i give in

this act of giving

is a successive thing

i can not hold moments

time, it takes me

little hans playing by the shoreside

his castle keeps tumbling, such grains

like rain they shower on his blood-plump hands

come back to me his mother cries. she is young

he will come back to her because he must. like this, 

i give in. she holds out her arms, which he fills 

dearer than the lover, his heart becomes 

the eye she sees with. clear and 

simple. blue beach, brown sand

there can be nothing else

one sun, one moon

earth.

i give in. 

waking

every day
behind the
multitudinous bulk of activity
the contractions of muscle
the movements which shape
what you are wearing and
the taste left behind
in your mouth and even
the words with which you swallow
the world around you

behind this lies
in a simple moment
not too long ago
the infinitesimally sticky
parting of your eyelids

that first sight
tearing the fabric
of your non-being

self portrait

name

i have begun to write poetry
for girls who are not real
with names which linger on my lips
long after i have met them somewhere.
they travel quickly
like little birds lost
in the branches of large trees

even you are not anything
but a name and an event
occuring to me with
everything you own
the hair you grow
and the soft scent of peaches
you carry into the room.

poem in progress

his saliva unzips my flesh
i spill things i have concealed
over the years: a bowl of dark hair
tangled around a fork
a pitcher of your tears
gleaming in the moonlight
a lost button from a shirt
of the child that never was

emptied, i rest in the hot sunlight
where little children plant inside me
sand castles and candy wrappers

when a nearby bird screeches, i flutter --
a fleeting brown dress, a
metallic zip.

allow me to assemble you tonight

once i heard a joke or a sad story
it made me cry until i lived in tears
shining pools of them around my feet

i could have drowned, remember this
instead i gathered and formed them
this is your hair now- so keep it safe

i will be careful outside it is quiet
and cold, birds trapped in ice and the
sun choked in blankness

i can't allow you to trim it, you
see what a waste of tears cheap
puddles on the ground that would be

words

words are a bleak currency
syllables find themselves like silver pennies
jumbled and arranged, rearranged
whisked away and glued together
torn apart, spit on in streets,
determining fates

well i bought you with words
we bargained our positions. a little bit
here, little bit there. we make concessions
one fine day, we will open a bank
to store words of our own
secrets and endearments, fears
among other things

but words can be traded
and as such i will come to lose you
to the solitary glitter of wishes
that lie at the heart of a fountain

i'm shameless, i'm offering myself to you but i am afraid. slavoj zizek

this cage will set you free

sometimes i wonder about the things i choose to discard and the things i choose to keep...in front of me, hanging from my shelf is a used tea bag, dry and intact held up by the pit of a delicious flat peach i ate one night while working on a paper. i think the beauty of the pit and the long darkening string and somewhat frumpy resigned teabag is in the struggle, my shelf being the cliff, the string being the life line, the teabag and the pit being unfathomable counterparts to each other. it's always in motion, the slightest displacement of the pit would destabilize the arrangement, the teabag would fall and all there would remain for someone to see would be two abject components of a summer refreshment. green tea and peaches ephemeral and forgotten. maybe keeping them alive, in the most tenuous, even crude way is a mistake. the drafts of the air conditioning makes the teabag sway gently, left and right sometimes giddy sometimes tired. there is something so innocent and playful about them, something so deadly compelling. some time they might end up as forlorn creatures in a garbage heap somewhere in a sea, but for now they are dance mates, traveling far from their homelands, creating music right here.

it is now summer

"There’s never been a wedding in this house," she
said, half apologetically, to Mrs. Rachel Lynde.
"When I was a child I heard an old minister say that a
house was not a real home until it had been consecrated
by a birth, a wedding and a death. (Anne's House of Dreams, Ch. 2)

the summer is here. full of preoccupations that awaken, having been carried over from the year, unfurling now from somewhere in the unconscious. this summer is a preoccupation with spaces that grew in me many years ago when i first read this book. montgomery was always careful about the subtleties of space, inhabited uninhabited in her books. this summer is full of potential, i feel as though it's important for me to not know the potential in something, knowing always makes it harder. so i am here in this space, four or five year old space. this is where i read some of the books which changed my life, this is where had deaths and rebirths, this room that was once her space as well. she used to use this table, the center while i use the corner. she used to time herself, study till deep at night. i took the bed, the ground. i spent time in other spaces, giving this up to her. the truth is perhaps i never wanted a space, i wanted to have a space by not being allowed it. it's always that way anyway.

i began this journal wanting to update once a week at the least, and somewhere along the way i stopped. i got self conscious that people were reading it but it was more than that, each entry begins to feel like a birth, a creation and perhaps i want each of them to be perfect in their own right. i just mean to say it got hard. so i apologize to everyone or anyone who comes back here hoping for a new entry and not finding one. who knows this summer it might become easier, i might write more, things may bloom :)

Listen to the cry of a woman in labor at the hour of giving birth - look at the dying man's struggle at his last extremity, and then tell me whether something that begins and ends thus could be intended for enjoyment. --Søren Aabye Kierkegaard

what is that private cause that a person has to create, to bring meaning in their existence? of course this isn't a question to be answered, but to be experienced. in every day, in the space of the private terrible moments i answer and reanswer this. there is so much, to feel to exist within, but both moments described in the quote were moments of blackness, when consciousness evades you. how are you expected to remember how to live, to really live if the moments in which you do are blotted out, are too heavy for remembrance? or is that the true task, to recreate it in an infinitude of different ways, the moments of life of anguish and joy? this something kierkegaard mentions, this life, is it a repetition of births and deaths, perhaps there is nothing in between

summertime

everything is hotness now. the air is dense, it is difficult to breathe. everything is ending and shriveling under the hot sun. it is so hot. i can almost imagine everyone here, their brains liquifying in their skulls and seeping out slowly. words becoming more disjointed, collapsing suspended and lost somewhere in the air. and me, eyes closed with my tongue out waiting for the fan to evaporate my speech into colder places.

the space in your heart is so black

i love the idea of black hearts, of black suns, of black stars. it speaks of the unknowable, vastness of the inside of the human. black pupils,mouths opening to the unexplored darkness of parted lips. voices are darkness, they form around the sounds and create immense wells. what are humans to each other than portals to the infinite expanses? what are ideas but pools of hidden darkness? there is no light without the beauty of darkness to frame it, carry it along.

growing into a name

one of my pet obsessions is my childhood. i think i could say with a fair amount of certainty that all children exhibit various neuroses, with some transforming said neuroses into less suspect behaviors and others repressing them into tiny packages which explode during stressful times in their future adult lives.

it's always so disarming to find the childhood inside of an adult's eyes, as the days progress i find that i'm less troubled by children then i used to be. sometimes i fancy that you can see the sum of all of a person's childhood in their eyes and laughs and movements and their very being. as g. said in class today, all it takes to know a person is to see them live out two weeks of their life, all three meals, all their interactions. and i see it in y., in her healthy walk and her manner of breathing. this is a woman with a memory like a crystal goblet of wine. nothing artificial, nothing diseased. she told us about a drink in russia for sick children called oxygen cocktail and how she used to read up in a tree.

i saw a little boy today after work, stopping in the cafeteria. he was purely absorbed in looking for the perfect purchase. there were only three people in the cafe besides him, and we were all looking. he was so nonchalant too, and so secure. he asked the price of everything and considered. i looked at the cashier to see if she were looking at him in suspicion of stealing and she did, several times quickly. i looked at him openly. he was very attractive, i always found focused people to be so attractive. as though attention were a deep inner pool, a swirling magnetic field.

now i see childhoods everywhere. it creates such a strange feeling within you, as the repellent voyeur, as the invisible one to be held responsible for all the unanswered questions. i can't stop seeing it now, all these children-adults, all these girlwomen and boymen. all these transformations. we are always becoming

the beginning

maybe this journal is about all the times i've discovered something to be different than i'd thought it to be all my life, a journal about discoveries and revelations. i think there comes a point in time where discoveries are far and few between and when something touches you, you want to make sure that you will never forget that feeling. this is a journal about all the questions that are answered in a moment of epiphany, realizations.

this is dedicated to the reader.