poetry and fiction- recent works and works of yore

Hey guys!

I've been busy writing- a new novel has come into my ethers and so I've been spending time working on plot, researching, getting to know all the characters... how they think, where they live, who they love and why.

In the meantime, please enjoy this poem:



Oh, life, how you flow into yourself, and into me,
Astonished, a pearlized heart and a smile of stardust,
And the places I have gone, and ballerinas in music boxes,
and the smell of the pine trees in the clearing,
and the people I have smiled at, and the homeless ladies
and the window dressings and the forgetting of sadness
just in time to remember it again as a sort of faded name on a dance card
from the days when such a thing pertained to a courtship...
And the people who smiled at me, and who did not look past,
and who did not keep going but who, in me, saw sister,
daughter, friend... and the poems, pages and pages and pages of poems,
and you, and a secret keyhole in your heart that only I can fill,
and the delighted surprise at the realization that somehow
I have unlocked my way into the memory of your future...

Radical Acts... Waxing poetic.

...Because the radical act is to be happy. To follow your heart. To connect to people and love them even if they're wrong about stuff, and if they don't love you back when you're wrong about stuff, what do you care? Love them anyway. And then remember that true love doesn't enable and you don't have to put up with disrespect in the name of love, and love will sometimes be from far away...

...But back to following your heart, and how hard that actually is, and the navigation of the rushing white waters of the river of your life, and how much energy you really have and thinking about your heart now AND then, not to future trip but simply to let go of everything and honor the self and that might include honoring the niggling doubt not because it's true but to allow yourself to investigate all those feelings and explore...

...and being willing to stand out and apart sometimes...

...and still connecting to people, the people who matter, and you might never get to know until you are five hundred and thirty seven years old, and what the hell is the point of any of it anyway?

...and being willing to then, after sitting with all those feelings, not in the head per se, but in the heart, purely, and in the body, and in your blood, and in your toes, and as you cradle a child (or in my case, a pet), or touch the rough ridges of a tree, or pray before your deity, or bow your head because you are still a human creature and such creatures do experience fear and welcoming it as a friend you get to care for because she is dying of cancer rather than shun her and ignore her because she is dying of cancer seems the more loving response for everyone, and especially for yourself...

...after all that...

...when the time is right (and how will we know?)...

Take the risk.

All of this great humanity,

this is the radical act that we are being called upon to take,

not false, fake, presentational happy,

the endeavoring, and the failing, and the endeavoring once again,

allowing all of life and saying,

maybe I don't fit,

maybe sometimes I do,

but this day is mine.

I shall lead, I shall follow. I shall offer, I shall receive. I shall weep. Laugh. I shall dance badly, and I shall sing well. I shall listen, listen, listen to the silence within, listen, listen, listen to the words as you are speaking them. I shall listen to the music and the starry starry night. I shall come forward with my hands open, asking for more, for reasons, for help. And then those hands open shall be ready to work, to build, to pound nails and plant seeds. And the seasons and the beatitudes and the tides and the turning and this is the stuff of life and we are born and then we die and every day we die again and let this take your breath away so that you may join the heavenly choir. Temptations sing... oh, glory, jewel of the nile, childhood things, wonder, mystery, discovery, all making things like taxes tolerable, all things like the power bill and heartache tolerable, tolerable, tolerable.

The options are yours, then. Will you allow life to be radical, or tolerable?

On Happiness

You think happiness is a gift, and then you learn it's a practice. 

Then you think happiness is a practice, and you realize it is a radical act of defiance. 

XO, Erin

p.s. you can also replace the word "happiness" with "love." 

Baseball- a poem

When the bat cracks on the ball-

on the inside of that sound,
if you stretched it out a thousand years,
you would hear the yearning sigh of a mountain.

My body is so rigid with desire,
with hopes, and sunshine, and wet on fresh cut grass-

The ball flies and the game runs its own pace,
and the mountain dreams and the clouds move along to the next sky.

The Love Song of E. Elizabeth Prufrock

REPUBLISHED from 2010-2011 ish

The Love Song of E. Elizabeth Prufrock

by Erin Elizabeth Muir

Amidst my avocations, distraction and demons,

and music, strains from another room.

Today the metamorphose is incomplete, and I have awakened as J. Alfred.

I am falling, again and again I am falling, you see,

and willfully, and against my will, an ancient pain,

sweetly, sensually, unrootable:

vines from a mobius strip wrapping round my body,

chains made of a flesh eating green, like a venus fly trap,

a nature, a desire. I want it. I fear it. It is me. It is he. It is all of us at once.

and words and words and words

and the poet sings

in dreams the message is perfect

but waking, she becomes ineffectual in her babel tower.

beautiful, and desirous, and possibly quite mad.

If ever I had known how to never

allow bitterness in my heart,

then I am child-like now, and so imagine my

shock at my own self-dismay,

as from all my shadows emerge, dusty, now dusting off the drapery,

the drudgery, engaging, on fire, a Demon.

like the brightest star that fell from the heavens,

plunging e’er deeper into the murky sludge, the far corners of paradise,

rising up now, the mists of eternity clearing way for that

truth greater than all facts and figures, the inhuman form

which whispering, places a single icicle of fear in my heart.

Oh, love! To be Juliet. To have died within moments of the first sweet lock,

to never know the other side of purity.

But I am not asleep, and nor am I awake.

I am breathless, I am all the breathing of the sky,

a billion stars shining in the heavens,

a single pebble on the sand.

No, I am no J. Alfred. Nor was meant to be.

And in the room, the girls giggle, talking of

nothing.

I am not walking on the beach, trousers rolled. I am not standing on the balcony, I am not sculpting David, I am not whimpering and I am not banging, I am singing-

I am singing!

(Each to each.) Which means-

the mermaid-

is me.

ah, drawing breath again, do I dare to be a human?

Emerging from this sea of crystal thoughts, wearing a crown of anemone and kelp?

Do you see? These waves are your dreams,

and these pink shells are recompense for your hopes that washed away

where once you wrote them along the beach,

and these glistening pearls within are made rarer, truer, more valuable in your eyes.

If you say so, I will remove my fishy scales,

lay down my cerulean triton, and emerge

a woman.

And if I say so, too, then the human voices waking us shall be our own.

(and it will have been worth it, and we will never know what we meant.)

Parakeets in India

This blog was originally posted on Apple news via http://markhusson.com/12blog/2018/3/3/parakeets-in-india#.Wprv69QrLGg.

It was my second trip to India, and I had started out very sick. The week before I had departed on this pilgrimage to Varanasi, to watch the burning of the dead bodies, and then go help build the school in Rishikesh, I had suffered away in a lover’s Cow Hollow apartment in San Francisco with strep throat. My fever had been so high I was hallucinating that he was an assassin sent by a FORMER boyfriend to kill me, but that’s a different story than what happened in Varanasi, and by the time I arrived at this gorgeous city dubbed “Venice of the East,” I was free of strep throat, probably, thanks to antibiotics, but still feverish and unable to eat, vomiting green bile. 

I stayed at a hotel right on the Ganges River, listening every night to the boatmen sing, watching stray puppies chase after the children. Holy men in loin clothes strolled past the steps of our hotel, and only a few hundred yards away, the families of India burned their dead. 

Sometimes, I hear my fellow western friends talk of India with horror at the poverty, the trash, the illness. They point out things like rape culture and the caste system. Controversially, I don’t see much difference between India and the US in those regards, but perhaps that’s because I live in a huge city overrun with its own problems of homelessness and violence. A lot of it depends on what you’re looking at, I suppose.

I was in Varanasi with a spiritual group that was working with a self-proclaimed guru. He’s pretty famous. I don’t know. He was angry on this trip. Because I was so sick, I missed most of the group outings and teachings. I was confined to my hotel, watching the river slumber by.

But every day, a little boy came to visit. His name was Ahmed, and he was a Muslim boy. I know because he came to sing the Qu’ran to me. Then he would offer to show me the finest shops. I would explain I was sick, and he would tilt his head left, then right, then left again, very quickly. 

“I am sorry, madam,” he would say. “I will be back tomorrow.” 

I loved that lilting cadence in his face. I would go back to my room and watch Bollywood movies, breathe heavily, drink flat Pepsi.

Finally, after a few days, I felt well enough to want to leave the Villa-turned-hotel and as I stepped out into the bright sun, Ahmed rushed up to meet me.

“Madam!” he cried. “Would you like to see an old fort?” 

I looked into his big brown eyes and felt a small warm hand slipping into my own.

“Yes,” I said, against my better, urban, Western judgment. “Yes, I would.”

We hurried down along the river for a few minutes, maybe ten or so, until we reached an abandoned villa looming over the foamy water. We climbed up the hill and Ahmed passed easily through a hole in a fence that I could barely shimmy through. Then, he took my hand again and led me through what seemed like an empty palace: a large veranda over the front, looking over the river… a center square in a large property with crumbling pillars and mosaics along the walls and floors. Empty rooms, a place void of any humans, at least dwelling there.

“Madam,” said Ahmed. “Would you like to see some parakeets?”

I looked at the excitement on his face, like a kid at Disneyland or something. 

“Yes!” I cried.

Ahmed nodded. He took my hand in his and we ran to the back of the house. There was a large, lonely willow tree reaching up over the high red walls. Ahmed put his fingers to his lips as we crept toward the willow. Then, he breathed in and raised his hands like a conductor about to instruct an orchestra. He brought his hands together in applause: clap, clap, clap, clap, and –

FLUTTER FLUTTER FLUTTER FLUTTER FLUTTER FLUTTER

Scores of little green birds bolted from the weeping willow tree, an exodus of rustling and flapping in every direction!

I laughed with sheer delight and felt a breath of life enter my body.

Then I looked at Ahmed and he looked at me. My heart burst open with a million little tingles of pleasure, and I wanted to cry. I fell in love at that moment with this sweet little boy. Not romantically. Just. Like. A mother. Like Mother India herself.

hmed,” I said, “how old are you?”

“Madam, I am eight years old.”
“And how do you speak English so well?” I asked. He tilted his head left and right a few moments, considering the question. “From the tourists such as yourself,” he responded.

And then, I took the risk. “And do you have a mother?” I asked. 

Now I wonder why I even could ask such a question, but I did. I already had the fantasy in my mind’s eye. I could adopt him. I could bring him back to America with me and we could live together as mother and son. I could give him all sorts of opportunities. He could visit my parents in Minnesota with me.

“Of course, Madam!” he chuckled.

My heart began to fall.

“Oh, and… um… where is she?” I asked.

He opened his hands, explaining the obvious.

“At home, Madam!” he responded.

“I see. And… would you ever… would you like to visit America?” I asked. A last-ditch effort.

A horrified look crossed his face.

“No, Madam,” he said. “Oh, no. My mother says I must never go to America. No, no. It is a wicked, violent place!” 

I paused for a moment. It was, but it wasn’t. So was India. So was the world. So had the world been in so many ways since the dawn of… since the dawn of opposition, whenever that was. 

I let my heart suffer these slings and arrows. I let my heart love him, knowing that I would never see him again. I marveled that I had fallen in love, not romantically, but as a mother. And then, I smiled and nodded.

“Shall we go back to the hotel?” I asked. The world was spinning. My fever was returning.

“Alright,” he said, taking my hand and leading me out of the abandoned building. “And if you like, I can show you some nice shops along the way.”

I didn’t want to go to the shops, but I heard my voice murmur, “sure.”

I didn’t look back at that fresh, clean, green place where no people lived, only birds and trees. We stepped out onto the dusty streets where bicycles zoomed past and poor women reached their hands out in need. I looked up into the firmament of sky, as open and blue as my heart.

photo by Rick Canter.