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loneliness is loyal

strawberry covered in diamonds

now i know i don't possess

yet everything is mine

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

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

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 

misalignment trap

my ex-believer

my failure

the dirt 

swirling the sweetness

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

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.*

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

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