early morning poem...because i can't sleep

i can't sleep...even when i read poems....poems aren't comforting to me, they cut deep, they resonate on a level where sleep is impossible and impossibility is where i expect it to be...sitting next to me on my bed, whispering to me all of the secrets that i thought could never be mine...in a song without meter, melody, or key signature.

Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing
by Margaret Atwood

The world is full of women
who'd tell me I should be ashamed of myself
if they had the chance. Quit dancing.
Get some self-respect
and a day job.
Right. And minimum wage,
and varicose veins, just standing
in one place for eight hours
behind a glass counter
bundled up to the neck, instead of
naked as a meat sandwich.
Selling gloves, or something.
Instead of what I do sell.
You have to have talent
to peddle a thing so nebulous
and without material form.
Exploited, they'd say. Yes, any way
you cut it, but I've a choice
of how, and I'll take the money.

I do give value.
Like preachers, I sell vision,
like perfume ads, desire
or its facsimile. Like jokes
or war, it's all in the timing.
I sell men back their worse suspicions:
that everything's for sale,
and piecemeal. They gaze at me and see
a chain-saw murder just before it happens,
when thigh, ass, inkblot, crevice, tit, and nipple
are still connected.
Such hatred leaps in them,
my beery worshippers! That, or a bleary
hopeless love. Seeing the rows of heads
and upturned eyes, imploring
but ready to snap at my ankles,
I understand floods and earthquakes, and the urge
to step on ants. I keep the beat,
and dance for them because
they can't. The music smells like foxes,
crisp as heated metal
searing the nostrils
or humid as August, hazy and languorous
as a looted city the day after,
when all the rape's been done
already, and the killing,
and the survivors wander around
looking for garbage
to eat, and there's only a bleak exhaustion.
Speaking of which, it's the smiling
tires me out the most.
This, and the pretence
that I can't hear them.
And I can't, because I'm after all
a foreigner to them.
The speech here is all warty gutturals,
obvious as a slab of ham,
but I come from the province of the gods
where meanings are lilting and oblique.
I don't let on to everyone,
but lean close, and I'll whisper:
My mother was raped by a holy swan.
You believe that? You can take me out to dinner.
That's what we tell all the husbands.
There sure are a lot of dangerous birds around.

Not that anyone here
but you would understand.
The rest of them would like to watch me
and feel nothing. Reduce me to components
as in a clock factory or abattoir.
Crush out the mystery.
Wall me up alive
in my own body.
They'd like to see through me,
but nothing is more opaque
than absolute transparency.
Look--my feet don't hit the marble!
Like breath or a balloon, I'm rising,
I hover six inches in the air
in my blazing swan-egg of light.
You think I'm not a goddess?
Try me.
This is a torch song.
Touch me and you'll burn.

sunday poem, because i'm procrastinating and yet always thinking about my dissertation

Spelling
Margaret Atwood

My daughter plays on the floor
with plastic letters,
red, blue & hard yellow,

learning how to spell,
spelling,
how to make spells.

ò

I wonder how many women
denied themselves daughters,
closed themselves in rooms,
drew the curtains
so they could mainline words.

ò

A child is not a poem,
a poem is not a child.
There is no either / or.
However.

ò

I return to the story
of the woman caught in the war
& in labour, her thighs tied
together by the enemy
so she could not give birth.

Ancestress: the burning witch,
her mouth covered by leather
to strangle words.

A word after a word
after a word is power.

ò

At the point where language falls away
from the hot bones, at the point
where the rock breaks open and darkness
flows out of it like blood, at
the melting point of granite
when the bones know
they are hollow & the word
splits & doubles & speaks
the truth & the body
itself becomes a mouth.

This is a metaphor.

ò

How do you learn to spell?
Blood, sky & the sun,
your own name first,
your first naming, your first name,
your first word.

and you ain't there...

And everyone in Balencia gowns with red corsages, and big dance palaces full of music and lights and racial impurity and gender confusion. And all the deities are creole, mulatto, brown as the mouths of rivers. Race, taste and history finally overcome. And you ain't there.

my new approach

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

--Margaret Cho

mantra from james wright

suddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossomsuddenlyirealizethatifisteppedoutofmybodyiwouldbreakintoblossom

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

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

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?

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

your revolution

i was teaching my women's and gender studies class today

and one of my students was giving an oral presentation on

women in the music industry

this student's presentation lead to a general class discussion

over what it means to be a woman in an industry that is

insidiously white, male, and (big surprise here: heteronormative)

then the converstation shifted to not just issues of gender but

also race...what are the terms for women artists who are not white?

as my class was productively mulling over the issues related to race,

gender and the music industry i couldn't help but think of audre lorde

and the speech that she gave at medgar evers college in 1980 and the kind

of critique she was developing through her experience as an activist within

the civil rights movement...the struggles of being a woman, african american, feminist, womanist,

and lesbian that made her participation and even her subject negotiation within

the political formation of civil rights groups difficult and highly complex...

she spoke up to a heteronormative, male dominated paradigm that required her particpation

while at the same time demanding that she remain silent...to espouse as best she could

the violent restraints associated with that of an image of "straight woman, african american

woman"

she fought against this pressure

she established place within a third space territory

she was unapologetic for it as well

lorde was not concerned with just interested rights

she was concerned with the flow of power and the assignment of value

she wanted to change the ways in which we all consume otherness

she demanded oppression be addressed at all levels...not selectively

she demanded that perception change not just laws because laws are always

"interested"

this brings me to sarah jones

in the clip below you can hear her perform a spoken word piece entitled

"your revolution" from hbo's def poetry series...

fast forward through moss def's intro and cedric the entertainer's piece (although

his piece is worth a listen as is the interpetation of gwendolyn brooks' "we real cool" at the very

begining) and you will encounter the goddess that is sarah jones...



Sarah Jones “Your Revolution” lyrics


[Intro]

Yeah yeah, yeah this goes out to all the women and men from New York to

London to LA to Tokyo struggling to keep their self-respect in this climate

of misogyny, money worship and mass production of hip-hop's illegitimate child,

Hip-Pop.And this especially goes out to Gil Scott-Heron, friend, living legend

and proto-rapper who wrote "The Revolution will not be Televised." Much Respect.



[Verse]

Your revolution will not happen between these thighs

Your revolution will not happen between these thighs

Your revolution will not happen between these thighs

Not happen between these thighs

Not happen between these thighs

The real revolution ain't about booty size

The Versaces you buys, or the Lexus you drives

And though we've lost Biggie Smalls

Baby your notorious revolution

Will never allow you to lace no lyrical douche, in my bush

Your revolution will not be killing me softly, with Fugees

Your revolution ain't gonna knock me up without no ring

And produce little future emcees

Because that revolution will not happen between these thighs

Your revolution will not find me in the backseat of a jeep

With LL, hard as hell, you know doin it and doin it and doin it well

doin it and doin it and doin it well, nah come on now

Your revolution will not be you smacking it up, flipping it, or rubbing it down

Nor will it take you downtown or humpin around

Because that revolution will not happen between these thighs

Your revolution will not have me singing, ain't no nigga like the one I got

And your revolution will not be sending me for no drip, drip VD shot

And your revolution will not involve me, feelin your nature rise

Or helping you fantasize

Because that revolution will not happen between these thighs

No no, not between these thighs

Oh, my Jamican brother, your revolution will not make you feel bombastic

And really fantastic

And have you groping in the dark for that rubber wrapped in plastic

You will not be touching your lips to my triple dip of french vanilla,

butter pecan, chocolate delux

Or having Akinyele's dream, m-hmm a 6-foot blowjob machine m-hmm

You want to subjugate your queen? uh-huh

Think I'm a put it in my mouth, just cuz you made a few bucks?

Please brother please

Your revolution will not be me tossing my weave

And making me believe I'm some caviar-eating ghetto mafia clown

Or me giving up my behind, just so I can get signed

And maybe having somebody else write my rhymes

I'm Sarah Jones, not Foxy Brown

You know I'm Sarah Jones, not Foxy Brown

Your revolution makes me wonder, where could we go

If we could drop the empty pursuit of props and ego

We'd revolt back to our Roots, use a little Common Sense

On a quest to make love De La Soul, no pretense

But your revolution will not be you flexing your little sex and status

To express what you feel

Your revolution will not happen between these thighs

Will not happen between these thighs

Will not be you shaking and me *yawn* faking

Between these thighs

Because the real revolution, that's right I said the real revolution

You know I'm talking about the revolution

When it comes, it's gonna be real

It's gonna be real

It's gonna be real

When it finally comes

When it finally comes

It's gonna be real, yeah yeah

the paradox of substance

I would really like to have slipped imperceptibly into this lecture, as into all the others I shall be delivering, perhaps over the years ahead. I would have preferred to be enveloped in words, borne way beyond all possible beginnings. At the moment of speaking, I would like to have perceived a nameless voice, long preceding me, leaving me merely to enmesh myself in it, taking up its cadence, and to lodge myself when no one is looking, in its interstices as if it had paused an instance, in suspense, to beckon me. There would have been no beginnings: instead, speech would proceed from me, while I stood in its path--a slender gap--the point of its possible disappearance.

--Michel Foucault, "The Discourse on Language"

an old argument

at 1:45 today i was walking to the stevenson building

to teach my 2:00 class.

on my way to the classroom

i noticed an "evolution vs. creation" table set up by the stairs

and instantly i became tired.

i am sick of this argument for many reasons

not simply because of the religious vs. secular

fight but rather the more obvious notion of

who's doing the fighting and i can tell you that it is

almost always white guys on both sides of a fence

battling it out,

trying to establish policy which in turn will regulate our bodies

as intellectual vessels that are thought to be depraved and which,

consequently,

need to be filled

either by believing the earth is 10,000 years old or 10,000,000,000.

what does this "knowledge" (if it can ever be truly attained) "do"?

i offer up and experience that

invovles one of my visits with j...

who, by the way, is studying to be an episcopal priest so

the intersection between god(dess) and science

is extremely complex and existential...

in any event, we were listening to a very outspoken

scientist/atheist who was commenting on npr about the ever persistent

debate between

science and religion (creationism)

and he said something interesting....and i am greatly simplifying

his argument...it was much more nuanced…

"why" questions are not worth answering

only "how" questions deserve our time;

why questions are "typically" asked by, in this instance, christians

whereas "how" questions are much more rigorous and tend to be

asked by scientists...

this drives me crazy....here you have this white guy,

upper class, who teaches at oxford university and assumed

to be heterosexual or heteronormative in the very least

telling the audience that there is only one mode of inquiry

and that, since god does not exist, the other type of question

is not even worth considering...

typical (typically male i should say).

i am not falling on either side of the religion/atheist or evolution/creation binary

in this post...that would be a book...rather

i'm just saying that the argument as it stands is being framed

like any other argument where power and policy are working

on bodies within culture vis-a-vis a representation of

two white guys arguing for/over power,

to tell us all how to live, and

what questions to ask...

for instance, i think why questions are extremely important

i want to know

why are people still dieing from poverty and disease?

why is there no healthcare for everyone?

why is there discrimination?

these "why" questions are not worth considering because

they implicate...

pointing the finger at real issues

instead of focusing on "issues" that are speculative,

that do not implicate and only require a body to speak from a

comfortable armchair, wearing a smoking jacket, and clenching a pipe.

someone

surrounded by

access and privilege

trying to figure out how old the earth actually is

or if there is life after death…

the answers to which do not feed or

help anyone.

furthermore,

arguments such as evolution and creation

distract and, worse, are simply circuitous…

because these two concepts need each other to survive,

they create a wheel that rotates

but doesn’t go anywhere

botero

this is an astounding painting by botero concerning the prisoners in abu ghraib.

the hyperbolic representation of the prisoners' bodies...the gaze of the viewer from

the other side of the bars...

torture as spectacle

that implicates we the viewers within this process.

the blindfolds on their faces not only tells us that they are blind

but the power of vision has been taken as well as physical gesture by

the binding of hands

piled as they are, subjectivity is stripped away

we as the viewers have the priviledge of sight and gesture

we are implicated

botero's powerful critique through the creation of this image

is stunning

in a conversation with deleuze, foucault stated (and i am summarizing at this point)

that we can never pinpoint the exact "place" or "origin" of power; we can only

know its movement by those who wield it

and those who don't.

by replicating trauma...we are guilty of the same crimes.

politics of nothing(ness)

ok, so the question that has been on my mind lately is the relationship between politics and subjectivity. as i have been reading about politics and overt political agendas in the media lately i have really been bugged at the overt political act of separating a personal space and speech acts that aren't considered political to public spaces that are expected to be framed as a politics as such. i know it's not a new issue and at the very heart of my inquiry is "the personal is political" mantra. but isn't the "act" of separating personal and political acts in and of itself political? i grapple with "the personal is political" on an almost daily basis. i used to think that politics were very much separated from personal acts and that politics informed decisions and that the discursive relationship between personal acts and political acts were pointed and strategic. however, i don't think that this is the case anymore. especially as i teach, i find myself attempting to disengage my politics in the classroom in order for my students to reach their own conclusions. they maybe young and immature at this point in their lives and they may still be encased within the political views of their parents but they are adults and they are capable of making informed decisions. however, this is dangerous territory. i create this space in my classroom and on some level i'm expecting my students to adopt a very open-minded stance. but this does not happen in many instances. they choose ideological conclusions that i simply do not agree with. i find it extremely hard to hold back. this is why i admire compositionist and pedagogue peter elbow so much. his writing stresses the importance to let students come to their own conclusions even if those conclusions are not necessarily what we want them to settle upon. recently i have been reading some student writing assignments that i'm just absolutely floored by. i guess this is the importance of instructor commenting. i don't consciously try to change their mind on certain issues but i do question them on their assumptions and encourage them to think outside of the box...but this is difficult and dangerous...especially when it involves the privileged demographic of the typical isu undergraduate. some of them don't even know why they believe in something...they just do. many of them have never really read a newspaper or watch the news. i found myself explaining the recent firings of the us assistant attorney generals last week....many of them had no idea of the firings, most did not really care and felt that it did not pertain to them as citizens in this culture of the united states while the ones who did seem somewhat informed were extremely apathetic. hence the importance of my job...at least for an hour and fifteen minutes of their day two times a week for about 15 weeks they will at least think about these issues.

an experiment in narrative because i am not a poet

ok, at illinois state there is a journal called euphemism that is entirely run by the undergraduate students within the english department. most, if not all, of these students are english majors who are concentrating their studies on the field of publishing. the faculty advisor for this journal is a brilliant writer and scholar who i will refer to as dr. h. well, i received an e-mail from dr. h. requesting that i "read" something for this event. apparently they would like to have more men reading in the program.

problem no. 1: i do not fancy myself a creative writer...although i have written some poetry and short stories...i don't think that i have ever shown them to anyone.

problem no 2: i have five minutes to read something. now, five minutes may not seem like a long time but you would be surprised by how slowly the minutes drag by when one is reading written work. over five years of writing conference papers has taught me this much.

problem no 3: the event is next thursday...

problem no 4: did i mention that i am not a creative writer? oh yeah, i guess i did.

at first, i had a couple of poems from other people that i was thinking about reading and then i thought i should at least try to create something of my own. i mean i am a compositionist, in part at least, and i can look at this event as an "assignment." i can look at it as something that i would ask my writing students to do. so i have been working on a piece of narrative. it isn't a poem and the best i could describe it as is a fragment, an observation. i see it as an object that is reflected in the broken pieces of a mirror....disconnected and yet symbiotic and somewhere "out there" beyond the reach of an instantaneous signification these narrative pieces will meld. writing is exhausting...creative writing even more so....i would never call myself a poet but i can call myself someone who tried. finally, any suggestions or helpful comments would be greatly, GREATLY appreciated. here it goes...


"Always in the long corridors of the psyche
doors are opening and doors are slamming shut"

Marge Piercy from "Song of the Fucked Duck"

doors: five narrative fragments

i

reading derrida on a friday evening i found myself hungry and restless.
i was caught up in a psychic paradox between my bodily desire to leave because of a hunger to fill up an emptiness and my longing to stay where i was...because of this same hunger.

i went out...the desire fueled by my physical hunger won...trumped, as it were, the excuses to stay put...to eat the words of the book that i was reading at that moment.

actually, both desires drew a compromise that involved take-out.

ii

waiting, waiting for my food i noticed a woman sitting in a darkened corner.
i know this woman, not by name but by recognition.
she walks.
she walks around town most of the time.
i have only ever seen her walking so it took me a while to place her in the restaurant because she was temporarily rooted,
stationary.
i heard her get up.
i heard her ask the server about time: she wanted to know what time darkness settles in.
i tried to answer the question in my mind...to myself and i didn't even know the answer. the server told her something...i think she said 8 but i'm not sure,
i was still calculating.

what time does it get dark?

iii

my food came up...handed over to me like a precious thing wrapped in styrofoam and plastic.
i paid.
i turned to leave and was faced with the unfamiliar-now-familiar woman standing next to me.
she followed me outside
our movements were cadenced yet displaced
like awkward choreography
she said she knew me.
she has seen me around town with other people.
i was placed, a stationary point on a map.
she wanted to know something so she asked me a question...a question that i could not answer for her...a question that required walking for its response...perhaps even walking in circles.
i stood, anchored upon the sidewalk in my own absence
shrugging my shoulders and smiling into a void
she thanked me for my time and inability to answer.
we whispered antiphonic goodbyes.
i went to my car, with very heavy feet and my plastic bag of food, cell phone, and cigs absurdly hanging off of my body--useless ornaments, swinging.
i stopped and turned as she kept walking the other way,
a vanishing point that expanded the muted territory between us.
i felt like saying something more than what my goodbye could offer her.
i wanted to tell her that i understood.
goodbye is easier though because this other understanding is beyond words...it only recognizes the grammar of movement.

iii

some say that this woman is a poet...a remarkable poet, a tragic poet.
i say that she is a walking poet.
others say that she has a psychiatric condition...i say that that assumption is relative...it depends on who is doing the diagnosing and it's usually a doctor that is sitting down, rooted in a place without movement
in some shadowed corner of some dingy restaurant, and who has no idea...no idea at all.

iv

i read the other day that dreams about houses are pictures of the psyche...i believe in that premise because i believe in basements.
i also believe in basements under basements as well.
imagine that you are dreaming….you are in a house that is webbed in the gauzy reassembled pieces of memory and nostalgia in which you find yourself walking.
vision invites you to drift downstairs through an open door that announces itself as a materialized binary marked by its two knobs.
you accept the invitation…you walk through and down into darkness.
you realize (through intuition and touch) that at some point these stairs stop or cease to exist in another, deeper room.
this room under the house is dark, a little cool and there are no windows.
most who get this far don't linger long enough to see the passageway that leads to still a deeper room, as vast as it is profound.
but some do...i did (or, rather, still do, I know it’s there) the walking poet did so as well
but even if the dreamer does get further than most and follows that corridor down to this other room...still, most don't see the door in this basement's basement.
it beckons anyway.
in a certain kind of silence, you can hear it...like the gentle static sound of snow falling. not only have i seen it, i have had my hand on the doorknob a couple of times, i have even turned it.
but unlike the woman who walks, something tells me, however, that once this door is opened and i cross over its threshold there is no coming back.
because the inside of that door has no knob.
i simply do not posses that courage.

v

so i know the temptation.
i know what her walking means.
i know this woman and she is brave,
to walk between two worlds and yet refuse to distinguish a line between them.
to only be recognized by the vision and grammar of others who have either been at the door or who have themselves trampled through.
or the ones that stare, that refuse to understand what her movement means
by hiding behind their own carefully selected rubrics of denial that thinly disguise their own basements with their own doors quietly singing like static snow
perhaps her walking makes it better.
perhaps it eases the pain of the door with no knob
slamming shut.

--oaw

the persistence of narration

I used to be lunatic
From the gracious days
I used to be woebegone
And so restless nights
My aching heart would bleed
For you to see
Oh but now...(I dont find myself bouncing home whistling Buttonhole tunes to make me cry)
No more I love yous
The language is leaving me
No more I love yous
The language is leaving me in silence
Changes are shifting outside the word

--Annie Lennox




this isn't sophistry, a plea for understanding, or even voice. recently, i have had contact with a past love. actually he was my first love. i have known him since the 8th grade. i have been narrating him for so long and hard in an attempt to write him out of my life that i have inadvertently stitched him into my being. a psychic tattoo that i try to rub off...but my efforts only seem to create and recreate more words, more narration, more dark circles of melancholy sutured to memories of the past that somehow follow me into my future... skipping ahead of me, even. and i follow like some stupidly naive puppy. i know better. i should know better. i can recognize this for what it is but still it does not stop me from continuously, somehow, loving him. my heart is rooted in this soil. my brain is somehow disconnected from the rest of my body....it tells my body one thing but my body doesn't listen. i use the tools available to me. i use anti-depressants, i use sex and other significant relationships, i use kristeva, i use butler, i use derrida, i even use foucault (although he could care less) and on occasion i have even used the/a goddess but still my heart's roots insist upon this anchoring that is terrible and mean.
i do not like this kind of love. i do not wish to narrate it anymore. it is obsessive and cruel. it clothes itself in an unrequited-ness, always incomplete yet circular and mimetic. i have always been caught within this web. it is a disappointing love that you get used to...which in its incompleteness creates a different kind of disappointment....not new, or easy but instead a disappointment of a much deeper kind. this love reflects back to me and also reflects itself within my other relationships. it is jealous and difficult; this love is dark red and it flows still. i do not want this love anymore but there is a resignation that is stained by its flowing. this love is one sided and it has really nothing to do with him and, at the same time everything to do with him. it casts a deep shadow that is mingled with nostalgia and memories that i try to name and make real so that i can exorcise them from myself, to cast them away, to abject them..but yet they still remain unnameable, solid, and insistent. a boomerang that i throw away from myself but returns, always. i see this love in my other relationships. i try to stop it but the same scenario announces itself clothed in the same nuances that i can recognize...that i am alone and waiting, in the dark, for this love to return. this love leaves me tired and broken, it sabotages my other relationships so that i am solitary; this love is not for sharing, it is "thick" and suffocating. how do you rewrite that? this isn't just an object, lost or otherwise, but the nature of the object...it's physics...how do you renarrate that? how do you rewrite a law? when the boomerang completes its circle how do i not occupy the space of its destination? i have never had the chance to start over.

early sunday thoughts on chuck norris....

i cannot claim this bit of genius for myself...it comes from my friend courteney.

Chuck Norris Facts:

When the Boogeyman goes to sleep every night, he checks his closet for Chuck Norris.

Chuck Norris doesn't read books. He stares them down until he gets the information he wants.

There is no theory of evolution. Just a list of creatures Chuck Norris has allowed to live.

Outer space exists because it's afraid to be on the same planet with Chuck Norris.

Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits.

Chuck Norris is currently suing NBC, claiming Law and Order are trademarked names for his left and right legs.

Chuck Norris is the reason why Waldo is hiding.

Chuck Norris counted to infinity - twice.

There is no chin behind Chuck Norris’ beard. There is only another fist.

When Chuck Norris does a pushup, he isn’t lifting himself up, he’s pushing the Earth down.

Chuck Norris is so fast, he can run around the world and punch himself in the back of the head.

Chuck Norris’ hand is the only hand that can beat a Royal Flush. (side note: i don't get this one...)

There is no such thing as global warming. Chuck Norris was cold, so he turned the sun up.

Chuck Norris can lead a horse to water AND make it drink.

Chuck Norris doesn’t wear a watch, HE decides what time it is.

Chuck Norris gave Mona Lisa that smile. (another side note...ewww)

Chuck Norris can slam a revolving door.

Chuck Norris does not get frostbite. Chuck Norris bites frost.

Remember the Soviet Union? They decided to quit after watching a DeltaForce marathon on Satellite TV.

Contrary to popular belief, America is not a democracy, it is a Chucktatorship.