I would really rather when you take pictures that you not look directly into the camera.
I can feel you stealing my soul.
I mean
I can feel you staring at me
And I am naked in front of you
I like to sit naked at the computer.
In front of the window.
But that’s different. The neighbors are not looking right at me.
And if they are, serves them right.
Close your blinds, mind your own business.
Mrs. Kravitz.
This is not supposed to be a poem.
It’s supposed to be clipped dialogue
I almost typed lipped
Clipped lipped.
Conversation.
Streamofconsciousnessonlymywordsonlyruntogethersometimesandi’vebeentypingforsomanyyearsit’sreallyhardformenottohitthespacebarbutthis
Isn’t my stream of consciousness anyway.
This is.
This is my consciousness.
Sentence after sentence. Each sentence a paragraph of its own.
Independent thoughts like a ladder dependent on what came before.
You know, steps.
Where were we?
Rapunzel, the steps to my window!
Rapunzel! Don’t look at me in that tone of voice.
Through your pictures.
Stop stealing my soul and climb down here instead and look me in the face.
Stop gazing at me through your camera. Every photo is a webcam until itself.
And the men and women merely players.
It’s silly but I have a page full of pictures all staring at me and none of them ever says anything or answers.
I feel judged.
Their Mona Lisas are equally enigmatic.
You seem to be smiling . . .
But.
I feel you stealing my soul.
Surrealist Doodle
This was used as the cover of Karawane in 2006 and I have included it in on a number of bags and postcards over the years. Someone on the subway asked me if it was a Miro. I was very flattered!
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Thursday, July 19, 2012
I felt briefly sad this morning, set aside my anger as I imagined you afraid. Remembered when you called every minute, we couldn’t get enough of each other. It’s sad not to love you anymore.
You said I said you did you said you said you would you didn’t i did not i never you said.
I wish I knew how to leave without pronouncements.
When I think of you I want to go to New York
Paris
Chicago
somewhere large and exotic and far away
You do not listen and you do not speak
I cannot know you nor become known
When I’m lonely I got to public places to call you
(empty house)
To be angry with you is to be mad at the world.
I dreamed of a widow with five beds.
I dreamed of a woman with 5 beds.
I dreamed of a woman with two heads.
(spinster)
I dreamed of a widow with five
In love with the light brown boys
I wait for fate to take me away from him. The though of giving him up hurts too much. I lack
time
distance
the will
to walk away. I don’t want to walk away. I can’t make it better and I can’t walk away. I will say something that I cannot take back.
It’s not like a gunshot or a disease. Always we try to pinpoint “the thing” that hurts us the most, but unlike physical death, it’s a lot of different causes, indications.
After a fight, the need to connect with someone else, the desperate need to prove that someone can still love you. That you are still worthy., The fear of losing others, of losing everyone. I want to break up with the whole world at once.
She wandered the streets wondering if she had more crying to do.
She went to the movies every day for nine days. Permission to cry without having to know why, without summoning logic and analyzing feelings and understanding and explaining herself.
To lose what sustains you is to lose everything.
She sat alone, seeing a strong man walk by who might be menacing, who might look safe but prove otherwise, lurching toward her. Sometimes she wondered if she would resist the rape. The murder. She could look at a man and feel his thumbs at her voice box, his big fingers straddling her throat and in her wondering, closed her eyes to surrender like a drowning, flailing her arms involuntarily but sinking into the earth accepting her body as a grave being dug a coffin being built, to surrender and be quiet.
We’re all afraid that our detractors are right about us. We want to be worthy of our eulogies but we fear it will be our enemies critics who will have the last word instead.
I need to go where there is no music.
Maybe we need love because we need god. We see the divinity in other people and desire communion, transmission.
All the great mystics were epileptic. Is god a disease? Or are we pre-wired, hotwired with the commission?
Love is radioactive. It dies in half-lives and never fully extinguishes.
You said I said you did you said you said you would you didn’t i did not i never you said.
I wish I knew how to leave without pronouncements.
When I think of you I want to go to New York
Paris
Chicago
somewhere large and exotic and far away
You do not listen and you do not speak
I cannot know you nor become known
When I’m lonely I got to public places to call you
(empty house)
To be angry with you is to be mad at the world.
I dreamed of a widow with five beds.
I dreamed of a woman with 5 beds.
I dreamed of a woman with two heads.
(spinster)
I dreamed of a widow with five
In love with the light brown boys
I wait for fate to take me away from him. The though of giving him up hurts too much. I lack
time
distance
the will
to walk away. I don’t want to walk away. I can’t make it better and I can’t walk away. I will say something that I cannot take back.
It’s not like a gunshot or a disease. Always we try to pinpoint “the thing” that hurts us the most, but unlike physical death, it’s a lot of different causes, indications.
After a fight, the need to connect with someone else, the desperate need to prove that someone can still love you. That you are still worthy., The fear of losing others, of losing everyone. I want to break up with the whole world at once.
She wandered the streets wondering if she had more crying to do.
She went to the movies every day for nine days. Permission to cry without having to know why, without summoning logic and analyzing feelings and understanding and explaining herself.
To lose what sustains you is to lose everything.
She sat alone, seeing a strong man walk by who might be menacing, who might look safe but prove otherwise, lurching toward her. Sometimes she wondered if she would resist the rape. The murder. She could look at a man and feel his thumbs at her voice box, his big fingers straddling her throat and in her wondering, closed her eyes to surrender like a drowning, flailing her arms involuntarily but sinking into the earth accepting her body as a grave being dug a coffin being built, to surrender and be quiet.
We’re all afraid that our detractors are right about us. We want to be worthy of our eulogies but we fear it will be our enemies critics who will have the last word instead.
I need to go where there is no music.
Maybe we need love because we need god. We see the divinity in other people and desire communion, transmission.
All the great mystics were epileptic. Is god a disease? Or are we pre-wired, hotwired with the commission?
Love is radioactive. It dies in half-lives and never fully extinguishes.
Thursday, July 12, 2012
Forgetting
When a building breaks open, a weighty air rushes out, settles like soot on the living bodies around it, perhaps small bits left behind of every other spirit that walked entered passed through traversed, bits of each one of us undusted fingerprints left behind, suddenly shaken from the surface.
Downtown silent downward faces. Quick glances away from eye contact, the silent bus ride getting there. When the bustle of the farmer's market at noon gets quiet you can hear the helicopters in the dances one short city mile away. All the cliches rush out -- heavy hert, the brick on the chest. My insides are full of cement limestone seeming to harden and weigh down my steps. I feel my legs move disconnected from my torso in some kind of cast.
No one mentions the people who lived under the bridge. They were not supposed to exist, so their disappearance is just another wish fulfillment self-fulfilling prophecy. You were never here (anyway). I pray too that you never existed in that moment that you (re) appear now Houdini of the under/overpass, uncensused neighbors.
Street preacher shouting "thou shalts" adds to my headache, piercing through several blocks of sound barrier. At least say something consoling I shout to him in a footstep, in a breath(er). At least put your arms around someone, move away some stones, show yourself (to be) a miracle not a menacing voice another layer of soot settling in an aftermath.
To forget even a moment seems a sin.
How long is the right amount of time for forgetting?
Downtown silent downward faces. Quick glances away from eye contact, the silent bus ride getting there. When the bustle of the farmer's market at noon gets quiet you can hear the helicopters in the dances one short city mile away. All the cliches rush out -- heavy hert, the brick on the chest. My insides are full of cement limestone seeming to harden and weigh down my steps. I feel my legs move disconnected from my torso in some kind of cast.
No one mentions the people who lived under the bridge. They were not supposed to exist, so their disappearance is just another wish fulfillment self-fulfilling prophecy. You were never here (anyway). I pray too that you never existed in that moment that you (re) appear now Houdini of the under/overpass, uncensused neighbors.
Street preacher shouting "thou shalts" adds to my headache, piercing through several blocks of sound barrier. At least say something consoling I shout to him in a footstep, in a breath(er). At least put your arms around someone, move away some stones, show yourself (to be) a miracle not a menacing voice another layer of soot settling in an aftermath.
To forget even a moment seems a sin.
How long is the right amount of time for forgetting?
Friday, July 06, 2012
The dark side of love (a journal entry)
He never forgave me for falling in love with him.
I exist [am allowed] in his domain to adore him. But not too much. And I when I fail to adore him, he becomes angry with me. And when I look at him too closely, smile too much, he says things to put me in my place, to make sure I know that I will never be enough for him, that I do not deserve his attention. He is never not angry with me. Not really.
When he hurts me I want to be raped.
To be pushed into a corner, grabbed, bent over a wall.
I know all of the psychobabble and all of the different explanations about helplessness, about the external manifestation of how I feel inside. To analyze it, reduce it to a talk show or cosmo cover would turn it into a cliche. I could pay someone by the hour to ask me the right questions to extract the exact reasons so I can get better but it won’t make him stop. The releases, the feel of rough hands, focused only on the moment, out of my control, pushed farther into dark feelings than I can take myself.
I exist [am allowed] in his domain to adore him. But not too much. And I when I fail to adore him, he becomes angry with me. And when I look at him too closely, smile too much, he says things to put me in my place, to make sure I know that I will never be enough for him, that I do not deserve his attention. He is never not angry with me. Not really.
When he hurts me I want to be raped.
To be pushed into a corner, grabbed, bent over a wall.
I know all of the psychobabble and all of the different explanations about helplessness, about the external manifestation of how I feel inside. To analyze it, reduce it to a talk show or cosmo cover would turn it into a cliche. I could pay someone by the hour to ask me the right questions to extract the exact reasons so I can get better but it won’t make him stop. The releases, the feel of rough hands, focused only on the moment, out of my control, pushed farther into dark feelings than I can take myself.
Tuesday, July 03, 2012
Ecstasism
What do people want to be?
I wonder as a I look at them walk down the street in their clothes, women mannish preppy frumpy. What are they putting on? What does it make them?
Me, I want to be quiet, still. But I still want to be heard. Want to shut down the to-do lists and shoulds and tv shows and news and bombings and mother’s voice, lover’s voice. I want to be heard from the silence without speaking or even having to think a single word. To radiate meaning.
That I may seek not so much to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love, to be consoled as to console.
Words and moments linger, an afterburn, a sunspot. Desire & regret; self-satisfaction & replay. It’s never really that we want to live forever or remain in a single moment of former glory, but for every moment forward to be like our best, for every minute to be worthy of a replay, so splendid and full of affirmation that it pushes us forward and forward until looking back, remembering, remains an act reserved for our eulogizers.
I’m getting overstimulated again, when it’s quiet that I said I wanted, isn’t it?
You’ll have to excuse me. I’m prone to ecstasy. Ecstacism. Outbursts. Exuberance. Protuberance. Tubers. Goobers. Gompers. (Samuel. Union leader.) I get giddy.
The bus is so jarring I can’t read my own writing. Where are the socialists now when we need public works. Who will step forward with their uncashed taxed refunds and say this pothole is mine! Stand back while I fill it in!
An old woman with a shopping cart.
A young woman, vibrant on the outside, secretly afraid of everything. Afraid of the phone. Afraid of men. Afraid of ridicule.
A bodacious middle aged woman. Young face. Varicose veins. Learning self-possession. Unlearning fear.
So many things to become. So many clothes to put on.
As I write this under white puffy clouds, fathers in Iraq are stocking up on nerve gas antidotes.
Such things will never touch me unless I dwell on it. Remind myself. I need to be reminded.
I don’t want to put on camouflage and a long face. Everywhere it should be sunny and even dark clouds in the distance should mean only rain and not fear.
Annunciation.
Glad tidings.
Does every story need a point?
A plot? A moral? A narrative arc? What is the thread of our lives so that we know that we are ourselves? Through operations and changed and removed organs, through people forgotten and dead and cut off from us, lives we may never return to, yet something holds us in, keeps everything from falling out in a big mess on the floor in front of us. But what was the moral of the story?
I ramble. I rage. I wonder. I cry. And so I should be still. And radiate. So you can understand me.
Lunge. Lurch.
Perch. Porch. Scorch. Scrounge. Scourge.
Scourge.
Scour. Scowl. Scourge.
With thorns.
Make yourself quiet. So you don’t feel it. Make yourself quiet so your body forgets you. So you forget to feel.
Annunciation.
Announce. Pronounce. Denounce. Renounce. Renown. Redoubt.
All of these things that come spilling out of my head when I’m trying to figure out what to be. When I’m trying to radiate
meaning.
Ruts & ruts & ruts & synapes & moats and potholes & veins & interstates & things that travel the same path forever. Only the river can change its course. I can(not) be silent. Can(not) quiet the cacophonies symphonies tympanies that accompany me. I am not what I am trying to be.
What do people want to be?
I wonder as a I look at them walk down the street in their clothes, women mannish preppy frumpy. What are they putting on? What does it make them?
Me, I want to be quiet, still. But I still want to be heard. Want to shut down the to-do lists and shoulds and tv shows and news and bombings and mother’s voice, lover’s voice. I want to be heard from the silence without speaking or even having to think a single word. To radiate meaning.
That I may seek not so much to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love, to be consoled as to console.
Words and moments linger, an afterburn, a sunspot. Desire & regret; self-satisfaction & replay. It’s never really that we want to live forever or remain in a single moment of former glory, but for every moment forward to be like our best, for every minute to be worthy of a replay, so splendid and full of affirmation that it pushes us forward and forward until looking back, remembering, remains an act reserved for our eulogizers.
I’m getting overstimulated again, when it’s quiet that I said I wanted, isn’t it?
You’ll have to excuse me. I’m prone to ecstasy. Ecstacism. Outbursts. Exuberance. Protuberance. Tubers. Goobers. Gompers. (Samuel. Union leader.) I get giddy.
The bus is so jarring I can’t read my own writing. Where are the socialists now when we need public works. Who will step forward with their uncashed taxed refunds and say this pothole is mine! Stand back while I fill it in!
An old woman with a shopping cart.
A young woman, vibrant on the outside, secretly afraid of everything. Afraid of the phone. Afraid of men. Afraid of ridicule.
A bodacious middle aged woman. Young face. Varicose veins. Learning self-possession. Unlearning fear.
So many things to become. So many clothes to put on.
As I write this under white puffy clouds, fathers in Iraq are stocking up on nerve gas antidotes.
Such things will never touch me unless I dwell on it. Remind myself. I need to be reminded.
I don’t want to put on camouflage and a long face. Everywhere it should be sunny and even dark clouds in the distance should mean only rain and not fear.
Annunciation.
Glad tidings.
Does every story need a point?
A plot? A moral? A narrative arc? What is the thread of our lives so that we know that we are ourselves? Through operations and changed and removed organs, through people forgotten and dead and cut off from us, lives we may never return to, yet something holds us in, keeps everything from falling out in a big mess on the floor in front of us. But what was the moral of the story?
I ramble. I rage. I wonder. I cry. And so I should be still. And radiate. So you can understand me.
Lunge. Lurch.
Perch. Porch. Scorch. Scrounge. Scourge.
Scourge.
Scour. Scowl. Scourge.
With thorns.
Make yourself quiet. So you don’t feel it. Make yourself quiet so your body forgets you. So you forget to feel.
Annunciation.
Announce. Pronounce. Denounce. Renounce. Renown. Redoubt.
All of these things that come spilling out of my head when I’m trying to figure out what to be. When I’m trying to radiate
meaning.
Ruts & ruts & ruts & synapes & moats and potholes & veins & interstates & things that travel the same path forever. Only the river can change its course. I can(not) be silent. Can(not) quiet the cacophonies symphonies tympanies that accompany me. I am not what I am trying to be.
What do people want to be?
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