Instructions

This is how you stay together:

tap your fingers against something

inane and ambiguous, something

inanimate

Linger in your memory

and let it whisper

against your skin like the silhouette

of a man in a photograph, a shadow

dark and drab and compromised

Pry out your language

shovel, pick-axe, bothersome hatchet-

any tool will do.

Just levy that stick and raise the roof

you are up on top of,

gleaming.

Some days will not be easy.

Some days won’t even be right.

Shoop, shoop

doo wah diddy

yakety yak

don’t talk back

This is how you stay together, this is how it stays so long:

don’t depend on the fragile

vocabulary built from silence

Don’t break out the bricks until

the cavity lets loose the gizzards:

heart, liver, anus and other visceral

organs

Rough, tough, tangled firm

Lay down against your lions, contrary

Let the drift outlast, lie fallow

Shoop, shoop

doo wah diddy

yakety yak

don’t talk back

This is the record you make:

of an event, of a smolder, of any simple

stilted sweep of the hip to a beat

Solid, unsanctioned

in tiny rooms with little sounds rasping against shrunk-up stones.

Your heart cannot get bigger, only

it does.

You bet you would

You bet he would

You bet the sky won’t be blue

He bets it will, he bets

he won’t, he bets

you would

Shoop, shoop

doo wah diddy

yakety yak

don’t talk back

He does it,

you do it,

loudmouthed,

in spite of each

other.

09.24.2009

from then

Your eyes live for splashes of light sinking

into wave, for

that instant when the water boils

so you know to throw the lure

to cast your arm

against the wind.

I'm flailing.

No good poems come from me.

I am not emptied.

I am not a vessel of light

just a husk of who we were.

In smaller moments I find

you on me, a finger here

slight touch there. I take it.

Legs like tree trunks rooted

firmly into your ground

never toppling, only undulating.

Sturdy arms never meant to row,

only cradle.

And yet they are too often

left circled

but vacant

like a lot on a street where weeds

grow over and smells of anise bloom against

the grit and grime of a city littered.

Those two blue storms, so grave in the recess of your brown

and set to narrow, they

trace the contours of a horizon, the impression 

of wind, the crevice between stacked rocks--

but never the stalled breath of a lover

the contrast of skin to skin to skin.

Still, there is comfort

in knowing the phases of the moon

which coincide with the tide

which shift to bait

your glance

this way.

05.19.2006

Sticking.

Here's the deal: I quit smoking two and a half months ago. It's a struggle for me every day not to smoke. My boyfriend seems to have an incredibly easy time with it and it drives me crazy.  While I don't think I'll literally go and buy a pack of smokes every day, I long for it at least once.  And I can't help it. He's sick of hearing about it and I'm sick of not smoking.  

It doesn't help that so many of my friends are smokers. And the bullshit from the informational booklet included with the patches about "friends will be jealous that you managed to quit" is just that: bullshit.  I'm jealous that they DIDN'T decide to quit.

I keep having dreams about two things: smoking cigarettes and my dead step-brother Greg.  (He died in a drunk-driving accident; he was the drunk driving...).  I think about Greg periodically but it's not like he crosses my mind every day.  Over the past month, I've had six dreams about him.  Three where he was there and three where he was just... a presence.

Anyway.

I'm sick of not smoking but I'm sticking to quitting.

Snarky Stalkery Behavior and the Revelation of Youth.

Nate is camped out on the couch playing Skate on PS3.  I am bored and have trolled my usual ninernet haunts to no avail.  It seems that nothing has been updated in the fifteen minutes since last checked.  How rude.

Jesus, that led me down a ninernet avenue I rarely visit: looking up old boyfriends/friends/people i never want to see again, but feel compelled to "check out" thier current lives.

Subsequently, I feel much better about my own.

For instance, how on EARTH did I ever date this guy?! 

 

(For the record, I did not date the pirate. Though perhaps I would have been better off if I had.)

It's hard to believe that I was so head-over-heels for Mr. S that I lived in a one-bedroom, cat-shit-smeared-on-the-walls, scary-child-beating-neighbor apartment with two other people (an epileptic and his mother, who liked to knock me on the back of the head with her crutch) just so we could "stay together".  This is the guy who broke my heart by getting back with his ex-fiancee?  This is the guy that caused me to pine for months and months? THIS GUY!?

Stalking him provides me with an excellent example of why I am SO glad I am no longer eighteen.

Seeing new pictures of this old flame has caused me to completely re-evaluate my time in Virginia/D.C.. Perhaps I was blind? Perhaps I was just young? Please let me blame all of those bad choices on youth.

I suppose I could go to that old faithful, fate, and say, "Had it not been for Mr. S, I would never have found Nate."  But that's bullshit.  "Meant to be" is bullshit.  The world is full of coincidence (call it a divine plan if you please) and sooner or later, I would have met him.   (For chrissake, we were both in Alameda. There's a cap to the number of years you can live there and not meet the whole island.)  It may not have been the perfect circumstance to fall in love, but I would have met him.

But still, had it not been for Mr. S, Nate might be playing Skate (for the last FOUR hours) on some other girl's couch. 

The only reason I am still bored is because there are not many old boyfriends to look up on various social networks.  (Likely the only disadvantage of being with Nate for ten years.)  Also, the other people I want to stalk are too damn hard to find. I'm still in contact with everyone else from whom I'd like an update.  (Being "friends" with the person, even if you're not that into actually being irl friends with them, is a great way to subtly stalk them and make snarky comments about them to others who do not know said person, thereby releasing the risk factor of aforemetioned snarky-stalkery-behavior.)

Left to my own devices, at this point I would usually crack a beer and turn on the tube. However, I must remain responsibly sober if I still plan to A) go down to http://oaklandlakefest.com/ today and B) check and see how the store is doing.  Too bad, so sad.  I'm interested in seeing some Hiero live, but I'm also lazy.  I don't want to lose my dope parking spot.  Walk?  Then I have to walk home!  Multiple hills deter me from bipedal transportation.  See: Elizabeth: dictionary definition of lazy.

Hunger might motivate me. I am a little hungry.  Nothing on the schedule for dinner tonight, so I've got to get creative.  Perhaps I do need a corn dog, some funnel cake and a little festival action to brighten my mood. 

holding on to it all

If you and I could float

on the sea

buoyed by a rubber raft

ice all around

neither one would clamor

about “who bought this” and “when

did we pay that”

 

mostly the argument

would be about getting to

higher ground

 

no one wants to leave

what is perfectly behind them

and perfectly ahead--

only just now perfected

 

the pleasantries of “what the fuck”

colliding with “just sit down”

 

I literally

Cannot hold

Onto everything

All at once

 

 

 

 

Sour Pickles

 

The why is because

It has to get done:

there is no one else to do it.

You won’t leave it, won’t liken it to a fruit:

ripened peaches, soiling air with

that sickly sweet scenario.

 

The why is because

Your mouth flaps around like wind on a tent

bright and loud

and brushing and soft

The why is because

there isn’t anything else for you to do--

 

--this is it,

watching peaches

--this is it, cog in the wheel

--This is it, commerce

--this is it, liquid turned to shiny bracelets

‘round the wrist, tinkling like chimes

 

The why is because your pickles

sour, your chicken dries, your eyesight fails, your child decays.

 

The why is because you read too much

(you read too much)

The why goes back to when

everyone else danced, drugged

limbs akin to cornstalks and presenting caterwauling cartwheels

down a hallway

 

the why is because every moment doesn’t matter

more than the next; complications in the simple and

simplicity in the complex like the stupidest stanza you ever saw. Dashed quality

in every sentiment abbreviated, like ampersands and semi-colons:

 

full throttle,

the why is

because it has to get done

and you are there to do it.

 

06.30.2009

Last published, August 2005

Oh, blogspot. How anonymous you are for me... as no one who cares a wick would ever think to check this.  You alone are my online diary, my unknown, my rarely visited but awfully explanatory little piece of the ninernet binary which makes up an infinitesimal portion of this world wide web.

I have to make my computer learn new words just to complete a paragraph without little dotted red lines underneath certain words; such as "blogspot".

Tomorrow is my birthday.  I'll be twenty-nine. Even typing that made me sigh a big sigh, and I honestly am unsure for the reason.  And then I re-read the blogs from four years ago; so angry and mad and horrified at life. I'm glad (even if it makes me crazy every damn day) for the job I have.  At least it isn't that old one.  I'm not on company time; I'm not searching for files so a judge can yell at me for looking shabby in her courtroom or a lawyer can misplace a file and tell me how I need to stay more organized.  I don't have a crazy co-worker who seems like she's out to poison every thing I value as good in the world.  I don't have to drive to a place where, underneath my feet, kids and near-adults play power games, beating, screaming, threatening and being threatened.  I no longer have to ride the bart, take the bus and walk up a hill just to get to a place to make me money.  I don't depend on someone else's misfortunes to make me my dollar- whether that misfortune was vast or slight.  So at least, this many years later, I've learned that my time is more worth more than the former.

The day after my birthday is also my grandmother's ("passed" aka died) birthday and the anniversary of my grandfather-(husband to said dead grandmother)-'s death.  So when I go for dinner on Saturday, I think I might bring my mom a little present.  A... this is a hard day but hey, at least you have me and i got you this awesome gift sort of present.  Plus the moms was away from the bay area for mother's day, so i'll have to double whammy it.

Going to the Monterey Bay Aquarium with some friends tomorrow.  Very excited for the sea horse exhibit.  Nate and I will wander around with Eric and Thereasa, and we'll point at tuna and say, "You're delicious."  It will be fabulous.  Last birthday in the twenties.  Next up, that dirty tune so many seem to be singing this year. Mmm, thirty.

La-di-da... that's about all.  Just something new to update this sadly neglected space.s