Le fin d'annee et magique

I'm opening up the last month of the year with a realization. That you can't always tie things up with a pretty bow when they unravel. You can't always get some formulaic, content form of "closure," some clear and comfy ending to the narrative.

Sometimes, you have to leave things messy and disgusting, because that's how they're going to be no matter what you do. Maybe, just maybe, if you leave that mess alone it can biodegrade on its own (hopefully it's biodegradable,) and the worms will slowly reincorporate it into the earth and peace will come back to you eventually. It's even possible that with time something new and dazzling will grow from that wretched putrification...but you have to let that shit do it's thing.

I have loved deeply but love isn't always enough. We have this fantasy in our culture that once Cupid's arrow hits, there's a happy ending in clear site. Maybe this myth is hurtful to our psyches because it's too simplistic and doesn't actually capture what happens in life.

Two people have to work to understand each other and to fuse a path that they want to walk together. The pleasure and delight and even the passion of it isn't enough to fuse that deeper understanding which can be toilsome and painful. Construct you me into a walk we both believe in.

That sounds almost gory, I'm imagining bodies fused poetically together into some flowing organic highway, but then again I have the imagination of someone on hallucinogenic drugs who is not on hallucinogenic drugs but just sees the world as a kind of flexible swab of multicolored clay. Willy Wonka's ride onto the kaleidoscope of endless possibility. One of the less psychedelic souls that I've met put this into a physics formula once saying that anything is possible, technically. Pick your imagination springboard, be it physical or poetical...musical even. Mary Poppins and the children holding hands, plunging into a pastel painting on the sidewalk.

October, a slippery month

Overdrive. Overdriven

whelmed

The knowing return of waves
of clock hands

I didn't know yours as well

but I hoped you'd tick

right back and you did and now

I'm an uncertain Cinderella

because time and magic
work in overly mysterious ways.

Birthday New Year

It isn't just that I admire Sandra Cisneros. I need icons, idols, fantasies that feel palpable that somehow either relate to the space that I'm in or feel like the right life line. Hope is this funny thing made out of thoughts. Somehow it's easier to find an idol to worship, an earthly one. It can be a kind of muse or a hope vessel. I want to be able to imagine a life I can see myself living.
But Cisneros sounded like a happy loner...I mean when your family lives in the same city, getting your own apartment and living entirely by yourself can't be nearly as alienating. You can come home any time you want. Coming home for me has become a conundrum wrapped in heartache. What the hell does it even mean?!
The problem with falling in love and making a home and then breaking up is that the home gets unmade. So now I have to remake it somehow and the task is daunting.

Today I went to a life drawing session for the first time in years. I had been meaning to do this for a while, and I forgot how wonderful it can feel! I got a high from it and will be doing this more, there's something so joyful about capturing the beauty of the human body with a few quick lines and colors. And the quick gratification of the image that materializes before you is so rewarding. Also being able to interpret the light and the feeling however you want to, putting your own imaginative filter of the world onto paper, there's a visual language there unlike any other and reconnecting with this part of myself was thrilling.

Happy Jewish New Year to all who celebrate and birthday to me and new beginnings that may be rough and complex and smudgy but how else could we possibly muddle through?

Writing on the Wall

How decadent. I'm writing on the wall without leaving a mark while finishing yesterday's wine, still in the glass. I poured the rest into my glass as if to save you from dissolving yourself. There is residue from yesterday but not that much. I'm exactly as I should be: here, no fear (or at least diminishing,) and projecting my thoughts with my new old ASK Proxima.

I'll bet you'll think this song is about you...

The sky is broken. Pink flesh peaks out through the blue sky and I long to reach it but I know that it's just right where it is...cupid's tummy, or the thigh of a child lodged between wisps of cumulus. Thank you Miley for teaching me about clouds in my coffee and thank you cicadas for chirping exactly as you did in my childhood when a game of tag might happen in the depths of the trees and excitement was this perfect lurking thing that I didn't fear. 

Hyper-Creativity

it comes at the most emotional moment. Or the most inappropriate moment. The most heightened moment. When I'm already thinking creatively for my academic work, the poetry and fiction flow too. It must be the same general faucet. Maybe an fMRI could solve this (which would be interesting), or maybe I already have a pretty good inkling that the two are connected. Create, create, create.
I could haiku you, dissertation, but I won't. I could brain scan you, fiction, but I'll save that for later. I could paint this beautiful rift together or separately but either way, both flow at once and it is a matter of switching between, feeding the greedy needs of two different fairies, speaking in different tongues, words that come from the same mind in an unfolding frenzy. Did I mention it's fun? 

an M.c.

I love living here but I hate living here. I am constrained by my own conditioning. The urge to break free bubbles strongly beneath. I hate this climate. If I could differentiate clearly between my emotional understanding of climate and culture, between the phenomenology of living in a box surrounded by rainy gray skies and the expectation of working alone like a rat in a box with the desire for sunlight and fewer mind boxes to lose myself inside and a culture that pulls me in smilingly and openly because the focus is less on work and more on human relations then maybe I wouldn't be stuck in this Marxist conundrum. 

growth hurts

whether in spurts, teenager style, or a more mature process of finding yourself through the cerebro-emotional wanderings on a psychoanalyst's couch.
I'm growing and hurting,
hopefully a worthwhile flower.

super fast Chicago winter

has been zooming past at unimaginable speeds. As if I could have ever hoped for this crusty tundra life to go on enveloping me.

This morning I had a one-sentence story published in Monkeybicycle, which is encouraging and smile-inducing and makes me want to project more oddly contrived language in to the universe.