Tuesday, July 30, 2024

...

loneliness is loyal
strawberry covered in diamonds




now i know i don't possess
yet everything is mine

Friday, July 26, 2024

paglia sexual personae notes

eroticism is a realm stocked by ghosts
cursed and enchanted

love is a crowded theater

our focus on the pretty
the birds the leaves the flowers
a patchwork pattern by which we map the known

earth cult to sky cult

a sequence of circular returns
beginning and ending at the same point
women's centrality gives her a stability of identity
she does not have to become 
but only to be

the western idea of history as a propulsive movement into the future
a progressive or providential design
climaxing in the revelation of a second coming
is a male formulation

no woman could have coined such an idea
since it is a strategy of evasion of women's own cyclic nature
in which man dreads being caught

woman does not dream of transcendental or historical escape
from natural cycle
since she is that cycle

bound to nature's calendar
an appointment she can't refuse
she has never been deluded by the mirage of free will

every time we say nature is pretty 
we are saying a prayer

perfect objectivity does not exist
every thought bares some emotional burden
had we time or energy to pursue it
each random choice

from the color of a toothbrush to a decision over a menu
could be made to yield its secret meaning in the inner drama of our lives 
but in exhaustion we shut out this psychic supersaturation

emotion is chaos
love for all means coldness to something or someone

imagination has a price
which we are paying every day

women do not need to conceptualize
in order to exist

unreachable omnipotence of woman 

everything is melting in nature
we think we see objects 
but our eyes are slow
and partial

nature is blooming and withering
in long puffy respirations
rising and falling in oceanic wave motion

spiritualization of cruelty
pain made pleasure

the pagan cinema of western perception
let us not steal from the eye 
to give to the ear

nature is forever playing solitaire with herself
there are ideas in images

a woman putting on men's clothing
merely steals social power
but a man putting on women's clothes
is searching for god

springtime goddess 
showered in flowers of mathematical calculation

pieta is a tableau of female immortality
and perishable manhood

we speak of falling apart
getting on top of things
getting it all together
only in the west is there such conviction of the unity of personality

the Italian imagination is darkly archaic
it hears the voices of the dead

mona lisa
sfumato is her game
the more he plays it 
the less leonardo can paint

a poet is not always master of his own poem

voyeurism is the amoral aesthetic of the aggressive western eye
transporting us unseen across space and time

masks = magic
western identity is impersonation

alchemy's spiritual aim is the achievement of inner silver or inner gold

dazzling electric wit

costume transforms thought

a liquid prisoner
pent in walls of glass
an alchemical image from sonnet 5
where summer flowers are distilled into an alembic of perfume
like love and beauty transformed into art

in nearness we enter each other's animal aura
there is magic there
both black and white

coffee water cookies plum

I can’t stop listening 
to her clanking and bludgeoning
man woman androgyne 

I rarely think about the Greeks
but maybe they think about me
I agree that we’re still mostly pagan 

that the pagan undercurrent pulls
that men's obsessiveness is escapism
and women know how to just be

Tuesday, July 23, 2024

redacted

I'll be songs in your car
the dust on your windshield

nothing too heavy or whole
for you to actually carry

I keep dreaming a baby
I’m raising alone

in a big dark city
fear and love percolating 

I'll be the heart archivist 
over here 

that day you made me sign
an invisible contract

invoke very briefly
your brown eyes and dirty arms

then relinquish my omnipotence
and I begin again

and again
wherever my beginning is

Friday, July 19, 2024

power play with days


my cake digests backwards or 

in shards anxiety shreds


dream also turned fleas a little bit and flu 

the semester, dark, feeding the cat early 

morning earthquake: school dad subway car


today I went to your frost covered field

in the middle of Example Summer 

where days just crumble and it

made me stronger to see stillness


you can’t design another person’s 

death or die it either


dream also had hershey kisses

and now it's raining

woke up to stressful logistics but it's raining


looked at the river really quick

sent you files and bought beer

the day crushes me


unending desire for extension 

and that’s what summer even is

dreams punctuate with subterranean 

temps that flutter into morning


everything manages to get worse and still

I hope to study, consider the 1000 variables

the various planes of consciousness 


Thursday, July 18, 2024

misalignment trap

my ex-believer
my failure
the dirt 
swirling the sweetness

Wednesday, July 17, 2024

as is

dirt piles multiplying around town
like the party so much better in my mind
I don't want random new attention

vision of a clearing in the day 
like a frost covered field  
in an otherwise summer city

some days there is openness
some days I can't avoid feeling 
not worth it to you

clear crystal heart 
(cold, heavy)

pick-n-pull

tired of the esp 
we've had to develop 
to protect ourselves
when they could just 
learn to read their own minds

our appointment with life
is in the present moment
the place of our appointment 
is right here

Saturday, July 6, 2024

ambivalence 10

 

i’m really here for the grass between houses

the views of grass between

houses, paint chipped and wrapped in porch

you ask me about my earliest memory it's one of those questions

for which i need an agent, like the word bedroom 

to drive my recall otherwise frozen 


fanny howe* in july, reading indivisible on and around the 4th

he said I should dj halloween music at the party next weekend

october’s perennial lust plays/disparate yet simultaneous tones 

click, or I let them/drive my recall


drive under waning, tepid sun to my friend’s birthday in the woods

my friend who writes, the force of a weather event or miracle…

to seek a miracle in a weather event, to make a brief church in the parking lot


the storm begins, we eat cake and she reads to us from a book that someone loves

i’ve read it too but today i’m the grass between houses


a weather event, a physical attempt to stir the objects of her life—


objects as agents of recall

the markers, the Chagall,

each stair, but collage with

how they felt on my feet


i remember the parking lot where you could pick up a radio frequency that played one boyz II men song over and over


Now the rain is letting up and a soft blue light is sifting through the flannely clouds. Gullies of water gurgle down the canyons and birds sing. I feel dread. The opening up of light and sky, the return of the responsibility that the empty air brings, horrifies me. Since God has abandoned the world, it is time who is left watching over us. Time is the spirit who breathes into the world. When it was raining, water was like an apology.*



Wednesday, July 3, 2024

antifreeze

I climb the tree at the show
after the man with pruning shears in his back pocket
I ask him what he's assessing, what's its name, how old is it
tissue density he says the most important things can't be seen with the eyes
he taps the trunk in different places
b's mom calls them in the middle of their set inside
isn't a carob the little prince tree I ask
baobab he says 
this is the oldest carob I've seen in santa cruz
probably 100 years
that was my guess
he leaves me sitting out on a branch alone 
in the next set ghost harmonics sound like a boy child chorus
we talk about joan of arc, silvia federici
temecula, antifreeze, jung 
I go home and dream I am reluctantly involved with j
not at all in love but allowing it
wake up to his texts sent one minute before my alarm
go to work and watch them continue to turn and spray my empty fields
get home and roll the trash to the street with h
my therapist and I both have glasses with tinkling ice out of frame

my glamorous penny


dreamt of kittens the size of pennies

woke up unfamiliar with my body temp, bleeding

take the survey off like a plastic sleeve

open line one like a floorboard

ryan had a kitten dream too

one that fit in his palm which

he recounted with a stretched out hand


Tuesday, July 2, 2024

feel light about changing

2 horses in my rearview
in the safeway parking lot
go in the ocean!! j texts

dreamt my toddler running ahead of me 
on a dark sidewalk under scaffolding
through green puddles of antifreeze

they're bulldozing my empty fields today
turning the dirt and spraying it down
bulldozing my favorite bar