hasn’t asked what I’ve seen...where I’ve been

He doesn’t know where I’m trying to go

I studied National Geographic magazine

Went to the Kennedy Space Center

I was perhaps an agnostic Catholic when I was 8 years old

He ignores, but doesn’t want to be ignored

He hasn’t been taught how to treat a woman proper

            I’ve been a rebel since I was 13

I made a fast exist at 16

            Control by force wasn’t fitting for me

           

He wants my lips, my hands...my hips

He doesn’t engage my mind, my heart...my soul

            I’ve been lugubrious since I was 3 years old...

            when I saw a ghost of a man standing by my crib

            I am sentient as all animals...

and clairsentient in my enlightened years...

            I feel the suffering of others...and shared energy with a whale

He doesn’t want to know anything about me

He can’t peel back any of my layers....

He can’t even get close enough to touch one.

            I am a zedonk.

            I am black and white...

            and full of grey matter

            I am a unique masterpiece under an azure sky...

            but rarely looked up to, until I die.

He can’t see...ME

because I’m inside this body....

my spirit...free

and his mind...

can only think of what his dick wants to do to...me

She's Baaaaaaaaaaaack! hahahahaha!

So...I'm making a New Year's 2012 resolution to write in this blog daily...I'm started today--why procrastinate?!  I'm just gonna write about whatever gets into this pretty, yet strange, often highly intellectual, yet goofy, little head, and yet big brain of mine!  Maybe I'll touch on politics or religion.  I'll definitely talk about male/female relationships, and LGBT friendly conversations.  You know--well now you do--I'm all about supporting diversity, yet finding unity within our diversities.  I like to take photos...so there will be images.  I'll share an occasional poem with you.  I'll interview artists, writers, musicians, and people of interest.  If I watch a film and it moves me somehow, I'll share it.

Here's a link to my fav movie scene ever!  crazy ass dance scene in Wild at Heart by David Lynch

I watch documentaries and foreign films that are thought provoking.  I watch tripped out films.  Sometimes I just like to laugh!  I'm compiling a list of some of my favs, so I'll post that here and add to it along the way.

Yesterday, my friend and fellow poet Joyce Conley discussed how we want to take our poetry to the next level.  Last August we delivered some empowering spoken word to the guests at a Women's Equality Day dinner to support the NOW  National Organization for Women and in celebration of the 19th Amendment giving women the Right to Vote.

Gosh, I just teared up watching that clip, and I don't know if it's cuz I can't stand how dorky I look, or I was actually touched by my own words--I think both!  haha!  Anyway....Joyce and I would like to participate in more events such as this one to help support non-profit organizations, and be the change we wish to see in the world (as Gandhi suggests!).  With our poetry we want to educate and uplift.  We are going to begin creating video versions of our poems with the help of Chris Penney--our local bad ass film producer dude!  And trust me...we are gonna look way more fly in these videos!  We wanna give ya'all something sexy to look at, something silly to laugh at, something cool to listen to (yeah, we'll add some jams) and most importantly SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT!

WRITE ON!

Oh...and lemme throw this one in here too where Joyce did a dedication poem for ME!
at the Avant Garde 2434!  Love U Gold n Bold girl!

Miss Grand Rapids Blog Questions

 I haven't written in this blog in some time, and the wheels in my mind are in constant motion trying to decide how to make the most out of my online presence with my art, writing, ideas and thoughts.  

A dear friend and talented writer--Claudia Moss--invited me to read her book and ask her a few questions about her book If You Love Me, Come.  I think this blog is an appropriate spot to share this, and I hope it will encourage you to read her book-and perhaps choose it for a book club, because it is worthy of discussion.

She has dubbed me Miss Grand Rapids, and here are her answers to my questions:

1.     How did you research your characters? Do they have parallel lives with anyone in your life? Miz Too-Sweet is my favorite, because you have her Southern Ebonics down! Her voice makes the novel come to life.

Thank you, Colette!  I love Miz Too-Sweet, also.  She is the glue that binds the other characters together in a web of love, and, ironically, she is in the projects, Techwood Projects, not in the suburbs as are Frenonia Roberts and her sister Rhonda Butler.  Miz Too-Sweet’s wise voice is that of my grandmothers: Pearlie Mae Young and Sophie Mae Moss.  Every summer, as a girl living in Waterbury, Connecticut, I traveled to the South with my family to enjoy a week or more with my grandparents.  I loved the other world nature of their accents, the Southern vernacular, their sayings, their customs and traditions.  And I adore Miz Too-Sweet’s gift to understand the Omniscient voice of the wind.

The novel is a frame story, with Miz Too-Sweet’s voice beginning and ending the tale.  In the Southern tradition, storytelling is a sacred pastime, allowing for a special bonding between family members.  It separated the storytellers from the audience.  You were honored in an unspoken way, if you could captivate your listener for hours on the power of your creative vibe, elocution and choice of words and sounds!

No, I didn’t have to research the characters in If You Love Me, Come.  They sprang from the creative space within, from a Stillness, from my fertile memory, and in a few instances from actual people I have known.

As for parallel lives, in the novel Pastoria (my maternal grandfather’s mother’s name) passes her baby to its father and asks that they go their separate ways, same as did one of my sister’s friends.  I couldn’t stop thinking about how such a thing impacts the mother, the child, the father and the person nurturing the baby.  Considering I was a young mother who prayed long and hard to conceive, I was in awe, witnessing such a mother/child experience.  Bittersweet, it was a perfume I couldn’t wash away!

2.     You definitely understand, and communicate so well, how many women feel on so many levels through your characters. Do you think this is a novel about our female, human condition?

Thank you, again!  Yes, ma’am, this is a novel about the female and how her world evolves with and without certain experiences, how she can change her circumstances by changing her mind, how other women living their lives can empower those who aren’t living theirs to the fullest and how they must stare fear in the eyes in order to live life more richly.  Writing this, I can almost hear Helen Reddy belting out the unforgettable line: “I’m Every Woman; she’s all in me.”

I think the story speaks to the female condition globally.  No matter what language we speak or where we were born or whatever our customs, we are yet the glue of society, reminding me that a society can be no greater than how it treats its women.

3.     The class differences are prevalent throughout your story. How does this come to shape our perceptions of not only your characters, but of our own attitudes toward those who fall into a different class from whom we are unaccustomed to having contact? In other words, what would you like the reader to take away from this as a lesson, or awakening, about class differences?

A sumptuous question this is, Colette!  Love it!  I want readers to walk away from the story with a different perspective on class.  I want them to question their preconceived notions of others from a class different from themselves, realizing that class is a society-imposed barrier that signifies your household income is different from another’s, and as such, your experiences are different.  You may have been able to travel to Greece, where as others may have had to settle for reading about Greece.  I want readers to be thankful for their experiences, whatever they were or are, and be open and willing to embrace people for who they are, not for the wealth they or their families might possess.

We are one.  And as souls cloaked in the human experience, I think we should defy the strictures of tradition whenever we can, and walk out on the waves of sisterhood and brotherhood to unwrap the gifts of our Present Moments.

4.     How important is it to you for the reader to have an understanding of the lesbian romance within the story? It almost seems to be a secondary story within the story of class and family struggles, but I could be wrong. Am I?

That is a pivotal question to understanding more about the story and the author.  As a lesbian, I think it’s very important to have readers encounter lesbians in the midst of a story about family and class struggles.  I want lesbians to be as ordinary as heterosexuals between the pages of a novel or in a social setting or at our family dinner tables.  No one in society is meant to be invisible, and if society and that group persist on invisibility for some, as in “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” then that will constitute the longer it will take for society at large to accept that lesbians and gays are souls having a human experience as well.  The world is an immense flower garden, and how much beauty would it miss if all of us were tulips?

Slowly, physically, I was creaking open the closet door when I began writing If You Love Me, Come.  In a magical way, I loved myself out of obscurity by coming out, to a certain extent, in the pages of my story, and thereby, my lesbian romance appears as a secondary plot, but for me, at the time, it was major.  Perhaps that is why I claimed myself wholly, as a lesbian, later, in the throes of my erotica published in several anthologies.

5. In what context are the male character references important to this story? Miz Too-Sweet says, "Then outside of his chile support, he died to me that day, and I been heedful of how a lap sits ever since." I love the wisdom that spews out of her! I just want to know what your intent as the author is concerning men. Is there a message that we can be strong without them?

I absolutely love your questions, Lady Poet.  My sole intent with the male characters that people the story is to show that, like the women, we are the result of the choices that we make on this journey called life.  Some of the male characters make choices that devalue and degrade their female counterparts, as with Miz Too-Sweet and several suitors she’d experienced in her deep-South past.  Yet, conversely, she finds a man she can adore in her present husband, Mr. Will.  She dotes on him.  He is the center of her world.  She makes certain he is fed when she tips out to visit with Pinkey, and she considers Preacher, a mute neighbor, as a part of her extended family in Techwood.

“J.T.,” Junior Thomas, Free’s man, is a dynamic character, changing over the course of the novel.  Raised listening to his grandfather’s dictum about a man being able to control his woman, J.T. bows to being the sort of man who looks admiringly at women dressed in sexy attire, sexy attire he doesn’t want Free to style, and when she calls the matter to his attention, it sparks a string of arguments leading to Free walking away.

Meka Rae, the beautiful model on the novel’s cover, vouchsafed to me that J.T. was her favorite character, because he eventually understood what it meant to love another, to love a woman.  He learns that you cannot change another person; you can only change self.

Thank you for sharing my story with your readers, Colette!  I sincerely appreciate you on many levels.

Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil

This doesn't have to do with the book or the movie--though both were good!

It has to do with dreamland. Our subconscious waking up memories of people who are dead from our lives. I have dreams of my mother, who passed away a few years ago, and most of these are good because I get to be held by her--even if it's in another realm, I'll take it, it's better than never again feeling her love.

Last night, I was dreaming of my ex-hubby. He's the only one I pine over. With relationships that have followed, I have become Comfortably Numb. Sadly, when I dream of my ex it is often unfulfilling. I often awake feeling depressed. I miss him. In last night's dream, I believe we were on a ship. At one point I know I was in a plane, feeling like I was about to slide off before it lifted off, and I actually wanted to, but didn't want to be hit by it. I think I made it. Oddly, I think my oncologist was the pilot.

I was following my ex to every corner of the ship in my dream, or simply wandering around aimlessly. Sometimes approaching him, sometimes not. We were on the phone, and it was breaking up at times. I was having trouble hearing him, and feeling very frustrated. When I did get to see him, I said "Please, please, give us a chance!" He was so calm, seemingly unmoved by my emotions. I feared I was going to get over emotional, and then he really wouldn't want me. I said, "I was young then, you would really like me today I think. Please. Can we try? I feel confident it would be wonderful."

I couldn't get out of this dream. Just as I can't get away from these feelings in my waking life. Then the bird sound on my cellie went off, signaling I just got a text.

"Can you come into work at 1:00? I'm sick."

"Ok" I text'd back.