Paris Tat *3rd installation* (Spring 2010)

(Here we go from the beginning...)

Olivier began in purple, a color that hints of metal, but a fantasy none the less. I’d chosen this color for the first structure being needled onto my rib cage, an iron tower that symbolizes the very city I was visiting. Paris, they say, is the city of love. An appropriate description, given the veil of romance that spreads over unevenly paved streets and huge wooden doorways and their palaces and train stations filled with art. It is a city ruled by beautiful things, and I was drunk with it even as I was lovesick for my home-island. The Eiffel Tower was an easy choice, the quintessential visual for this city spread across the Seine. The tower dates back to the 1889 World’s Fair, where it served as the entrance arch. Gustav Eiffel engineered this wonder, and built it to resist the wind, with its broad open spaces and artistic curved legs. He also contributed his name to it, the tallest building in the world (until the Chrysler in 1930, another marvel named after a man.) City dwellers were appalled, called it an eyesore, and indeed had every intention of taking it down as soon as the city took over ownership after twenty years. But! It’s 1,063 foot height proved functional for broadcasting, and during World War II it became a symbol of war heroics, and eventually of the city itself.

My first sighting of le Tour happened in the cab ride from the airport to my new home, on the second day of a snowstorm. Its romance is undeniable. Indeed, it seems to bestow the whole city with an aura of cinema worthy kisses and tearful goodbyes. As we drove over the snow-blanketed streets I was awestruck and silent, exhausted and nervous. I never thought I’d study abroad, and even a five-week winter session seemed like a long time away. I was crashing a University of Delaware Women’s Studies/Art History trip, so I knew no one. I also stuck out like a sore thumb, as my mother would say. I was very anxious about how this adventure would unfold. I couldn’t fall asleep that first night, and around 2am I crept out into the living room to stare at the snow falling onto the street below. Everything around me felt so unfamiliar, I was more homesick than I’d ever been. The next morning things looked less alien in the daylight, and later that day I looked up the address and directions to the tattoo shop. The journey there was my first independent outing, and my roommate Sarah and I got lost. It was only my first week in this new place, and I was slowly re-learning the language without harsh halts, and getting oriented on the un-gridded streets. Getting lost was usually acceptable barring time constraints. In fact, it was a welcome exploration. After all, it would take years to explore every narrow winding alley, to see all of the small museums and lovely facades and whimsical shops. Getting lost was a mini-adventure, and one more way to get a look at as many beautiful things as possible. Of course, like any city, there are borders to this overwhelming beauty.

Paris is a city with a rich interior and under-privileged exterior. The banlieus, or suburbs, are the neighborhoods surrounding the center city. These outskirts include urban housing developments, originally built in the 1970s as a place to live while you worked towards owning your own home. It was, indeed, an optimistic endeavor. They were supposed to be stepping-stones to upward mobility. Racial and ethnic tensions run high here, where residents feel abandoned and ostracized, even though many of the youth were born in country and are legal French citizens. These places are sites of high unemployment and violence, where each generation attempts to be heard by the government, and to be recognized as French instead of shooed away as immigrants. Riots have been breaking out here since the 1980s, and as recently as 2007 the media and government both seemed shocked that this sort of outburst was occurring, again. These latest riots were more organized than the car burning and rock throwing of the past, and this time bombs and guns were utilized to attack police. Close to 100 officers were wounded, retaliation for the death of a teenager they claim was involved in a police chase. Some estimate the injured count was much higher, not to mention citizens who were hurt or killed. The cause of this unrest has remained largely intact. The Arab and North African populations want to be treated like citizens, and to be given the opportunity to learn, succeed, and become French. There is an immense strain between them and the ‘other’ Parisians, whose whiteness is a privilege. The truth of this racial tension is deeply imbedded in a colonial history. Particularly in the country of Algeria, whose fight for independence included acts of violence with Paris’s city limits, France was not except from the European trend of colonization. This merging of cultures started out violently, and has continued to be complex and difficult. These darker citizens, kept on the outskirts of the city, have a conception of Americans that is largely un-friendly. When my roommate and I got off the number 11 train at the Pyrenees stop (about a 45 minute ride from the Louvre with multiple train transfers), we began to wander in the wrong direction, across the traffic circle from our destination. I had a large backpack, a laptop, an expensive winter coat, and a racial profile and overall demeanor that screamed, “I’m American and I’m lost.” Not smart. Not safe. Of course being from New York I was used to wandering around ghettos, and felt this was no different. I knew something was off, but I had no idea how afraid we should have been, how close in time and space we were to widespread public violence.

To make matters worse, when I returned the next day for my appointment, I ended up being tattooed completely alone. I assumed my 5pm appointment would give me plenty of time to make dinner by 7pm. However, the Parisian mindset is not one of efficiency. We did not start on time (he was eating), and I was on the table for three hours. When we hadn’t started by 5:45, my roommate raced home so as to be on time for dinner. It is very, very rude in France to be late and/or absent to meals without letting the host know. She went to represent both of us, to beg my forgiveness and try to excuse me. Silly me, I thought I’d be able to fit it all in. (I was over two hours late to dinner.)

Those three hours I spent on the table are crystal clear in my mind, the way some of the other day trips and paintings and wine bottles are not. I stood behind a screen and undressed, bra and shirt carelessly discarded on a folding chair. When he placed the stencil I panicked for just a moment. It looked big. It spanned from about 4 fingers below my armpit to just above level with my belly button, behind the curve of my breast but never quite reaching the flat part of my back. I was shocked at myself, standing alone and naked in this unfamiliar space, willing to remake my body this way. I took a deep breath with my eyes clenched shut and said, “Ok. It’s perfect.”

Paris Tat *2nd installation* (Spring 2010)

(More of this epic-ness. If you follow me then you recognize that the poem was my first poem ever, included here as primary evidence of my emotional experience. This is a lot in scene, which is some of my favorite stuff to write on. Scenes are key to making the reader feel like you are really including them. Again, if you wanna see the tat, just ask...)

That winter in Paris I fell in love with the night. That was when I felt the most at home, when New York felt close, when the city felt familiar. I wrote only one poem there, a verse for the city I missed.

I can't quite adjust
to streets that I can't map out on grid paper,
and this city without liquid borders.
The streets zig zag and curve
in an unfamiliar sprawl
as I walk with my headphones to steady my pace.
Sometimes when I'm just setting foot on the sidewalk,
a breeze seems to brush my cheek, & through the music I can hear
my city, and feel my own streets underfoot as I set out into the dusk.
Like all breezes & moments that matter
this feeling is fleeting, and as I cross the street
I remember that this place doesn't sing to me.
We can't even speak except in halting sentences
fraught with disconnects & lost in translations.
At night though, if I un-focus my eyes, the lights seem familiar.
And if I listen, underneath the rhythm of a language not my own
I can hear the lap of the East River.
And with one focusing breath
I can trace the skyline onto my forearm
where it'll stay for me the whole night.

That space between rivers,
my island of abbreviations
& stumbles & imagined constellations,
is more patient that I.
I wrote the skyline a post card.
It said: Thanks for waiting

But this is just a part of the story. Because my enchantment with Paris was undeniable. I loved having wine with lunch and being surrounded by things that were ancient. I loved the Seine, and the walkway at its banks. I loved the language, the challenge of communicating. I loved the lingerie, the beautiful women, the stick shift taxicabs. And I loved collecting souvenirs, post cards to be sent (and kept), and shoes, and shot glasses. And of course my own piece of Parisian art: the tattoo.

His work was steady and light. He paced himself in the Parisian way. Maybe because they are surrounded by art, eternal and lasting art, they see no reason to rush their own for such a silly thing as schedules or dinnertime. It seems ingrained in them, this aversion to rushing. I used my breath, gathering the pain of each touch of the needle with an inhale, and breathing it out as he paused or re-inked. Every once in awhile another artist would step behind the screen to see his progress. They all forgot I spoke French, and so I eavesdropped on these conversations amusedly. They talked about getting take-out, about the absurdity of an all color tattoo. They talked about how American girls are usually screamers, about various clients that they’d serviced that past week. They talked about my breasts, about sharing wine with me, about how shocked they were that I was taking this all so quietly, so strongly. I smiled through this secret knowledge, too focused on controlling my breath to think about what it meant to be alone and foreign and exposed in this way. After all, these guys were professionals. My breasts were unremarkable, my body just another canvas. Possibly. Or maybe I was exotic and tempting. Maybe he took his time because he enjoyed touching my skin this way, this intimate act of creating me. It was absolutely intimate, sharing this cramped space of pain and creation and color, for no less than three hours.

* * * * *

I needed a break between colors, so while he cleaned the blue from his needle I slipped off the table and walked back into a narrow hallway towards the bathroom. As I peed I tried not to notice how tender my skin had become, or my slightly lightheaded feeling. I knew enough about tattoos to know that my body was in defensive mode, and I was cruising on adrenaline. I also knew we were halfway done, maybe more. So I hurried, eager to ride out that high till the end. By this point in my tattooing history, I had begun to understand my body differently. It was a place that I could change, recreate in a new way. This high I was feeling was a reaction to pain, the pain you have to go through to make something permanent. Tattoos were never just pretty things to me, though I think they are beautiful. They are statements and stories, and for me they are an assertion that I am a storyteller, and that I will make you hear my voice. Tattoos should be sexy, adding secrets and color to the naked body. Revealing secrets in this way makes me vulnerable and powerful at the same time, a balance women must deal with on a daily basis. They are both a reveal and a command. My tattoos assert my control over my body and my stories. They declare that both are valuable, that both are worthy and beautiful.

When I walked back out into the main room I had to squint, let my eyes readjust to the bright light, and when they had I saw that Olivier was smiling at me. I must have been a sight, squinting and naked to the waist, my ribcage stained and red with irritation. “Ready?” he asked. “Oui, je suis prêt.” I said. He raised his eyebrows and nodded. When I lay back on the table he was ready with the last and final color: red. I took a deep breath and listened for the buzz of the needle. ‘Home stretch’ became my mantra. This color, bright like lipstick and ladybugs, was not for a famous landmark, or any building for that matter. It was for a bird.

To A Skylark (Shelly)

(We just watched Becoming Jane so I thought a little romantic piece would be in order. I like how this floats and soars, like the bird. These dudes got it, and women were just starting to be able to take a crack at it, and now I get to write. Romantic poetry is super lyrical, romantic *DUH* and pretty. Don't discount it...)

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

In the golden lightning
Of the sunken sun,
O'er which clouds are bright'ning,
Thou dost float and run,
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.

The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight;
Like a star of heaven
In the broad daylight
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight,

Keen as are the arrows
Of that silver sphere
Whose intense lamp narrows
In the white dawn clear
Until we hardly see—we feel that it is there.

All the earth and air
With thy voice is loud,
As, when night is bare,
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is overflowed.

What thou art we know not;
What is most like thee?
From rainbow clouds there flow not
Drops so bright to see
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.

Like a poet hidden
In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:

Like a high-born maiden
In a palace tower,
Soothing her love-laden
Soul in secret hour
With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower:

Like a glow-worm golden
In a dell of dew,
Scattering unbeholden
Its aerial hue
Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view:

Like a rose embowered
In its own green leaves,
By warm winds deflowered,
Till the scent it gives
Makes faint with too much sweet these heavy-winged thieves:

Sound of vernal showers
On the twinkling grass,
Rain-awakened flowers,
All that ever was
Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass.

Teach us, sprite or bird,
What sweet thoughts are thine:
I have never heard
Praise of love or wine
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.

Chorus hymeneal
Or triumphal chaunt
Matched with thine would be all
But an empty vaunt,
A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.

What objects are the fountains
Of thy happy strain?
What fields, or waves, or mountains?
What shapes of sky or plain?
What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?

With thy clear keen joyance
Languor cannot be:
Shadow of annoyance
Never came near thee:
Thou lovest, but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.

Waking or asleep,
Thou of death must deem
Things more true and deep
Than we mortals dream,
Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?

We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Yet if we could scorn
Hate, and pride, and fear;
If we were things born
Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

Better than all measures
Of delightful sound,
Better than all treasures
That in books are found,
Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!

Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow
The world should listen then, as I am listening now

Paris Tat (Spring 2010)

(So this has been a huge project, I've been working on it since the winter. The whole piece is about getting tattooed in Paris, and about my Grandmother and her life in NYC in the 40's. There is a power point that goes with it, and I'll probably post some more sections of this. It inspired the ideas for my thesis, so thats cool. Basically I'm gonna amend traditional histories with women's stories, making it more true and more complete. So this is some of my memories, and what I can piece together of Elizabeth Ann's. The whole thing is very available upon request. I very wanna go back to Paris, and I very wanna get another tattoo. This is the first calendar year since 2005 that I won't get inked. Weird...)

Olivier maintained a steady if not frantic pace, and when le Tour was complete he rinsed the needle and dipped into a new color: blue. A blue close to that of a midday cloudless sky, a color that did not realistically represent the structure he began to needle onto my skin. This next image was just that; another structure, another landmark, although this one stood overlooking a city I was on more intimate terms with. Over the west side of Central Park, two pointed towers jut above the tops of the trees. Some mistake this for the site of John Lennon’s murder, but that was two blocks south on 72rd Street, at the Dakota. This building is called the San Remo, and it’s your average pre-war luxury apartment building. Asking prices range from 3-25 mill., and your neighbors could include Bono, Steven Spielberg, or Dustin Hoffman. It first entered in my city visuals archive on walks around the Jackie O reservoir, usually taken on slow afternoons with a partner to catch up, gossip, console and laugh with. It is a significant mark of the skyline, less flashy than Empire or Chrysler, endearing in its oft-mistaken old school identity. I began looking forward to seeing it swaddled in the multi-colored setting sunlight.

How it made its way into the fold of images designed to color my ribcage is slightly more complex than a pretty silhouette against uptown summer days. The West Side is my unfamiliar side of town, a whole north to south span that I’ve explored remarkably less in my Manhattan lifetime than the east side. The west side, slowly, became the mythical land of “her”, a woman I’d known all my life but never really seen. When I sat in my childhood church at her funeral, I realized how strange it was that I knew almost nothing of her life before the years I existed. She was my mother’s mother, taller than average and not prone to long speeches. I remember her in slippers and curlers, tending to the compost or doing the Sunday crossword. We never had heart to hearts in the kitchen. She never deigned to pass on sage wisdoms. She came back to New York only once when I lived here, in a dorm on 55th street. She told me then she’d lived on the west side, and that the subway had cost a nickel. I didn’t occur to me to ask her how it felt to leave rural Pennsylvania for the big apple. How it must have been hard being a beautiful single woman in a new urban environment. How she fell in love here. Why she left after four kids. None of this seemed relevant until she was gone, and I realized that her and I had shared this place I loved and I had wasted the benefit of learning from her lived experience. When she was gone she left behind a large mystery and a lot of money, and it was this fund my parents dipped into so I could have my Parisian adventure. So for this, my ninth tattoo, a small testament to two beautiful cities and a woman I loved but never truly knew, this west side landmark became the symbol of her New York, the New York we’d failed to share.

Howl Pt III (Ginsberg)

(Finish it out. Tomorrow, some prose...)

Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland
where you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Rockland
where you must feel very strange
I'm with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I'm with you in Rockland
where you've murdered your twelve secretaries
I'm with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I'm with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
I'm with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and
is reported on the radio
I'm with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit
the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica
I'm with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the
harpies of the Bronx
I'm with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you're
losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss
I'm with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul
is innocent and immortal it should never die
ungodly in an armed madhouse
I'm with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your
soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a
cross in the void
I'm with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and
plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the
fascist national Golgotha
I'm with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island
and resurrect your living human Jesus from the
superhuman tomb
I'm with you in Rockland
where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com-
rades all together singing the final stanzas of
the Internationale
I'm with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under
our bedsheets the United States that coughs all
night and won't let us sleep
I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse
O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
here O victory forget your underwear we're free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night

Howl Pt II (Ginsberg)

(I'm not saying these guys are perfect. Especially the feminist in me has some issues. But they were breaking free of all sorts of constraints. It was the beginning of poetry as we know it today. Keep it rolling...)

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up
their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Chil-
dren screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old
men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Mo-
loch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jail-
house and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judg-
ment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned govern-
ments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running
money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast
is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrap-
ers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose
factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and
antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity
and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch
whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the
Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in
Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness
without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ec-
stasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light stream-
ing out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries!
blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible mad houses
granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios,
tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American
river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive
bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood!
Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides!
Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells!
They bade farewell! They jumped off the roofl to solitude! waving! carrying
flowers! Down to the river! into the street!

Howl Pt 1 (Ginsberg)

(Ok so back to 60 years ago. This is setting the scene for the beats. There are three parts, I'll post it as such, plus a footnote. Just go with it. I know it seems long, but thats only b/c as I said, he's working with these long lines to imitate actual vocal rhythms, and the page can't support them so they're broken up and it looks much longer than it is. I promise. Also, if you go to poets.org you can listen to him recite this. I highly recommend that experience.)

For Carl Solomon

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving
hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry
fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the
starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the
supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of
cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels
staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkan-
sas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes
on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in
wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt
of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or
purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and cock and
endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind
leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunk-
enness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring
winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of
mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy
Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain
all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's floated out and sat
through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the
crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue
to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire
escapes off windowsills of Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and
anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with
brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous
picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of
China under junk-withdrawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wonder-
ing where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward
lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah
because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels
who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural
ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse
of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or
soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but
the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in
fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts
with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incompre-
hensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze
of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and
undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and
wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before
the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for
committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and
intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof
waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and
screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of
Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of
public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whom-
ever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind
a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to
pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew
of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the
womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass
and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom.
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a
package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued
along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with
a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of con-
sciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and
were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of
the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C.,
secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver--joy to
the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner
backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or
with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings
& especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys
too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a
sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung-
over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams
& stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks
waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam-
heat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hud-
son under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy
bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions
and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to
build harpsichords in their lofts,

who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the
tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in
the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming
of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside
of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next
decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and
were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were
growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue
amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regi-
ments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertis-
ing & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down
by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked
away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown
soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window,
jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the
street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph
records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whis-
key and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears
and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to the each other's
hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you
had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver
& waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver
is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salva-
tion and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a
second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals
with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang
sweet blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha
or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with
their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently
presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with
shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instanta-
neous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity
hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & am-
nesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table,
resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and
fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns
of the East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the
echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to
stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book flung out of the
tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 a.m. and the last
telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room
emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper
rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary,
nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination--
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the
total animal soup of time--
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash
of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the
vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images
juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual
images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of
consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens
Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before
you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet
confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his
naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here
what might be left to say in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow
of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love
into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered
the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies
good to eat a thousand years.

April Eve (4/14/10)

(Sorry for the lack of poems lately, I was away and then sick. But this is no excuse for not infusing one's life with poetry. So here is this short and sweet tidbit to ease us all back into the world of words...)

I can hardly stand the streets
lain under dusk
on a too-cool April evening.
Blooms suspend in the trees
but an East River breeze
gives me goosebumps.
My insides, grainy and worn
from turbulent times
feel as delicate as these
white and pink petals.
We all crave more warmth.

Sunflower Sutra (Allen Ginsberg)

(More beatnik love. Ginsberg was a star at Columbia, before he started writing like this and his former profs scorned him. The long line length is a break from metered verse, and is supposed to mimic the rhythm and breath of regular speech. He believed that when done well, this was harder than traditional iambic pentameter. Last stanza is unreal. Apocryphal, inspired, epiphany-ish... yea, you get it. you dig...)

I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look for the sunset over the box house hills and cry.

Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery.

The only water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves rheumy-eyed and hung-over like old bums on the riverbank, tired and wily.

Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust--

--I rushed up enchanted--it was my first sunflower, memories of Blake--my visions--Harlem

and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the past--

and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye--

corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face, soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays obliterated on its hairy head like a dried wire spiderweb,

leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,

Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!

The grime was no man's grime but death and human locomotives,

all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black mis'ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance of artificial worse-than-dirt--industrial--modern--all that civilization spotting your crazy golden crown--

and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what more could I name, the smoked ashes of some cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs & sphincters of dynamos--all these

entangled in your mummied roots--and you standing before me in the sunset, all your glory in your form!

A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden monthly breeze!

How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your grime, while you cursed the heavens of your railroad and your flower soul?

Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a flower? when did you look at your skin and decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive? the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?

You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower!

And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me not!

So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck it at my side like a scepter,

and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack's soul too, and anyone who'll listen,

--We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all golden sunflowers inside, blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision.

My Sad Self (Allen Ginsberg)

(The beat generation got it. Broken rules feel right, so does poetry without rhymes, and dedications to Frank O'Hara who wrote my favorite poem about New York. I'm reading a book about 1959, a time of turbulence and change, and we need this time to be that time, and we need voices and leaders to get us there. The beats make me nostalgic and idealistic...)

To Frank O’Hara

Sometimes when my eyes are red
I go up on top of the RCA Building
and gaze at my world, Manhattan—
my buildings, streets I’ve done feats in,
lofts, beds, coldwater flats
—on Fifth Ave below which I also bear in mind,
its ant cars, little yellow taxis, men
walking the size of specks of wool—
Panorama of the bridges, sunrise over Brooklyn machine,
sun go down over New Jersey where I was born
& Paterson where I played with ants—
my later loves on 15th Street,
my greater loves of Lower East Side,
my once fabulous amours in the Bronx
faraway—
paths crossing in these hidden streets,
my history summed up, my absences
and ecstasies in Harlem—
—sun shining down on all I own
in one eyeblink to the horizon
in my last eternity—
matter is water.


Sad,
I take the elevator and go
down, pondering,
and walk on the pavements staring into all man’s
plateglass, faces,
questioning after who loves,
and stop, bemused
in front of an automobile shopwindow
standing lost in calm thought,
traffic moving up & down 5th Avenue blocks behind me
waiting for a moment when ...


Time to go home & cook supper & listen to
the romantic war news on the radio
... all movement stops
& I walk in the timeless sadness of existence,
tenderness flowing thru the buildings,
my fingertips touching reality’s face,
my own face streaked with tears in the mirror
of some window—at dusk—
where I have no desire—
for bonbons—or to own the dresses or Japanese
lampshades of intellection—


Confused by the spectacle around me,
Man struggling up the street
with packages, newspapers,
ties, beautiful suits
toward his desire
Man, woman, streaming over the pavements
red lights clocking hurried watches &
movements at the curb—


And all these streets leading
so crosswise, honking, lengthily,
by avenues
stalked by high buildings or crusted into slums
thru such halting traffic
screaming cars and engines
so painfully to this
countryside, this graveyard
this stillness
on deathbed or mountain
once seen
never regained or desired
in the mind to come
where all Manhattan that I’ve seen must disappear.

Quotes (Buddah)

(So I am very in need of spiritual nourishment. So tonight I read through some amazing quotes from Buddha, very cool fat guy, and I'm skipping class and going to yoga. Words have healing power, they can be a life raft in this turbulent sea. And don't get it twisted, it's turbulent. All we can do is breath and try to find a patch of still surface. Priorities shouldn't focus around money or school or even your friends and family, they should center on loving yourself and finding balance. At least, thats what I strive for...)

What is the appropriate behavior for a man or a woman in the midst of this world, where each person is clinging to his piece of debris? What's the proper salutation between people as they pass each other in this flood?

You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe deserve your love and affection.

All things appear and disappear because of the concurrence of causes and conditions. Nothing ever exists entirely alone; everything is in relation to everything else.

An insincere and evil friend is more to be feared than a wild beast; a wild beast may wound your body, but an evil friend will wound your mind.

Ambition is like love, impatient both of delays and rivals.

Have compassion for all beings, rich and poor alike; each has their suffering. Some suffer too much, others too little.

We are formed and molded by our thoughts. Those whose minds are shaped by selfless thoughts give joy when they speak or act. Joy follows them like a shadow that never leaves them.

Corner of the Sky (Pippin the Musical, Stephen Schwartz)

(Ok so this isn't a poem, I get it. But I need cheesy motivation right now. Plus Fosse is great. Plus this is my blog so I can do whatever I want. I very like the 2nd to the last stanza...)

Everything has its season
Everything has its time
Show me a reason and I'll soon show you a rhyme
Cats fit on the windowsill
Children fit in the snow
Why do I feel I don't fit in anywhere I go?

Rivers belong where they can ramble
Eagles belong where they can fly
I've got to be where my spirit can run free
Got to find my corner of the sky

Every man has his daydreams
Every man has his goal
People like the way dreams have
Of sticking to the soul
Thunderclouds have their lightning
Nightingales have their song
And don't you see I want my life to be
Something more than long....

Rivers belong where they can ramble
Eagles belong where they can fly
I've got to be where my spirit can run free
Got to find my corner of the sky

So many men seem destined
To settle for something small
But I won't rest until I know I'll have it all
So don't ask where I'm going
Just listen when I'm gone
And far away you'll hear me singing
Softly to the dawn:

Rivers belong where they can ramble
Eagles belong where they can fly
I've got to be where my spirit can run free
Got to find my corner of the sky

Foolish (Fall 2006?)

(This is when I really really young and naive and romantic. I love how... how idealistic. How caught up. How imaginative you can be when you're nostalgic and haven't been really broken yet. I know this is overkill, but it's nice to remember how this felt...)

As memory reels replay
in tehnicolor
through my mind,
I lapse into a fools paradise
that I discovered inside a slow dance
when twilight was falling
(and you hadn't yet left...)

I'm certain of every detail
contained in that moment,
thought I can't recall which ones I imagined.

A string of lights,
they blend in overhead with dim stars.
And music. Notes written to our own
spontaneous choreography.
Not loud enough to drown out
the sound of your breath on my neck.

The smell of salt water, and you,
and vanilla cream coffee
and my chapstick.
I don't remember any of the scenery
we were placed in, but I know
I watched it move behind you
while your hands rested on my back,
and we swayed there, in a
slow spin.
We were standing on sand,
and then carpet,
and then the roof of the house I grew up in.

This is the dance in my mind that goes on forever.
At least, I don't remember your hands letting go,
or the music fading out,
or how you looked when you walked away.

When I close my eyes
the lights are still hanging
just beneath the sky,
and your lips brush warmly against my ear
as you whisper "I love you"
and then I know,
simultaneously,
that the moment never ended
and I'm a foolish girl.

A Room of One's Own, Chapt 5 (Virginia Woolf)

(I'm not sure how I got through undergrad without reading this, but it's pretty amazing. Especially for it's time. Some prose for ya, to get the weekend started. You must understand, these ideas can be applied to all kinds of jobs/ways of life, not just writing. She is describing a whole system of inaccessibility and denial and contempt/scorn/hate. I'll stop ranting and let her speak for herself...)

All these relationships between women, I thought, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted. And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. There is an attempt at in in Diana of the Crossways. They are confidantes, of course, in Racine and the Greek tragedies. They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman's life is that; and how little can a ma know even of that when he observes it though the black or rosy spectacles which sex puts upon his nose. Hence, perhaps, the peculiar nature of woman in fiction; the astonishing extremes of her beauty and horror; her alternations between heavenly goodness and hellish depravity... Even so it remains obvious, even in the writing of Proust, that a man is terribly hampered and partial in his knowledge of women, as a woman in her knowledge of men.

Tass: Dedicated (2005ish)

(I wrote this poem the day we found out that my middle school art teacher committed suicide. Someone close to me is losing someone they love, so I'm thinking about how it feels when people are gone. It's always suddenly, even when it isn't...)

Scenes from long ago
shimmer in the heat waves
rising from the street.
Past conversations drip and glimmer
down through the leaves
and fade before they hit the ground.
The only evidence that time is still
moving forward
is the wind,
which swirls the white blossoms
in a dance that can only mean
summer.

Untitled (unknown)

(This isn't a poem. But its the water I'm floating on right now)

While love is a dangerous guide,
there are parts of the forest
we sometimes find ourselves in
that no other guide ever guesses the existence of.

Prufrock, 2nd Installation

(Fun facts about Prufrock/TS: the epilouge at the beginning of this poem (which I didn't include) is from Dante's inferno... Eliot won the nobel prize for literature, and attributes his style to the combination of being born in America and educated abroad... Prufrock is insecure and pessimistic and removed from the action. He's lonely. Eliot blames his first wife for the state of mind in which he wrote "The Wasteland". That, and this, are considered masterpieces of the modernist movement...)

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep . . . tired . . . or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet–and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say, "That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all."

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
"That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all."
. . . . .

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old . . . I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock (T S Elliot)

(So I spent all day in Brooklyn, avoiding the doing-ness of Manhattan. This is Claire's favorite poem. I'm posting it in 2 installments, cause dudes were super long winded back then, but its worth the whole thing. I shouldn't need to tell you about Elliot, so I won't, and shame on you if you don't already know. Genius is pretty easy to spot...)

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question. . .
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions
And for a hundred visions and revisions
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!"]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!"]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all;
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?

Silly Cancers (Spring 2007)

(Same theme, sleeplessness. This time was b-a-d, bad. The assignment was to start by describing something absurdly, thus 'silly cancers.' It's an interesting place to start a poem, because usually things in life are pretty absurd. Also, I'm taking it back b/c I'm sick of posting things about now. So here is some then...)

Silly cancers have been
latching onto my skull.
I can't figure out how
they manage it in the dark,
with only the lights from the view
outside the window to illuminate
the crevices and patches worn down from nostalgia.
They wriggle behind a soft orange sleep mask,
and in through dirty hair.
I'm not sure if they have
nails, or talons or claws,
but they utilize these
and bony fingers to pry open
the bone and let loose
the beast thoughts within.
This species includes ideas
and memories and imaginings
that are far too hairy and mammoth
to be drowned out by the TV.

These whimsical, resourceful
disease-balls are not really
villainous. They are not vindictive,
they lack cruelty. They're here
because I created them.
Deep in my under belly
where I've never laid eyes.
They began to emerge
from the primordial ooze
of rage and wounds,
taking advantage of my temporary inertia.
I didn't react quick enough,
so now I can't sleep.

Insomnia Journal Entry (3:14am, sometime Sept 09)

(So this is because right now I am ridiculously sleep deprived and overwhelmed. It's not a poem per se, but what evs it'll work. If you've ever experienced any sort of prolonged insomnia, holler back I wanna hear about it. And I know this is super emo and nostalgic, but who isn't nostalgic for the 55th street dorms every once in awhile, for rent-less accommodations and 8:30am classes and long/curlyhaired Alex with only 1 or 2 tattoos...)

My insomnia was once a symptom of pure excitement. We were so young, and reckless and wild. We existed in a time before responsibility, before heartbreak. I felt a buzz, a need to stay up so as not to miss a single moment. I wanted to go on adventures. So we did. Sometimes we'd roam the streets finding friends to laugh with, drink with, watch movies with, flirt with and kiss in dark corners until the end of the night when we'd ride the N train home, stumbling into the elevator exhilarated. Of we'd sit in the kitchen, shoes off, and talk. We'd talk about school and acquaintances and fluff and subways and tattoos and sex and art and melodies and women and masks and memories and thrills and fingernails and hipbones and hallways and parents and home. We'd talk at a frantic, exhausting pace, because we loved eachother and we wanted to hear nothing less than everything.

Now this insomnia is full of words. I read; I write; I repeat. I am trying to figure out something most complex. That is, how I've changed, why it is I still can't sleep but am more desperate. It's borne of longing, yearning, loneliness. I think thought with no conclusion, write to try and say what I only sort of suspect and read just to hear beautiful sentences. My mind wants to rest but my body wants something like comfort, close to warmth or maybe pressure. And I can't sleep because I don't fully understand why I want this and why it is so hard to get my hands on.

I can't even finish this. Even resorting to drinking, alone or with friends, doesn't guarantee that I'll be able to close my eyes once my head hits the pillow. Instead of making me forget, it all takes on a surreal vibe, like dreaming while waking. I miss my sleep dreams, the colors and the symbols and waking up believing, for just a moment, that things like flying or running towards the beach or swimming with turtles, are possibilities.