Going to Chicago

All anyone ever wants to talk about is the cold.
As if I am entering forbidden territory
A labyrinth
Or an Evangelical Church.
Chicago, eh?
they say
You ever been to Chicago in the wintertime?
No.
I was in New York once in January,
But it was 70 degrees.
Must have brought the Santa Ana’s
in my suitcase.
I’ll take the cold please.
The challenge,
The shock,
To cut through all my former me’s.
The she who wouldn’t leave home
So she ended up enrolling in purgatory
Some forbidden land outside of LA
Where life became Depressing and
Oppressive
like the heat.
The me who hated sweaters as a baby
and cursed the gods every time it rained.
I scoff at the audacity,
The gall to pass myself off as weak
so early.
No, not so.
I was a woman of twenty
Who went to the Midwest
On the eve of her birthday
Who turned 21
On Midnight
When it was below freezing.
I took a picture of the thermometer
As if to say,
Look at me now, bitches!
I battled the beast.
And when it first snowed
I became giddy.
Awoke in my bed next to my sleeping lover,
Took a look out the window and…
GASP
Hoo-wee!
Git a look at that thar snow honey!
Looks like somethin’ from a movie.
See, this is what I always think of when I see snowdrifts on shrubbery:
Wal-Mart
Cheap plastic trees
Covered in the snow my dad disdained so.
As if our desiccated California pine
Had any place in our bright dusty living room
On Christmas mornings.
Now I know what “real snow” looks like.
And,
Yes, I have experienced the cold.
I even saw it drop into the ‘teens
So, I say,
When people ask about the weather,
It is freezing,
Not windy yet.
No,
I’m making it out of here before it gets the best of me.
But I have experienced the cold.
Each successive day,
My. Coldest. One. Ever.
And I relish it,
Thinking,
Ha!
I can do this
(As long as I’ve got that down jacket Elly lent me)
I can do anything.

Borrowing my melancholy from Sandra Cisneros

SO, I felt melancholy earlier, but with good reason. I have a new favorite poet:

"Once Again I Prove the Theory of Relativity"


If
you came back
I'd treat you
like a lost Matisse
couch you like a Pasha
dance a Sevillana
leap and backflip like a Taiwanese diva
bang cymbals like a Chinese opera
roar like a Fellini soundtrack
and laugh like the little dog that
watched the cow jump over the moon

I'd be your clown
I'd tell you funny stories and
paint clouds on the walls of my house
dress the bed in its best linen
And while you slept
I'd hold my breath and watch
you move like a sunflower

How beautiful you are
like the color inside an ear
like a conch shell
like a Modigliani nude

I'll cut a bit of your hair this time
so that you'll never leave me
Ah, the softest hair
Ah, the softest

If
you came back
I'd give you parrot tulips and papayas
laugh at your stories
Or I wouldn't say a word which,
as you know, is hard for me

I know when you grew tired
off you'd go to Patagonia
Cairo Istanbul
Katmandu
Laredo

Meanwhile
I'll have savored you like an oyster
memorized you
held you under my tongue
learned you by heart
So that when you leave
I'll write poems

Me Myself and I

Being surrounded by all of them is like having my mind swathed in men. I swim in it. The thoughts, the repetition of thought and feeling, feeling unsure of what I'm feeling, and then reconsidering it all over again. The closer I get to something definite, the less I am comfortable with myself. The more I distance myself from chaos, the more I want to dive in. This head trip is maddening and exhilirating. I love the idea, the possibilities, and loathe the guilt, the doubt and the despair (sometimes). I am treading solid ground feeling as if its me that's crumbling. I truly have lost a grasp on what I value, what I desire, and what is in store for me. When I was fourteen, I wanted a tan boy and an elected position in Student Government. Now I want sex, sex, money, independent success, spontaneity, caprice, love, stability, a comfortable lover at home and one with wanderlust, another with no regrets and no regard for courtesy. I must be crazy to think I will be an ardent environmentalist, a greener fundamentalist than thou, when even my thought patterns are unsustainable, much less my desires and then my actions too... Who knows what is in store for me, and for them. I am eager, anticipating taking flight, and postponing the descent

Chatter

I will be patience
And you can be sin
We'll trade places for a day
Grafting thought onto skin
I'll make an origami crane to repent
And trade you all my right angles
Mend my mind around mine
And bend my thoughts into circles
They say curves speak to the soul
And angles borne of men
Craft the intellect of women
Who think beauty is reflection
But men don't want our bones
We've been sinning for no reason
Under the assumption that our thinning
Is our most winning feature
Fast and ye shall receive
A feast of hungry eyes
It's no surprise when the desired
Complain of being compared
To a piece of meat
Saying,
'I will not be likened to what I have the privilege not to eat'
No lessening of self
Should befall our lesser selves
It's only me who does the butchering
Only I who cuts the me
My curves a prize of flesh
My thoughts a war of worlds
So hateful in one hemisphere
And then so loving and secure
I tip my hat to those
Who are snobs of the body
Because they reap the benefit of
Each target's reasoning
Reasons
And reason
After reason
Why my face should be plastered
Or my ass should be spackled
I've come a long way with reasons
Making knife turn decisions
Around every curve
I cut and snip out all the round words
Whole being the one
That trumped even confidence
I can be confident even
With a razor's edge held to
My own deflating body
Pierce every engorged appendage
Until I've let out all my self-(esteam)
Becoming paralyzed by angles
Trying to fit circles
into edges
Taking a mallet to my hips
And praying to be liberated
Angles speak to the intellect
But curves speak to the soul
I am still trying to break each ruler
While digging my own hole

Ready Or Not

Ready to go home
Not ready to leave
Ready to roam
Not ready to let go
I'm ready to sleep,
Eyelids low
Dreams of Venice Beach
As my heartbeat slows
Ready to leave
Take flight
and go South
Feel another body
Another warm mouth
I'm ready to go
Ready to sleep
Anticipating morning
Cause I'm ready to eat
I'm craving the day
When the sun set late
When I was the last light of Summer
Content to sit, and stay

Silence

How to explain this? Sometimes when I speak, it is to say for no good reason. It is to say and not really to listen. Sometimes when I ask, it is because I am dreading the answer. I am almost a masochistic speaker. I can have an idea, a thought that I express, and then immediately regret the sharing. As in, today. A question I posed at the end of a conversation:
"So, are you coming to _____'s house tonight?"

"No, I wasn't invited."

"Ohhh, well that's probably because her mom said so.. I mean, yeah (and I trail off with some lame mumbling excuse)."

The back-story is, I know that this person I queried was not invited to attend tonight. Well, maybe I didn't know, but the evidence was clear. She is not musical, nor a performer, and I am. The event happening tonight at my friend's family's house is an event where all of the invitees are asked to perform, whether it be a song, instrument, or in my case, some poetry. I knew quite well that this person would not have been invited, if only for the fact that I know she does not practice any of these talents.

So, my reason for asking? I asked this of myself when I walked out of the room, having killed a perfectly good interaction with a sour end-note. I believe my motives were selfish. Though this person I asked evidently did not care about not having received an invitation (she made it expressly clear that she "had plans tonight" anyways), I wanted her to care. Selfishly, I wanted to present the fact of my invitation to her as a symbol of my merit and not hers. I am such a dunce.

Would I have thought for a second that the interaction would not go well, I could have avoided it. Now, however, I have another notch of awkwardness to add to an already scarred olive branch. I want peace with this person, but I provoke a certain testiness--a certain mal à l'aise between us--so that we are never fully at ease with one another. I want this to change, yet I AM THE ONE WHO WILL NOT CHANGE.

Why do humans do things like this? Are we self-punishing by nature? Repenting for the sin of having been born into a fierce world? Covering up our loneliness, our fears and our regrets with masks of sincerity and earnest. This doesn't go for everybody--I know that much. But I also know that I am not alone in this feeling of helplessness.

Slow It Down

My feelings of stagnation are phenomenal
They lift me up, put me down and lay upon my chest
I am immobilized in the presence of nothing
Not a care, not a real worry to share
All the material comforts of the first world
And I am thankful
But I am hard-pressed to lift a finger
to change what I complain about
do the work I stress about
eat enough food to live and not the stuff I live to eat
My feelings of inspiration are intermittent
They come peaking in crests like light washing over my brainwaves
And I believe that something's going to change
And then the living comes
Then the doing comes
And then the decisions are made
The convictions forgotten
And the cycle is completed
Stagnation
Posing as continuous movement
When really it feels like all is spinning around me
And I sit on an axis, watching from the point of nothing
With a 360 degree view of everything
Not participating, just an incredible semblance thereof
As I fall slowly
Slow quickly
to a snail's pace
and then pause
as time passes by

kitchen talk

we are an interesting family unit here in the Shtetl. we break bread, make tea, talk weed, depravity and puppies. I enjoy my time here

this is a poem I wrote today in a workshop at the Hyde Park Art Center. it was inspired by my obsession with design and a photo of a deck, a pool and some shrubbery


You spin me

And I come sailing

Sliding along the slope

of your deck

like a child in socked feet

Your blue sky
electric and chlorified

appears reflected in an empty pool

And the shrubs that you tended
blur my eyes

I wonder who is the architect of your
design

And who loves the spiral, the curve, sweep

and the unnatural that translates nature as much as I

Outro

There is a certain air about intelligent young men. It is their confidence and their poise that arouses me. I don't mean to say that I am physically aroused by them. I do mean to say that I relish their youth. The lack of weight in their lives lends them a certain arrogance, or a determined way of being. I like to watch them float ideas like sock-clad feet sliding across wooden floors, smooth and steep. What I take from my conversations with people of this sort is completely personal. I am normally an observer, taking in all I can about the human being, while I attempt to stay afloat in the conversation. Tonight was no different. As the conversation dipped around civilizations and debates about the creation and maintenance of culture, I remained on the sidelines. I truly enjoy the unadultered listening experience. I like to watch the words flow and use them to paint pictures in my mind. My interest in education has never been so much the knowledge itself as the people who seek to acquire it. I prefer academicians to the academy. In this way, I have always considered myself an amateur anthropologist, one who seeks to understand the mechanism of the social human being. I like the study of the mind and the mannerisms that lend to a person's depth. It makes me think... about thinking... about people... and reinforces the reason why I love being human. Here's to a good night

Come Around

Waiting for it is half the fun. I have always been an impatient person, but I know the pleasure of anticipation. Thinking, imagining, visualizing what it will be like. Our fantasies are spectacular measures of our inner selves. Mine are all catered to my needs, as are yours. We are selfish beings. Altruism is unnatural, in my opinion. I know some gophers practice it, some mothers do it too... But all anomalies aside, acting out of sheer selflessness is an unlikely occurrence.
Thus, I ask, what to do about the experience of selfishness in bed? Oftentimes, I feel like a taker and never enough of a giver. I desire to give pleasure, but I am more inclined to enjoy the experience I am having independently. I do enjoy giving very much, I like the aftermath, the ego-boost. Maybe it is because I am new to love and haven't achieved a simultaneous orgasm before. Maybe I'm lazy. Bottom line is, I love to love but I desire to be a better lover.

Blow the Whistle

I was going to put up the music video for Too $hort, "Blow The Whistle" but iTunes encrypted that shit, so I can't share the love.

My love for hip hop is weighted on a heavy bass line. I feel every reverberation and it makes me want to get down on my knees and pray (sometimes I just want to freak). In my room, growing up, I was afraid to turn my music loud. My dad would say, "Bam, why don't you play it a little louder?" And I would just shake my head and shut the door. Then came punk, and all of that changed. But as the years progressed, I sought out more and more musical styles, and mainly the ones that bumped and rhymed. I like the feeling of that heavy bass as it sinks low and buzzes under my feet. It makes me think of a scene in Mr. Holland's Opus when Richard Dreyfuss is sitting with his deaf son and his deaf son is sitting on an amp. They're both enjoying the music, one fully listening and the other simply feeling it. That's the way I feel when a good bass line drops. I feel it.

I have little respect for radio acts, but I praise their producers. Too Short falls somewhere in-between hip hop and radio, in my mind, so I give him props on both sides. He's a bit ridiculous. Take for instance, this line from the aforementioned track: "Pretty girls in the VIP, They came to drink, They don't need ID, Blow the whistle." Right. Everybody wants to get their freak on. I get that. Sometimes his lyrics get downright corny. He raps about Kelis in her "Bossy" track, saying "She's fine and she's pretty." So? I can't really get with that. Besides all that, though, Too Short is a pimp. He is catchy as fuck and this song makes me want to get on my feet and go dumb. He says he's from "East Oakland, where the youngsters get hyphy." I'm all for that. Count me in, Too Short.

A side story I heard the other day:
A friend of a friend lives in the Bay and sometimes wears a dress. I should clarify: This is a dude who sometimes wears dresses and I believe he also wears makeup. The dude's on the bus one day, just doing his exhibitionist thing, not giving a fuck. There are two other dudes in the back of the bus poking fun and basically talking shit. The dude with the dress turns around, and who could it be? Too Short and one of his cronies. Now, take into account that this is 1994-ish, sometime in the height of Too Short's rise to regional fame and recognition. So here he is, riding the bus, making fun of some dude in a dress. The cross-dressing dude turns around, sees who it is, and calls him out. As in: "What? Are you Too Short? Yeah, right. How could you be making fun of me when you're the one still riding the bus?!" Daaammmmnnnn. Yeah, that's right. Too Short, big pimpin, at the height of his new fame, rapping about all the riches he's getting, and he's still taking public transportation.

Shit.

Now go here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUVfDvIP2EQ