Freedom Two

Dying is much like birthing

There's still blood and excrement

Sometimes

And often I have to squeeze myself

Toward freedom again

I want to be part of a whole

When the man tells us

He just wants to send us to God

We scream and call him things

Things are cut and again

We might be fed through tubes

So often, too,

No one can hear us when we scream.

Freedom

I come from the womb

That fleshy place of warmth and pounding heart

I came from a place of life

Fed through a tube, connected by limbs of string and sinew

Yet wanting, wanting to be alone

Kicking my way free, screaming that silent in liquid scream of drowning

I wanted to be a separate entity

I bulged outward like a tumor

And erupted in a sea of blood and urine

When the doctor cut me free though,

I screamed again, and it echoed

Painfully through the remainder

Of this my solitary life 

Melding

It's always a strange thing, how stories seem to resonate with one another when you read them in succession.  I wonder sometimes if this represents the interrelatedness of everything or if my brain isn't always trying to make such connections.  I like to tie a red string to the first text I ever read and weave it through all experiences until I'm done reading forever.  Does this happen to other people?

Today I am overwhelmed by the man I sat next to on the train in Tokyo.  I think it was on the trip to the trash island to fix something on my visa at the embassy.  The old man who was Japanese and spoke English with a German accent.  He said he was stationed there during the war.  We didn't go into more detail about those particulars.

I think I wrote about it, but I can't find the story.  I would have put it here, I think, but it doesn't show when I search.

He wore a grey bowler hat. He wore an old suit.  His shoes were scuffed.

I read about the cat temple in Asakusa and want to return.  All those lovely cats, fat and smoothed through grooming.  Why weren't they fixed though?

I read about panopticons and think of the path of least surveillance.  How are we to avoid being captured by the all seeing I?

I read about pills and wonder about the aesthetics of the many pills I take each day.  Do they make my insides rainbowed?

Everything feels so connected always.  I'm going to learn that by thanking others, I acknowledge myself.

Smelling of smoke

Smoke is a lovely word.  There's really nothing much that isn't wonderful about it, aesthetically.  It looms and sweeps and swirls.  You inhale and exhale.  Just such pretty language surrounding it, isn't there?

Bonfire party last night.  I didn't realize how many folks in my program smoke.  I honestly don't mind it in the short term, it is only the smell in the hallway that sits from my neighbor smoking that bothers me. Standing next to a smoker, I just want to anti-anxiety myself via the second hand smoke.

Smoke from the bonfire, smoke from cigarettes, smoke from the pot at the next fire over.  All of it is clinging to me today.  My hair smells magnificent-- I feel like a cocktail waitress in the 20's.

I woke up with a sore throat though.  Who can say that it wasn't from the cold?

I've got the feeling I'm wanting to fall in love again.

Instead, I'm going to snuggle with my cats, who didn't recognize me in my Brigitte Bardot hair and make up.

Lots of love.

Think Diary. Diary diary diary.

I keep hearing diarrhea when I repeat "diary" in my brain.  Ok, no poetry.  Or maybe.  Anyway, let's talk about what has gone down since I last posted.  Yeah! (fist in air a la Breakfast Club)

Sitting here in my workout clothes, I really need to go to the gym and shouldn't be procrastinating.  Time is tricky.  So, I am meeting G to see movie at 2:20-ish about 5 mins away.  Leaving the apartment at 2:10 then.  Okay!  I need at least an hour to get ready (shower, dry hair, make ups...) which means I must be home by 1:10.  I lose about half an hour commuting both ways to gym (fifteen minute drive), which means, if I leave here now-ish, I should have about a half hour to work out and ten minutes to stretch.  Let's do the fake math.  12:55 I must leave the gym.  I may leave apartment at 12:00, get at gym by 12:15.  Whoa.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is how my brain works in everyday life.

Going to see Cloud Atlas and critique the crap out of it.  I've read the book, so feel prepared.  Going to look at the race-bending and sexy geisha sex kitten image of Sonmi.  Also, making Tom Hanks play Zachry, who I think is meant to be a teenager...  and making him curse a lot?  I don't remember that in the book... anyway...

Poor G got in a bad bike accident last night, so we moved movie seeing to today.  Yikes!  People with beautiful faces should not be hit by pavement- tsk tsk, concrete surface.

I'll probably post something about the movie, but I have to leave in a few minutes if I want to keep my fancy gym schedule O.o

¡Ciao!

Autobio

It seems like I need to start writing slightly autobiographical or at least realist fiction-y pieces.  Seriously.  Maybe poetry all alone doesn't work for readings very well.  But I can't think what to write about...

The problem is I want to get more involved with readings, like doing So Say We All events or actually submitting to This American Life.  I went to SSWA VAMP event last night to hear my friend H read a poetic prose piece.  It was an amazing event- really high quality readings, and H's poem was super well performed and sexy.

But how can I sustain a piece for long enough to make it a performance? Just reading various poems in an unconnected manner seems very boring.

Anyway, so I am trying to think of something autobio-esque to write about.  But they all seem slow- like talking to a man in Tokyo who learned English during WWII.  Or maybe a ghost story.  I just feel like I don't have anything interesting to talk about....

Anyway, I'm going to try to do daily diary type posts here again because I did a really nice job while in Japan and seem to steal material from there a lot.  Then something will present itself.

Good plan?

Garden

It is the sound.  You can hear the garden-ness on the breeze. Stagnant, they are merely plants.

But no, it touches everything.  The smell of dirt and growth- that lavender or rose that someone  will try to bottle and spray on herself- "can't you tell I am woman? I smell of the womanly garden?" She asks. I place a sprig of rosemary in my car and the air conditioning makes if feel like a very contained garden in motion.

You should want to eat a garden.  Even if it is a flower garden, the growth is most edible.  T hunger to be beautiful by consuming the buds.  The aesthetic minded murderess will poison her lover with oleander. 

I like the butterfly, but I want the ladybugs.  Ladybugs offer luck, butterflies just the frivolous pretty of a debutante.  Ladybugs are useful and red. Marketers say red makes one feel hunger- thematically, ladybugs are more sensible.

There must be a way to walk. I've never thought of this before, but if y are incapable of traveling through a garden without falling over, are you really in the garden?  The rock gardens in Kyoto.  But the monks can enter, and they do- changing the sand designs and rock placement at regular increments. And nature, of course.  Fish can enter the seabed garden at will.  

Can someone possess a marijuana garden? Or does its cropness or illegality ruin it as a garden? But who could say the plant isn't lovely?  More, consider the greenhouse of an abandoned home.  The plants slowly go to seed, they rot an awful stench but a stench of an effort for survival.  Shouldn't that be enough?  Ants creep in, and then the spiders enter looking for warmth. A beehive is built in the corner.  When they die, it happens at once.  The realtor has the whole structure torn down at once- "we can make a lovely outdoor party space here." 

Soft plants are particularly pleasant. Running fingers down the bud or leaf that feels like animal coat. What came first, the cat or the cat tail?  We see our nature in the desire to pull leaves and flowers- I want to rip the whit flower sprig from the sky and capture it in a vase.  I have no idea where the desire to pull leaves comes form, but its there.  Perhaps a strange nostalgia for the petal picking of a girlish romance.  

We wanted in the rock garden.  We leaned over the edge when the monks were away, but th had stretched the barrier enough to omit us.

I am not a visual person.  I'm not sure why.  I stand in front of paintings and think of them and look and look and read the description and watch other people look and listen to audio tours and look and look and look.  But I can rarely feel anything from this looking.  Gardens are far more than looking.  

In the art museum, I will get in trouble for touching or smelling the piece.  In the garden, such practice is encouraged.

center of the universe

The Center of the Universe

Amanda Martin Sandino

Write a piece assembled from class/presentation notes.

i.

minor key and Debussy-esque

a lesser movement of the Arabesque

where it crescendos into slight cacophony

(but just a piano in the darkness)

the metallic ball. holes many protruding

bifurcated, it feels a great violence

has befallen this projector of the stars

perhaps great violence is what

we must come to

in order to project the sky

ii.

i could live here

reclined

with quiet company

and a moony voice

above.

it occurs to me

i’ve never slept beneath

a naked sky.

i’ll sleep now and dream

i am living

iii.

roofs are meant to be global

skies dark, music playing

time is only one dimension

but space is many

iv.

Nix, the Goddess of the Sunset

We can Simulate a Sunset

All the Known Universe

v.

globular steampunk tortured device

spinning powered by a tesla coil

cgi lightninging in the lobby

vi.

a view of Alexandria via camera obscura

Ptolemy sits with an ancient pre-telescope

In the background, our serapeum burns

vii.

galileo’s sideways study

the scientist was young, thin

voyeuristically

visual consumption

of the hubble telescope

motion sickness

viii.

there is hope here

planets die all the time

earths are dying

all the time

we are not alone

in our ruin,

only alone,

in our cause

ix.

are you afraid of dark matters?

“dark energy” feels maudlin

poets rarely have the opportunity

to name scientific discoveries

x.

we will one day

live on an earth

made Martian

cold world

ocean spaces

signs of was-life

for droids to visit

but none to mourn.

Why are we here?

The energy draws upon us and draws us at its will.  This is my will, but also your will.  You understand, these mean the same thing.

It feels simple to distinguish between the two, and my hereness to your thereness.  But this is an illusion of the misunderstanding that is horizontal time.

I want you to be happy so that I am happy.

But we are the physical manifestation of a goddess with DID.  We are like Tara's one self killing her other selves but without the normal center.  The center is hallow.  There is no spirit.

I want to believe that your success is my success.  That you are my child because you have been my child in some time that is now, but my brain, our brain, can only sometimes understand it.  Maybe it is enough that the sea grass gets it, and thus it sways.  But this is using poetry to escape reality.

We want to be in the shared consciousness of sleep.  We can feel the draw and wish it were more productive in the waking and thus dominating world.  We are not the dream man- Friday is not the fuck wagon.

I want to be happy.  I know that love is somewhere in these endeavors.  I feast upon that energy and try not to feel the hollowness that is our center.  Let it fill with chi.  Let the me wash away.