What Kind of Times Are These
adrienne rich

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled
this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it's necessary
to talk about trees.

We
had a face-off in the light.
Dust
floated around us, tenderly.

-Ernst Meister

allow me to share wisdom from Nicki Minaj and Drake.



"to live doesn't mean you're alive...
i'm really tryin' to make it more than it is
'cause everybody dies but not everybody lives"


this is my moment, i waited all my life
i can tell it's time
driftin' away, i'm one with the sunset
i have become alive.

I always wonder why
birds stay in the same place
when they can fly anywhere on the earth.
Then I ask myself
the same question.

- Harun Yahya

amazon is going to start charging tax. so i bought 10 books today. i won't tell you what else i bought, because then you'll know how much i am in debt now.

i am reposting this from Addie's blog:



You know I have friends who used to laugh at me when I said we have to create a relationship. They thought relationship is a miracle, it just happens, it comes, we find it, and there it is. But it’s not true. I never found that to be true. One friend was amazed at things that happened in a relationship over the years. And I said: “Yes, we created that. This friendship was created with talking, with struggle, with crises.” So wait until you feel right within yourself, and then you’ll feel right towards others.— Anais Nin

oh, hello sunday. 

As Charles Baudelaire would tell you- get drunk. 

"One should always be drunk. That’s the great thing; the only question. Not to feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and bowing you to the earth, you should be drunk without respite.

Drunk with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please. But get drunk.

And if sometimes you should happen to awake, on the stairs of a palace, on the green grass of a ditch, in the dreary solitude of your own room, and find that your drunkenness is ebbing or has vanished, ask the wind and the wave, ask star, bird, or clock, ask everything that flies, everything that moans, everything that flows, everything that sings, everything that speaks, ask them the time; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird and the clock will all reply: “It is Time to get drunk! If you are not to be the martyred slaves of Time, be perpetually drunk! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please.”

this was the birthday of flowers
of orchids, of roses, of calla and stargazer lilies.

of carlos vives, marc anthony, david guetta, and don omar

of letters, of hope, of long distance, of short distances, of faith.

i was thinking about our trip to Peru and how we met Mark and Sheri while heading towards Machu Picchu. it's amazing how close you get to strangers when you share every minute of a grueling, beautiful journey. you wake up before sunrise together, you groggily and grouchily eat breakfast together, you shiver your ass off together, you chew coca leaves together, you laugh together, you commiserate together about not showering for five days, you get sick together, you get better together, you distract each other while others are going to the bathroom up ahead on the trail, you get lost together, you watch the big soccer games together on a jerryrigged TV in the middle of the mountains, you commiserate about crazy traveling companions together, you ride buses together, you sit down together, you get back up together, you walk through freezing water together (the Canadians took it better than the Texans), you dance together after your legs are so tired that you have to keep moving them or else you might never stand up again.

and when you reach your destination and you awkwardly stand around realizing you may never see each other again, it feels like you've grown these limbs that you have to say goodbye to. and you aren't really so used to them that it warrants too much sentiment at first, but that "together"' journey really changes everything.

(i highlighted something in this)



In the Beginning


by Anne Pierson Wiese

There was the famous photographer, Walker Evans,
who started by photographing old signs and ended
by filling his bathtub with them and washing
himself in the kitchen sink.  There was the Harlem
man whose pet tiger cub grew so big that first
his family and finally he himself fled
the 12th-floor, three-bedroom apartment in the housing
project, returning every day to fling raw chickens
through a crack in the front door.  Love displaces


everything.  All over the city the signs peer
from beneath modern facades, fade in the sun and rain
high up on sides of buildings: BEST QUALITY TWINE.  Ghosts
on brick, cockeyed atop demolition dumpsters, tin
worn delicate as paper, pale lettered—mint,
red, black: ELEVATOR APARTMENTS AVAILABLE:
INQUIRE ON PREMISES.  If you stare at them words
are faces; everyone who ever spelled them out,
ever debated whether to buy twine or rent
an apartment fades up into view wearing shadowy
Homburgs, black veils, parcels in their arms, the winter
air freshening for snow.  Or imagine the face
of a tiger waiting behind a thin metal door,
your furniture demolished, your family living
on friends' floors, your neighbors smelling urine and fur
and losing their tolerance, a policeman
rappelling outside your windows with a dart gun.

Imagine a hunger for the invisible world
so deep it must have existed before you were born.

All love letters are ridiculous


All love letters are
Ridiculous.
They wouldn't be love letters if they weren't
Ridiculous.

In my time I also wrote love letters,
Like the others,
Ridiculous.

Love letters, if there is love,
Must be
Ridiculous.

But in the end,
Only those who have never written
Love Letters
Are
Ridiculous.

If I could go back
To when I wrote love letters
Without thinking how
Ridiculous.

The truth is that today
My memories
Of those love letters
Are what is
Ridiculous.

(All extravagant words,
Like all extravagant feelings,
Are naturally
Ridiculous.)

-Fernando Pessoa

in the decision of a beginning [3]

 by Rusty Morrison


No sensation of falling, which suggests that this condition may be flight.

My eyes might be open or not. My coffee poured into a cup or

onto the countertop. This, a ball of saved rubberbands or the thick clot of tremors

I usually keep deep in the drawer that I can trust will stick

when I absent-mindedly forget, and try to open it.

What would it mean for a body to yield?

A use.

That is to say, dew moistens the grass and is gone.

The body moves from out of its past with each glimpse of its own

disappearance, cumulatively. With each drop of rain the earth’s atmosphere pelts

its grove of tall cedars and saplings

with equal force. A body

negating itself as an object possessable. To hold one’s breath would be to drown

in order to avoid drowning.

Duino Elegies, Rainer Maria Rilke

   Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.
   And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note
of my dark sobbing. Ah, whom can we ever turn to
in our need? Not angels, not humans,
and already the knowing animals are aware
that we are not really at home in
our interpreted world. Perhaps there remains for us
some tree on a hillside, which every day we can take
into our vision; there remains for us yesterday's street
and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease
when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left.
   Oh and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space
gnaws at our faces. Whom would it not remain for--that longed-after,
mildly disillusioning presence, which the solitary heart
so painfully meets. Is it any less difficult for lovers?
But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate.
   Don't you know yet? Fling the emptiness out of your arms
into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the birds
will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.

-from The First Elegy, translated by Stephen Mitchell

i saw this on s.'s profile:

"hot as heaven."

this is how i feel about texas.

"You Are Gorgeous And I'm Coming"

Vaguely I hear the purple roar of the torn-down Third Avenue El
It sways slightly but firmly like a hand or a golden-downed thigh
normally I don’t think of sounds as colored unless I’m feeling corrupt
concrete Rimbaud obscurity of emotion which is simple and very definite
even lasting, yes it may be that dark and purifying wave, the death of boredom
nearing the heights themselves may destroy you in the pure air
to be further complicated, confused, empty but refilling, exposed to light

With the past falling away as an acceleration of nerves thundering and shaking
aims its aggregating force like the Metro towards a realm of encircled travel
rending the sound of adventure and becoming ultimately local and intimate
repeating the phrases of an old romance which is constantly renewed by the
endless originality of human loss the air the stumbling quiet of breathing
newly the heavens’ stars all out we are all for the captured time of our being

-Frank O'Hara

in the past few weeks,
i've tried to document every single happy thing that happened. mostly in my mind, or in my scribbled notes.  there were too many things to write down. but i will never forget.


--

for the first time since march, i ran.
i did something different. i sprinted as fast as i could. then i stopped. then i sprinted as fast as i could. then i stopped.

and i remembered what you told me about sports, and short and long muscles, and how you were impressed that i know track terminology and bowling terminology and billiards terminology and football terminology.

i thought about all the people and stories that led to me knowing something about something i actually know nothing about.

i remembered when i couldn't run a mile.
i remember when i ran 6, and collapsed on the steps of the texas capitol, pleading G. for an apple
i remember when i ran 11
i remember when i ran 13.1
i remember when i stopped running and when i started.

i remember when b. told me i'm a fast runner
i remember when someone told me i have fast pickup

i never would have thought my short stubby legs would be called fast.

i remember first seeing chaturanga and thinking, "i am never going to be able to do that." now i do it for every vinyasa, and even an extra one into downward dog. i remember seeing forearm stands and thinking they were impossible. and now i know it feels like floating.

and i love thinking about these memories and remembering that things can change. that if you spend your life saying "i never," then you'll be right, you'll never. but once you do it, you will have done it, and it's as simple as that. not really that simple. but you'll see, when you do it. and say to yourself, "today, i can."

yesterday, i spent all day staring into the blue eyes of one of my closest friends. i have known for years why men fall in love with her, and our day together reaffirmed it all. she let me borrow a zebra-print dress, tried to convince me that i looked good in it, and

we attended a wedding together. the sky was the color of the shadows in my room, and the clouds opened their mouths and spit out fire and rain. suddenly everything was wet, and just as suddenly everything was soaked in sunshine. and we danced, and we ate too much food, and the bartender (at a wedding!) asked for my ID, but i convinced him that i am old enough to have a lime-green frozen margarita. with salt.

and we sweat, and we bounced around in a bouncy moonwalk, and bride and father two-stepped to a country western song.

and then pete sang matt nathanson's "All We Are" as the couple's first tango dance. and i cried, and i cried, and the bride's speech ended with her being unable to speak, and choking back the tears, she grinned and said, "it's okay, it's cool to cry."

and they played a song just for the children, and only for people carrying a child, and s. swept me off my feet and she carried me out to the dance floor to dance.

the sun set

the grass couldn't keep the light off of itself

the earth shook with water and happiness, and with the weight of how long it took for this to happen (and of how many people thought it wouldn't), but it did, it finally did

and back at home we talked about the power of vulnerability, and we got ran over by happy loving dogs who had just jumped into the swimming pool, and we drank strawberry banana smoothies.

and M made delicious food, and we laughed, and we ate lemon trifle made with no dairy, and they sang, and  i blew out one candle, and we went dancing, and in the end, the words didn't matter.


every day is a start

"Au milieu de l'hiver, j'ai découvert en moi un invincible été." - Albert Camus 

(in the depths of winter, I discovered there was in me an invincible summer)

on july 6th, 2009,  i wrote to S and sent him this poem by Carl Phillips. this was after i spent part of an afternoon in San Francisco in L's apartment reading Phillips' poetry.

Radiance Versus Ordinary Light

Meanwhile the sea moves uneasily, like a man who
suspects what the room reels with as he rises into it
is violation — his own: he touches the bruises at each
shoulder and, on his chest,
the larger bruise, star-shaped,
a flawed star, or hand, though he remembers no hands,
has tried — can't remember...
That kind of rhythm to it, 

even to the roughest surf there's a rhythm findable, 

which is why we keep coming here, to find it or that's 

what we say. We dive in and, as usual,
the swimming
feels like that swimming the mind does in the wake
of transgression, how the instinct to panic at first 

slackens that much more quickly, if you don't 

look back. Regret,
like pity, changes nothing really, we 

say to ourselves and, less often, to each other, each time 
swimming a bit farther, 
leaving the shore the way 
the water — in its own watered, of course, version 
of semaphore — keeps leaving the subject out, flashing 
Why should it matter now and Why, 
why shouldn't it, 
as the waves beat harder, hard against us, until that's 
how we like it, I'll break your heart, break mine.

are we seasons? do we change? do we cycle?

have i not said this before here?

 "The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea " (Isak Dinesen)

All of old. Nothing else ever.
Ever tried. Ever failed.
No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
- Samuel Beckett

See, now they vanish, the faces and places,
with the self which, as it could, loved them,
to become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.
- T.S. Eliot

Wherever my travels may lead, paradise is where I am.
- Voltaire

"We need to make books cool again. If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them."
— John Waters