the violence of rhetorical silence

i believe that rhetorical silence can be violent. i think that i want to start doing research on the act of dismissiveness and of NOT talking...of actively ignoring. i have noticed how on many levels of my life i have been violently ignored by others as i myself have violently ignored. the act of actively ignoring is a way to claim power over one's body while also attempting to stabilize the ecology of one's established place.

and yet in actively ignoring a person some people make a point of NOT ignoring you. of asserting their selves upon you when you are clearly attempting to ignore them. this act of assertion is most definitely violent as well...a war that wages between speaking as intrusion and silence as defense and counter attack. in this latter example this rhetorical silence is reactionary...attempting to claim power over words levied against my "self" and at the same time quietly rebutting a rhetorical attack (unsurprisingly [in this instance] generated from 'straight' while male subjectivity).

because my silence is, in my mind, justifiable for solidifying and simultaneously protecting the borders of my self, others' reactionary silence and dismissiveness against me is most certainly and violently and absurdly reactionary. i saw one such person the other day. i turned my back, caught a reflection of this person in the window of the door i was staring at. the silence was thick and yet sharp and i could not help but feel the hatred radiating from their own narcissistic subject position. it's paradoxical. in a way, i don't care but yet in other ways i do. i care enough to write about it in the very least.

why day friday

1) why do i always feel like i'm running late even when i have no place to go?

2) why is annie lennox's song "why?" so damn good?

3) why does it seem so damn cold when we're supposed to be globally warming?

4) why is bush not being impeached?

first snow fall

why day friday

why is it that when my "gaydar" is off it's atrocious but when it's on it's perfect?

why is it a proven fact that every time a gay man fems it up a straight man cries?

why does george michael's voice still sound so good after all of that crack?

why is it that people with the most to live for commit suicide?

being thankful...srsly...

why day friday

why is it snowing so early this year?

why can't this economy just get over it?

why are jobs so hard to find and the price of gas is lower?

why are steven king novels so damn addicting?

why are vampires so cool?

why am i a geriatric goth and not a geriatric emo?

why day friday

why am i always being held to someone else's time frame?

why is it so difficult for me to be concise?

why do people use their car horns for doorbells?

why do i always misspell "definately"?

why do the smartest students never speak up?

why am i not impressed?

song for sad thursday

red house painters

"Uncle Joe"
-----------
Where have all the people gone in my life
I'm looking at the ceiling with an awful feeling of loss and of loneliness
The after late night television pain, I'm running out of strength
I'm running, running, running out of strength

And it feels so wonderful
To swim in our fears
And divide inseparable
The awakening of life

Oh, Uncle Joe, could you tell me about what you know?
Of being having mental problems and their solutions, too
I'll give anything a try once
I'll try anything three times
I don't care, I don't care
I don't care, I don't care

But there's no company
That can stand to be with me
So my dependency on you grows
And I am not very well read
And consider I will lose my heart
And can you spare me of my pain
Can't you spare me of my tears?

Oh, Uncle Joe
Uncle Joe
Uncle Joe, Uncle Joe

And suicide's intentional
When I spin in your fear
I am over-influenced
By movies
And you should've gone
To the fear
To my hope
The darkest hope
Did you know?
Lies become the sky
That's all gone
To the fear
To my hope
The darkest hope
Do you know?
Lies become the sky

this is a wallace steven's kind of day....

music score: The Emperor of Ice Cream by roger reynolds



image/installation: The Emperor of Ice Cream by Varujan Boghosian


The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

--Wallace Stevens


I love Helen Vendler’s expository (and poetic) interpretation of Wallace’s poem:


For purposes of experiment, I have put the details the poem gives us into the form of a first-person narrative; I see the poem as a rewritten form of this ur-narrative, in which the narrative has been changed into an impersonal form, and the linear temporal structure of narrative form has been replaced by a strict geometric spatial construction – two rooms juxtaposed. Here (with apologies) is my conjectural narrative ur-form of the poem, constructed purely as an explanatory device:

I went, as a neighbor, to a house to help lay out the corpse of an old woman who had died alone; I was helping to prepare for the home wake. I entered, familiarly, not by the front door but by the kitchen door. I was shocked and repelled as I went into the kitchen by the disorderly festival going on inside: a big muscular neighbor who worked at the cigar-factory had been called in to crank the ice-cream machine, various neighbors had sent over their scullery-girls to help out and their yard-boys bearing newspaper-wrapped flowers from their yards to decorate the house and the bier: the scullery-girls were taking advantage of the occasion to dawdle around the kitchen and flirt with the yard-boys, and they were all waiting around to have a taste of the ice cream when it was finished. It all seemed to me crude and boisterous and squalid and unfeeling in the house of the dead – all that appetite, all that concupiscence.

Then I left the sexuality and gluttony of the kitchen, and went in to the death in the bedroom. The corpse of the old woman was lying exposed on the bed. My first impulse was to find a sheet to cover the corpse; I went to the cheap old pine dresser, but it was hard to get the sheet out of it because each of the three drawers was lacking a drawer-pull; she must have been too infirm to get to the store to get new glass knobs. But I got a sheet out, noticing that she had hand-embroidered a fantail border on it; she wanted to make it beautiful, even though she was so poor that she made her own sheets, and cut them as minimally as she could so as to get as many as possible out of a length of cloth. She cut them so short, in fact, that when I pulled the sheet up far enough to cover her face, it was too short to cover her feet. It was almost worse to have to look at her old calloused feet than to look at her face; somehow her feet were more dead, more mute, than her face had been

She is dead, and the fact cannot be hidden by any sheet. What remains after death, in the cold light of reality, is life – all of that life, with its coarse muscularity and crude hunger and greedy concupiscence, that is going on in the kitchen. The only god of this world is the cold god of persistent life and appetite; and I must look steadily at this repellent but true tableau – the animal life in the kitchen, the corpse in the back bedroom. Life offers no other tableaus of reality, once we pierce beneath appearances.

From The Columbia History of American Poetry. Ed. Jay Parini and Brett C. Miller. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. Copyright © 1993 by Columbia UP.

somewhere in my imagination i hear a greek chorus singing about sleep, numbness, what counts and what doesn't...but, most importantly, who gets to decide.

why day friday

why do i see xmas trees already?

why does coke taste better than pepsi?

why can't the weather make up its mind?

why does 30mph seem so slow?

why do i feel like i'm a repeat offender all of the fucking time?

an open letter to florida

dear florida,

you are the land of my birth where palm trees, beaches, strip malls, humidity, and tourists make up your many landscapes. people automatically love you it seems. the very mention of your name, no matter where i am, brings out the daydreamer in anyone that asks me where i am from. indeed, my sanity is often questioned by my decision to have left you. but these daydreamers don't understand. they think that you are warm and loving with a very laid back personality and a voice made out of the sound of waves and seagulls. these people honestly think that to live with you is to inhabit a state of perpetual relaxation and where mickey mouse and cinderella stroll hand-in-hand down well manicured and extremely clean sidewalks and every night there is a parade.

i know better.

we have had a very volatile relationship over the past forty years. me hating you for your conservative, unfair, and oppressive stances against people who are anything but "normative" and you not caring for anyone but the rich and religious while stealthily breaking your own moral codes in the many rest stops that dot your landscape along I75 or I275. unwisely, you elected jeb who nearly ruined you and now you have charley sneaking around the ruins of any type of dignity you might have had had you really thought about what pain and damage you have caused. you allowed katherine harris and her ilk to steal an election thus opening the door to the eight years of hell this nation has endured. i even saw you prohibiting voters at the polls like the fascist you know you want to be. yes florida, you have made some bad decisions in the past; and even at this moment, you are still making them. i suppose you always will. but i was surprised last night florida. when i hesitantly checked the polls i noticed that a voice of reason was announcing itself in the results that i was looking at. when the final tally was in and i saw that your color was blue i must say that i was proud. are you learning something florida? or was this a moment of temporary insanity on your part...a bad choice made while drunk that you will regret the next morning? either way, it doesn't matter. i am glad you are blue and at least in this historic moment you're not the biggest asshole on the block. for that: i thank you.

does this mean that all is forgiven? does this mean that a new leaf has been turned over? certainly not. i am not coming back to you florida...i still do not trust you and i never will. but i am proud of this one moment. for once i am not cursing your name and regretting our association with each other...i am sure it will go back to "normal" in a day or two but at least in these five minutes i can smile and say that "yes, i do know you."

cq

why day friday halloween edition

why can't ghosts have babies?

why day friday

1) why can't i turn my hatred into indifference?

why day friday

1) why do broken hips take so long to heal?

2) why does the taste of cold coffee seem unnatural?

3) why is fall the shortest season?

4) why are tuesday/thusday teaching schedules so difficult to come by?

5) why does the hours put in on a job search seem like wasted time?

the language of fall

fall has its own language

much like memory

its colors are vibrant and yet muted

creating words and sentences that are so

fragile that the slightest breeze disturbs

their grammar

mixing and rematching words into new phrases

that are gentle and webbed

fragile yet eternal

beautifully stark and enormously full

turning so quickly to dust and creating in this charcoal coloured death

a recitative

becoming what will soon be a barren vastness

to be inscribed upon by the voice of winter in

a well metered aria filled with sharp phrases and powdered notes

that complete the frame by which fall is known and knows itself to be:

essentially the nonessential phrase lodged between two commas in the

mouth of

eternity

things that i miss...

1) my father

2) living in chicago

3) j.

4) j's nightly phone calls

5) traveling to st. louis

6) holding hands

7) the "largeness" of the world

8) possibility

9) coherency

10) a grammar of love

why day friday

why is it all or nothing?

why does coffee taste better in the morning?

why are endings always the hardest to get through?

why is _details_ magazine considered a hetero text?

why can't i specialize in one area?

why does the fall season always seem so short?

awesome picture 4 monday

joan didion + toni morrison = 2 incredible 4 words

music for a sad sunday

6 underground

Take me down, 6 underground,
The ground beneath your feet,
Laid out low, nothing to go
Nowhere a way to meet
I’ve got a head full of drought,
Down here, so far off losing out
Round here,

Over ground, watch this space,
I’m open to falling from grace

Calm me down, bring it round
Too way high off your street
I can see like nothing else
In me you’re better than I wannabe
Don’t think ‘cos I understand,
I care, don’t think ‘cos I’m talking were friends,

Over ground, watch this space,
I’m open to falling from grace

Talk me down, safe and sound
Too strung up to sleep
Wear me out, scream and shout
Swear my times never cheap
I fake my life like I’ve lived
Too much, I take whatever you’re given
Not enough,

Over ground, watch this space,
I’m open to falling from grace


*i think that this is the best cover of the sneaker pimps so far.

ability and place

the body is inscribed upon by a language of ability
that in a room confined through language the body that refuses or
cannot be inscribed with this language must be contained
how do we change the language to reflect inclusive places
how do we narrate ability in different ways
the architecture that we engage with on a daily basis
is simply a language of ability
a narrative that helps to inscribe bodies
reminding particular subjectivities of their "normal-ness"
or "other-ness"
to change this language we need to change the architecture
not just materially but also rhetorically
and not simply by laws either
this change needs to occur on the level of metaphor and poetics
we need to stop thinking and conceptualizing a certain type of
normativity as an involuntary reflex

dear monday

love,
me

sunday memory: music

my new approach

Just because you are blind, and unable to see my beauty doesn't mean it does not exist.

--Margaret Cho

why day friday

why am i still using my air conditioner in september?

why do my cats have to use the litter box right after i clean it? and it wasn't that "dirty" to begin with

why do i feel that i have made a really big mistake?

why, all of a sudden, am i using physics and grammar metaphors in my writing?

why is philip pullman such a good writer?

given all of the crap that i have been going through this year, why am i not crazy yet?

why is chicago so close and yet so far away?

mantra from james wright

suddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossom

poem and image for the week...probably a re-post but i don't care

Not Waving but Drowning
by Stevie Smith


Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.





From Collected Poems of Stevie Smith by Stevie Smith, published by New Directions Publishing Corp. Copyright © 1972 by Stevie Smith.

why day friday

why do i worry about small stuff and not really the big stuff?

why do some drivers think that going slower means "safer"?

why are friendships harder to maintain the older you get?

why are some people easy to forget?

why am i easy to forget?

why isn't it worth it?

why is existentialism always such a buzz kill?

driving towards death

i have never been more acutely aware of freud’s concept of the death drive as i am now. with the dissertation writing and the job search questing….i am now beginning to see that the various exercises and tasks that i must perform as neither ultimately getting a large document written to completion nor is securing a job for the future. rather all of this “activity” is nothing more that the accumulation of highly stylized rhetorical acts in order to stop the flow of life. when i write “stop the flow of life” i am not meaning it in a suicidal way (although it can and does mean just that). I am really looking at this in a very metaphorical way. the flow of life that articulates its movement onto and through moments of stress is what i am trying to address here. life is flowing around me like a fast moving river. it is pushing me to goddess knows where…perhaps over a cliff or maybe to a lagoon. but my overall desire is to get the flowing to stop…to quiet down…to become inert and static. i want to be able to find a consistent rhythm like a gently pounding heartbeat that harmonizes itself with calm, graceful breathing. writing a dissertation and finding a job will not accomplish this. in fact, both just lead to more “unfinished” business….more frantic flowing down a river. sometimes i wonder that if i swim with the current i will find the peace and inertia that i need oscillating between within the almost imperceptible interstices of this rapid flow of water.

daemons

"why" day friday saturday...

why am i posting why day friday on saturday?

why do raspberry mochas taste so good?

why do people seem more insane the older i get?

why do i feel liberated when i probably should feel sad?

why do i feel sad when i probably should feel liberated?

why is life so paradoxical?

rooms

painting by nick patten (nickpatten.com)

Sometimes I have the feeling that we're in one room with two opposite doors and each of us holds the handle of one door, one of us flicks an eyelash and the other is already behind his door, and now the first one has but to utter a word and immediately the second one has closed his door behind him and can no longer be seen. He's sure to open the door again, for it's a room which perhaps one cannot leave. If only the first one were not precisely like the second, if he were calm, if he would only pretend not to look at the other, if he would slowly set the room in order as though it was a room like any other; but instead he does exactly the same as the other at his door, sometimes even both are behind the doors and the beautiful room is empty.

--Franz Kafka
in a letter to Milena Jesenska

the unbearable lightness of daydreaming in houses

...the house shelters daydreaming, the house proetects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace. Thought and experience are not the only things that sanction human values. The values that belong to daydreaming mark humanity in its depths. Daydreaming even has a privilege of autovalorization. It derives direct pleasure from its own being. Therefore, the places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as daydreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time.

--Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, page 6

that daydreams can be embodied...that they can wrap around you like a familiar home and that this home is always with you....that's what i like about this passage.

pictures by paul politis at www.paulpolitis.com

friday "why" day

why am i so predictable?

why do i always have to go to the grocery store 10 times a week?

why do i always expect too much?

why is the new harry potter movie taking so long to get here?

why must there always be loss?

speaking of which:

why do the writers of "lost" time their seasons so far apart from each other?

note to self

apparently "interpretive dance" is NOT a skill to list on your cv or
in your teaching philosophy statement...please remember to extract
the offending material from both documents today.

FYI

seriously

poem for the week

One Art


The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three beloved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

-- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop

st augustine

i have been reading the works of st augustine for quite a while now
and there is no doubt in my mind
that his work on sign theory
is foundational to poststructuralism in general and
deconstruction in particular

but what strikes me as particularly interesting
is his theology as well
augustine is what we would call a founding "father" of
the church...not just the catholic church although in
the fourth century catholic was the only option
but his influence can be seen
woven into the protestant reformation as well

he influenced everyone from martin luther to john calvin
and their successors
baptism as a requirement for full inclusion into
christianity was established by him
as well as his involvement with the development
of the nicene creed and other germinal
church documents

he also refined the practice of hermeneutics
a practice that not only is used in theology
but also in secular contexts as well
from literary theory and cultural study
to feminist critique and queer epistemology

i, myself, have had a rocky relationship with
christianity
i have very little patience for literal interpretations
or heaven/hell, all/nothing binary thinking

but i do believe in a creator
i do believe that there is something
outside of our perceptions
maybe an energy
maybe a communal soul
maybe it's love
that draws us like magnets from this
plain of existence to another
and i certainly accept that
there is more than one "way" to conceptualize this
energy which is to say that
anyone who says christianity is the ONLY
way is, in my opinion, wrong
not only wrong but extremely short sighted

i have been watching and reading the debates
within the episcopal church in particular and the anglican
communion as a whole with some interest
not only because i am episcopal but i am
also queer

the issue at hand deals with ordinating
gay and lesbian bodies as bishops, priests, and deacons
homosexuality (a 19th century term) is being
debated using a text that is (at the youngest) over 2,000 years old
i have little patience for this
and quite frankly i have never seen such
unchristian behavior
or arguments against homosexuality
as i have witnessed in these debates
especially at the lambeth conference of bishops
in england that took place this past july

at first they invited an openly gay episcopal bishop,
+gene robinson, to participate in the conversation/debate
then they uninvited him because conservative bishops
threatened not to come
the irony of it all is that during the closed service
these bishops sang an hymn entitled "all are welcome to the table"
really?
the stupidity and obvious hypocrisy of it all astounds me

aside from the social construction of sexuality
and the misinterpretation that occurs when conservative
male bishops like jack iker who (i am embarrassed to admit)
was my priest and assisted in my confirmation almost twenty years ago
takes such unchristian stances while at the same time
claiming the love of a creator

i go back to st augustine at this point
as problematic as his fourth century views are
he at least recognized
that interpretation was, at best, faulty
that we could never, ever truly know the mind of
the creator because this creator is outside of language and therefore
incomprehensible
the best we can do is work with the language that we have
to approximate distance between ourselves and the spiritual

in his book _on christian doctrine_ and in _the city of god_
he discusses the role of scriptural interpretation at length
whether it involves complex work with dense passages
or straightforward texts where interpretation is fairly evident
there are two rules (and only two rules) that we
should pay attention to...two rules "uttered" by
jesus christ ("son" of "god" or a "prophet" or something else...you choose)

1) love god with all your heart, soul, and mind

2) love your neighbor(s) as yourself

according to augustine THESE are the two rules worth
paying close attention to
other interpretations whether simple or highly complex and abstract
are ancillary
and, in some cases, useless if in the end the love of the creator and
your neighbor are detoured

now my question to the anglican communion at large
and the episcopal church in particular is this
where is the love?

surrender and change

if i must learn anything thus far in my life it is this:
surrender to change and learn how to say goodbye

most of the time i don't like saying goodbye
to friends
to family
to "life" partners
because there's always a twinge of panicked desire to
make them stay
to keep them close to me
i am not perfect...i am difficult
i try to be honest
and i also try to accept other people's honesty
as hard as that can be sometimes

i disappoint others
i let them down
i am not who they want me to be for them
they ultimately are not what i desire
either
it hurts beyond belief
this letting go and saying goodbye but
if trust and safety are betrayed then
there is nothing else left to do but
to deeply sigh and get used to the change
or apologize for a double sided hurt
that is no one's fault and yet everyone is to blame.

i use language in an attempt to always further
my own liberation and sometimes this tactic backfires
sometimes it binds me further to
a life that i do not want or desire
a life of lack
or forced solitude
perhaps, even, exile

i have lost significant relationships this year
this has been the year of losing things
but it is also
a year of appreciation as well
of what i had
of smiling upon instances or times and memories
that have passed
that i can display as pictures with pewter frames
somewhere in the crevices of my mind

but i will also appreciate all that i have as well
to hold these things tightly
to say goodbye to those who need to move on
to appreciate the others who, for whatever reason,
choose to remain with me.

i surrender to this change
to this pruning
because i am growing
at the very instant that i am feeling
diminished

note to self

don't break your arm patting yourself
on the back because one of your
frustrated "straight" white male students
got up and left in the middle
of class yesterday...

but you can take five minutes to smile
and know that you are at least
doing SOMETHING right.

images, song, and lyrics

wise up
aimee mann

It’s not what you thought
When you first began it
You got what you want
Now you can hardly stand it though
By now you know it's not
Going to stop
It’s not going to stop
It’s not going to stop
‘Til you wise up

You’re sure there’s a cure
And you have finally found it
You think one drink
Will shrink you ‘til
You’re underground and living down
But it’s not going to stop
It’s not going to stop
It’s not going to stop
‘Til you wise up

Prepare a list of what you need
Before you sign away the deed
'Cause it's not going to stop
It’s not going to stop
It’s not going to stop
‘Til you wise up

No it’s not going to stop
‘Til you wise up
No it’s not going to stop

So just give up

poem and image

“We Don't Know How To Say Goodbye”
Anna Akhmatova

We don't know how to say goodbye,
We wander on, shoulder to shoulder
Already the sun is going down
You're moody, and I am your shadow.
Let's step inside a church, hear prayers, masses for the dead
Why are we so different from the rest?
Outside in the graveyard we sit on a frozen branch.

That stick in your hand is tracing
Mansions in the snow in which we will always be together.

poem for today

“For a second time there was no sign. Again no bridegroom
and the priest in the house. She could not remember any other sorrow
because this grief wiped them all away. Oh, no, there’s nothing more
cruel than this—I’ll never forgive it. She stretched herself with a deep
breath and blew out the light.”

Katherine Anne Porter, “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall”

pruning time

my arms are strong
my eyes see clearly
from dark brown knots

sculpted by time
and patience

my heart is somewhere
beating deep below
my barky surface

forcing a circulation
of life through my veins

but it’s all very confusing
when the time comes
to prune

to lob off a limb there
shave clean a branch here

to listen to the cracking
of my bones
worn tough by wind
and rain
to watch them break and fall

i’m on my knees
as if in prayer

looking up at familiar faces with
arms unfolded like a letter as if stretching
the muscles awake after a long night of sleeping
falling with force and gravity
making deep cuts
with every swipe

and i cry
while this same heart keeps
pumping
keeping me alive even
as i lose parts

for these parts have their
ways now
their own names

while i still

become smaller
by forced lack
and fragmentation

but my heart still beats
as it has
always done

pushing life through
my veins
repairing the damage
with new growth
because in the certain stillness
that always returns
after the violence
has retreated

i can hear the quietness
of repair
within deep sighs
and extended embraces

oaw
09/18/08

2008: the year of lost things...

People who are lonely, people left alone, sit talking nonsense to the air, imagining...beautiful systems dying, old fixed orders falling apart...

People are like planets, you need a thick skin.

I have to go now, get back, something just...fell apart. Oh God, I feel so sad.

--Harper in Angels in America: Millennium Approaches

FYI

image and poem for the week....

A Grave
by Marianne Moore


Man looking into the sea,
taking the view from those who have as much right to it as you have to
yourself,
it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing,
but you cannot stand in the middle of this;
the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave.
The firs stand in a procession, each with an emerald turkey-foot at the
top,
reserved as their contours, saying nothing;
repression, however, is not the most obvious characteristic of the sea;
the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look.
There are others besides you who have worn that look--
whose expression is no longer a protest; the fish no longer investigate
them
for their bones have not lasted:
men lower nets, unconscious of the fact that they are desecrating a grave,
and row quickly away--the blades of the oars
moving together like the feet of water-spiders as if there were no such
thing as death.
The wrinkles progress among themselves in a phalanx--beautiful under
networks of foam,
and fade breathlessly while the sea rustles in and out of the seaweed;
the birds swim through the air at top speed, emitting cat-calls as hereto-
fore--
the tortoise-shell scourges about the feet of the cliffs, in motion beneath
them;
and the ocean, under the pulsation of lighthouses and noise of bellbuoys,
advances as usual, looking as if it were not that ocean in which dropped
things are bound to sink--
in which if they turn and twist, it is neither with volition nor
consciousness.





From The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore.

it's easy to miss something that you're not looking for...

on spirituality or its lack

perhaps i feel compelled to write this because i have been reading the works of st augustine all summer or perhaps it is because my significant other is contemplating the episcopal priesthood. among other things, perhaps it is all just arbitrary or maybe not. maybe this is a combination of things…i am trying to finish a phd program…i am trying to keep my patience…i am trying to deal with the expectations of others…i am trying to keep my feelings safe…i am trying not be angry, disappointed, or hurt. i am also negotiating my 40s…something that no one seems to understand (or they just can’t understand). i am one half of an orphan and i can not help but worry or fret over the day i will become complete in my orphan-ness. i have just completed the last half of my life (assuming, of course that i make it to my 75th year) and i stand here looking across a chasm. this is not where i would have thought my life would be or become. trying to create something new or something else…can i really call my life after grad school a career? i will not be “professional” about this. furthermore i cannot anticipate the needs of others in relation to my own journey in this life. it has been and will continue to be a struggle between keeping myself “here” or turning inward. this is, i think, a spiritual crisis (not one of a particularly “christian” type but definitely related). i thought that when i started writing this post i would narrate my coming to terms with a spirituality that intersects with my relationship to my s.o. who is very spiritual. rather, these words have turned into something else…or maybe not…maybe this is what it is…a spiritual crisis…nothing more…nothing less and what i am going through other people have gone through for a millennia. nothing special…nothing here to really see…just a whole lot of emptiness and disappointment, self pity, and betrayal. but i just can’t fix it and i just can’t ‘get on that’ because if i did i would be doing it for something other than myself. the inside voice is calling me back while the outside voice is chiding me to keep going. it’s all very confusing and frustrating. and the words of others won’t help because it boils down to my own complicity and “what i want” which is probably nothing and i certainly don’t wish to be reminded that this is all my own fault because i really detest being reminded of the obvious. and besides, whenever i am reminded it’s just to solidify an other voice’s distancing of what is most obviously my own mess. i think i will re-read katherine anne porter’s “the jilting of granny weatherall” or maybe i will clean my room.

poem for today

“One day walking in Argyll with my husband we encountered a wishing tree which surprised us a great deal because I didn’t know there were any in Scotland. I mean a tree people have bashed coins into for a wish or desire—I knew they existed in Ireland but had never seen one in Scotland.”

The Wishing Tree
by Kathleen Jamie


I stand neither in the wilderness
nor fairyland

but in the fold
of a green hill

the tilt from one parish
into another.

To look at me
through a smirr of rain

is to taste the iron
in your own blood

because I hoard
the common currency

of longing: each wish
each secret visitation.

My limbs lift, scabbed
with greenish coins

I draw into my slow wood
fleur-de-lys, the enthroned Brittania*.

Behind me, the land
reaches toward the Atlantic.

And though I’m poisoned
choking on the small change

of human hope,
daily beaten into me

look: I am still alive—
in fact, in bud.

*This is not a misspelling of Britannia…This is an older version of the word originally assigned to Britain by the Romans. oaw.

proposal and its lack

i have to write a dissertation proposal

how do i fill up this space?

or, better yet, how do i start to narrate a place
for myself.

this liminal threshold
this in-between-ness is quite stultifying

not that i have a writer's block or that i am unable to write...
because i can

i feel like an intellectual fraud
i notice my peers writing and moving toward something and that
their ideas are fresh
innovative

i'm stuck...not that i am without my ideas
but that my ideas really suck
and that my writing really
is a convoluted mess
and that this unfortunate circumstance
is quite lonely

writing is lonely business

and the more i try to fill up
this lack with a narrative
i create more lack
i try to grasp at any kind of border
to solidify or at least close up
the "place" i am trying to create
but the borders are outside of my reach

like some kind of mirage on a hot road
i see it from afar but the closer i get
to it the more it fades
and is gone
leaving me more room
to write with words that, to me,
lack any kind of substance

the things that come out of my mouth...

i have had one of those days wherein i feel like
i'm doing a lot
but at the same time and upon further reflection it doesn't seem
like i accomplished anything...kind of like doing research for
my dissertation proposal.

i ran a mucho amount of errands today
thank goddess for dunkin donuts coffee to keep me
half way alert

i'm not going to recount my entire movements
because, quite frankly, i would fall asleep while
writing this post. much like reading
early american literature (especially the criticism not so much the actual writers.
the exception to this would probably be
cotton mather and noah webster...these two definitely cure insomnia.)

don't even get me started on the oxford comma...but i digress

i found myself in petco today buying kitty litter.
i have to buy a brand called "ever clean"
it's the only brand that works with max's diabetes.
it's supper absorbent and it stays clean.
of course it's also the most expensive.
of course.

in any event, i buy two boxes at a time and i usually like to buy
the same "type". this means that i like the "lavender" ever clean the best.
now petco has a nasty habit of not getting enough of this kitty litter in stock
so i usually have to mix and match various types of litter.
today i had to settle on lavender and the unscented kind.

i was annoyed but whatever...i wouldn't recognize my life
if it were not absurdly complicated with inconveniences on every level.

to continue, i have my two heavy boxes in hand and i go up to the
cashier. i place the boxes next to each other and the cashier
scans one box and looks up at me and says
"is the second box the same?" meaning, i think,
that she wanted to scan once and hit a register key twice.
i can appreciate economy.
so i respond by saying
"yes they're the same brand but different flavors."
i stopped and thought about what
i said and i must admit that i think that i threw up in my mouth
a little bit.
i looked at the cashier and she was looking at me with her head cocked to the side.
i just said, "oh, you know what i mean..."
she said "yes" and proceeded
to finish up with the transaction.

if i were on my toes i should have added that
the lavender kitty litter is delicious when used
as a light seasoning in salad, pizza, [notice the use of the oxford comma]
and/or spaghetti sauce. but i think that i have said enough for one day.

once upon a dream

while i was away in florida i had the strangest dream...ever.
consequently,
i have been debating with myself: should i actually
write the dream down or, following the advice of stevie nicks, just keep it to myself?

well for posterity here it goes:

prelude: my dreams are usually very detailed
and i, more often than not, remember them.
i also dream in color.

i am standing in a condo
it looks as if i am in a florida town
because i see palm trees and the window
(which is actually more like a glass wall)
overlooks a waterway
i see to my right a bridge that crosses over
this said waterway

resting on top of the bridge is a plane
a big plane...like a dc 7
above the plane there is flying a smaller plane
like a 10 seat cessna
there is a rope that is hanging down from the smaller plane
the smaller plane flies over the larger plane
and the rope hanging down hooks itself onto the jet

the smaller plane then picks up the bigger plane and
carries it over the water
in mere moments the bigger plane is dropped
while in mid air
the bigger plane falls into the water but before doing so
it performs a 360 turn landing upright
the plane then proceeds to
lift off into the air from where it landed in the water


this happens several times
and i remember thinking to myself
that it would be terrible if
the bigger plane doesn't complete a 360 rotation
before making contact with the water.

sure enough as soon as i thought it
the event happened and
one big plane fell into the water with
its underside up

(is this what people mean by lucid dreaming?)

but then something really odd happens...
the upside down plane turns into a whale
and swims off

this happens a couple more times before
i eventually wake up.

i shudder to think about
a freudian interpretation of this.

note to self

1) remember that you must always own up to your own responsibilities even though you would rather just wish them away.

2) never forget that depression is expensive.

3) forget about making it through the day...focus on the hour.

4) the proposal won't write itself.

priceless

frustration....or the absurdness of humanity

so i finally watched the documentary on derrida

and it is extremely frustrating to watch...not because of the

philosopher or the concept of deconstruction

but the absolutely stupid questions that people

(the "documenter" included) asked him

i must say derrida himself was composed, graceful, and patient

most of the answers he provided to these questions

spoke to their own impossibility

derrida, throughout this documentary, stated that he...himself...as

an articulated and inarticulated self, is skeptical of narrative acts

especially narrative acts of auto/biographical frames...

one constantly speaks about oneself but only in an always already limited way

because there is always something being withheld

always something suppressed or abjected

but we take these narratives anyway and hold them up as something

"authentic" and universal when, in fact, they are nothing more than specters

or phantoms...therefore, we are disjointed in our "being"

we reject the Other while also embracing it

we look and we touch and we remember

but what if we attempted to look at ourselves with the eyes

of the Other?

what would we see then ?

subjectivity, as derrida stated throughout, is an inescapable violence

many times rhetorical

often times physical

most times both

it's rather disheartening...to dispel or unravel the violent knots of being...

of i-ness...

and the utter masculinity that all of this is framed within

i also was extremely interested and saddened by a talk that he

gave in south africa regarding the "who" and the "what" in regards

to the concepts of "forgiveness" and "reconciliation,"

the role of love, and the conflicting terms of negotiation

that inevitably announce themselves in this type of analysis

i say interested because i see relevance and

saddened for the same reason...

but above all

my favorite moment in the film was also, ironically, the most absurd

an interviewer actually asked derrida if he was familiar with the u.s. sitcom

seinfeld...when he replied "no" she gave him a short introduction

to "what" it was via an anecdote then

she made a connection between this show and a process of deconstruction by the

insinuation that this show illuminates a deconstructive process...

i loved his answer:

"deconstruction can never be a sitcom"

loves it...

but i'm a drafter

"we write to taste life twice."
--anais nin

i was hanging out with my friend M yesterday and
like most grad school nerds we were talking about
academics...more specifically writing.

i have a very strange relationship with the process of writing
i love it
i hate it
i use it as an object to gauge my own self worth,
to determine the exact dimensions or specifications
of who i am as a writer
i realize that this is unwise
but i still do it nonetheless

in any event, back to my conversation with M
i was telling her about one of the comments
that i received (anonymously) from a reader
who, incidentally, passed me on the answer to the question...
anyway,
this reader basically scolded me for articulating my
ideas in "tortured" prose.
i must admit that this hurt my feelings
and i was pretty vocal about it

i'm not above criticism...and i,
more than anyone else,
realize that my writing can indeed be 'torturous' to read
because it is torturous to write
but i think that's the point

going over this comment and my adverse reaction to it with M
she looked at me and said:
"YOU'RE a drafter"
i thought about it and i sighed out an agreement
i am a drafter
writing is never, ever finished for me

my project and, consequently, my writing is and always will be
a draft
i write against language
i write against grammar
i write against the active
in an actively passive way...the paradox is torturous
but, for me, most necessary

while i disagree with the violent word of "torture" and
the various acts that it signifies i do realize that
my writing is a struggle
with knots
i untie them while at the same time making new ones
i look at the knots that i have made and i begin to untie
them and in this process creating newer ones
and so it goes

i am a drafter
an un-tier and maker of knots simply because
i hate the regulatory "nature" of language
with its power and its violent oppression
i will always write against it
because my life and who i am is reflected within the very
prose that issues forth from my clouded mind

i am a drafter therefore
my life and who i am is a draft and i
will continue to write
and rewrite my ideas and my life

at times, my stances will be cogent even if only in an instant...
at others
not so much (at least for the reader)
but ultimately i must be true (in a postmodern sense of 'true') to the conflict
that brews inside of me and work it out the best
way that i know how
which is writing
which is reading
which is interpreting and
ultimately unapologetic

it's funny, this same reviewer rattled off a litany
of scholars that i should read...(about 8)
6 of them i have read and
hindsight causes me to chuckle
because when i reflect on this list
i have very specific reasons for NOT using
these suggested writers
and i chuckle even more when i think
that if i ever attempted to copy or emulate the ways in which
they write or, more specifically, how they work out their ideas
within their writing i would never have
been accepted to grad school and certainly would never have
passed three comprehensive exam questions

from now on
i will be unapologetic with my writing
it has to be honest (if only temporarily)
and it has to be
re-written

i am a drafter
i would not want or have it any other way

note to self

pat yourself on the back

for passing your comprehensive exams

(but only for about 5 minutes)

then start writing your proposal

and freaking out over a dissertation.

is "fag hag" empowering? and the "colonizing" mother

i presented a paper at the children's literature association's international conference this month and (like most conferences that i go to and present at) i either love what i hear or hate it...a binary i know but i very rarely find gray areas at these events.

for the record i am not specializing in children's literature...my ethos to this field is through english studies via rhetoric...i am transdiscipinary which means that i feel a certain amount of responsibility to verse myself (if only incidentally) to the major intersections of critical discourse where text and culture intersect.

with this said i listened to two papers that were absolutely horrible if not disturbing. one paper was given on a panel that i was chairing. the panel was devoted to issues of colonization and (to some extent) the future of postcolonial studies.

one of the papers (given by a recently graduated "master's" student) analyzed the relationship between illustrations in a picture book and the words on the page. although i am all for cross pollinating concepts in order to parse through dense theoretical connections i sat there wondering what any of this had to do with colonization? i mean, i was making connections in my mind but as far as listening to the direction of this person's paper i was coming up short in constructing some kind of intellectual relevance. then she started talking about colonization.

the picture book being analyzed is entitled _the water tower_. essentially it is about two white boys who are around 9 to 10 years of age. the speaker then proceeded to talk about how these two boys were colonized by their mothers. or more accurately, how one boy was colonized because he had a mother and the other wasn't because his mother was absent. i suppose in her theoretical context fathers are unable to or just don't 'colonize' their spawn? i was dumbfounded. what did the speaker mean by colonization? acts of discipline imposed from one body onto another? althusserian interpellation? i am not persuaded. in fact this is what happens when students (and i am still a student) are given carte blanche to any half baked idea and consequently thinking that they are being "original" or "subversive". this student's mentor (a supposedly "big name" in this field) was there as well...and i kept on thinking to myself that this "mentor" approved this garbage and that she should know better.

the paper was not only terrible, it was dangerous. this paper is dangerous indeed because it downplayed the very real material presence of colonization (and its after-effects). colonization is local but it is also cultural...it deals with hegemony and the violence of the hegemonic struggle in a very "real" sense. it is traumatic and violent and it reifies this trauma on bodies and cultures mimetically (even after this said colonization or the colonizing agent has extracted itself from the cultural landscape). the power of discipline from a mother (or parent) to a child is many things. for instance, it creates subjectivity...it proves itself problematic insofar as insuring the proliferation of white male heteronormative power (in western society) is kept in place. many, many theorists have written about this power dynamic (adrienne rich or jessica benjamin, for instance) but in no way does this process even mimic a colonizing process. if anything this student's analysis downplays colonization...giving it license to hide itself in an irresponsible analysis.

furthermore, this student talked about the image of the water tower itself within the narrative structure of the book. she surmised that the water tower was/is a matriarchal (and colonizing) figure in the story. how so? well this student says that the boys went swimming in the water tower. the water tower was round (womb-like) and it contained water. my brain almost exploded. what about the shape of the water tower? is it not in some way a phallus? the fact that this womb was housed inside a phallus was absent from this critique therefore actively ignoring at least 50 years of feminist scholarship that addresses this very issue. what kind of work does this ignorance or short-sightedness do? could it be that the figure of the mother as womb is created within phallogocentrism? this student's problematic paper displaced the point of critique from the oppressive dominance of white male heteronormativity onto the body of the woman as mother using a non sequitor of colonization.

also, another alarming aspect to this student's talk was her use of "marriage". she constantly reiterated a marriage between the image and the text; marriage between oppression and the body. yet again, i am reminded of how very pervasive white male heteronormative dominance can be in that it manipulates and hence reifies itself under a rubric of a critique that supposedly does the opposite. meaning, her paper was not a critique but an excurses based upon a very well hidden apology from the dominated to the status quo.

the second paper that i had the "privilege" to listen to was given by a new master’s student. if not for the fact that i had to read my paper right after her, i would have left the room. she proposed through her paper that the term "fag hag" is empowering. she used an adolescent text to make her point. in this text a young woman finds out her boyfriend is gay (through, i am assuming, his disclosure). they break up. this break up does not lead to animosity but rather to friendship...this young woman becomes in this text a "fag hag." the reader of this paper then tries to say that this is empowering...that fag hag is not what it used to be but it is something different. she also used several examples from pop culture to illustrate her point (seinfeld, will and grace, and sex and the city, etc.). i kept on thinking to myself (while biting my tongue and trying to keep blood from shooting out of my nose): really....Really.....REALLY???????? not once did she theorize the term. not once did she rely on any of the critical feminist and queer theory scholarship that challenges this term. furthermore, she didn't even historicize the label as a pejorative.

i am all for reclaiming a name...i do this with 'queer.' but unlike this reader i try to always question the terms and the work that 'queer' does. queer in my lexical and theoretical usage is grounded in strangeness...it functions on ontological, phenomenological, and ultimately epistemological registers. queer looks at race, gender, ability, sex, and class in terms (and not despite) of normativity (in a juridical foucauldian sense). however, i must never forget what this word still can do. i must always remember that it functions for many as and only a pejorative. it still does work that i critique against. this word is still rhetorically VIOLENT. i must never forget this. the same goes with "fag hag."

never once was the question raised by this student...can "fag" ever be empowering? what about "hag"? both have very long histories. both have been critiqued together and separately through countless pages of scholarship. i am not persuaded that these terms can ever be empowering...maybe i'm wrong but unlike queer this term was created solely for very specific reasons. it is a raced term...it is gender specific and points to a solid demographic (self identified straight white women who hang around white gay men). "fag" in this sense is being used as a label by white gay men to lay claim to the "hag" or, more specifically, the body of the straight, white woman. therefore, "fag" is a term of empowerment and melancholy for white gay men over white straight women. it is a move that signifies not only a claim to bodies but a claim to power. so my question is who is being empowered by this term? how is the term "hag" functioning? is it empowering? for whom?

during the q & a time i tried to bring these questions to the fore. i attempted to get people discussing the inherently misogynistic work this term is still "doing" within culture...is will and grace subversive...what about sex and the city? what specific images are being attached to the term? how is this term working? no one wanted to talk about race or class or gender in this way. they just wanted to sit around and talk about how "fag hag" is empowering. this, like the previous paper, is dangerous. the term is still used as a pejorative...unnuanced and under theorized by the people who want to claim it as an excuse for doing "cutting edge" work.

i have said this before and i will say it again (even though it is problematic). anytime (white) straight people/scholars attempt to discuss the lesbian/gay/transgendered/transsexual bodies within culture and cultures through what they think is substantive critique they (9 times out of 10) fuck it up. thus "open minded" and/or liberal/progressive self identified straight (white) people are always reassuring their listeners through their words that they as normative bodies are still the unquestioned paradigm and thus, unintentionally, admitting that although normativity should be questioned it is only questioned insofar as their fear of implication allows them to go.

a rough couple of days

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

--e.e. cummings



i couldn't understand my mood

these past couple of days

then i remembered that it was

father's day on sunday

and all of the heaviness

started to make sense

grief is tiring because

it is heavy

and mourning is like a movie screen

that plays memories

in no particular order

so you sit with your grief in the darkness

of this theater

watching the glow of the past in

illuminated gestures

breathing slowly and just wishing for

that time back.

saturday night wordle

i follow the example of the greatness that is devin because

i too created a wordle...


title="Wordle: Untitled"> src="http://www.wordle.net/thumb/Untitled_365"
style="padding:4px;border:1px solid #ddd"
>


you can create a wordle too....

http://www.wordle.net/

hump day video with better than ezra

Juicy

Here We Go
I got with somebody's date
You're like a soap Opera cover
My lover self-automates
Juicy
Aw, Juicy

You say a-somebody say
You're like a salve for a leper
You're sweet for somebody's pain
Juicy
Aw, juicy
Aw, juicy

Yeah, you got to live for your own
You say you got all the sordid details
Check-out retail
Watch it sell
Now juicy
Aw, juicy

I gotta delay...

Mothers, children on the street
Can't get enough to eat
Off the record, dishes fly
Don't know the reason why
Meet me in the check out stand
See who can be the lover man
Conscience bleeding in a song
Guilty as the day is long
Goodbye

Yeah, you got to live for your own
You say you got all the sordid details
Check-out retail
Watch it sell
I got to see that lie
You say what you're going to say
You got to know it's a bitter poison
Sapping all of your soul away

Yeah, aw juicy
Juicy
Aw juicy
Aw juicy
Aw, ooh, aw, ooh, yeah yeah yeah
Juicy

the-world-as-it-really-is(n't)

124 was spiteful. Full of baby's venom. The women knew it and so did the children.

Toni Morrison

Derrida insists that the problem of reference admits of no solution. Language is not the 'house of Being' with the potential for leaping the gap between culture and 'nature.' Language will never become a transparent window to the-world-as-it-really-is.

The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics

wondering where i am

i always thought that i was getting to know
myself better the older i got...
i definitely have changed since i was younger
but this new middle age me is still as perplexing
as the me in my 20s and 30s

i have more aches and pains than ever before
aleve has become an important part of my diet
i play "trombone" with the books that i'm reading
i think more about death now than ever before

the last point is more complex than just the anxiety
of fretting about whether there is an afterlife or not
a heaven or a hell
or if i'm coming back as another person
or a fly

this anxiety is over loss
which means i'm not anxious over my death
but the death of those around me
paradoxically, it seems that i'm not afraid
of death after all but
i'm afraid of living
living through loss

i am the youngest of my siblings
theoretically, i will outlive them all
because i am significantly younger than they are
i am so used to following
i am so used to being the one who trails along
being told what to do
being loved and loving

i was re-reading _the return of the king_
in this book there is a scene in which sam
is trying to resuscitate frodo after he was bitten
by the spider shelob
sam yells at frodo telling him not to go
indeed, he says to frodo "don't go where i cannot follow"

i feel that i will replay this scene for the rest of my
life
the people that i love
that i follow will leave
and i cannot follow them
one of my sisters is having this issue
right now with the loss of my father
because just like her oldest daughter
passing away some 12 years ago
my sister is reminded once again of
the inertness of her position
of the imposed 'stillness' of life

i felt it too when i was beside him
when he took is very last breath
and i felt the numbness creep
from my brain to my feet

i'm sure some scientists somewhere
will tell me that it is all chemicals
a "natural" and "evolutionary" development
to help me cope...to get by...to keep on living...
to deal with the idea of not following
there is little comfort in that for me
to be reminded that i am only soft tissue and
that my longing is just gray matter
and neurons firing
that not being able to follow is natural
because it secures survival
because for these scientists...that's what
it's all about anyway

not for me
never for me

but the concept of god or an afterlife
is hardly any better...
people have concocted some wild theories and stories
that we take to be true
leaving one group of people yelling
at the other
it's noisy being in the middle of all of this
ideological dissonance
it still doesn't feel "good" or reassuring
because the longing to follow and yet
not being able to is there
and will always be there

i didn't want him to leave
and i miss him
i don't want my mother to leave
nor my sisters
nor my brother
my friends
my partner...if only he thought of me this way...which i am unsure of
and much too afraid to really ask

this is not about being alone
this is about access
about a preemptive lacking
that i know will be coming
so maybe things haven't changed as much as i
have imagined
maybe age while dulling
my body like a river stone: smooth and rounded
sharpens my inner hearing
to what my mind and my body are trying to tell me
through voices that extend way past the box
of scientific discourse
and chemicals
and nature

the voices that only a young body can suppress
there is a spirituality
about all of this
about following
about the love that creates the desire
to follow
maybe that's what keeps us going
anticipation of not being able to follow
and waiting for a resurrection that we know
will never happen

note to self

try not to judge too harshly

people who choose to put bible verses on

their t-shirts;

we all have our own 'bibles' to read

because death is kind of scary

hump day poem

i thought that i would preface this poem with a quote from "why i write" by joan didion

in many ways writing is the act of saying i, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. it's an aggressive, even a hostile act.

Take the I Out
by Sharon Olds


But I love the I, steel I-beam
that my father sold. They poured the pig iron
into the mold, and it fed out slowly,
a bending jelly in the bath, and it hardened,
Bessemer, blister, crucible, alloy, and he
marketed it, and bought bourbon, and Cream
of Wheat, its curl of butter right
in the middle of its forehead, he paid for our dresses
with his metal sweat, sweet in the morning
and sour in the evening. I love the I,
frail between its flitches, its hard ground
and hard sky, it soars between them
like the soul that rushes, back and forth,
between the mother and father. What if they had loved each other,
how would it have felt to be the strut
joining the floor and roof of the truss?
I have seen, on his shirt-cardboard, years
in her desk, the night they made me, the penciled
slope of her temperature rising, and on
the peak of the hill, first soldier to reach
the crest, the Roman numeral I--
I, I, I, I,
girders of identity, head on,
embedded in the poem. I love the I
for its premise of existence--our I--when I was
born, part gelid, I lay with you
on the cooling table, we were all there, a
forest of felled iron. The I is a pine,
resinous, flammable root to crown,
which throws its cones as far as it can in a fire.




From Blood, Tin, Straw by Sharon Olds, published by Alfred A. Knopf.

the art of revision

i hate waiting for my comp results
sometimes i am ok with the pressure and
i attempt, in part, to write out a place
within myself that gives me a certain amount
of peace
because, i am really trying hard not to
narrate a worse case scenario

but still....

at the most odd times,
driving around town running errands, etc.
i'll get a flash of panic
and i think...omg, i've failed
everything that i have been working on
for the past four years is insubstantial...my scholarship has been built
with cards...flimsy, unstable
and then this moment goes away as quickly
as it came
leaving me tired...and scared...and depressed
imprinting a question mark on my brain
'am i a sham?'
'do i know what i'm really talking/writing about?'


this drives me crazy

at other times i think
i answered the questions the best way
that i knew how...
i was careful
i tried to be precise or at least
i thought that i was and sometimes
this is reassuring

but then the panic flashes again
like heat lightening or
an intense moment in a movie
where the villain jumps out of a corner
grabbing the unaware protagonist
and then i start narrating again

i narrate a future that is dismal
and ornamented with failure
i stop this writing
and begin again
i revise
i delete paragraphs and phrases
and i attempt to add a more healing prose
a prose that is comforting EVEN if
my worst fear materializes out of thin air
or from some dark corner
my revisions tell me to breathe
to be present
to close my eyes and most importantly
to remind me
to keep taking my meds

i thought that phyllis schlafly was dead...

apparently not because she just received an honorary doctorate from

the washington university of st. louis

this is controversial in that phyllis is/was a major voice in the

conservative movement...she fought against the equal rights amendment in the 70s

in a most eloquent way, she also told a reporter that the marriage contract is also consent for sex....

so if a woman claims that her husband raped her...according to phyllis

this would be inaccurate and, in most cases, a lie

she also stated that the pictures of pows taken at abu ghraib

showing our military personnel committing crimes against humanity

was a fantasy of feminists because that's how they (or i should say we)

want to treat men....

whatever

the justification for bestowing this honor on her by wash. u. basically came down

to this:

she is an important voice in the conservative movement

she is a "good" and "vigorous" debater

and she has contributed to the political discourse of the united states

to which i say: really? really? REALLY?

i would love to shake the idiot's hand who thought that this was

a good idea...

seriously there was NO ONE else that they could have honored? and again i say

really?

oh did i mention that phyllis is twice an alum of wash. U.?

did i mention that phyllis has a lot of $$$$$$$?

a major voice in political discourse...yeah, sure.

who are they going to honor next with a doctorate?

fred phelps of the westboro baptist church?

i mean he certainly fits the above criteria

it was nice to see a lot of the faculty and students

protesting this batshittery

if isu ever did anything that stupid...my head would explode

i tried to give my bk a hard time about it because he teaches there

but to no avail...i love how he puts up with me...

i don't know how he does it

poem for the week

My Mother Would Be a Falconress
by Robert Duncan



My mother would be a falconress,
And I, her gay falcon treading her wrist,
would fly to bring back
from the blue of the sky to her, bleeding, a prize,
where I dream in my little hood with many bells
jangling when I'd turn my head.

My mother would be a falconress,
and she sends me as far as her will goes.
She lets me ride to the end of her curb
where I fall back in anguish.
I dread that she will cast me away,
for I fall, I mis-take, I fail in her mission.

She would bring down the little birds.
And I would bring down the little birds.
When will she let me bring down the little birds,
pierced from their flight with their necks broken,
their heads like flowers limp from the stem?

I tread my mother's wrist and would draw blood.
Behind the little hood my eyes are hooded.
I have gone back into my hooded silence,
talking to myself and dropping off to sleep.

For she has muffled my dreams in the hood she has made me,
sewn round with bells, jangling when I move.
She rides with her little falcon upon her wrist.
She uses a barb that brings me to cower.
She sends me abroad to try my wings
and I come back to her. I would bring down
the little birds to her
I may not tear into, I must bring back perfectly.

I tear at her wrist with my beak to draw blood,
and her eye holds me, anguisht, terrifying.
She draws a limit to my flight.
Never beyond my sight, she says.
She trains me to fetch and to limit myself in fetching.
She rewards me with meat for my dinner.
But I must never eat what she sends me to bring her.

Yet it would have been beautiful, if she would have carried me,
always, in a little hood with the bells ringing,
at her wrist, and her riding
to the great falcon hunt, and me
flying up to the curb of my heart from her heart
to bring down the skylark from the blue to her feet,
straining, and then released for the flight.

My mother would be a falconress,
and I her gerfalcon raised at her will,
from her wrist sent flying, as if I were her own
pride, as if her pride
knew no limits, as if her mind
sought in me flight beyond the horizon.

Ah, but high, high in the air I flew.
And far, far beyond the curb of her will,
were the blue hills where the falcons nest.
And then I saw west to the dying sun--
it seemd my human soul went down in flames.

I tore at her wrist, at the hold she had for me,
until the blood ran hot and I heard her cry out,
far, far beyond the curb of her will

to horizons of stars beyond the ringing hills of the world where
the falcons nest
I saw, and I tore at her wrist with my savage beak.
I flew, as if sight flew from the anguish in her eye beyond her sight,
sent from my striking loose, from the cruel strike at her wrist,
striking out from the blood to be free of her.

My mother would be a falconress,
and even now, years after this,
when the wounds I left her had surely heald,
and the woman is dead,
her fierce eyes closed, and if her heart
were broken, it is stilld

I would be a falcon and go free.
I tread her wrist and wear the hood,
talking to myself, and would draw blood.





From Bending the Bow, published by New Directions, 1968. Copyright © 1968 by Robert Duncan.