They see faces on fronts of bumper cars. But
the eyes in your shoulder,
the arrow across my chest—where do
these sights lead? Stubborn wonder.
The trouble: a head.
Pre-construction, we can’t imagine
putting together
whatever contents in this box, our minds place
the prize’s nails in such strange places.
Still, long as they can be. We’ll take our night
strawed. Yes, I kept my promise. I made sure
the lamp grew eyes, saw all.
The trouble with anything: strange noises
offstage. A crash, and your muffled directions,
stage right. I keep to the lighting, learning
the angles. Toy with the curtain strings.
(And we put things backout into the air,
and we put things back out into the air,)
Listen, I’ll bring you soup
while you’re away.
The trouble starts today.
22.7.09
time
it is time i picked this thing up again. i am sitting in the darkness of my room in my mother's apartment, 448 am, unable to sleep in spite of having driven some seven hundred miles through the mountains today (yesterday?). i am somewhat delirious and more drowsy than all drowsy, but too busy thinking to sleep.
the last times i wrote in this, i was a few months younger. in a very different place. there was that small blonde girl to worry abt. i hadn't heard from any schools. there will always be women who catch my attns. and now, i've signed my near-future away to the iowa writers' workshop, having also gotten into columbia, sarah lawrence and san francisco. i've even already passed through the terrain of frantic worries over am-i-good-enoughs. i'm more than prepared; i may actually be confident. at least, i want more than anything right now to get even better than i may perhaps be. i want challenge, bold and hot on my tongue. i feel readiness like statue grown up in the marrow of my bones. fuck chisels. this one be grown in earth, stone, in earth.
i am going to return to this blog. i'm still not sure how i feel about the nomdeplume i gave myself abt half a yr ago now. i like the name, really, but i'm uncertain abt it's purpose. it has many purposes, but what purpose would my given name then have, at least in the yrs yrs to come?
granted my worries are always petty. at least, you know, whilst holding several universes in one fist like an orbing dandelion. we can never really know.
the last times i wrote in this, i was a few months younger. in a very different place. there was that small blonde girl to worry abt. i hadn't heard from any schools. there will always be women who catch my attns. and now, i've signed my near-future away to the iowa writers' workshop, having also gotten into columbia, sarah lawrence and san francisco. i've even already passed through the terrain of frantic worries over am-i-good-enoughs. i'm more than prepared; i may actually be confident. at least, i want more than anything right now to get even better than i may perhaps be. i want challenge, bold and hot on my tongue. i feel readiness like statue grown up in the marrow of my bones. fuck chisels. this one be grown in earth, stone, in earth.
i am going to return to this blog. i'm still not sure how i feel about the nomdeplume i gave myself abt half a yr ago now. i like the name, really, but i'm uncertain abt it's purpose. it has many purposes, but what purpose would my given name then have, at least in the yrs yrs to come?
granted my worries are always petty. at least, you know, whilst holding several universes in one fist like an orbing dandelion. we can never really know.
24.2.09
apology
sorry I haven't written in a while.
putting less and less stock in sense.
loving the sound of that. little else.
last semester as an undergrad well under way and I am, of course, severely slacking.
oops.
but the work-- and how does it do this?-- will get done somehow in between my worries and ramblings over how I'm never going to finish...
the waiting to hear from grad schools is constantly eating away at me. the waiting, its teeth are neither warm nor cold. but sharp, very sharp.
about a wk post the SMN-posts, I told her to never call me again. never speak to me again. and now, approx. two months later, I have not heard from her. every once in a while I wake up from dreams of her and shakeshakeshake them off before coffee and class.
somehow, this does not help me focus or get work done. but I think that's because I can so quickly shift the focus of such attns to another, the stories spontaneously birthing themselves in the dark soils of my imagination before I have time to approve them, my dreams picking up where my imagination leaves off, the inability to sleep well, and so on. even the girls I've met a thousand times before, just let them sit close enough once! hah... I can barely come down again from my own mind's perches; but there (here?) I am, and there four eyes, four hands, four legs. how real and how surreal. and how I can never untangle the two.
really, how can I be honest when all of this is strictly the sloppiness of my own feelings and perceptions in my head? how can I speak it? I cannot help but sit amidst all my beautiful friends, thinking slow and soft, painting their portraits on the walls of my skull-- Well Fuck, there is nothing to this, nothing behind this you've built upon, nothing that will breach the surface of you and come forth, nothing that will ever be known. which is-- granted-- why I am trying to write to you now. if I give up, then I will have to die. (there would be nothing applied to nothing-- the horror!-- and as I've said, not yet, not yet.) for now, I merely enjoy the sights, the smells, the warmth, and the vast vast blanketing network of bullshit going down in Me. most importantly, I don't know a thing.
but for the most part, distance has allowed me to reattain a complete and functional autonomy. it is painful. and I couldn't tell you the locale of the pain. its a swollen pain, though, and absurdly similar (just shaded ever so slightly more pessimistic) to the overwhelming sort of happiness you cannot prevent or explain.
putting less and less stock in the sense of such things. there is no sense to such things. none that I can pick up on. only the sense that I create. and for the time being, I create less and less... I merely remember the soles of my feet, and keep walking towards the finish.
putting less and less stock in sense.
loving the sound of that. little else.
last semester as an undergrad well under way and I am, of course, severely slacking.
oops.
but the work-- and how does it do this?-- will get done somehow in between my worries and ramblings over how I'm never going to finish...
the waiting to hear from grad schools is constantly eating away at me. the waiting, its teeth are neither warm nor cold. but sharp, very sharp.
about a wk post the SMN-posts, I told her to never call me again. never speak to me again. and now, approx. two months later, I have not heard from her. every once in a while I wake up from dreams of her and shakeshakeshake them off before coffee and class.
somehow, this does not help me focus or get work done. but I think that's because I can so quickly shift the focus of such attns to another, the stories spontaneously birthing themselves in the dark soils of my imagination before I have time to approve them, my dreams picking up where my imagination leaves off, the inability to sleep well, and so on. even the girls I've met a thousand times before, just let them sit close enough once! hah... I can barely come down again from my own mind's perches; but there (here?) I am, and there four eyes, four hands, four legs. how real and how surreal. and how I can never untangle the two.
really, how can I be honest when all of this is strictly the sloppiness of my own feelings and perceptions in my head? how can I speak it? I cannot help but sit amidst all my beautiful friends, thinking slow and soft, painting their portraits on the walls of my skull-- Well Fuck, there is nothing to this, nothing behind this you've built upon, nothing that will breach the surface of you and come forth, nothing that will ever be known. which is-- granted-- why I am trying to write to you now. if I give up, then I will have to die. (there would be nothing applied to nothing-- the horror!-- and as I've said, not yet, not yet.) for now, I merely enjoy the sights, the smells, the warmth, and the vast vast blanketing network of bullshit going down in Me. most importantly, I don't know a thing.
but for the most part, distance has allowed me to reattain a complete and functional autonomy. it is painful. and I couldn't tell you the locale of the pain. its a swollen pain, though, and absurdly similar (just shaded ever so slightly more pessimistic) to the overwhelming sort of happiness you cannot prevent or explain.
putting less and less stock in the sense of such things. there is no sense to such things. none that I can pick up on. only the sense that I create. and for the time being, I create less and less... I merely remember the soles of my feet, and keep walking towards the finish.
10.1.09
weird, weird evening. seems so usual, so unusual. not esp. weird to still be drinking, drinking since six-ish, not feeling all that drunk but still being literally shocked to find that the red sign in the hallway for dodgeball says 'january'-- fuck, it's january-- however, it is weird, as tonight was the first time someone younger than me, someone we took out with us, sits over a cigarette with me and says that my work's really changed them. it may sound cheesy from me, but she made it very believable. inciting writing in others, who knew. i mean, i dig when i hear someone say, 'it's bigger than you,' but fucking hell do i dig when i'm staring straight at a younger faced myself, speaking shit i've certainly said, speaking shit about how amazing my poems are, blah blah. i mean, it isn't the compliment itself here that's significant. it's the impact going on without my knowing. i've got my proof; and we all know how i need my proof. don't make no diff what you say if i ain't felt it. you're lucky, too, if i can feel what you say. but this one vibrated some heartbone deep in the chest, you know? i was shook. erica even said it out loud, 'and you're like a younger R.' when the shit's not even being squeezed out of your own mouth, and you swear it should be, the disjunct in situation is just too odd not to pay complete attn to. an essay on my poem, poems from my poems. what a pen of fucking rabbits, as one might say.
goddammit i love red wine. i'm finishing the bottle too; never let a cabsau down yet. ain't gunna.
turns out this wk has been strangely satisfying. my work has not only led to frantic dancing, frantic joy, frantic crying, and frantic napping-- it's there standing outside me; it's watching me as i sleep [drunk], it's making records of my dreams.
goddammit i love red wine. i'm finishing the bottle too; never let a cabsau down yet. ain't gunna.
turns out this wk has been strangely satisfying. my work has not only led to frantic dancing, frantic joy, frantic crying, and frantic napping-- it's there standing outside me; it's watching me as i sleep [drunk], it's making records of my dreams.
9.1.09
8.1.09
the ESP strikes again... or something like it
After finishing editting the SMN post, she calls on the phone.
And I answer.
And she wants to come over; "What're ya doinggg?"
I say, Just got up from a needed nap; I've been writing; I'm about to fix myself some dinner...
And I say, You can come over and do that with me if you want.
And she says, Yea, I'll buzz when I get there.
(Where do the waves break off each other, where does the apprehension meet the desire and leave me feeling this pained inside?)
And I answer.
And she wants to come over; "What're ya doinggg?"
I say, Just got up from a needed nap; I've been writing; I'm about to fix myself some dinner...
And I say, You can come over and do that with me if you want.
And she says, Yea, I'll buzz when I get there.
(Where do the waves break off each other, where does the apprehension meet the desire and leave me feeling this pained inside?)
SMN
She was here two nights ago (you know the one, she chased away my friends, my roommate, made me insane with love/obsession? --I'm lying a little; see, I can't live with people, so I pseudo-chased the roommate away myself with mess and madness that comes with trying to be an "Artist" and supposed selfishness) and I was getting the good guffaws out of her. She was doing little but dying laughing; I was aglow. I was trying not to think of her soft mouth, but it was impossible. I was trying to remember how much I love her for that laughter, the things that come out of that mouth word-wise, the way her memories always excite me just as much as my own (if not more)... you know, not just how much I love to kiss that mouth. How much I miss her just laying down beside me.
I let her read everything I write. She sits down on the shitty futon beside me, cramped warm arm to arm, warm leg to leg. She tells me to stop looking at her, with a giggle. I can't tell if that means I really need to stop looking at her, or if she's only vaguely embarrassed. I look anyway. She points out things I don't think of. She tells me I'm too dark, too morbid.
I make her coffee. She keeps asking if we can hunt down some pot. I don't want to smoke. I'm trying to take my shit more seriously. So instead, I tell her to ask for something else she wants, something she can have. She asks for coffee. I guess I can do that. We sit together on my bed a long time. We talk about how neither of us are "relationship-people" (whatever that means), and she says, "But I want to adopt kids; maybe I just need to find another non-relationship person" and tells me in great details the imagined children-- an African boy, a Chinese girl with Southern rock names; she wants to raise them to save their respective countries. We shoot kid names back and forth at each other. I'm thinking about what it would be like, sitting on a future bed, with children, with her. It hurts a little, but I like it. And at one point, my story-words make her blush. She's not laughing. But then I can't handle the tension if she isn't going to reach out and take my hand or something (God, how I miss holding that small hand...), so I make her laugh again.
She decides, all caffeine-high, that we should go for a drive. She drives me out to Herrodsburg, some place called Line Station or something like that; she's describing the images that pop into her head as we drive these dark, tree-lined roads-- stuff about Napoleon and Northern Italy; we sing real quiet together-- myself always taking the lower parts-- Cat Power's cover of "Wild is the Wind." I'm dying on the inside, the wild animal is back. It is going to destroy me.
When she leaves me, however, she stays in too long for the hug. I'm breathing her neck, she's talking 'She loves me' shit; I kiss her cheek, gentle as I can be. And of course, comes in for that charateristic sneak-attack kiss she's sometimes uses (sometimes I believe she's as shy as me), so fast I don't know she's kissing me until it's over, millisecond style. And she's out the door, walking backways, smiling at me... She says, "Don't worry, because I want to stick around because I want to know you..." I'm thinking, "What kind of 'know'?" But she's gone.
Then, last night, she's calling around 8. I'm at ALW's in the city; I don't answer the phone even though I know it's her, to be polite to A. I leave an hour after anyway; the roads are icy, it's been snowing. I call up my mother and say, "How safe is it to drive that one-lane road to Danville right now, given the conditions?" She sounds wary, but just tells me to be careful. I think to myself, "Is it worth it to drive back now for a girl?" and answer myself with "Of course!" Then, I think, "But is it safe? ... Now you've reached the real question. I never gave myself a straight answer. I got back and called her; she didn't answer. An hour later, she calls back. She sounds sad and tired. She says she'd wanted to see me earlier, but now she's going to sleep. I think it's for the best. I shouldn't be putting myself through this again.
But I'm probably going to.
PS--Workshop is going really well; I'm making new friends for the first time in a while. There is one man who is particularly nice to me. I like him for his nice and his overly-English sounding name. I'm feeling all right about writing again. Funny how that works...
PPS--I just work up from a nap in which I was seeking God in psychadelic rainbow mooncrater under the sea... my backpack fell over the edge and I lost it. And I remember feeling in constant terror, constantly unsafe.
I let her read everything I write. She sits down on the shitty futon beside me, cramped warm arm to arm, warm leg to leg. She tells me to stop looking at her, with a giggle. I can't tell if that means I really need to stop looking at her, or if she's only vaguely embarrassed. I look anyway. She points out things I don't think of. She tells me I'm too dark, too morbid.
I make her coffee. She keeps asking if we can hunt down some pot. I don't want to smoke. I'm trying to take my shit more seriously. So instead, I tell her to ask for something else she wants, something she can have. She asks for coffee. I guess I can do that. We sit together on my bed a long time. We talk about how neither of us are "relationship-people" (whatever that means), and she says, "But I want to adopt kids; maybe I just need to find another non-relationship person" and tells me in great details the imagined children-- an African boy, a Chinese girl with Southern rock names; she wants to raise them to save their respective countries. We shoot kid names back and forth at each other. I'm thinking about what it would be like, sitting on a future bed, with children, with her. It hurts a little, but I like it. And at one point, my story-words make her blush. She's not laughing. But then I can't handle the tension if she isn't going to reach out and take my hand or something (God, how I miss holding that small hand...), so I make her laugh again.
She decides, all caffeine-high, that we should go for a drive. She drives me out to Herrodsburg, some place called Line Station or something like that; she's describing the images that pop into her head as we drive these dark, tree-lined roads-- stuff about Napoleon and Northern Italy; we sing real quiet together-- myself always taking the lower parts-- Cat Power's cover of "Wild is the Wind." I'm dying on the inside, the wild animal is back. It is going to destroy me.
When she leaves me, however, she stays in too long for the hug. I'm breathing her neck, she's talking 'She loves me' shit; I kiss her cheek, gentle as I can be. And of course, comes in for that charateristic sneak-attack kiss she's sometimes uses (sometimes I believe she's as shy as me), so fast I don't know she's kissing me until it's over, millisecond style. And she's out the door, walking backways, smiling at me... She says, "Don't worry, because I want to stick around because I want to know you..." I'm thinking, "What kind of 'know'?" But she's gone.
Then, last night, she's calling around 8. I'm at ALW's in the city; I don't answer the phone even though I know it's her, to be polite to A. I leave an hour after anyway; the roads are icy, it's been snowing. I call up my mother and say, "How safe is it to drive that one-lane road to Danville right now, given the conditions?" She sounds wary, but just tells me to be careful. I think to myself, "Is it worth it to drive back now for a girl?" and answer myself with "Of course!" Then, I think, "But is it safe? ... Now you've reached the real question. I never gave myself a straight answer. I got back and called her; she didn't answer. An hour later, she calls back. She sounds sad and tired. She says she'd wanted to see me earlier, but now she's going to sleep. I think it's for the best. I shouldn't be putting myself through this again.
But I'm probably going to.
PS--Workshop is going really well; I'm making new friends for the first time in a while. There is one man who is particularly nice to me. I like him for his nice and his overly-English sounding name. I'm feeling all right about writing again. Funny how that works...
PPS--I just work up from a nap in which I was seeking God in psychadelic rainbow mooncrater under the sea... my backpack fell over the edge and I lost it. And I remember feeling in constant terror, constantly unsafe.
6.1.09
Had a dream that I was running from someone last night. He was supposedly a student at my old elementary/middle school-- just graduating. I was looking for my old French professor, Mme. Fouladian. He grunted, 'What the hell are you doing here?' I said, 'I used to go here,' and he took off after me when a sharp gardening hoe. I tried to hide under three feet of water in a fountain, which, by the miracles of dreams, worked for a while. The pounding of the water falling from the fountain head was causing a complete disorientation of all senses-- I had no idea which way was up. But I managed to reach the surface and began to run again from the maniac with the hoe. I went into a small cottage that lifted me from the ground, flipped me upsidedown, and got me to the second floor. Once there, I ran up a narrow, spiral staircase to an office, where I asked the woman at the desk (the definition of mince, long bright blonde hair; I took her for French) in French, Excusez-moi Mme. Je cherche Dominique Fouladian. J'etais un de ses anciens etudiants. She bitched me out in words I don't recall, and which point I jumped in a trash shoot, landed in a dumpster, crawled out, and got into my mother's car, where she was waiting for me in the alleyway.
5.1.09
gross
Gross Gross Gross
Everything I've ever written was shit
And the shit I just spent 2.5 hrs on? Shit.
But guess what? I'll be fucking happy for every second of shit I write.
Know why? 'Cause nothing compares to the ecstatic mindfucking time warp--
2.5 hrs seems five minutes--my skin tingles and my blood goes to my head--
Warm all over, Poetry, you filthy WHORE!--
et cetera et cetera
I've been screaming at myself and jumping around the room for the past half hour because of this. This mess I find myself caught in. And every poet will say, 'No one ever chooses to be a poet.' I mean, DUH. Everything about this is totally useless. And awful. But oh so fucking divine.
Hm. Gotta shake this headache...
Everything I've ever written was shit
And the shit I just spent 2.5 hrs on? Shit.
But guess what? I'll be fucking happy for every second of shit I write.
Know why? 'Cause nothing compares to the ecstatic mindfucking time warp--
2.5 hrs seems five minutes--my skin tingles and my blood goes to my head--
Warm all over, Poetry, you filthy WHORE!--
et cetera et cetera
I've been screaming at myself and jumping around the room for the past half hour because of this. This mess I find myself caught in. And every poet will say, 'No one ever chooses to be a poet.' I mean, DUH. Everything about this is totally useless. And awful. But oh so fucking divine.
Hm. Gotta shake this headache...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
