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.

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.