Thanks for the reason to go,

Coleen

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Thank you for taking the time to compile my questions last week.

Looking over your list I have to say it’s not exactly what I was thinking (are you sure I inquired about oatmeal cookie recipes and Emma Lazarus’s The New Colossus in the same week?)

Yes, I was curious, worried, even angry, but you’re missing something (not bouteillan noir, you remembered that one too).

Anyway, I put my chaotic thoughts into my craft engine and chipped away at some things, gilded some others and ultimately decoupaged strips of paper from a century old disaster.

The art of last week’s search history reframed.

Maybe it isn’t any clearer,

the truth may have gone incognito,

but at least you can still look for it.

Until my next inquisition,

Coleen

*Frame is removeable although seeing it is papered in disaster, I’m not sure about the implications of reframing that.

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It’s been 3 days since mystery movie Monday and I’m still thinking about you.

You know I love sitting in a dark theater to see a big monster movie. The thrill of foot quakes and roars (although tbh Godzilla’s roar is my favorite). The greedy bad guys not winning, nature finding it’s way. Oh and you got me with some pretty good jump scares this time, and that darker note about nature and humans, specifically that the earth will find its way with or without us.

Have I ever told you about the monster dreams I had as a kid? Mostly they were unseen giants, and somehow even in my dreams I knew how to hide from them. I guess you would say I found a way.

But some days those darker notes are more difficult to hide from.

It was the third movie. I don’t know if you remember, but it was the first time we brought someone else. She was tucked away safe, hidden (even now so many years later I don’t want to write the P word). In her muted hideaway, she kicked and rolled and poked me while the room around us quaked and roared. Maybe she would’ve liked dinosaur movies too.

She is a big thing I’ve never been able to hide from (oh how I try).

Sometimes nature doesn’t find a way.

Sometimes the bad guys win.

Sometimes I will cry at a monster movie

thinking about mysteries suspended in amber.

Until we meet again,

Coleen

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Lately you are never far from my thoughts. Even at 4 am your words seem to be around every folded corner of my gray matter. Indelible line and no filter getting caught in the squishy grooves, and I don’t even know where captain backfire thinks it’s going.

But you’ve always been a favorite song. I forever see a window into an awkward moment. I said too much again. That window of napkin fiddling and cringe-y games of chess with the salt and pepper shakers is not just mistakes, another social casualty, but a place to be seen.

You mention needing a filter and fair, maybe that’s true, but for me this song has always been about being misunderstood.

Too often a filter, for me, means making myself more palatable for someone else. Sometimes it’s not letting some of me out, sometimes it’s hiding something completely.

Me, redacted.

And even then the perception is not up to us. We can rearrange ourselves and then they can rearrange our rearranged selves and ta-da, found poetry.

A paper version of you.

Maybe every now and then it isn’t your stupid mouth–it’s their stupid perception.

Maybe they just didn’t find you well.

Maybe I try too hard. Yeah I feel that too.

Until next time (but maybe not 4am),

Coleen

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One by one the words arrived

(microgravity, jellyfish, wild anonymity)

so floaty and untethered

(or maybe it was me)

zero cooperation

so I drew my way out.

Purpose often feels like a mystery

a silly prank

it taunts, hides, eludes

offers a glimpse

leaving a reverse image on your psyche

(which looks a lot like doubt)

but only if you let it.

Not today raisin tetra.

*if a raisin tetra does exist would it be a wrinkly fish or a swimming raisin?

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