{firemouth poets in the Ace Deuce as it were}

I'd like to condense my thoughts on the week in Ann Arbor with these crazy wonderful teenagers before the thoughts dissipate entirely as those brain cells are usurped by memorization of this work I have to perform in a week

these teenagers, these poets becoming more themselves by the minute like some mad morphing, every exercise a cosmic jump and forward or back, it's movement all the time

such a joyride, this time when the writing is so new and malleable, that less step by step advancement than the work moving in leapfrogs and quantum jumps that land us so often in strange and dangerous, though gorgeous, territory

of course, with no clear path to look back on, it can be hard to stay in the further place (isn't it always, though,) so much backsliding is likely before foothold is found

and then as we become such good conduits for the poems, telling the Truth gets overwhelmingly scary - so we learn to obscure, to drape the perfectly flawed body of the Poem with gauzy non-specific metaphor, shift the lens to soft-edged with tiptoeing language that dazzles and blurs and keeps us what feels like a safe distance from the firebreathing organ that is the poem's heart spewing Truth

so we comb through the poem like a thrift store, like Value World or the Salvation Army, hunting the images that are us, that say Buy Me I'm Yours, I am You / and it's honest and only you could wear that orange straw cowboy hat, that child's t-shirt that says I'm Special, that pair of plaid pants with the butterfly patch

but it's scarier than that sometimes, sometimes it's the back room that beckons, the store room a jumble of stuff upon stuff and it's the sorting, the finding, the sitting cross-legged in the middle and rocking the doll you forgot you lost or the ring that never left your grandfather's hand

and these poets found all of that, sifted through and handed to the page miracles of imperfect sound, becoming and becoming and becoming / so well

{fragmentation & jetlag}

back in LA

I need to post, and will, but for now I'm beat after a day of travel

it was my birthday, which was lovely

NYC, you're not off the hook -- the celebration will re-ensue there

I'm reading Steven Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" -- $1 at the Salvation Army -- mining for metaphors

working on this long piece about the Rosenbergs -- not sure if it's working, we'll see

have to meet with a "costumer" tomorrow morning with the rest of the cast. am very afraid

photos of Ann Arbor and the fam to be posted to the web site soon. don't get too excited

five nights alone in this too-big California king bed before I make it back to NYC. sigh

the rental place gave me a monster SUV thing this time. I hate it. just five days but how much waste

Joy Harjo wrote

"Give me back my language and build a house
inside it.
A house of madness."

oh, yeah.

{small murders exercise & example}

OK, here's an exercise based on the poem posted in the previous entry:

write a poem using "SMALL MURDERS" as a model, in that it should
(a) use one of the five senses as a central metaphor,
(b) contain at least one surprising yet relevant historical/mythical reference,
and
(c) move around in time or geography.

here's what happened for me today while the brilliant kiddos were writing:

anniversary song

in Pittsburgh, you were blue. electric heaven spotlight
blue not Picasso's blue period not Man with a Guitar but
blue like Jimi Hendrix purple blue like bruise to run a hand
over like call on the healing there like blood at the surface
visible / resist. pull back from blue but the blue calls
not for healing but for whole / were we broken
before Pittsburgh? when you were blue and I
well, I couldn't see it then, not before not until
blue light, horns in the background, standing bass like
low strumming guitar strings under voice blue pulling
high humming and the blue spark bright bruise spreading
Chicago to Arouca blue melting we spread melting
two blue syllables under a disbelieving Pennsylvania moon.

***

if I hurry, I might be able to get in a siesta before we have to come back here to the Neutral Zone to perform. yes, it's Old Folks Night at the youth center. watch out!

we analyzed Stephen Dobyns' poem "White Pig" with them after "SMALL MURDERS" and blew their minds. THAT was a long and passionate discussion. who is the father? who is the man with the knife? is this about cultural imperialism in post-twentieth century America? is it about class conflict? why does the pig wear a blue ribbon? does that make him a prize pig?

awesome.

{sixteen again and poems}

dude, I'm like, turning 31 with teenagers. yesterday they guided us to Ann Arbor's top thrift store and the Fleetwood Diner (poor service! mediocre food! no milkshakes! impossible!) after a full five hours of poetry. three days down, two to go. Monday was Writing/Wanting the Forbidden, Tuesday dealt with establishing/creating access to Big Ticket Issues, and yesterday was Exploding Forms... we're supposed to leave in five minutes, Roger's still in the shower, and today is the extended metaphor.

rock on:

SMALL MURDERS
by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

When Cleopatra received Antony on her cedarwood ship,
she made sure he would smell her in advance across the sea:
perfumed sails, nets sagging with rosehips and crocus
draped over her bed, her feet and hands rubbed in almond oil,
cinnamon, and henna. I knew I had you when you told me

You could not live without my scent, brought pink bottles of it,
creamy lotions, a tiny vial of parfume—one drop lasted all day.
They say Napoleon told Josephine not to bathe for two weeks
so he could savor her raw scent, but hardly any mention is ever
made of their love violets. Her signature fragrance: a special blend

of these crushed purple blooms for wrist, cleavage, earlobe.
Some expected to discover a valuable painting inside
the locket around Napoleon's neck when he died, but found
a powder of violet petals from his wife's grave instead. And just
yesterday, a new boy leaned in close to whisper that he loved

the smell of my perfume, the one you handpicked years ago.
I could tell he wanted to kiss me, his breath heavy and slow
against my neck. My face blue from the movie screen—
I said nothing, only sat up and stared straight ahead. But
by evening's end, I let him have it: twenty-seven kisses

on my neck, twenty-seven small murders of you. And the count
is correct, I know—each sweet press one less number to weigh
heavy in the next boy's cupped hands. Your mark on me washed
away with each kiss. The last one so cold, so filled with mist
and tiny daggers, I already smelled the blood on my hands.

{notes for the eventual film}

when they make the movie of my life, somebody make sure they include the part where I spend an entire California afternoon unwashed in my underwear taping poems and fragments to the wall of a pre-furnished apartment in an attempt to figure out what the hell this book is about.

I've determined that the reason I can't make headway in the supposed second book is that the first one's not right, not done. so it turns out that the woman's not just going mad because she is, but because the world is a mad sick place and insanity might be the only reasonable response for a thinking artist with such thin skin.

SO using Brenda Hillman's Loose Sugar concept, I'm taking the poems and developing a sort of two-pronged narrative where the writer/speaker is trying to create this book and cope with her own demons while simultaneously being bombarded with the hurt and screaming world via radio and TV and print... this is not easy. this may require more boundary-destruction than I possess.

but we shall see. for now, there are poems taped to my wall, and a few sequences that I believe are working, and I'm about to leave for a week and let that all ferment. which requires that I pack, a task I've yet to begin.

I should probably also eat at some point.

Edgar Allen Poe said:
Men have called me mad, but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence – whether much that is glorious – whether all that is profound – does not spring from disease of thought – from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.

Beau Sia. Jerry Quickley. Wammo. I love my life. :) 

{growing wilder}

so I featured last night at the Ugly Mug Cafe in Orange, CA (the Poetry Idiots reading) and it was amazing.

first of all, these people are really into poetry, as in they are the Poetry Idiots the way that we are Poetry Geeks. they open and close the reading with poetry by (gasp) poets outside community. and they listen, they really listen.

second, I did no quote-unquote performance work. and I found new places in my voice in reading this work that was somewhat memorized just because I've been looking at it so hard -- I don't know how to explain it, but I was in love again with the words in my mouth and the people hearing them in a way I haven't been in far far too long.

I had... fun. and not the wow, I rocked it kind of fun that comes from super-delivering strong work in high-energy performance, but the kind of fun that comes from discovering new levels and joys and disturbances in the work just by vocalizing it and being really present in that sharing.

and then I had wine with Mindy Netifee, a fantastic poet herself and a true activist. discussing local gentrification and land use issues with Mindy and her journalist roommate, and then talking the madness of nonprofit and fundraising work, in combination with the realization that I maybe shouldn't even try to be an entertainer, made me thirster than ever to get back into activist work.

so, OK, a few more minutes on Nick Flynn:


across a shorn field. I stood over it

- we've talked about "shorn" -- now the other clause on this line -- "I stood over it" -- the bag is burning, here. the suicide note belonging to someone the speaker knows is burning on a bag full of baby mice, and the speaker is just standing there.

- the speaker stands over it, not crouched down to look, not at its level, but looking down, above it. above the person who'd write such a note? maybe. unable to do anything, or unwilling?

& as the burning reached each carbon letter

- hm. not the fire, not flame, but the burning. more visceral somehow, and we know from the lines above that this is not fast fire, this is smoldering, slow burn. what does that mean about the person this bag represents, about that person's life and decision to die?

- "each carbon letter" -- not penciled, not lead, but carbon. what are carbon's associations? carbon-dating? carbon the essential element? and how would the line's feeling in your mouth change if it were "each lead letter?" see, on top of the alliteration that would pile on top of the internal rhyme, how much weight the word "lead" would heap upon the line? and yet it's pencil lead... not pencil carbon.

- why does carbon feel more like ash than lead does?

- also, the burning is reaching each letter, not each word. again, this is slow and methodical burn. what does this imply about the suicide?

of what you'd written

- an editor's first instinct might be to cut this line. of course it's what the You has written, isn't that obvious? couldn't you go directly from "each carbon letter" to "your voice released into the night"

- but look: this clause, all by itself on a line, what an indictment. sort of a "look what you've done." almost a taking to task. or a sigh, an acknowledgement. remember the passive voice of the early lines, almost implying that the suicide note might NOT have been written by the You? here, that's adjusted. it's still passive, it's not "of what you wrote" but it is an edging-toward, a gesture at, acknowledgement.

your voice released into the night

- well, it's a suicide note, so the idea of release makes sense. escape.

- this is the first time we the readers discover that it is night in the dream, as well as outside the dream. somehow that blurs the line further for me, between the dream and the actual

- and look, we go all the way from the first line to the tenth before hearing You again. and now, we get you/your in two lines in a row. there's a sense of build, of mounting energy

like a song, & the mice

- the simplicity of "like a song" is surprising -- part of me wants to know what kind of song, a dirge, a hymn, a lullaby? but let's assume he considered making it more specific, and chose to just say "like a song" -- what does that mean? a song could be anything, and look, we have no picture of the person who wrote this suicide letter

- a suicide note written in pencil on a paperbag. darkness. baby mice who are never physically described. the voice releases like a song. no specific song, no specific type of song, just a song. in the absence of description of this person, I get a sense that this person is him or herself, absent. slipping.

- "& the mice" -- the implication with this linebreak being that the voice released into the night not just like a song, but also like the mice. and what are the mice doing? they are huddled in the dark bag, pushing it across this shorn field. so the voice goes out like an anonymous song, and like these frightened mice in the dark

grew wilder.

- nothing wild, not even the fire, in this poem. until now, the mice starting to panic as the burning smolders closer and releases the voice into the night

- could this be the moment of panic just before the suicide occurs? the possible almost second thought as the body falls through space or the trigger cocks or the rope snaps?

- in any case, this matches the understatement of the entire poem's tone. and that I think makes it all the more terrifying, and dreamlike. that disassociation from something so overwhelming as a suicide note...

- and he never does grow wilder. maybe, maybe the speaker believes the wildness might save the writer.

***

oh, Mr. Flynn: should you come across this at any point: we'd love to have you read for us some Monday. please be in touch. (hey, it's a long shot, but a shot nonetheless. people Google themselves all the time.)

{mice & exercise}

Bag of Mice
by Nick Flynn

I dreamt your suicide note
was scrawled in pencil on a brown paperbag,
& in the bag were six baby mice. The bag
opened into darkness,
smoldering
from the top down. The mice,
huddled at the bottom, scurried the bag
across a shorn field. I stood over it
& as the burning reached each carbon letter
of what you'd written
your voice released into the night
like a song, & the mice
grew wilder.

***

exercise:
select a person.
quickly make a list of 20 objects that represent that person.
choose the most interesting/surprising/right object.
the object is in a bag. what does it do?
do you reach in and feel it? what does it feel like?
does it become animated? does it lie there unmoving?
what does the bag look like?
who put the object in the bag?

look at the way Nick Flynn's poem uses a central metaphor that is complicated level by level throughout the poem.

I dreamt your suicide note

- as if he dreamed it into being. and the echoing Ts lending a feeling of encapsulation, even though it's enjambed to the next line

was scrawled in pencil on a brown paperbag,

- first of all, note the passive voice: not "I dreamed you scrawled your suicide note on a brown paperbag" but "was scrawled." as though the "you" in the poem might not even have written it -- a sense of separation here compounding the separation imposed by the fact of dreaming.

- note "scrawled" -- an important verb. strange in the mouth, uncomfortable. not an easy word to say. and the implication of quickness, carelessness in the writing.

- "in pencil" -- a critical detail. a suicide note written in pencil! how temporary. how erasable, like the writer?

- "on a brown paperbag," -- how ordinary. what are the associations? a child's school lunch? the grocery store? and how illegible must a note be, written in pencil on a brown paper bag?

& in the bag were six baby mice. The bag

- ampersand, which could just be a stylistic tic of the poet's, but for now let's examine within the context of the poem. to me, the ampersand is used when the word's even shorter than "and" -- it's more casual somehow, and faster. which, when dealing with a suicide note written in pencil on a paper bag, may be appropriate.

- again with the passive voice. "were" six baby mice. the way that in a dream thing simply appear to BE, rather than actively occurring. the mice are simply there, unquestioned.

- baby mice. picture them: hairless, vulnerable. not grown mice but babies.

- note the linebreak: how it puts the emphasis not on the mice, which are a given here, but the bag. the container.

opened into darkness,

- all by itself on a line. as if the interior of the bag, the seeming emptiness/darkness of it, even though we know there's something in there, something living, were as important as the exterior (where the suicide note is written.)

- an interesting thought, opening into darkness. is that like sleeping, the way we are open/vulnerable in the dark, asleep? and has that something to do with death, the final sleep?

smoldering

- all by itself. no punctuation, so much weight on one word. smoldering. and we have to go to the next line to find out what is smoldering: the bag, not the darkness.

- so we're pulled in two directions here: we want to stay with this word because out there by itself, it must be important. and yet we're pulled down to the next line by a need to know what is about to burn, or what just finished burning.

from the top down. The mice,

- so it's the bag that's smoldering, about to burn.

- and from the top down, the direction in which we write. undoing, of course, the writing. which was already so temporary, being in pencil.

- and now the mice are the central thing, ending the line.

huddled at the bottom, scurried the bag

- finally some action! and it's the mice doing it.

- baby mice in a burning bag that bears a suicide note, all dreamed. picture it. how complicated is this metaphor, within seven lines!

- they "scurried" the bag. the mice themselves aren't scurrying, but somehow doing that to the bag -- because the speaker can't now see the mice. in fact, we're not sure he's seen the mice at all. invisibility, knowledge, temporariness...

- and now fear. the mice scurrying the bag

across a shorn field. I stood over it

- "a" shorn field. what a difference if he'd said "the" shorn field, indicating that it's a known place, and not the strange dream location

- a "shorn" field. what gets sheared? sheep -- an animal we think of as complacent, passive (as the voice in the poem, someone who'd write a suicide letter in pencil on whatever was handy?)

...

to be continued.

{all we need to know about joy}

today was Jen Weiss' surprise good-bye party; reason 607 to wish I were in NYC... though yes, here, a lovely weekend with Ms. Gottlieb and I don't hate LA so much.

but I wish I could have been there for it -- and I wrote a poem for her/the reading but didn't get it to Roger in time.

it's not that I want to get back into activist work because it'll be good fodder for poetry or because I'm afraid that teaching poetry full-time will make writing it tedious or more difficult -- but because I miss the tangible knowing or at least belief that what you do every day makes a difference in the lives of at least a handful of people. and when those people are amazing young writers who might otherwise never understand how phenomenal their voices are, well, a lot of career options pale in comparison.

but it's a Job. and an exhausting one at that. of course, after this experience, I don't know what ISN'T exhausting. short of winning the lottery or discovering a lost trust fund, I haven't heard any funding options that don't interfere in one way or another with just creating art. and I can't say for sure that having nothing to do BUT create art wouldn't engender an experiential vacuum and leave me with nothing to write.

anyway, here's the poem (huge thanks to Daphne for the by-the-pool edits):

incantation for the hard road

we fuel. we burn through daily and wake
anyway, we hummingbirds dreaming of Sisyphus knowing
there is another side to the mountain, we go on.
listen: a face that toils so close to stone is already stone itself

/ we push. know the heart's invisible work mends
not just itself but the world's heart, that bad engine
struggling, and his and hers and is fuel, that the wind relies
on the hummingbird's speed and what seems like stillness

is Sisyphus' first breath and shoulder to stone again
/ we are not myth. throw our fist-sized hearts into the void
and push, believing. knowing the stone we roll uphill
leaves a clearer path than one made by walking

alone / we do not explode. become the stone
we push, cheek to rock, a kiss, a hummingbird's faith in levitation
our belief in the other side we will never reach
teaching us all we need to know about joy.

***

note: italicized line is from The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays by Albert Camus; translated from the French by Justin O'Brien, 1955; Vintage Books edition of 1991.

{expiration dates & what next}

just a few minutes when I should be doing something else. I've been thinking about what I want to be when I grow up -- which is to say, when this project ends. I've never had a job with an expiration date. it's very strange.

I'd fallen into the post-MFA mindset of "must get published to get book. must get book to get teaching job. must get teaching job..." because that's what you do. but I'm not so sure it's what I'm supposed to do. I know I'd be good at teaching poetry to college students, but I'm not sure it's the right path.

in a conversation with Marie Howe while I was still in grad school, she mentioned thinking that poets need to do something other than poetry, otherwise what will you write about? it's a danger, the myopia of read poetry teach poetry talk poetry -- focus has it's place, but as Marie said, maybe we should be painters by day. something, anything.

for me, I think that in order to feel necessary to the world (and this is important for my grassroots savior complex heart) I'm going to need to do something other than show college students how to break lines. besides, I'm realizing more and more that there are people who MUST teach -- Roger, GinnaKarla -- who are born to it -- and there are those of us who do teach, and can, but would do something else if we had a million dollars to spare.

I think that poetry IS necessary to the world. that its precise beauty is a nutrient the world's body requires, maybe not so obviously as it needs protein to keep from disintegrating, but the way it needs, say, iron. you don't notice the lack of it immediately, but you start to feel tired, and cold all the time.

which is to say, I don't plan to stop writing. or occasionally teaching for that matter. I'm just not sure that the adjunct professor hope toward tenure track hope toward tenure thing is for me.

which means, time to figure something else to do. I still think that Roger and I could be great motivational speakers at colleges/high schools, and I'm looking into that. and still checking idealist.org to see if I can get back into non-profit... I just feel like this year, this project, had to happen for a reason, and there has to be some way to use it toward something new...

anyway, the ellipses are creeping in, which means I've derailed my train of thought into fragment-town. so enough for now.

I just finished working on Roger's new web site -- for a sneak peek as they say, go to www.geocities.com/rogerbonair. AND he has a blog. drumroll please. it's no coincidence that it looks a great deal like my redesign of my site, since I only know how to do three things through geocities. anyway, there it is. career #74: web site design without any HTML knowledge whatsoever.

{poetry envy}

Allison Benis, you have destroyed me!

so on a poetry bender last night, I went to Beyond Baroque (a fantastic literary center in Venice) for an open mic and featured reader thing, before going into Santa Monica for Co-Lab, an amazing open mic where no one is allowed to perform alone and poets collaborate with musicians including violinists, a beatboxer, a harpist, a DJ, and so on.

anyway, I didn't know anyone at the BB reading, so I was strangely nervous -- I forget sometimes what it's like to enter a space where I know no one and nobody knows me. it's a valuable reminder for those of us who run spaces, and have been doing this for what feels like forever. how much it means to have a stranger make a connection.

in any case, the open mic people were fine, above-par for your average open mic, actually. the first feature is moving to NYC in the fall to get his MFA at NYU, so I gave him a flyer for 13.

the second feature was Allison Benis. she explained that she was going to read nine prose poems from her manuscript, which consists entirely of poems dealing with absence through the lens of Degas' paintings, sculpture, and sketches. I was worried. it didn't bode well. too many layers, I thought.

I was wrong. it's happened before. it'll happen again.

look at this:


From Degas' Sketchbook
by Allison Benis

The hidden are alone too. I crouched in the closet, between my mother’s skirts and shoes, where the legs should be. Whether I was quiet or not, I would be found. It was an obvious place. Her clothes and shoes. I only have to say it once. I don’t say anything because the game requires silence. This is an external narrative: when I was small. It would be easier to fold in half or not say anything. People lose their minds and leave in the middle of cooking salmon. I will tell you something quietly: we tried to send her a birthday card, but it was returned, wrong address. It is common to know very little, if anything. The point is to stay calm. To be found before you disappear. Not blank or colored in yet, but the outline of upturned hands and a quick circle for a mouth. Sometimes the face is so specific and the body is just penciled lightly in. It would be easier to finish here, before the tenderness of the figure is gone. And the silk of the slip sewn inside my skirt as I sat carefully in the dark. It is so close to being skin. People exist for as long as possible until it is too difficult to matter. The shoulders are the span of the hanger and the mind is the hook which suspends the entire dress.

***

are you kidding me? I am completely wrecked. "People lose their minds and leave in the middle of cooking salmon." the way she's able to weave the ordinary into this terrifying strangeness -- "The point is to stay calm. To be found before you disappear."

in several of the other poems (you can find her work on the Poets & Writers web site) she accomplishes even more than in this one to leap from idea to idea and never lose us, never feel arbitrary.

I read "the impossibility of February" which is madness enough to thrill the academics and I've worked out the performance enough for everyone else so it's my fallback poem in most unfamiliar settings.

and I really wanted Allison Benis to like me.

here's another one of her poems:

Waiting
by Allison Benis

I think of broken snow, but this is permanent. Two separate women on a bench—crossed at the wrists, her hands could make a smaller version of the dancer unlacing her shoes. Or maybe she's just clutching her ankle in order to communicate a small, but consistent pain. The kind that makes you look at pictures because words are not sufficient to describe it.

God said just float on a black lake like a child floats on her back to stare at stars. Let go. Watch cool paper boats. But I'm afraid of black water and the way women ignore each other at restaurant counters (one sips her coffee while the other draws circles on a paper napkin). When a child throws a stone into a lake, God is pleased, and opens in rings, then fades to prompt the child to throw again.

When I hear her set her coffee back on the counter, I look at my napkin to pretend I'm occupied with my love of circles. This could be an aerial sketch of twirling ballerinas, I think—each dancer ignoring the small white pain in her ankle. Like a moon incessantly reflected in a lake. When a child floats on a paper boat, she wonders, Where do stones go after they've pleased God?

This is a hinge at the end of a lake boat, but I still don’t know how to draw the fear of separation. We were alone for a long time. After many years, God said to the child, There are hundreds of wet stones in your mouth--and inside stone, the possibility of black unopened umbrellas.

***

I think I'm not trying hard enough. I'm not pushing my hands far enough into the dark. did she find her way there through Degas, or were the images always there and it is only in this series that she uses him? did examining her life through the lens of his work complicate it or simplify it? now I'm obsessing.

perhaps I will write a series of poems about living alone in California through the lens of a grapefruit. sigh.

{grapefruit and much ado about the new book}

my new obsession is grapefruit. how could I have neglected this phenomenal piece of citrus for so long?

we have a new director for Declare Yourself, and he's great so far -- though all we've done for the past week is read and read and read all the material we've developed so far, out loud for him to hear. it was oddly exhausting. aside from that, we're creating new pieces under tight specifications, topic-wise, to fill specific needs.

I'm really struggling with this "second book" idea -- it was supposed to comprise mostly poems that were not personal, but overtly external -- and it's not happening. and what I can't figure out is if that is because the poems that arrive with legitimate urgency are personal, or if I'm just being lazy about creating anything that doesn't spring from immediate and personal emotion.

I spent so long training my brain to reject the easy line, the obvious twist, the surface dealings -- but for this project, that's what is needed most times. and it's not bad writing I've done, but I'm realizing the futility of pushing to the strange and scary place in work intended for this show.

and consequently, when I go to write poems that are not for the show, it's like going to the gym after eating chocolate on the couch for six months. so the flow is so much slower, and the process far more taxing than it needs to be -- I used to be so good at telling the truth, the gritty uncomfortable truth. now, it's slippery. not as easy to grab and get down on the page.

the crazy images aren't coming -- that basic ability to look at a radiator and think shoebox for heat, my heart -- what underlies all brilliant poetry, the ability to connect disparate ideas and objects, to create something New --

I was looking at some old poems, stuff that's maybe three years old, from grad school. and I know that what I'm writing now is superior in craft and precision to what I was writing then -- but I'm not sure how. and I could be wrong.

but probably not. these poems are better. they may not be great, but they are better. and I suppose that's a comfort.

now I'm hungry, and the grapefruit is calling. the primary drawback to grapefruit is its preparation requirements, the necessity of utensils, and the fact that you can't eat it while accomplishing other tasks like typing.

more on my obsession with multi-tasking and the gender basis of that later.

I'm back in Los Angeles, again. my jetlag appears to be working backwards this time -- instead of falling asleep at 10 p.m. because it feels like 1 a.m. to my body, I'm just not getting sleepy. which is totally unacceptable given that I am a champion sleeper, and if I don't get the sleep I need, I get sick immediately. I'm fragile like that.

the other wierd thing is that all my dreams for the past week or so, maybe longer, have been chase dreams. I'm constantly in these surreal and perilous situations, and at some point I end up escaping and running and being chased. I don't usually remember my dreams, so it kind of freaks me out when I do. any dream interpreters in the house? they're also really vivid, and when I wake up from them and go back to sleep, they continue.

anyway, I suspect that if I could work the dreams into a poem, they'd stop.

I finished Louise Erdrich's "Baptism of Desire" on the plane. Some of the poems are excellent -- fierce and terrifying. others fell short of the pace early ones had set. she wrote one whole set of them in the middle of the night when she had pregnancy-related insomnia. so if I really can't sleep, I'm going to try to write. and not this drivel, but an actual poem. I'm sure that pregnant insomnia is different from regular insomnia.

OK, that thought is my cue to stop.