46

To All The Beautiful Girls in San Francisco,

where did you come from? You alight on the seats of the MUNI like migratory songbirds and I imagine you laying in my bed, wearing only your yellow boyshorts that I spy peeking above your low slung khaki cargo pants, telling me about your migration from Middle America. In my mind, beautiful girls, you are all from Illinois.

You are dangerous, distractible, delightful. I simultaneously want to take you home and see what your pretty bones look like under all those layers of vintage clothes, and also ask whether you have health insurance (because I worry about those pretty, pretty bones).

In summer, you seduce me not with the standard sundresses (is it ever warm enough here for sundresses?) and sun tans, but the smooth sure roundness of your calves, which is entirely unfair. As sculpted as the curves of a seashell, one August a particularly disarmingly Zanzibar brown pair distracted me from catching the 14 bus up Mission.

I love you, all of you, without discrimination. I am an omnivorous visual slut. I love the defiantly lounging punk girls in the Haight with their kittens curled around their shoulders, because blue hair don't care but also because I want to feed them pancakes with plenty of (vegan) butter and ask where they nest at night.

I love all the tough femmes congregating outside the Lexington wearing their mother's crinolines like their mothers never did. I love them for their pinup tattoos and ability to cry without their mascara running and throw a punch without breaking a knuckle.

I love the girls in the Mission who walk like a big fuck-you and almost a suggestion at the same time, who let their hair blow in the wind like a banner for their own private war. Girls like that make me close my eyes and think of Death and Desire and wonder if God underestimated both.

I love the rockabilly butch who once waved to me and my girlfriend from the bus stop as our overflowing bus pulled away from Castro Street, almost as if to say hello there, tribe. And I love that butch for hir tattoo on hir forearm that read no blood no foul.

I love the hipsters in Valencia, nervous-skinny and too aware of their own breakable beauty for their own good. And sometimes, I could sell my soul just to watch them smoke outside the restaurant; a slow and evocative kind of death.

I even love the fourteen year old girls in bedrooms across San Francisco, noses pressed against windows, watching this glorious parade of misfits strut down the city streets. Poor babies. Just wait, little darlins.

I love all of them, all of them for being alive and awake, for paying attention, for seducing me by standing on the station platform at the 16^th and Mission BART and also for boarding the train and never looking back.

Come here, my beautiful battered birds. Bring your broken wings, and crooked teeth, your childhood sexual abuse. Let's all go home, wherever that is, together. We can all hold hands in Golden Gate Park and kiss each other with all the tenderness this beautiful, brokedown city can manage.

 

46, a long one kiddos

This kind of thing is so easy for me to write. I could do this for days, but I really don't feel it's a reflection of my best work.

How We Fell Apart and What Was Left Behind

1.

Are you awake and listening? So much of what I say goes unheard and I want to be sure you're awake and listening. The time I cried for two days, cried while I was vacuuming, cried while sending out grad school applications, crying while making overly ambitious dinners using ingredients I couldn't afford, no one listened to me. My family had heard it all before and you had never bothered to listen at all.

My stepmother told me that some lessons are unteachable. That somethings you have to walk through to understand what walking through feels like, to arrive at the destination to understand what the destination feels like.

I know what my destination is. The destination is inside the envelope that holds announcements of my student debt, it is the wall side of my bed that I press my body towards (these days, my body is interested only in solidity), it is the dryness and the emptiness of the bottom of my coffee cup and also the realization that I can't afford more. It is also called absence, also independence.

Listen, alright? I am going to give you directions to the place I have arrived. Pay attention. Don't follow me.

 

2.

If I could turn back the clock I would let you escape the bad fortune of ever knowing me.

• Emmeline, 12/27/2008
  

3.

Don't go.

-Emmeline, 12/29/2008

4.

And I dragged you out into the carless street because the shower didn't work and it was raining and the overdoses on TV were always wet, thrashing. You were very still. I brought you out into the rain because I wanted you to live and you were intent on dying in my arms, you always told me you played Romeo in your high school production and now I believe you. If you had been conscious enough (and I doubt you were conscious enough, you were never conscious of how I made myself smaller to make room for you, or how I trailed after you, picking up the tab [you did notice that I always had store brand peanut butter but no jelly in my cabinets and complained mightily]), but between the sodium yellow street light bathing you in a kind of golden midsummer glamour, and the way your bones that were doing a terrible job of holding you together looked like cathedral spires, between your stillness like a saint and the blue of your lips like Alki Beach the first time you kissed my neck so tenderly and then got shy-

you were awful beautiful that night.

I guess you got what you wanted. I held you half upright, your knees getting soaked in the puddles from the rain that fell like a benediction. Everything was very still and very quiet. Each rise of your chest was the world to me. I don't know how long I held you in the raid, Emmeline, because you were then living solely on my attention, and I could never deny you that. Each breath you drew was a concession to the fact that you lived your life for an audience of the people you charmed by being reckless and pretty like their dead grandmothers before they got married, and stupid like fireworks are stupid.

Eventually, you woke up. You said you wanted to go back to the party. I followed you in.

 

5.

How we met:

It was at the wedding of two friends who had had an abortion and then decided to get married. I couldn't decide if this was progressive or regressive of them.

The band was in full swing at the Seattle Observatory Floyd and Georgia had rented, and the year's constellations were scrolling slowly across the ceiling and Emmeline sat right down at my table and demanded to know if I was wearing false eyelashes. Later, I found out that she was the groom's half sister, but at the time, I just thought she was a bitch. I told her I was most certainly not and she said she most certainly did not believe me. She took my face in both hands and demanded that I close my eyes so she could check and when I did she kissed me.

 

6.

Emmeline was an art history major. I was looking at business and accounting or possibly marketing. There were signs.

 

7.

I think one of the tragedies of Emmeline is that she carried out her dramatics on such a small stage. In the Puget Sound, in November, you are less a god of the late nights, with blue fingernails bitten short and tally marks caked on your wrist, then someone's drunken aunt just ten years off from decay.

Maybe if she had gotten herself to a big city, where it didn't rain so much. Maybe LA. New York. I feel like she could've been one of those people that you read about on blogs, not so much for their talent, but for that one old fashioned thing they hung on to, charisma. Even a different time would've been better. I can picture her in the Washington Square Park with the Fitzgeralds, Zelda would've loved her, loved the mouth on her. And they would've gotten drunk off the strawberries in the champagne and gossiped about all the pretty people and Emmeline could've curled up between the two most sensational people of the decade and fallen asleep with her feet hooked around their ankles.

Instead, I watched her look at the lamps I bought from IKEA mild distaste. She didn't like that we lived close to a grocery store. She hated orca whales, and whale watching tours and didn't give a shit about the salmon run. When our lovely, private, liberal arts college put on readings, I sometimes thought that she choose those times to be strategic about her bad life decisions, stumbling shouting through the neatly arranged folding chairs, getting sick on the lecturer's notes. She was maybe a little pleased at my mortification, and definitely pleased when I took her home, gave her a warm shower, fed her tea, tucked her into bed. She liked to hook her feet around my ankles as she fell asleep.

 

8.

If she doesn't make you nervous, you should be nervous.

-Surprisingly good advice from Emmeline's old roommate, who I later found out was also her dealer

 

9.

One of the things that kept my heartstrings fully wrapped around her wrist was her early morning behavior. She was never a good sleeper and would do her best through the night to entwine her body around mine. In the mornings, I would wake up before her and if I didn't have class till later, I would let her rest her head on my chest and tell me about her dreams. Her sleepy warmth was almost as good as the feeling that she needed me to listen. There were stinging jellyfish, and elephants, and her father, and they kept trying to get her. I would protect her, right?

I wish I could've protected her.

 

10.

She had us kiss in the front pew of every church in Seattle.

Her childhood nickname was Ducky.

She was catholically attractive. Gay men, grandmothers, sorority sisters, middle manager types, small children, - all at one time or another I caught scoping out her sweet high ass.

She could catch bumblebees and never be stung.

She had perfect white, straight teeth. She would never admit to anything so suburban as braces.

No matter where she woke up, she always flossed.

She had a habit of sitting in my lap when she wanted to talk to me about the cafeteria's lack of vegan options or cats and it was very endearing.

 

11.

"And here's what we're going to do, okay? Are you listening? Okay, you've got those AP credentials, so you can graduate early. And I've can take online classes. I've been looking into it. We can take your car and drive to Colorado. You don't know anyone in Colorado, right? I don't either and I think it will be good. And we can go get a cabin in the mountains and you can tell people how to spend their money and I can paint. We'll grow squash and cucumbers and not get a phone so I can't talk to anyone from the city, which I also think will be good. You can get one of those dumb happy dogs that are just like you. And we can be happy, okay? We'll be so fucking happy they won't know what to do with us."

-Emmeline, 3/12/2009

12.

Her parents did a terrible job with her.

 

13.

Sometime after we got the apartment together spring semester, I realized that you had an awful lot of friends. Well, visitors. They were all skinny like runway models from Russia or the girls with eating disorders in my high school and none of them seemed able to control their volume I'd hear you with them in the living room, snort laughing over nothing and then I'd catch a shouted AND WE DON'T KNOW WHERE SHE IS or THE HOSPITAL, IT CLOSES AT or BUBBLES, YOU'VE GOT TO GET THE BUBBLES OUT, or FUCK ALL OF THIS I DON'T NEED THIS SHIT, I'M GOING HOME, but I always woke up to them on our couch. I worried to you that they didn't have homes. You assured me they did, but maybe not in the same kind of way I was thinking.

Every time they'd leave, you'd pad into the kitchen where I would be doing my financial accounting homework and demand kisses from me and ask what was for dinner. I would boil you some dollar store pasta and we wouldn't ask hard questions.

 

14.

She was beautiful and she knew it.

She had decided she was more beautiful than I was and was not afraid to let me know.

She was not afraid of things she should have been afraid of.

She was exhausting. I woke up worrying about her, went to class worrying about her, came back to the apartment, took care of her and fell asleep worrying that I wasn't doing enough.

She had a chest piece that said The Struggle Still Feels Beautiful, which should have been a tipoff right there.

Sometimes, most times, she wanted a sycophant, not a girlfriend. She wanted someone to keep track of her during her stumbling back alley nights and to admire how pretty she looked with the sweat making her bangs stick to her forehead the morning after.

 

15.

Things I Should Have Been Doing with My Life Instead (a short list)

• Getting a real job instead of doing the spreadsheets at my dad's office all the time
  
• Actually applying to grad school, not just looking at their websites with the amount of guilt that regular people associate with internet porn
  
• Gotten a cat
  
• My stepmother thinks I should've waxed my eyebrows or not gotten my hair cut by the little boy's barber. This one's open for debate.
  
• Spent less time in craigslist looking for the right job for Emmeline, that involved flexible hours, medical and dental, art and no assholes.
  
• Made friends.
  
• Made friends that weren't Emmeline's friends
  
• Made friends who actually cared about things like the economy and voting and which grocery stores had the cheapest yogurt.
  
• Slept
  
• Worried about myself. Fed myself.
  
• Gotten a girlfriend who didn't wake me up crying into a pillow on the far corner of the bed, curled into the smallest ball possible, who would never tell me why, or who, or when
  

 

16.

I have never forgiven her for the morning she woke up and cuddled closer and said, "You'll do for now", before she was fully awake.     

 

17.

I would be lying to say I don't miss you. I miss you in the same way a dog misses its collar. I have a lot of dreams about her. I never used to dream before.

I would dream that I was walking through a city with bridges that we built together and a river that we had both named Safety. I am always looking for you. You have left me with this terrible city that is now my responsibility and I want you. The streets are made of cobblestone, which in the dream reminds me that we had argued over making the streets cobblestone or brick and you had won out. The city smells like your neck after I brought you in from the rain during the party. Sometimes I see the heel of your favorite pair of shoes as I turn the corner, but I never catch up.

 

 

45 Mills Meta

This is a collaboration I'm doing with a dance MFA grad student, so it loses something without the dance. But it says a lot of what I've been trying to say these last two years about my school and Oakland and my own obligations to both.

 

 

Intro

Over to the left we have the children's school, which moved from its original location in the Vera Long building in the early 1970s. The children's school is a laboratory school. Mills students with children estimate that it would cost 65,000 dollars to attend Mills and have childcare on campus. The eucalyptus trees on campus are over a hundred years old. Mills had the first computer science major for women west of the Mississippi. For forty years, Mills owned a ski lodge in Lake Tahoe. I am only providing context.

 

Here we have cyrus mills.

 

Please, don't pay too much attention. Cyrus knows about the two fourteen year old boys who were shot on the streetcorner on the first day of classes, but we don't want you to know about that. That's beyond us, its out there, outside the gates. So don't worry, don't stop walking, don't look. What you can look at are the roses, do you see the rose, aren't the roses pretty? He brought them from Ceylon, never mind the revolution in Ceylon Cyrus, just think about the roses, alright?

Cyrus, cryus, don't worry so much. We've got all the natives on reservations, they died in mining camps, the land's clear for the college. Sleep safe at night Cyrus. The girls are fine, but sad. You worry that their bodies, falling like snow betrothed for another landscape will catch in your rose trellis. They don't, don't worry.

And you. Are you awake and listening? Do you know what's going on? Cyrus isn't telling anything, caught in that splendid abstraction called history, but Cyrus, I've gotta ask you some questions. Are you awake and listening? Do you know what's going on?

 

Dance of Ivory Ignorance

 

So you won't tell me anything? Frankly, I doubt you knew anything, anymore, ever. Because what I'm trying to say to you Cyrus, is that I'm afraid. I'm afraid of the kind of disasters that result in snapped necks and bloody mouths, but I'm also afraid of the slow kind of disaster, the kind that take place in children's lungs as they walk to school and result in thinks like asthma and chronic pneumonia. Do you know what I'm talking about Cyrus?

It has not been so, it can not be so and it will not be so.

But Cyrus, listen! I'm afraid that what I've learned at college is that murals are only there to cover bullet holes. I'm afraid of my own fear that dogs my heels as men approach me at the bus stop. I'm afraid I'm becoming more like you everyday Cyrus. You saw brown people as things that ought to be educated and a burden you cared for abstractly, in Beatitudes and rice, and I worry that we think of Mills as a kind of mission outpost, the relic of New England's and Spain's good intentions in beautiful, brokedown Oakland. Am I right, Cyrus?

It has not been so, it can not be so and it will not be so.

Are you sure? Because the first night I was here, I mistook fireworks for gunshots. I'm terrified because I'm not terrified. The boys who died on the streetcorner behind my back are not my boys. My someday daughter will never be shot in her sleep, because I'm majoring in something sensible and getting out of here. All the same, all this eats at my heart like disease. Do you understand what I'm saying, Cyrus?

It has not been so, it can not be so and it will not be so.

Do we even know each other? I'm awake and listening, I'm paying attention, but you won't let me know what's going on. You must've had some kind of intelligence that rested in your bones saying marry this woman. she knows where she's going.

I'm supposed to be your granddaughter, I walk the garden paths you paved, I am smelling your roses, but you leave me locked out. I am looking for an education, and a kind of understanding of the hardest things, but you were so ignorant that I worry you have nothing to teach me. You, you and your roses.

 

 

 

Situation

I have talked to you as I am. Sophmore, brokenhearted, young and afraid. But sometimes, I just get so tired of trepidation. I want to talk like someone who always knew what was going on, understood the loops and patterns of history, for better or worse. Somehow, when I imagine that voice, I imagine Susan speaking to Cyrus in the rose garden called time. I imagine this is what she would say to him:

Yes, your roses are beautiful.

Yes, you were part of this thing that made history, you made the books, even as a blundering footnote.

But darling, things are moving, awake and alive. You're still here, still repeating, still caught in this loop called history.

Maybe we run out of money in ten years and close down to rot and rust. Maybe the gates come down, and little girls from Seminary come and sleep on our lawn.

And sometimes, I want that voice to speak to me, I want it to say to me this:

Let them know who you are and what you represent. Make what you represent a thing to be proud of. Work at it.

Don't be so afraid. Stay awake. Listen. Look around. There is work to be done, and you are the ones to do it.

44?

Because my family was always lovely to me about the gay.

A Family Romance

When Roger brought Lewis home, we did not approve. Roger is our baby, our sweet boy smiling through all the changes in hairstyle and height in all the photo albums. Even when we no longer all wore matching sailor suits and started to have our photos taken in Notre Dame graduation robes and Episcopalian wedding chapel, he always hung back a little, beagleish in his eagerness to please. We had hoped he would grow up to be something interesting that we could tell our friends about at cocktail parties, but tax law had thrilled him in undergraduate and the family always had our taxes done by February, so we left him to his small sensible pleasures.

 

Roger's mild fagginess was as much a part of our family as the story of Ann driving the motorboat too close to the lake's shore when Dad was waterskiing and the memory of the sling he wore for the rest of that summer vacation. You have to love a boy who collects leaf rubbings and ceramic dog figurines. We did.

 

And when Roger emailed us to ask if he could bring a friend to our traditional Thursday soup night (uninterrupted for seventeen years, except for summer, when it turns into barbeque night), we hoped that he could swap Eddie Bauer khakis with and who would dote on his gently overweight black lab. Mom speculated that spring weddings were still very popular and more than one of us googled his and his tuxedo sets and group rates at bed and breakfasts in Massachusetts.

 

However, Lewis in the flesh was not up to family standards. The story goes that Mom twisted her ankle at the university she and Dad attended. Dad had a huge crush on her. So, when she wasn't paying attention in chemistry lecture, he threw her crutches out the window and gallantly offered to escort her around campus all day. What they told us this story meant is: someone who loves you should work for it. What it also means is: marry someone with at least a bachelors.

 

Lewis did not look like he had his bachelor's degree. Lewis looked like he had dropped out of community college to pursue other interests. Lewis scuffed his steel toe shitkickers on the hardwood as we looked at him. He looked back at us from under extravagant, almost effeminate eyelashes with puppy soft brown eyes. His trousers were studded with patches proclaiming "Slavery ended in 1864", with a picture of a cow and "Stop Police Brutality", with a picture of a pig. Condor wings peered out from the collar of his tshirt, entangled with tendrils of fire and snakes rendered on his skin, suggesting familiarity with a kind of apocalypse and break down that our family is unfamiliar with.

 

We watched him pick peas out of Mom's beloved minestrone soup and the way he ate only the soft gut out of the home baked bread, discarding the crust on the butter plate. We watched his restless legs and wondered if that might indicate a failure of ability to be constant to just one mouth. We imagine him drunk on Seagrams at a bonfire proclaiming alliance with love, not lovers.

 

And while, we were watching Lewis, Roger was watching us. He was still our sweet boy. He would probably abide by the family's judgment. We wondered how he had ever worked himself up enough to bring home this wheatpaste and drumroll creature. How did they ever meet? Do vegan anarchist collectives need their taxes done?

 

But still. There was something in beautiful in their asymmetry. As they sat on Dad's couch from his first apartment, we could watch the flicker of history between them. A slideshow of the rabbit they adopted together and how it snuggled with their old lab. Fights as subtle as paper cuts that were resolved in shouting and snuggling. Roger's inability to put the toothpaste cap back on, Lewis' fear of loading the dishwasher. The time they got lost in Chicago. Cascades of coffee that kept them up at night, wandering somnolently though their apartment until their exhausted bodies collided and wound together like puppies. Roger standing in the crowd as Lewis shouted from the stage, because I'm a wreck and I love you, because I like what you laugh at, because you welcome me to a new kind of church, because I would leave all this and follow you to Guam, Gaza, Greater Uzbekistan, because my heart's chaos and your head's order, because this time I'll be bulletproof, because if you were infirm I would feed you, because I love you like a thing that does not even know it loves another thing-

 

We passed Lewis the cookie plate and asked after his family.

 

whooohooo

Like Pomona is getting published! This is only my...third time? And I've made literally five dollars from my writing. But its a start.

44

This was a fun one to read out loud.

Said the Sun to the Earth

 

    Said the sun to the earth, you seem very beautiful to me. Said the earth to the sun, but my Sun, have you seen my dirt? The sun kissed the earth with waves of photons that undulate through space like seaweed and murmured, I don't know what dirt is. I know what light is, and I understand darkness, but I don't know what dirt is. To me, you are the solution to the darkness that surrounds me, and also the antithesis to the fire that burns me. Basking, the earth said, but you don't understand. The way your hydrogen burns is so pure, so self convicted and determined to devour itself. I am afraid, he sighed, you would not understand things like dirt. The sun, she bathed him in her heat (and all of us who are alive understand that heat. it is also called desire, also, truth and hope) and asked, try.

 

    -Alright. What you need to understand is that even the dirt loves the foot that stamps on it, just as the antelope loves the lion as it tears out it's throat. Life loves life. I feel across my body the hope within decaying logs. They will feed those who are yet to come with their own bodies, like cannibalism, like true love.

    What I think you understand, my sun, is that decay is a form of love. The Brazilian family, with their bellies full of hookworms and their women pregnant and silent, that is a form of decay and I love them for it. Their struggle still feels wonderful. I feel them writing about themselves (and when they write, they never write we are writing we are writing, but, the virgin mary has come to me and she has asked of me to marry soccorro, despite her bastard child) and about cities that never existed except for one tubercular man in a garret in London during the Blitz and about passions that never transpired except for a moment's glance between a man and a woman who never met again. And I am bewildered that they don't spend sunrise to sunset sitting on the dirt watching the million different chemical reactions called life. I love life for it's inability to reach equilibrium. I love all of them for their restlessness to be more than cells, learn how to grow horns, hair, fins, fingers, learn how to fuck and fight, leave gifts for no reason at one anothers dwellings.

    I love the child with smallpox. I love smallpox. I love the forest fire and the genocide and I love them all for being alive and unwilling to settle. I dread stillness. Dear sun, you are still yourself and you would not understand the desirability of the unstable. Do you even understand what it is to have moment? asked the earth to the sun. The sun felt her hydrogen catalyze into small explosions that rippled across her skin and nodded. The living on the earth understood it as an eclipse.

    I love the living for telling me that if I am stranded somewhere, and exhausted, love is an Arabian horse. I feel stranded and exhausted, but I am waiting for the Arabian horse and I envy the living for their ability to be rescued. I love the living for inventing angels so vividly I feel battered by their pinion feathers. If you're wondering, my Sun, it feels exactly like when the flamingos take flight off Lake Victoria.

I love the living for a girl I remember from what they call 1985, what I remember as old and tired, but that's most years these years, who descended out of a bright August sky in the Columbia River Gorge, wearing a wet red tshirt. I love her for her beauty on the descent and her beauty as her neck snapped and her beauty as the blood trickled from her ear into the river. I love permafrost. I love mammoth corpses doomed and frozen from the moment they wandered from the herd. I love viruses and lemurs, nervous systems and potato blights, struggle and collapse, hands and wet hair, magnets and penguin chicks, dance and Colt pistols and blood clots and do you understand what I mean when I say I love dirt?-

 

The sun reached into its clean burning heart and thought it could find a dark greasy smudge of something like understanding.

-

 

43

Less joyful than it usually is.

 

The Goodness of the World, And the Sweetness

        

    There is no sorrow but loss. I lose nothing. I am no longer broke down by sorrow. I am afraid of goodbye, because goodbye is losing. And nothing comes back, anymore. I have perfected the art of loosing things. The cathedral in Prague. I no longer miss it. My mother. She is dead and I will not get her back. The night they burned my Bible and the ashes fell like snow. It burned for nine minutes and was done. I am learning to want this state called nothing. Loss is sorrow. I am learning this like a liturgy. There is nothing that I want. Nothing.

 

    I need you to believe that lack nothing. Do you hear? My world is made of this gravel path. The weeping mud, the thoughtless stones. Even though these solely are my world alone, I don't need them. There loss is nothing. If tomorrow I step shivering into the fog and this path has been replaced by the mouldering canals in Amsterdam or waist deep mud and shit, I won't mind. I have stopped minding.

 

    Please. Don't ask me to desire again. I used to understand yearning. Yearning is what one feels in the mountains in Austria, praying for the fire called Holy Ghost to descend on one. Yearning is what one feels for the warmth of your girls shoulder when she is out of the city on a university outing and one knows she'll be back on Sunday. There is none of that.

Desire is not the root of all evil. I have come to know at least that.

 

    When people are gone. I am learning not to mind. I used to believe that we were all essential cogs in some whirring productive machine called the world and also life. I had thought we together turned out loaves of crusty bread, babies, the curl of maple on the cradle my grandfather carved for me, potato dumplings, the ability to play chess. Now. I know this machine can run itself without any of us. I am not sure what it makes. We are no loss. The other day, I saw a man break another mans's ribcage by stepping casually on it, as easily as one climbs the stairs to go to church.

 

    Notice also means almost lost, or about to be. To notice is to take inventory of what exists without preparing oneself to lose it all. What exists in the world is nothing. A gravel path. Not even that. Once a thing exists, it leaves. Please don't ask me about the others. I want for nothing.

 

Forty Two makes me think of mr winkley

I'm alive and functioning and I feel okay. This means that I will write oversexed new gayer Greek myths

Like Pomona

What I really mean is that while you come to me like Vertumnus, in costumes to catch me, I am not so sure about the Pomona part (i'm irish, not greek). You wear nude Cuban stockings with black keyholes that lick your legs laviciously as you swagger towards me in the garden. I pretend I am interested in pruning the plum trees. I'm not. I imagine the ferny curlicules of hair between your legs beckoning, but something about the your pencil skirt and cocked hip makes me want to teach you something about hard work and responsibility and the kissing cousin closeness of delay and desire.

The next day, you try again. I'm in the vegetable patch where the smooth skin of the summer squash reminds me of eight year old golden Guatemalan girls, lined up neatly for chocolates outside the corner store. You present yourself in full femme array, your garter all steelgun gray and silk and snaps. The black patent leather of your heels is as slick as industry as the spikes sink gently into the compost. And, yes, I know I know I know you are the one I want to sleep under the earth with (even thought you drove me sleepless above it). I want our bones to moulder and the next gardener not to be able to tell whose fat feed these tomatoes. And I know I want to brush my fingertips across your cervix with the same prayerful intensity I feel for the first valiant asparagus of spring. But this, my sunshine, my springtime, my delight and my humus, darling blackberry bramble in my side, this will not do. You depart in a huff. You have a clump of horse manure on your right heel.

The leeks are almost grown before you try again. This time, you present yourself to me as some splendid hipster city nymph, artfully slouching on my seven hundred year old olive tree. The olives themselves are still as green as absinthe, a comparison I want to share with you, but I don't. The dragonfly wings behind your ears are a nice touch, as is the horseshoe branded into your neck with the vagueness of healed flesh and scars. It's turned upwards to catch all the luck and all the breaks, as you always do. The sides of your head are shaved and through the peach fuzz I can see FEM rendered in Sailor Jerry script. Maybe, maybe closer I think, but you are so caught up in lighting your cigarette in that way that illuminates all the studious hollows of your face (and while I sometimes think about watching you smoke in cafes in places that have cobblestone and cable and capitalism), I stick around just long enough to make sure you don't ash in the eggplant and split.

Beautiful, breakdown, best arrangement of carbon and hope and arrogance I've yet met- you need to try a little harder. You've left marks on me the same way baby pumpkins will take fingerprints in their flesh and grow them into portraits rendered through the body itself. My heart is not elusive. It is unsophisticated and greedy. Enough of this artifice. What I would really like to do is chain you to my body and sing for days and days and days.

So I will wait while you try again. You give me strapping Israeli solider in a camo bikini with boots I assume you got some skinny subby girl to black, Carmen in black lace and merengue ( I appreciate the lapdance, but the carrots need to come out of the ground so I leave) big girl butch in grey wool trousers and matching vest, Lolita in ankle socks and pennyloafers and before you flounce off, you make sure I notice you are not wearing any panties under your bubble skirt. You are about as subtle as an earthquake.

Finally, come one dying September sunset, you get it. I am pulling the last of the leeks when suddenly, here you are. You have finally understood the power of you nakedness, radiant trusting as a sapling. The hair between your legs is as downy as dill, and I imagine, just as soft. The bruises on the corona of your hipbones, the silvery stretchmarks between your legs, red spots, broken veins, I want to run my tongue over all of it. You are the fruit from an orchard that flooded last spring, a redwood cathedral in a forest that could build itself only after fire

You tell me: i want you on every hill in Lebanon, under every tree

How this telling of the story ends. Afterwards I leave your hands tied to the headboard Penelope grew for me out of willow. You are stretched long and languorous, a garden of delights on display. Your paleness on the river green moss. I feed you slices of mango. You take them from my fingers with great tenderness and care. The ripeness runs in rivulets and when I lick you clean, cannot tell one sweetness from the other.

I want this to be number 41

So I'll say it is.

The Consequences of New Albion

1.
We built between us a city.
You built the bridges that spanned me, the river that we both named Safety.
I want you to remember, delightful,
that I did not lay these cobblestones alone. You were beside me,
you were the one who suggested brick. You
taught me to lay grout by taking my fingers in yours
and running them down that smooth slick groove.
The pleasure gardens, as well, were yours.

2.
"To walk the city of New Albion was to understand what want will look like, after its been satiated. The couches at crosswalks, the small clean bathing pools in the lobby of every hotel and on the roof of every apartment building; the city made me want to rest in it. New Albion has always made me want to go home, where ever that is. I was born in Lancaster Maine, was schooled in Zaire, I've bought a house in Quebec, but New Albion, while it stood, was the only place I've ever been that made me fall asleep curled around building corners. It was that protected and settled and warm. You never needed sweaters, not in New Albion."

-"Disappeared Cities of the West Coast" By Samuel Marks

3.
Now.
I wake to walk alone.
The trees come apart in splinters when I touch them.
I should fix that.
Buildings calve like glaciers.
When I pick up the phone, I hear only a rustling of dried cicada shells.
The memory of this city's glory eats me in small, tender bites.

I'm sorry, I'm tired it's one and the same

This has been a year of surviving. Writing requires a certain joy from me and hope, both of which I have lacked this last year. I'm going to try again. Wish me luck

"Untitled": By Marilyn Hacker

You did say, need me less and I'll want you more.
I'm still shellshocked at needing anyone,
used to being used to it on my own.
It won't be me out on the tiles till four-
thirty, while you're in bed, willing the door
open with your need. You wanted her then,
more. Because you need to, I woke alone
in what's not yet our room, strewn, though, with your
guitar, shoes, notebook, socks, trousers enjambed
with mine. Half the world was sleeping it off
in every other bed under my roof.
I wish I had a roof over my bed
to pull down on my head when I feel damned
by wanting you so much it looks like need.

30, too tired for clever

An older one, with some editing. Homesick and lonely.

 

i've already given up on myself (once twice) but the third time is the charm

we stood on the hills in oakland and threw caution to the wind

but damn i've got a lousy arm

you used to tell stories about us versus the world but our silhouettes were never heroic

hunched shoulders messy hair angles of fear and exhaustion

(were you trying to tell me something?)

i miss when we used to lie on the floor and you would lay your head on my stomach and hum

breathless almost hesitant filth into my bellybutton

and i wish we had reached that point in the future where you would've driven all night just to meet me in the morning

(the sunrise was spectacular all burning carbon monoxide and carcinogens)

and sing me happy birthday happy happy birthday

off-key, but the beat would be perfect

i know you as a kind of perfect

 

because we are failures bound only by silent elevator rides crowded against the walls by the mass of our disappointments

because i can smell your body ripening into sweet age that is not for me to know and have

and because your nighttime noises in my memory keep me awake with the immovable ache of our distant proximity

-you turn the earth beneath my feet but
i keep still

it is as though you decided in a snit that movement never existed for me at all

(such exiles from the continuity of our reality can be found in every village, in basements, under bridges

they are not to be touched or marveled at

they are to be left alone and pitied)

and I don't regret any of this you-inflicted destruction

 

only that away from you is the only place left

and oh, oh

how i wish it wasn't.

Interludes: Other people’s poetry

The truth is, goddesses are lousy in bed.
They will do anything, it's true.
And the skin is beautifully cared for.
But they have no sense of it. They are
all manner and amazing technique.
I lie with them thinking of your
foolish excess, of your panting
and sweating, and your eyes after.

(missyoumissyoumissyouinwaysyoucan'tevenknow)

Interlude: Other people’s poetry

This is Nikki Rhodes, everyone. The best thing I've felt.

Best Beloved (I'm in the market for a new title for this btw)


If you burn enough people, you can squeeze
the ash into coal, the coal into diamonds.
We are carbon bodies; we will be.

If I were wealthy, darling, and I wanted
to keep you with me everywhere, here
is what I would do to you:

I would burn down your house with you in it,
you and your cats and your bottles and books.
I would burn it thoroughly. What didn't catch

I would leave hanging on strings
from the maple tree in your yard until
it was eaten by birds and sliced them through

like glass. The ashes and coal, I would push them
together so tightly they shone. I would compress you
into diamonds, you, your home,

and everything you know. I would wear
you on my neck and be beloved all the time. People
would say how beautiful you were but they

wouldn't even know the half.

29, long post.

But I like to pretend it's worth it.

Jacob Dreams the Ladder and the Angels

Her opiod receptors are blown. There is only so much pleasure a body is built to take, her doctor tells her. As she fills out the hospice forms, she makes a mental list of things she would've rather allotted her life's pleasures to: afternoons spent eating cherries and brownie batter, the encyclopedia of textures of skins of the world that she never got to touch. Are there equations in this? Could she have traded the gardens of heirloom tomatoes she grew every summer for forty years for the ability to walk on her cancer softened hips? please god please god please god, i'll trade you the four nights when i was nineteen i couldn't sleep for laughing, the pair of red soled shoes i had when i was thirty and… Judah realizes she doesn't have anything else in her life that she could trade with god. She wishes for two pain free months, three weeks, a hundred minutes. She wishes she had had a daughter. She wishes the cancer hadn't metastized. She doesn't know a god who would give her any of this.

She wishes she had told her story any kind of different way; loneliness, divorce, and isolation have been done to death. But it's too late for self revision. It's almost the end of all her stories, the angel is about to cap her pen.

1. Call to worship
   

The first night she dreams of herself, of the translation that went out of print sixty odd years ago.

-Washing the dishes at the sink in her first apartment, she reminds herself of a very young racehorse, sinewy and nervous. The bones of her hands peek through the skin; she is far too skinny. The lines of her ankles and calves are tidy and minimalist, but her body has never managed to get traction, healthwise. Her dreamself watches the veins in her neck flex each time she jerks her head at a sudden noise and thinks this is someone who could use nurturing. She always attracted people who wanted to fill up the holes in her with macadam and tar and liquor when what she really needed was a pan of mac and cheese. Judah has learned in her time to recognize those who are only walking holes and wonders how she missed seeing the absence in her own self

At this point in her life, she remembers that she was spending most of her afternoons (and nights and three in the mornings) building towers of Babel out of matches and dead Queen Anne's lace on the floor of her kitchen, little Zions instead of sleeping. She called these failures art. She tried not to sleep. When she was finally pinned down by exhaustion, she dreamed of blue pinfeathers and her eight foster homes.

A body is a city, which in the Bible means a thing to be protected.

She (the eighty nine year old one, the one who loved the Book of Job, who did therapy until she stopped crying uncontrollably on a certain Saturday in April) looks at her younger self and wishes someone had protected that. Out of the corner of her aging eyes, she catches a flash of gold and blue just behind a cracked door.

2. A call to prayer

Nowadays, the ending takes so much time. In the Pentuarchal before, you burned out in chariots, you walked with man no more. Now there's paperwork. Judah can't decide if she wants to outlast Methuselah or just take the Seconal and get it over with. All the drugs have blown her capacity for pleasure and she misses grace, the feeling of a tongue on her clit, almost feeling pure. There is no glorious ascension nowadays.

She sleeps a lot these days. She closes her eyes and dreams of blood.

3. Call to confession

Unfortunately, what stays with you is mostly fragments. Half drowned soldiers. Her fathers perfume (she thinks its from the cedars they cut down in Lebanon). A robe of beaten gold. The sword that burns, from the beginning. She dreams the sword is buried under the foundation of her childhood home and the fumes rise like radon and that's why her family turned out so sick.

Judah supposes the dreams and prophecies are a side effect of the medication. She does not tell her doctor.

3.Confession

She lies awake, dreaming eulogies.

She was a good woman.

(There was a cave filled with bones in the desert)

Nobody had such lovely, small hands as her.

(The people who lived in the desert went into the cave)

She never complained. Judah was a woman who did not want to burden others.

(What they saw in the cave was a disaster. They saw the bones of people who died in a disaster, and they knew it was a disaster sent from The Thing That Moves The Wind)

She never let a sad word slip about her lack of children.

(When they came out from the cave, they took the story with them. It is a disaster)

Her childhood was warm and loving.

(The story becomes a metaphor for the things you shouldn't let yourself have)

She spoke often of fond memories of growing up in the church.

(The cave became a city. The people in the desert are angels. In the story, their wings are white, not blue. This is another fabrication.)

She never regretted her two short marriages. She said that marrying a farmer taught her about life and that marrying a tax auditor taught her about life.

(The consequences become not just dust, but brimstone. The moral is rendered in fire and Judah is left as a pillar of salt).

4. A reading of Scripture

A short list of words she has forgotten so far

yes

good

pinfeathers

bright

rest

together

complete

easy

quiet

hope

Words that have stayed with her, regardless

hurts

more

pain

meds

no

no

no

want

5. The Gospel readings

Death is the termination of the biological functions that define a living
organism. The word refers both to a particular event and to the condition that results thereby. The true nature of the latter has, for millennia, been a central concern of the world's religious traditions and of philosophical enquiry. Belief in some kind of afterlife or rebirth has been a central aspect of most, if not all, religious traditions.

-Encyclopedia Britannica

6.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

-Pslam 23

My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me!

-Jesus of Nazareth

7.

Dreams are lies.

-Judah, age nine`

8.

The nurses have begun to stop telling her that she can stop giving away her books and gardening trowels. She takes this as a sign that the end is near, but she doesn't know if she believes it. Where is the denouement? Even Ezekiel ended all his stories with a lament, as a sign to his listener that this here was the bitter end.

Besides, her dreams have so much movement in them. In these endtimes, she lays in bed grasping at images of (she can picture them, the small downy feathers that coat a bird with warmth, but she can't think of the word. the doctor says that's a symptom too) rivers in the desert clotted with blood or boiling with bright fish, or rippling with a kind of light filled glory. Or of frogs' fat legs across the threshold of houses. Or the arc of a seed as it is tossed onto barren soil. The tawny curve of a lion's neck as it lays down by the lamb. Water that is also life (she remembered that it tasted like the air on her wedding day, and also the wine she drank alone in celebration after the divorce). Salt glinting like the morning star as it poured through her fingers. A tossed crown, that meant nothing. The muscular rustle of a dove's wings as it took flight into the newly blue sky. A light that knew no darkness.

And above all, a sense of ascension, a pair of wings.

9.

Judah's kidneys are shutting down. Her blood insulin levels are poor. Most of the time, her toes and fingers are icy cold and she keeps forgetting whether she was eight or nine the first time he took her from choir rehearsal behind the church organ and raped her and her heart is slowing down and this must be what the end feels like. She thinks there are no angels in defeat but all the same, she's lonely.

10.

Her god is the sense of togetherness, but she guesses that dying is one of those things that you do by yourself. The Filipino nurse has settled down for the night in the armchair by her bed, but she might as well be across the Jordan river. It is late May. It is evening. The window is open.

Her body is the Macabbees, it is the Hittites, and the Aramaens and the Phillistines, all those things made to be defeated. Dying is a battle. She is tired. Judah closes her eyes.

-The final secret is this. Once you have wrestled your angel, that's it. The match might have taken nine years or a quarter century or a lifetime, but when that's it, that's it.

Judah circles the angel. She is a young lioness, young and sinewy. Both of them are slick with sweat, a deep scratch bleeds sluggishly on the angel's forehead. Judah can barely summon up the energy to keep her fists up. The angel surges forward to kick Judah's feet out from under her and dropped her to the ground, not carelessly, but with the great love and smugness of a lover who has been fighting you for a very, very long time. They have always known you were wrong, but all the same, they have always loved you.

Judah opens her eyes, and the angel has her pinned to the riverbank. The angel's blue wings are a feathery summer sky above her head, though it is night, though she can feel the hoarfrost melting under her cheek. For the first time in her entire life, she feels shelthered. The angel lets her wrists go and helps her up.

Where before there was only a murky landscape of darkness and hills, now there is green metal stepladder as big as creation, stretching up to the velvety night sky. The angel takes her hand, and they begin to climb, together.

28, I only post when I should be doing other things

This one is in the style of an old friend and from a while ago.

As Sam

 

I keep catalogues of decay now.

The Queen Anne's lace dies

like a dowager, all arthritic frills and obsolete. Keeping the moondust

from heaping in drifts in the front parlor takes up twenty three hours a day.

I sweep with a broom made of my children's hair. On the last hour

I rest.

 

I wipe the animals caught in formalin preservation with the silk from my wedding night gown, all cream and pearls and stains.

My favorite is the Throughbred foal who died before breathing

as alabaster as the mausoleums of Egypt. They say the filly is the daughter of Secretariat, but I'm not sure.

 

I fall asleep considering all the bribes that would be necessary to restore time's movement to my still and moldering world.

I wake to dream.

27, I think, I think I should be sleeping

What Goliaths

Petulant and street savvy, they were children nonetheless. They snorted dust and swallowed laxatives but in those morning after brunches in Berkley, they tried to remember to drink milk. Their bones were still growing in their uncomfortable bodies.

It was a time of slackrope and deadlines. Half the time the trick was to look like a burning church couldn't arouse your passions, that this braided nylon under your bare feet was as solid as an inheritance. Sweat was last month's old fashion, not a biological necessity.

 

The other half of the time, the fashion was a kind of studied over-work. The look was sweatpants that hung off your artful hipbones, a drip bag of coffee and a certain expression that said my calendar's full and my bed's booked. aint gonna happen, sugar.

 

She's seen kisses that made Judas seem sincere. There's not trick to it, really. Read her lips, she'll show you as easy as lying. But Cate's teeth are brace-straight. She was diligent about flossing. She washed her face regularly. She kept up these habits like a lonely army regiment, waiting for a general to appear.

 

Her peers experience desire as a broken rib that hurt every time they breathed. She had thought she was her own unique mess, but she's just the parlor in the Collyer brothers home. None of them trusted their bodies as biology. What they between their legs was a mixture of hope&fear&wetness&and a sense of urgency that no one had talked about in sex ed.

 

They made their own curriculum and she listened in on lectures on Saturday nights and syllabus reviews on Sunday morning. The students pontificated on the intersectionality between two bodies, trade relations at two in the morning and practical biology discussed in terms of cunts and toes and dejected curves of his neck.

 

They were all in transition, she thought. Their old children's bodies were helped us a porcelain vessels to be protected. Children's life vests, vitamins, car seats and sunscreen. They were accustomed to their bodies as the subject of protective legislation against faulty school buses and moral outrage over short skirts in the preteen department.

 

Now they wore gold shorts that let half moons peek through and no one staged an uproar. It boggled the mind. They reacted against the discontinuity by learning how to hurt themselves in socially acceptable ways. The women ate less and less, learning how to admire the austerity of an empty plate. They all learned the skill of taking leave from your body, which is a synonym for blacking out. And even the little destructions; staying up too late watching Disney movies on laptops, forgetting over and over and over again to wear a jacket in the rain- these were, in their way, a cry for attention.

 

Their bodies were on the precipice of decay. Some of them had already blown their ACL, had knee surgery. There were rumors of tan girls who lay on white hospital sheets, dying of melanomas, but no one had seen them for certain.

 

They were wired awake, iridescent, privileged in the way of the young and whole, absolutely miserable, full of earth shaking enthusiasm, exhausted, strung out on caffeine and worse, too beautiful to touch. She wasn't sure any of them were going to make it out alive.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By what Goliath was I begot, so strange and so unwanted?

Rainer Maria Rilke

25, Incoherent Love Poem

I'm surprised its taken me this long to post one of these. These used to be my speciality. One time, I wrote 30 love poems for one girl (hey there, jay-z) and posted them all over the glass walls of my high school. Two months in, and I am being careful not to let i love you drop. I am being careful with this one.



If All This Were Up to Me



Then this would be the last love poem I'd ever write.



I want this to be a manifesto of all that moves between us

(the slow stutter of your hips when you want something you can't have,

the way you stumble when I lean into you {the way you manage to catch me})

But we are in the pre-write phase and I'm afraid that what I want is the ninth edition paperback of us, dog eared and stained with mint tea.

I'm afraid that what we between have is barely even a first draft. This tenuous thing between us is as smudgable as the pencil marks

(you run the pad of your thumb along my eyelashes, and smudge black mascara)

I am interested to learn how you're going to hurt me.

Now we move around one another in highly choreographed waltzes, and I let you rest your hand on the small arch of my back,

but I want to know what I'm going to say that's going to make your face go hard and as private as a weekly appointment with a therapist.

I want to hear the comment that you're going to toss off that's going to leave me bawling uselessly into my unwashed pillow.

I am afraid to let you know that my insides run together with rot.

(maybe I am also afraid to see what you are made of)

Because biology was all blah blah enzymes and blah blah blah reactions until you taught me something about collarbones and the tangent curves of thighs.

You are the explanation I can understand, a religion I can believe in.

And champ, you ask me when we're laying in bed at nine on a butter and toast Sunday morning,

but I never told you this fantasy:

I think about grocery shopping for you a lot. I want to set up a joint checking account. I want tax returns and a pantry with your favorite brand of peanut butter and your laundry mixed with mine. I want to can tomatoes for you.

(I want everything+everywhere and I am learning how to deal with the fact that I can only have today.)

I think about walking in San Francisco and how someone's going to fucking regret it if they look at you the wrong way (it calms me to have something to protect) and

I'm terrified because we are children playing with a very adult form of fire and

I'm scared because sometimes I want to throw my whole body at you and I am still learning how much you can take of me.

I am scared because you make the noise in my spine drop dead.

I am scared because you are so beautiful you make the breath in my throat curl up and whimper

(I am scared because you tell me I am beautiful and I am still deciding whether I trust you).

You are the river I've been looking for, a religion I can believe in. Even your anger is as constant as the waterfall and I would pick your eyelashes over the Louvre. You love dogs. You want kids. You fit my bones.

The only thing left is charting out where my vast selfishness and your unchartable goodness will collide.

I swear, I'm ready.

Two months in. Wish me luck.

24, In repentance

This is an old one, for a boy named Spencer Slattery, who I don't really talk to anymore but wonder about sometimes.

Resplendent Quetzal

 

Others have told me this, and that makes sense because sometimes I only see myself refracted in the eyes

of others but their baby blues never stick

(biologists have documented fifteen colors on the resplendent quetzal):

 

"You smile when you lie. I know that's not really much of a tell, but it's true. Your entire face lights up like it's fucking Christmas morning or something, and then you tell the biggest crock of shit I've ever heard. It's kind of classic"

I don't know what to believe any more but

I'm a mascot for what you've become, and I love the mayhem more than the love

and I read that off the printer paper and I'm like

damn, I'm an ass and a half but I don't care what you think just give me attention attention attention

(the skin of the quetzal is thin enough to be torn by daily flight)

 

I've always been able to tell when people were looking at me. As vain as I am,

it's not exactly considered a talent, more a natural ability.

in case you're wondering and I know you were, don't pretend

it feels like a hum buzzing just beneath my skin and

I like to dance like broken ankles aren't just a misstep away and the music vibrates

like mercury on my skin

but that might have just been a chemical juxaposition

(the resplendent quetzal is poorly adapted to cope with its environment)

 

And at this point in this narrative I'm pretty sure Enda St Vincent Millay ain't got nothing on me because

m candle isn't just burning at both ends

my candle is a firecracker torch pinwheeling across the dirty rhinestone sky

and this town eats its own puppies so as soon as I hit the ground with loafers

that cost more then I like to think about

I am sprinting, I am getting out of here until my lungs burst and my

legs are on fire but I am getting out of here

 

I am too

afraid

not to

 

(the last color of the resplendant quetzal is iridesence)

Oh my goodness, I feel like a genius

Totally just figured out how to upload blog posts from word, about three years behind everyone else. Here is a sample of my thinky thought pamphlet to start making up for things.

 

his brother and sister glare at him like maybe if he weren't around they could have nice things.

cheerfully unrepentant sociopaths

 

I could have gone to Reed and gotten really pretentious. Instead I came here and got kinda gay.

 

Mr. Picciotto: 'Do you drink copious amounts of coffee before coming to class?'
Student While Jittering: 'Nooooooo, I'm liiiiike thisssss allllll the timmmmme.'

 

when someone tells you who they are, listen.

 

He looks, for the first time since she met him, tired

 

a kindergarten teacher whose class are all armed with semi-automatics and filled with sugar and hate

 

that's my weapon right there

 

and as long as he was breathing he would Know Things about Shit

 

Bert's eyelashes were long and thick and his bones were thin as grass stalks. He could walk on his hands, recite the periodic table backwards, and set the whole damn thing to music.

 

get the hell out of Gomorrah

 

YES WE ARE ALIVE.

 

Do you think any of us are in a situation we want to be in here?

 

"Welcome to the new church! Can I get an amen!"

 

Ninety-eight years of love. He supposed he could have done worse for himself.

 

Floyd and Georgia are gettin' married…

 

Narratophilia

23, Welcome Back

for amina, who i love

and suddenly, my life doesn't seem such a waste,

pretty girl with flames at the tips of your fingers.

you wear your clothing like those girl saints wore armor

all hedonism and martyrdom

but you (you are the most you), never bothered to learn how to drown

so you butterfly through the water with a kind of glorious imprecision

and you've got this magic you deploy like chemical warfare.

Force of personality, you are the rajah of your own ottoman empire of oakland.

May you always be this, darling of the fates.

22, I'm so behind oh my goodness

The Young Musician (for willie)

His youth is striking.
With the arrogance of the unpublished, he doesn't believe them when
they tell him he can't save anyone, he's damn well going to try.
He wears his insecurities like a banner draped across his victor's chest
Lovely, manic eyes alight with possibility and when he sings, the mountains strain to listen.

(if you were a singer in your own time and place, you would sing those stones to weeping
but magic died with Brahms and you are trying for something alive)

And the arch arch in his back as he bows telegraphs this as good as a smirk,
he's got this shit down to a science.
That trill remind the listener of the numbness and purity atop glaciated peaks,
that crescendo evokes the magnificence of faith.
This is as calculated as chemistry.

But all these academics are a metaphor for the vagrants
that tramp along the highways tucked in the ventricles of our hearts.
That dirty thing called love,
love and joy and how sometimes i'm better before you get to know me
and the way you sometimes feel about a girl you just met
how you want to put her fingers in your mouth and memorize all her cousins' names
right now, this very instant
but you don't, so you won't.

This is what I think about when I hear him sing.
This is strange and good, and very, very much alive.