Ebbs and...

Today after an incredibly successful week, an incredibly productive couple months, I woke up feeling like a broken little piece of glass someone accidentally found in the sand. Sometimes consciousness has to be recollected like a lost fragment. Recollect how it got here to this non-place and this everything place.

I wish washed over myself in a worry of drownings. Always the fear of drowning. Except for literal drowning: the ocean is exquisite. Water calms and soothes, Lake Michigan can do this for me as well. A few days ago I walked out onto the beach which was a frozen-over glacial tundra, icy blue hills and valleys with brown sand peeping out in clumps. The water impossible dark blue behind the tundra hills. My soul was calmed immediately like a baby returning to the breast.

Memory foam

All these words to say to you apparently but they melt into the skin upon contact. The voids allow for words to become the material of contact. Later they can barely keep up with the impulse to kiss. Speaking is lost under kissing, touch itself confirms the word. The word is to be touched in my mouth, hands, between my legs the word begs to be spoken. The deep, aping word of the flower petals opening and begging. Speak body, the openings phrases for you to read, this braille we read in the flesh, flex with the tissue between sentences, comma, kiss.
"I need to reform myself to the mattress."
"Reform yourself to my body." 
Open the eyes or close them and the knowledge is the same. He/she will not disappear.

It was like that reassurance I felt last time after seeing my former (tragedy-inclined) chess partner. The feelings brought on by him had inspired this sense of self, this continuous sense, knowing that I'm still here, with or without him I'm here and somehow the reassurance wasn't that he was the same but that I was the same and would remain so upon leaving. I refound myself in a bleak little room despite the defiant air with which we said goodbye I was saying hello to myself. It was only a beginning in my relationship with myself.

So now upon knowing that I'm here, the knowledge of non-disappearances. Despite mortality, the knowing that all will continue to be and be. Even the seeming permanence of the stars is non-permanent, is old light. We look at ancient history when we look at the sky at night. Who knows what quickens the pulse of the universe thousands of light years away? What word chimes between her legs? Maybe she lays clocks like a hen, alternate realities ticking inside.

I'm hatching a few.

Object permanence is a constant concept to re-evaluate. All life long. If I close my eyes will you still exist? The young child doesn't know yet, mother leaves into a realm of non-existence. Mother reappears and she is reborn. The mind is remade every time mother appears and reappears. Birth and rebirth is introduced. Attachment is a series of relationship births and deaths over and over again. A constant reincarnation of the self and the other and the other and the self and the mirror that comes back come back to the mirror look at yourself, smile, hopefully. Smile. The grin on that face that's your grin to have and keep it's probably not permanent but you know that you could make it again it's yours to make. Smile, melt into the word and the skin the word the skin that makes the word.

Letting the brain fly as it will

Fly brain, fly.

I get sucked into other people's problems and projections too easily sometimes. Especially when I'm procrastinating on my dissertation and I'm hungry for a distraction, oh anything to remind me of something that matters, to remind me of something that resembles REAL things in the world where people feel and love each other and maybe even sometimes fight for each other? Even if the fight is nuts, as it often is in the games of love and war people co-construct in their minds, it's a fight and you get energized and your heart beats like an eager little soldier boy's drum da dum.

Something to trigger the passion in the brain. My stories of heart ache, where I ached until I couldn't ache any more.

It's too easy to become the target of someone else's insanity. The fixation for someone else's depravity. The cookie jar for cookie monster.

I'm no cookie jar. I'm a vat of infinite light and sound
watch the colours swishing round, colour fish
singing magical dolphins,
seas of infinite creatures

you best learn to swim in these waters, swim with me. Breathe like a mermaid. Serena. Serene. Ocean Yemanja Emerald Queen

Third Life Crises and Central American Predators and Such

A friend of mine talks about how she needs 6 hours of uninterrupted time to get 2 hours (?) of work done. For me, sometimes it's days of reluctantly transforming myself back into a monk. Or something.

This morning I wondered through my half-sleep about having a third-life crisis. I did so well in that play last weekend--maybe I was supposed to be an actor all along and here I am having spent most of my 20's in a PhD program for Self-Torturers in which I haven't been nearly as productive as I know I could be/would like to be. But the nature of this activity is such that it's hard for anyone to sustain constant motivation and productivity. You are on your own with usually no support whatsoever and you're supposed to keep imagining that what you're doing matters, that it's worthwhile, more importantly that you want to be doing this.

The whole point of running off to Central America for a couple weeks, (yes I just did that,) was to turn it all off. Because at some point you become so bombarded with expectations and obligations and emails and calendar reminders that it seems normal. But that trip, though lush and full of jungle views, was quite weird. It's like I forgot how to be properly defensive with strange men. I was overly friendly. I smiled, I wore adorable outfits. I had so many stalkers that there was a limited period of time during which I could actually stay in one town before it would get to be too much and I would have to move on.

Now I'm back in Chicago clamoring for space, on some nights opting to spread out luxuriously in the huge apartment I rented instead of going to parties. Luxuriating in my own territory. That trip left a bit of an antisocial (more like anti-random-men) taste in my mouth and it might take a little while to get past it.

The trick I'm sure is not to stop letting people in entirely, but to let them in selectively. You don't want the whole village thinking you're a welcoming target. It's a tough negotiation for women. (And more obviously so in a country where everyone's blood is boiling from the heat and more insidiously so in a country where everyone pretends to be polite and pc.) On the one hand there will always be endless numbers of predators looking for a babe with a friendly grin...on the other if you become too defensive when do you meet someone nice and decent? Barbie would have drowned instantly, that plastic lipsticked beauty pageant grin is there for the whole wide world to aim for. And we all love her, don't we.

My clearest voice and sense of self has always been right here, in writing. Which you would think should be my answer, probably is my answer. The trick is somehow using all this other stuff (i.e. PhD torture,) I have devoted years to in some kind of positive, useful way--whether in academia or outside of it or both. I mean certainly flushing five years down the toilet seems pretty self-obliterating. But that's impossible because I'm a different person now whether I like it or not. My mind has been trained and sharpened and looped into deep, meticulous thinking processes. These five years have changed me, regardless of what I do next.... Some say you can do multiple things, be a Renaissance Man. My father used to warn me against being a jack of all trades, master of none. I hear all these voices. And here I am sitting with them, echoes of echoes. My own dissertation topic a reflection of something I ask myself--something that can seem incredibly clear on some days and the warped, ever new day dreams of a little girl on others (be a fireman a ballerina an astronaut)--how do people figure these questions out, I mean really? And how on earth do you let go of The Bell Jar's tree of possibilities?

Hopeful Sunday, full of breath

I had a very vivid dream this morning, I could sense it was morning (it's those dreams lately right before waking that I feel I am living in...that I'm getting to the theme of my day or the latest "point of it all," just before I wake up,) it was a dream about poetry. It was a dream about my poetry writing. I was in these writing programs in Iowa, I was clamoring to squeeze in these poetry programs because it was important. I didn't do a creative writing workshop this quarter and there is a worry in me because the important thing is to stay motivated, to keep writing, keep going. I was at a psychology conference for a few days, a rather turbulent little conference that is making me wonder if I should be thinking about cortisol and stress all day long which is stress-producing all on its own (someone asked if I'm studying other people's stress or my own?)...and before that I hardly focused on my writing hardly enough for a few months, it was all about pushing my research proposal through. And then the sad truth that I had to give up my beautiful first project for this one. And then the fear of giving up things I love for other things and then the fear of being consumed by the wrong thing.

So I wrote a short-short today. Not a poem. I mean the poems and the fiction and the memoir have all become part of one project to keep pushing the words through no matter what comes.

I started reading Alexander Hemon's memoir the other day and in it he says that he only considers himself a writer when he's actually writing and that's exactly right, write. If you're not writing, but you're a writer then you're not existing so you better get to it!

Another Sunday...body, body, body, dislocate the hip joints by sitting for too long, then tighten everything by capoeira kicking, then breathe with yogic hip openers? It's the same with words, dislocate, then locate, then breathe. 

Deja Vu, Deja You

Sometimes I interact with people in my life, significant people, who have very little memory of the events we have shared whereas I have excruciatingly detailed memories.... This can be a problem. It can make me feel like I am the only one awake, the only one not erasing my experience. It is a broken mirror when you see someone as a fuller past continuity than they see you. You live in me more deeply, Person, than I live in you and is it pointless to ask why? Maybe it is useful to know why the grass is green, and why you don't remember that we've already been here before that you've already said these words before that you're following a script except I'm the only who knows it. 

What is this scripted nonsense--can't you hear yourself? Listen, listen, be your own best audience. Let's keep it fresh, growing, spontaneous, improvisational...let's write new lines, new plays, unearth each other in new ways. I am not your deja-bot, I want to shine not like your PTSD but like glistening possibility. 

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.