kinfolk

blog: life is but a dream

I have very vivid dreams; a lot of the time my dreams are like movies in my head where I’m not represented in them at all, and there’s no deeper meaning. I can tell the ‘mouthfeel’ of these dreams are different. I watch fictional characters react to situations and I wake up thinking ‘damn that would make a great story’. I’ve even tried to write those stories, but there’s never enough meat to flesh them out.

Other times my dreams have very overt references to my life. The kinds of dreams you wake up from and know exactly what they mean, why those themes would have been on your mind, and what (if anything) you’re supposed to take from them.

Then there are others with meanings that are older, deeper, harder to pick apart. Recurring themes that keep popping up in my head; my brain’s way of communicating the issues I struggle with chronically.

One recurring theme I have is around houses and possessions left behind. For example:

  • I will dream I left behind an apartment in the States with a lot of stuff in it (I actually did leave things behind when I moved, and have no idea what happened to it all or even what exactly I left behind), or I dream I am in the US trying to locate or gain access to the apartment I had when I was there last.
  • I enter a building where I used to rent a room and suddenly can’t remember if I got all my stuff when I left, but can’t find which room I used to have so I can check. Or I’ll remember that I DID leave stuff behind, and gain access to the room, but the room will be empty.
  • I’m at my parents’ house which has a granny flat or large garage where my stuff is stored. Sometimes there’s urgency because they’re moving / have moved out of the house. If I go in the granny flat/garage, it’s either too dark to see what’s in all the boxes, or I can see it but it’s all so jumbled up that my mind can’t really process the actual things in the room.
  • I’m renting a new house, when suddenly I realise I still have a lot of stuff at the old house that never got moved across. Or I have access to an old house that I used to rent, and I go there but it’s empty and everything’s different.
  • I’m renting an old house that is literally falling down around me (ceiling caving in, walls with huge cracks in them, water damage and flooding, etc). This is slightly different in that there’s no element of owning material things, but I still include it in my ‘house’ dreams.

In most of these dreams there’s a sense of things that have been left behind but not a clear sense of what those things actually are, so no real way to tell if I’ve lost something valuable or not. And it all revolves around housing, and usually family. Houses in dreams often represent your ‘self’ or how you view yourself, so to me these dreams are about how unresolved issues from my past impact my current sense of self or areas where elements of my past are holding me back.

A therapist would have a field day with me, haha. 😛

poem: kinfolk

When I think about where I’m from
I think of fat bottoms encased in high-waisted stretch denim,
Babydoll crop tops, daisy dukes,
And sitting around a picnic table on a late summer’s afternoon
Drinking everclear and southern comfort and acting like we were grown.

I think about the familiar ritual circle
of shelling peas into a well-worn metal basin

-plink- -plink-

Drinking sweet tea from mason jars while engaging in casual racism…
Gossip about that ‘negro girl who works down at the Piggly Wiggly’
and my uncle who won’t own a red truck because he says red is an N-word color.

I think about how they pronounce words like
iron and wash and libraries –

“arn”
“warsh”
“liberry”

And say caricature phrases like

“fixin to”

and

“I reckon so”

but make fun of me for my lack of accent
as my roots start to dissolve.

I think of the unloaded shotgun always propped
in the corner of the closet where we played dress up
I can still smell the leather of Mamaw’s shoes
The roll of cinnamon certs in her handbag
And the oddly pervasive woodsmoke aroma of a farmhouse that had no fireplace.

There was a snake under the table once
It blended into the rug, rough and tightly coiled
Like the alzheimers coiling itself invisibly around my grandmother’s brain.
Nobody saw it until it moved but then
We moved and there were screams and
Someone chased it out with a broom
When I think it probably just wanted somewhere warm to lay.

I think of Papaw’s hands,
Big fingers that liked to crumble cornbread into a glass of milk
Calloused hands that preferred to shake hello and goodbye rather than hug,
But so gentle with the barn cats that played at his ankles.

I don’t remember the last time I saw my grandparents
In my memories it’s always late afternoon
Bleeding into evening when the fireflies come out
And you catch them in jars with no thought to their fate,
Just a fleeting piece of nature to be devoured and consumed, like me –

The last bud on a
Dying branch of a family tree
I neither know
Nor understand.

blog: reminiscing

I had an amazing birthday last night, best I’ve had in a long time. I got to wear a pretty dress, go out to dinner with some awesome people, and got some lovely gifts and flowers. And my husband really made my birthday special by spoiling me.  :)

I asked people to come to my birthday dinner dressed in 1950’s attire, so as I was getting ready, curling my hair in a retro style, and attempting to do period-accurate make up, I was thinking of that time period, and of my family, especially my maternal grandmother who has passed now.  I do resemble my father a lot, but I love the photos of my grandmother and see a lot of myself in them.

My mother in NZ has all the family photos, so I don’t have any of the ones from when I was a kid. These were all taken in the 50’s – top photo is Granny and Papa with my mother and her two sisters, bottom left is Granny and Papa, bottom right is Granny and her mother Grandma Lloyd… Hard to imagine that in the top photo my grandmother was 13 years younger than I am now, with a whole family… Whereas I still feel like kid half the time!

Granny and Papa Brown

Maternal family members, taken in the 1950’s

This is a comparison of myself on my birthday and my grandmother in the mid-1950’s.  Still younger than me, dammit!  But I’d guess we’re of a more similar age here.

me vs granny brown

Me on my birthday vs Granny Brown in the 50’s.

I always regretted not contacting her more as I got older.  It’s hard when you’re living overseas to remember extended family as much as you should I guess.  But I do miss her and all my family in the States and wish I could see them more often.  <3

poem: confession manifesto

– TW: SA, addiction

Here is my confession – when I was seven
A little boy touched me in a place I didn’t like
No grownups did anything to stop it
And it was all my fault.

Here is my confession – when I was twelve,
I was angry and I didn’t understand why
My parents didn’t believe in counselling so they hit me
With a Bible instead and told me to shape up or they’d ship me out
And it was all my fault.

Here is my confession – when I was seventeen
My father said, “It’s my way or the highway.”
I put on my big girl shoes and lit out
To face the wide world on my own.

I partied and played out tired stereotypes of misspent youth –
I fell into a bottle and stayed there,
So damn drunk I couldn’t hold down a job
Or tell the man who gave me a ride home late one night
That No definitely does mean No.
I burned up opportunities and friendships
Like the cigarettes I lit to mark the sorrow on my skin
And it was all my fault.

In my 20’s I turned to confession,
Threw myself on the mercy of Jesus
And trusted his followers to be cut from the same cloth
But they chewed me up and spat me out
Like wolves in sheeps’ clothes
And it was all my fault.

Confession becomes my obsession,
I scribble poems and half-thoughts on notebook paper that I screw up and throw out
“Not Good Enough” becomes the motto emblazoned across my chest
As I watch other poets spittin it, hittin it as hard as I wanna do,
As I could do, if it weren’t for this damn block –
And the block is all my fault…

I’m stuck in this confession,
Without a priest to absolve me
Or a psychotherapist to resolve me
I’m a puzzle beyond solving
Fault lines crack and plates start to rub each other the wrong way
My skin gets compromised by a million different splinters all pushing to get in
And the –whoosh- of my soul, trying to get out…

But…
It is not my fault.
In fact, it was never my fault.
And for those of you who see a bit of yourself in my story,
It’s not your fault either.
It was never. your. fault.

We were the ones society was supposed to nurture
We were the ones who were supposed to grow up to greatness
The ones who carried the promise of the future in our tender hearts
Like the unopened petals of a sunset-yellow rose
We were the ones who were supposed to hope, to think to dream,
But we got crushed by the machine,
We opened our eyes too wide, when the light was still too bright to hide us.
And the lies they told pierced the unformed armour of our souls
But it was not our fault…

We were just too fucking fragile.

So I want to lift up this poem as an anthem
For anyone who was ever told they were not good enough
Not fast enough, not smart enough, not pretty enough
That they were simply not enough…

I want to burn away the lies and get to the real you
I want to replace the coals of shame with the fires of truth
I wanna lift up this poem as an anthem,
Because everyone knows coals
Are just diamonds
Waiting to happen.

poem: lying in the dark

In the darkness I lay next to you under the doona we picked out together but never used; I remember it was on sale.

In the darkness you cuddle tightly into me, your face pressed against my neck; the barriers of polite distance temporarily torn down.

In the darkness you are a little boy again, an innocent with tousled hair and no defences; I wish I could keep you this way forever.

In the darkness I am haunted by the ghosts of what will never be; I hold you tighter to keep the wolves at bay.

In the darkness my thoughts torment me relentlessly; they pick at my flesh and gnaw my weary bones.