This entry was originally written a few years ago just after the death of Alison Yanero.
It's title at that time was "Alison Yanero's Pages of Flesh"

This morning I woke up very early and did some thinking while it was still nice amd quiet and dark: just impressions / reflections of my life so far and the lives of friends who have gone on. I thought of Alison again. I wondered and contemplated what her life felt like to her. What did the world look like through her eyes?

I understand and accept that there will always be certain rooms of human experience which some of us can never enter. Still I try, even if in vain to understand what I can. So what you're reading here is the best I can do so far.

Death is such a brutal teacher. It's definatly an effective one. We don't seem to be learning much from Life or history.

My hope/reason for putting this up again is that someone, somewhere will read these words and understand Alison's plight on a higher level and 'use it' to change the world for all the other Alisons who are with us now or are on thier way. (Oprah can you hear me?)


Written below is the way I imagine the world looked through her eyes.

Some things are meant to be. Some things are obviously meant to be. ‘Life’ is a good example especially if it’s our own. The ones we love; No questions there. Even the ones we don’t, most of us believe that their lives mean just as much as ours, but what about the others?, The child molesters and the serial killers of the world? What about them? Does God love them too? And what about God? Where is HE? And what about torture and genocides? If these obscenities aren’t enough for us to look at or turn away from or fall to the ground with grief from, there’s abject poverty right in front of us everyday inside the doors to the land of the milk and honey. Yep hunger, disease, not enough medicine, not enough funding for researchers to do their jobs and feed their own families and at the opposite end of this madness is enormous wealth thriving simultaneously beside the suffering poor. It’s so surreal. I want to compare it to the sickest joke I’ve ever heard. The contrast is turned up so high we walk around wearing sunglasses. So in the midst of this we build better war machines to insure us greater capacity to kill. We create bigger cars and bigger TVs because that’s commerce baby! It’s progress and furthermore it’s health food for our egos and maybe most importantly, it’s entertainment. We fly around in outer space and dream of forming meaningful relationships with aliens while the least of us down below dream of just a fraction of that attention and Mother Earth cries acid rain because she is dying too. You tell me: Is the whole world insane or is this a gift reserved for the exclusive Hyper-sensitive elite; The keepers of compassion who don’t know how to look away. The flowers, the butterflies, the diamonds: You want to see what they look like? Here: We are Sylvia Plath, Vincent van Gogh, Virginia Wolf, Sergei Yesenin, Ernest Hemingway, Rembrandt Bugatti, Jim Morrison, , Janis Joplin, 'ALISON YANERO', Frida Kahlo, Curt Cobain, Billy Holliday….the list is so long. It’s too long. How much longer does it need to be before we realize as a whole race of one people that we are killing our own selves: Suffocating the spirits of our own hearts.

The world lost piece of it’s self not long ago: Another part of our body died when Alison Yanero simply walked outside her home one night and drowned in four inches of water. Fear scores another touchdown as apathy cheers from the balcony. Did I mention pride? It was there. A whole legion of it.
She was only 44 yrs. old.

This is the way she looked through my mine.

Tortured, terrified and often paralyzed by the conditions of this life, the beginning paragraph is dedicated to her: Alison Yanero, our poetic genius who hated to write. For her, I think that writing about anything true was like tearing off a piece of her skin for us to look at and read and 'analyze'.
I just want to say a few more words about this amazing and yet broken spirit. This part I dedicate to her family and closest friends who loved her: Alison Yanero was an intellectual. She held a masters degree in sociology. She had a raging passion for social reform and justice, especially for the poor. She was a diehard democrat. She wore a tee shirt once that read “Rush Limbaugh Must Die” on the front of it. I'm about the most pro-life person you could ever meet but that tee shirt was funny. Alison the singer had a haunting, smoky voice very much like Stevie Nicks’ and could captivate an audience, suppress bad stage fright and morph into whoever the crowd wanted her to become all at the same time. That was Alison the pleaser. Alison the compassionate along with her husband Tixi worked with wayward teenaged boys and threw thier whole hearts into the job, but especially Alison. She could never put it down. She cared too much. That was Alison the mother. She also worked for a time for the Human Services Dept. as a children’s advocate- family social worker. Her job there was to deem families and their physical environments worthy or not to keep their children. The importance of which always over rode it’s low pay as well as the emotional tug it took on her heart. I remember telling her once ”Ally, that’s just the dark side of the light.” trying to encourage her to write about it and I can’t forget the way she looked at me at that moment. A look that said ”You just don’t understand.” She was fighting so much harder than any of us knew except maybe for Tixi her husband. But even he felt helpless I think.
None of us can know the value of a life. We are left to suffer the sorrows when it is taken from us. She taught and showed us things we cannot humanly comprehend. At least not in our conscious states.
She came to us for Gods own reasons and stayed as long as she possibly could. It's our job I suppose to accept these things which God alone decides: these things that are meant to be.

I saw you fighting Ally. I watched you looking for a place to just breathe for a minute. I saw the fear and the damage done that day we prayed together and I held both of your hands in mine to stop them from shaking. I heard your prayer: you spoke three words to Jesus and I thought my heart would break in two. I felt your despair and the fear and the dirty old man. He's gone now Ally. You're safe.

Thank you for your heart of gold and your courage and your brilliance and complexity: Your poetry; your own "Pages of Flesh". You gave so much more than you ever asked for. Your legacy will be difficult for us to achieve. Because it will scream to us from this day forward >>>>"YOU ARE YOUR BROTHER'S KEEPER~!This is what happens to the human spirit when we lable each other because it's simply easier than taking the time to understand." <<

This is a great legacy Alison.
You were a flower living in a world full of elephants.

I guess elephants would have no reason to know about flowers or why they may feel a little nervous now and then.

Through my eyes YOU ARE A GREAT WARRIOR. Few would last as long as you in that particualar battlefield.
Through my eyes you'll forever be 'ALISON the BRAVE"