FITFUL STILL

One of your poems in your own handwritting.  It seems fitting for today as I remember you in dreams that are "fitful still." My own heart beats in your chest my darling just as yours does in mine. You are never far from my thoughts - and I know you have changed the lives of so many. We all remember you - your strength and vulnerability. Everything around me reminds me of you. Today I will smile as I dream a dream of you. One day we once again dream together.

MY BEACON

"Finished in Beauty" one of Kristy's favorite paintings

Wide shoulders
Thick legs
Veins that have been a beacon
He says it is his vision
that is good
He says
I
am
his girlfriend
He asked if it hurt
I bit his cheek
I show him my pallor
My softening legs
He lowers his eyes.
My wine glass remained full
as I drank.

And I felt wanted?

by Kristy Gough

STOLEN BEAUTY

Collage by P.S.

Don't speak.
Don't laugh don't smile
Let the merry go round wind down
Whispers of childhood are all I can allow

I only hear within myself
My voices cry a chorus
of timeless plays
and fading colors

You think these perfect?
These deals I've touched
But I can see no beauty
You stole it when you called out
Love - but didn't know it's name

I thought my grip was strong
But my calluses were worn thin
And my blood was warm and red
It hurt when I saw it puddle on the ground.

BURGUNDY SHOES

Kristy 2008

Kristy told me about this incident the day it happened. She must have sat down and written this poem shortly afterwards. She didn't show her emotions easily but nevertheless her feelings ran deep. Although sometimes disappointed in love I know she was also transformed by it. In her own words she said she knew there were others who were "made from the same piece of soul".

Did you see me?
Did you know I was there?
That military stance is seared into my head.
A still portrait.
I don't know what I saw before or after.
Your heels together
toes outward for support.
Slender ankles
You have lost your softness.
Your many earrings
and the new darkness of your hair.
Her expectant face turned upward towards you
hanging in an eternal joke

I was fifteen feet from you!
Fifteen feet.
There's a world somewhere
a justice too
Where I could walk to you
Move slowly to your ear
and tell you you're with me everyday.
That I love you.

I can only say before I forget
like any intense emotion
that seeing you jolted me so entirely
I became senseless to time,
etiquette, place, myself.
For that period of time, I was so
close to you that I felt as though I was
in your heart, in your burgundy shoes
and the warmth of your browned skin
was my own.

WASTED

More of Kristy's earlier prose (are you listening Sonya?)

By what right was sin defined?
Is it not a greater sin to be bound without feeling.
Than to be true to the blessed innocence of passion?
They have passed through ages without question
Tradition has sealed their fate.
Their sightless eyes hold only an accusatory stare
Their tombs await their wasted bodies
The same bodies they sacrificed
for the imagined salvation of their souls.
their bland devotion to the truths their fathers laid before them
Will eradicate their ability of independent thought.
The path they have tread is deeply worn,.
No deviation is permitted.
The tomb they have decayed in will be passed,
like their traditions, to those who learn to stifle their questions.

(My interpretation of the mentality of the community in which Hester and Dimmesdale live) Kristy Gough, 1994

A WORLD OF MATH

Kristy's English teacher was not amused by this poem. Needless to say, Kristy was not too amused by Math. One thing about Kristy - when she didn't like something she was the first to tell you. And if she didn't tell you then you were really in trouble!

Brick by brick, it's layered high
Equations, radicals to the sky.
An unmovable wall made of shit
The wall surrounds and becomes a pit.

I claw and claw at the crud,
and soon my hands are a mass of blood.
But I am not the first I know.
I watch the heap of corpses grow.

My brain is sore, my limbs are weak
Never will I each that peak.
The clouds have gathered, dark and gray
I will not reach the end of day.

They burst open and begin to pour
The blood of those who died before.
It tinkles down this wall of shit.
Into my personal, hellish pit.
The walls collapse, the worms are free,
To take this pain away from me.

Kristy Gough - 1994

HARDER

The winners - Clas and Kristy 2004

It's becoming harder,
at first I just desired him,

wanted him,
wanted him to desire me
appreciated that he could appreciate me
loved that he could love me.

Then it traversed my expansive ego.
Now his words trigger my thoughts,
my feelings, my tears.
He must be happy
I can say truthfully, that
he was made to be happy and content.
It would break my heart to think that
he does not love me with the same
wonder and familiarity that I love him.

I'm happy with the syrupy sweet sadness.

He's so like me - from a different time and
a different place - our nature's are so similar.
As I sit here I still believe the words he told me
with that look of deadly earnest.
You can have what you want.
It's so hard to do right by him, and
I can feel the time when I must begin

drawing myself together.

by Kristy Gough

A FORGED SECURITY

Kristy's brother Gabe

What of buildings and corporations and bosses?
They elicited no respect from me
I saw greater possibilities in life
Than they in their vaults of forged security.
they required that I sacrifice my natural freedom
To enjoy the comradeship of their ranks.
They prod and poke at a diseased heart
in hopes of implanting obligation,
the ruiner of men.

Don't misunderstand me-
I am not the messiah of an unacheivable morality.
I was a man, and a mouse,
There was nothing noteworth in my existence.
Except that I questioned.

It is beyond humans to change fundamentally
in time that can be passed in a handful of lives.
I can only hope that my optimistic pessimisn
will be captured by another mind, in a time more forgiving.
I don't claim any false pretenses to having suffered
in the name of my principles.
I cannot lament what had no substance to be abused.

My life was a nameless speck,
created in the interest of continuation.
There was no weightly meaning to it.
I was created and proceeded to decay.
I saw what little there was to see,
And nothing more.

(In the style of Biff Loman, a character in Death of a Salesman)

by Kristy Gough 1994

A SLIPPERY FEE

Kristy and I play with stray kittens we rescued

Kristy got an A for this poem which was written when she was 17.

Armageddon makes me laugh, don't you see?
It was created to extract an annual fee.
Luckily, these chains have no control over me,
I know that death only releases pee,
And yummy corpse juice, hee hee.

There's no afterlife with noontime tea,
Only a moments shocked regret for faithfully paying the fee.
If you happen to open your eyes and see
Accept my apology in advance, it's free.

Keep them closed, the truth's too bright, said he
If they knew their life was for your comedy,
Gee!
They could withhold my slippery fee.

You're a greedy bastard, but I admit and do agree.
It's opportune that you do not function from the we.
For an honest life can be so lonely.
A question, though, if you please:
How did you escape the fervor, and why me?

Inspired by Anon
written by Kristy Gough - 1994

A PIECE OF MY SOUL

This is such a sad poem so full of longing. I want to cry each time I read it. The last few lines are so beautiful they haunt me and I catch my breath as I hear them in her voice in my mind. She will always be held close and I join her longing each night.

Say no more
Say no more
The words from your mouth
fall on the floor.

Your liquid brown eyes
they hold me at night
My heart beat only
under your sight.

Summer and fall
winter and spring
Each season has passed
I've heard not a thing.

And then there came light
just as you were dark.

Read many books and
wrote reasons down
why I was so lucky
you weren't around.

But my heart has no eyes
nor ears to hear
My words that I sang out
so crystal clear.

I'm forgetting your face
The touch of your hand.

You've got a heart just like mine
from your birthing day.
You've got a piece of my soul
down beneath the waves.

Oh, but I need you
Ah ah ah, I need you

Take me away in the night
to my motherland
Show me the wind in the trees
hold me with my own hands!

-- Kristy Gough

BREAKING SOUNDS

I passed a man who breathed:

beautiful

my arm touched a man whose skin

seared my mind

the eyes of a man offered me

it all

I see a man who I try to memorize

prematurely

to all of these I turned away to my

most constant self

and to none spoke with my

most vocal chord

I speak to the room

who gave me this?

the room is still

it pulses like waves in the night

for no one

the breaking sounds

are the words my mind creates

that is the answer

-- Kristianna Gough

Today's workout: none - today I am definitely sick

HIS NAME IS

He is my mystery
He is known to me in moments
His bones are long and narrow
His voice returns me to simplicity
He is my first kiss behind the playground
He bears gifts some refuse to see
He stands coupled with my fear
His name is Desire

- Kristy Gough

Today's workout: 10 miles on treadmill.

THE WORTH OF YOU

One of your most beautiful poems.

You and I were born with something
that's taken us away
from pretty clothes and steady beaus
and kept the world at bay.

Though hearts may come and give a taste
of greater things to be
the worth of you demands far more
than ambiguity.

Sometimes
I think of you with my own heart
beating in your chest
and I wonder when the day will come
when it will grant me rest.

My soul is largely unexplored
as is my love for you
I feel both beckon and it gives me peace
though dreams are fitful still.
- Kristy Gough

I hope you will forgive me for sharing your most private moments with others. Those of us that love you deeply need your words. We want to feel close to you again. You are forever in our hearts. Mom

Today's workout: 6 miles on treadmill at 5300 ft. My heart felt sore and tired.

MY VIEW - THE WINDOW

Images of myself

I feel I should recognize

the girl whose present is sealed

as someone else's past

unaware of the stranger's eyes

that study them through time

what secret does she long to tell me

what thought has she caressed

in the darkness of my drawer

I want to hold her close

and absorb those stolen parts

that wail the need for change

the senselessness would achieve a logic

a dense weave would collect my pieces

and give my peace it's sustenance

dreams they mock of promises

the girl will haunt my present

until the camera snaps again

to shave this splintered grain

- Kristy Gough

When I read Kristy's poem I was reminded of a passage in Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung. "Modern man protects himself against seeing his own split state by a system of compartments. Certain areas of outer life and of his own behavior are kept, as it were, in separate drawers and are never confronted with one another."

In my own experience there are many thoughts and emotions I have which seem to be caught in this limbo of compartmentalization. They seem ready to spring out at any unforeseen moment. If they were all "out" at the same time would they form a whole, a "dense weave" as it were? And would this explain all the secrets or illuminate all the dark passages? It may be man's basic instincts we are trying to reconcile. It may also be dissociation for psychological complacency.

In any case, Jung goes on to say: "The sad truth is that man's real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites - day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail against the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always has been, and always will be; and if it were not so, existence would come to an end."

MESSAGE OF THE EARTH

I was born to some lost purpose
it rumbles in my viens
it pushes liquid beauty from my eyes
but has no song to play

It calls to me from living thing
majestic silent stewards

Not love, nor touch, nor baser deeds
my heart is lonely for
but beauty and the eyes to see
such tender trust - so silently

Breeze that feeds and holds me firm
my parents are the trees
majestic stewards with wisdom woven
in the rustling of their leaves

There's times I hear
and then do not
the Message of the Earth

by Kristy Gough

I found this poem along with many others in the shoe box you left in the attic. They affected me deeply and I decided to read some of them at the service we held in March a week after your death.

Today's workout: 50 minutes cross training