I am in love with change

     I am so in love with change, my wanderlust is constant, strong, and dreamy. I have spent too many hours feeling as though my desire to mix things up is a negative character trait when the reality is that all of my moves have made me a better; more open; dynamic; and adaptable person. I turn thirty in seven months and with that comes these notions of societal (or is it all internal?) pressure to settle down. I want to spend more meditation on growth which translates to constant change for me. Of course, I want graduate school, eventually a phd and professor position, write a great book or four, and maybe a husband someday but those will come with the full acceptance of self or else they are not for me.
     I am currently in Austin, Texas finding an apartment and job and giddy with anticipation. It feels new, scary, and full of potential. I love Seattle more than Paris if that is possible but cannot wait to see who I will be this time next year having tried out Austin. Thinking of where the last ten years have brought me (Seattle, Paris and Europe, Mexico, Canada, Dutch Harbor, AK/Yukon, and beyond) makes me smile.
     Spending this last spring/summer as a tour director throughout Alaska/Yukon was amazing! I took on something new and loved it while exceeding the expectations which I had placed on myself. I met amazing people and felt like I did my best to help them have a wonderful vacation. I hope to be invited back next season. It blends a few of my favorite things: travel, making new friends, helping the public, seeing more of Alaska, getting back into nature, etc.
So cheers to change and growth and may we all love ourselves!
Big love,
Randy

Leaving Seattle again...

Now that I am off to Alaska in a few weeks I have begun realizing all of the things which I love about Seattle:
I love having so many wonderful/artistic/caring/funny friends nearby!
I love wandering around.
I love coffee (I have three current barista crushes)
I love that the weather enables/encourages me to read and write frequently.
I love fitting in.

Packing up my apartment feels rather splendid. I try to not have too many belongings and with moving comes the promise of getting rid of a few material objects. I admit I am a tad sentimental, therefore I have been known to save boyfriend memorabillia and the like but am steadfast in disposing of said objects.

I suppose growth is on the horizon.

A fist full of flowers

My writing has slowed down since the weather here in Seattle is getting a tad lighter.

In other news, Lacy helped me remove my nipple piercing yesterday. I'd had it for ten years as of next month and see the removal as a step into maturation in some odd sense. I am turning 29 in April and have mixed feelings about it. I am a survivor and am definately aware that each year is a new gift wrapped in growth. However, this one puts me in my last year of twenties and with that comes the notion that I need to get back on track with grad school soon. I want children so bad that I can't breathe sometimes and told myself I would only adopt by myself if I had my Master's degree. That said, I have not fully abandoned the hope of meeting a husband. So I suppose taking the nipple piercing out meant something larger to me. It signals the birth of a new self.

In music news, I am solely listening to Adele and Bright Eyes new albums on a loop and find them both fantastic/therapeutic.

In tv news, Top Model and RuPaul's Drag race are rocking my world.

I wish all of the light in the world to all of you...
Randella Shymballa

A new style

I forget, when I am writing my own rap songs, that it is not 1992 anymore and therefore all rap songs do not start out with the word "yo."

I have been working on a new poem which I feel rather bittersweet about. The style seems a bit more structured than I am used to but the themes are not clear enough for me. Either way I want to share it at this stage and let it fall into place later. Like an unexpected baby, it does not have a name yet...

What if we had grown old in the age of Love for dolls?
Those synthetic embraces.
How I still act out that adolescent lust-
mashing our plastic bodies together.

My furs may be hand-me-downs but,
I am drunk on sex.
It is mostly those lost whom I
want to cradle.

Oh world, I swallowed all of those pills
still I am not any the prettier.
Nor were they hormones to soften my sharpest points.
I am all yours.
You? You didn’t fix anything.

That was the house we grew thin in.
The walls screaming at me, in beige.
The empty days.
My slumber- a complete shield.

How I don’t tend to leave the apartment.
The chiseled face of my own toilet.
You are not in here-
you brought shame with the winter‘s broom.
I am still exhaling your sickness.

That's it, good-day lovahs
Dr. Randologist

body cast

Dad, it has been four years since you passed and I still do not have an answer. I miss you.

In fourth grade I wanted to be hit by a car and put into a bodycast in the hospital. It was very important, when I repeatedly acted out this scenario in my mind, that my head and neck were visible and functioning as I wanted to be able and turn my head away when someone tried to reach in and kiss me. I was so afraid that no one was watching me that I thought a huge hit like this to my physicality would reign everyone's attention in and place it upon me. How melodramatic and rather unloved of me.

My poem of the day:

I Am With You

Dear reader, I want you to know that I was with you on so many of those nights
you felt abandoned.
I was with you the night you stumbled to the overpass,
gripped the railing,
stood firm.
Your wild hair waving in the height’s wind.
Hurled out every minute insecurity of yours.
How you wanted to leap,
the desire always licking at your wounds.
I was with you, my pinky slipped around yours.
Our own Plath/Sexton anti-suicide pact.
I was with you

I know about the nights when dreams of Mom and Dad still alive
came like a pack of soap stuffed, sock bearing cadets
to beat your already swollen face in slumber.
They wanted to take your hope.
Little one, how you thought you’d never recover.
I found it so appropriate; your laconic state.
It was I applying pressure to your heart.
I was with you

It was also I who held the door open the night two toads appeared on your front porch.
I kept you from fainting as posies sprouted out from their mouths,
an uninvited omen.
I was with you.
I watched as you felt the choking of roots pushing their way down your own throat.
I guess some lessons don’t pull back after they’ve punched you in the lungs.
The blossoms may have stolen the show,
but I was with you.

Some times I even witnessed the nights that seemed to mollify you.
A new lover’s leg brushing yours in the backseat of a taxi.
A text message which allows for a day of perpetual garrulousness.
A close friend who understands you, open-faced.
I was with you
I am with you

I am coming up.

First an ode to my favorite coat:
     Today I have to face the fact that my favorite winter coat is ready to retire. The buttons are screaming, the lining is exposing itself, and the collar has grown limp. I wish to take a couple moments to celebrate the life of said coat as it has lasted me six years and elbowed past other coat-bitches to reign supreme in my closet year after cold year. I love you coat. Thank you for being here for me. I remember picking it out with a dear friend, Sunny years ago and knowing I needed a great black trench to be whole in Seattle. It has been to Alaska twice with me, in fact we almost parted once in Dutch Harbor. Someone grabbed it from the bar and before they returned it the next day I had built up this huge damaging notion in my head in which my poor coat was targeted for it's gay owner on an island in the Bering Sea. Fortunately it was an honest mistake. This will be our final winter together.
   
Anderson Cooper, be safe in Egypt boo.

Poem of mine for the day, I need to edit it a bit but here it goes...

Hold Me Down
Letting him back in felt like buzzards
their talons slowly prying through flesh to my rock/fist of a heart.
I attempt to ease his irascible ways by breathing quietly as his post-coital apologies
drip slowly.
I am not he who takes the wrong way home any longer.

Seeing the bruises in the morning reminds me of my grandmother--
she would blast “Loveable” by Sam Cooke,
tight-lipped, cleaning her double wide,
regurgitating her own history upon itself
each time my Alzheimer’s grandfather had hit her.
His unfitting obscenities pushing their way past 60 years of bible repression.

Give me a law I can hold onto.
Give me an example to follow.
Give me a god who sees me.
Or give me a man smaller than me next time.

Today there is sunshine in Seattle. Today I am born once more.

First: Egypt, I am proud of you for standing up.

     I often wish that I was physically a part of a queer rights movement as opposed to just belonging to the struggle mentally. Sometimes I get so frustrated by homophobia and the absurdity behind such notions as my not being able to marry in this state that I fear I'll either burst into flames or cry for years without stopping.

   It is lovely out today in Seattle and with that comes dreams of my future. I have been serving for far too long and silently wishing that someone would waltz into my life and start publishing my poetry or give me a new career where I am fostered creatively. That is largely unjust toward myself and it is time to be more proactive. I have committed to making Feb. the month of me. With that comes entering into new writing competitions, performing more, and pursuing work which allows me to be a bit more rewarded and where I can blossom. I have spent years thinking I wasn't smart enough nor deserving of anything else, how wrong I have been.

Poem of mine for the day:
Without Apology

I could think of a thousand ways to say, “you should love me”, or even just “fuck me for an undetermined amount of time”.
But saying, “I was wrong” seems impossible--
despite attempts in the few languages I now know.

So, Mizz Cather I want you to write this story for me.
Please use ardor reds and yellows.
Let my emotions roll onward like Nebraska plains.
I want you to stretch me out so eloquently that my impurities feel like crescendo,
my words-- a climax.
Be cognizant of the lovers left in my wake.

Do not talk to me about love songs.
I’ve already authored every love song with the dropping of a few quarters into his cup.
Do not speak to me of dancing.
I was spinning in fields of green but I could not say good-bye to you while--
you were already living in my best friend’s toes.
You’re ribbons have all been cut.

When I was handed the tray of my traits,
Daddy was adamant about giving me his stubborn horns.
I wear this shit with open eyes and plush hands now.
My face welcomes any fellow ship in the harbor but ask me to change my direction boy--
and I’ll swallow your whole goddamn crew.

I have spent too many alley nights trying to knife my own history in the ribs.
There is no voice box for weakness.
My grit is quicksand.

I have always been diseased with the giving

A new poem that I feel is complete:

I have always been diseased with the “giving”

It is all this constant posturing which keeps me so exhausted.
I am never told “no” just once.
My acquiescence comes slow like sea/change.
I ask one night stands to stay forever--
then write bad poetry after they’ve scurried away.
I am always told “yes” just once.
Cramming my heart shapes into circle-shaped holes.

You see, in my heaven there are many gods.
Some male,
some female,
some intersex.
Yet all wear the mask of my face.

I too was young and on fire once.
Now I find joy in letting the bathwater get as hot as possible.
Remember the nights I sat nude, open poppies--
hoping to burn away the men with creased faces.

I have always been diseased with the giving.
The constant peeling away of self.
That cursed snake of anticipation slipping its split tongue in and out of my ear.
Until I grip the rails.
How quickly I can desire you, dark.
Oh ye in waiting!

My father shot his own admission onto the last train out of here in a clawed foot bathtub.
Fearing a god whom he thought he knew,
clenching a black handgun with his cellphone’s volume turned all the way up.
I didn’t call until he had already pulled the trigger.
Mom went out with the slow organs.
Cold sank its teeth into her pickled flesh one final time.
A release more free than empty.
Some existential mash-up my life has become, huh?


We are all born waiting for the train out of here.

Too much caffeine

     I have been really inspired lately. As a result, I am spending hours in coffee shops frantically trying to write as much as possible. I am unsure if it is all the coffee or the inspiration that is making me giddy and a little manic as well. I suppose we do what works though. Nikki Giovanni said that "... we poets tend to think our words are golden..." I do not think many of my word are indeed golden but sometimes they can be so I am attempting to let these ghosts speak through me. If the words are not properly mined and come up murky browns or greys I will still smile that I have put more of them down. So I ask you, mediated world, to come along on this journey with me. Let us not look back as we giggle into the future.
Favorite stanza of mine for the day:
It is the waiting for my turn to go down to his well for water
that always trips me up/never been good with not getting what I want part.
Now each thought is a woodpecker keeps knocking/keeps wanting in my head