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 :)