the unknown place

2012-02-03T13:20:00.005-05:00

where do you me come from?,
i ask the poem boiling inside me,
a blossom,
a tea,
gnarled and warm.

i will go down to the river
to lay, in place,
my love poem,
alongside all the others.

every person
is alloted 20 love poems in their life,
20 places at the river.
not so neat, they sprout and gape
open
sometimes,
offer flowering hands,
up to the stars,
dirty and scarred.

in an open space, my own,
i will kneel and my press my mouth into the earth
to make the shape of her.
i love the ritual of it.
when i am done, the clay there will smell of her,
translucent like her skin.

poem, you were born
here,
a wet ember buried in my blood.
poem, you came of age inside my body.
poem, you left me,
left my mouth
when the first eyes knew me--
knew that i was not a girl.
poem, you cut my hair along your blade
and gave me my exhaustion.

but now that i have found the words for you, i lay you down to rest here,
in the river mud,

breathing deeply,

grateful i have 13 left to go.

the softening

2012-02-03T13:17:00.002-05:00

i could sink softly between,
Between our bodies.
Between your words.

i am grateful for your pauses and your silences.
i am grateful for the moments we do not touch.

I could rest there, i think.
i would cry, curled, on the forest floor.
i would burrow deep within the earth,
and maybe you would find me there,
while digging up old jars of marrowed leaves.
I, too, would be marrowed
like ginger root,
clear & sharp.

and we would skim the surface of each other's skin,
wandering, like bent seeds,
into each other's hair,
drifting like rain clouds
like birds
underground.

small but heavy

2012-01-05T00:33:00.005-05:00

i am small
but i am heavy
because i carry
the ocean on my back
and in the ocean are their stories,
whispered like seagrass

and even in the silence,
in all that breath and stillness
they tell me
their sadnesses
their sadnesses
become my own

recovered from my journal from last year

2011-12-31T18:33:00.004-05:00

the other day i woke up from nightmares,
feeling so afraid
that i couldn't be alone,
so i went along with my friends
to an animal rights protest--my first.

we stood outside a warehouse,
where they store live monkeys
for cruel scientific research,
holding posters of bloody monkeys
and yelling at the concrete wall
and the unseen employees inside
"you
have no conscience. you
are evil. you
are scum."

i stayed for a while, listening to the other protesters'
anger.
but they sounded so much like the mean voices in my head
that i walked to a peruvian restaurant
in the shopping center next door,
and tried to order vegetarian food,
but the waitress didn't understand my broken spanish.

now, ordinarily, i look the other way,
don't want to make a scene,
when a little chicken grasa
ends up in my beans,
but after all that yelling at walls,
i felt too much like a hypocrite,
so i sent my order back 3 times
feeling sheepish that my request for no chicken broth
had somehow turned into an order for chicken broth.
"disculpeme."

dendrite (tanka)

2011-11-16T17:35:00.003-05:00

writing keeps me here,
keeps my nerves awake, alive.
through my skin, they scrape the sky
like branches, like leaves

Sheriff Arpaio Interruption

2011-11-15T12:01:00.004-05:00

We sit in the conference,
trying to be inconspicuous at first,
while security glares at us,
our clothes too wrinkled.

The man on the microphone
talks about our side
the way we talk about their side.
"They are taking our rights away.
We have to fight back,"
he says,
heart-felt,
And I don't like sides.
And I don't believe in them.
but I wonder for a moment
if we are just their opposite,
their symmetry,
and that is all.

The man with the microphone has a story,
I think,
and his story wrote his speech,
and my story gave birth to this moment,
to my short hair and thrift store shirt,
to this chant inside my head
that I'll shout in an hour.
We all come from stories, I think.

But then I think of the border,
a line drawn by Power,
onto bodies.
And I think of the stories
I have heard and read
of those who crossed it.

The desert is a myth to me,
but to my friends,
it is a memory
they were forced to face.

To stumble from the desert into prison,
into tents too hot to breathe,
into a "concentration camp"--

This suffering doesn't have a side.
It doesn't have a politic.
It has a beating heart.
It has a story.
It has a voice.

And so we will stand up and shout
when the sheriff is speaking,
even though we are shaking,
even though we know we will be tackled to the ground.

We will be dragged away,
a sheet over our head,
and we will shout.

Not because there is a line
in my heart
between us and them,
but because we don't let lines silence suffering.

The border has tall walls,
but still,
it is not solid because it stands on living earth.
The border wavers like our strength.
The border shivers like our hands.
The border gives birth like our stories.
And so we shout.

brain tumor

2011-11-03T13:46:00.005-04:00

At first,
she'd fumble for the words sometimes
or stumble in the hallway,
but now when she gets up at night,
and I wake suddenly somehow after 2 flat shuffles,
and rush in to help her to the bathroom,
she yells a dadaist poem at me,
her finger pointed at my chest.
"And the, the what! And the you! And the book! You oughta!"
She is all exclamation points,
her mouth a toothless snarl.
I imagine William S. Burroughs taking furious notes in the corner,
but i know she means to say,
"how dare you wake up at 4am
to help me
when you are my grand-daughter?
And even though I don't have words anymore,
I worry about you,
and I am supposed to take care of you.
and I am ashamed things are so backwards, now."

She is always furrowed, now.
I cannot comfort her.
Even in her sleep, she asks loudly,
"Am I alright? Is everything alright? I don't know. I just don't know."
She calls for help, but doesn't know why by the time I arrive from the next room.
I guess wildly, as she grows impatient.
Sometimes her hair feels too heavy on her neck,
Sometimes the painting on the wall is crooked,
but mostly it is something else she just can't put her finger on,
a knowing that life--
which so diligently held her so steady for 96 years,
as she sat at her sewing machine and hosted dinner parties in regal pant suits--
has given up and gone askew,
like the ground in a pinball machine,
and she is lost in perpetual motion,
wandering its back alleyways,
everything familiar but nothing quite right.

I tell myself I am here to care for her,
to bear witness, and honor her process
of dying,
as if I am somehow above it,
outside her strange-smelling world,
looking on.
But when I am with her,
I cannot help but be reminded of my own mind, my own life,
also estranged from me,
also suspended.

I cannot help but wonder what went wrong.

resistance

2011-11-03T10:35:00.007-04:00

sometimes i think
the whole world is built on NO
a NO you can sink your teeth into,
a NO you can pull up by its roots,
a NO you can tear up into pieces
and stomp into the ground,
like someone else's history

But humans have great capacities.
Filled with sadness, they do not burst.

Not bursting, they make coffee
and ride the bus to work.
Not bursting, they band their bodies into circles,
together, and talk things through,

the memories and contradictions gathered in their throats,
like rain on concrete,
unable to reach earth.

i am a NO.
we make a NO with our bodies.

Summer Lightning

2011-05-18T17:01:00.003-04:00

Last night,
my friend jill and i rode our bikes to the beach
to watch the quiet summer lightning.
It lit the clouds like lanterns
or jellyfish
like life inside lungs,
heart inside skull.

We sat in the empty lifeguard tower
We pressed against the walls to evade the flashlights
when the cops came
to yell the beach was closed.
We ate homemade applesauce from a jar.
We talked about our lives.

And we said we didn't know the name for lightning like this
that went on and on.

When i was a kid
i didn't have words for the tar
that washed up on the beach sometimes.
But it seemed perfect and natural that the sea would give birth to
such darkness.
I would scrape it off my feet,
and marvel at the strangeness of this world,
the mysteries of ocean.

Giving words to things
is almost always a losing,
a giving up.

We talked,
the storms inside me became words,
and i became carved out,
hollow.

I could be musical instrument,
a noisy emptiness.

When i went home, the nightmares came.
they will stay for weeks.
i wake up and know there is someone dangerous in my house again.
i tell myself it doesn't make sense,
But i am hollow,
and i have no doors to close.

When i am terrified like this,
i like to imagine roots growing from my body down into the ground,
but maybe my terrors and aches are already part of the earth
and its cycles,
the mysteries that live inside it,
like oil and tar.
The moon pulling me up,
like water,
into hollows and canyons.

And maybe, outside my curtained window,
the sky is still lit like a house that is safe,
like a life inside skin
like a song.

Sometimes, i am happy,
a bell.
life hums against my skin.

But then the nightmares come.

sinkholes

2011-04-06T23:16:00.009-04:00

Today i saw the news reports
about m's friend dying.

i didn't expect to,
but i cried
with my knees and forehead to the ground
and my arms stretched out like rivers,
as if this sudden sadness
could drain out of my body,
& into the earth,
like water.

Today the kids used the hose to pour puddles into the sand.
Angry about the waste,
i suddenly remembered that
water never leaves us,
only loses its clear-eyed purity.

i imagined its strange journey,
rising up through air and sky,
in the heat of day,
taking
all the dirt around it
into its fragile body.

I imagined the relief of being rain,
in that moment when gravity takes over,
and you know this is what you were meant for:
the perfect forgiveness of falling.

and then, once on earth
to keep sinking,
slowly,
through sand and graves,
the homes
and deaths
of many animals,
the soil
smelling like their memories.

to remember,
wide-eyed, opening, deepening,
all that came before.

all the love and violence,
bound together
like water and toxicity
that we take into our bodies,
just trying to survive.

we are not pure,
not any of us.
the dirt of this world
is clenched
in our blood
in the cloth of our skin,
the gnarled roots of bones
that keep us standing on the ground.

Oh, to seep slowly down into the earth,
unclean and whole.
It would feel like mourning,
like when i sink into my chest,
softening.

Now, listening to the report of the assassination,
i lie curled on the carpet,
imagining stories dripping into pools below me,
an aquifer of sadness
underneath the ground.

Today i am safe.

But sometimes,
the earth cracks open.
Sometimes we fall.

2011-02-03T00:00:00.009-05:00

my body is a door
a hole,
an opening.
Your hand lives there.
and it died there.
a grave.

slowly, i swim against you
through you
earthworm, soil.

and
eyes,
eyes,
eyes
rock like ocean in my throat.
i was always seasick as a child.

because to be in this body is to be unsteady.
skin and blood never stay still.

i always feel nauseous when i kiss.

But
not-remembering is magic
because still the story lives
in the rhythms
of my blood.
just a glimmer of a fish,
in the ocean
of my body.

a distance,
a song,
ago.

like a cage door,
a shutter in my heart gapes
open
and
i stammer, caught.

my home or the place where love and loneliness are the same

2010-10-17T11:24:00.002-04:00

thinking about you,

i realize

i imagine we are already partners

at some deeper level than our lived experience

-as if-

beneath the horizon of our skin,

we have a life together.

Inside me are the landscapes from your poetry.

I couldn't leave them if I tried,

and i have tried and tried.

they are my home,

the one i carry with me.

Inside me, we walk together through the marshland,

stopping to pull our hearts from the mud,

like roots we’ll cook for dinner

medicine

for loneliness

beneath the iris sky.

the trees are our hands,

and they rise

from the Earth,

like stories,

bent fingers.

In this life,

i may long for you,

i may ache

but in the life inside this life,

the trees hold us,

when we climb them,

and we walk along the lines in their palms,

and remember our futures together,

and the places we broke.

fell

2010-10-11T21:46:00.006-04:00

In July,

I fell

through

the barn,

filled with abandoned things,

piles of lives

that have long since left,

carried themselves elsewhere

in backpacks and boots

that we dug through,

with dirty hands,

looking for something.

I fell

because there was

light coming in through the dusty window,

and I fell

because 2 chairs framed the light

as if 2 lovely people

had just been

sipping tea,

fondly,

as if,

in the stacks of abandoned shadows,

they had found their home.

Staring through my camera,

at the imaginary scene,

I put my foot out into the open air,

and I fell

and falling was like flying and I didn’t know if it would ever end.

Later that summer,

I kissed you in the barn.

We sat on the orange hill

and I cried,

and you said I was safe there,

that you would paint my body on the roof.

Later that summer

night trapped us,

sleepless,

in your bed,

in the woods,

in a blue tarp

in deer stars,

held by a thin wooden frame,

just bent saplings.

And later that summer,

your dirty hands

dug through me

looking for something.

And later,

I knew. suddenly. that I had been broken there.

But then, I was just falling,

like a dream,

like a whistle.

And there was nothing in the world but air.

bound

2010-09-28T13:04:00.010-04:00

Today i tried to bind my breasts

with an ace bandage

i found on the shelf at walgreens

unwrapped,

discarded,

perhaps by some other curious boygirl,
nervous

they made it easier for me.
i made it out of the store,

free
ness hidden in my purse,

but it hurt me.
it was hard to move,
to breathe.

i felt bound.

like corsets and sets of teeth

gnashing.

like dreams.

there are two sets of dreams:

there are the ones where i am free

and the ones where i am bound.

My breasts bind me.

to calls on the streets

to minutes spent with men who take my
no

like pick-pockets

when they shake my hand,

with smiling eyes,
and put it in their pockets.

then, when they say you're pretty,

and ask you for your number,

you look for your

no,

first in your hands,

then in their eyes,

and all you see is danger,

so you smile back

because you know the way like metal

aut
o
mat
ic

you know the way the world runs,
cold.

my dreams bind my chest closed,
bind my body to my bed,
wrap my room up,
around the windows,
so it is dark,
cucoon my house, my town

in panicked nighttime,
bind Time
so it is tiny,
stilted, silent,
short and fluttering winged heartbeat
of a moth
that forgets
where it has gone,
all the forests,
that have taken flight
underneath its belly.

we are
Stuck.
in fabric
clothesed.

and if i could choose
its taste, my name,
it would be red silk,
carved by dying silkworms
in iron pans
stuck
to eachother's bodies
sliding on the round metal ground,
burning
like the summer asphault.
against my feet
when i am running
from nothing, toward nothing,
haunted by nothing but a knowing at my back,
a quivering cold rain
without memories.

that's how they get the silk out, you know?

last week, in my dream, i said no,

but it didn't matter.
and then i forgot it on His skin.

bodies and streets have a way of getting me lost,

together.

in mo(u)rning,
i forgot my dream,
but knew the silken film it left in me
like it had crawled in
each pore of skin
needle sharp,
nothing left closed.

i knew the taste of metal in my mouth,
the gag,
Bound.
to
Forget

i want a new body,

new street,

new dream,

new memory.

but all i have is this,

this cloth in my hands.

duality

2010-07-22T01:45:00.004-04:00

"I think maturity is accepting duality, accepting contradiction.

People who do bad things are not paskudniks. Do you know what that means?"

It means the worst of the worst.

We all have both parts of us,"

said the rebbitzen

at "Tea and Torah."

in a nice b&b near the beach, a few blocks from my house.

I came once before for the alliteration and the pastries,

but found myself fed by the torah.

I think maybe there is a part of me designed to receive it.

Before I came in, I paced in the garden outside,

on the phone with a friend of the man who assaulted me last summer.

It is still hard for me to say the word assault without flooding the air with caveats--

it was that thing that felt like assault to me, only to me.

Because that night our experience split in 2,

like a tree struck by lightening,

not just his and mine,

but also I.

that night, there were many of me

and one of them is only made of sound.

But I want to go back, back to the beginning,

before last summer,

before i was a child,

before i lived in a body, coiled,

before i lived in 2 bodies, divided

playing stickball on the soft summer streets,

we’d run away.

and in 4 bodies,

we left the ghetto,

left our secrets ground into the dirt floors,

and in 8 bodies we climbed out of the shtetl,

like vines with nowhere left to go

we rose up

above our bodies

just watching

and we crossed oceans

and remember? it felt like we moved through time.

And our people are a people pushed into corners,

backed against walls

and our people fight to find a way to fight.

And I fight

And I fight to remember

he is human.

And we are human,

And in 16 human bodies,

I imagine it began.

I imagine it began,

with the kazaks

heavy boots, soft earth

and we were crushed

under their horses,

and hands,

and bodies,

and languages we couldn’t understand.

and the earth was infected.

Rape is

a parasite

a pathogen,

carried on the backs of shame,

scurried on ships, riding across oceans,

it climbs into the bodies of our children,

an old illness of old oppression,

in our clean new homes.

And rape

is a weight,

sewn, with our ancestors’ tailors’ hands, into the insides of our skin,

passed on like a valuable hidden in wartime,

like the only way to survive.

And assault is a language,

a way of speaking.

And last summer, it spoke to me,

and it said,

I don't believe you exist.

I AM HERE

I AM HERE AND YOU WILL SEE ME.

And we will see each other.

I don't believe there is anything that matters

inside your body,

Inside my body is the clawing of life across the earth

just a body.

Inside my body is the curve of trees and the space between them.

To me, you are only skin.

Under my skin is the arch of sand stained by the rush of winter, so I know the ocean rocks with the sadness of what is lost, but is still open.

The rebbitzen said,

the ocean represents torah.

But I know that before judaism,

Ocean was the power of the

darkness of the

womb.

And we hold this hollowed power in our bodies

and we live there when we are afraid.

And the rebbitzen said,

But Hashem said,

"just go forward. don't even pray."

And Moses split Ocean in two.

And I am ocean.

Ocean has no skin.

And I wrote letters

to the man from last summer,

demanding he change.

“The thing is, he lost the letter,” says his friend, on the phone. “You know how he is always forgetting things.”

“Yea,” I said. And I am too.

And last summer, my grandma, we poured into the ocean,

but what of the part of her that was torn from her body,

not just when she was raped,

but when she raped my father?

I think that, without body, she is made of (unsaid) sounds,

I think they fill my mouth, like food, when I cry or remember,

and I think there is a part of me designed to receive them.

Rape is a ghost that lives inside us,

through us,

without wings,

without skin,

without song,

without sound

without memory.

And I am here to remember.

And Hashem said “just go forward. don’t even pray.”

So we went forward, but our hearts flew away.

They became birds,

and I became a rush of bones

a person without flesh,

a person, who,

without flesh, cannot exist,

so, not existing,

I went home

I looked for home.

and I came to the Ocean.

And I wrote letters.

And I send them again, when they are lost.

I go forward.

I don't even pray.

And the ghosts still swim in my belly,

just fish in the bottom of the deep, open ocean,

So I swim alongside them.

We swim to

survive without shame,

like the summer.

It is summer again,

when mangoes and sunlight make music

in my body,

hollowed and hallowed and whole.

poem for a short romance

2009-11-23T15:39:00.006-05:00

one week ago,
you were new like lemonade.
you were winter opening her clear blue eyes
and feeling cold was almost like feeling afraid
when we bicycled through them.
or sometimes at night we just walked together
and you were the streets
the criss-cross map of our lives,
as our thoughts built constellations above us
exploding a thousand years ago
and you were light
and you made me remember.
and you strung me between earth and sky
and you stitched me into the pattern that holds the world together
and it was sewn into our bellies
and written on the treehouse beams we climbed
and it said "love"
and it was a strange, handmade vine that grew in my garden
yellowed like paper, and sad.
and we laid down on the sidewalk next to it.

"i'm not sure i want this right now," s/he said.
and you were light

and you made me remember

you made me remember

my skin

made me remember

its sadness

me remember

your sound

remember

your alwaysness.

it was so good to find you again

to meet you in a poem,

to forage you in the pale green grasses of lake worth,

in between the side streets

and then lose you in a satursky

on a bicycle with no hands,

because you taught me how not to hold on.

for ben

2009-07-28T09:56:00.007-04:00

we fought all morning
and then you found
the horses had trampled the fields
you found their hoove marks
in the collard greens,
their leaves parted
like children,
ashamed to be seen.

you went to town,
and i stayed in the field
and cried
because i am afraid of you
and then i began to carve a burdock root from the earth
as if it were a memory
we'd share for dinner
outloud, i wrote you poetry
with heart-cupped-hands,
moved the damp earth away from the stalk of the plant,
grateful it was stubborn
and i was patient
and small
and lonely for its company
and we were both anchored to the earth
by secrets
round wound dirt and stones.
and with deep-sun-breaths, I lifted them.

And then you came home
and with one hand,
and one pull,
took the burdock root from the earth,
like it was nothing.

I stood holding it--
too rotten, you to told me, to eat for dinner--
when you said you were just hurting
like the trampled fields.
Then, angry, you turned and walked back to the house
like the horses
strong and sudden,
their hooves gliding through the wildflowers
on the hill behind the fence
now carefully pulled closed,
their backs arched
to carry on
the sky.

blues

2009-03-11T21:49:00.014-04:00

feeling lonely on the beach an arm's length away from you,
i can't imagine there's anything out past the sky and sea,
and the place they meet--
a color i've never seen before,
all those dust motes in the mouth of the universe,
yawning open.

but you say
if i held a magnifying glass to a leaf,
i'd see a dozen tiny leaves within it,
and a hundred within each of them,
and on and on
all their little veins stretching out to sea and sky
like our hands in the darkness,
blind to the galaxies just under our dirty fingernails,
the matted roots of cities
clinging to the insides of our eyes.

if i could, i would hold a magnifying glass to my loneliness.

and would i see
just me, palm open, at the edge of the ocean,
trapped within my heart,
within my heart,
within my heart,
like russian dolls?

or would loneliness include us both
in its infinity?
the sea and sky and 2 near strangers--
just old friends still unfurling
like ferns opening outward,
a kaleidoscope of skin and blues
and truths curled closed.

even now i wonder how much i have known you
through your absences,
the way the sea has carved the earth and in these carvings lives its history.
they say that cold is an absence of heat.
and i wonder, is there any such thing as an absence of sky?
and what would it look like, magnified?

if i could, i would look at your life under a magnifying glass,
till the deserts are just grains of sand,
and in the grains of sand are deserts,
and your lover's skin
and my skin,
are all just lines that run like rivers
into spirals at the fingertips.

they say we've burned holes in the sky.
and i would
spin my thoughts into string
and weave a new sky
to wrap around us.
but then we'd never get the chance to see
its absence.
under a magnifying glass, it looks
just like
loneliness.

that break of blue just before the horizon.

Here is where time spirals in on itself,
and i have known you for a week,
and also for forever,
reaching for words that are not yet born,
their syllables uncurling open.

in the palm of your hand,
i trace the patterns of your silences,
the contours of your history,
like the shape of your body next to me,
or its absence,
like water,
blues
on the sand.

what i really mean to say

2008-08-24T03:00:00.005-04:00

My friend said tonight, on the phone,
that she'd learned on the farm where she works
that everything is transitory,
the workers
who stay for a few weeks--
young and strong,
from cities,
they live in tents
And the chickens she feeds
and chases after
when they run away,
their legs fast
their wings sprawling.

She said she's as good as killing them
when feeds them grain from her hands
because intention is what matters
and she's only feeding them
so they'll be food, soon.

She says she's realized
dirt isn't dirt
and even shit isn't shit
because some kind of magic will come over it
and it will become alive again
in lettuce or grains
or chickens' wings
flailing and falling
like windmills, like kites.

And I remember the moment I realized that, too,
in the 3 days I spent
sifting pebbles and dirt from grains of rice
on the porch of the kitchen of the ashram--
the rhythms of it,
alone in the sun,
the arguments in hindi all around me
and the mantra inside me
falling
like breaths
under water.

I'd sing it outloud, sometimes,
to keep from feeling alone,
and the music would sift through me.
And the pebbles weren't dirt anymore--
They were a part of the life of the rice
as it grew
in the air that was so hot it burned
the skin of the earth,
the ground so red and rocky,
food was coaxed out of it,
shaken from the stalks,
pebbles
still caught
under fingernails.

And when I'd find them, still, in the rice I'd eat at breakfast,
I'd remember their history
and my hands
rising and falling like
so many things--
empires, arguments, breaths,
lives.

And what I really mean to say is
tonight is the first night since my grandmother died
I can look through the drawer in the kitchen,
the one that holds the things she used everyday
the dirty post-it notes she bought in the 80's or 90's
in a plastic holder
in pastel colors.
They spent my childhood
next to the phone
or on the kitchen table.

These are the things that remind me
she was alive,
and now they are in a drawer all together,
even though they don't belong together,
the cat's collar next to the car keys.
I spread them across my bed.

Earlier tonight, I went into the garage
looking for a quiet place to talk on the phone,
and I remembered, suddenly,
that this where I'd felt safest.

We'd sit in your parked cadillac
in the dashboard light,
and eat saltine crackers from the glove box,
wrapped in plastic
You'd stolen them from restaurants,
and shoved them in your purse
like you had nothing to apologize for.
And we'd laugh about the crumbs
all over the upholstery,
and you never scolded me
for the dirt on my hands.

Haiku by Evan :)

2007-12-07T21:46:00.000-05:00

Because I am tired,
an economy of words:
I love you, Ana.

5 Days with You

2007-12-03T00:51:00.000-05:00

I.
You’ve lost your contacts again, so you can’t see me at the airport
waving and laughing into the phone I see you holding to your ear.
You’re 20 feet away from me and getting closer, saying no, I can’t see you yet,
not yet,
not yet.

How do I say I don’t want you to see me, afraid to see what’s uncurling between us, like dreams waking up?

On the train ride home, you point out the brightest-colored trees, just blurs to you. And I recognize something like loss in your eyes, gaping like the red rush of trees—gone.

How do I say I want to kiss you on the escalator, when we each glance from eye-to-eye-to-mouth, and our sentences brush against each other, like kids trying to dance, awkward, sweaty palms and all.

And how do I say you scare me when we make out in your room, and your desperation pins me to the floor? And how do I say I’m crying because I feel your eyes inside me, asking me for something I can’t give them, something I can’t even give myself?

Instead I push you away, and say it’s okay, and fall asleep, cold, on the couch.

II.
You try to kiss me all day, and I turn away till I say things I didn’t want to say, words that cower in the corner like wallflowers; old children, heads bent.
Your eyes, ashamed, climb the stairs to your room, spread your records on the floor, unfold their jackets, read their poetry. I forgive you, and I envy you, the way music ends your loneliness. How do I say I can’t find an end to mine?

III.
We kiss once, and then all day, exploring cities of skin-and-sound. Scaling escalators underground, we sneak into the subway without tickets. When you lose your keys, we break into your apartment, balanced on the roof, throwing stones at the window. The bad neighborhood leers below, children trying to be thugs jeering, threatening, afraid.

IV.
We sneak into the zoo late at night. And how do I say the deer walk like whispers?

V.
I try on and take off all my clothes for you, as your records dance across your room, spinning, their arms outstretched for you, alone. We fall asleep, wake up like dreams, our words falling into seems between deep breaths that rush like trees, that end like songs: in silence.

And how do I say you are finally close enough to see me?

Last Supper

2007-11-23T00:51:00.000-05:00

I want my last meal in this life to be a meeting.
Everyone I've ever hurt would come.
They'd flood the room
Then, one-by-one, they'd touch their hands
to my hair, my cheeks, my bones of knees
till all I could see was skin all around me,
warm and deep like music,
their pulses still playing strains that were drifting away from me,
refrains forgotten.

And when they would speak,
I'd feast, and and be filled.
"I love you," they'd say, one at a time.
"I forgive you,
I forgive you,
I forgive."

for elanor and lola

2007-08-28T20:21:00.000-04:00

we don't see like we used to see
eye to chest as i'd watch you
breathe the air...
as we breathed the air
like we had no troubles

***

i miss you.

for jessie

2007-08-10T23:14:00.000-04:00

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

haiku

2007-07-16T00:40:00.000-04:00

Long after cooking,
spices, like some memories,
stick to fingertips.

Loose Ends, a tanka

2007-07-15T00:44:00.000-04:00

Leaving the theater,
I feel like I'm in a film.
The music slows, so,
softly, I walk tall through the
dark halls, and look for endings.

Genesis

2007-06-19T01:31:00.000-04:00

"Have trains ever collided?"
a young boy asks his mother.
I am watching them.
She pulls him towards the door of the coffeeshop by one hand. His other digs in his pocket for the answer.
It is an urgent question,
a question born immaculately
in curiousity,
a question that must be answered.
"Yes," she says, after a moment.
And then they are gone,
leaving me to write that there was a time before I knew of train crashes,
of crashes at all,
of tracks and streets criss-crossing horizons like tic-tac-toe games
destined to end.
There was a time before x's and o's
a time before letters,
were magic, their permutations endless.
but this was before i could count
before numbers existed,
before seasons and seconds.
before minutes and planets danced pirouettes on an axis of time
like angels on the head of a pin
before religion
before a need to explain
before death and birth, and day and night were divided.

Then, there was only the pulse of silence.
and it pounded like pencil on paper,
like rain on pavement,
like the heart of a train.

And two thoughts collided,
crashed in the criss-cross of nerves that carry consciousness!
and light sparked in the darkness of the inside of the universe!
and i lived in a body inside-out
my hands reached out, suddenly needing nothing and everything
the big bang at the beginning went off like a gunshot,
took hold like a wound
bleeding life in the middle of blackness.
The crash had caught fire,
and my eyes burst open
and began to see.

sketch of an afternoon inspired by billy collins

2007-06-18T00:05:00.000-04:00

I came to the beach to be alone.

My feet left lonely footprints in the sand,
and the sand left lonely sandprints in my feet.

To me, these patterns look tiny, like freckles or stars,
but if I were small, even smaller than sand,
they would be the crators on the moon, the grand canyon, the great lakes,
and they would make me feel so small, as I looked out over their emptiness.

But I am human, and I watch, instead,
the rain clouds blossom above me,
like a bouquet of faces,
like the family submerged in surf,
the grandmother's turquoise t-shirt washed into watercolors,
a perfect rendering of sea and sky.

Further down the people become silhouettes,
statues dedicated to the muses of finding seashells, of wandering till getting lost, of leaving footprints in the sand,
gray monuments reminding me I am not alone.
I watch them fade into the shadowed, hallowed place where earth meets sky,
the gap in the atmosphere where the universe was born, and is reborn every moment,
where lonely statues evaporate like seas, like dreams, like memories,
as words bloom in the air
like clouds of rain.

A Tanka for a Wise Medicine Woman

2007-06-15T19:48:00.000-04:00

Do old loves have ghosts
like ancestors? Do they move
like water, cold? And
will they ever fall to Earth,
like blackened leaves, melted snow?

The Speed of Sound

2007-06-03T05:51:00.000-04:00

In Elementary school, I stuttered.
W’s were worst.
Like wolves, they leered at me, bared jagged teeth
from the pages of fairytales.

So teachers sent me
to experts in office back rooms
with flash cards, fake wood tables, books.

After several sessions, they said
my mind moved too quickly
for my mouth to catch up.

I've always chased my thoughts like raindrops
spiraling in breathless air,
scaling me, their eyes shining, scared
of shattering.

I'd watch them fall across car windows
from my car seat, stained like storms.
And as they'd race toward the edge,
I'd hedge bets.

But inside, I move slow as time,
as Earth
red rocks and rising tides
climbing down and up
in lines
you traced with your fingertips.

When you left me, you moved like my mind.
You trembled over me,
violently
crumbled me,
finally,
the darkening tranquility
broken,
fallen open,

frail as rain.

As if I, earthly, only weighed you down.

Since then, I have found
a canyon,
that sits between my ribs,
small and silent,
a spoon-sized grave
shaped like a raindrop.

And I think it’s always been there.

And if you held your head against it,
(like you used to,)
you'd hear the ocean,
gently rocking you,
washing you
away.

inspired by a break up and a billy collins book

2007-05-18T13:32:00.000-04:00

I don't know if anyone's ever told you this before,
but Trying To Forget You
is a man who smells like you,
and smiles like you,
and he's really got your walk down.

He's got sandalwood and sunlit skin,
thin limbs that speak with slow, smooth movements
of his tongue,
sung along to old Doors songs
teeth grinning, earnest, tarnished,

bent

Like the pages of the books we borrowed forth and back
and never read.
They sit next to our beds
and wait for us to open,
just slightly misplaced and
oddly obsolete.

Today I shopped for new books
hoping to learn
to Take My French Further and Do It Myself!
I turned ambitions into salvations,
and stacked them close to my chest,
hoping that, with them, I could
forget Trying To
Forget You.

I saw him, though,
in "Culture and Society"
(your favorite section, tragically next to "Feminism".)

And then, again
sprawled out comfortably
sipping green tea
in the cafe.

So I walked--no, ran--away,
weaving in and out of the shelves I've found and made familiar,
tracing the spines
of titles that rise
from the worn, carpeted ground.

Kneeling, my hands opened
to forgotten names,
hoping to learn,
in their thin refrains,
how to say
all of this.
(Because maybe if I write down all the sadness, it'll disappear.)

But all I could think
was "Thank. Fucking. God
you never read poetry."

The Way to End Loneliness

2006-12-16T02:42:00.000-05:00

You say that
in your mind
you stop time.
You slide between moments,
and sleep for hours,
under sheets made out of magic powers.

There’s no rush of schedule
no crush of dread
pulling you awake
so you lie in bed,
and make love,
with everyone you've ever loved.

Your kisses are stories, unfolding
and you sip your conversations slowly,
the metaphors and moonlight swishing between your teeth,
like tea.

You stroll down New York city streets,
with your hands in pea coat pockets.
the clocks are only faceless sockets
and music's sweeping, softly, through the frozen streams of cars.

The sky is full of constellations
and the seconds still as stars.

But in our conversations,
which all take place in time,
you tell me everyone you love can't die.

They will be lined
with tears and wrinkles
like years faded to torn poetry.

Time gives us our frailty.
But I,
I am grateful time will only let me know you

Briefly

like the flicker of stars
cracking open
like our lives bending, broken
our fears spoken
to music soaking in the deep night.

Like a precious dream
Bared in the light.

Luz

2006-07-23T02:31:00.000-04:00

They live within the worn gray walls
of tin and rain and smoke and time.
They live in the gray of their grandmother's eyes,
as she sits next to the open door,
her hands as empty and shining and torn
as the earth floor.

She tells us she's lonely
and the words break like her soft bones
stuck
in the hush of dust and sunlight,
in the dirty chair.

She kisses our cheeks, and cries
and her tears fill up our eyes
with the softness
worn into her life
by the shadows of the fire that cooks food in the corner.

In a crack between the gray walls,
I find them-- two boys' eyes,
as small and shy and dark
as the puppies they carry, in their arms,
to us.

We wish we could remember how to say they're beautiful
as light falls through the round holes in the tin roof like rain.

*the name of the poem's subject, an old woman I met in costa rica; also means "light" in spanish, which i found to be ridiculously appropiate

After the Argument

2006-07-04T02:34:00.000-04:00

It is born cucooned
inside regret. It flutters,
hushed: the loneliness.

Reading Poetry at the Gala

2006-05-13T02:35:00.000-04:00

We walk amidst tapestries,
their dust stories
swirling golden in the silken air,
their faces fair.

But we wear
the colors of sky cracked open,
dresses soft as eggshells broken.
And in cheap high heels,
our feet sore,
we leave apologies scuffed on the clean floor.

Alone before the microphone,
our hands shrink into pupils,
hard.
Our breaths, like sails,
tear apart
on tides of
sequined ribs and thighs,
flattery dripped
from fat, red lips,
with pearls of teeth and fingertips
strung up under marble eyes.

We sing love poems
and they just walk away
like white wine,
tiny seas swirled into storms
by heels that clink like fluted glass
when they pass
and wash their lives away
in sips.

We drown in tapestries dripping down the walls.
And our words,
like small soft faces, fall
-Ignored-
into the pools of chatter.
and shatter
on the cool glass floor.

Searching

2006-01-06T02:37:00.000-05:00

My father doesn’t have a home.

He was born in a New York City borough, to a house hidden between high hills and distant highways, in the days before the grass gave way to asphalt in the lot behind his house. The Long Island Expressway was built there when he was three, so he grew up in the place where the pavement met the playground, amidst engines never loud enough to silence his mother’s screams.

His mother raged at a husband who was too gentle to raise his hand or voice to answer her. She screamed about how they would leave each other. She screamed to move him, because if he moved, even to hit or silence her, she would know he loved her, and didn’t want to lose her. And though his hands had made rhythms out of plywood and car engine machinery, she screamed and screamed but could not make them move.
So my father grew up in the noise between his parents’ silences, squeezed between two older brothers on road trips to the water. He thought if he could just find a quiet place, he could hold his family together, so he looked out car windows and into television sets for a home he never found.

He burrowed into the attic of his house, at 12, and stayed there until he was 33, and all the noise was gone. In the silence, he learned to meditate, work, live alone and love.

My mother met him, loved him, and made him move.
They married in another state. And I was born there.

But my father says he met me before I was born, in a house on Cape Cod, inside himself. He was deep and quiet like the sea outside the window.

He says he can remember nearly drowning on vacation as a kid, when he sank down to the bottom of the turquoise world, and everything was finally quiet and peaceful. He says meditation is like drowning. He’s meditated for 28 years. He meditated in Cape Cod in a cottage, while his wife was skinny with a baby in her belly, and he talked to the baby, inside himself, and told her he’d find her a home.

So they moved to Florida. There, my father grew warm and happy. But he grew to despise Florida when its constant construction of houses and highways began. With everything always growing out and up, nothing was quiet long enough for him to burrow into it and make it home.

So my father gathered about him everyone he loved, all the strange neighbors he had taught to meditate and turned into friends. He said we could all move somewhere together, call it a commune, grow our own food, and there wouldn’t be any highways anywhere that we could hear.

I guess nobody ever really feels like they’ve got a home, because we all began to look for one everywhere where land met turquoise water-- in every state bordered by sea. We flew in shuddering jets, where I’d look out scratched windows to see tiny, shining houses below and see us living there. We drove toward perfect homes on road trips where I’d fall asleep between two screaming parents, hoping that if I kept them together, they would stay still long enough to notice each other.

They never did.

The search for a home began when I was three, and it never ended.

We climbed mountains and walked along rivers through the backyards of people we’d never met. We slept in dingy hotels and drove hours through desolate towns, jotting down the numbers on for-sale signs. We stayed in cold, whitewashed log cabins in winter, just to visit the mansions nearby. We befriended dozens of realtors and hundreds of home owners. But nothing they could offer us was exactly right for us, even though it seemed okay for them. So we lost thousands of dollars in non-refundable deposits on houses we determined weren’t homes.

The longer we searched, the harder it became, because after a while, we began to love the search itself. And we’d seen so many small towns and pretty houses, they needed to become more than that in order to be worth the sacrifice we’d make of giving up our search.

The small towns now needed gourmet restaurants. The houses needed barns and cottages and wrap-around porches. And the fields nearby needed wildlife sanctuaries, because it wasn’t worth living anywhere that could ever get ruined.

It seemed as though my father ruined everything last week, when he found us a home.

Burrowed between mountains and wildlife sanctuaries, the mansion had a barn, a cottage, and a wrap-around porch. The streets of the town below were lined by used bookstores, a river, and gourmet restaurants. As we wandered through it, we felt like we were home.

My father and I sat down next to the river, and he told me the town it flowed through would never be my home. He wouldn’t move there, and he didn’t know why. Maybe it was the mountains, he said. In between them, he felt sort of trapped.

And I thought, I feel trapped. I have lived in anticipation of an upheaval and a home that has never come, and I can’t live with the idea that it won’t. This was your dream, but it has become ours. What did you want if not a home to fill yourself with? What did you want if not a turquoise river to flow through you, that you could sink down inside? What did you want if not everyone you love to stay still with you, in a house with you, forever? And now you have us and you have found a place for us. And you won’t give it a place inside of you.

But the things I screamed were less poetic than that.

I screamed that I share a tiny room with someone who sold her house to buy the last commune we didn’t buy. I screamed about all the things his dreams and decisions were doing to all of us.
He yelled that I was selfish, and fell into silence.

And in his silence, I waited for him to figure himself out the way he always did.

But he didn’t. So for the first time, I forgot myself, and learned to forget selfishness, as I reached for him. I discovered how to find him, where he was sunk down inside himself, and staring at the scene before us.

The river and the mountains and the house were just too big for him to burrow into, and they were growing in his mind, up and out, as he realized they wouldn’t be his home.

He was drowning, and I began to drown with him.

My father had thought that he had to find a house for everyone and all the love he had for them, and hold beautiful scenes still within its sunlit windows. But now he couldn’t bring himself to burrow into the house before us because that would mean having nowhere quiet left to go when the scene outside grew houses and highways that grew away from us. We would never let a house hurt us the way we had been hurt as kids, sitting in the backseats of cars, watching the waves outside the window wash away everything but hope. Highways and arguments were always reaching higher, growing faster, in the air above our heads. So somewhere in our search we had decided to never stay anywhere long enough to hear them.

I sank into the silence with my father, and felt myself grow closer to him, when searching for all those houses, I had only grown away. Together, we saw our lives hidden in the hills and mountains that would never mark our home.

And suddenly, the scene became more beautiful than it had been before, because we didn’t need it anymore: My father has found his home drowning in meditation. It is gone only when he reaches his head above the water.

So he and I decided, in the silence that lies at the bottom of rivers and lives, to search for our own silences as well as we can, and in them, to perhaps find a home.

Autobiography of a Poem

2005-09-12T19:12:00.000-04:00

I am the shape the paper takes
crammed into your pocket,
the white thorn of infant's tooth
torn through wordless socket.

I am thirst.
sharpened into sound
that carves dry rivers into white ground
you can't make whole again.

so i fold into earth's openings,
and I'm waterlily without wings,
sinking down the denim sky
smooth white-washed and tumbled dry.

Till you find I'm empty paper sea
and your hand's tired, treading over me,
threading white waves with leaden black
that you erase, replace, rewrite, take back.

till all my words sound worn and round
and I'm just the dust of white and black,
all swirled into a yin-yang pearl
inside your seashell pocket.

The Voice of an Unfinished Poem

2005-09-06T03:17:00.000-04:00

I am the shape the paper takes
jammed inside your pocket,
a jagged little geometric tooth that's tearing open
a face that can't yet speak.
I am the path its tears take:
hungry, clumsy, incoherent
sinking slowly through the denim
I’m water lily without wings

a stillborn shooting star
too small to light a sky

Library poem

2005-07-30T19:46:00.000-04:00

so
i'm skimming
thru the poetry section
(dewey-decimal 811)
and i'm noticing
great poets often wrote mediocre poems
and i'm thinking
maybe i could write one too.

grandma

2005-07-03T02:49:00.000-04:00

Her house is dark,
and she says
her hands used to reach shelves higher
but now like old trees
heavied by disaster,
they have fallen down
to earth.

so
i climb up
to their storybooks
held just beyond my cereal.
a spoonful for a sentence,
we’ll spoon the story dry
till we’ve climbed so high
nobody can touch us,
interrupt us,
till we're growing
younger older faster
we can see lifetimes together
falling page-by-page across the faces of the earth.
and we’ll unearth
our secrets
in dark rooms full of pearls
that we’ll pour
past our necks
till our stomachs swirl
with stories.

people i love

2005-06-01T18:46:00.000-04:00

the party

2005-05-17T02:27:00.000-04:00

Last night, i noticed that your eyes soften everything, even the light that falls around them, and the faces falling into them, and the walls they fall against.
From a distance, your eyes were softer than your hands
And your hands are soft like oceans
you have washed over me like ocean
and now i’m worn away.

Last night, i stood away from you on the worn carpet night, the air between us weary from years of love songs and forgetting. you danced to it, and i stood in it, in remembrance of things:

First time we met, our eyes met over breaths of confessions, making memories of loves we didn’t want anymore.

Sometimes i don’t want to love at all anymore. i wanted to tell you that last night, but i don’t like to speak in anymore’s.
and last night, i didn’t think we’d speak much anymore.

Now i don’t know.

i remembered we used to speak of things we knew would never happen. but i’d forget they’d never happen. i used to think someday we’d really lie somewhere alone together. i thought we'd lose eachother in each other.

Sometimes i even thought we did.

Last night i lost you in songs that grew the air still wearier. i grew weary in the break of rhythms that brought sweat to our silhouettes, and brought me hope. i danced until i wasn’t too worn down to dance, anymore. i danced until i forgot, in the faces lacing through the stubborn air, the loneliness i thought i’d been worn into.

Last night, i came home and dreamt i wasn’t lonely anymore.
i dreamt when we met, you were dying quickly, so i loved you fully, and it softened you. it softened us both. you died in a short breadth of time. and in that time i loved you more than things i knew would never happen, (for things never have the time to happen.) when you walked away, i was worn away, but only into sadness that stayed
the color of eyes i'd never see anymore. i loved you but wasn't lonely anymore, when i missed you.

Last night, when we were dancing, i missed you. the music was new and taut. it caught us when we jumped into it, and taught me we are dying. even in ways never see, for your eyes even lost some softness when the lights were turned back on. your hands weren't as lovely without music trapped inside their pockets.

time broke that music into rhythms that said softly into hard warm air
we’ll soon lose everything but love.

Last night, as my dream ended, i was afraid to walk up to you, walking away from me. i was afraid to touch you because maybe i would lose something. a little bit of softness, or a little bit of fullness. maybe i’d get worn down into someone you could wear down more. Maybe I’d get worn down into nothing.

Last night, as the party ended, i was afraid to walk up to you, walking towards me. i was afraid to touch you, afraid to hug you goodbye. because maybe i would lose you, or lose myself in you, forget my hands in your hands, have my eyes sink into your’s.

or maybe I would love you, and let go.

Eating Disorder Exposee

2005-04-25T21:51:00.000-04:00

Maybe Johanna Kandel’s life is just another Dreyfoos alumnus’ success story: she got the body and skill she needed for the career she wanted in professional dance.
But that was not her success.
“To Johanna, success means helping even one person avoid going down the same road she has,” says the website of the organization she founded, The Alliance for Eating Disorder Awareness.
There, at eatingdisorderinfo.org, are resources about eating disorders, including a long list of the statistics Kandal once embodied: 11% of highschool students have been diagnosed with an eating disorder. Over half of females between 18 and 25 would rather be run over by a truck than be fat. 51% of nine and ten year olds feel better about themselves if they are on a diet. The most common behavior that will lead to an eating disorder is dieting.
Yet in a way, Kandal’s story of developing, suffering from, and overcoming Anorexia Nervosa, began years before she ever dieted, at the age of three, the year that she began to dance.
“I knew I was going to become a professional ballet dancer, no matter what the expense and sacrifice,” Kandal writes in her personal story at eatingdisorderinfo.org/Johanna.
For her career in dance, Kandal sacrificed her health:
She first dieted at 13 to fill a position in a production of The Nutcracker. When she didn’t get the part, her dieting intensified.
“Success in ballet depends on the development of a wiry and extremely thin body,” said a March 2002 Reuter’s Health Report on Eating Disorders. Yet ballet is not the only pastime with an “occupational hazard” (Kandal’s term for work-related encouragement of weight loss.) Endurance and performance athletes, like runners and gymnasts, are also at risk. Estimates for episodes of eating disorders among such athletes and performers range from 15 to over 60 percent, Reuters reported. In fact, the term, “female athlete triad” is now used to describe the serious disorder affecting dancers and athletes that has the combined presence of three main components: eating disorders, osteoperosis due to weight loss, and Amenorrhea (absence or irregular menstruation).
Kandal developed all of those traits.
Yet the cause of Female Athlete Triad, namely the pressure to perform, explains why many performers, not just athletes, are in danger of disordered eating. “I would think that [eating disorders are more prevalent] in dance, drama, musical theater and even… the choral department,” said musical theater teacher Craig Ames. “In those areas [where] your body is the instrument of your craft… the pressure is greater to have an instrument that conforms to those of your peers.”
Kandal’s dance department peers supported her dieting and exercising, even as it grew less healthy, and more dangerous. “The anorexic condition may be encouraged by friends who envy thinness or by dance or athletic coaches who encourage low body fat,” explained Reuters Health. When people began noticing Kandal’s weight loss, in her sophomore year at Dreyfoos, “I was getting compliments…particularly in my dance classes, such as, ‘you look so great’, ‘you have lost so much weight’, or ‘I wish I had your discipline,’” wrote Kandal.
Kandal’s discipline drove her weakened body, often collapsed on the mat, to get up, and continue working. Thinner and physically ill, she got a part in that year’s Nutcracker, although she admits her weight may not have been the reason.
“Professional ballet companies want their dancers to be thin. There’s no question of that,” said Dreyfoos dance teacher Jeff Satinoff. “[But] these days, [dance company] directors want their dancers to be athletic and physically fit [too]… It’s less about [being] a rail, and more about strength.” Satinoff believes that with weight standards in the world of professional dance changing for the better, pressure has eased in Dreyfoos dance studios as well. “We have had issues in the past with eating disorders,” admitted Satinoff, “but in the dance department… the weight issue is not a big issue for us… anymore.” At least one anonymous dance student disagrees. [quote from dance student saying something else.] Yet, according to Satinoff, the dance department does not encourage their students to lose weight.
Whether or not Dreyfoos teachers discuss weight in their dance classes, the pressure to be thin certainly transcends their department. When I attended Dreyfoos, the biggest misconception was that dancers were the only ones with eating disorders, said Kandel. Today, persistent stereotypes surround the dance department, while students in all departments suffer with disorders. Eva*, a Dreyfoos junior, developed Anorexia in 8th grade; Kelsey*, Dreyfoos sophomore, had both bulimia and anorexia in middle school.
Neither of them are dancers.
According to Dot Sparks, DSOA school nurse, “Eating disorders are probably more of an issue [at Dreyfoos, in all departments,] because we tend to have overachieving people here, already.”
“I was [always]… a perfectionist… a straight-A student, a type-A personality, and a control freak,” wrote Kandal, “…what you call a textbook anorectic.”
In the February [insert year] issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, researchers found that perfectionism seems to increase the risk of developing eating disorders, but not other psychiatric problems. “Part of the drive for perfection is…attaining some ideal image of thinness,” reported Reuters Health.
Anorexia is linked, not just with perfectionism, but also with many other mental traits and disorders, including Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). OCD is defined by the presence of rigid, compulsive behaviors and recurrent ideas or mental images. According to Reuters Health, up to 33% of women with bulimia and up to 69% of women with anorexia suffer with the disorder.
These figures once characterized both Kandal and Natalie.
“When people think of OCD, they think of hand-washing and jumping over the cracks in sidewalks,” explained Kandel, “but it’s also [about] thoughts…[and] most people with eating disorders have obsessive thoughts.”
“There [was] a time when all I would think about was my weight, and if I was skinnier than the girl sitting next to me,” said Eva. “It was so consuming. It completely takes over your life.”
Reuters reports that “Some experts believe that eating disorders are just variants of OCD.”
“[Buhlimia] made me feel like I was in control,” explained Kelsey.
“The [control of] food is just a sublimation,” said local psychologist Dr. Suzanne Kaplin. “You [must] numb the feelings of inadequacy with something, and food is the easiest [substance] to get.”
The perceived inadequacies that lead to an eating disorder often stem from troubled pasts. Studies have reported sexual abuse rates as high as 35% in women with bulimia, according to Reuters Health.
Yet soon the eating disorder is something else in the sufferer’s life rapidly becoming out-of-control. In that way, “an eating disorder is like any other addiction,” explained Kaplan. Kandal, too, sees a link between addictive behaviors and eating disorders, and is currently working, as a dual diagnostic therapist at a treatment center, with people who suffer from both addiction and disordered eating.
Like addictions, there may be a genetic cause for eating disorders. A National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) study is taking place right now to investigate the possibility that Kandal’s anorexia formed in her genetic code, long before she began dancing, and before she was even born. According to Reuters Health, anorexia is eight times more common in people who have relatives with the disorder. Yet the cause of that trend may not be genetics, but psychology. One study found that 40% of 9 to ten year olds lose weight at the urging of their mothers.
“I have a mother who is very fit, and I was envious of her,” said Eva. “Knowing that she was anorexic as a teenager, I thought in order to be thin, it was something I had to do.”
Kandal believes a gene gives someone a predisposition to an eating disorder, but that an environmental factor triggers the disease, itself.
Many people believe the Western media is such a factor, that it encourages eating disorders in its display of often unnatural and unattainable thinness. The National Eating Disorders Association reports that the average fashion model is 5’11” and weighs 117 pounds, while the average American woman is 5’4” and weighs in at 140.
Yet, according to Reuters Health, the societal causes of disordered eating go deeper than the pictures on the pages of magazines: not only does the media market the emaciated ideal, but also the ‘junk food’ that makes rampant obesity a national reality. “In a country where obesity is an epidemic, young women who achieve thinness believe they have accomplished a major cultural and personal victory; they have overcome the temptations of junk food and, at the same time, created body images idealized by the media,” said Reuters Health. “Few people living in this overfed and sedentary culture eat a meal guiltlessly” the report continues, “one can nearly make the sweeping generalization that everyone who lives in a developed nation is at risk for either obesity or some eating disorder.”
Yet within developed nations, females are at greater risk of developing eating disorders than males: 90% of eating disorder cases are in females, reports Reuters. Kaplan believes this gender discrepancy is due to imbalanced societal pressure. “Girls are taught they’re supposed to be beautiful, and thin….and lately, they’re also supposed to be smart,” she said. “That’s a lot to handle.” Kaplan believes the rising rates of eating disorders among men can also be traced back to gender-based pressure. “As women have had to change their roles in society, men have had to acclimate to that change,” she said.
Sexual orientation also seems to affect the occurrence of eating disorders among men. According to Reuters, in one study, 42% of men with bulimia said were they homosexual or bisexual.
Yet all sufferers of eating disorders, regardless of gender or sexual preference, develop certain symptoms.
“[When] I was fifteen years old…although I was literally at the point of [being] nothing but skin and bones, when I looked in the mirror, the … person [I saw] was extremely heavy (maybe even obese),” Kandal wrote. She was experiencing distorted body image, or body dysmorphia, a symptom of both eating disorders.
Bulimia is also characterized by a promiscuous attitude, broken blood vessels in the eyes from the strain of vomiting, tooth decay from stomach acid, dramatic weight fluctuations, poor self esteem, poor control of other impulses like drinking alchohol or spending money, and wearing tight clothing.
As an anorexic, Kandal developed different symptoms: she noticed her hair was falling out in clumps, her skin was yellow, and her body was growing a layer of fine hair, called Lanugo, which served to warm her, and compensate for a lack of insulating fat. Other symptoms of Anorexia are dizziness, fainting spells, exhaustion, mood swings, excessive excercising, and very poor self-esteem.
Kandal developed all of those symptoms. Her dance teachers, friends and family members began approaching her with concerns, but her parents still didn’t notice her disorder, due in part to another one of its symptoms: secrecy.
“When an individual has an eating disorder, he or she becomes very good at hiding it,” Kandal wrote.
Yet, in one moment in the middle of her junior year of highschool, Kandal’s lies stopped working. She was changing out of her dance clothes, and had left the door cracked open, when her mother walked by, glimpsed her ematiated body, and became horrified. “She began shaking me,” Kandal wrote. “She was crying and yelling at the top of her lungs, ‘You look like you just walked out of a concentration camp…You can see all of your bones and muscles.”
Kandal’s mother then took her to a doctor, who found that even with the layers of heavy clothing she had worn for the occasion, her weight was extremely low.
Kandal believes the first step to eating disorder recovery is seeing an MD, and getting a blood test to determine eloktrolyte and nutrient levels, and an Electrocardiogram (EKG) to measure heart damage.
At the age of sixteen, Kandal, who had never gotten her period, found she would also never be able to have children; she also had osteoporosis from lack of protein, and massive kidney and heart problems.
“[In anorexia-induced starvation,] the body will start to use its own tissue, including muscle and organs, for energy, since [it] has no food to use” reported the Eating Problems Service (EPS), at eatingproblems.org/epsefffect. “The heart muscle…can become thin and flabby,” according to the EPS, “and heart failure [may] occur.”
According to the South Carolina Department of Mental Health, (DMH), about 20% of people suffering with anorexia will prematurely die from complications related to their eating disorder.
Bulimia also has serious long-term consequences. “I have esophogitis, and a hiatal hernia,” said Natasha*, a woman in her early 20’s who still suffers with bulimia. “If I eat too much, [food] automatically comes up without force,” she continued, “It is [an] embarrassing… and constant reminder of the harm I have done to my body.”
Bulimia, too, can be fatal in some cases, notably when the esophagus ruptures, esophageal cancer develops, or long-term dehydration leads to kidney failure.
Eating disorders have a higher death rate than any other psychiatric disorder.
“One day my mom literally broke down because she thought I was going to die,” said Eva. “I didnt want to die.”
The next day, after previous relapses, Ava began to truly battle her disorder.
To recover, an eating disorder sufferer must first break the barrier of denial they have built. But even after overcoming denial, many eating disorder patients relapse, often because of stress.
Kandal relapsed once she was accepted into a dance company. Yet she went on to prove that relapse doesn’t mean there is no chance of recovery.
Kandal found that, for her, recovery meant “doing the unthinkable”; it meant quitting ballet.
For Eva and Kelsey, recovery is a day-to-day struggle with their weights and their minds; and for Natasha, it is still elusive.
Although many eating disorder patients never achieve a normal weight, or lose all weight-related mental criticism, “[they] can develop positive tools that help them…supplement negative behaviors,” said Kandal.
She recommends never keeping negative thoughts inside, and for help, seeing an eating disorder specialist.
She, herself, was in out-patient therapy, and seeing a nutritionist, when she realized she “wanted to help others deal with eating disorders.” She enrolled at UCF, and worked at recovering, volunteering with the International Association of Eating Disorder Profesionals, and earning a degree in Women’s Studies and Psychology.
After graduating, Kandal realized, “I wanted to create my own association…and help make eating disorders understood by the teenage population and every other age, gender, class, and race group.” With this goal in mind, Kendal founded the Alliance for Eating Disorder Awareness, at age 21.
Today, Kandal runs the non-profit Alliance from a small office in West Palm Beach, with private donations, one full-time employee, and five part-time volunteers. She answers about a hundred e-mails a day, mostly from people suffering with eating disorders, their loved ones and their caregivers. She does interviews with teen magazines, and radio stations to raise awareness. She visits local middle schools and high schools, workshopping and lecturing.
And everywhere she goes, she tells her stor- knowing it will never be a typical Dreyfoos success story, but hoping it will change typical standards of success.

The Things I've Never Heard

2005-04-02T00:41:00.000-05:00

I’ve begun to think there are strings that connect people,
So that from the moon, the earth looks like it’s laced with spider’s silk.

For us,
On Earth
strings are invisible.
But once they pulled
at me
till
I could see dust motes breathing
a frequency of light
i tried to write
softer than words could hear
and I could hear
the dust motes eating strings’ vibrations.

I hear dust is creation’s beautiful parasite.
I hear it’s the color of strings.

I’ve begun to think strings are everything.
binding the wings
we would grow from our backs
if our backs
weren’t breaking.
tying our lungs too small to
swallow
the stars
till
in shadows
i see
we are
puppets in gallows:
dancing till dancing is snapping our necks.

I cry
sometimes
till I choke on strings
I sob knots into my stomach
I sew lines into my hands
And if I stand for too long in one place
I replace
my veins with threads
and my limbs with ropes,
dead
and thirsty for blood.

But I’ve heard the strings are our’s
and I’ve heard they go on forever.

And I’ve heard they’re a single strand of DNA
Weaving, as we walk between them and across them, our fates.

And I’ve heard they’re an endless line of music:
The refrain that plays at the beginning and ending of everything.

But they pull at me
like they can't be
anything
but
Love.

Ten Fingers

2005-03-11T01:03:00.000-05:00

“Let’s play ten fingers,” you say. It is last year or maybe the year before and we are all younger. We sit wide awake in a wide open night that palm trees and pavements have bordered into a backyard, where we will tell secrets.
“How do you play ten fingers?” i say.
i don’t want to tell any secrets.
i sit on a hammock that’s stretched between trees, the fabric of my skirt stretched into a triangle of twisted legs, and as i sway its slit slips open and i am in familiar nightmares in which my clothes all fall off and everybody laughs.
You explain ten fingers, and everybody laughs, holding the night in tight mouths, between tight teeth, till it can’t hold me anymore. Till I get cold. Then they fall together into silences between the un-confessions, into remorseless little rhythms I can’t hold up with my two hands.
I hold up my hands for the dirty sky to blacken, open my ten fingers for the black night to fill. For i am sick of being clean.
And then i pretend to blend into the night, and its laughter, and the swinging i’m tied to, trying to balance my skirt’s slit closed and my mind open, open enough to let in the whole goddamn world.
It’s not working.
Everyone falls into silence, waiting for you to break the heart of Night (with a secret) until it bleeds over the backyard fence, into parties and cars and Jacuzzis that I have never known.
Earlier, they broke the night so open, it ached, and ran empty. We fed ourselves on the fluorescent lights of dollar store to (un)satisfy our hunger for the darkness, and we stole 1 dollar sunglasses and 1 dollar chains and a 1 dolllar hats to fill ourselves up. And i was scared with no real reason to be scared, as together you and i held the boys (who were high) in a circle of sidewalk, like Rama drew Sita into safety in the sand. But the boys wandered out, into candy stores and streets and bushes, where we couldn’t find them, where I couldn’t get warm. I was afraid and poor at pretending I wasn’t, and you knew, and I knew that you knew.
I am afraid now, as you sit across from me, saying something you have never done. It’s something with a lot of clauses, like, “I have never stolen anything worth over $137 from a store on the left wing of the boca mall.”
Then:
I hold my silence on my tongue a long time, before I surrender it to them. i have never smoked pot. 3 turns. I have never been drunk. 3 more. I’ve never been with a girl. My turns fall upon me faster now, and the world is spinning faster. My mind is splitting into fragments of unrelenting innocence that waver into words that fall off of my tongue. I want to force them all back into my mouth, down my throat, swallow sharp edges softly, so I’ll never see them again.
I stretch back, and see the stars waver above me, drawn by gravity into the frantic mass inside my mind. My awkwardness rivals the night, in its power. It has spilled through the cracks in the fence, and now the neighbors are awakening to cold awkward sweats and clingy sheets. And only I know why.
I don’t know there is nothing alright left to say. “I have never given anybody a hand job,” I say. And you say nothing but you look away and I know my words have been taken by the night , and I have fallen into it, and you can’t even see me anymore. I am clear and black and starry. I am nothingness. I slip away from you, into hands and mouths and stories.
It’s just so cold.

Light

2005-02-16T23:28:00.000-05:00

The car is holding us
And we are holding hands
And your hair is holding sunlight
And the sunlight’s holding secrets
And it tells your hair everything
And I do too.
But i can only think the things i tell.
i think
Your hair smells like just hair because it’s just too original to smell like anybody else.
And i think
i love you i love you i love you
and i am not supposed to think that.

The sunlight doesn’t think; it just holds us
and it holds I am 6pm and the train is coming soon
it holds our hair and hands that we hold together till we don’t think anymore.
and it holds: I am falling Light is
falling from your back
as we fall silent
and i fall, with light, down train tracks and dark thinking horizons:
i think
i want your hair to smell like me
i think
i have to leave now.
i think
i (don't want to) stop

holding you
Like Light.

Why I Come To School

2005-01-27T23:13:00.000-05:00

it is her heart we hear when we're hushed in the halls
hush
for today
it is silent
it is tiny, failing
and she's tiny, flailing
as she starts to scream on the sonogram screen
she is dying in green
she is born.
white
silent
still
so we whisper ariastillwe're singing ariastillwe're screaming arias in her ears
until
she hears
us
minds
poured in pens over the bends of the blue
lines
of her paper skin.
there is poetry in
her hands
and we ring our hands
painting drips in her eyes
till she cries
and the colors run brown
and the sounds
her eyes sing
strike her lung's strings
till they're burning
with the breath of violins
and the earth of creation

This nation
doesn't hear her
silent
anymore.

she isn't silent
anymore.
we hush
for
her heart has returned to this hall.
and.

We
call
her

"Art".

autobio part 2

2005-01-24T02:33:00.000-05:00

As a child, two things seemed realer than anything she experienced later:
1. Her life was a book.
2. She could fly.

These were such compelling realities that she never stopped to think maybe they weren’t real at all. She became real in her dreams that she didn’t know were dreams. And when she noticed they were dreams, she couldn’t fly any more. She tried too hard after that, jumping off couches and constructing wings.

In her dreams, she never flew with wings on because wings were more than human and flying was more human than walking or talking and or other such modern contrivances.

Flying was human like breathing, like drowning.
There was nothing to believe in, and no beliefs to suspend. There was only looking up at things and wishing to be with them, and then floating above them, above the heads of bewildered parents. She could bypass blades of ceiling fans and ceilings altogether- beams and shingles so much less substantial than she. She developed a faithful kind of fear of flying. Of never knowing how high she would go, or how she would get back, but feeling that the sky itself was holding her steady, ready, unafraid, to fall. It was the fear that rendered her humble-enough, human-enough to fly. It was the fear she felt when she was about to climb a tree, fear she could always successfully, though never entirely, ignore, or diminish, or forget.

Adults would always forget she could fly, as she would grow frustrated and bewildered and sad. She’d patiently sit them down and rise above their heads, grace on her face, in the face of their frown. “You can fly,” they’d admit, shielding their eyes from the rising sun, as she rose, satisfied, and shamefully aware that they were chained to the earth by suspicion.

It was a shame they’d forget her flight so soon.

She flew every night as a child, though it seemed like everyday, and everyday, they forgot she could fly.

Adults couldn’t remember what they didn’t want to believe in.

There was little, in her life, that she forgot. In adolescence, she could still remember wrestling with sleep in rocking chairs and warm white arms. She could still remember humiliating things that were meant to go unnoticed: the way, when her car seat tilted sideways, and the car lilted back, and the steering wheel tilted all wrong, her mother forgot everything she knew. She looked down because she forgot her hands, and looked back to remember her daughter.

Sometimes the girl was once removed from her memories; she could only remember remembering. And she’d think that if she could just remember enough moments in which she remembered other moments, she could remember her entire life; she wanted to remember being born, this way. She had always hoped to remember being born.

self-portrait i.e the right asignment for hauesseur (it's pretty bad)

2005-01-20T02:43:00.000-05:00

She’s just so strange.

Her nose defines her: twisted, skinny, asymmetrical, perverse. She’s perverse. She tries to flaunt her falsities but instead bares her innocence, and barely wipes it clean of inhibition. It trails behind her like toilet paper, stuck to her dirty shoes in her dirty mind. Her dirty face is covered in bad skin. Her skin is white like pale people on pale sheets in pale rooms, white like the empty papers she fills with empty mind. Her stomach, too, is empty. And flat. Like her chest. Flat like rats squeezing under doors.

She doesn’t shave her skinny little legs. She thinks nobody can tell while she’s draped in used clothes, in colors and patterns that have come to define her obnoxious brand of anti-sweatshop righteous indignation. She’s a goddamn hypocrite. She’s against violence unless it’s verbal, loud and obnoxious, when she’s ranting her beliefs to an apathetic crowd. She rages bloody, non-violent wars against apathy, but refuses to slice the hair off her goddamn legs. She thinks nobody notices when she wears the same pants or misses the train four fucking days in a row. But I do.

Her irresponsibility is breath-taking. She pays the least attention to what she cares about the most, and then re-pays all her attention in regret. Too late. She is reliable only in being late. Staying up late. Sleeping late. It’s like she likes to think she, in her 5-foot-two glory, can re-write the rhythms of the atomic clock in motion, can reverse the rotation of the globe in the sky.

It’s like she owns the sky. She likes to think it rains for her. I’ve watched her, face turned upward, outward from her emptiness, standing in the rain, as if it could mend her, fill up all her little white holes. She desperately wants to be mended, but not quite enough to do anything about it. She feels bad and she could bask in her misery forever, bash herself in the third person forever. But she likes to think she’s more than that. She likes to think she transcends her skin, even though she’s always slightly too aware of its existence, slightly too uncomfortable within its white walls, in white motion. She likes to think someday she’ll stop being irresponsible and empty and bad. So she writes pretty poems about it and takes pretty photos about everything else and they all come out pretty good. And then she’s not so bad.

But still so goddamn strange.

Awkard Meditation

2005-01-17T04:50:00.000-05:00

There are feelings we acquire about years, vast clumps of time we can lend no words to, or atleast, no few words. We can speak of them only in volumes or sensations, for if some stranger on the street were to inquire, how were those 2 years or that 6 months, you’d know. You’d stare him dumbly in the eyes, but your mind would be bathing in the tepid tea of history. You’d know.
I know my life in a familiar map I can’t spread out fully in my lap, but can see only folded into little squares of feelings, easy to hold, but impossible to place into he context of a state, a world, a nation. I don’t know how long the rivers of my expectations flow after they’d dripped off the page of my immediate 28 miles. My life is patches of adolescence to examine separately from the patches of infancy. Yet the feeling of these patches, their over-riding color, is common.

I could call it awkwardness or humiliation, but to lend it a term is to deprive it of its meat: the ability to scare me, to slip too easily under my skin and, (my mind wanders), never come out.

It’s the feeling of being caught doing something we all do but don’t speak of, that somehow, in its universality, is more sacred:
Picking noses. Scraping the dust out of a paper cut. Examining our own shit. It’s more menial than masturbation. More self-absorbed than popping zits. It’s something I can’t give origin to any more than I can stop giving it my attention. I think perhaps it’s what allows me to so easily believe I am homosexual, clinically insane, anorexic, and then to so easily stop believing it. It’s the feeling of inexplicable 4 am hysterias that I transcribe into inevitably dissatisfactory poetry.

It’s digging fingernails into innocent skin. It’s pulling out individual hairs.

When I was a kid, a really little kid, littler than 3 or 4 or self-awareness, I thought I’d be a criminal when I grew up. It wasn’t a wish so much as an inevitability, something that, like growing breasts, was uncomfortable but unavoidable.
It was untouchable.
It was awkward.

I am fascinated by awkward.

I tried to write a poem about awkward conversations the other day. I wanted it to be hard-hitting slam poem. It went like this:

You breathe uneven and self-aware
You bare
Your naked ass to everyone
And they feel too bad to laugh at you.

That’s as far as I got. My (poorly written) righteous indignation at the enigma of the awkward conversation then tapered out.
I feel like tonight I’m picking it up again.

I began this strange, humiliating meditation to figure myself out but I’m growing impatient and a revelation seems neither fitting nor forth-coming.

I take comfort in the experience that uncomfortability precedes revelation, and discomfort in the proverb that a watched pot never boils.

Tonight, I’ll be up watching pots.

auto bio part 1 i.e the wrong assignment for hauesseur

2005-01-14T01:59:00.000-05:00

Mitch knew her before she was born. They met inside a house on Cape Cod, inside himself. He was deep and quiet like the sea outside the window. He said he could remember nearly drowning as a kid, when he sank down to the bottom of the turquoise world, and everything was quiet and turquoise and peaceful. He said meditation is like drowning. He meditated for __ years. He meditated in Cape Cod in a cottage, while his wife was skinny with a baby in her belly, and he talked to the baby, inside himself, and smiled.

Then he told everyone what she told him: that she was a girl, a strong girl, and she was named Sarah. She would be a photojournalist, she said, and she must not go to the middle east in her twenty-third year. Because then they would lose each other.
He gained 28 pounds and gallbladder disease and a prophecy in those nine months; his wife, Rose gained twenty six pounds and a cup size and some fear. And together they lost a good marriage. And two good jobs, and a good house.
They would say it was worth it for an exceptionally good daughter, who, by the way, never believed them.
They would also say that was a time of great change: Everything old fell apart and everything new was constructed.
Old house. Old friends. Old marriage. Old Connecticut.
New kid. New friends. New affairs. New Florida.
Florida. They grew warm in Florida, and grew to despise Florida.
But she’s getting ahead of herself.
When her pointy head emerged from her round womb to a square room, she didn’t cry. Her mother grimaced as her baby fell grinning into the hand she’d just spent ___ hours silently holding, drowning with her husband, with ice melting in her mouth with unbearable pain in her body. She never cried. He never let go, except to get her some more soda-fountain ice. Together, they never forgot that, and often told that to their daughter, who grew to admire her mother’s silence, and grew to cry silently.
Crying was her only silence. She said her first word at three months, and it was book. The word foreshadowed her later obsession with the things: reading them, composing plots for them, discarding them. Book, she said, as she looked into the room with the shelves that were filled with them, little face, eyes big, room big. Book, she said every time they carried her in there. Book.

As a child, two things seemed realer than anything she experienced later:
1. Her life was a book.
2. She could fly.
She flew everyday, as a child, in front of everyone, but no one ever remembered.

Forgotten Graveyard

2005-01-13T13:57:00.000-05:00

girl is afraid, is losing her footing on thin earth over coffins, is losing her eye in her camera.

she laughs at epitaphs and jumps on skulls and imagines a thousand stirring souls whispering legacies into her lungs, railing against her eardrums. she imagines she has desegrated eternity. she imagines her eternal retribution.
but she can't imagine Death.
though he is desperate, hungry for attention.
the young pretend they don't know he exists. the old pretend they've forgotten him
while
wild flowers sweep through whole families, aesthetic plagues. and heavy stones fall on thin wood propped up to restain them. old men. cheap canes. monuments disintegrate: illegible. erased. silenced by nothing in particular.

Even the epitaphs are dying.

amazing quote

2005-01-10T18:20:00.000-05:00

"i don't like to write things about myself, but i'm too self-centered to write anything else."

put up a parking lot

2005-01-09T22:10:00.000-05:00

The trees rise from muddy earth to muddled sky, and become lovely. They kiss each drop of rain to forget their greenness. They grow inspired by the wind, as you inspire me. They leave luminious stories rotting in their earth, as I will leave you my stories. And as the earth takes their oranges, you take me. They know they belong to the earth, as I thank you. Their roots encircle each worm casing, each seed, dark and lonely, and they drink and drown and are thirsty again. Thirsty trees. Thirsty me.
I love you.
I hate you.
The oranges have rotten brown and fallen black. You've fallen quiet. The wind forgets to inspire. The earth forgets to be dark and lovely. You are not lovely anymore. We are not lovely anymore. Concrete pours itself into the crevices of roots and hands till I forget how they were ever interwoven. The trees rise from asphault earth to granite sky. And they lose their innocence, forget their greenness in the gray. I have forgotten my innocence, and I wish to remember, but it’s too late.

i fucking hate this poem

2004-11-18T14:24:00.000-05:00

It’s the Beginning of the World
and
the stars are fire
the sky is fire
the night is fire
We touch it with our feet
and turn to clay
we say
we are no longer beautiful
for we are full of words and water
we cry the fire into dust
(and it becomes the earth)
and then we live
and then we lust
we lust for too many years to count on our two clay hands
we lust until… nothing is still
until
it’s the end of the world
and the stars and sky and night are fire again
but it's too beautiful to fear
so we go near
Sit in rainbows at its feet
and eat the dust

Elanor and Me

2004-11-15T02:02:00.000-05:00

What is it like to be completely helpless? To be like an insect, pressed up against glass? I only ask because I think that maybe I am helpless. (Sometimes. Or most of the time.) I think that I am up against something big that’s keeping me from what I want.
I want complicated things, or really, simple things that this world feels the need to complicate. I want world peace, and an end to hunger, and beautiful girls to make love to me endlessly. And I want to be kissed.
I want someone to stick their tongue in my mouth in the library. Or the supermarket. I want someone, somewhere to want me desperately, to want me as much as I want the idea of them. So what if I don’t want them, specifically? The beautiful things in this world are bigger than specific. They are world peace, God, giant panes of glass. They are the beauty of beautiful people. My friend, Elanor has beauty so big, she reminds me of universal truths. Sometimes I want to say to her, “Your lips seem to contain human suffering,” or “your eyes hold the meaning of life.”
I want to say this right before I want to kiss her. I want Elanor specifically, for Elanor is beautiful. Elanor lacks the instinct to be cruel. Elanor is the only one who knows I have never been kissed. She keeps my secret because I keep her’s. Her’s aren’t so bad by themselves, but altogether, they have the power to dehumanize her. And they always come all together. They flood my mind with the severity of a monsoon, through the telephone, which has a remarkable capacity for Elanor’s secrets. Her secrets plague her whole being, all at once. They are memories and criticisms and beliefs that make Elanor feel so tiny, she thinks she isn’t worth the space her tiny body takes up, while she’s lying in bed, crying to me; I wish she could understand that her beauty is so big it barely fits inside my mind, and it’s much too much for the telephone to handle. And it can handle a lot. It can handle more than I can, because it can stand to hear her cry.
Elanor, if you’re reading this, I love you.
Elanor would never read this. She would never violate my notebook because she loves me too much. She’s told me so. But she doesn’t mean it the right way.
She cuddles with me sometimes. In my bed. In her bed. In her car. Elanor’s a flirt, and I tell her so, but she doesn’t take it the right way. Once she got drunk, and bit my neck and giggled. I giggled too. Right after that, she fell asleep, and I wanted, more than anything, to kiss her forehead. It was pale and pretty, and I was pale and scared. I was scared my knowledge of her beauty would be transmitted through my kiss, and she’d reject it in disbelief, and she wouldn’t understand. I was scared she’d be scared. So I stared at her. And she woke up and looked at me and smiled.
Elanor and I had a nice conversation the other day. We have nice conversations a lot. And this one was sad. It was about how I’ve never been kissed. It was about why. She didn’t think there was a why to it, but I did. Because I think there is always a why. Like, why doesn’t Elanor know how beautiful she is? Because one day, I’ll whisper it to her, and , she’ll believe it, and it’ll be wonderful. And why isn’t there world peace? Because, one day I’ll be masturbating on it, and I’ll suddenly understand why. And I’ll tell Kofi Anan. And he’ll fix it. And it will unite the Israelis and the Palestinians. And the Muslims and the Hindus, and the Muslims and the Christians, and the Muslims and the Jews, (because it seems the Muslims are problematic.) Or so I hope.
See, I like to masturbate on big important wishes, bigger and more important than random girls, with their big tits, and their small beauty. I like to masturbate on world peace and an end to world hunger, and why I’ve never been kissed. I like to think that when I come, my wish comes to pass.
When I was talking to Elanor about why I’ve never been kissed, she didn’t know why. And I didn’t know why. And then I got upset, and mad at God. And then I felt bad because it’s a stupid thing to get mad at God about. Except that I remember this one time when I was praying to for world peace, and an end to hunger, and a kiss for a poor 18-year-old guy named Joe, that something happened. I felt loved. I felt more loved than I ever felt. And I didn’t think I was crazy or pathetic or stupid anymore. I thought I was okay. And everything was okay. And I thought I’d be kissed. But I tend to forget about being okay, and I just remember the kiss. And it hasn’t happened yet. Which worries me that God was full of it, or that I made the whole thing up, that it never really happened. But I really think it happened. So I must be missing something. Because people tend to do that.
Elanor is missing the most obvious things. The other day, we were having another good conversation. This one was sad, too. Elanor was talking about a boy who made her come, who treated her like shit. And I thought, “I’d do the former, and not the latter.” And it seems like Elanor is missing me. And she’s missing why I love her. And how can that be okay? And in that same conversation, I was talking about how I haven’t lived yet. Because I’m 18 and I’ve only come alone, and I’ve never been kissed, or drunk, or high. I've never smoked pot, and I’ve never been homeless, and I want desperately to be homeless. Punk-rock homeless. Hard-core homeless. Ripping-off-the-evil-capitalist-system homeless. My year off was supposed to be homeless, dammit. But instead I’m lying in my family’s big blue pool, and sinking down in their little green Jacuzzi, and thinking about my hypocrisy, and my innocence, like right now. Right now, I think about Elanor, and how I can’t have Elanor.
Want to know the truth? Yesterday, I told Elanor the truth. That I loved her. That I loved her a lot. That I’d loved her a lot for a while. And I told her to please not panic. And my heart hurt because I knew she’d panic, and I knew I’d lose her. And I knew that in retrospect I’d know that it wasn’t worth it. And as I said it, I knew all of that, but I didn’t know what else to do. Because I already felt bad for wanting to kiss her. And do a little more than kiss her. Because she thinks everyone is only friends with her so they can kiss her and do a little more. Or a lot more. And I never even told her that, even though I tell her everything. We always exchange secrets and I was one short.
And it was strange because after I said it, I stopped panicking and she never panicked at all. Elanor giggled, told me that she was flattered, that maybe she’d think about kissing me. And we sat on my porch and laughed about logistics at 2 am and it didn’t even matter if we kissed because we loved each other but it was nice to know that maybe we would.
So I’m sitting in the Jacuzzi and the phone’s ringing, and it’s Elanor, and this was just 10 minutes ago. And she’s speaking softly and I’m writing hard, and it’s not nice. And I’m crying and I can’t help that I’m crying. “So Elanor,” I say, “you never wanted to kiss me?” “That’s right,” she says, “I’m sorry.” But I’m sorry. But she’s sorry. But I’m sorrier, dammit. We exchange heartfelt apologies for 20 minutes straight and they cancel each other out like Algebra class until there is nothing but the tired murmurs of two exhausted people who love eachother desperately and sigh, desperately afraid, into two callous telephones that are dying. I am dying, I think. I can’t take this, I think. I sink into green chlorine and want to dye my eyes out. But they’re still there.
Elanor’s still there. Somewhere. With a dead phone. I think of her, her eyes that are so beautiful they have witnessed eternity, and I start yanking on my cock because I’m so goddamned pathetic. So motherfucking pathetic I can’t even get kissed by the only person I know who loves me. And I wish, more than anything, to know why. And I don’t even want to jerk off anymore but I want an answer to the fucking wish because it plagues me like all of Elanor’s little tiny worries. Her little tiny worries that mean so goddamn much to her. And Jesus Christ, I’m worse than Elanor because I’m not even beautiful. And I’m coming and I feel like shit for coming. And I can barely hold the pen.
So I came. Got a little bit of white in my parents’ green Jacuzzi. And Elanor just now showed up at my door. Just to see if I was alright, I guess. And I can’t hate her. Even though I can’t kiss her. I think it’s because I love her too much. Yeah, maybe that’s it. And she hugs me even though I’m wet, even though I’m clutching my notebook behind her back so I can write while she’s speaking, which she hates. She hugs me for a long time, and it feels good, and I think she’s crying.
And I’m scratching down everything she says because it seems meaningful. She says I won’t kiss you because you’ll want to do more, and I’ll want to do more, and things’ll get bad. I say things are pretty bad, right now. She says sex makes then worse. I say I’m not like the boys who make her come and treat her like shit. I say I’ll do the former and not the latter and it’s really a pretty good deal. She says our friendship will change. I say it already has. I say life is change, dammit. She says I say dammit too much and spell it all wrong. I shrug. And then I start crying bullshit self-pity crying and then I can’t stop and then I’m whimpering about stupid shit about how pathetic I am, about how I want to be homeless instead of sitting in this Jacuzzi with her who's still got her clothes on, and about how I want to get kissed, and about how I’m too innocent for anybody’s good. And she tells me I’m not cut out to be homeless, but I’m good at sitting in jacuzzis and crying. She tells me innocent is better than orgasms with assholes. And you know what she tells me that makes a lot of sense?
She tells me the reason that I can’t get kissed- the big reason, the pane of glass reason- is because I’m missing the fact that innocence is beautiful, because I’m not willing to accept my own innocence. She tells me I am beautiful, beautiful that’s big like the meaning of life and all the shit that’s wrapped up inside it. She tells me to live innocently because I haven’t got a choice, and the whole reason i haven’t got a choice is so I can learn to dig being innocent. And I think that’s impossible, but I'll try do it anyway just as a nice gesture to God because he actually gave me an answer when I came, and that’s pretty Goddamn cool in itself.
And now we’re just sitting here, in silence, Elanor and me, and now everything seems okay.

madeline

2004-10-26T11:22:00.000-04:00

madeline
lives in the back of her vw van

(from 196osomethin or 70somethin, that

used to be stuck in the ground, that

we liberated, laughing)

madeline is liberated

from

cities

gritty

crack-cocaine

houses

that used to be southern plantations

and i see her laughing incantations

to rich people and vegetables

(andsheisbeautiful)
madeline has a skirt she made
and an education she made
and a life she made
from old patterns she found
on the ground
that she aligns
in new designs
that are beautiul

she is full

of home-grown sweet tomatoes and sweet potatoes
that she'll shit into holes
that she'll sit on. alone. under a sky that has clouds that go on and on forever
she tells us her story it goes on forever
and i think it's because she likes to follow the sky.

wish

2004-10-18T19:11:00.000-04:00

give me
this concrete this dirt this green (grass) this blue (sky)
but pry my eyes open
my lips open
my lungs open
(because)
i want to swallow the sun
as it lulls me to sleep
(in its circles,
its darkness.)
i want to breathe the sky
choke on clouds
down the blue
the sound of blue
has yet to be heard
and the dirt...
i want to become the dirt
(and i will)

home away from home

2004-07-21T01:30:00.000-04:00

Looking into the window of the abandoned house next door
i see
that the
old lady was doing laundry when
(i don’t know why)
she up and moved to the nursing home, 3 doors down
on the other side of the street.
She has a better ocean view now
the sea and her eye
dance together
breathe salt and sway
look away
from the house
that she left
with the dirty socks inside
that she wonders about
every so often

paradise, lost

2004-07-14T02:51:00.000-04:00

the other night, a moth was drawn to the light of my window
and a spider's web was stretched across her porthole to paradise
the sky was black
and the moth was the color of clay
her struggle was brilliant
i closed the blinds
and her paradise was lost

love poem from older generation to my generation

2004-07-13T00:34:00.000-04:00

(AKA serious social statement gone awry)

you are so young
so doomed
so beautiful
this era becomes you,
graceful and writhing
you dance and sway and your hips are bony and your purple eyeshadow makes you look like you're magical.
you are tempted and give in and regret nothing.

you babble romances and inspire songs
and then believe every word of them.
you make me i wish i didn't know any better so i could believe them too

i think
you are too skinny
but when you kiss me
i taste eden sprouting on the tip of your tongue
it's from the fruit of knowledge you hid in your purse when you hopped eden's fence and ran away and almost got busted by the security camera.
(but i think AID's is just God getting back at you...
you know what they say about running from the law.)

unfinished fiction...it was going to be the great american novel

2004-07-11T02:36:00.001-04:00

I step out of bed and my glasses affirm that I can’t see worth a damn anymore without them, and that with them it is 3:58. And the carpet affirms that my feet sleep more persistently than me. I trudge into the living room with drowsy unanswered compulsion and this line’s running through my head from a poem written by my pseudo-intellectual college buddy: “I would stay up all night if all night I could write something beautiful.” And this line just keeps running through my head. Persistent as my feet covered with hair and sleep that yanks at nerve endings and twists them into knots that come undone and fall away and leave my feet trudging down basement stairs, barely sidestepping asbestos and not having as much luck with the dust. And I’m coughing and dreary but compelled to stop and think awhile atop boxes filled with 57 years of unexamined shit. I suddenly remember a dream that inexplicably reminds me of old happy movies, of John Wanyne, and Fred Estaire and Ginger Rogers. And then I remember what I’m there for. Somehow my typewriter finds my lap. Somehow there’s still paper in it, and somehow there is light enough to see by. It filters through oceans of dust and I am just a fish in the vastness. The line from the poem is audible for miles, and I think it is ancient like the light of stars that through the bends of space, is lost for generations. I answer it. The first words in my mind are on the paper and they are re-arranging themselves into coherent lovely phrases. Then sentences. Then paragraphs. And I can’t help but notice how eloquent I’ve become. My feet are cold and white and lonely for eachother, but I notice they are awake. And satisfied. And so am I.
I go back to bed.
Every night repeats itself in my dimly lit basement. I notice plots and sub-plots unfolding on yellow paper. In the yellow light. I have to buy more paper. There are stacks of it, now, next to the old avocado-green kitchen chair that I write in. In a year, there is a stack of papers high enough to qualify for the term, “book”. I secretly call it a book in head.
And my feet have never been more satisfied.

writing about writing is so fucking cliche

2004-06-24T23:17:00.000-04:00

i am in maine sans a scanner. but i shall put my camera to good use on rocks that have posed for photographs in vain for 10,000 years.
and i shall write you poems about those rocks.
and maybe one or two about failure.
i am lonely.
last year i wrote a poem about my loneliness. and this year i read books about its nature. vonnegut inspires temper-tantrums about my writing. about everything i may never become. everything i am not. everything i am araid of (never becoming). good books remind me: "you know nothing about life." they say it over and over again in neat little rows on their pages. there's this story i want to write so bad and i don't know how to begin. i don't know how to become a 45 year old man. i don't even know how to express his loneliness. because when you are lonely, it is so hard to remember that somewhere a 45 year old man is lonely too. because if you remember that, all you've got is a story worth telling. i guess. all i've got is an endless supply of empty pages and an unshakable feeling of failure.

i would very much like to be a writer

2004-06-20T02:29:00.000-04:00

i beseech you, (god) give me a story.

what the fuck is compassion?

2004-05-16T23:53:00.000-04:00

2004-04-29T02:34:00.000-04:00

I am Joe Dimaggio, continued. (fictional blog by ana)

2004-04-24T12:52:00.000-04:00

One would think I would have left as soon as I walked in, and saw what that man was about, with his crazy ideas of conceptual art. But I didn’t. And it wasn’t out of hope, that I stayed… or love, not then; or even desperation. The truth is there was nothing so noble that drove me into that hell-hole. It was shock, and awe, and morbid fascination. And I am so ashamed.
And I’ve suddenly realized you will never believe this. All of it. But you need to. Because it is true. And because I will never free myself from the past if it is not believed in… and could you treasure it? because maybe it needs to be treasured.
My poet’s apartment always smelled like paint. I think it was a mixture of the blood and the narcotics that lay puddled in the cracks in the floor; heroin and turpentine and things that lose their minds inside the bloodstream, that flood your own mind in effort to reclaim what is rightfully their’s. They say you could get high from walking on his ground, from the cracks in your feet splitting into blood, from the blood meeting the intoxication that thrived between the floorboards.
A lot of poets contracted AIDs inside his apartment. It’s really a good thing I always wore my socks.
(and condoms).
And I think my visions of feet pajamas were my vague attempts at salvation. I was like the woman who flails her arms to save herself from the shark, when he is already upon her. My dreams were flailing little wills to protect his feet, to save his blood, to save his mind, his immunities, his dead best friends. I have just realized this now.
And I am ashamed. I want to banish that noble calling of shame from the faces of the earth, forever. But shame makes me immobile, makes me hopeless. Not even the murderers deserve to be ashamed. or maybe only the murderers. But not the bad children, or the ugly people, or the whores.
I’m listening to shitty kind of new rock music on the radio. I can’t tell if it’s mostly static or if it’s supposed to be like that. Whatever happened to rock and roll? I am ashamed of the generation we have produced. I am ashamed of what all the dead have done in their collective copulation. Because, somehow, it devolved to this. If Einstein had had children it would have been different. The gene pool is what needs this generations’ “technological advances,” not fucking cell phones. and they’re too arrogant to notice. Whatever happened to rock and roll? And I am not ashamed of them for their music. I’m not really ashamed of them at all. Well, maybe a little. But mostly, I’m ashamed of myself for understanding this shit, for being perfectly familiar with the ignorant righteousness, with the instinctual indignation; It’s that sense that you’re born with that life just isn’t fair, but that it’s worthy of your anger…and later, of your shame.
I am so ashamed. My entire life, I have lived wrong. Half the time I knew it and did it anyway because it was easier.
I fucked my poet. You probably guessed. This is like the plot of a movie my brother would boycott. A movie where the audience has been holding its breath, for the predictable attainment of the cliché dream. It’s kind of like sex, all over after the orgasm. Our friendship went kind of like that, it really did. The only thing keeping us happy was the anticipation of the obvious.
The problem was I overstayed the anticipation.
Shit. Is counter-culture poet sex really that predictable? Let’s wax-poetic: Our jazz blood, just about busting through our HIV-infused veins, sinew on starving sinew. Alcohol breathing down the neck, remorselessly.
It’s like a movie my brother would make. To him, as long as it’s counter-culture, it loses that cliché factor that he’s so against. Problem is, he’s wrong. It’s like the grass-roots governor campaign he was so keen on running….and so keen on filming. He does documentaries. They’re bullshit, though, completely contrived.
So I ran for governor. And the upshot was I didn’t even make it to the ballot. My campaign slogan was: The best of both words: famous name, but the heart of an average Joe. The whole campaign was run out of Wal-Mart, because my brother works at Wal-Mart. He gained some converts, though… not to me, but to atheism. And I’ve decided that I kind of hope he’s wrong about there being no god….just for the look on god’s face, just to put the fear of god into him, just because he could use it.
Christ, I sound like an old man.

In case you were wondering, I never thought that I was gay…I never thought that I was anything like that. I never gave a damn.
I think my brother thought that he was gay for a while. He’s hinted at it vaguely in our awkward “getting to know each other” phone calls, oddly reminiscent of conversations with girls I was dating in high school. It was that same rush to pour your life through the phone line, without seeming too over-eager. Sometimes, I could see my brother’s whole life, whizzing towards me, in the phone line, through some town in east Nebraska.
And so my brother hinted awkwardly at some struggle with some sexual identity or other. And I remained silent. Truth is I remained silent through much of our conversations. Truth is I wasn’t trying to pour my life through a wire. I was just listening, just breathing on the other end, unknowingly but unabashedly inspiring unease or acceptance. I just listened.
And my brother knows almost nothing about me.
He doesn’t know my race or my dad’s real last name.
He doesn’t know any of it.
The truth is I don’t really like my brother, but I’m sorry about that. But I don’t know why.
In the AARP magazine that is delivered to my house every month since I’ve been of age, they mention “curmudgeons“. and, I, this 50-some ought year-old didn’t know what a curmudgeon was. It’s a funny word, though. It sounds like a butter substitute.
So now that I’ve read the article, I think I’m a curmudgeon. And maybe that’s the only reason I dislike him.
I generally toss it up to his pretentious artist bullshit. But I’ve been there too. I’ve dressed in all black or nothing and had orgies with men in Greenwich village.

- posted by Joe @ 10.10.03

I am Joe Dimaggio

2004-04-24T12:36:00.000-04:00

Monday, September 29, 2003

As you may have noticed, I am Joe Dimaggio. A real one. Not the dead one. I'm not some long-lost ghost of baseball. Like the Elvis of the sport, being dug up and revived and paraded around to a full house in Vegas; fat middleaged men (much like myself) milking me of all my stale glory. I'm very much alive. Well, not very much, but enough. Enough to mourn. Last year, my father died and i've lost much of my life, but somehow I'm still alive enough to mourn. And enough to be taxed, and touched, and enough to be lonely. And somehow i am alive enough to run for California state governer. Which I am. I really am. My shrink said it would help.

I suppose this is the introduction to my life, my life runnning non-linear through my wilting brain. Yes, my brain, though only 55, is wilting, I've decided. All the color is being drained from its crevices that grow memories like moss. And the memories are plentiful. And I have no one to give them to. No one to help me understand how they began and became more than images, but whole universes to fall into and believe in and die inside. But i don't want to die inside them. I just want them to be seen, and heard and forgiven, somehow. And...Christ, I'm just so lonely.
- posted by Joe @ 29.9.03

Sunday, October 05, 2003

My brother's my campaign manager. My half-brother bastard. i'm a bastard too, actually, if you count that week of pregnancy before the marriage. Does that count? Maybe it only does if you're Catholic. And I'm not. Yes, despite the last name, folks, I'm not even Italian.

My brother was raised Italien. He picked up the accent, and all. He used to be Catholic. And even though he still wears this horrificly detailed cross, and prays to Mary, he says that he's an aetheist now. I I was always so greatful to have been raised Jewish, just so I didn't have an unsightly dead guy around my neck. Really, what a thing to walk around with.
Anyway, my brother says he's seen the light. Or rather, the lack there of. It doesn't seem to me he's changed much from being Catholic, though. He still gets all righteous about how Washinton is against him, and he still tries to convert old jews at the mall. I still pretend I don't know him.

So my brother showed up a few years ago at my doorstep. He saw me for the first time though this big video camera of his. He makes films. I panicked. And so he said, in this dramatic voice that I'm his brother. And I stood there awkwardly in my bathrobe.
It was the 80's, then. Everyone who was young or wanted to believe they were, was dressed in clothes too big, clothes faling off in neon colors. My brother was apparently young enough to make an ass of himself, completely unquestioningly. Not me. I always wore my postman uniform. And later, when the postal service invested in those trucks, I took to wearing my bathrobe out on the job. I'd been working 20 years or so on litle more than minumum wage, and so I figured I was entitled to losing my dignity. Everyone accepted my change in attire non-chalantly. They wouldn't even let me properly lose my dignity. The bastards.

Anyway, when my brother first showed up, my heart skipped. And not because he was my late mother's illegitimate son. It had nothing to do with that, actually. Liked most things in life, it instead had to do with sex.

In 1972, my mother died.

A thought: when are you too old to be an orphan? 10? 20? I think i am a 55 year old orphan.

I used to wonder, when I went to my dad's friends' funerals as a kid, what my mourning style wold be, exactly. Because the survivors always acted differently. They rarely mourned like the perfectly black and white people did in Hollywood, and so it was always disappointing for me. I secretly hoped the dead guy's mistress wouold climb on the casket, pouding the glass and screaming "why?!" then collapse and hug the casket, weeping. But she never did. The mistress was never terribly vocal at these things. But you could never even count on the legitimate survivors for decent melodrama. Sometimes they were hysterical, choking on the air in their lungs, and sometimes they sat stoically, taking in the day's events as if it were a witness' testimonial, begging their judgement; or they cried silently; or sat in smiling appreciation, as if of the beauty of a sunset.
When my mother died, I found that I would have been rather perplexing to a 10 year old boy at a funeral. My mourning style was half-assed. And It was fickle. I went through the 4 or 5 stages of mourning, or whatever the hell they are, atleast 20 times each, and in no particular order. The common thread through all of it was that there was no hope. No matter how outraged or functional I felt, I only had to silence insignifigant voices to hear the trembling that that life was empty. Last year, it was the same, except it roared.
Through all of it, I didn't miss a day of work.
And i found, somewhere in a droning of voices in my mind, a letter in a mailbox that was addressed "to anyone." On the outside of the envelope, all it said was "to anyone." and i was the only anyone who'd ever find it, the only one who'd see it before the person who'd discard at the post office like letters to santa-clause, letters with imaginary adressees. and i couldn't lt it happen...because i wasn't imaginary. and i... i was "anyone."
it was read on a bus home with quivering hands. and it overpowered my hopelessness, quivering too.

you know, all this reminiscent shit is just trying to make these experiences beautiful, trying to make them worthy of something more than my subsistence, or maybe just worthy of my suibsistence. maybe that would be enough. i don't want them to be folded up inside me anymore, like intestines, crumpled into inefficient function, into the longest distance between myself and clarity. there is no access, now, to the clarity that is rumore to be waiting behind the palest eyelids.

and maybe, if i can make death lovely, it will not come.

in 1972, death had alreay come. and not just to me, but to the man that wrote the letter.
It took me a week, after unfolding it, to decipher every word, to place every letter between every other other letter. And it was lovely. And death stopped quivering in my ears. the words slipped effortlessly beside eachother. Poetry. A few years later, the man who write it would be the poet laureate. but then, he was just a poet. my poet.
and so i found his doorstep again in the grid that is manhatten. truly, i found his doorstep every day. i brought him catalogues. but he had not gone outside for the mail. They piled up, forlornly; the lists of books and spices for purchase; they kept company to the bills that were becoming overdue. a fear grew in me that he would be evicted, that they would tear him away from the walls, in feet pajamas. in my fantasies, even the darkest ones that involved my poet, he always wore feet pajamas. i have begged an explanation of this, from my psychiatrist. when pressed, she says that freid said feet were sex, and since my poet's feet were covered, these dreams lacked sexual intent. Even, i wondered silently at the woman in the cushoned chair, when i fantasized of touching my poet? and even when these fantasies were realized? but i have gotten ahead of myself. you are not supposed to know of this yet. only know of my poet's existence. and his feet pajamas, that were, by the way, blue.
So i wrote my poet letters. They were never so beautiful as his. They never succeded in effortlessness. And he never checked his mail. So it mattered little. And one day, i went inside. The door to his brownstone in harlem was unlocked. The walls were covered in graffittied hysteria and he was screaming in the bedroom. He was screaming what i recognized as the roar of hopelessness, what i wondered later if he had began, in that summer of 1972.
He was naked, in the bedroom. He was carving his nails into the wall, and i was terrified. I suddenly realized that all the graffiti was his blood, from under his nail, from it scraping the plastor.
And i held him. And he was cold and white and bleeding, like his walls. And i loved him. Because i knew that the epics of loneliness, and insight, that had been contained inside that envelope to anyone, were still contained inside his mind. I knew he had his sanity, that it was just stored away. And that the only difference between him and i was that the trembling was louder, now, in his mind.
I skipped work, the next day, for the first time, after sleeping there, as he recovered rom a binge on pills in bottles that I didn't recognize.
I take those pills, now. For a heart conditon i developed from taking too many of thise pills. But i strongly believe the heart condition is realy just "Irony" w/ a big latin name to throw me off.

My poet told me i was like him because i had jazz blood. From my dad. and that jazz blood was different from all other blood because of it's pulsing, because of the way it pushed itself through your heart, crying the blues. My poet told me all sorts of beautiful things, and i always believed him.

My poet hated me. And once i saw it, he was spitting it into my face, but i still culdn't leave him.

- posted by Joe @ 5.10.03

it's all about perspective...

2004-04-16T01:29:00.000-04:00

2004-04-11T23:30:00.000-04:00

2004-04-10T01:27:00.000-04:00

2004-04-09T00:07:00.000-04:00

and as i'd sleep in class i'd dream that i was trampled as they poured into the school, trampled by sketcher's and saucony, and as their uncaring feet pushed into me, my spirit was ground into the earth, until i became the dirt, and as they all left and the dust rose, i was the dust. and at last there was silence. and at last there was peace.

footnote to the above 1000 words:

2004-04-08T11:27:00.000-04:00

haiku:
in the kitchen my
dad's girlfriend cooks lovely food,
writes erotica

forget me not

2004-04-07T17:49:00.000-04:00

"How happy is the blameless Vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd."-Alexander Pope

2004-04-06T23:13:00.000-04:00

footnote to the above thousand words:The sky is soaked with animals. i taste their musk when i breathe. they breed above me till the sunset streams their blood down the throat of the horizon and it falls on hiroshima, on the other side of the world. the sky, itself, is consuming them, i realize. it slowly eats at their flesh like toxic quicksand. they are drowning in the stuff. at first i am horified, but now all i feel is the weight, the unbearable heaviness of the blood of lions, the unbearable crushing of 10,000 feet. i am suffocating with them. their blood and shit pollutes the water when it rains. i drink their corpses. it is their blood in my viens. when i cry, the acidity of 10,000 species' turmoil carves canyons into my cheekbones. but all i can do is cry.