{I was also re-reading Li-Young Lee's "Book of My Nights" this weekend}

dream about string theory

does a man love the world less
if he drops his empty coffeecup

on the floor of the G train? someone
will pick it up with the newspapers

and gum wrappers and one confused
translucent condom she prods

with a stick and lifts with a loose grace
into the bin – what is her song, the sun

just arriving over Brooklyn?


*

{writing in form long-hand because someone left the power cord for your computer in South Carolina is hard!}

but here we are -- and kind of nifty to have all the drafts written out on paper. quaint, even. and it's not a pantoum!

heretical sestina for D.
{with lines/phrases from “Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art” by Julia Kristeva, Columbia University Press, 1941.}

impetus of the waiting body, inducement to touch
the intersection of subject and history –
do you like to be held down? known flesh
under gauze, writhing with the wax, affirm
this subversion of the cold universe; your tongue,
saturated with the old discourse, refuses to be held.

do you know where your boundaries are? held,
permeable, opening at unsainted touch
in every sense of the word, this resurrected tongue
a dignified but amorphous domain, history
of turning your head as a model might, or a child, to affirm
away but not breaking, to memorize the safe word: flesh

has reached its apex in the Christian-capitalist era, the flesh
wins, to the point of being its secret motor, some withheld
heretofore undiscovered uses for metal and silk, affirm
the patience of leather, transcendence of contradictory touch,
your back an antilanguage, marble palmed smooth, may history
marionette my bones as you do, into wings, span of tongue

when indulgence refuses to cool but lifts the tongue
like luggage, that gift, discharged energy, quantitative flesh
cathexes, a thumb’s vibrato in unreluctant places, history
invents myth as a kind of speech in which we are held,
sweet compendium of irreconcilable limits and touch,
each gathering areola its own day – affirm –

each arching hip a new instrument – affirm –
you haven’t the boy in you to kill me but this tongue
better than death, equaled only by touch,
call it transformative or even mortal, this flesh
tent where fist is kiss and we are praxis, syllables held,
sound endowed with biography, body, and history,

given tenor and tremble, the substance of history
mentioned but in passing though the floor dips to affirm
each kiss, though the ceiling splits to show we are un-held
by promise or men’s logic or anything but tongue
which is more than enough to sanctify this joined flesh
(isn’t transubstantiation in reverse reason enough to touch?)

bend your touch into an ecstatic history
where the grace of flesh is the only way to affirm
one true god, your tongue, right there, held.

*

{this goes beyond creature of habit, I feel}

So this weekend I tried to submit to the Bellevue Literary Review because I have three poems that deal with health/mental health, etc. -- and I've been a huge slacker on submissions of late. Of Late being the past 4 months or so. Anyway, it wouldn't go through from my home computer so I emailed it to myself and just now remembered to send it.

Here's where it gets creature of habit-y:

BLR lists your previous online submissions on their site -- so after hitting "submit" it showed me all my submissions, including the one received today and the one they'd rejected that I had submitted ON THIS DATE LAST YEAR. What is that about? Is that a good sign or a bad sign?

I haven't heard back from a bunch of the magazines to which I submitted the last time I got inspired -- which I am going to pretend is a good sign. Like, maybe some of the poems are in the running. It's been less than 6 months, so I may not be making that up entirely.

In good news, I won the slam last night. And had fun doing it. St. Catherine rocked out, as did Peter's poem which wasn't totally memorized, and a flourish of a finish with Instructions for a Body so that I can't use it again until semi's, assuming I make semi's.

I have to train the women who want to slam to loiter at the back table before 7. The men are far more aggressive about getting on the list, and as a consequence our slams have been grossly (and I mean grossly) testosterone-heavy. Not OK.

Back to work.

{developments & dabblings}

I went from having to work in the Bronx from 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. tomorrow to having to work from 8 a.m. to noonish tomorrow to not having to go at all -- almost simultaneously went from having my sister and brother in law visit this weekend to having them visit the following week to having them get screwed over by American Airlines (boo hiss for the monster airline) and possibly not come at all -- so now instead of a crazy packed weekend I have a calendar full of white-out and all sorts of open time... which should be a good thing, yes? and is, though it leads to a strange draining feeling. list: writing, painting, laundry (good god, laundry, I need clean socks), perhaps brunch of a sort, that great New York pastime, perhaps I will even memorize a poem and perhaps slam it on Monday, that whole hat in the ring thing, now that I won't have a sibling audience to be wounded should I not score well. it's always hardest on the family.

*

{I'm thinking of a new series, a companion to "lies about"}

dream about third-wave feminism

there’s no daughter here, only men
dead between floorboard of the upstairs
and ceiling of the down, the moth
put them there. still, we don’t leave.
not us, not the women on the couch
and the women behind, we can’t
lay down, it’s clear. something
to stand on: something obvious:
it’s love, you know, a kind of
obligation to the world or the one
inside, spinning, the doors
are unlocked but we stay. waiting
for our turn to sleep.

*

{truth and fiction in art and non}

This makes for an interesting afternoon wonderment about the nature of truth in writing and where lines get drawn when profits are on the line... would these books ever have been published if they stuck to the facts? if they were positioned as fiction, which they apparently, largely, are? how much do the lies affect the art, the craft, of what was written?

JT Leroy: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/09/books/09book.html?emc=eta1

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0104061jamesfrey1.html

Thanks to Oprah Winfrey, author James Frey's "A Million Little Pieces" has sat atop best-seller lists since the TV star picked the nonfiction memoir for her powerful book club four months ago. Winfreyhas called Frey's book, which chronicles his years as an alcoholic, drug addict, and criminal,"gut-wrenching" and "so real." Well, not exactly. A six-week investigation has determined that Frey'sblockbuster is filled with fabrications, falsehoods, and other fakery. In a related note, a "rattled" Frey has lawyered up and is threatening to sue us for millions.

*

{randomosity from the evening just passed}

I managed to remember the entirety of "St. Kevin of Glendalough's dead admirer to George W. Bush" and score decently with it as the sacrificial goat for last night's slam. Rockin'. I might toss my hat into the season, or at least a shoe. If it gets me to memorize, it's worth it.

Faced with a drunk, rageful, flailing woman, I had two simultaneous thoughts:
(1) I need to put this wine glass down because she is going to break it and hurt herself.
(2) If she hits me, I might knock her down.

How is it possible that in a city of 6 trillion and a half bars, the drunken morons we eject from Bar 13 end up at Reservoir, the place we frequent every Monday? Are the gods that bored?

on looking for a sliding-scale therapist in New York City

but it is too much to look because the thought
of finding threatens that void vacuum taut skin
feeling, again. and this is the office, a haven of
spreadsheets and white-out and the inexplicable
four-square ball on the conference table, a chart
of your four colors, primary, sometimes it helps
to count. sometimes water. sometimes a call
to say nothing, just checking on dinner plans,
not that you have any, though you could, could
make plans, the calendar segregated neatly
into squares you diligently fill, highlight, code
against empty, against time. are there three
primary colors or four? red, yellow, blue, a little
looking gives subtractive primaries, when colors
are produced by subtracting light, as in printing,
or when mixing colors from a paintbox, data to
derail the mind from its mad track, its insistent
circle or spiral, or away from finding the
Psychotherapy and Spirituality Institute or
Pamela Saunders, LCSW, PhD, ABD,
psychotherapy and psychoanalysis
for artists and creative people
but let’s face it, crying on reading
the article on How to Be Happy
in your mother’s Real Simple magazine
is not a good sign in terms of mental stability
here’s a quiz 16 simple questions that may help
identify common symptoms there are additive
primaries, when colors are produced
by adding light, as in TVs and computer
monitors, red, green, blue if you would just
call someone or give up caffeine or start
hitting the gym again do you have
difficulty concentrating do you sleep
more than eight hours a night do you
feel the need to shift positions often
get up and pace do you feel a
loss of interest or pleasure in activities
that were once enjoyed the colors
that correspond to tickling each type of cone
in the eye separately are the cone primaries, or
fundamental primaries, extreme red psychedelic
aquamarine extreme purple approximately
five percent of the population of the United States
suffers from major depression average age of onset
is about 40 years old can we spell Sexton or Plath
Woolf Baudelaire O’Keefe Balzac Faulkner Fitzgerald
Hemingway Shelley Eliot Keats between 65
and 70 percent of depression goes untreated artistic
people are often unwilling to get their depression treated
for fear that it may destroy their ability to be creative, although
whether or not this is so has not been proved or maybe it’s
the calendar the four-square ball the spreadsheet, perfect
portal sections Alice’s looking-glass the fortuneteller’s
crystal ball maybe extreme purple should be called extreme
violet. but violet insists pale, and the daytime moon is full.


***

D. Falk, D. Brill & D. Stork `Seeing the Light' (Wiley, 1986).
Overview of Clinical Depression Copyright (C) David Joffe 1998


*

if I am ever The Boss, I will not talk to people in the bathroom. really, give a woman a chance to pee in relative peace and fake anonymity.

so I stayed here at the office late to work on a proposal and instead wrote a bad poem. urg. arg.

on livejournal, they get to list their mood and their music. lucky.

mood: stuck. stuck. stuck. stuck.
music: eery 7:30 office silence.

whatever.