Anyway & Other Poems
A new approach to Nightmares & Morning Pages, from January
When December turned January, I was in my own rhythm, I was still writing poems when I succumbed to time. These poems came in fits & finally! I kept it moving, kept it busy, became addicted and then bored. I held close to stay warm, I said, thank you so often. This is only a version of how I have been & I am happy to share. Thank you for reading.
An audio recording of the poetry below:
I. All my goals go back to poetry To explore it's possibilities, to Move through poetry, stretching And swirling, to sing and sing and Sing, to record and publish and Perform, to fight for poetry politically, To love poetically - deep, profound, Far-reaching, forever, to find and Express love to as many people as Possible, like poetry portends, to make More room for the creation & exploration Of poetry, to make it physical, to dress Myself in poetry, to imprint it onto skin And scar, to leave it all on the floor & Surrender, to see it fill a room & to see That room pulse, to be in the room with It while it takes up no space at all & Instead, friends like family like poetry After all, to try new things & be brave, To try new things & trust Time ~ to Trust Time, to trust Time, to trust Time, To hear it in our ears, years from now, & be filled with it, wings on the wind, To bring it around the world & to let the World change it, to bring myself around The world & let it change me, to dedicate Myself to the only thing I'll ever wholly Know, holy holy, the poetry inside me. It is hungry, I am at its mercy and it is Merciful to me. I cry when the saxophone Plays and my pelvis flicks alive. I am Honest when the lights are on me & I see in the darkness. No one needs to Understand in this life, we just need To feel it.
II. Black moon, sirens, heavy fog, walking in the street free, holding our broken hearts together. I cry & hope these are good tears but ya never know. I know there are not enough trash cans in this city, not enough affordable places to live, not enough lives in a lifetime, never ending kisses, never ending cobblestones, no trash can to throw this butt out. I am seeing my friends again tonight & though I am carrying a lot, I can let some down here. I find a trash can by the paint bar in the fog as the fire trucks circle the lot, our world getting thrown around. My heart is trying to leap out and find the sea. The moon is hiding from me. Or just taking a rest of her own. God knows she deserves it. I ask my friends at the bar a word to describe 2024. The Rabbit says, catastrophe. Red says, Hot mess. I say, TESTING. My friends say, Testing? Testing 1-2-3? MC takes a moment & says, hmmm challenging or Challenging- adjacent. Prickly! Yeah! Pungent!
III. Feel good Feel good Feel free Feel me Simple art Simple simple art Going back to where I mean it, the root of me, simple and red like dripping onto the carpet, the sound of that. The sound of the bass through the amp & in all directions, bouncing off of everything like that. Cats upstairs because of the noise, boys & their instruments in motion. I'm taking out a menstrual cup, I'm standing in front of the mirror with my pants down, on my notes app, cool and blue on a blooming winter night. A toilet flush in the breakdown. Everything I do is on purpose. Reality is debatable but I feel good now, deciding on my desires in the moment like this. Feel free Feel me Feel free free, free Moving my hips again. Moving my hands again. The boys learning to jam. The best blues songs have all the same Notes and a day as beautiful and blue as this sounds the same as any other. Feels like the softening season may come early this year, like I may come too, with something new. My colors different now than they will be when the train comes. Another beginning inside another end. Another unique scratch on the lens and in the silver, another new skill, another old skill, another true skill, all blue blue blue & my girls and I in our pops of red. Marlboro cap, wool fringe, pointed leather, toes all scuffed. We went where the music was, where the soup was, where tickets were bought dancing & there was laughter at the door. The barrels All stacked & in the back, our coats all in a pile. Employees only except for this tucked away corner where we throw down in the dark and see how we left it at the end of the night. A flash light. A cellphone flash. All our shit on the ground. Ceasefire on The radio. Not enough & in our city:
A show to send some money somewhere else, somewhere that may help. Artists auction on the tables and the three of us on the picnic bench. High energy when we walk in. The band on stage playing songs we know while we vow to Now. I say to my friends, if you want me, you've got me forever. And they know what I mean but I wonder if they know what I mean. Doesn't matter, I’m still here. Here with rice and tobacco smoke, hair growing long. Longer, longer, we chant. Longer, longer it grows. My friends & I & our hair growing long, rooting brown into the ground, into the ground with the mud, into the ground with the trees. Up we grow, soil of shit & the sun shining. Knowing day when we see it. Making love when the night eats it.
IV. OK, yes, I'm in the bathroom again, stoned and writing again. This is Thursday and I lick it up. Coffee table moved to the kitchen to make room for the amps and foot pedals. The boys are learning a new one. My green cowboy boots tipped over on their side, dirty socks left out & my vibrators charging silent on the wool rug. Lemon, Earl Grey, Wrought iron in the air. My stink all over this place. All over my home. All over my rental. My lover the same, coats and Crocs and nearly empty seltzer bottles, cans of beer to overflow. Neither of us like endings. We forgive the piles, the piles, the piles of us, the piles of our lives. We see the way we live live live where we are, all the time. We clean up together. Our home is shared, is red, is rare. A home where we are free & left alone. A home we rent. We rent. We pay. We pay. We pay temporary in a temporary world, We rent. We pay. A temporary whirr. We are living in a temporary world & I am a temporary girl. Feel good Feel good Feel free Feel me My boy asks me to write some songs & I worry they'll all be titled We capital W, like God. V. Today My side of the Internet is all David Lynch. RIP to a real one, we say as the wine spills, the wine spills, the wine spills like oil on the concrete and we watch it, we are wrapt, we lick it up, we watch it until it's empty, we watch & we don't notice the man smiling at us like that the whole time. The whole time? Yes, the whooooole time. You always knew the world was a puppet.
Sky, Ground, Sky
·
This entry is actually a transcription of a recording that went nowhere, me talking to myself in the in between moments. The original recording was full of dead air, but I wanted to save it. I may or may not do this again. I want to practice using my voice more often, more poetry, less pretense, and when I remember, voice notes have been really helpful …
VI. East of bohemia ~ We love it for it's eroticism We know rain for its dread Why do you kill such beautiful flowers? The vampire in me sees the vein in you I am an appetite, nothing more I think of those beautiful still lives in the Louvre. Rabbits hung upside down and bleeding. Rope bound around white fur. I think of self-tying corsets, of the hands that tighten and the hands that release. How doctors would say to tighten, to squeeze the demons out. How I will cut them loose to set something free & quickly! I am a vampire in a vampire world, hunched over & hungry. It is 2025. Are you bleeding yet? Do you want to? Vampires know love lasts forever. Know life is short & so so long. Know hunger only gets worse. Looks up at the sun and is burned by glory. The true vampire in a vampiric world is the naked one.
VII. ANYWAY In my dreams, I search for myself before I leave Crawl under the cottage where the spider must be Follow the hare tracks, swiftly swiftly, in the snow as it melts See the leopard in bed, yawning & waiting for me We go on a trip, my lover and I. He drives while the sea washes up, spins us out, course corrects as the sun sets. David Bowie puts on a show in the dark. We can't believe it, in our city! It is large & then it is small & then we are all a part of it & singing. It is almost Christmas time again, the new year again. I haven't moved past it. We sing into the night and away again. Bowie looks good. Alive. We have something joyful to sing about. Today, I am given A free coffee after the paid coffee, so I drink both. My Lover researches gumbo and I tie a key around my Waist. I listen to the blues more deeply than I could before. I find I cry at the sweetest songs, the ones where the singer is too in love or pretending To be, dressing it up for the most beautiful moment, Like gold, like diamonds, like a puff of smoke in the cold. Gone, gone to the pollution in the clouds with the rest Of us. Peace asks me what I need to be whole & if I can just pretend. Just imagine, it says, just tell your body you have it already. It says, Have some water with all that caffeine. Have some comfort in your soul as it Squirms. I tell Peace, I've been dreaming of this strange kind Of safety. Peace points, says, Are you grateful for it? When you wake up you still are safe, still are grateful. In the blue days, in the brown days, restless angels dwell in you. So wash your hands with the green soap & get the herbs in your eyes. Tulsi in your tea. Motherwort in your gut. Tell your lover you love this bleeding and he'll root for red. Tell your world you are ready for it and watch it dig, dig circles, circles in your sheets. There is a match lit behind Your eyes, always flickering. A friend is visiting & I am running Home. I bleed and bleed weak. My hormones restless too, up and down and deep and numb. Death squeezed through a narrow tube. The radio sings, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. We pray the ceasefire holds. My mustache grows. My mother worries. I listen to The drag queens as they flee the fire, saying, like when I throw up, you throw up. They pack their wigs & their shoes and leave the rest to burn. The sun glares orange in traffic out of my city. Cold. I'm going out. There is a show, my friends are going. There is a Vietnamese place in the East End we haven’t been To since the summer. Our coats pile up in the corner. My friends and I stay close. Music in my head Before I fall asleep. Anyway.
VIII. They're playing Plantasia at the bar, I hear it from the cobalt bathroom, reading the graffiti, taking my hair down, dressed as a mystery but feeling clear, dropping a silver ring on the wiggly streets, hungry but patient, always in my head, a voice saying, Don't pay for that.
IX. I blink & it’s January 20. I dream and I am right back where I was, kicking my back feet up on the mat and kicking up dust, making a mess, demanding dissatisfied, turning dirty napkins into white flags, sitting w/ myself too long in the distracted never-quiet hum of time-to-myself when I most need it. But I bump into these little walls all tight, the cage I toss myself in when I wanna be more than I am right now, tugging on the buds before we can see Spring. It comes back to Death after all, like Joan said, more free than I've seen her be in a season. I know Time as a two-faced thing, a mask, a contradiction in brotherhood. I want to learn to move at the speed of my whims. What I become chained to is this slowness, this stagnancy that I gave into while I was young. I became enchanted in all the ways a body can change all on its own, all the ways a body can move, all the ways a will can bend. A spirit becomes quieter when the colors of our imagination fade - how dreams are less vibrant the less awake we are. Color comes when we take in the world and believe it. I am sorry to my words but I know the truth can be told in countless ways. Truth demands to be looked at, even sideways, in colors and cramps. I’m back to black ink and pushing down too hard. I imagine the paper soft like skin. I try to loosen what gets packed down at the root of me. Digesting deserving into fucking compost.
Oh, and the sun shines bright on me! She wants to see the snow dance! I am parked in a familiar temporality. I am parked with the heat on just outside my city. I make paying attention to life my only job, chosen by God like an animal to watch this world for a while, from this exact perspective that I will die w/, changed a thousand times over before I kiss the mud, in a thousand mouths before I become soil. Eucalyptus branches thwack something soft in the sauna and the softness slugs off like gossamer feathers, our youth always rubbing and rolling off like red, red clay. In the winter, you can find me steamy, melting like a witch, moving slow, at a liquid pace. Mercurial and curious. I trust the electricity of me, I'm just moving it south for a while. A lava lamp inside me, spiraling out funhouse freak out in the winter, always swimming. I led a small caravan through the snow last night, slow and calm like that, leading my friends home & hoping. I remember to move w/ kindness towards this body, this body that has learned to love sweetness and is still practicing it - ernest ma, like you showed me! X. At 30, moving my body Is like an exorcism. I think about creating performance art around it, stretching and moaning with my head to the ground, stretching something out of me while staying exactly the same. I imagine telling the class, When the stars leave your eyes, start massaging your jaw with your thumb, right to left through the skin, skeleton to skeleton, until it relaxes, until your hips open, until something sheds, until your lover's hands are on your back pushing, helping the way bodies know how, soft and deep. Remember Care is not a test, it is a practice.
XI. I want to ride the waves of Desire & find myself always alive and laughing in the sand I think of how, culturally, waistlines drop when we need to breathe I think of Willem Defoe's shoes in Nosferatu You know what's actually vampiric? The tax season. I'm going to New Orleans about it. I'm overstimulating my senses about it. I look for joy to replace the anger, the wanting, the fear about it I see a blue jay at my window
XII. WORKSHOP 13: SOAP High in the bathroom again Thinking about soap, thinking I prefer the bar in the shower & liquid by the sink. I want it To smell like something green. I opt for soap with a scratch, a Scrub, something that digs While it cleans. I don't shave. I don't overwash. Life gets on me. Life sinks in. I am greasy & Brown before I know it, this muddy Heart oozing right outta me. I've been trying to clean softer, Learning from others who say, You don't have to scrub so hard. You are organic. Cum and shit Organic. Dirt and mud organic. Organic like the potato is organic, Alive like that dog is alive! Friends and lovers in front Of you, organic! & you touch Them with kindness, don't you? I look at the world these days & I feel myself hunted & easy To sniff out. I admit, I've spent years of my life trying To scrub out what will never leave Me. There are some bugs I'll never See, feeding off of me. There Is water included in my rent Thankfully. I know someone in The next room who loves me. I write from the smoke side Of the fire, where I am filthy And forgiven. Where I am Unfiltered & unfinished, Yes, Filthy, this body that gets Home late and mutates. I float on the world today All liquid. It erases as it has Always erased, heavy black Lines & bullet holes. We try to Mourn all together like bubbles Circling the drain, tempestuously Deciding what stays & what Gets washed away. We're all Watching now, committing our Beautiful crimes under burning Skies. We will again wash feet In rivers after we wash them in Floods. Side by side hopefully. Shore to shore hopefully.
XIII. Thinking probation thinking possession thinking precedence all precious now, feels more possible now. We are romantic and moving our furniture around, opening opening. XIV. The evil of asking for what you want The evil of loving what you love In effort, don't run. J says, Even when weird shit happens, I still laugh We are cleaning the apartment before friends move in. We are together, sincerely listening to Que Sera Sera I’m lying on the floor, cleaning her door so carefully. I look forward to walking through it again & again.
XV. It's almost February again & my naivete Is showing. I am showing, or my softness Is, showing you my belly. It is easy like This. I am used to pretending I'm easy, Pretending I don't feel guilty for always Taking what you want to give me. Older By the day. The snow falls like it used to. I am feeling my age, no longer so afraid Of the cold, swimming in my world like a Liquid dream. My body knows When you dream of me. I run away w/ Your fantasies of me - every one of them, Every one of you. I came here to be naked On stage. I know the power in it. I know what The spotlight can do. I only play a devil for you, All in red. Glory, glory! These fucking plastic Tabis in the Nearly February snow! This winter So far, so dry. I was almost feeling safe with it, Almost careless in the collapse, almost enjoying The unpredictability, the unusual warmth, As if we threw a lasso around the sun (We did, we did!) & pulled him to us like a old lover. I’ve learned To love even the cold, now. I still sweat when It's cold. I can relax my shoulders in the spotlight Of the snow. I can drive slow. I can get drenched Alone & laugh alone. I know what alone really is, Or I'm romanticizing it again. I treat this life as a Prayer, or I'm sexualizing it again. The dirt is Damp and soft again below the freeze. My feet Are where they belong. My body catches ice & Turns it to tears. The earth takes a great big gulp, A cold, cold one like in the middle of the night, One that freezes your teeth. The one you needed. You drink half-asleep. You hang over lover Half-awake. Moon on skin through the window. Woke up thirsty. I am thirsty now on my Lonely Weekend, the first one in a while. One day Near wasted and the next, something to look Forward to. February for real, saying Find a way, find your way, find a way 11:01 Jan 31, 25
This entry is a part of my Nightmares & Morning Pages series, where I write every day and share the good stuff. Subscribe to keep up with me & share what you like (please).
My messages & chat are open for inspired journal prompts or anyone who wants to pick apart the world with me. Catch you on the next go around 𖦹
G