The first time you open your eyes.
The first touch, the first flicker of electricity, the pause and the temptation.
Exploring, rushing, guessing; finding with your hands the goosebumps, the plains, the plumes. A first kiss, a first time, a first: fresh, fleeting, tightening and releasing.

I realized it just one day, casually--
pushing the hair out of my face, looking down to the ground, surrounded by people with whom my voice is too quiet and I am just not good enough--

I produce smiles for you and I fuck for you.

The the newness is there beneath the skin, the layer on top of everything, the mountain of emotion, and pressure and tension and fear--I am scared, too.

I think about the first time for someone else, not for me. The first time and the earthquake that follows. The ocean that spills from their eyes. The ocean that creeps up around us. Our epidermis against the meniscus.

We are two sea monsters and we're waiting for the moon.

space

a field

an expanse 

tumbling, somersaulting, landsliding 

into 

this moment 

a glass alabastron 

floating just above the grass

and inside just antlers 

antlers

sea rise/set
yours for the taking.

"i've been a mess for some time.
now i get what i deserve."
-jenny lewis

you sing to me from the landscape

you smell to me from your sweater

windless. 

mothless. 

inside glass. 

lying in a half-dream. 

to blame for your half-dream.

concealed

(as the yolk).

 isolated from all but vibrations. 

feeling only breath and cotton. 

you can be

the third

color

begin today.

touch touch touch touch touch touch

The glowing ballerina. 

She is holding a light (such as a lantern). 

She dances towards the young girl.  

This is the semen finding the egg.

It's all about the pauses. 

Quiet. Whispering skin, skin as it slides against skin.

As we press blushing flesh into hot dermis.

We slant and lean / side to side. 

Is this dancing? Is this sex?

Your hand at the nexus. At my shoulder. 

Pinked faces. We look down. 

Not ocean, nor kelp, nor jacaranda. 

Your empty bed and a glass of water. 

don't wait for it

just write it down. paint it. peel it. 

squeeze something.

 fuck somebody.

create. 

withdraw. 

inclose. 

encompass. 

draw your dream. 

paint your ideal. 

philosophize the shit out of everything. 

say fuck way too often. 

eat something tasty. 

try your best to make something tasty,

 and when it comes out all wrong, 

laugh about it with your best friend.

build your favorite something. 

in your favorite world. 

that you can create with construction paper. 

with photographs. 

i am guilty of procrastinating the things that will make me happy, too. 

we all deserve better. 

Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.   For I have known them all already, known them all; Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,                     I have measured out my life with coffee spoons; I know the voices dying with a dying fall Beneath the music from a farther room.   So how should I presume?   And I have known the eyes already, known them all— The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, Then how should I begin To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?                      And how should I presume?   And I have known the arms already, known them all— Arms that are braceleted and white and bare (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!) Is it perfume from a dress That makes me so digress? Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.   And should I then presume?   And how should I begin? Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets             And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? I should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

-The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot (lines 45-74) & "I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all is born again. (I think I made you up inside my head.) The stars go waltzing out in blue and red, And arbitrary blackness gallops in: I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed. And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane. (I think I made you up inside my head.) God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade: Exit seraphim and Satan's men: I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. I fancied you'd return the way you said, But I grow old and I forget your name. (I think I made you up inside my head.) I should have loved a thunderbird instead; At least when spring comes they roar back again. I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. (I think I made you up inside my head.)" -Mad Girl's Love Song by Sylvia Plath

the sky was gold at sunset. 

the horizon looked like it was breaking away from the lake. 

we saw a star glinting even in the afterglow. 

maybe it was vega. 

at night

in the darkness

with lightning bugs flying around us.

we eased up off the wet grass.

a deer had wandered into the clearing,

and suddenly scampered away. 

we were a universe apart and yet so close.

always. 

11/4/2011 (already)

I finally know it is a real place. Attainable, achievable, touchable. 

We're adrift. 

today:

candles with blue wax, oranges, italian cookies. 

walking when it's just slightly raining. 

kissing, sometimes. 

feeling a presence, feeling present, feeling your presence. 

thinking about her glass legs.

writing something fiction, reading something fiction, painting for three hours straight. 

constructing a mask, wearing a mask, painting the pieces (the layers of a mask). 

walking around at night. writing to you. getting letters. finally feeling calm.

under a barrage of rain. 

waking up early and knowing.

hearing good poetry. 

being thankful, being quiet, being silly. 

mirth. 

elderberries, daddy's peach jam. 

the moon. 

Yesterday, I went to Syracuse for the evening. Autumn is clinging to the atmosphere, hanging over the roadways, pulling in Northern winds but no snow. Soon winter will descend like a punctuation. And for four months we'll be between parenthesis. We should all be playing in the leaves.

It's easy to move away and forget a place that disappoints us. We're all given the responsibility to do something and be something and make the place we live in the most creative and exciting place possible. We can't just all wait around, sitting on our computers, isolated, hoping someone else will do it for us.

Come up with an idea. Go out and do it yourself. Just make it happen. Don't be afraid, don't be nervous, don't wait for someone else. Do it. We're all directly responsible for our boredom, our disappointment, the lackluster quality of the world around us. Turn off your computer, your television, your video game system, your music machines, and play. Just play. Rediscover. Re-explore. Put on new lenses, new space goggles, new binoculars, new glasses, new blindfolds. Touch the world around you. Watch the world around you. Smell something new, breathe something new. Please. Go spelunking around your imagination and then tell everyone what you find. Everyone has this place.

You can find your way back home.

I say it once more (with new energy and confidence):

Don't put off being creative. 

to what it is, while awake

Outside it is quiet. Outside it is 5am. Encroaching winter cold calms the foliage until it is eerily still, nothing stirs; the birds aren’t even awake. Everything seems absent, abandoned, alone. My only company, year after year, from walks here and there, in my imagination and in real life, before the sun rises, always, Venus. 

She looks down, a whisper of of luminescence, a silver bauble. She winks and promises to return. Next morning, she’s there waiting again, pulling the stars and other planets across the sky; an epic, million-year-old symphony—comforting in its promise to continue, in its desire to move despite your existence. You may acknowledge it—and somehow it feels like it’s acknowledging you. 

A place you can never, will never go; a place composed of poetic stanzas and perfectly knotted paragraphs, with promises of moments that will never happen to you, to me, to us. We are always kind of alone. Our innermost hiding place is usually hibernating. It is usually cold, isolated, afraid, distant. The tundra amidst vibrancy, radiance, energy. Venus ignites this and that reminds me THAT in my pretend place where I am mostly alone, I have lived a thousand lives with a thousand pretend and real people, been on trains and trips, in different countries, planets, said different words, married different men, made movies and pornography, written novels, never grew up. 

It is more beautiful to pretend that you will do these things than try and fail. Hemingway knew it. 

 Autumn is a season of ghosts. Ghosts of nostalgia. They march in with lanterns, burning incense, transmogrified, wearing layers of decaying leaves and lace-capes made of snow and they hint to smells and promises never kept and years past that we can never reclaim. Inevitably, they grow weaker every year, unable to carry the burden of our past lives, our past autumns. The memories to be rekindled become less and less as we become more disenchanted with hope, the past and rebirth. 

The entire sequence of everything: from our collective globular, fiery beginnings, to every storm, bug, gust, hut, home, mountain, moment, kiss, tingle, tickle, sex position, person, planet, putsch, promise, rape, rapture, song, war, birth, breath, comet, quake, book, poem, death or autumn that led to our existence, here now. Every thing that had to happen so that when while walking at 5am, I was hit with a particular raindrop, that I smelled a particular shade of wet earth, that I saw and cared about that particular glowing body. That I am in my particular body. That I am here and I love your particular body. I do love your particular body.

What is love and what does it feel like? The commitments and promises we make are so intangible, so forgettable, so weak. These are all mysteries to me, overwhelming, dependable, beautiful, mysteries. They are mysteries that are worth going to sleep and waking up for, so we can dream and pretend, so that we can maybe play and smile and do something worthwhile for ourselves and someone else. Always for someone else. It is true love if it keeps you walking but maybe not feeling and then sometimes feeling (too too much). And you write something. And you feel even more than love. You are in love. With the view of the hillside farms and forests. With the animals that you care for. With the animals you’ll never meet. With the people you pretended to love. With moments that are now memories and the moments that will soon be memories. With the beginning and the end. With infinity and its promise to always be there even when you’re not.

now you can go to sleep. 

the moon

Perhaps you stared into a river.
There was somebody near you who loved you.
They were about to touch you. 
You could feel this before it happened.
Then it happened. 
That is my name.
Richard Brautigan, In Watermelon Sugar

if it gives you hope

I miss baking. It is soothing and delicious. While at school, I don't get the chance to bake and that's about the only time I know enough people to make confecting something decadent worthwhile.

(Unrelated, but I am perhaps too excited for Pad Thai, which I will consume with ferocity on Thursday.) 

Today while walking outside some wind made all the yellow leaves fly off a group of trees. I never want to live someplace without seasons. I am thankful that I get to be surrounded by Autumn right now, because it makes everything seem easier and nicer.  I am thankful for the leaves changing. The view from my window is like looking into a different universe. 

thumbprint

I said, wait-- then

dawn collapsed leaving only the moon

jellyfish rising like hot air balloons 

I see see-through dress

membrane, presence, shedding a layer 

before becoming an incandescent insect

stumbling towards a barren land of light

children walk up and down the street

waiting for you-- me, here

candy, glass, candy, your shadow

among misty birches

hiding, but pretending that you're not hiding 

looking at the light in the kitchen, watching what you're not supposed to see

your old lover, the person ignoring your calls 

grey and haunted 

if you call me I will turn around

if you want me to wait I will wait

if you give me that night

if you give me that whisper

wrapped in plastic

I'll take off the mask and eat them

wound up in the choking of a crowd

breathing in their breathing and

not able to look to either side

I look into the grey matter at the bottom of my cup

I look into the baobab seed

I look into the parentheses

I press my hands into my ears 

to block out the sound

if I can’t hear it I didn’t hear it I never heard it I won’t hear the lie

it was quiet--

inaudible—your lips moving but a throat without vibration

closing my eyes, cringing, in bed, collapsing myself into myself

I remember Celine—a figment in porch light

a crease on the bedspread

not my lover in the headlights, rain pelting us like grains of sugar

with hands shaking, I can barely keep the pencil

erect 

I am grateful for showers. I am thankful for running hot water, a tide of warmth and a rushing of comfort, a place I can hide and close my eyes and be naked.

I am thankful I have skin to feel the water.

Ska music. Ska for always, unconditionally, making me feel happy. 

Really cute animals, such as bunnies.

Dinosaurs. Dinosaurs for being cool to read about and watch movies starring them.

My ficus bonsai tree because having to take care of it reminds me I have to take care of myself.

I am thankful I have the ability to throw myself totally and completely into projects and people; to donate myself wholly, solely to a play, a painting, a person, and know it’s the right thing.

Snow. Boats. Water.

Yoga at the end of the day.

Hockey games.

Going camping, smelling like a campfire, the woods, pine, coffee.

The universe. The universe crashing. The Milky Way pulsing. The cobalt Cayuga Lake.

I am grateful for the garbage pottery bin in the art studio, from which I’ve snagged many pieces of pottery that are worth a second chance. Everyone deserves a second chance, maybe sixty chances.

I’m grateful I am patient.

And for the ivy growing over my window throwing green onto my walls.

Bugs.  Even if they are house centipedes trying to crawl into my bed.

Colors. Autumn. Tennis.

Mint tea.

Animals, dreams, poetry, hushed promises, wet grass, sneakiness, raspberries.

                                                                        wake up.

in my life, i want

a solar eclipse

i want to help people
i want to help animals
i want to make people and animals get along as much as possible
to climb trees
to kiss and be kissed, to befriend, to be gentle and kind and forgiving, to be more patient and caring, vigorous, passionate without fear, grateful without question
i want a house, to go back in time, to have grass, to have a cow, to have many cows and if at all possible a farm, to wake up on the farm, to paint and watch the sunrise
i want to have a child and to surround myself with people who i care about
to praise nature
to learn, re learn, r elearn, rel earn, to never stop learning
go to an opera
play piano
paint things that are beautiful
and to appreciate things that are beautiful, even sadness


i like:

My friend Johanna's pottery. She creates ceramic bowls that look like they were formed in the ocean. They look like aliens live inside of them. They contain creatures and nebulae and lichen and feathers and chocolate, all in their glazing. I have a surplus for all my dying mint plants.

Mint plants. Because when you take real mint and you make a tea and add lots of sugar and some lemon, that is the best thing for your stomach.

The film Tree of Life.

Children. Because nothing has given me more purpose or comfort or happiness than working with children. With children, I am allowed, encouraged, expected to be silly, excited, curious, awkward, innocent and funny. I love hanging out with kids and listening to them tell me stories and I like making up stories with them.

Bees, of course. Bees have been on the planet since the Tertiary period. The same period where mammals overcame the giant reptiles.

The poem, I Sing the Body Electric.

The books To The Lighthouse, Sula, Wuthering Heights, My Antonia, Lolita, Venus in Furs, Tess of the d'Urbervilles and the works of Carl Jung.

Playing pretend. Pretending I am someone else. Pretending that everything is different. Imagining myself on one path while I walk on another. Pretending that colors are different, people are different, places are different. Imagining, creating, strengthening the place in my mind that only I can go, the only place I can touch, the safest place.

Being in love, but I say this with caution.

Farms, farming, cows, sheep, ducks. Fields. Grass. Quiet. Quiet, gracefulness, simplicity.

Moments. Moments strung together. We are swept from one moment to the next, relishing in the intensity, the succulent, bursting, pleasure of color, texture, sound, rhapsody. And as we connect from one moment to another, we're building webs of memory like a spider. Every seconding we're shifting between moment (memory) moment (memory). Here is where God is.

sequence

fossil hunting.

walking through fields, walking through libraries, walking in forests. dampness. becoming a bug. crawling inside flowers. pressing our faces together. pressing.

painting, drawing, building, breaking, tearing, mashing, creating, mixing, feeling beautiful, feeling like you're floating, feeling like your hands have separated from your body, feeling like you have separated from your body

remembering that you're part of the universe, that the universe is part of you, that you are part of a whole, that you're responsible for how you treat others and how others treat you.

holding children, playing with children, watching children play, being with children, being loved by children and loving children, hold their hands, holding hands. clasping. folding. giving. excitement, enjoyment, the luxury of enjoyment. deceived into enjoying, tricked into believing, forfeiting. weakness.

writing. even if you go back and are sad about what you wrote and it's sad to remember that we have forgotten or what we never had or what we lost. but that is the most beautiful feeling. we should embrace those feelings and try, with everything, to know that we are feeling those things and understanding them. trying to understand memories, to understand the shape of memory, to touch and hold and keep the feelings that we can't always have forever. elastic, unforgiving, relentless.

cacophony.

rain.

aurora, crepuscolo, accepting defeat, accepting failure, accepting anguish, inviting change, inviting wires, divulging, whimpering. glass trees. glass sound. glass winter. glass touches. glass emotions. glass whispering. cerbiatto.

remembering things that never happened. imagining places that never happened. walking when it's raining, when it's october, when it's cold, pretending that you're someplace else. hearing music when there is no music. touching music when there is no music.

bee

lacrimosa