She was wearing green
and he was wearing red
I like your ways was all she said.
He couldn’t believe she like his kinda fellow
the light was blue all they were missing was yellow.

I wanna stare in your eyes
maybe even hold your hand
you remind me of Decatur street
where there’s my mud and my sand.
There’s two ways to look at life
you can whine about what you need
or you can realize the less you have
the easier to set you free.

I’ve travelled around the country
all the cities are the same
Full of people driven mad by things they cannot name.
With phones and cars and mortgages
they never are alone.
From birth to death they never rest
until they rot to bones.

Menstruel cramps feel like your body is being beaten.
If you are lucky it is like a thin but deadly blade, slicing your stomach.
If not, it is as if you have been hit by a blunt object as thick and as heavy as your own body.
This pain is constant. It constantly reminds us what we are.
How the water runs from a mountain.
How the blood runs from the body.
Trying to escape the pain it causes, the pain it leaves behind.
The spasms that remind us of our origins.
In your creation is pain.
In your pain is creation.
We are reminded that we started this cycle,
and in the end, we will be there to finish it.
In the meantime we are beaten by ourselves and all women to come:
no one pain any easier to bear.
All women carry it in our bellies. We carry it like all pain we carry.
Not on the outside for all to see, but inside,
where we can use it to beat ourselves silently. We beat ourselves both for creating life and for not creating it yet.
All pain, outside and inside, is turned on the genesis in us, the waiting womb, that 'fertile soil'.
We plant the seeds of pain in ourselves and are surprised when what we have created comes out screaming it's head off...

(july 30, 1994)