Nikki Darling

How To Find?  

There are more flowers in the field

than weeds.

Sorry for musing and abusing you. Better luck next time.

Whenever I think I'm being responsible I'm actually being lazy and just
making excuses.

It is a truly refined bizarre, this adult life.

Walk with me
I am the widow of moonlight

And there is farther yet to go.

How To Find? II

When I make art I make it for you. Of course. To see or touch you. To instruct or
suggest. To grieve and regenerate. It is inextricably tied to my heart and how it beats
and falls and struggles. I keep saying names and perhaps I should stop. I flirt with danger
in my actions, skirting reason, pushing away, being intense, flying too close. I burn
edges. Paper in a fire pit slowly going up. I come from smoke. I was smoke first. Always
hanging around in the corners pretending to be mist. But I did not materialize I grew and
travelled. I found you. I find you then lose you. Over and over and over again. As the
bellies of my girlfriends grow fat with babies and something to do in twenty years I throw
my love with dumb and stupid abandon hoping to hit the other crazy on this earth that
speaks my special language. Tossing away my chance at knowing that wholeness. I
yearn for motherhood but do nothing to help it materialize. No. I am determined. In my
fear and work ethic. You would be surprised how much more time I spend right here, at
the Typing Alter rather than the Human one. A delight I rarely know. A delight I knew but
in my youthful alcoholic-ness forgot a moment later. Floating around the amniotic fluid of
my brain. Perhaps as the light fades and life runs out I will remember suddenly all the
bodies that pressed into me their expectation hope and desire. I get there too late. Or
too soon. But never when I should. All the chances have been thrown away by the time I
arrive. Or growing has yet to be done. The maturing of the soul that companionship
requires. And I want so much. I ask so much without words, with my eyes and openness.
Look at me. Sad and beautiful. But
even that will change

for instance, now it is a This.

How can I be sure, in a world that’s constantly changing? I steal lyrics.

I have my stations memorized and they soundtrack my existence. I cannot always be ‘here’
on this earth. Ok? I take breaks, check in and out. Fantasie is the fume. I chase it black
smoke. I turn into a tiger, then a cartoon, then a dog, then a coyote, then a wolf, then a
fox, then a squirrel, then a tree, then a fossil then a tire and I turn.

I built an alter to you.

I have ceremonies while the creditors leave messages. I juggle money with the fools, eating
from one hand to the next, slipping in and out, just before the door slams. I get high.

Get out of your head. Get into mine.

Get out of my head. I need that too.

I ask then take. Cry and throw. It’s too much to hold and heal.

I miss you, liking everything I do. I miss your hands on my back, telling me this is the
softest skin they’ve ever felt.

A few short hours spent together feeling one another. Grooving on a separate shelf. Looking
up and down. I see you in unfamiliar places. You are a cloud, a parrot, a tortoise from the
Galapagos Islands that I found walking unbelievably down Monte Vista in the middle of the
day I'd never encountered such an odd and beautiful thing I googled animal emergencies then
rescues then simply what to do I then rescued and released to the capable hands of officer
Martinez who wrote her number on a piece of paper and said, feel free to check in anytime.
Lacy Street. Where the pound is. She took him there. Then driving down the same street six
months later I
decide to call. I pull the number off the fridge, dial and her voice is cool, unemotional,
at work and tired. His family came and got him, she tells me. Then you are gone.
Just a man who never calls to say hello I think of you do you think of me. And in the celluloid
third world the audience anticipates an ending that never comes. I never seal any
deals. I take handshakes in the underworld and get trapped in their agreements. My soul
floats up then hits. I went home with him, to his family, and we wait beside one another
salient and silent, old and strong. It occurs to me that he was wandering back, to a place
he could remember but had not been for many years, or perhaps ever seen. How long I wonder,
he had waited to break free. I found him then, on the road and sent him back. No wonder he
resents me. Let me reroute your destiny. Of course I write for you. There is no other kind.
Somewhere along the way we got mixed up. It was me, waiting to be found.