Brazilian dreams

I found out today that I won a fellowship that's gonna send me to the beautiful Brazil this summer. I'm going to ride this happy wave of anticipation for all it's worth, baby yeah!!!
I've never been to Brazil, and the goals for this summer could include:
1. Improve Portuguese (well this is obvious and the point)
2. Check out potential dissertation research sites and ideas (the second obvious point)
3. Write a novel
4. Learn the capoeira
5. Fall in love
6. Enjoy life
7. Write a novel about:
    a. falling in love to the beat of a Brazilian drum
    b. autoethnographic self-fun
    c. something wildly fictional where Kurt Vonnegut meets J.D. Salinger meet Lev Tolstoy meet Emily Dickinson meet Louise Gluck meet my mother
8. write poems and prose-poems, and stories, and articles and other fun things
9. draw, paint, dance, smile, laugh

I'm into lists at the moment. Lists this organizational thought process where numbering and sub-numbering is supposed to provide order. I'm so damn excited!!!!

fantasy inside this memory box

For several hours I did not pine
for my work. I talked to a merman
who swam up to my laptop and reminded 
me of fantasy. It seems like there is always
strange magnetism on this planet
from unexpected directions and it will take 
all my will to stay here
on my little piece of focus,
before it all churns under 
and I become wherever fancy 
wanders or wherever memory streaks.
On a black beach where you pull my hand,
a cold wave where you swim beneath me
merman, a fire around which we croon
to the moon and the light turns to 
tangerine creases in butter.
Yellow morning, we don't even need to wake up
we have been sleepless, kissing and swimming 
like children, 
don't wake me.