dream I was being sent to hell. when I asked how to get to purgatory, someone said “pray.”

After work, I head out. Almost immediately. I pack thebowl. Smoke. Repack the bowl. Make a cup of tea. Head out. I get my papers done, generally. I get my paperwork in. I have a mounting to do list that keeps me functioning. Today it says:

–read syllabi
–look for lightbulbs in storage closet.
–sign up outreach.
–read texts for class
–begin sw series

I love being packed to the brim with ideas to keep me occupied. I devolve into an automatic writing session as I am distracted before my walk. I do this sometimes. Close my eyes pick up a pen, ask God to talk through me and I write it. Sometimes with my left hand. TOday it says:

God moves through me like water. I am everything. I feel everything. I am an angel. There is no time.

I am wrapped in a blue cool light and my purple peacoat. I am on the street by 6:45 pm and moving away from the bridge. I am not prepared to cross the bridge today. I take the University side again. I am at Market and 32nd with a blink of an eye when someone asks me how to get to the train station. I have no earthly idea what’s going on and can say this firmly, as I keep walking. I sometimes pretend I don’t speak English in these situations. Shake my head and throw my hands up. I have no earthly idea what’s going on, I say and keep walking towards the train station.

It’s not that I don’t want to help, it’s that I have no idea where I am. Better to pray they find a more unshakeable scout than me. Someone who may just lead them there, arm in arm, on their nightly walk around the town. I am at the train station and laughing uproariously in five minutes. I am pushing along, suddenly looking up at a sign that reads 22 and Walnut. I am wrapped in a blue cool light, breath condensing on a window near Chestnut St. saying out loud, there is no time.

1/9/2017

May 12, 2020 0

(this is for house of leaves circa 2013)

there’s this girl I killed.

she’s dancing for me
in black:
black blindfold,
black panties,
black fingernails
scratching at my larynx
pulling questions from my lips.
she wears a morose and
cloying smile.

the hallway is closing in on her:
it is inches from her bare breasts
speckled with black marks, charred
from spare matches when she conflated
masochism with trust
long before I ever came along.

when uncloaked, I breathe in
her sterility a virescent mass
growing from her chest;
toxic moss that threatens the whole garden
everytime she hoped
her wounds would be given a sadist
to hold them.
her eyes fall on mine like heavy snow
in spring: it blinds,
it’s unexpected and
unfortunate,
damages everything
nascent in the ground
and causes wrecks,
she says to me.

it’s like the way the moon drives men
to madness when she finally
disrobes, as she goes and sings

and stings with her guardian tail,
her ferocious sadness,
her ubiquitous laughter
never seen, heard everywhere.
she should have grown tulips
shaped like daughters,
but instead slashes at them
like a God on fire
begging to be humanized,
touched with bare hands,
begging to be boxed
one last time.
it causes wrecks

each time she smiles,
she is gnashing teeth.
she is twirling.
she is pouring it out in blizzards.
when she cries,
she is screaming.
when she wakes up
it causes wrecks.

there’s this girl I killed.

the blossoms are frozen.
everyone is celebrating a
resurrection of water
and she’s thirsty,
she’s sunk,
evaporated and coming back to haunt;
raining like God,
Sisyphus.
a storm of a kind that
wears the equator;
how she bore the world
on her spine.

there’s a crack in the world
tonight and
it causes wrecks
she tells me,
you have opened it.

“the corridor”

May 11, 2020 0

(transition)

what’s it like looking east to west
and men for miles?

but nice smile.

small.
unmonitored fidgeting.
nervous laughter.
seems to force her way through small
talk and presents as
calm but quite fanatical
about some previous existential
crisis that she says
was“indelible.”

she doesn’t show me her skin
or much of her teeth when I
am watching. she’s
currently being touched and
it seems,
does not like to be touched without
motive.
she is currently being undressed.

she is currently turning from ice
to flood,
to steady stream of
cold, red blood
and asked me to sing this
last part out loud.

“how guys save me in their phone”

May 9, 2020 0

in Boulder,
it was the same reason.
it was called “Unity.”
I was invited by a girlfriend.
we talked a lot about
life and mysticism,
the way currents showed up
for us. I wish I had
documented more of the tension
of the room. like the gratitude meeting,
I stayed with meetings that forced
everyone to share.

they went in a circle.

I sat in a room
among them, mostly
men, always mostly men:
some young,
some old and reluctantly,
shared when it was my turn,
becoming chair,
inviting others.

once I remember saying
I can be really manipulative
and a guy that I had reached
out to about something,
never responding,
made eyes at his sponsor.

at the risk of being
labeled shrewd,
I still liked being seen.

“unity”

May 5, 2020 0

I used to
leave class
in high school,
go to the bathroom stall
and masturbate whenever
I let dirty thoughts
build too long.
usually it wasn’t
the subject of the class
but the way a boy
brushed my sleeve
on the way to pick up
the beakers.

I used to ask men
to reach under blankets
at house parties
and touch me.
my shorts not so
tight they couldn’t
be pushed to one side.
I used to pay their
way in when there
was a cover,
crawl up
their stomachs,
my mouth smelling
of Bud Light and
cigarettes and smiling
bright asking them
if they were still seeing
Mariel and if they wanted
to reach under the
blankets.

I always had a spare
five dollars on hand,
at least three cigarettes
and a way to materialize
fire, a way to morph
into lap cat
for whomever I
craved. my name
is a whispered name.
a baleful sweep
of syllable in halls.

“the rooms”

May 5, 2020 0

after each meeting,
I stood awkwardly and
made small talk.
I would give almost any
woman my number and barely
kept up with what I had told
anyone but I

made efforts.
one day I got a fortune cookie
that said
“focus in on the color yellow
tomorrow for good luck.”
this meeting held
a lot of talk of God,
as it had a few catholics
and devoted disciples like
I, interested in the supernatural
themes of faith and
manifestation.
we spent many days
focusing on the third step
regardless of topic
and the passivity of that step,
being actually a willing action,
yet a passive stasis to uphold
is what kept me under spell.

“Made a decision to turn our will and our lives
over to the care of God
as we understood him”

the carpet was blue
with yellow circles everywhere
and that’s probably why
I made it my home group
shortly after I got the fortune cookie.
after much reluctance to join
any of them, ironically,
I picked the only group
that was mixed but
mostly men.
just me and one or two others.
and these men were
not young, but old.
I slowly invited more women
and they showed.

what they always ask me
is what my motive is.
I cannot simply say
that I looked at the carpet
and saw it was yellow
as someone spoke about the
divination of action into form.
I did not intend
to build the group,
amass it,
celebrate it,
throw an anniversary picnic,
show up weekly and
listen, share, open
vulnerabilities but listen.
To wives and the ways advantageous
players play,
then let my serpent spine
sizzle in its case,
one day call them all sexist,
balk at the coming year’s celebration,
do nothing but exit
and get all of the women
to leave.

“God”

May 1, 2020 0

sometimes when I think back
to my fuck ups or falling down,
I come here and I see all these
women and I think,
whose answered prayer am I?
she said
and that struck me.
when women speak
I put my head down deferentially
but also out of my own
need to curl up
inside myself.
It’s winter, 2015,
just past the new year,
I’m broken hearted
and knee deep in
some fucking secrets
but whose answered prayer
am I? who called
the wounded shepard
here? It’s 2015 and I had
just been gifted three thousand
dollars from my grandmother
that my parents called and asked
for back.

I gave them two thousand and
used the rest to move out of
the townhouse
into a one bedroom
in the heart of Kensington.
embraced by the “Auspicious
Coin Laundry” service next door.
no one would ever miss my house.
I didn’t have anything left o
over but I never did.
it’s worth mentioning that when I was
eighteen and just home for
the summer from college,
my mother told me they had
cleaned out my savings account.

“family”

May 1, 2020 0

I go to meet you
with my hand
smudged with ink,
a bad habit of mine.

this is 2014 and
I had things to remember:
about seven or eight phone calls to
make, the weaving of
committees plus incidents to report,
plus how much I stepped or made
or consumed and the beep of friends
in need
like the outer rim of a leech,
stuck to hip and
wasting me.
when I saw the melting
phrase, a faded scrawled “pw”
near my thumb
which meant paperwork.

I had to submit five more
things tomorrow but I was here to
get my scarf back actually.
focus on just reporting
earnestly my feelings.
I walk boldly
up the walk and
then upon seeing
you, tall,
I just scatter
every thought into the air.

grab the scarf
and go.
we are at
love is patient.
I am in my car and
gone.

May 1, 2020 0

my hand is smudged
with ink;
marker actually,
I lick my finger tip
and check again,
try to rub it, realize I had
written it in Sharpie
before I stick the tab under my tongue.
this is
a bad habit of
mine:

writing to do lists on
my hand
with whatever pen I was holding
so I wouldn’t forget.
I saw the melting
phrase, a faded scrawled “pw”
near my thumb
which meant paperwork.
it was already Saturday.
this is 2018 to keep up.

there is one heart on my left hand
to count the hours between when I took the
dose to now.
everything is obscured by
the fractions
of stories, I am looking for
something that can
only be found by my favorite
scope of talent:
my eidetic memory,
my propensity to travel
from one section of
the ground to another,
my ability to walk backwards.

the first hour is the hardest.
my stomach sort of lurches
realizing the first wave has already hit
this is acid so it’s harder.
I take half a tab so
my doors won’t melt
but still
I need to get out of a place that is wall to
wall carpet and packed with scribble,
pillows, cat hair, journals,
the air of segregation as
I chain myself to my five mirrors
not to be heard from for a whole year.
I grab eight stones and empty
everything else out of my bookbag.
I bring one water bottle.
I begin to walk with no
sound, letting minutes
weave themselves around my body as
I patiently walk down the
three flights trying not
to be appalled by how crooked
the building was
or my sore knees or
the temperature of my men;
a reaching tepid.
I ignored the chipping bathtub
just to make it out the door.
I am remembering when I had bed bugs.
there are things I will miss
I think as my skin leaps.

other things I’m naming:
ways to feel unsettled in transition.
states, or
how to move between things and
home also; the way the birds landed
on the trees outside my stained-
glass window,
the way the pink light cut through
the room and all the green on my block
in summer which meant
blackbirds, blue jays, cardinals,
plus skateboarders.
my short dresses catching
on the points of fences.
I am opening the door to warmth
and it shreds me.

I spend forty five minutes
sauntering in presence,
pinching the skin of my purlicue.
tedium, ennui
or indifference.
how much space
reverie takes in my brain vs.
results.
What do I want?
a soft nothing
like my jaw opening on
a pillow, feeling the satin
on my thighs and just
gawking at the glitter on my ceiling,
another thing I will miss.

my leisure:
the growth between getting
and having.
people never change.
I am stuck
somewhere on a trail
walking and wanting not endless
provision, but the
allegory made more
palatable.
by the time
I walk into the graveyard
hoping to see deer,
I am mired deep in belief
that it is a dead sister
I am seeking,
ignoring my real
brother’s name.

I take the Sharpie
out to mark the second hour
at the gate.

“the first wave (grief)”

May 1, 2020 0

I send you a thank you card
in the mail just to remind
you I exist.

you could tell
I was very longing.
you had told me that was merely
absence doing that to me,
we were sustained.
I agreed but
I was cutting all my hair
off and I needed
diversion from
picking the skin off
my lips: something
tactile.
I began to
recite all the things
I was grateful for daily.

*watermelon
*mangoes
*apples
*Alize

it always starts the same way.
something I can eat,
my cat and then I see where my head
is at:

*the tiny aberrations that make up
my brain.

“the tiny aberrations ”

May 1, 2020 0