“Wants”

this is because lj said so.

trying:

to be happy

seaglass

to feel safe in my own skin

a collage of arms around in a circle

sunglasses i won’t ruin

colors, the past and the future

safety in bits

between rooms of blue and gray

or should i call them boxes

less should

less negative

less i don’t want more i do love

what i already have

more art

doing art

watching/listening/reading art and just being in awe and just letting it fill me like sunset down the throat not worried or jealous or rushing just happy

sunset again at the top of masada

the ocean to stay like pretty child believing eyes

stop the hurt

stop the shame, guilt, terror

dream

then wake up and follow them

feel right, like i’m doing the right thing, being the right thing, that my body is safe and all right. preferably get validation from outside but yuck that’s gross i don’t want to need it

and maybe i don’t want it even

a new tablet to animate

to animate — bring things to life — who wouldn’t want to do that? and no, mom, i don’t yet know what form that comes in, because music can breathe life words can breathe life pictures unpictures all kinds of breathing of life can and none of us can breathe life like chlorophyll/god/G/s but

the human thing

to rest on a soft cushioned place in sun or maybe a little forest pocket carved out just for your childhood whims

reading with a cat in your lap

and being only here and there but not over there

and happy. mostly to be happy.

friday like eleven

there’s a perfect crocodile in my class

who has always energy, so much energy

she complains. she is very happy to be gay

and a sunflower twinge in her buzzcut. i wish

she could skim some of the excess like whipped cream

off a hot chocolate mug and give it to me

to wear as a bloodsugarrush white beard,

to stay alive through all of the things my body is expected yet

my mind rejects.

i’ve been looking at lists all day and

now it’s time to write something profound-

-ly soporific, so i can fall

asleep

walking with Salvador

it’s different.

where you used to see happy couples,

a million proofs of your utter and desolate alone

now you just see hands, holding

hands, mysteries of lips in conversation

that will never quite fall into step

and you don’t wish yourself inside

the empty couples, the glinting storefronts, the ghostly handprints

of fallen leaves, the trees as imperfect umbrellas

from rain that seems less cold, though you both

failed to bring an umbrella. and it would be nice, you think suddenly,

to share an umbrella — and then the words come to your mind —

next time. there will be a next time.

{/but does it make you codependent, the way his light revises yours/}?

you don’t see danger in every angle and curve,

cars zipping down the concrete toward the bowling pin of you,

men glancing with poisons writhing in their irises,

women looking away with intent to kill. you aren’t so afraid

to cross the street, to laugh completely

and you see a young girl on the other side

of the sidewalk, walking alone

and you realize now she’s the one out in the cold, watching you

with hungry eyes, unable to hear

the mysteries between the lips of you and the one you’re walking with

even if you yourself can’t make out all the words, you are closer to the fire

and will not freeze to death this time, though perhaps you will burn

tonight, running over in your head

all the banter, the giggles and silly faces

exchanged. not everything has changed, nor ever it will.

{& does it make you codependent, the way you starve after his light/

/as if when he falters you will wilt away?}

but what i mean to say is

when he walks with me

i feel less alone and more alive

my feet are really touching the sidewalk

and the valley path in the part of my hair believes it can touch the sky.

happiness

ally cat said, you touch me, i swear you’ll know

what happiness is. she didn’t say how

she wanted to be touched, or where

on the body. i’m lying flat now

bars beneath my back sparring with my spine to see which

can dig the deepest hole in my grave flesh.

the color of fireflies is pink when viewed through a telescope

the telescope is made of an off-brand soda bottle, glass

paris-tapestried with flatworms from the parts of the sea

so sunspilt they speak aloud. but i don’t know

if ally really knows what happiness is

or whether her fur’s touch can transmit that knowledge

into dead-man’s-fingers, sea lettuce, sea breath.

& the cat who allows me to live in her domain

gets squirmy when i hold her too close to my heart,

hot beating thing asking, asking, asking

she cannot give, so she flips over and bites

until my grip gives instead and she lands on the floor

and stalks away. but when she hunts my bare feet

across the living room floor, i feel so loved

it is embarrassing to be inside my head when everyone else has left

and the eye sockets are gushing water,

strange.

so much so much joie

like the sound of whipped cream (that’s never been whipped)

sighing out of the bottle into flowers

(the island of sheets floating atop my mattress)

so much so much joy

i hardly can focus

which is a good thing ’cause if i could

i think i’d turn into the cars that get chopped up in the cartoon about “worthless”

see the lines of my lines turning into loud outside the lines

spilling over unwanting

what if i ruin it

wish it could stay

you could stay

please

se déménager/to displace onself

(English translation below.)

Un coquillage évidé, évidemment, c’est bien meilleur

qu’un palais déjà peuplé

— que ce soit de gens ou d’escargots. —

Une personne évidée, profondément, ça manque de cœur

ce qui va bien mieux pour ceux qui ont bien marre

de cette chaleur que l’on appelle faussement

le bonheur.

Désamarre-toi de tes rails, l’enfer n’est pas

les autres

que

lorsque tu demeures

proche de la terre.

Mer, prends-moi en tant que sœur

évide-moi, je crois que ça sera

bien, bien meilleur.

English translation:

An empty seashell, obviously, that’s much better

than a palace already populated

— be it by people or by snails. —

An empty person, profoundly, that lacks heart

which goes much better for those who are quite sick

of this heat that they falsely call

happiness.

Unmoor yourself from your rails; hell is not

other people

except

when you stay

close to the land.

Ocean, take me as a sister,

empty me, I believe that will be

Much, much better.

Notes:

1. “L’enfer, c’est les Autres” is a quote by Jean-Paul Sartre from Huis clos, an existentialist theatre piece. (see French Wiki article here)
2. S’amarrer is the pronominal verb for “to moor (oneself)”; I just really liked the sound of “se désamarrer” so I made it into a word for this poem. It reminds me of desamor, a word I have seen in Spanish song lyrics (ex. “Dile al amor” by Aventura) and that I think we need in English and French as well. “Dis-love??” I’ll keep working on it.
3. In French, the past participle évidé means “emptied, made empty, gutted, sacked…” It sounds like it has the same root word as évidemment, which means “obviously.” But I am not educated enough to know whether they are faux-amis or whether they are really etymologically related. If you know, do tell!
4. Mer is French for “ocean/sea” while mère is French for “mother.” The two words sound exactly the same to the ear. I do not think it is an accident.
5. En avoir marre is a French familiar expression meaning “to be sick (of something)” and happens to include the same-sounding marre as the one in s’amarrer (although they are not from the same etymological root, as far as I know.) (see French Wiktionary entry here)

Image credits in order of appearance/sources des images dans l’ordre d’apparition

“Vlora is the second largest port city of Albania, after Durrës. Geographically, it has a coastline on the northern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, the Adriatic and Ionian Sea, which forms the Bay of Vlorë.” By Desarashimi1 – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63201247

“Vypin or Vypeen is one of a group of islands that form part of the city of Kochi, in the southwestern Indian state of Kerala. It was a magnificent golden hour on the shores of Vypin beach.. I saw this shell and captured using my Iphone 5s.” By Sannxavier (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

“venta ambulante de caracoles gigantes de mar en camino empedrado de Cartagena, en castillo San Felipe.” By Franciscokarriere (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

gently

enough that the quivering glass-mouse-heart

on the tip of your finger

sighs into an even rhythm,

a ripple

in the feather-pond

of conversation, a music

enough to change the air without disturbing it

or changing anything really. and when the leaves

that you’re not strong enough to hold back

in time will change color and yield

to winter, and when the clouds

that you can’t reach high enough to stop up

will wring heaven’s dishwater down

upon our heads,

still you & i will not be lost:

two islands abed in a creamy sea,

laughing, splashing each other with tides:

strong-hewn, yet crashing each

on the other’s shore only

gently

Image credit:

“Spume created by the passage of the cruise ship Norwegian Dawn in the waters of the Caribbean.” By Captain-tucker – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6303045

Joy

Noun, oft. forgotten by grid-classed students between the ages of 5 and 25 years:

The simple hyper-pleasure of one’s eyes skiing a slide of words in sentences on pages of a book that does not devour, but sprinkles seeds of opal-apple trees that blossom in the gut of the mind branchia nucleating towards the ever-moving sun of a sandwich of paper and worm-paste that can be reinstated on a shelf, piled over with required readings and tiny Hungarian porcelain women, suffocated by alphabetic bookends, and still can be unended, still can spark a sun inside one’s mind, a reminder between the steel bars of literary criticism and the monkey wrenches of current squander that there is more to literacy than this; that letters can join hands and fins and crepuscules and together create something greater than the sum of a teacher’s paycheck, gridded, flat, dark, unchecked by what is sunlit.

Bubbles

water-wing my helpless arms

into air, over cars, patterned cities and giant clocks

fizzle in my cheeks and burn my heart – such furious lemonade

such heights and views, such lightness! Yet I loathe

the love-drifts the bubbles create in my jubilant cells

for knowing they will pop before soon,

leaving only soap.

Image by Jeff Kubina – Bubbles, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3425864

Death of a Rainbow

In the midst of walking from library to transient book-bound nest,

Smack in the middle of blank-faced winter trees and puffy coats trailing dogs and how will I get all this done and you said the wrong thing on Monday,

Like a gods’ intermission through it all penetrates this sudden upside-down melon rind in the sky, shining with colors, blending with tart and sweet harmony. A rainbow.

So I stand in a little-used corner of the sidewalk, so I can stand forever without blocking anyone’s busy bustle, and I stand and I watch the arc-en-ciel just be. Tracing the crisp trails left by rain’s fingers in the tear-eyed fabric of the sky, pulsing and blooming like a sundress, and the old brick roofs squinting reachingly for this architectural perfection they will never surmount, above and below and around them and really nowhere at all.

And I stand on the sidewalk’s dirty armpit, and I wrap my furry blue arms around myself because there is no one there to do it for me. And I wonder what it would be like to stand here and watch the rainbow being a rainbow, with someone next to me who also didn’t mind standing in the sidewalk’s armpit in the midst of a moving mist of transient schleppers, and just being still for a moment. And I wonder if anyone is looking at me, thinking I am weird for wasting time this way.

The clouds move like cupped palms behind the arc. Starting from the smooth curved peak, it slowly dissolves into the blue-torn sky. Like acid caressing down and down the pillars of some falling utopia, softening the soft gem-tones to nothingness in air. The two feet it stands on trench farther apart it seems, separated by so many brick roofs and misty backpack-bustlers and twiggy trees. The rainbow is dying.

The death of a rainbow is not too upsetting to watch. It’s not like the death of a chicken or a librarian or a sad essay you dropped in a puddle in concrete. That’s because a rainbow isn’t concrete. It never achieves realness, so it can never be obliterated. It is in your eyes, in the rain, in the physics, in the sea of molecules you drown in and suck dry and replenish through the nose without ever realizing it. And as the rainbow dies the death of a rainbow, before my eyes, I start walking, knowing, when I get to the right place, I will find another rainbow, or another way of looking at my rainbow. You can’t possess a rainbow, so you can’t lose it. But no one can take it away from you. Unlike salesmen, cells and stars, death is just another breath in the endless joyous life that is the life of a rainbow.

Image credit: By Danesman1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23363888