outside the cage

i've been out of the cage for a while now. only recently have i begun to enjoy it. very recently. i've stopped worrying about how it looks and am just going with what makes me happy. that means leather pants and tats at the dinner party, it is who i am. i can't keep apologizing for that. and if i'm not good enough as i am, i'm not interested in your company, whomever you are. amen.

it's tough, navigating the cage, i remember it. it feels forever. it feels like there is no way out. i remember when we had a standy uppy rabbit cage in the backyard of my cousin's house. the house on the top of the hill in monterey park, where we spent all our early years, each summer digging in the dirt, climbing up the ivy playing army. we laughed, cried, learned about life there.

anyway, the older cousins made sport of younger cousins by doing such things as luring us into the rabbit cage (imagine!) we were small then, and tumbling us around the yard. now i don't remember if this was meant to be malicious, but it was a past time. i scarcely recall more than one of us being in there at a time. can you imagine over and over with your cousin passing you by in various states of upsidedownedness.

that's the cage. that's what it feels like.

my sister and i got in a cage together once at a fair. it was called something i can't remember but it was the shape of a kidney bean and they locked you in, never a good sign. these independently spinning kidney beans were also orbiting a giant center as they spun. immediately upon departure all the shit drops out of my sister's and my purses and we are tumbling through the air screaming and being pelted by all manner of cosmetics and miscellany. that's the cage.

i don't know what to say, how to tell you to get out. i can only say, i hope when you're my age, you've found the door, or at least the direction of the door. that you've not foregone looking for an out, because there is one. and i am testament to that. all the dark shit is real, i understand it more deeply than you know. perhaps you know, but i understand it. there is a door.

it is not the door you think though. perhaps it is not the door i think. perhaps i'm merely in the foyer of the great cage, unawares of my remnant cagedness. perhaps. i don't know. i don't profess to have any answers.

i just know this. no one can make you accept what you don't want. or want what you don't accept. or some combination of the two. not even i.

i don't pretend to try.

so it's back to the studio for me, i have to recut those first four tracks. i just can't live with them the way they are. four of my strongest poems wimpered out because i was uncomfortable. i'm not the lamb anymore baby, i'm the lion. i want those poems to roar like the rest of the cd. they have to.

i remember so long ago how my friends kept believing in me, and i wrote this:

it's a great friend indeed who can see the lion in the silently trembling lamb.

i see the lion in you sweetness.

roar.