this is my moon

I Had a Name in Blood's Absence

2011-12-04T23:27:00.000-08:00

Five years old, there was a day that I bled
and told no one.

I squeezed my finger into a paper towel,
soaking it deep. I was a painter’s daughter
cleaning a brush. And I was red cinnabar.
The stain was a portrait of myself. I tore it
out of the cloth
and, pressed in glass,
made it into a slide.
I had a child’s microscope,
and in it saw myself
as an image. I saw my insides.
I could have written my name in silent blood then,
awed. The word in my own hand.

I have since tried to write
in images. At seventeen I squeezed red
cinnabar onto my palette beside a pile of yellow ochre.
A painter’s daughter,
I cleaned my brush on a paper towel, careful,
but never made a canvas.
Sealed shut, I wasn’t menstruating.
I couldn’t even
prick my finger then, so my guts stayed within. I held myself tightly
and searched for the truth—nothing
else warranted being written in blood.
Nothing else could touch my open hands
without profaning them.

A long time later I noticed that I had been in pain,
a child that had chosen to look at herself
magnified 10,000 times
instead of crying.

Dialectic (Hive)

2011-09-02T16:25:00.001-07:00

You are weak and tired.
Did you hear me? You are unfed.
You may ride out your loneliness, but
I give in to desire.
And I am happy.
I live in a garden and I grow my own sweetness.

You want arms wrapped around you?
Go harvest them. Go honeymaking,
wear your lust like a beekeeper's mask
and visit the apiary of drones,
of heartless work.

Spend the day wandering
listlessly through smoke
and heavy-lidded, prick yourself
again and again
on the abdomens of the dying.
Venom is an aphrodisiac
and you are empty. Go sex yourself
fuller, force something to bloom
in the black soil of your chest.
Chew on legs and stings if you like
and glut yourself from the pollen sac;
collect the powdery semen
of dandelions on your lips.

Come, my garden is for the bees. Find me
here in the grove, resplendent
in white and covered in failing bodies. Witness,
smell the damp in me and know me
as I am, standing here
hollow and spoilt.
Feel the nectar congeal
inside even as it lands.

*

I know you, but you won't find me
near your garden
or the pale bloc of bees;
I self-taught the evils of domestication
and value careful slowness too well.
I have no veil of lust
to thin the heat of alien hands,
and I am shy of being further altered.
I content on liquid smoke and stay far--

for through cultivation
the keeper became the other: amended,
scorned and stung enough without request.

2011-07-12T12:15:00.001-07:00

I am a terrible gardener, and yet
I know what constitutes the seed of Love
I know what conditions it needs to grow--Love
is a shade plant in loose soil,
a succulent with night-grown flowers
and a vast network of stunted roots like a lattice
or a fisherman's net for stones.
I know that I must plant love
in the southwestern corner of my garden,
water it sparingly at the start, and always
turn my face away while doing so,
gluing my eyes to the rising moon.

I have read Works and Days.
I know the rules must be kept
if one wishes to appease the gods.
I know that I must rely on the divine hand
in the tending of my crops.

So I must never spit in the Garden
and ever reap only half of what I've grown
in a blindfold
with a scythe. It can't be known I sow to glean.

And last, to glut the seed of Love
I starve myself;
I live on chaff
for the first three years of winter
and content myself with weeds the rest.

Yet Love is older than Hesiod
and to live
requires an even stranger
arcanum of tasks:

To yield desire one must work
while knowing
that Love, once harvested, cannot last.

2011-07-11T22:55:00.000-07:00

This night is a coda to a summer,
to a city in equilibrium.

With britches dropped in the wet grass
on the Oak's Bottom lookout,
I am pissing downhill in joyous abundance
at the lake, at the amusement
park's dark stars, singing
with frogs in my ears and and naughty soft
touches from the high marsh reeds
and the cool wind.

Everything but the lake
is reflected in the lake,
and tilt-a-whirl screams roll
across its sheeny surface like excited ghosts,
mingling with the peepers and the moths
as they climb the cliff where my ears
breathe the shaking spirits in like smoke.

From up here the carnival is cradled in mountains,
but I know its illness and delight in the lurch
of the careening evening.

The crematorium sits to my right,
its dread face blankly
overlooking the rites of the median strip
and the ghoulishness of neon
at midnight. Soon I will rejoin its dead world
and clamber into a dumpster
to scavenge bread like a raccoon,
but for now I am content to time the roar
of the screaming lights
to the leery frogs
in darkness,
my words made equally visible
by the street-lamp and the stars.

tongues

2011-07-11T22:41:00.000-07:00

I am filled with purpling desire
that expands like a bloom
of vermillion ink in a clear bowl of water
sublimating the fullness of experience
into my light body,
seasoning it with the gravity of helplessness.

I am full of sex as Medusa
is of snakeskin.
The vermillion tongues of serpents
are what comprise the ink of lust
and the lucent water of my guts
roils as it is rippled through, vainly trying to keep time
with the flickering hypnotism of snake handling.

In excreta, in another world I draw the line of life
from the blood of these red tongues in me
and use its languid flux
to connect create the constellation of eggs
that will someday become my daughters and sons.

In lust I become a constellation of ashes
in the dust of ashes, the constellation of mercy
drawn onwards towards benediction
and the sinewy noose of God,
the circle in red blood,
the ova and the love.

In hunger I touch you gently
for stalking is the province of the silent
and only in the limblessness of snaky desire
can I hush.

anarchy long form

2011-07-07T16:55:00.000-07:00

you believe that private property is theft
and you believe that your body is only yours
so perhaps it fits
that i can only have you
in a dark cave
and i can only have you
when i steal you from yourself
and in the dark carve
into your flesh
on the hunt for bones and your skin
totemizing you when you're gone
stringing your ivory on sinew
memorializing you in song
and hoping that my misdemeanors
will call you home
that my imitative witchcraft
will call you home
that my petty magic
will call you home
that my song of your stolen body
will do what I cannot
that my defilement of you
will do what i cannot
will call you home
will tug at your heart
strings til they blossom with longing
for my mystery
and full-throated themselves
respond
in song
in a love song
til they respond
in a longing of their own
to that which has gone
until in a longing of their own
for that which is gone
they respond.

I hope you know that because
i've done these things
because i have carved you into song
because your long bones are holed
under the lost island of my bed, in my home
your body is no longer only yours
and I have committed a most natural act in theft.

for in loving you
i steal from coveters
and redeem the poor

for in loving you
i liberate the property
of your form.

all light is the moon

2011-04-15T03:14:00.001-07:00

you told me that moths follow moonlight
and so moths fall into flame
because in their minds it's always nighttime
and all light is the moon

"what if i held out a match?" i said
"what if i was light?"
"what if my body became covered in moth bodies?"
"what if my eyes were covered by wings?"

you said "well, when they settled onto you"
"they'd think they'd found the moon,
and they'd never leave you.
no, they'd never leave you."

"and if they got too close?" i said
"if they flew into my flame?"
"then they'd circle you afire," you said
"become disasters - wandering stars"

so i said: "then, your light is a candle
your light is a flame
for i know it only as the moon
i know it only as the moon

and i'll never leave you
no, i'll never leave you
i'll wrap my wings around you
and i will follow only you"

"then i'll burn you with my fire," you said
"and i'll eat you up in flames"
"for i am a disaster," you said
"i'm a wandering star"

Prescripted

2011-03-26T15:44:00.001-07:00

TAKE STICK
TAKE STONE
NOT A BONE
WET YOUR HANDS IN A RIVER
TAKE TIME TO LEARN,
TIS I.

Inténtame

2011-03-26T15:12:00.000-07:00

Por dos semanas,
no preguntes a nada.
Por dos semanas, les da
al amor animál y la proximidad caliente.
Por catorce días, me revela
desnudo y vacío,
sus costillos arcados y extendidos
sobre un piso de lodo.

Permíteme entrarte
por un momento, por un verano.
Permíteme lécher a las gotas que constelan sus caderas
como una fauna extracta el agua de los helchos oscuros
con su lengua húmeda.

Permíteme cantar alrededor de sus hundos
como el viento, permíteme saltar
los diezmil oídos de sus labios separados.

Permíteme nadar hasta que me cego en sus cavernas--
permite mis ojos (que el mar ha blanqueada)
terminar buscando,
rodeado de su oscuridad y su piel.

Finalmente, permíteme quemar en éxtasis temporaria
y permite que mis llamas léchen a su suavidad.
Permíteme espirar como una pluma de humo desanimado.

En todas maneras elementales, te quería.
En todas las maneras que pasan las tormentas, pasaría eso.
Permite que nuestra estación termina--solo
no preventes su empieza.

Por un momento, por un verano
permíteme entrarte,
sus costillos arcados y extendidos
sobre un piso de lodo.
Desnudo y vacío, por cuarenta días,
me revela en el amor animál y la proximidad caliente.
Por dos semanas, da--no preguntes nada.
Por dos semanas,
inténtame.

Neruda Translation Project

2011-03-14T21:38:00.001-07:00

I've been translating a lot of Neruda lately, in my free time. It's wonderful. Here are a few of the better results:

Poem Twenty

I am able to write the saddest verses tonight.

Write, for example: “The night is starry, and
they shiver, blue, the stars, far away.”

The night wind turns and moans in the sky.

I am able to write the saddest verses tonight.
I desired her, and sometimes she also desired me.

In such nights as this I held her in my arms.
I kissed her endlessly beneath the infinite sky.

She desired me, and sometimes I’d desire her.
How could I not have loved her large, staring eyes.

I am able to write the saddest verses tonight.
To think that I don’t have her. To think that I have lost her.

Listening to the immensity of the night, so much vaster without her,
verse falls from my soul like dew falls on the pasture.

What was so important that my love couldn’t chasten herself?
The night is starry and she is not with me.

This is everything. Far away, someone sings. Far away.
My soul cannot contend with having lost her.

In order to draw nearer to her, my gaze searches for her.
My heart searches for her, and she is not with me.

The same night blots out the same trees.
We are no longer who we were before.

Now I don’t have her, it’s certain, but I desire her so much.
My voice searches the air hoping to reach her ears.

Another. There shall be another. As there was before my kisses.
Your voice, your radiant body. Your infinite eyes.

Now I don’t have her, it is certain, but still I desire her.
Love is so short, and forgetting boundless.

Because, during nights like this, I had her in my arms,
My soul cannot contend with having lost her.

Although this will be the last pain she causes me,
And these will be the last words I write for her.

Naked

Naked, you are as simple as one of your hands,
Smooth, earthy, minimal, rounded, transparent,
You have lines like the moon, fissures like an apple,
Naked, you are slender as a bare stalk of wheat.

Naked, you are blue as the night sky in Cuba,
You have vines and stars in your hair,
Naked, you are enormous and yellow
As summer in a gilded church.

Naked, you are small as one of your fingernails,
Curved, subtle, and rosy until day breaks
And you lay yourself in the vault under the earth

As you lay yourself in a large tunnel of suits and tasks:
Your clarity exposes itself, dresses, and expires
And yet, later on, it shall return to being your bare hand.

I like when you are quiet

I like when you are quiet because it’s as though you’re absent,
and you sound as though you’re far away, and my voice cannot touch you.
It looks as though your eyes flown elsewhere
and it seems as though a kiss sealed your mouth.

Like all the things that are full of my soul
you emerge from those things, filled with my soul.
Butterfly of dreams, you look like my soul,
and you look like a melancholy word.

I like it when you are quiet and seem distant.
And it’s as though you’re complaining, whispering butterfly.
And you hear me from far away, and my voice can’t touch you:
Make me such that I can be quieted me by your silence.

Make me such that I can also talk with you in silence
clear as a lamp, simple as a ring.
You are like the night, quiet and constellated.
Your silence is like the stars, so distant and solitary.

I like when you are quiet because it’s as though you’re absent.
Distant and painful as though you had died.
A word then, a smile suffices.
And I am filled with joy, joy from somewhere I do not know.

Homes

2011-02-20T04:19:00.000-08:00

All people walk around carrying
inside them, homes.
Within, their couches,
their living rooms, dinette sets
all organized in a concentric circle
around the hearth,
like courtiers around the throne.

And in those homes wherein
there no longer sits
a gargantuan, gaping mouth
a fiery hole in the plaster wall
there is a television.

Eternally, supportively, for all, always
there is this focal point on the wall.
And it either holds the heated, flaming god,
conviviality and jollity and a secret,
or the vapid empty
blue-tinged;
the silent song
of an empty sun.

Exploratory: Comparing the Confucian Analects and the Ta Hsüeh and Chung Yung

2011-02-13T21:43:00.000-08:00

This is a short paper that I wrote in response to two readings that I did for my Chinese religion class. It's pretty conversational and a little disorganized, but I think that the last two paragraphs do a pretty elegant job of summing up the differences and the interactions between spirituality, religion, and "ethical" or political thought.

The sets of lists at the beginning of the Ta Hsueh that fade into and crescendo out of one another display not only a religiosity (as Ken commented on in our reading maps), but also an order that is nothing short of staggering in its impressiveness. I began doing the reading before looking at the reading map (for shame!), but in this incident I actually appreciate the result of my inattentiveness: I came to an understanding of the Ta Hsüeh and Chung Yung as being quasi-religious on my own, and as a result it is slightly different from and therefore contrastable to the perspective you provided. The qualities of the Hsüeh neatly exemplify the hazy line that exists between “religion” and “spirituality.” Drawing the Analects into the comparative mixture only strengthens the broth in the melting pot of ethics, politics, religion, and ritual that the three texts in concert create.

The first two characteristics that one immediately notices about the Ta Hsüeh and Chung Yung is their attention to linear organization and the texts’ focus on the individual. Especially in comparison to the Analects, the personal level of propriety is quite stressed and detailed; as is explicated in the diagram on pages five and six of the Hsüeh, the openness and flexible stability of an individual’s mind is the necessary and primary cause for, ultimately, world peace. In comparison to the emphasis placed on filial piety and ritual propriety in the Analects, the deeply personal advice of the “supposedly” ethically-focused Hsüeh seems much more spiritual than the “religious” Analects.

It is very frustrating to me that, so often, ethics, spirituality, and religion become so polarized from each other. As a person who unabashedly refers to herself and identifies as spiritual, it makes me really uncomfortable when people a) accuse spiritual practice of being “religious” and b) assume that because spirituality is an integral part of the religious experience for many people, that the spiritual cannot be present in the moral or ethical, as the latter two are supposed to be “rational” and ideologically neutral realms. Letter “a” addresses the first question on the reading map; I think that it is inappropriate to call the Ta Hsüeh and Chung Yung religious. Although the tone of the works is certainly transcendental and the content prescriptive to a realm that most people access only through deep intuitive focus, the advice in the Hsüeh fits into the Chinese system of ethics as ascribed by its context more than it fits into the religious sphere. I say this for two reasons: first, that Chinese ethics are clearly grounded in the perfection of the individual, and such work can only happen vis a vis the advice given in the Hsüeh; and second that, as is shown in the Analects, personal, spiritual enlightenment is clearly not the prerogative of the religious realm. Ritual practice and the ancestral cult combined make up the keystone of Chinese religion, and as is written in P. 1215 of the Analects, “if there is filial piety in serving one’s parents and obedience in heeding orders and these are set into the world, then everything will get done.” Clearly, ritual and ancestor worship clearly serve the purpose of teaching and maintaining filial piety, which is itself the cornerstone of Chinese social cohesion. Thus, it would appear to Western eyes that the Hsüeh and the Analects serve one another’s purpose, and are thus improperly cross-catalogued with one another; that the religious text serves to teach about social conduct and ethics, and that the ethical text serves as a guideline to personal spiritual growth.

My response to the above statement is: and what is so wrong about that?! Reading a corrupting “religious” bias into a text that espouses personal enlightenment and the “cultivation of [one’s] own character” is the Western knee-jerk reaction to centuries of tension between the Western Church, which serves to instruct personal morality, and the State, whose primary function, via the Law, is to prescribe guidelines that engender social organization. When one truly analyses and compares the respective social functions of religion and ethics/morality, the characteristics of the Hsüeh and the Analects actually start to make a lot more sense.
In a very widespread and popular social setting, as is noted in the Analects themselves, order and the collective become very important. As we discussed in class on Friday, people who are attempting to function successfully in large groups need to operate like individuals gears in a vast network of emotional machinery, constantly checking and redirecting themselves in order to match with the rhythm of the whole. Thus, the importance of ritual; having a prescribed and set way of doing things is pretty much the only way to guarantee social cohesion when you’re working with a large mass of individuals. In order for the rules of the ritual to be followed, they must be esteemed as very important, and it is at that moment of endowing severe significance to ritual practice that it crosses over from the quotidian province of the handshake to the awesome and mysterious realm of religion. However, because the alchemical process that transforms ritual into religion is often non-linear and definitely not obvious, the two can often become almost indistinguishable. The common trait that ritual and religion always have in common is personal involvement, and hence personal investment, the ritual and the religious often end up being characterized together as being inherently “emotional,” and thus irrational, disorderly, and therefore not applicable to politics.
The extreme order of the Ta Hsüeh in particular clearly shows that the path to emotional transformation can be anything but erratic. The wisdom of the Hsüeh, however, lies beyond the order that it espouses. As evidenced by the great emotion that religion inspires, rules are best followed when they hold personal appeal to those they attempt to sway. Thus, it makes good sense that ethical systems should also be rooted in personal conviction. It’s true that when left simply at that the door is left over for all sorts of types of crazy fundamentalism, religious included, but when personal emotional involvement is prescribed, as it is in the Hsüeh, it becomes completely possible for the political sphere to encompass the personal. Indeed, regardless of how messy the outcome, the personal and the political always intertwine; making space for emotion in politics actually seems to be the most peaceful and productive way to allow the two to coexist.

In sum, the “spiritual” (a silly term which, at this point, can act as shorthand for the deep, emotionally involved and intuitive state that the advice in the Hsüeh seeks to engender) and the “religious” (which, in this context, refers to the active, collaborative social enactment of the order created by doing “spiritual” work) are separated by their form much more than their function. The same is true when one compares religion and politics in China. Due to the role that filial piety plays in both religion and politics, political action can be seen simply as the result of what one learns from religious instruction: how to properly engage with one’s family. Ultimately, the “spiritual” and the political” in Chinese society are almost indistinguishable, as they are related on every level; “the cultivation of one’s individual character constitutes the core of all attainment” because it s successful development allows the individual to operate on the “correct conceptual grid.” Thanks to the Analects, we know that the mental state being referred to in the Ta Hsüeh is that which espouses filial piety; it is the incredibly reverent, respectful, open, and sincere countenance necessary to approach the ancestors in the shrine. Finally, proper filial piety is the key to maintaining order in the state, as the family is the guiding metaphor for Chinese government.

In conclusion, (and in the context of the Analects and the Ta Hsüeh and Chung Yung in particular) although spirituality, religion, and politics superficially appear to engage radically different parts of the human psyche, such is not actually the case—as is brilliantly outlined in the Ta Hsüeh, the three are actually just building blocks that work off of one another to ultimately manifest as the same unified and contained whole: personal, familial and, ultimately, political peace.

the antipodes

2011-02-12T13:05:00.001-08:00

I am concentrating, furiously, all the time. I get so frustrated and distracted by interruptions and minor details because every moment is a holy moment, or at least I try to make it so. I am so tired because I'm always in the process of making the Kirkegaardian leap; I am always on a quest to one of the finite provinces of meaning, in hopes that I can learn something there
out of the reach of this watered-down reality.

I realized last night that I need to re-discover the grace of being alone. I realized that I have been left so untrained in morality that I (along with so much more of the world) turn simply to the whims and mores of the collective to proscribe what is and is not right. I realize that I have to stop. I realize that it's going to be the same mountain over and over again. I will become hopefully sisyphean in my quest for self-knowledge and self-defined thought. Learning morals is to become a battle eternally fought and seldom won. But I will push my way up the hill. I will become my own hive-mind. I can no longer be tossed around by a mutant and nameless system of thought. I am not a scrap of paper on the wind. I am a solid body. I am a physical presence. My actions have consequences, and I want to be taught.

Alone

2011-02-12T13:04:00.001-08:00

Somewhere, there is mud without a boot-print.

Somewhere, there must be zones that
get tracked only by small muskrat
pawprints and doe-hooves.

Somewhere, there is still a wild
and a secret--a hidden shade plant
loamy and dark.

Like a rolling drop of water to a well
will I be there, becoming groundwater;
adding to the yellow spring
that permeates the quiet soil.

I will grow a wood-ear.
I will board up my bellowing mouth.
My body will sleep silent
and glory in the feeling of being alone.

Truth or Consequeces, NM

2011-02-12T13:03:00.000-08:00

There are places that still have two names

The first may be starchy
and ill-fitting like a paper gown, made
for the figure of no one.

The other is earth-brown,

left over from when,
as if before birth,
the land still bore the placental name
it wore while lying
un-touched
under water.

2010-12-25T01:20:00.001-08:00

the fact that we cry is proof enough for me that our bodies are full of magic

hens and chicks (old)

2010-12-25T01:11:00.000-08:00

I’m done with loving
I’m done with eviscerating myself,
gut to spine,
tired of bleeding under my clutched fingers
as I wait in line
to buy the bread I
stuff in the hole
like a pullet.

I’m done with mourning
I’m done with tattooing your name
in memory across my arm,
tired of telling people
that, when written, the letters in “me”
only matter in “mine.”

I’m done with loss
I’m done with this un-animal solitude,
tired of crying alone in the library,
the last chick in the henhouse,
when all the others have been yanked out
and with a whine,
branded.

fruitseed

2010-12-25T01:07:00.000-08:00

My mother has had her last child—
that must be very strange to bear.

Meanwhile, I am so full of life,

/belligerent seeds of child/

kicking and crying
to be born out of the little grapefruit
of my womb.

But there’s no one I want
to raise them with.
There’s no one who I want to let
harvest my small, sour fruit
and kiss the bitterness left there
by ancient fear.

So, the fruitseed babies lie heavy
within me, coagulating over time
into stones. Burnishing, they settle
over even more of a while
into pearls, so that on the day
when I die,
whole yards of beauty will be able
to be drawn out of me,
white, balled, and whole
with a knife.

(sometime in Nov.?)

Alone in the Kissing Breeze (ver. II)

2010-12-25T01:04:00.000-08:00

Through I see myself grey-faced like a statue
of a maritime saint, any grimness is betrayed
by the laxity of my pushed-up dress
in the face of the stalwart sea.
Pink and fleshy,
I shuttle my ankles closed together,
a skip-and-a-jump motion
that makes all my halfhearted attempts
at modesty even more childlike;

by myself, beside myself,
alone on the waterfront
I am tactile and sensory
for the first time/ &

to keep my legs closed
and folded
on such a beautiful day
on this old pier
in the kissing breeze
will always be a halfhearted game
of hopscotch
with my impish and reluctant self.

the Future

2010-12-04T18:38:00.000-08:00

some thoughts:

get out of school around May 18th
stay in and PDX and work until around July 1
come home to Brooklyn from July 1 to August 1
return to PDX around August 1 and prepare for burning man and hopefully work some more
leave for burning man somewhere around August 25 (?)
attend burning man from Aug. 29 - Sept. 9
return to PDX briefly (until Sept 15?)
WWOOF/ranch/explore/tour from Sept. 15 - Nov. 15
return to either PDX or Brooklyn
be in Brooklyn for Christmas
return to PDX on the early side (Jan 1?) in case I need to house-hunt again/make other preparations
Jan. 31 re-enroll at Reed

hooray!

stars

2010-11-16T00:10:00.001-08:00

Chthonian Darkness

2010-10-24T21:17:00.000-07:00

The idea that somewhere in the still—
There in the darkness
Is a germ of life
Floating like a plankton
In the imperceptible night.

This invisible seed was born
At the right time, entered the water &
Tide-guided by some vague notion of sky, made it
To the one place where it could be brushed against
By a sleepy swimmer’s toe
& switched On,
A pincushion of light
That turns the void into a bioluminescent bay.

Shanty

2010-10-12T21:31:00.001-07:00

There is something in this world
that is so big, we can’t get
to the bottom of it.
No one goes there,
except maybe as a fragment,
long dead.

& yet, there are so many forms
of life down there, beyond even worms.
There are spineless monsters
with snowy, hoary heads
and masses of waving tentacles,
pallid like the coiled leavings
in the gut bin at the grocer’s.

Maybe they’re just little souls—
the floating sacs of saline
and transubstantiated life.
Maybe they were grown
from human flesh
and are just as much a reflection
of us as they are horrible.

The creatures down there could well be a figment.
So could the soul.

& I think I could go on believing that
if only the floating death masks that leer
in the deep like repressed memories
didn’t suck at me
every time I smell life on the air,
pungent and dark.

Untitled

2010-10-11T17:33:00.000-07:00

Apprehensive, Henry asks me about what art is
& I tell him not to worry too much,
because I remember when he was art.

We had sat up the whole summer
night—Indian style,
though it happened on a park bench—
and gotten stiff-kneed while busy
sending words up to the stars.

Without knowing it,
I had been facing West until I turned around
to see the dawn come.
& I only found this out because
for one moment

straight-backed on the bench
in Brooklyn night
Henry’s face got all lit up
& his glasses shined
with the new pink light,

with our words given back,
all pouring from the sky.

Trainyard

2010-09-29T12:24:00.000-07:00

I have to ride my bicycle places to write.
I can fill my brain all I want
with images of boxcars
but I cannot see the boxcars—
I cannot touch their corrugated frames.

I have to take my body to the places
that my mind goes
in order to pluck details from them
like butterflies from the air.

Sitting, still as I am,
I can pick out their black wings
and trace the constellation of white dots
like points on a map.

The butterflies of my memory sound
like the clear sky
and like weathered
wood—they shuffle out the song of how
everything that is outdoors
has touched the real air.

Riding the rails
I zoom past the ramshackles
on my tennis-shoed feet
as much weight in me as a butterfly
as much contained space as a boxcar.

And the yellow light
which sighs through the train yard like a whispering ribbon
unspools across my back
as I mount my bicycle and ride back home,
head full of things to stick
pins through—black
on a blank, white page.

the capacity for infinite patience

2010-09-19T04:40:00.001-07:00

i have the capacity for infinite patience. i'll exercise it.

the fact that we cry

2010-09-19T04:35:00.001-07:00

the fact that we cry is proof enough for me that our bodies are full of magic

the sleeping place

2010-09-19T03:09:00.000-07:00

[knees pressed into the sandy soil of this fragrant field,
a drop of human musk in the expanse
of clover mustard & winter wheat.]

This tiny world/
(eight outdoor cats and a fraying, desiccated mouse skeleton on the front steps)
is linked to billions of other crystalline places/
(a devoured spider's skeleton still hanging from a blade
of grass, spinarets left miraculously intact and hollowed body open
to reveal eight tunnels to tiny legs)

is linked by the sinewy black wires of telephone poles.

Hopi gods mapped geometric and towering across the blue &
white(gold) back of the palomino sky, the spectral ghosts of the power lines
cradle the buckskin world in their outstretched limbs--

they are the wardens of this abandoned country,and their fierceness preserves
the wildly inhabited empty spaces where Nature steals
in like water downhill
and is sucked up by the life that uncurls here,
rosy-cheeked and vibrating/

(red ants crawling
up my sleeping legs)

exalting in the berth we give to our creations
and the taboo of change.

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Midnight Sky (Imagining the Ponderosa)

2010-08-08T12:17:00.000-07:00

I miss the winter sky.
I miss my midnights crowned
by crystalline Orion's belt
that Ginsberg loves,
that stretches from home to Oregon.

Snyder and I lived and wrote in the same place
and both struggled
both loved Ginsberg
both looked at the empty
Portland sky and found only Orion.
The winter is watched by mortality, by blind Jesus,
hung up by fingers,
palms and knobby toes, defeated
benevolent and blind.
Those ancient mica flecks
that stud the black granite
of the western sky in
Hades night
outrank our Jesus,
outrank Orion. But
if any legend can be true,
they shone a grim portent,
that sky-flung belt of three stars; a red thread
connecting a birth
and death,
the palm-read line of petty fate,
that destined, curving course read rote
and laid bare in palmistry, in art
(the stars).

For who are these men,
dangling from invisible wires
in the dampened blackmold rafters;
hung
from plank like pine,
like ponderosa?
How do they compare to a field
of yarrow, sage, and bittersweet sorrel? How
do their words, their life-spun stories
surmount
the moon shining full like a dewdrop,
full like an egg containing sparrow,
sperm, hummingbird
rabbit?
Their wisdom rests on shallow
mountains,
absorbed like dry dust into the waiting
horns
of the mountain goats--fodder for shofar
--and nests in their capricious
brains; adorns
the tops of the leery juniper
bushes and holes under the flatrock
dens of scorpions.
Their wisdom never leaves
those breast mountains,
those sloping hillocks like
nipple and aureole,
that earth/Mother body.
Their words are not blown out
of the decapitated horn of the ram
or written down on papyrus,
birch-bark, vellum,
tincan or gold.

Their words are absorbed by the ponderosa.
Their words are covered in moths.
Their words are wordless
and can only be heard in silence.

with Oregon and August come many storms

2010-08-06T22:30:00.000-07:00

With Oregon and August
come many storms
and brooding cloud-banks over high hills,
spread out west to our shore,
the last land,
the charnel grounds of the sun.

The thunderheads all hustle as far out
as they can over our poor city,
searching beyond the hills, beyond the ocean,
looking west as every lost soul does
when ambivalence digs in, real
for the first time.

The clouds in Oregon run the course
that set the pace for our ancestors to follow, first
in covered wagons with hollow hearts,
then in combat boots and backpack
bustling with collected notes,
hungry ghost of a script
that's to be written and then learned rote
and delivered, hands clasped
tight behind the lower spine,
pitch-perfect.

It is the song of all our time spent hoarding,
collecting and judging,
the song of every part of our lives
idly passed through too-easy boredom.
This yarn (spun of words pulled
from Mother, books,
graffiti on satchel, conversation,
nights
alone and waterfronts)
is the anthem of longing.
Our pioneer hearts weave it,
the red thread that connects all our artlessness in the morning,
when it first sets in (shocking
like the hothouse and then the frozen lake)
that you are alone and will be;
and at night
when the sorrow of a wasted day
wraps you up in a black
cocoon of dreaming.

Cavalier and lonely,
we are like the tall clouds
(they came first, and twist our ears
with bad weather and melancholy
when when we ignore them)
and we press towards the west
in a bedraggled but maddened
and maddening hoard.

Our hearts spawn in those
woods where the sun dies
and we push out West
to be born.

runaway

2010-08-04T09:04:00.000-07:00

Mamihlapinatapai

2010-07-25T13:04:00.001-07:00

Mamihlapinatapai (sometimes spelled mamihlapinatapei) is a word from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego, listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the "most succinct word", and is considered one of the hardest words to translate.^[1]

It describes "a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start."

New Cloud

2010-07-25T12:57:00.001-07:00

New York under New
Amsterdam cloud
salt and musty sea of mica-
crusted skyscrapers,
the city a moment of grave portent
on the ocean, crests
and briny foam frozen,
peaks
into our needling towers.

New York under New Amsterdam
cloud,
your river-valley sweetness
plunging into sudden void,
impossibly steep,
and I see into you -- palm
the full lengthiness of 34th street
with my eyes
and discover the hazy ghosts of Brooklyn
drifting,
balletic in their purgatory
east of the river,
east of Eden.

New York under
New Amsterdam cloud,
a high
and mighty wassailer,
grand
and wide-hulled as a ship, you,
cloud mountain--
nimbly surmount these rolling hills
with the same marked gallantry
that mingles with the city
lights
and which transmits
through perforated density
the soft and slanting
beams of morning.

7.20.10

The Artist and the Healer

2010-07-25T12:16:00.000-07:00

Today the sky fades perfectly from white mixed with crystalline
blue at the horizon
to a deep and pelagic cornflower at its highest peak.
O, how I long to live in the mountains.
But I am torn--am I an artist
or a healer?

Being an artist requires incredible devotion to the self,
solitude,
and a superabundance of beautiful and lighthearted surroundings
to quell and satiate the depressive melancholy that everyone creative suffers.
The artist must surround herself
with organic and resplendent comforts, must
create a safe place within which she can be sensitive and receptive without
being forced to absorb (via the sheer
and uncloseable openness of her heart)
bad energy.

The healer, on the other hand,
must dwell, by force of her profession,
around people.
She must be willing to absorb, and indeed take pleasure in empathizing
with pain, suffering, and existentialist ennui.
Unlike the artist,
who spends her days searching for and defining meaning,
the healer must have already found
or decided upon
her true concept of reality, and be ready
not only to impart this knowledge to others,
but also to infuse their very bodies with it--to use her perception
of the fixed and definite order of things
to re-regulate a broken heart.

To be both:
open and closed
solitary and social
depressive and stable
seems impossible.

It is true that the healer must be open, too--
she must be absorptive.
But at this point in my understanding it seems as though the healer cannot process
or retain all that she absorbs,
for what she takes in is not only alien, but lethal.
In order not to be taken down with the sinking
and mutinous ships of her ailing patients' bodies, the healer must possess an amount of detachment
and mindlessness
that the artist does not and cannot have.

//\\//\\////

Even the philosopher and the artist are different; I see this myself.
In all my efforts to create, I forgot
about the importance and the pleasure of processing
or analyzing, of pattern-seeking,
rather than simply making forms. I want to do both--
I want to do all.

7.18.10

Ode to the Light in the Evening

2010-07-25T12:08:00.001-07:00

The earth is an ordered body, just as we are ordered
beings
and she reflects and resonates
the same warm streams of electric, amber light
that every living creature feels coursing through their physical bodies,
connecting the mind and the heart,
and filling up that space between them (the chest cavity
that overlies our holiest organ and contains
the soul) with golden spaciousness.
This is why the light turns
all warm and glowing in the sun's preamble to its setting;
the sun, messenger between earth and sky,
is a visceral embodiment of these rays, and it grows
most intensely lovely
and magical in the moments before it finally settles into the bosom of the earth, and delivers
to her own glowing core (both iron, both like blood)
all the infinite wisdom
that it, the holy messenger sun, has gathered throughout its day
spent with the moon, and clouds,
and veiled but still existant stars.

7.18.10

Ode to the Sky and Her Clouds

2010-07-25T12:00:00.000-07:00

Her formidable clouds obsess me
to the point that I fix my gaze constantly upon the blue bowl that contains them
and I become the circadian sunflower: my entire life
spent experiencing the sky.

These cloud giants
are what first allowed me to conceive of her,
the planet,
as magical.
Looking up at their whiteness,
their decidedly un-geometric and abstract beauty, I realized
that they existed
not in another realm of coldness
and sparse air,
but in the center of a vast vault,
our skin,
that connects this world
indefinitely to all the others.

The science of their bodies,
the ephemerality of their forms (a solid-seeming
thing made up of water)
is what revealed to me the true miracle of this world:
we are
from top to bottom
an open system,
and all parts cohere in a manner as precise and scientific as the laws that allow
our amazing clouds (just
simple wisps of gas) to form.
It was that dense condensation that opened my heart
to the regularity and perfection of nature.

7.18.10

Ode to the Body of the Earth

2010-07-25T11:51:00.001-07:00

God, this is a beautiful day, and I live to praise it.
I am so grateful that all this exists, that we are both here
and I meditate
on the thrumming gratitude that plays my heart
as I bury my cheek in the soil and the dusty grass
(strewn with pebbles, clover,
and anthills),
nuzzling and pressing in to
the warm shoulder of the earth
like a sweet and desirous woman: affectionate
and lusty.

As I lie over the bosom of the earth, I feel
completely grounded, calmed, and more--pulled
by an invisible force as strong as love,
but stronger, in its fixed way, like gravity,
from all the lively, spinning centers of myself.
My hot and liquid core, pulsating
and flowing with acrid, vital fluids
is drawn, irresistible,
to hers,
and our bodies lay upon each other like mirrors
and reflect an endless symmetry
until we blend into one another and are indistinguishable.

The earth is my god and my body,
and only when I think of her,
when I press myself, childlike, into her tumescent sphere,
wrap myself in her long grasses
(the first fibers to be woven into clothes) and her caressing winds,
and fill my ears with her self-bound stars,
the birds,
do I feel at peace,
and my heart opens
to encompass the entire sky.

6.30.10

The Ocean pt. II

2010-07-25T11:44:00.000-07:00

As the glowing sky dims,
over water, over ocean-
floating pier,
men appear out of the bushes
and the drydock anchors, hushed thinkers
and fleeing criminals, all struggling
to pantomime the slow,
open and shut
motions of the hand of god

(God, who is fleshless,
God, who is the ethereal,
God the sublime).

It can only be for the sake of poetry that this
innumerable, unnameable presence
has limbs.
It can only be for the sake of my heart that this evening, Venus
shines brightly over the bay, pinkly radiating
with a blank and listless beneficence.

There can be no beatitude by the ocean. It is too weighty.

7.18.10

Alone in the Kissing Breeze

2010-07-25T11:37:00.001-07:00

By myself, beside myself,
alone on the waterfront
tactile and sensory for the
first time, watching
like film glitches in a '40s film, rainbow
bridges and crystal globes
doubled and spinning, ringed
and familiar, like how
the halves of cut pearls
radiate
the same layered symmetry
as displayed in the miniature nymphs
that float hazily before
my eyes,
ballet-ing in and out
of the panorama I'm facing
and hanging, star-like,
from the shimmering pistils of my
blurred eyelashes.

For the first time in a year
and a half I am alone
in my silence
and quietly complacent in a self-imposed quarantine,
the nursery of all my latent
and brilliantest thoughts.

Grey-faced like a statue
of a saint,
I resolve to know the saints, to osmotically become
a manifestation of their devotion
through my understanding of their lives.
Pink and fleshy,
I shuttle my ankles closed together,
a skip-and-a-jump motion
that makes all my halfhearted attempts at modesty even more childlike;
to keep one's legs closed
and folded
on such a beautiful day
on this old pier
in this kissing breeze
will always be a halfhearted game
of hopscotch
with my impish and reluctant self.

7.18.10

Found Some Old Poems (The Ocean)

2010-07-25T11:28:00.000-07:00

you cry on to me on
the other side of an ocean
and i want to rock you in arms made
of tear-salty waves. the liquid
from my bleeding heart adds
to the distance between us; it dilutes
the purity of the ocean's amniotic
fluid and makes both our
sadnesses spill onto the shores we've
created with our different perspectives.
On mine can be found the futility of
rebellion; on yours the stale
taste of an ultimate freedom and we
both pour our bodies into different
vessels of murky water. Your eyes
shine brightly at all times speaking
of youth in its prime and your knowledge
of how to succeed in just living. You cry
slowly into your cup of beer while
my eyes glow dully with the trembling
flame of fear and the knowledge that
nothing will stay the same. I cry
into the ocean as the water adopts
my tears, and i bathe in myself.

8.2.09

Found Some Old Poems (Leaving)

2010-07-25T11:27:00.000-07:00

on my left hand i wear my grandmother's
ring, symbolically wedded to you
so i won't cheat when we're forcibly
separated by nothing
other than fate and my drive
to succeed. i pleasure your
name and your lips and your hair i
drive myself crazy imagining how
i'll feel when we're both home but
in different states; i imagine
you'll be crying while i grimace
and grapple with so many
different desires.

you love me now but will you
still when i give in and wrap
myself around a stranger?

8.2.09

Found Some Old Poems (Details)

2010-07-25T11:26:00.000-07:00

this one has a renewed relevance!:

your little bear's nose and your laughing
girl's lips all pinkened by liquor and kissing
a cigarette each make me crumble
and wither inside; their perfection
reminds me that all things are fleeting.

8.2.09

Found Some Old Poems I

2010-07-25T11:24:00.000-07:00

This one is actually the oldest of all. A poem?

"You know, although it would make me feel quite disloyal, self-sabotaging, and maybe even a bit inappropriate to ever be your friend, I like you."

9.8.08

Found Some Old Poems

2010-07-25T11:19:00.000-07:00

I found some poems that I wrote about Felix, most from almost exactly a year ago. They seemed like 1 am rants at the time but upon reexamination I actually think some of them are pretty good. I'm going to post them separately. Here's the first; this is the poem that used used to be a secret:

As you stare at me
nakedly I wonder whether
I would love you
if you were a woman
and in a case of severe dramatic irony,
I often wake up
tragically next to you
from a dream of making love to a girl-

the same girl I've dreamt of
numerous times.
Once I kissed her, drunken sparked-orange
tongue lolling into her perfect Romanian mouth
on a sidewalk, and I remember how
she pulled away
upset despite months of subtle come-ons.

She is grating, turbulent,
petty
so this is not a love poem.

She haunts
me, grimly, a skinny blackhaired reminder
that I will always want something
more.

3.29.09

This is the first time I have ever really told the Truth in my whole life (Admission)

2010-07-14T23:50:00.001-07:00

The reason that I'm writing you tonight is to tell you something very important. It's something I've known for quite a long time but have been afraid to share with you. I believe in god. And magic. And spirits and energies, not as elegant metaphors, but as manifest realities. I believe in these things because I have experienced them firsthand. I never told you because I was afraid of you juding me and not holding my beliefs to be legitimate or sane. I projected this fear onto you because you are the lens through which I experience the world when not looking through my own eyes -- yours is the second opinion I seek. For a long time I was ambivalent about the validity or even the reality of these beliefs, and so I used my fear of being judged by you as an excuse to not fully admit them to myself. However, tonight on the way home from your house I finally was thinking about it clearly and I realized for the first time that you want me to be happy, and that the source of that happiness is immaterial to you so long as it exists. This was very huge for me. I'm sorry it took me so long -- I don't want you to feel offended. It's not you. After realizing that I had been raped (and most likely throughout the entire time leading up to that realization), my ability to trust anything was severely retarded and our development as intimate friends was undoubtedly delayed. Coincidentally, it was during one of these times (most seriously, when we weren't speaking) that my passion for mysticism and spirituality really bloomed. That made it easy for me to hide it from you.

But yes; ever since I went to Burning Man, and even before that, I have felt as though I have been on a spiritual journey of sorts, to reconnect to myself and to the Mother earth, the entire bountiful Universe, that I came from. It is very hard for me to write these words, perhaps because they portray a sentiment of vulnerability that I am most afraid of betraying. To say that one believes that the Universe is founded on love, harmony, and symmetry, as I do, is to not only open oneself up very wide in general, but to open oneself specifically to ridicule; when viewed at surface value the world hardly seems to reflect that, so believing in and devoting oneself to accessing all-present love definitely seems more than a little crazy. But I really do believe, and when I open up the shell that surrounds my heart, I feel it.

I hope that you can respect this. It is a very integral part of who I am and has been for years now. I deeply apologize for not telling you sooner. I have wanted to, and have been trying to for a long time, but unfortunately I only felt able to today, and we are no longer together for me to say it to your face. I'm going to leave out details because I do think we should talk about this -- after all, we have both got to both equally see through the mask, and this is the side of myself that I have been hiding from you. To succinctly define what I mean, I will leave it at this:

over the years, I have discovered that I am a reverential person, and am most happy when in the act of worshiping something. You probably know this from the way I used to worship you. However after a lot of thought and processing I realized that I cannot worship people in any form, but rather that all I feel comfortable revering is nature and the great, unknowable, cosmic/psychic/spiritual/

physical forces that form and govern every aspect of our Universe. Pretty much, I love science, and especially quantum physics and geology (fuck it, I love em all, they're all inseparable) and am overwhelmed by the symmetry and organization I see present between and without all aspects of physical reality. What takes this home for me is the way that I feel these forces relating to me emotional being. I believe that all bodies are supersensible resonance chambers capable of being affected on the quantum level. Thus, we are all connected and every shift in motion of the breeze, earth, galaxy, and Universe can be felt within us if we pay close enough attention.

And that's what I'm trying to do with my life, among other things -- to pay attention to the cosmic rhythm and use what I feel to help others do the same, because it feels so good. So I worship the sky, love the clouds, kiss the trunks of the trees and embrace the hot earth that lies beneath everything. I do this alone, but it is truly this sentiment coming out when I call things beautiful. That's why it hurt me so much when you used to tease me for that -- it felt like you were catching me at prayer.

I hope that this does not make you feel different about me. If it does, consider this: all od these feeling and habits have been a very real and manifest part of me for years, and I know that you have still loved me. I don't doubt that love enough to think that this admission would be enough to drive it away; I don't doubt it at all actually, and that is why I am finally telling you this. I really want you to know me for all I am, for what I am most proud of, as you said. To close, I think that Joanna Newsom has a pretty good way with words, so I'll let her sum up how I feel about life:

"Squint skyward and listen, loving him, we move within his borders, just asterisms in the stars' set order. We could stand for a century, staring with our heads cocked in the broad daylight at this thing: Joy. Landlocked, in bodies that don't keep, dumbstruck with the sweetness of being, 'til we don't be."

So yeah. That's all. That's my side of the mask. Thank you for showing me yours.

Love,
Stella

The Same Hands

2010-07-07T22:55:00.000-07:00

This entire year has been a re-run
of all the stupid shit I already
thought I'd said and done. And
you can break my heart
'til the dawn comes;

I'll just pick up all the parts
and stuff them down in my pockets
until you think that they're all gone
and you've erased my fear of love
made manifest
in that broken old organ.

And I have held the same hands
for what's suddenly become four
whole years, tracing
the bones
and
fondling the broad palms,
soft as lambs' ears.

But really I know
no time at all has passed
between us, because
everyone leaves for so long:

spring through fall, still
circling the sun's sphere.

And even more harshly, each
decides they were wrong
and they want to come home,
but they'll only love me if
I've completely reformed and developed
telepathy, so
they never have to show me
all their hopes and fears and weaknesses
and we can live together, happy and
blindly
and never have problems
if we don't feel like talking.

And through all this leaving and
reuniting, I can't
grasp why no one will trust me
when I told them softly,
lightly,
that my love is a constant
like gravity.

Yet we repulse
one another yearly, drawing so
close only to find
with great shock and surprise,
our magnetism's contrived,
so we spiral off

to a new network of stars.

And I have held the same hands
for what's suddenly become four
whole years, tracing
the bones
and
fondling the broad palms,
soft as lambs' ears.

But there's one pair of hands
I'll probably never tough again, unless
we're reunited
by that great mystery,
tragedy,

and I have to comfort him
because we've been thrown together
(against our will)
by that force
that can only form death
and beauty.

But considering
my only chance of holding him
in my arms again
would be if one of our friends died, I'd
rather lie alone and whisper
myself a lullaby
made of all the tears we cried
in the corner of my room

underneath the God's eye.

And you can break my heart
'til the dawn comes;

I'll just pick up all the parts
and stuff them down in my pockets
until you think that they're all gone
and you've erased my fear of love
made manifest
in that broken old organ.

You've destroyed my heart just to help me
grow a new one.
You're destroying my heart
just to help me grow a new one.

Around Your Borders / Catlike / I Hope (100th Post!)

2010-07-06T23:29:00.000-07:00

I hope that when
you break her heart
you are swift and honest,
and leave her doubtless
that you are gone
or else you'll be at fault
for the grief you've caused.

And she'll lay around your borders
all day-- she'll lay
around
your borders all day, mewling
and clawing, with catlike paws
at the door that just held all
that she loved,

until she collapses for almost seven
months, wondering
in her feverish sleep, what exactly
made you leave?

And she'll lay around
your borders all day--
she'll lay
around your borders
all day.

I hope that when you break
her heart, you
do it early
and do not leave her to linger on,
kitten-blind while you move
on.

Or else she'll lay around
your borders
all day-- she'll lay
around
your borders all day, mewling
and clawing, with catlike paws
at the door
that just had held all
that she loved,

ignoring, willfully,
the new pet you've begun to feed,

and she'll lay around
your borders all day--
she'll lay
around your borders
all day.

So I hope that when
you say you're gone,
you're gone,
and that she does
not hang around too long, skinny
and starving from the gifts
left on your lawn
that should have been her breakfast
every morning that she laid
around your borders all day,

laid around your borders
all day, mewling
and clawing with catlike paws
at the door she knew had just held
all that she loved.

Sparrow and Scallop

2010-06-25T03:16:00.001-07:00

A tiny house, up on a hill:
that's where I'll be, still.
And when you feel all overwrought,
I'll be the only soul
who's not corrupt.

And we can lie together
in the mustard and the clover,
and sing each other's praises
over and over,
alone as the loneliest last stars of morning--
plaintive as sparrows
and sealed shut like scallops:
nestled in our solitary loving.

But like dogs on a trail,
our deer-hearts will be hunted
by people with the zeal
of over-nervous mothers.
And we'll vainly
try to hide from them:
lower our eyes
and cover our skin,
grow out our hair and hide nymphlike,
behind
the translucent vestments
like reluctant brides.

We could hide this way forever,
as meek subsistence farmers;
preoccupied with sowing
and nature's simple, sainted order.
Born from the constellation of the archer,
headstrong as stallions
and trembly as rabbits;
united in our adroit
and earthy cunning--

we'll ignore them and laugh.
We'll ignore them and laugh;
let their gaze roll like water down our backs.
We'll ignore them and laugh.

But like dogs on a trail,
our deer-hearts will be hunted
by people with the zeal
of over-nervous mothers.

Each striving to fondle and fetishize
and worry themselves over
the same solitary consciences
lain wasting in fallow fodder,
searching the sky for a limit on its borders,
star-eyed as boatswains
and fate-bound as martyrs,
cradled in a hollow in the soil.

Or, we could ignore them and laugh.
We could ignore them and laugh;
let their gaze roll like water down our backs.
We could ignore them and laugh.

Musings on Kiki Smith / Night at the Batcave (poem)

2010-06-10T23:26:00.001-07:00

The ever-present old woman
The glass glitter
The delicately painted mirrors
The feeling of old, white cotton linen
and quiet sunlight in the attic.

A room of one’s own
The space between inhaling and exhaling
The darkness at the bottom of the spaces
between blades of grass
The contained expansiveness of a dandelion.

Space,
mute and white.

The smell of the porch at night
The sound of staring straight into the darkness,
and not being able to see anything
The feeling of taking a trip to nowhere
with the person you love.

Looking up at the milky way at night
Looking up at the moon
The feeling of space
and of looking—
the feeling of experiencing the self
within a context.

/

When the boundaries of this space
are ascribed by nature, we are
happy, and feel like giants;
the space
within us
grows.

But when the boundaries of this space
are ascribed by man or his materials,
we feel terrible, like ants; we are discomfited
and forced to feel
the confines of our fleshly bodies, of
our faces.

We submit to recognition
in the grasp of human hands; we cannot
circumvent the obligations that our common humanity binds us to
when in the presence of our own kind:

We feel small.

:

But I love the greatness of the clouds.
I love the grass that wraps my calves
like a stocking.
I love that I crept, knock-kneed and uptight, into the Gowanus, led, precarious, by expert night crawlers,
over the most sloping and rusted lean-to fences, and scrambled,
scrambled slipshod in the dark grass,
with wind
rushing and sticky arms waving,
to rest at the foot of my favorite building,
the monolith, beautiful
and resplendent in the faint starlight.

We watched raccoons and bats shuffle and flap
fleet-foot and leather-winged
in their nocturnal dance under that purple sky,
all stretched out in the haunted gloom
of the structure’s moon-
wrought shadow and gutted
windows like empty eyes.

Our every shiver in that weirdly consecrated place
was ordained by the crisply painted, revelation-
seeking banner
that crowned the brow of the beast,
that shouted into the darkness:

“OPEN YOUR EYE GIRL.”

Our singular movements across that concrete veldt
were all brought into being,
our skins all wriggled
and our brains all turned
in the way they did
because that order hung above our heads.

:

We settled into the night like deer
that tramp listless circles into the high grasses
to create their chosen torpid nests;
mosquitoes
hummed lazily around us as we sipped our stolen beers
and waited, growing dimmer and stumbly,
for something to happen.
And imperceptibly, it did.The stars shifted overhead
and the dimly glowing hands of the Fulton Clocktower
lazily circled the hours on its invisible face, carving
time out of the blackness
like two small trails of dark blood
swirling in a slow and shallow drain.

Various thuds passed in the night;
we felt as though we were being watched
by all manner of creatures, and more
than once caught looks from a pair of shyly glowing,
close-set eyes
that peered, humble and inquisitive,
from the bushes that sprang
(dark fireworks)
from of the cracks in that abandoned lot.

The only way into the towering structure, full
of holes and trick boards
like loose teeth in the vast and damply shifting floor,
is to scale a wall, catlike and fearless,
until you reach the lone, creaky fire escape
that is to be swung onto
as if it were the bow
of the boat to your salvation

(it is).

:

During the day I am told
the light filters through the blackeye windows
honeygold like pure laughter,
and illuminates the traps and dead zones in the toothless floor.
The light, always filtered through a smoky screen
of luminescence, moted,
and filled with the tranquility of a dead and silent space, alights
on what parts of the walls it can touch, revealing
the forgotten art
that dwells there
in the same way an overheard whisper reveals lovers.

The sheer emptiness of this space,
its ultimate abandonment,
makes the dusty vacuousness that you find there more truly intimate than a
kiss.

Its silence envelops you in a totality
so solid and musty, so clearly unadulterated
that in your solitude you are more surrounded
than you have ever been before.
The surety of yourself, and only yourself, in that place, is a warmth unbroken by all time
and that embraces the entire space of your being.
You cannot think of anything else but the fact
that you are completely alone there,
and that it is truly only you,
for as long as you wish.

You bathe in this silence, luxuriate
in the way it muffles everything
but a resounding impression of your own wholeness.

:

But the infinite quietness is not the deepest phenomenon of that hollow place—after having stood transfixed for an entire day
and slowly losing your sight,
the expansive
perception you have gained from so deeply excavating yourself
within that hallowed space allows you to hear,
with unmitigated clarity,
the tiny sounds of the silent house—you notice
that there is a moth nearby, fluttering
a muted waltz outside the window.
Later you realize, almost impossibly, that it has left
and gone somewhere else.

You hear the minikin squeaks of the sweeping bats as they echolocate, laughing
as you come to realize that the gloom is just as inconceivable
to them as it is to you.

You laugh, and as you do you come alive, and bring with you
that dead space. The whole house rings
with your joyous, triumphant laughter, and the silence is so shocked in its departure
that your tiny laugh, writ so large across the fleeing back if what that space once was, shakes some plaster from the wall.

:

Your laughter shakes up the still summer night—the bats flurry
out around the old, broken windows
and begin feasting on moths and spiders that they would never have caught had you not come there.

The raccoons sit upright in their bosky bowers, shaking off their usual, sleepy affectation
to be momentarily transformed into lean and stalwart sentinels.
Sooty, swaybacked meerkats,
they appear to be heralding the dawn
and for an instant the disparate and wily tribe, scattered
throughout the empty lot and Brooklyn,
is united in their alertness.

The katydids and other clickhumming
night beetles quit
their buzzing as your laughter rolls across their antennae
in a singular, momentous signal
to their robotic brains.
The feral cats that had come to war
with the masked and bandit-like raccoons
in a territorial dispute
lope
away into the distance,
whiskers twitching and backs arched;
they can sense the mood is wrong for a fight this evening.

:

Even the slimy fish
resting at the farthest reaches of the murky canal
are wrested from their slow, cold-blooded delirium.
Your laugh has caught the breeze, and ripples the surface of the water, tinkling merrily
upon the crests of the convex, crested ridges
and circles it creates, and spiraling
down to the silted brown bottom, echoes
in a muffled cascade through the green water:
your laugh, the dispersing
eidolon of its selfsame source,
has gained entry to the stygian depths through the small portal created
by a rising pocket of gaseous levity,
the canal’s bubbly response to your genuine display.

And so the fish stir too, wending
their way among the fragments of broken fruit crates
and rusted anchor chains
that line the muddy, clouded bottom,
smiling slightly as their cold eyes and algae-bearded lips
light up
for the first time since winter’s stilling caress rocked them
resting,
to the bottom,
to sleep.

:

The whole night, quiet but already living, is woken up
by the ghost
of your gentle laugh in the toothless, eyeless, gutless building;
by the recognition that even in total solitude there is
a superabundance of life, perfect
and intricate in all its forms.

As you laugh, you nearly begin to weep—
you have never been to such a beautiful place,
and the cells in your heart feel this, and begin
to resonate with the quiet frequencies of all the secretly living things there.
And your heart beats
newly,
like it never has before:

your chest is filled with the warm
and solid spaciousness
of the man-made building
that has become a precious,
organic cavern.

Musings on Kiki Smith / Night at the Batcave

2010-06-07T23:44:00.000-07:00

The ever-present old woman
The glass glitter
The delicately painted mirrors
The feeling of old, white linen
and quiet sunlight in the attic.

A room of one’s own
The space between inhaling and exhaling
The darkness at the bottom of the spaces
between blades of grass
The contained expansiveness of a dandelion.

Space,
mute and white.

The smell of the porch at night
The sound of staring straight into the darkness,
and not being able to see anything
The feeling of taking a trip to nowhere
with the person you love.

Looking up at the milky way at night
Looking up at the moon
The feeling of space
and of looking—
the feeling of experiencing the self
within a context.

/

When the boundaries of this space
are ascribed by nature, we are
happy, and feel like giants;
the space
within us
grows.

But when the boundaries of this space
are ascribed by man or his materials,
we feel terrible, like ants; we are discomfited
and forced to feel
the confines of our fleshly bodies, of
our faces.

We submit to recognition
in the grasp of human hands; we cannot
circumvent the obligations that our common humanity binds us to
when in the presence of our own kind:

We feel small.

I love the greatness of the clouds. I love the grass that I currently wrap myself in. I love that last night I crept, knock-kneed and uptight into the Gowanus, led precarious by expert night crawlers over the most broken corrugated and rusted lean-to fences, and scrambled, scrambled slipshod in the dark grass, with wind rushing and sticky arms waving, to rest at the foot of my favorite building, the monolith, beautiful and resplendent in the faint starlight. We watched raccoons and bats shuffle and flap fleet-foot and leather-winged in their nocturnal dance under that purple sky, resting in the haunted gloom of the structure’s moon-wrought shadow and gutted windows like empty eyes. Our every shiver in that weirdly consecrated place was ordained by the crisply painted, imposing banner that crowned the brow of the beast, that shouted into the darkness: “OPEN YOUR EYE GIRL.” Our singular movements across that concrete veldt were all brought into being, our skins all wriggled and our brains all turned in the way they did because that order hung above our heads.

We settled into the night like deer that tramp listless circles into the high grasses to create their chosen torpid nests; mosquitoes hummed lazily around us as we sipped our stolen beers and waited, growing dimmer and stumbly, for something to happen. And imperceptibly, it did. The stars shifted overhead and the dimly glowing hands of the Fulton Clocktower lazily circled the hours on its invisible face, carving time out of the blackness like two small trails of dark blood swirling in a slow and shallow drain. Various thuds passed in the night; we felt as though we were being watched by all manner of creatures, and more than once caught looks from a pair of shyly glowing, close-set eyes that peered, humble and inquisitive, from the bushes that sprang out of the cracks in that abandoned lot. The only way into the towering structure, full of holes and trick boards like loose teeth in the vast and damply shifting floor, is to scale a wall, catlike and fearless, until you reach the lone, creaky fire escape that is to be swung onto as if it were the bow of the boat to your salvation (it is).

During the day I am told the light filters through the blackeye windows honey-gold like pure laughter, and illuminates the traps and dead zones in the toothless floor. The light, always filtered through a smoky screen of luminescence, moted, and filled with the tranquility of a dead and silent space, alights on what parts of the walls it can touch, revealing the forgotten art that dwells there the same way an overheard whisper reveals lovers. The sheer emptiness of this space, its ultimate abandonment, makes the dusty vacuousness that you find there more truly intimate than a kiss. Its silence envelops you in a totality so solid and musty, so clearly unadulterated that in your solitude you are more surrounded than you have ever been before. The surety of yourself, and only yourself, in that place, is a warmth unbroken by all time and that embraces the entire space of your being. You cannot think of anything else but the fact that you are completely alone there, and that it is truly only you, for as long as you wish. You bathe in this silence, luxuriate in the way it muffles everything but a resounding impression of your own wholeness.

But the infinite quietness is not the deepest phenomenon of that hollow place—you have stood transfixed for an entire day, and the loss of your sight, combined with the deepened attention you have gained from so deeply excavating yourself in that hallowed space, allows you to hear, with unmitigated clarity, the tiny sounds of the silent house—you notice that there is a moth nearby, fluttering a muted waltz outside the window. Later you realize, almost impossibly, that it has left and gone somewhere else. You hear the minikin squeaks of the sweeping bats as they echolocate, laughing as you come to realize that the gloom is just as inconceivable to them as it is to you. You laugh, and as you do you come alive, and bring with you that dead space. The whole house rings with your joyous, triumphant laughter, and the silence is so shocked in its departure that the momentum it gains from your tiny laugh, writ so large across the fleeing back of what that space once was, shakes some plaster from the wall.

Your laughter shakes up the still summer night—the bats flurry out around the old, broken windows and begin feasting on moths and spiders that they would never have caught had you not come there. The raccoons sit upright in their bosky bowers, shaking off their usual, sleepy affectation to be momentarily transformed into lean and stalwart sentinels. They become meerkats for a moment, and appear to be heralding the dawn; for an instant the disparate and wily tribe, scattered throughout the empty lot and Brooklyn, is united in their alertness. The katydids and other clickhumming night beetles quit their buzzing as your laughter rolls across their antennae in a singular, momentous signal to their robotic brains. The feral cats that had come to war with the masked and bandit-like raccoons in a territorial dispute lope away into the distance, whiskers twitching and backs arched; they can sense the mood is wrong for a fight this evening.

Even the slimy fish resting at the farthest reaches of the murky canal are wrested from their slow, cold-blooded delirium. Your laugh has caught the breeze and ripples the surface of the water, tinkling merrily upon the crests of the convex, crested ridges and circles it creates and spiraling down to the silted brown bottom, echoing in a muffled cascade through the green water: it has gained entry to the stygian depths through the small portal that was created by a rising pocket of gaseous levity, the canal’s bubbly response to your genuine display. And so the fish stir too, wending their way among the fragments of broken fruit crates and rusted anchor chains that line the muddy, silty bottom, smiling slightly as their cold eyes and algae-bearded lips light up for the first time since winter’s stilling caress rocked them resting, to the bottom, to sleep.

The whole night, quiet but already living, is woken up by your gentle laugh in this toothless, eyeless, gutless building; by the recognition that even in total solitude there is a superabundance of life, perfect and intricate in all its forms. As you laugh, you nearly begin to weep—you have never been to such a beautiful place, and the cells in your heart feel this, and begin to resonate with the quiet frequencies of all the secretly living things there, and your heart beats newly, like it never has before: your chest is filled with the warm and solid spaciousness of the man-made building that has become a precious, organic cavern.

-----------

this is going to become a really long poem.

no stone unturned

2010-05-30T21:25:00.000-07:00

there may be silence here
but rest assured
i've left no stone unturned.

some may castigate me for this, harshly
but i cannot live a life of bland
obsequiousness-

i cannot creep like moss over
the surface of things and sit,
hands folded like an egyptian statue.

i am a tunneler
by trade, i am a rodent with a nervous heart
and a keen mind that never stops whirring.

i will infinitely delve, inverted sysyphean am i,
for i cannot be convinced there is a bottom
to things, but rather an everlasting, murky fond:

all nature is like the tumescent, layered
soil: richly creeping with comlex, ethereal beasts
and strewn with gems at every tier:

the self is a deep, dark well
life is escaping that capture
thought is tunneling.

i am a stone at the bottom of a mellifluous pit
i am a mole, scraping at the edge with my paw
i am transformed by my desire to escape the boundaries of myself.

occasionally, with tooth and nail, i will break
out through to the clammy and sodden void,
and i will scrape at the dense nothingness of absurdity-

haphazard but strong, penetrating, and entirely direct-
until i find the bottom of another well to lie in, in hopes
of finding, in that hollow vacuole, a stone

to turn
and wonder at,
in awe.

Blood Orange

2010-05-09T19:49:00.001-07:00

Last night I dreamed
of being raped,
and retaliating:
of screaming and gnashing my teeth,
of clawing and biting and yelling
violently public obscenities,
of throwing broken shoes
and champagne glasses and scrambling
out the window of my childhood home
(a wild-eyed and frantic bacchant)
to streak stark naked
and wailing across the silvery tar-
papered roofs of a dormant Manhattan.

Fleet-foot and furious,
I ran long and hard,
only to pause,
trembling and shocked
like a trapped animal,
once I hit the last stretch
of that final roof on the corner of Greenwhich,
that place where the tarmac
became my ritual ground
and I became electrified,
rooted,
compelled to cringe
and stomp and arch my back
and leap in terrified frustration,
to tear my hair in a freakish pantomime of grief,
and to howl,
from the deepest place in my heart,
all the songs of destruction,
backlit in my archaic mania
by the obsequious figure of the rising sun:

A broken blood orange (with tattered
and dripping hemispheres revealed)
that, reddened and oozing
with the previous night's violence and surrendering,
slowly spread its indelible stain
across
the great,
white-tablecloth mesa of the morning sky,
the ghostly filaments of its hollowing skin
trailing in the breeze as translucent
crepuscular
clouds,
and its small seeds disseminating
like missives
to the lonely, hanging stars
of Callisto's great Bear.

For Molly (extended)

2010-05-09T19:25:00.001-07:00

black ringlets fiercer
than any tempest, my
late-fall paradox:

in your anger you
burn so brightly, you
rage like mars
to the point that I want
to call you a summer storm,
I want to characterize you by your anger
(mouth a summoning trumpet of war)
janus-faced and desirous
I want to make you
red
bold
hot.

but you are not, raven
eyes: anciently wise, alive
with the laugh of a secret
muse and scrutinously askance.
No, you are much deeper than that red
hot anger that is fueled by furiously rolled
tobacco and
seemingly endless fucking; within you lies a great heart.
Scorpion mistress, Animalia, you hold
your morals close to you
and guard their precious heads like a she-bear
does her pups. But
I remember
when you were all the gooseflesh
of shaved arms
and tube-tops
and no lunch
and Newports. I remember
when we were young ruffians
and I savor our silences, our hatreds, our
violence, stinging like
cold snow on a hot palm.

We warred like young wolves
we warred like boys
twisting each other's arms and wrestling
the shirts off our own backs while trying
all hot-blooded and valiant
to aim for the eyes.

We sparred like mustangs,
but we always remembered
how lovely we found one another
and our shared solace, in
those endless basement, backyard
cigarette, stairwell
tell me everything,
tell me, dreaming, graffiti,
tarot,
apple cores and coffee,
inspired, platonic
sixteen-year-old
nights.

And you are the greatest poet, I know, but
I'd never written you a poem
until now:

Within you lies a great heart
of stillness, a well-deep organ
so greatly profound that when one climbs deep
down to its silt-jade depths
the warm darkness is so vast that during the day
when one is resting, curled at the bottom
of the profound aquifer that is your heart
it is possible to see the crystalline stars
wheel overhead in their fixed lattice.

The great well of your heart is fed
by the abundantly radiant spring of your
phosphorescent mind -- an opal --
sixth chakra like a diaphragm, bountiful third
eye opening and closing like the pneumatic wings
of a butterfly--your mind! Is a Mountain
wind bearing pellucid stream
waters to aquatic heart.
Mind, breath
of life, capillary fringe between
soul and sense.
Abundant consciousness
a lung, and
blood-salt like sea water:
your thoughts breathe
throughout everything.

The sister stars of your love
and seething mind are wrapped,
papooses in a cradle of sheepskin-- soft
and resilient, suede from the child
of a mountain ram,
your skin has been everywhere, at least
once before. Dark locks
are your prize and your otherness.
Womanhood is your vitality. Liberal limbs
join at a torso that is constellated
with a girdle of tattoos
like stars, each
marking a moment when kismet came
too close to home.

Fed right
and hearty since childhood,
you are strong.

Well-worn and well-loved,
you are beautiful
and you have regained
my trust.

for molly

2010-04-11T04:51:00.001-07:00

black ringlets fiercer
than any tempest, my
late-fall paradox:

in your anger you
burn so brightly, you
rage like mars
to the point that i want
to call you a summer storm,
i want to characterize you by your anger
(mouth a summoning trumpet of war)
janus-faced and desirous
i want to make you
red
bold
hot.

but you are not, raven
eyes: anciently wise, alive
with the laugh of a secret
muse and scrutinously askance.
No, you are much deeper than that red
hot anger that is fueled by furiously rolled
tobacco and
seemingly endless fucking; within you lies a great heart.
Scorpion mistress, Animalia, you hold
your morals close to you
and guard their precious heads like a she-bear
does her pups. But
I remember
when you were all the gooseflesh
of shaved arms
and tube-tops
and no lunch
and newports. I remember
when we were young ruffians
and I savor our silences, our hatreds, our
violence, stinging like
cold snow on a hot palm.

We warred like young wolves
we warred like boys
twisting each other's arms and wrestling
the shirts off our own backs while trying
all hot-blooded and valiant
to aim for the eyes.
We sparred like mustangs,
but we always remembered
how lovely we found one another.

And you are the greatest poet, I know, but
I'd never written you a poem
until now:

Within you lies a great heart
of stillness, a well-deep organ
so greatly profound that when one climbs deep
down to its silt-jade depths
the warm darkness is so vast that during the day
when one is resting, curled at the bottom
of the profound aquifer that is your heart
it is possible to see the crystalline stars
wheel overhead in their fixed lattice.

The great well of your heart is fed
by the abundantly radiant spring of your
phosphorescent mind -- an opal --
sixth chakra like a diaphragm, great third
eye opening and closing like the pneumatic wings
of a butterfly--your mind! Mountain
wind bearing pellucid stream
to aquatic heart.
Mind, breath
of life, capillary fringe between
soul and sense.

The sister stars of your love
and seething mind are wrapped,
papooses in a cradle of sheepskin-- soft
and resilient, suede from the child
of a mountain ram
it has been everywhere, at least
once before. Dark locks
are your prize and your otherness.
Womanhood is your vitality. Fed right
and hearty since childhood,
you are strong.
Well-worn and well-loved,
you are beautiful
and you have regained
my trust.

I AM

2010-03-21T12:10:00.000-07:00

Tonight I read the Song of Solomon
Tonight I absorbed drop by drop the bitterness
slow-creeping of Kaddish, vulgar
gloom and creepiness describing
ancient
vagina, death, Kali,
mother looking, grey eyes
with yellow jaundiced rims, staring
bloodshot and cocked
into the terrible void of future, the promise
of nothing.

Tonight I saw the moon hang
twice, a crescent: fingernail
clipping on night sky making gaudy
the ragged shrouds of old cloud that lingered
like dust trails on the velvet black night: twice
reflected blurry in gazing pools that dotted
New Jersey, wan
sickle, imitator.

I saw you, beautiful, two moons
running swifter than gazelle
over quiet night-plains, Artemis,
hart leaps over middle-america.
Your two breasts like two fawns--
I remember
that song like love like your solicitation
and I am that second moon
blurred and transient
sitting, airplane seat cold, hurtling
back towards life unknown--no friends--
falling headlong into college,
secondary
education in forms, education in
fucking, in no one, in meaningless
beers by the side of the road.

Library dust, smell,
isolation and hard-backed chairs
ears twitching with the paranoia
of a hacking cough or a restless heel,
I feel
more like pain every day, more like
twisted, spine broke, ruined brain.
I feel like love gone
fallow lands
I feel like spring, like Rilke's
melancholy and I'm 3200 feet closer
to the great unshifting stars, this whole country
encompassed by Orion,
that same doomed hero I watch spread his arms across the skies
of Brooklyn, of Oregon, sword hanging
flaccid and useless at his belt, Orion--
already dead! Has been
defeated by crustacean nemesis, sea's
Arachne, hubris, excellence, void!
Already bloody like the ravine
sliced through my thumb by tremulous 8 am
breakfast, the burnt poppyseeds like asteroids
across the countertop milky way--
the blood, sudden, dyeing my bagel like love, crescent
cut like sky-caught moon, pain like
Solomon, and the gradual joining of skin
without scab, I see into myself
and like a prism
my heart's distillation into a thousand
colors: flesh, bone, blood, I am
revealed to myself
a scared and quiet thing
manic scribbler of choked-up words
struggler, love-obsessed,
knowing only
when I give birth will I be born.

Sage and Snow

2010-03-10T21:08:00.000-08:00

I kissed those lips once

extracted drop by drop

the holiest of liquids

o fluid love, o mountaintop!

Your fountainhead's dried up

softly ceasing, little stones
lighten in color, as your

body leaves their bones

Sage and snow, a stoic sylvan throne

tread lightly across the surface

undisturbed until you come

and weave frosted bowers upon the peak, upon the place

Where lonely I lived, o quiet grace!

O empty space!

[instrumental]

Come, sweet, soft

twining vines surround you

my heart is a fruit fallen off

of your limbs, of your limbs, of your warmest bough!

Bursting open, sapped and sticky, I am drowned

and the ants crawl in to my grieving skin

to pluck away my seedling hope

and to scatter my body in the wind

And wither tend you now?

I am the seed, I am the vagrant spore

Wind-tossed and wandering, hollow and soft

inchoate, separate from your barky moor

Rooted, you must be where you were before

but it seems you're as breeze-blown as I

For the earth, she has turned her face

clear around, left you inverse, dangling in the sky

She has left you, lonelier than I.

Anemone (revised)

2010-03-04T01:22:00.000-08:00

Eyes, o sand dollars!
Your gaze like a brittle star
wraps around the sea urchins that are
my eyes
and devours,
insides out,
the facile jelly your exposed viscera has created--

but buoy, tide, ocean: boy
you filled me once, fingers like eels
tickling my insides, frantically
plunging to hide slippery inside a calcite, crescent
neptunian warren. A pearl diver, you
once held your breath for hours while exploring
my deepest fissures, exhaled deep
bubbles that rose like jellyfish, dissolute
and trembling. They escaped
your sealsoft body through conch-pink lips, trailing
slowly towards the surface as you sank down
slowly into all of me, my skin:
you filled each pore with our shared salt
sea sweat, you filled my milky mouth with the liquid
words of kisses, murmured moon-drawn,
writhing with the tides: "I love you."
Fisherman, you filled my heart
with blue beach-glass
hope, you transformed it from a slickshut oyster
into a beautiful, deep-sea waving
anemone, brave (foolhardy)
you trained it not to recoil at your touch.

Grown boy, ashore, too old to angle: now
you are grounded, never
does your toe touch my sacred waters. Your hand
no longer lingers lazy beside the hull of the small vessel your father made you;
trawler, your fingers do not stir the silt-smooth waves
of my pelagic hair. But still
I feel the taught pull of your nets: forgotten and torn,
their broken wisps wrap around the half-dead memories that laze, limpid
and translucent, at the bottom of my brain,
and the dredge you ran still drags deep furrows through the subaquatic ooze
of my great heart.

Anemone

2010-02-28T03:36:00.000-08:00

Eyes, o sand dollars!
Your gaze like a brittle star
wraps around the sea urchins that are
my eyes
and devours,
insides out,
the facile jelly your exposed viscera has created--

but buoy, tide, ocean: boy
you filled me once, fingers like eels
tickling my insides, frantically
plunging. A pearl diver, you
once held your breath for hours while exploring
my deepest fissures, exhaled deep
bubbles that rose like jellyfish. They escaped
your sealsoft body through conch-pink lips, trailing
slowly towards the surface as you sank down
slowly into all of me, my skin:
you filled each pore with our shared salt
sea sweat, you filled my milky mouth with the liquid
words of kisses, murmured moon-drawn,
writhing with the tides: "I love you."
Fisherman, you filled my heart
with blue beach-glass
hope, you transformed it from a slickshut oyster
into a beautiful, deep-sea waving
anemone, brave (foolhardy)
you trained it not to recoil at your touch.

Grown boy, ashore, too old to angle: now
you are grounded, never
does your toe touch my sacred waters. Your hand
no longer lingers lazy beside the hull of the small vessel your father made you;
trawler, your fingers do not stir the silt-smooth waves
of my pelagic hair. But still
I feel the taught pull of your nets: forgotten and torn,
their broken wisps wrap around the half-dead memories that laze, limpid
and translucent, at the bottom of my brain,
and the dredge you ran still drags deep furrows through the subaquatic ooze
of my great heart.

****************
this is a second draft.

ode (to gabrielle)

2009-12-24T21:42:00.000-08:00

O poor soul! Soon,
I must make a choice to explore
either your soft face, to delve
into the ultimate meaningfulness of our love, or
I may jettison myself far
out among the stars to try and grasp something larger
than ourselves and our often-petty
circular loving.
Which shall I choose?

Do I care to explore that bond
which once held us close like refugees, that union
against the common enemy that was ourselves,
against the greying New York City
streets that birthed us?
Shall I return to myself, childlike, curled
on the bathroom floor, sobbing at your holy feet
as I professed my desire, singular and dawning:
to become
like you
to be
merged in some greater entity than my lonely self
and to probe the darkest recesses of your lovely flesh.
I cried, drugged and bewildered on the bathmat
and grasped your cold knees,
terrified by the immediacy of my nothingness.

You were all I knew,
brilliant orange,
taurean mistress, keeper
of my heart and of all the wisdom in this
damn world of plastic, gutter
trash and the sighs of the lonely.
I felt for you, blindly
begging in the darkness to be born,
knowing that myself would only be consummated
if I could consume you with kisses.
I loved the moon because I orbited you, o earth
grounding of my adolescent childhood
dictator of my self
mother of my desire to be alone,
but not lonely.
It was your pain that made me-
it was the pangs of your heart that forced me into being.

And now I choose, returning:
do I explore my motherland once more?
Or do I use that chemical otherness to dance
in realms known, but not felt
the paradox:
felt but not known.
When I rise, will it be to greet the dawn of myself
or of us? How can
I reconcile you with my vision of the cosmos, how can
I both love you and that which appears
to frighten you most?
You shy away from causality,
from the consequence of you,
while I go running, furiously in search of life,
poignantly striving for meaning.
I often find it in myself
and once I found it in your breath,
your breasts,
but now I no longer see you as that fractaling spiral
as that exploding pattern, that flower--

I see you grey-faced from 2 am
I see you digging inside yourself
hiding from the luminescent spheres that guide us all
blocking them out with fistfuls
of dank self-reproach,
covering your face with fear
that seeps under your fingernails like moist, black earth.
I want to tell you all of this, but I am afraid
of your seal-brown eyes-- I am terrified
that they will look at me with confusion
and an intense not-knowing.

I realize now that although you birthed me,
you are not my mother -- I am.
This makes me realize that I do not know you
and my stomach aches as I remember you
crying to me, in fear of my rejection.

(Sometimes)

I do not want you to love me because you never used to
and I would rather not know your soul.
If I did, my heart would be torn open,
a whirling galaxy of lust and pain,
a frightened and awful miasma of otherness.
I would have to realize that I have been lying
to you, to myself
to the entire world.

(Sometimes)

I wish that I still loved you as I had loved you-
now I see that you are broken, not holy
and I feel seismic, waves of fear.
You emanate an uncertainty I can hardly fathom, and I feel you
like a black hole, like the center of a galaxy.

Perhaps you are the singularity
and I, the world.

sad poem

2009-12-12T02:43:00.000-08:00

As I trace these swirling lines
out of the elegiac palms of my black hands
I feel myself being lifted
out of the ground by my roots, plucked
bare and writhing from the shivering soil
to twist gray-faced and wizened like a breach birth
hanging from the palms of your blank,
white hands. And as my
poisoned roots swell around my heart
I twist and curl tighter
trying to avoid your murderous hands
trying to enshrine myself
nymphlike in a cave of bark
squinting my eyes against the the needle rays
of the eclipse that is rolling across your
beautiful eyes, and slowly hiding
your once-beautiful gaze.

And from this height you drop me
a wan and helpless teardrop
an acorn from the mighty oak
of your barren hostility. I know
this is not you, o towering
one, o sterile mask. You look
at me like I am a dead thing
(and maybe I am)
and I cling to you with my poisoned roots,
crying for fear
that both of us will die.

Paradoxically, I will always remember you as you now
hold me: a small child
wrapped in bark, trying
desperately to protect against the harsh
winds that blow outside the boundaries of love, a selfmade
papoose, raising hands to protect against the harsh
blinding sliver, the eclipse's knife edge,
that pale sickle that acts
as a solitary and pathetic tribute,
the surrendering flag of all we used to know
and now still hold, dear.

open letter to daniel pinchbeck

2009-12-11T03:03:00.000-08:00

Hello.

This is a message for Daniel. I just wanted to let him know that if possible I would be very interested in corresponding with him via email. Reading 2012 was a very comforting experience, which is interesting to me (and I think might be for him) because for most people it seems to be profoundly disturbing and often rather painful. In my case, however, the book (essay? treatise? polemic?) made me feel incredibly welcomed, as it made manifest the reality of the fact that there is a community somewhere out there that thinks as I do, and as I believe is necessary to fix things. Reading 2012 was also exhilarating because throughout I felt and intense unity with Daniel- many of the things that he wrote about I have been aware of since I was seventeen years old. I would be especially interested in talking to him because I share his distinctly New York brand of skepticism about life, and am still struggling to believe in what I know is true. It's a rare scenario- for once, the mind has arrived at the destination before the heart. Additionally, I wanted to share some insight and wisdom about the number phi. When I was a junior in high school I spent a great deal of time thinking about phi- I was in a uniquely contemplative, pattern-seeking state, and was lucky enough to simultaneously be taking a conceptual physics class. Over the the time that culminated between the end of my junior year and the beginning of my senior year, I became acutely aware of phi's relevance and a very specific way. I was fixated on the idea of time, or of life, having a pattern, and had originally begun my thinking process with pi- it showed me, very simply and clearly, that randomness produces circularity. This fact thrilled and excited me, but after a short while I wanted more. Circularity was fine, but it was very clear that while the human process is innately repetitive, time and history definitely had a point- it was definitely going somewhere. Around the time of this realization, I became aware of phi. I had been obsessed with the aesthetics of the golden ratio for a while, but knew nothing about the number itself. As soon as I learned that phi is also a random number, everything clicked. It became perfectly aware to me that phi was the accurate representation of true human time. Coincidentally, it was the only thing that could save humanity from what seemed (seems) like imminent destruction. As many are taught in school, there have traditionally been two concepts of time: ancient, circular dreamtime, and modern, linear, concrete time. Phi was an integration of the two- it was a circle with a direction, it was a line that allowed for repetition. Upon further thought and consideration I noticed that, incredibly, the physical symbol for phi manifested itself as exactly what I had realized. Overwhelmed by all of these synchronicities, I was very happy. It was not until months later, when I was beginning to consider topics for my senior research project, that I stumbled upon a website devoted to the cult of Phi that systematically spat back at me everything that I had figured out on my own. I have had many moments like this, but the coincidence with Phi was truly special. I felt as though I finally knew what was right, and was astonished and so pleased that it was possible to simply discover. Previous to this revelatory experience, I had learned some truly special information about Phi that I think would be very relevant to its inclusion in 2012. At Burning Man 2008, a spiritual healer named Adam Apollo told me two groundbreakingly significant facts about Phi: first, that it governs the ratio between pitches in the sacred pronunciation of Om that only the holiest sect of Tibetan monks chant, and second -get this- the ratio between peaks and troughs in the heartbeat of someone who is feeling love and compassion is the Phi ratio. So now we know! God (which is just reality) is love. How incredible, and how overwhelmingly joyous and wonderful.

I would also like to thank Daniel for the way that 2012 has changed my interactions with people. This book brought me a great gift: a spontaneous four-hour conversation with my boyfriend a perfect stranger. Her name is Corinne, and miraculously, when we met, we were only five pages away from each other in the book. We bonded instantly over its revolutionary, truly eye-opening quality, and spent much of our time talking about how, because of reading it, the idea of establishing a 'normal life' seems impossible. This book has been so helpful in affirming my understanding of the realness of samsara, and has really helped me try and avoid mentally succumbing to it. 2012 also greatly re-increased my awareness. I used to be an incredibly sensitive person, and would frequently experience synchronicities, but the stress of senior year made me largely lose sight of that capacity, and generally dulled my wit, perceptivity, and emotion. During and after reading 2012, my awareness finally came back. Since beginning to read the book, I have seen four lenticular clouds, forms which seem unspeakably significant to me, and which I intuited as being a formative part of Terrence McKenna's Amazonian experience.

The prominence of Glastonbury in 2012 also makes me feel unspeakably brilliant- what was perhaps the greatest synchronicity of my life involved Glastonbury. In sophomore year, when I was deep in an incredibly apocalyptic and desperate-feeling stage, I began to write a short story. This was well before I was at all aware of the mayan calendar, of shamanism, of crystals, or of any alternative thought. I was just beginning my sojourn into what would be a very intense and ultimately rather ruinous relationship with philosophy, and was avidly devouring a literary analysis of Nietzsche. Anyway, the story was about how I felt that the world was collapsing, being consumed by a mechanistic overlord that I had ominously dubbed "the machine." In my story, this machine sat on top of a high hill, devouring the entire surrounding environment and producing nothing but clouds of ash and thick, black smoke. It was built in what had become the last town in the world- everything else had died out but, paradoxically, those nearest to the beast. I decided that the town still existed because it was the town of Cain- it was where he had finally settled down after being doomed by God to roam the earth seven times over. The town could not be destroyed because, like Cain, it bore a mark that ensured its perpetual torture via the inability to be annihilated. After much more outlining and detail about the details of the machine and the society that fed it, I jumped back in time- to Glastonbury. I had been reading a lot of Neil Gaiman, so I decided that I wanted my story to be set in England, perhaps as a kind of tribute. Without giving it much though, I came up with the name "Glastonbury"- it seemed to have a perfectly sleepy and shire-ish name to it. After this, I continued to write about how the inhabitants of the town were suspicious- in ancient times, Glastonbury had experienced an incredibly dramatic flood, and although the rain was always generous in Glastonbury, that year it was so intense that the old men of the town were starting to worry, and to hearken back to the old times. At this point I realized that it might be a good idea for me to check and see whether or not there might actually be a town called Glastonbury- if there was, I didn't want any readers of my story to get confused and start assigning incorrect details to my narrative. I innocently typed the word into Wikipedia, and as I am sure you will understand, the response that I got so startled me that I literally flew out of my chair. Glastonbury was the town in my story. Glastonbury was flooded. Glastonbury has a mystically significant hill. Glastonbury was the site of major Christian importance. Most importantly, Glastonbury was magical. I told this story at burning man, and Adam Apollo told me that I had received a direct transmission from the stars. Although I wasn't quite sure how to reconcile what that meant, I believed him. My experience with Glastonbury was revolutionary, but nonetheless I had rather forgotten it by the time I started reading 2012 last July. I feel so grateful to have been provided with as much information about Glastonbury as you gave. Its presence in 2012 made me feel intimately connected to the book, and additionally, to you.

Daniel, I would be very interested to hear your thoughts about anything. I greatly admire that you accepted the responsibility of writing this book. I know from talking to Corinne that it has a truly universal effect, and that it is one of the very few things on this planet that is truly real. I also greatly applaud you for refusing to take credit for what you have rightly identified as ancient and immutable wisdom. Your story is of immense interest to me, and I would be really, incredibly interested in talking to you about the aftermath of writing 2012. How did completing such an epic make you feel? Are you still seeking? For some reason I assume so, and I certainly hope so- nothing is more important than refusing to settle down. Belief is integral, but blind acceptance is deadly- there is always more unfolding. Again, thank you so much for writing 2012- it has really and truly informed my understanding of my own spirituality, of the world, and of other people. It was only because of this book that I was able to be willing to articulate so much of what I know, deep down, to be true. Also, thank you for mentioning the open heart- opening up my chest was an integral part of my experience at Burning Man, and to see even the smallest homage to the importance of having an open heart chakra made me smile. Also, thank you so much for writing about your relationship. I could not have gotten to the section of 2012 about male/female relationships at a more appropriate time: my boyfriend just broke up with me in a very strange and peculiarly devastating way, and the depth and insight with which you probed the many realms of love significantly helped me relax and, paradoxically, forget to think about him. I hope that someday he will read 2012. Although, like your parter, he is a rather hard-headed empiricist, I know that he has a very soft and absorptive side- during the last few months of our relationship, I felt that he began to really accept and absorb the possibility of there being other forms of consciousness that than which we experience on a mundane and daily basis. I am very sad that we're no longer together in light of this, because I felt like he was finally starting to grow. I think I am going to give him my heavily annotated copy of 2012, and hope that he will someday explore it. I include this story about my boyfriend because it was 2012 that really helped me feel like he knew me- although he did not participate a lot in our conversation with Corinne, he finally got to see me be passionate about what I believe in in a way that would only be possible if I was speaking to a fellow believer. Thus, I cannot stress how grateful I am to you for writing 2012- it has truly brought me closer to the world, and made me feel more certain and positive about the necessity and possible possibility of a global community based on love and trust. I am pretty scared about what's to come, but you are right- we are truly blessed to live when we are now.

Good luck, Daniel. I hope that things in your life are going well, and that you are still discovering.

P.S. To give you a sense of context for all the stories I just told, I am now 19. I attend Reed College, and my friend Creighton told me that he and some other friends were working on making it possible for you to speak here. Please do! I know you would be met with a wonderful reception, and beyond that, Reed really needs you. It is no longer a spirited place, or if so, the spirit here is very weak- it is pulsing at the strength of a whisper. Reed has great potentiality to be a holy place, and even has a sovereign spirit. I met him via a ouija board, and his name is Mamalaj. He is very disappointed by how apathetic the students of Reed have become because, as you probably know, Reed was once on the forefront of the psychedelic experience. Drugs still run rampant here, but nobody knows how to use them- I am repeatedly disgusted by people's attempts to use LSD and mushrooms as mere party drugs. How can they not acknowledge the intense spiritual knowledge that both of these drugs impart? The experience of taking psychedelics can be described as nothing if not important, and it sickens and worries me to see people abusing them so heavily. Please come to Reed and impart your knowledge! Reveal to everyone the existence and the crucially true reality of their own inner worlds. Use your authority to inspire everyone to be earnest in a way that I cannot.

I hope to speak with you soon. As listed above, my email address is stellaluciajones@gmail.com. I would be absolutely delighted if we could communicate in some way.

Be well, and never stop looking
Stella

P.S. Enclosed below is a copy of The Machine, if you ever feel like reading it. It's not very long, as shortly after the Glastonbury experience I got distracted by a boy and a pretty crippling and long-lasting depression, and now I feel strange going back to it. Regardless, here it is. I'd be curious to know what you think. Also, after reading the section of 2012 about psychology and your rejection with the healing aspect of new ageism (which I HEARTILY agree with- we are none of us sick! just lost and rather forgetful), I recommend that you check out the work of Neil Goldsmith. I heard him speak at Burning Man 2K8 and I think you would love him. He's a (covertly) psychoactive psychologist who specializes in guiding and experiencing therapeutically oriented mushroom trips. In a nutshell, it is his theory that everyone is perfect, but feels flawed and disoriented because their personae were created by the brain of a two-year-old. He's a very interesting guy, and also very New York. I absolutely love New York, and am so glad to be from there. It really feels like it is going to be were everything culminates, and I think the media is aware of that as well. New York is THE CITY, and thus the manifestation of everything manmade, external, and false, but at the same time I feel like it is also the realest place on earth. Once New York loves itself, perhaps the rest of the world will begin to take notice. I know that New York can be absolutely soul-crushing, but I applaud you for not leaving. I currently live in Portland, and although it is quite comfortable, something feels wrong. It feels like a toy city, a lush, cushy playground for those who can afford to be kind. It is idyllic certainly, but somehow it seems unimportant- it is already understood that those in possession of moderate luxury have the mind and energy to be considerate. What we need to focus on is making it such that the poor can also be open and empathetic. When I was sitting at the bus stop today after finishing your book I was thinking about this, and realized that sadly the only way that such a thing would be possible would be if poverty was eliminated, something that seems increasingly unlikely. Either that or we must all lose our socioeconomic wealth, and thus become equalized. I only hope that someday everyone will understand the value of love. It seems that such a realization should be obvious, but I suppose that right now too much of the world is blinded by pain to see what is right under their noses, and within their hearts.

Have a good night, and have a safe trip, wherever you may be going. With affection, here is The Machine:

10/23 The Machine

It's either the end of the world or the beginning of a new one. It's impossible that anything could continue to thrive in the present environment. Things are so bleak; grey, worn, blighted, dead, just DEAD. Either this is it, or, as before, this end is breeding a new beginning, a dormant earth waiting in the subconsciousness of the certain individuals on this present earth meant to inhabit it. It could be good, I suppose, or it could be just as foul and evil. Perhaps it will just be honest. Perhaps.
This could just be the end. The final era, last wriggling advance, this human virus's termination,
I see no light, no way out.

Humanity follows a pattern, but what happens when the cogs become conscious of the machine, and choose to break it? This is what's happening, the trend, but some are truly renegades while others, sophists, wish to be, emulating better the the creators themselves -- ultimately their own doom is brought out in such a way; they crack under the pressure of consciousness, the huge weight of reality at its purest. But they've already come, they've already left the machine to be links in a chain and they falter. Chaos ensues once more. Not even once more -- it occurs for the first time since the great breakdown, the stalling of the Machine. Chaos comes and with it comes the rejection of the links. Slowly parts reassemble crawling like the brooms shattered by the sorcerer's apprentice and the machine is there once more. Hopefully it's weaker. It is still churning out clouds of thick, black smoke.
Someday the chain will form and it will be cast out, cast out, a lifeline for a new life, but how long, how long will the impulse to remain conscious last after so many failures. It seems fated, doomed. The machine conquers all.

-------------------

There is a machine on a cold black hill. The sky is grey, polluted and darkened like milk mixed with ashes. The machine spews. Blackness onto whiteness, more blackness. The land is dead and cold. Everything had been at once consumed and blocked out -- it reeked not only of suffocation but of sheer barren desolation. It stank like an open wound, and the machine sat high and brooding, The clouds settled like ravens. It gloated. There was nothing here to challenge the authority of the machine and it ruled like a saviour. Tyrannous lies. It looms.
The town surrounding the machine is dead. In certain places, small fingers stick like surrenders out of the ash. Others, corners, house jumbles of molten amorph. All meaning is lost in the town. It has no name because nobody visits it. Nobody has lived here for thousands of years. Only one sign remains, hanging crooked: ∅ . There is no god here, there is nothing here but darkness. The sign of Cain is ignored in this town, the town where nothing happens because there is nothing left to happen. This town has seen every horror, every atrocity imaginable to man, in dreams and in the light. It is a mass grave. It is an oven. It is an exploded star. The machine sits king over this town. It is the only thing it cannot consume. This town, the oldest in the world, has suffered. It is not fated. The town cannot be destroyed because even to the three Terrors that is unjust. And so it sits and bakes in the fumes. It rots alone, in the shadow of the machine.

-------------------

This town was Eden or perhaps the town founded by Adam and Eve, yes. . . . . . . . It is that town. It looks suburban now: It lasted, lasted though everything; dead as it is, it is still here. It is from this town that hope will spring, if it chooses to. It will not be a human protagonist -- it will be some kind of god, some kind of demigod, an Achilles. YES; all was crushed but the immortal spot, tattooed onto the bottom of the left foot, the mark of Cain. And this waits. . . . . From this, this ___________ springs the New. It is androgynous, broken, with name. It is Samael. And it rises, slow and shaky like the bugs out of ashes in Silent Hill, moves like the legion of nurses, but it moves, and it is with name. It is legion. It is strong. Bearing the force of a million million generations, it is everyone who has died, and out of the broken-ness it assembles its selves. The all bear the mark of Cain and in a slow liquid motion like air condensing, they come to it. EVERY SOUL that has ever borne the mark makes its way, and they grow, tower in a blaze of grey light like cobwebs building. The last of the light is sucked into the eyes. They are black. Slate-grey, the creature turns and slowly, limply, lame, it makes its way up the cold, black hill. SonDaughter of Cain, so it rises from the ashes.

**It looks like Noodle with Dream's hair, black bushbaby eyes, moldy teeth (Noodle's mouth), long lanky limbs, skin the color of slate, tattered rags that were once white, long ago. It crawls like an animal.

The Mark of Cain Culties:

The mark of Cain is the symbol that God placed on Cain's forehead dictating to all that Cain was never to be killed after the murder of his brother, Abel. The first fratricide. However, this immortality was far from being a Boon -- rather, it was an eternal curse for Cain. It forced him to forever be a wanderer, rejected by his family, by the Light, by both Lights. The angel Lucifer Morningstar was not allowed to have him either. And so it went for eons, hundreds of thousands of millennia gathering like dust, and still Cain wandered. It was said that Cain never died, to this day. He joined the legions of the immortal stories in the land of Nod, stories that would never escape the consciousness of humanity, stories that would spawn dreams and new stories, circling onward like the very mark itself. Because that WAS that mark: a circle on the forehead of Cain, the eye of God and the reminder that his fate, his life would never end just as a circle has no end. The only difference between Cain and his mark's significance was that Cain had a genesis, long ago. Cain had a mother. But his memories of her were lost to the sands of time and eventually it really did seem as though Cain was endless. He'd traversed the world 100 times over, the mark forever leading him in a circle, lost in his own footsteps. One time he even thought he ran into himself. Because that is all that remembering really is -- déja vu.
Such was the plight of Cain.............

Around the time of the third world war, it seemed like Cain might have been forgotten. The New Testament had been dead for a century, and those who even spoke of the New Testament, of Genesis, would be severely punished. Science was the new ruler of common consciousness, replacing religion entirely. There was too much freedom within religion, too much chaos and room to bend rules. Those at the factory preferred the rigidity, the simple beauty and symmetry of scientific rules and principles. They were more economical, and if the factory heads liked them than that was what must eventually be so. And so, one by one, bibles were laid away, left out of hotelroom nightstands across the world, eradicated over a slow process of days. It was not spoken of, but they went to the furnaces. For once, it was the machines who fed, sucking up the culture that had so depended on them, turning the small white pages like delicate feathers plucked from chicken corpses into a fine garnish for the thick black smoke that billowed forth from the Factory.
But they did not stop at the Bible. Q'urans were snatched from even the most important mosques, the K'aaba. It was closed. Instead the Saudi Mall towered bright and shining towards what was once the holiest of all skies. And deep inside that black box, construction was already beginning, iron cogs and copper wires arriving from all over the world in secret caravans driven by men who didn't know who they were anymore.
Torah scrolls were found empty across the western world.
Hare Krishnas found themselves at a loss for words.
Zen monks began to wonder what was on television that night.
Slowly, a chant of binary replaced the witch-doctor's secret tongue.
All over the world religion was dying and with it stories died as well.

But in one town the secret still remained, buried in the collective consciousness of the residents of that town, the one town that, when the world was cold and gray, never got completely destroyed. It made sense -- this was the birthplace of Cain. It held the memories of his childhood, from before his banishment, from before he left and spread himself all across the world, before Man was truly a reality. The residents of this town found themselves strangely drawn into corners where they would hunch in groups of six, talking and laughing, always in circular form. Possessed by the sight of an empty well, they'd sit by and trace the edges of the pipe with their fingers, marveling at the roundness of its contours, such perfect Roundness. The Men abandoned their work planting genetically modified seeds to stare at what was left of the sun for hours on end. Women braided and pinned their hair into giant circles across their heads, and slowly every person in the town ringed their nipples and bellybuttons, painted stark black circles onto their hands and feet. The children played obsessive games of ring around the rosy, spinning until they vomited, then drawing strange things in the mess. Round, perfect things.

The scientists thought they were mourning the loss of CD culture, some secret human greed for that perfect round rainbowness dredged up by a careless professor of technology one night as he passed through the town; maybe he was telling stories of caution, stories of when the machines were not yet dominant. Telling them how awful it must have been.

This was not the case.

In secret night the town would gather, families gathered in the sewage pipe on the outskirts of town. They met far from the control station, this one lonely glowing box in the center of the dark town. They were "energy conscious" -- all surplus power must go to the machine.

The pipe rose out of the ground, gateway to the newest development, the newest freedom for the townspeople. It had been found one day when ______ was carting waste to be dumped back into the processing unit of the Machine, a protoype that they were developing, trying to get it to run on nothing, trying in vain to get it to run on its own feces. So far it had not been successful -- the machine rejected it, belching sparks of glowing nuclear waste. It's CPU was too powerful: the atoms were getting split. This phosphorescent grime lay draped around the pipe, and one pool had been fortunate to land, a giant neon teardrop, just inside the mouth of the metal cave. It provided light by which readings could be held.

The people in the town were not stupid. The watched the machine grow day by day, and slowly, although they had never seen another man die, began to question their own mortality. The understood nothingness, and that seemed to be what the machine generated. Nothing but clouds of thick, black smoke. They read here because they knew that what they were doing was dangerous. They knew that they had contraband. And yet, those beautiful words! Letters had lost meaning almost entirely: the only place they still occurred was in manual instructions for operating the great cranes that constantly patrolled the town, searching for scrap, for anything that could feed the machine. Sniffing out anything. Anyone.

O but this page they had.

Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” “I don’t know,” he replied. “Am I my brother’s guardian?" Then He said, “What have you done? Your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground! So now you are cursed with alienation from the ground that opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood you have shed. If you work the land, it will never again give you its yield. You will be a restless wanderer on the earth.” But Cain answered the Lord, “My punishment is too great to bear! Since You are banishing me today from the soil, and I must hide myself from Your presence and become a restless wanderer on the earth, whoever finds me will kill me.” Then the Lord replied to him, “In that case, whoever kills Cain will suffer vengeance seven times over.” And He placed a mark on Cain so that whoever found him would not kill him. Then Cain went out from the Lord’s presence and lived in the land of Nod, east of Eden

the back of the paper bore what was to be, in but a few years, their most powerful mark
O
It made everything make sense. These circles they had, the shapes that they loved, they would protect them. It explained to much; Why it felt so wrong to live fenced in the town like animals. Why it seemed like the roundness was the only thing keeping them safe anymore. Why every family only had one child. This wonderful mark, this brand that they adorned themselves with, it brought them closer together, it brought them inner calm, it brought them immortality and an escape from the confines of the town.

And, thousands of years after the death of Christ in a broken town ravaged by pollution and disease brought on by man, o holy hopeless man, a new Christian sect was born.

-------------------------------

The first thing that everybody noticed was the rain. It was normal in Glastonbury for there to be an often uncomfortable volume of rain, but this year was the worst that the town had endured farther back than anyone could remember. Records stretched back farther than most cared to look -- being a farming town, and out of the way of the Norman trajectory things went unharmed, untouched even. Records began well before the Middle Ages. It was a town of moor and marsh, and although its few thousand citizens moaned each spring when the rains came, they secretly rejoiced as well, for all was as it should be. This spring was far worse. Sheep were sucked under by the fresh peat bog, spongy and soggy, hogging the rain residue from the fields. The local legends, the old men of the town who seemed to have witnessed every at of history itself posited that the last time this much rain had been had in Glastonbury was when Joseph forded the flooded Somerset Levels with the Christ child where together they disembarked on Glastonbury Tor. High and broad, the hill provided ample defense from the most intrusive of invaders. It was here that Joseph first bloomed the Holy Thorn, where Saint Michael's was built, here was the one safe place of refuge in the town from both storms and soldiers. To the older citizens of Glastonbury, the ones who knew -- it seemed that soon the time to retreat to the Tor would come. The rain was not stopping.

gardening

2009-11-02T22:17:00.000-08:00

Let go, let go! Let
go each petal tightly curled around your hammering
heart. Unfold them
tenderly, softly pry at their
tearfully moistened cocoon
with your clumsy, eager fingers.

Dirty your hands in the soil of your open chest
as you gently harvest the fruits of eighteen years
of watching and waiting
fearful, hoping that someday this small thing inside you
would nod up from the till.

Let go, let go, quieter now but still
diligent- do not forget what those early moments felt like.
Remember what that first petal looked like in your hand,
softly translucent and wrinkled,
remember how delicate it was to hold.

together

2009-11-02T22:11:00.001-08:00

I'm sitting in my room with the national playing and
feeling good for once. Maybe
I'm finally figuring out how to be around people
and not arm myself too heavily, to shed
my meshy links at the door
and dance happily
among the friendly spirits,
the wavering egos who desire happiness and
that's it.

I'm learning that wanting to be happy isn't such a bad thing
and that closeness is a truer form of knowledge than anything that can be written.

While I sit here alone I feel surrounded by a pulsing
yellow-radiant sphere, like the small gleams
that the sun makes on the hills over Portland. At night
when I look at the moon it tells me
that I am no longer alone
and that I never deserved to be.

hamster

2009-09-20T22:56:00.001-07:00

My heart is racingpumping madly.
I am a small thing, true
but this is beyond the norm
for my mammalian frame.

Rather, I feel like I've been quietly fed
into a new pushbutton universe, where
everything whirrs and clickhums
mechanically. I feel my clumsy flesh straining
to replicate the metal ballet, feel
its grossness, its lumpy and imperfect solidarity,
and know that if i tried once more to
compete with the machines I would be reduced
to a sliver, a ghost, a spark
to be consumed quickly in the circuits, by the need
intense and white
for human power.

So instead I become what my heart says I am
I am the hamster on the wheel,
I am the small warm thing trapped
and helpless by the powers that be
running swiftly
never knowing where I'm going
realizing slowly that it doesn't matter

and nursing small memories, childlike
of how it felt to run on grass.

knowing

2009-09-20T22:35:00.001-07:00

There was a time I used to know
things in my inward heart, things
that only those you read know.

I don't know how I figured them out
but I had a few good years in which the world
revealed itself to me, cracked open like a clamshell.

I knew what gods know and
it all made sense, somehow.
I guess I was alone back then, so things were
simple; I was a quiet, lonely country.

When I started to know people better,
and love, I stopped understanding many things
or at least, I forgot thinking about them so much.

An intrepid messenger in me needed
to know about the warm craftings of others, and although
much of me revolted, scared
of how our serenity might be troubled,
he was determined and brave, so eventually
I readied my ships and we set out.

I live on a massive, shifting continent now. No longer
is my home a small crystalline bubble
suspended in bright space. There is color here and
such life! But still, often

I want to return to that place of knowing
that I still reach sometimes, only at the most
heady moments of conversation with a new
friend, one whose eyes show me they knew things too,
once, and perhaps still might.

O, once
I lived in a place unlike any; it was populated
by only myself
and my great thoughts.

nakedness

2009-09-20T22:21:00.000-07:00

Something is wrong with me, a
coldness like the longest stretch of that
last week of winter, the one
before you start to catch sight of hoping
spring, when it seems as though all
your days and nights will end with the same mundane
routine of shedding layers too mindless
to examine what your numb
fingers are fumbling with.

We undress to sleep, we
quietly take off those things that
hide our nakedness from ourselves

I feel like I am forgetting to do that
I feel like every day I am
sleeping clothed, slowly
forgetting what my naked body looks like
in all its honesty.

2009-09-03T17:16:00.000-07:00

doors flung open

and white light

In The Dark Tent

2009-09-03T17:07:00.001-07:00

A dust storm raged and spat
angry mouthful of bitter alkali against
the walls of the swinging tent. Outside
my family worked, hard
trying to break camp
so we could return to the world.

Inside I sat, hunched, gripping
a flashlight in my teeth madly
scribbling what I could recall of the night
my heart burst open. They entreated me
'help!' but I glared beastly at them
baring the few teeth I had left
unobscured by the light.

From then on we worked
silently, all smudged, breathing
frantic particles, they furious while I
madly
came into being.

Night I

2009-09-03T16:53:00.000-07:00

Last August, among crowds
of refugees from our culture, among the hum: their
third eyes nodding in syncopation
to the rhythm of the music drifting from the colored bus
the chant of the wandering monk, o
the guttering midnight wind and
the pulsation of a secret:
one inward heart beating through the machine
and briefly painting flames across the sky
it stained black by infinity,
by the letters describing each possibility
they ran together to form
a bottomless sea, a spiral void, a tube;

it was among this I burst open
alone
and the lotus within me flowered.

In The White Tent

2009-09-03T16:47:00.000-07:00

There was
a moment
in which I stood transfixed
and watched colored lights
shimmer in and out of one another
and explode on the back walls
of my eyelids they watched
those things inside me
empty out
into the white tent
that dim room and disperse
like smoke among the linens;
they shrouded others, and in
the moment before I lost my
balance, I hung there
truly empty
like a star.

written 4.16.09
edited 9.3.09

I Would See

2009-09-03T16:41:00.000-07:00

The fog crawls across the mountain
like an army of white termites
swallowing trees and

I can only see it because I'm
in the air. And if
there was an ant below me
I'd never know it
I'd pass it by unknowingly;
In sleep I pass by whole forests
unconsciously

I am just a particle
asleep in the air

If I were on the ground I'd see the ant
I'd see the air I'd see the trees
but I wouldn't see the fog like an army
instead it would see me like an ant,
and I would become invisible in whiteness
I would be the same, but hidden
and someone in the air would never see me.

written 4.16.09 at Reed College

Physics

2009-09-03T16:39:00.001-07:00

I will conquer that
which oppresses my
coiled heart
I will unfold
the petals of sacred lilies and make
manifest the shining wisdom
I will know; trace
the spiraling patterns the orbitals
and meridians. I will find out
how everything is the same and how
it is all one and how
we all commingle brains
aligned in resonance with the planet core,
deep-thinking of

the movements of space and
the all-time
we secretly inhabit

Portrait

2009-09-03T16:25:00.000-07:00

I sob on the floor for
you, your arched ribs
spreading
and the trail hollow
that leads from your marble hips
(I'm kissing it)

2009-06-01T20:24:00.000-07:00

Erowid Experience Vaults: Nitrous Oxide - The Ultimate Lack of Truth - 31722

such a benign thing produces so
much; I was right about our brainmaps
our explosions under eyelids
being infinite. Three

atoms unlock a hidden world.

2009-05-17T19:49:00.000-07:00

today i did nothing
after felix went home i talked to no one

my body makes strange sounds
and my heart feels twisted

chronicling

2009-05-14T20:22:00.000-07:00

in november i revised It Was Like Losing a Favorite Necklace:

Slipping off like the times midwinter
jostled mercury like pearls down
my jacket into the lapel slithering
unnoticed to vanish, for

Fate: it was the
Fates condensed and meddling;
she knows your weak spots,
screams them
aware that I tread the fault lines regardless,
searching for quiet possibility lurking there, fuel
for reparation. And it is known I know better -- I am
not blinded by love nor soldered
tight in obligation to you, to
love -- you're
like a piece of jewelery, like
my very favorite one
but I can still take you off
or lose you
or even change my mind about you sometimes;

you will not always match me
you will get in the way
you will be itchy
and you will make me remember things
that have nothing to do with you
things that are long dead.

I haven't written a real, good poem in months. realistically, probably not since november or december, unless i'm forgetting something. It fucking sucks. Everything I say is trite and oversimplified and I feel anxiety like static interrupting the signal between my brain and that golden spacious feeling that my chest cavity gets when I know I am writing the right words, the right things. it's not like i've been strapped for material lately, either. fuck.

i have no time to sit down and experience myself. i know what i'm doing on a day-to-day basis but i have entirely lost my motivation to keep feeling, or maybe thinking. i miss being passionate about patterns so much, i miss believing in magic i miss childhood i miss thinking i could understand the world and i miss feeling like i could ever be important, ever have the stamina to become an important person. i feel like an infant i feel useless i feel crippled. i feel naked and talentless and pathetic i feel all too normal, too human, too dull. none of the books i read are making it all work out nothing is showing me the way i'm starting to think there is no way i know there's no way out of here out of me out of this family this life these predilections and insecurities, this body. i watch television, i love sex and sleeping and emotions i love believing that everyone is the same but o really i love thinking that i am purer i try harder i could empathize with an asteroid i am connectivity incarnate i am in touch with the universe i am singing the song of the black hole at the center of the galaxy. i still believe in magic i still believe in god i still believe in animus and ritual and a linkage a force a connectivity a network of mind of love as the basis of life in shamanism and totemic cultures in women and the holiness of babies and prayer. i believe in the beauty of truth i love the oneness of all i love orbitals and the specific conditions for life the wonderful lattices and patterns created by our atmosphere, our core, our trees our vast vast oceans deserts i believe in the golden ratio i believe in the sublime. i want a family. i am astounded that anyone loves me. i often forget that i love anyone else. i am shocked that there is a human condition shocked that i am tapping into what every book is about what every 'great man' thinks about what every religion tries to answer and solve what everyone knows is true and hates and loves and can never escape from. i wonder how many people are so acutely aware of the cartesian dualities that we have all been trained to subscribe to i wonder if it's ever going to be truly possible to disseminate the distinctions of the world to live in a sludge in a grey and sparkling mosaic. i love destiny. i believe in the fifth dimension, i believe in all dimensions as somehow real, somewhere outside our brains i beleive that all of the forces and picture that make up halluciantions are concrete i believe that magic exists i cannot accept that i am just an animal just a sack of biological machinery i love my animalness but i need there to be more, i need an external force i need a green-tinged soft-focus shimmering entity to envelop my entire consciousness to become my being to become everyone and to do what then? i wish i could say that i wouldn't go crazy in the woods i wish i wish i was able to be at peace within myself i wish o i wish that i didn't need variation that i didn't have a destructive urge that i didn't have a computer that i wasn't slowly succumbing to this world, this world of pleasures and distractions and technologies and convenience. i trust none of it. i trust no man but i must believe that somewhere, out there, is a perfect person and i don't care who they are i just need to know that it is possible that somebody has successfully blended all the lines crossed all divisions so i can do what they do and enjoy enjoy enjoy my life for one fucking second to live free of anxiety of will of the need to be known. tolstoy says that will is an illusion because we are all of us directed by the hand of god the and of god that is really just the algorhythmic pattern of the universe of time of history just like the mayans said just like all religions say all wisdom because that makes it feel better that makes all the pain go away then life is safe. but what if it's bullshit. everything i know i hear from an unreliable source everything is opinion based everything is subjective and we humans are so damn inventive that there is no way of knowing the truth there is no truth. all there is is me and everything else and a gigantic fucking web of causality and a nebulous jelly (that doesn't even make any sense forget it) an ether that carries our impressions of one another to and fro our impulses our moods so i can almost read his mind, any mind, so i know all situations yes can typify everything and yet

Portrait 3.29.09

2009-03-29T15:58:00.000-07:00

I remember reading Alex
Grey to you in bed, showing
you the way he traced perfect forms
examining their nude faces
and thighs, conscious
that we ourselves were naked.

I remember the yellowness of the light
as it traced the graceful dip
of your equine nose.

Untitled

2009-03-29T15:37:00.000-07:00

for the first time I wrote a poem
that is a secret

i'm not a ladies man, i'm a landmine

2009-02-24T16:19:00.000-08:00

title by Why?

Frustration comes in waves, bursting out behind an
Underdone conclusion as I watch you, resent you for
Creating this rift between us - usually so tender, why is it when I need
Kindness that you dismiss me the hardest.

geometry

2009-01-23T00:50:00.000-08:00

legs swinging from
the top of the low wall
we make diamonds in the pavement
and i watch the sky
for clouds that look like mountains
and feel that there is no wind-
our movements hang
like silt underwater and
the sun in its stillness
casts golden motes
on the tips of our brown feet.

it is because you are a safe place
that i tell you about
the tiny things i see.

lightning

2009-01-23T00:34:00.000-08:00

alone in my room at night
i imagine you
as storms pelt my windows
as lighting threatens the church tower
i imagine you out
on your roof, glorying
in rain magic
curling through the dark ends
of your wet hair, legs
spread wide in
a defiant stance

with lightning cracking purple
around you

alone in my room at night
i imagine welcoming you
with a blanket, safe
from the harsh winds.

lagrimas

2009-01-23T00:04:00.000-08:00

only for you; tiny
raindrops glisten poised
on my eyelashes, they are
myself, my insides
coming out, overcoming reason
a dizzying wellspring burst suddenly
conjured from my heart
by that longing to combine
which is finally made
manifest as they trickle into
your pores and i sigh with
relief: we are together
you are in my arms.

awe

2009-01-22T23:53:00.000-08:00

we hide in museums
softly giggling
in awe of sperm wales
in awe of amethysts, black holes
synthetic coral reefs the largest
oldest tree we look
at the painted moon,
the greatest detail in that hollow
place, we sit quietly underground
in awe of machines, in awe
of the smoky trails wandering
from our mouths,
reflected by the lake
we are in awe of each other.

ursa minor

2009-01-22T23:17:00.000-08:00

the smallest nose
nuzzles me gently: ursa
minor, littlest bear you are
written in the stars you are
my magnetic north you are
the only place i can stand to be
in all my polar wanderings
all the loveless nights and
carelessnesses
bigger bears- you are the only one
who can melt my lonely
little heart, you are the only one
with your small warm nose
and wise old eyes, who knows
all the secrets of the stars
the wind and the trees.

Repulsion

2009-01-19T20:04:00.000-08:00

heat between our shimmering backs
created by the angry negation of our polarities two
magnets drawn far apart
cometlike
to different orbitals
a mutual jettison of space waste accelerating
too fast for entropy or loneliness to catch
up with us we are screaming with delight
luxuriating in the speed of our separation
we are riding the frequencies of our screams
we have entirely forgotten one another
we have been annihilated by the blissful
shockwaves that repulsion creates
morphed by the excitement, we are smeared
and neutralized we hang starlike for an instantaneous six months
crystalline and beautiful we wonder
and slowly, hanging
we regain harmony and quietly our polarities tire
of the pretense that interference creates to remember
that once it was separateness that drew us together and it was not ourselves
nor the orbits we complacently trace but the false idolatry that made us think
we were the same

repulsive creature from whom we both fled.

frank o'hara

2008-11-26T14:13:00.000-08:00

AVENUE A

We hardly ever see the moon any more
so no wonder
it's so beautiful when we look up suddenly
and there it is gliding broken-faced over the bridges
brilliantly coursing, soft, and a cool wind fans
your hair over your forehead and your memories
of Red Grooms' locomotive landscape
I want some bourbon/you want some oranges/I love the leather
jacket Norman gave me
and the corduroy coat David
gave you, it is more mysterious than spring, the El Greco
heavens breaking open and then reassembling like lions
in a vast tragic veldt
that is far from our small selves and our temporally united
passions in the cathedral of Januaries

everything is too comprehensible
these are my delicate and caressing poems
I suppose there will be more of those others to come, as in the past
so many!
but for now the moon is revealing itself like a pearl
to my equally naked heart

News

2008-11-18T18:38:00.000-08:00

So i'm finally making my poems real-world public;
Stages just got published in
my high-school literary
magazine. It isn't much but I'm glad
that I'll finally be able to say
I've been in print.

excerpt

2008-11-16T15:47:00.001-08:00

"I am interested in two very significant numbers with infinite decimal places that contain no overarching patterns: phi and pi. The two contradict one another; pi makes the statement that randomness leads to circularity, whereas phi's digital randomness produces an infinite inward spiral that comes close to, but never reaches, a point of singularity. When used as metaphors for the progression of humanity, the two produce two very different paradigms; pi states that our random actions will inevitably lead back to the same beginning, whereas phi states that random activity, although still circular in nature, has the propensity to progress dramatically insofar as the amount of energy that is required in order to come full circle. What is interesting about the arguments made by pi and phi is that although a deterministic framework would make both impossible, each outlines a shaky but possibly determinable pattern."

tangential excerpt from SLC application

all

2008-11-13T20:59:00.000-08:00

The patterning of my molars is identical to a small area of the Himalayas.

2008-11-09T23:23:00.000-08:00

It's almost 2:30
I've been up
for 16 hours,
not very much really.

I wish I had privacy
I've shown everyone
myself

I sit here feeling quiet and
I describe myself as shy and with
some personal issues mostly
regarding trust, I'm indifferent
sad and

the process is like tiny drops
of water emerging millimeter by millimeter
slow-creeping crepuscular rays from between
the folds of my brain;
that's everything then that transmits
electricity arcing quietly through,
yes

a quiet hum
and a pulsation
like the center of the earth
a black hole, the pulse
of a dying honey bee that
is all of us

and my brain is
a phosphorescent halo also something
nobody understands yet, but
I think everyone holds a map of the universe

somewhere inside, like explosions
under eyelids.

2008-11-02T19:20:00.001-08:00

So today was a really weird day. I woke up in philly really disoriented and angry because Gabby's cat Bruce jumped all over me and the sun was in my eyes. The rest of the day was pretty unremarkable aside from the fact that we went to ben's house. I saw Jacen, which was nice. I like him. We hung out there for a while and I watched Gabby and Darian make tape boxes for the Filled With Guilt and Diamonds EP while eating good pumpkin products made by their subletter, Jessie. I had to go at 5, and after a pretty quick bus ride I was home.. for a minute. As soon as I could I was at Felix's, and we were really happy to see each other. I didn't think I was going to be allowed in, but we went upstairs and hung out for a while. I told him about my time in philly and how it made me feel strange. An hour went by much too quickly and it was time for me to go. We both had a lot of homework, and it was almost 10. Then, as I was putting on my shoes, his dad came upstairs and started yelling at us both about how irresponsible Felix is. It was horrible, and I still feel pretty weird even though that was almost an hour ago. It made me realize that I haven't been yelled at by and adult in almost two years.

After sitting on my bed and fuming for a while I got up and went on the computer. I ended up on this blog called kittens and existentialism that's run by this boy I half-know named Gregg. He hasn't updated it in a while; from what I can tell he mostly writes about animation and social anxiety. It made me wonder a lot about two things: why some people are so scared, and what the point of art is. Well, I guess I should say that it made me volver a pensar en estos, because it certainly wasn't something new. It's jsut rare to find actual evidence of people being as nervous as I find myself being sometimes, or that I think some of the people I know are when they're acting strange. The closest one generally comes to are depictions of characters like Franny, and god knows that she could be completely overblown. The problem with fiction in general is that although it's all true in the sense that it came from a human mind, it's also fantastic, and thus impossible to relate to on a practical level. Gregg's entry on April 22nd really affected me; it reinforced once over how real shyness is, and also how intuitive the withdrawn are. I've had this theory forever (and its Fransiscan-ness has made some of the more callous people I know cringe) that nobody is actually very bad; just hurt, or scared.

Gregg's not the greatest example because he never seemed malcontent to me in any way, but to actually be able to see what he was probably thinking when he was being quiet around me and Gabby was still revelatory. I can't even ask why he or anyone else does that, because I do it as well, and I still can't say for certain. Psychiatrically it makes sense -- an analyst would probably say that our social anxieties come from a combination of inherent personality (i.e. not being programmed to process other people very well) and past traumatization. I understand not being entirely socially oriented totally; some people, including myself, honestly prefer thinking about other kinds of patterns, like those in math or science. That's fine, but it shouldn't make us fear others. It is a well-deminstrated fact that humans fear what they do not understand, but that's just the thing: everyone is human, and as I've noticed so far, we're pretty much all the same on the levels of basic communication and functionality. So excluding the fear of the unknown, there is the platform of a past problem that would lead to difficulty socializing as a (relative) adult. This makes but half-sense to me: although I'm a big fan of the super ego/ego/id construct, it seems absurd that people could actually be ruled by sublimated fears and desires that they had at a time when they were too young to effectively rationalize events... or perhaps they were. One of the curses of humanity is definitely the fact that we do not have an infinite capacity for memory. I appreciate the fact that often feelings are so overwhelming that they can outlast an event by great a distance, and make all hitherto judgement of it very difficult, but to be instinctively upset by situations that are similar to events that we cannot remember at all... I can't tell if my reaction to that hypothesis is one of genuine disbelief, or just discomfort; such a truth would be a very scary thing.

I don't really know where I'm going with this, but that's how I've been feeling lately in general. I'm in the process of applying to college, and I really don't know where I want to go or what I want to do, so the fact that it requires so much energy throws me into-near constant reflection as to why I bother. Luckily I know the answer to this question, and that's why its still a pretty petty problem. But the bigger things, like where I'm going to be in five years, what I think I ought to be 'in the end', as it were, or if anyone ever really grows up... I honestly can't tell. I see people around me as old as 25 still basically behaving like children, and the ones who can be categorized as 'adults' only seem to be that way because they bear too many responsabilities and are sapped of the time and energy to be frivolous. Additionally confusing is that fact that I have no idea what I want to believe about this paradox; on the one hand I feel as though it is imperative to my future happiness to never have to stop being a child, but on the other I worry deeply about my future security and autonomy if I don't stop. And of course these concerns extend to the people that I love, which makes it all even more bizarre and upsetting.

I'm turning 18 in three weeks and find myself worrying about understanding the state of 'the world' more and more. It's either going to ruin me or save me. I keep doing this thing where I trap myself in a loop of pessimism and cynicism when I think about history, and I have to sort of approach myself from a third perspective and calm myself down before it goes away. Although doing this calms be down very much it also makes me worry that I'm crazy- it feels really abnormal when it happens. More worriesome is when I start assuming that I can psychoanalyze myself to a T, and then get struck with the possibility that maybe I'm just subconsciously picking what I want to be true about myself and then convincing myself that that's the truth. My life has too many reflexives in it for me to possibly be a normal person. Right now we're reading The Souls of Black Folk in seminar by W.E.B. DuBois and in it he talks a lot about a dissociative feeling of double-concsciousness; this is nowhere near the first time I've encountered the feeling either within myself or within literature, but he puts the war that society creates within the self into words more completely than I've ever encountered.

Maybe I'll return to write about the other half of tonight's thoughts. For some reason I half-hope no one reads this. Although the exposure of weakness within oneself is incredibly cathartic when received properly, throwing it out into the void and an articulated form (rather than in shadowy, instinctive poetry) can be kind of terrifying.

So many things are interesting. I could go on doing this forever. Every comment sparks a new thought about something just as important, to the extent that I'm speechless sometimes. Goodnight.

Botanical Gardens

2008-10-22T16:49:00.000-07:00

A weeping birch:
branches respond to gravity almost
like lovers,
Small leaves like fingertips
caress roughdirt skin
and form a dome
like the kind lovers make
in sheets
in solitude.
As I sit in the heart
of this, a small child almost enters --
he is afraid of what he does not understand.

The sun sets
the tree grows cold
I am reliving
fucking.
This tree reminds me of things I've only felt
a few times.

Soon I will go to the rose garden
and think about how I feel now.

written 10.11.08

Four Years

2008-10-21T20:14:00.000-07:00

It's been four years of this
four years of waiting
counting drops of spilt coffee in cafés
feeling my cheeks flush when I realize you're not coming
and quickly hiding the embarrassment
behind the neck of a sweater.
I made the excuses
you probably won't bother to
for you, I understood.

Four years turning into sediment

Two years of wishing I was kissing you.

I don't think it was wasted time, and I try to believe it's not
becoming wasted time
You don't believe in wasted time, as you go from state to state
as you quietly wriggle out of the warm
night grips of boys
but where's our time going now?
Honestly,

Days

2008-10-08T16:18:00.001-07:00

I do official work for the only ones that matter;
they're up there somewhere
dunno where regardless and

I NEVER STRAY
but that's self-employment for you.

Meanwhile

You're somewhere, running scared
from something, I don't think
you know what it is --
if you do
it's unutterable

We're all too serious for our own good
serious in the wrong way, obsessing
over archaic structures and the past, our past lives our lives are passing stop WAIT!

I think that Kant could tell me what to do:
he can't. Nobody
always gets what they want, NOBODY
ever knows what's coming next or what will follow in 100 years
or even what came before them even if
we read read read
compulsively eat
up text, study, wonder, FANTASIZE THEORETICALLY WE WILL NEVER KNOW THE KEY TO OUR OWN HAPPINESS BECAUSE ONCE WE ANSWER THAT QUESTION THEN WE MIGHT AS WELL BE DEAD. THAT IS THE END! ULTIMATE HAPPINESS!
IT CAN NEVER BE FOUND ON THIS EARTH
(only for a moment, maybe?)
(please)
(just let me taste it)

- - -

People always want things
but never what they actually need

can we predict our own need?
or is it like everything
else.

2008-10-01T17:14:00.000-07:00

five letters become
the universe; today you
are my only thoughts.

2008-09-27T12:28:00.001-07:00

i sit here
i am scared

you treat me well

go
don't go

Sonar Dream Poem

2008-09-16T20:43:00.000-07:00

run run!

run we run
outside

to sit clustered but
we are not afraid not even when ushered

into that dark tube darkness lit by phosphorescing
wiggly glowing lampy beams

they are alive!
creatures here

we are submarines
instead of subterraneans
so there is no objection when
slowly things
begin to shift perception until there is

a shady lane and
un fille en biciclete
the familiar half-face
of childhood friendship i walk

through columns of prestige
old oaks old oak
beams
on my floor she is sitting patient

eyes do not work
i try to cut her hair
but i can't.

written 5.4.08
don't know why i never put it up

Evening

2008-09-10T16:01:00.001-07:00

I feel like there are
coming off of my organs
hundreds of tiny strings
dangling and swaying in the cavity of my torso
like the ribbons
of a shinto shrine.

But my ribbons,
they have
been disarranged
and tangled by the nimble
filthy fingers of the thousands of snow monkeys
that are living, currently,
on the shelf of my diaphragm

chattering
they are screaming
and jumping
making me unbearable and nervous.

Obviously, we do not coexist peacefully
they will only go when you return
to me
to scare them with the face you make

The one that is better than kabuki.

2008-09-06T13:23:00.000-07:00

My friend Duncan Powell on love: "it's like a barbed wire chain covered in flowers around your eyes singing"

Visions

2008-09-04T19:13:00.000-07:00

There was just a lot of white stuff. No vision, just whiteness. I don't really remember anything except a booming voice. It was like being born. Or maybe dying. I don't know really, it's not like I'd be able to remember either of them. But the voice: it was getting hard to ignore.

"'God' is just what is true: physics, numbers, time. Wavelengths and vibrations. Resonance. We have forgotten our prophets -- we rename them philosophers in order to strip away the old religious connotations that would otherwise continue an order of consciousness that is currently becoming ineffective. It is the job of the philosopher, the prophet, to translate the truth of the universe, these patterns, into a code that can be understood by the maximum populous. The time has come to re-write the code: because the- rather, we inhabitants of the modern West are no longer competently literate in the old code, the ancient, mystical, 'religious' symbols have lost their integrity within society. Presently they will lose their meaning. Unfortunately, with the understanding of the universe provided by such knowledge will go any semblance of contact between individuals and their internal vibrations (instinct and essence). If such a thing were to happen a very large cosmic shift would be inevitable. I doubt it would be very much in our favor."

"But!" I felt myself crying. I don't know why I was doing it, I didn't want to. I hadn't been listening very much to what he was saying. But there my mouth went again: "But fortunately humans aren't... aren't incompetent! We're biologically destined, we've been crafted by time to succeed!"

Slowly, a man walked out of the void. Or maybe he materialized a little bit first, in a stationary position, and then walked. He looked kinda like John Malkovich and from then on I couldn't think of him as anyone else. He was impeccably dressed in a black turtleneck and slacks. His shoes and bald head gleamed, and he laid a hand on my left shoulder. I thought this was a kind gesture, attempting to calm me in such a confusing environment. His aura would have been purple if he'd had one, but don't ask me how I know that. I guess I just associate that color with nice things, like my mother. Lilacs were always her favorite flower.

In the midst of this kinda reverie I was struck with the curious sensation that I ought to listen to him, so I did, and then he opened his mouth and started speaking.

"Against alien environments- we can succeed against alien beings. But no, no, not E.T. -- I felt you thinking that. No. Just against the outer, separate things that the brain is capable of conceptualizing, replicating, thus destroying. But man can never truly conceptualize himself until he has become selfless. Ego gets in the way. We keep who we are on the most real level a mystery so as not to be thrown into despair by what we are- do you see the problem? And even if we were, deep down, resplendent, have you yet met a man who can see his own face, who can truly get outside himself? You see, everything must have a yang, Ricky."

I knew John was speaking. I could see his mouth moving. But the words seemed to be being rerouted within the atmosphere- I had a horrifyingly distinct sense that he was both behind and in front of me at the same time. There was a slight metallic buzzing all around. This couldn't be real, and if it was I didn't want to believe he was telling the truth. He had to have been mistaken, thought I was someone else, addressed some other, inaudible question. The man hadn't known my name, I realized, and breathed a sigh of relief. The whole day, or hour, or five minutes or whatever, had been weird enough that I didn't really notice being addressed as Ricky, but now the name hung over my brain like a cool mist. John Malkovich had to be wrong. He had to be. He didn't even know who I was! I thought to myself that perhaps he was the other voice, that he had just been behind some kinda one-way mirror, and that maybe he just had messianic delusions, and we were really in this white room for a safe, routine reason. Maybe we were a part of a focus group and about to be provided with a new kind of food or an antidepressant or a pair of socks. That had to be it; otherwise, I wanted out.

There was a metallic sound, like a scraping or a slight shock, and I was filled with a feeling of déjà vu concerning being very grateful that the green grid which had previously been superimposed over my vision was finally gone. I was sure that nothing remotely like this this had ever happened before, but neither had anything that was currently entering my eye- and ear-holes. When the remembering feeling subsided, although everything still felt quite strange and I couldn't really see once more, I was filled with an irrevocable sense of pleasure, and slowly I sat down. It was nice to just see some plain white again. Although I like John Malkovich quite a bit and I really respect his work, it always makes me feel kind of nervous to be around famous people, like they're perpetually doing something right and I'm just some guy in the corner of the room who's taking up more space than anyone with his flappy elbows or something, so then I'm not quite anonymous but nobody really likes me either. It's like I feel as though they'd only wanna pay attention to me to complain or because I was close to someone who we all think is great, know what I mean?

A while later my analyst said that this was what's called a psychotic vision, but I remember feeling pretty calm the entire time. I'm not sure how much I trust my analyst most of the time but I'm pretty sure I get more than him, and he's an alright guy, so I can't say I mind the little extra company and attention every couple of weeks. And I feel like I can maintain my dignity when he tells me what to do, because at least he isn't a famous asshole like John Malkovich.