everything

i can be
alone by myself
i was
lonely alone
now i’m lonely
with you
something is wrong
there are flies
everywhere
i go

-Alone, Nikki Giovanni


The first poetry I ever really got into was hers.  Also I will be performing at a poetry reading tonight.  Me and my manly voice up onstage just doesn't seem like a recipe for a good time.  It's one of those things you do just so you can say you did it.


ALSO! I am working on a painting for my brother.

wwooooh exciting.

Peace/Shanti

Will you feel better?

I wish that youtube had music with no videos sometimes.  That's the way I like to consume it.

In other news, this is devastatingly relevant.  

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Oh HEY I got accepted into the Northern Eclecta, which is a journal NDSU puts out every year with creative submissions... I am happy.  This next poem isn't the one that got accepted.  I just wrote this today actually.  

Paring

would you cut out

the rotting parts of your

past as if it were a slightly-too-old

vegetable?

there have been times

when I wished for

forgetfulness

still, decay is good for the ink

in a way that easy-to-consume

isn’t

so I leave myself inelegant I leave myself

whole

another year of tangled half-brilliance

another year of enough imperfection

to blind someone

caution tape

hey please don't fall for me, just don't.

I'm sorry in advance for not having the courage to give you the warning you need out loud.  I'm sorry because impulses take precedence over what I know I shouldn't do, most nights.  I live with my eyes wide open.  I stay sober so I don't even have that excuse.  I can't expect you to walk the fine line of detachedness with me.  If I could I wouldn't be alone on my couch right now.  

-------------------

I've been thinking about Sufism.  And how maybe Judaism isn't the root of Christianity or Islam the root of Sufism, maybe its just that they needed to keep what they had been taught originally, but the end result is still Love.  

organized religion, hmph.  

I love Rumi.  I don't wanna call it Christianity or Sufism, can we just talk about how love is pretty much the only thing worth worshipping? The only quality I would allow you to attribute to God?  

and I'm tired, not making all that much sense, but I've been writing beautiful things.  That always comes to me as the nicest surprise.  

365

things are capable of changing

ice to water to smoke

over the course of a year

my heart has unfolded

the way a garden worships

spring

rebuilding itself from multiple

warzones of

a winter that has

gone on far too long

I can’t think where my

demons have gotten to

perhaps swatted dead

like flies while I’ve

slept

somehow

it took

less than twelve months

to finally be able to awaken

feverless

into a dark blue that is

only deepening with

stars

-----

time traveler. The past is looking more and more surreal every day.

you ever find yourself crying on an examination table to a doctor who insists you're only sad because it's winter?

you ever find yourself unable to even disagree because your confidence level is zero and you have de-evolved to something almost unrecognizable to anyone who knew you before?
----------------

Submit to love without thinking,
as the sun this morning rose recklessly
extinguishing our star-candle minds.

-Rumi

It is possible I have been spending too much time trying to make sense.

"With this story I'm going to sensitize myself, and I am well aware that each day is a day stolen from death. I am not an intellectual, I write with my body. And what I write is moist fog.  Words are sounds transfused with unequal shadows that intersect, stalactites, lace, transfused organ music. I hardly dare shout out words at this vibrant and rich, morbid and dark web which has its countertone in the thick bass of pain.  Allegro con brio.  I'll try to wrest gold from charcoal.  I know that I'm putting off the story and playing ball without a ball.  Is the fact an act? I swear that this book is made without words.  It is a mute photograph.  This book is silence.  This book is a question."

-Clarice Lispector "The Hour of the Star"
\


"Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history"
-Plato

If you feel like acquiring

some calm

I'm writing something.  Lots of fire metaphors.  Maybe that started the night we lit approx. 249 matches and held them, watching them burn out with all the fascination of a child discovering bubble wrap.

It is becoming apparent to me that I have been asking the wrong questions my entire life. So here it is, five years too late.

"Which one of us will forget the other first?"

daysleeper

My dreams try to find my balance for me.

When I hated my life (for roughly six months last year), my dreams were beautiful and comforting.   I slept for something like 13 hours a day.  I woke up wishing I could be living what I was dreaming.  I can't give you an example, the only thing that I really remember was being deeply content.  Transitioning to daylight was almost unbearable.

Now that I am more or less content with my life, my dreams are frightening and horrible.  Last night I had what I consider a classic horror movie dream, involving some sort of maggots laying eggs in my skin.  Also I dream about things breaking or malicious intent of someone I love.

When I have a bad day my dreams are better, but since I am mostly happy with my life right now, they are still tinged with a negative aura.

Flashback to a year and a half, when I wasn't sleeping at all, and something becomes very clear to me.  I wasn't sleeping, so I wasn't dreaming. All the very horrible and very good had to be expressed during my waking life.

Dreams don't make sense,  and when I stop having them, when I stop sleeping, that madness leaks into real life.  The yin yang is no longer separated into neat black and white curves.

Things get jagged.

Get Thee to a Nunnery

OA or Why I Became a Nun

I learned to identify rocks in high school: granite, quartz, diorite.  I still can't identify which men are dangerous, not even on an intellectual level, until I'm busted up on the side of the road, another flower in a bouquet of "I told you so".  Character judgement as a beginner's level course is something I flunk out of more often that I will admit to anyone.

Historically, I have been perfectly comfortable gambling on myself.  I have always believed that my heart can take any amount of abuse.  I would rather be a thousand splintered pieces no one else but me would bother to tape together than the reason you're flinching every time a woman walks in.  I would rather be with someone who doesn't care about me all that much and even I can see that's a trainwreck of a policy.  

I'm over here tiptoeing past the sleeping giant of my inner child begging for the cereals with all the sugar.  I'm over here with my "just say no" and my "I'm sorry I can't do this".  I'm over here keeping my heart away from things it could break, elephant in a china shop and sometimes

I wish I didn't have to.

----

some of this is probably B.S., and I ain't telling you which parts or how much.  OH MY GAH this is sophistry! Bam! Identification.

I will be homeless for the month of June (until the 26th when I leave for Korea).  Well... not really HOMELESS homeless, I'll still have a place to stay I think.  I just won't have a place that's mine. but hey! I won't pay rent this whole summer, which will go a little ways toward making up for the cost of plane tickets and the TEFL plus program when I'm in Thailand.

"When I'm in Thailand"

love that statement.

Found this, love it

I Lost a Bet

The best time to know someone
is when you don’t yet know enough.
Metallic tongues slipping dog-eared
excerpts; cracked smiles sticking
paper masks together.

Moments everything is fascinating;
times every word is effervescent —
we cling.
Discovery is the gentlest unknown,
spine just cracked, the novel’s first third.

Perhaps I do not know you
well enough to write about you, perhaps
I do not know whether you prefer pancakes
or waffles, how you take your coffee
or if you take it at all, what songs
smooth your cracks, or what words
could calm the cratered cacophony
when shattered is the only
best descriptor of your dreams.

But I do know that for one night, if just,
we found a way to make alone
less lonely.

The rest I’m willing to learn.
-jayarrarr

Tips to be healthy:

eat a bunch of oatmeal without cooking it first (oatmeal is healthy)

oatmeal is also dry, thus you will be forced to drink copious amounts of water (also healthy)

---

I can't write. anything.  I've written one poem in weeks and it was pretty terrible.  I am worried.  

maybe all the creativity is leaving my body when I dance.