the time breath forgot itself

“If there is something to desire,
there will be something to regret.
If there is something to regret,
there will be something to recall.
If there is something to recall,
there was nothing to regret.
If there was nothing to regret,
there was nothing to desire.” 
……………………………………….Vera Pavlova.

Dear Rebel,

So much of this is about persistence. Did I tell you about the time I forgot how to breathe. I awoke on a Saturday and my chest was sore like April in mourning. I googled: steps to take when breath is forgotten. Videos and imagery emerged. Yoga poses. Lots and lots of kundalini. Some recipes for tinctures and toxin-reducers. Am I housing foreclosed energies that are tying up my lungs into suffocated pauses?

Name one thing I regret: letting that ring rust away from  my finger. Call out the first sounds I heard this morning: steam and persistence of cold. What happens when we recall: lost time. You called yourself pregnant and I told you about the time(s) I thought I was too. Last year, I miscarried my mind. This year, I may find myself giving birth to a mountain; how many stretchmarks will add themselves to my body from that push.

Rebel, in a room full of poets, I was reduced to a stereotype. In a room full of metaphors and freestyle’d verse, I was called dirty and abused. Sometimes we have no idea who sits beside us and the routes of survival.

I used to desire the wrap-a-round of somebody’s fingers into mine. I used to desire monogamy and breakfast. I used to regret my inability to close doors and keep them locked. Now I desire music and tuned colors. Now I regret not wearing sturdier boots.

Rebel, I still think about that yurt and the ways in which bodies can resemble this portable dwelling. We can airlift our bones anywhere. We can escape this cold and travel toward the moon or dig our way around it. I’ll bring the paper, percussion and manuals on how to breathe. I’m still gathering.

just stay.

“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.” ………Virginia Woolf.

So, the writer looked out the window where glass froze into a shocked moment and all the kids were forced indoors and asked to read against the ember and the humans panicked because there was nothing left to do but shiver and chap but the writer remembered that imagination lifted enough weights to build a fire just out of memory.

the bone structure of yesterday.

“you’ve got to burn
straight up and down
and then maybe sidewise
for a while
and have your guts
scrambled by a
bully
and the demonic
ladies,
you’ve got to run
along the edge of
madness
teetering,
you’ve got to starve
like a winter
alleycat,
you’ve go to live
with the imbecility
of at least a dozen
cities,
then maybe
maybe
maybe
you might know
where you are
for a tiny
blinking
moment.”

—–Charles Bukowski, from Bone Palace Ballet: new poems

Where you are may include obscurities but if the footnotes are still attached, one may find clarity in what is further explained.

Where you are may be damaged or sprained.

Where you are may require a chest x-ray or formal apology.

Where you are may include a defend of language and after all the booze has been broken into, you may mumble out: ‘you’d be surprised what stalks inside bodies’.

Where you are is a desert in the west of what is central. You thirst for articulate shoulder blades and coffee.

It was only yesterday, when you offered up your waist waste. It was intimate only because you read that poem but in all of your nude, you realized that line breaks and italics can be far more intimate than exposed bones. A spectator will call this a rough-up, when you finally come to terms with the discrepancies on your body and come out about what is no longer true about you. And it’s ok if you decide to forego political vocabulary and just call yourself human from now on. Where you are is forming. 

unfurnished dust traveling through tumbleweed

“How you love another person might be a reflection of your relationship to God or the world itself, not to the other person, not to any other person, mother, father, sister, brother. Untrusting? Suspicious? Jealous? Indifferent? Abject? These feelings may be an indication of your larger existential position, hardly personal. And the heart is an organ of the soul, in such a case, not the reverse.”   –Fanny Howe
Reference this as a pilgrimage. Gather up leather knapsack but if such a contraption does not exist, prepare the turquoise one given to you by the one who exhales bits of sea glass. Fill it with spiritual remorse, muted sounds of love-making, womb of peace-offerings, reflection of space. Walk to nearest planet where library of crumbled books beg you to put them back together with spit and ink. If such a location does not exist, walk to nearest bodega and purchase a lemon, plastic bottle of honey, and tweezers to pick out the particles of sad hunting through your organs. How do you walk. With hands playing hide-n-go seek in pockets or do they sway like winter’s wind at your side. Do you hop or hunch. What leads you to look up. Write a haiku about the last time you loved:

similar to traf-

fic light, when one is color-

blind and cannot see

 

All these noises are a reminder of the first one. The first time. Or the third time. And all these feelings were gathered on that walk that lasted two or three decades and in your pockets, you picked up moss, mosquito bites, grey, techniques on how to kiss, several steno pads, half of a butterfly, two addictions, an allergy, almost-death, almost-marriage, exhaust fumes, a newspaper dated tomorrow, an over-priced cellular phone plan, champagne mangoes, a dog, a scar, paper, another scar, someone to eat dinner with, a ring which has since rusted, salt.

Before you got here, you were over there. And over there was (maybe) when you were at your happiest or hungriest. Where you need to be is where you are going. So go there.

where were you before you got here.

“A liar can reproduce the feeling that a wilderness does. In Sufism, ‘the pupil of the eye’ is the owner of each member of the body, even the heart, and each part becomes a tool under its lens. It is in and through and with the pupil of the eye that the catch locks between just-being and always-being. The less focused the gesture, the more true to the eye and the heart it is. You are progressing at one level and becoming more lost at another.”       –Fanny Howe.

Here, I move forward. From this distance between gender of collarbone and gender of calves, I am noticed. I notice.

Everywhere in this body, trees. And all the branches that curl around me attached to the others are not attached to me.

All this skin– that will soon be paper– drips of rain and afternoon excursions. Sap replaces blood. Grass is my footwear.

I am itchy, but wait for a darling poet to lean against me, and rub out my knots.

This quest for love has gotten me lost again. This map is torn at the corner and missing a slice of middle america.

I’ve used my passport enough times to understand how to present it.

I’ve been hired as a muse. I get paid to read poems and _________ .

How many clicks of heel or appointments of analysis or carvings of life into flesh to prove containment of love for myself.

I asked them to fall in love with me again but my letter got lost and they keep moving further and further into the wild. There is no internet access in the ocean.

Meditate ten minutes every mo(u)rning, then fall asleep from the germs housing a riot in your body. Awake eight days later to lunch of salt-water diet and handkerchiefs.

“For some persons, meditation, contemplation, prayer indicate that there is an emptiness already built into each body and it is that which (paradoxically) makes them feel at home in the cosmos.”     –Fanny Howe.

How not to get used to all this. Stop reading local newspaper and internet scroll-downs. Stop passing by handsome humans without asking them for coffee. Make the first move sometimes. Live inside present-tense, realizing the past can still guide you but does not have to define you. Where there is empty can be filled. Do not wait for another to fill it. Every breath is a possible movement toward self-kindness and forgiveness. This body does not have to be labeled. It can gather up a respective blur from each intentional push away from gender-normativity. And when love is found, they will appreciate the way your bones articulate their political movement. There is no such thing as stopping. Everything continues…..so continue on.

nothing compares to you, a poem.

this poem is for all the ones who let me love them and the one(s) I still search for.

Here is an experimental poem I’ve been working on. Spliced in a bit of Prince as well. And my uke.

I think about love so often, I wonder if it is the reason my lungs have recently staged a collapse. Now, I own an inhaler, offering up steroids to my breath canal. I am still searching for my voice and love and ways in which I can understand both.

kind of like eggplant

Every time we’d walk beside the ocean, she’d find a rock shaped like love. I was beginning to think they waited for her, coughing their way out from the coiled salt water.

Last night, over an Autumn spiced cupcake, the three of us spoke about love. He told me about the last time and the way clocks lost their meaning when he was with her. Sometimes you meet someone and they grab your hand and the sensation of the shape of their skin pleasantly bruising yours feels like it should be hung in a museum. Feels like some scholar should be studying it because so often we hold onto things that we forget the names of and when you touch something that audibly calculates every cell and freckle on your body, something is happening. 

I think I am in love with my memories.

What happened is this. I got dressed. I walked outside. The rain was hunting the ground with bullets of ice. I have been trying to turn left more recently. A lover once told me to keep my mind fresh, change your patterns. Walk away from routine. Find a new way to get to where you always need to be.

After my left, I make a right and keep walking. This route is much quieter. I hold the hand of the ghost who climbs beside me. They smell like old books and thyme. We slide over patches of winter. I try not to think about the time we picnic’d on a railroad. When the rocks climbed beside my bones. You wouldn’t stop speaking about geometry and hot rolled steel. Do you remember? We ate with dirty fingers and it was either summertime or winter, but what mattered is how each bite felt like a photograph.

What if love is really just a sound and we’ve all been mispronouncing it and no one is left to tell us the proper form.

He asks me if I am capable of love and I hesitate telling him that my previous lovers would probably answer that as a no. But I say yes.

What is left but to turn around and rewrite a poem interrupted by music. I repeat the same three chords on my ukelele and belt out a Prince refrain, later covered by O’Conner. Sometimes love is taken away and other times, when you thought it was there, it really never existed. So maybe there is no answer to what it even is. It can be difficult to call or classify. Kind of like eggplant.

push. force away. drive out.

The first time I pushed you away was on a Wednesday and everyone kept talking about the sun and its entropy. You were not too wooden because I pushed my way through. As a courtesy, I sucked out every single splinter from all your years as a hummingbird and I think it all derived from that first time you noticed me notice you noticing me.

The next time was Autumn. Too much wine dove into me like an aggressive Olympian with too much spring and muscle. Is one ever ready for that kiss that does not need to be directed. Is one ever ready for the moment one’s body is accepted even in its pothole’d-caution taped-crime scene investigation? There must have been wind because you knelt down to pick up leaves, newly catapulted from nearby trees. You took a needle and thread, which you always kept in your right pocket, and sewed these leaves to me. Called them my wings. Told me this wind could lead me anywhere I wanted to go. I chose your hands.

There was that time we slipped on a rainstorm. The last time. We never believed in umbrellas or boots. You fed me drops of cloud blood and we ate meals of dandelion roots. You hated that I was a hippie, until you became one and you loved the knots behind my knees until you stopped.

Love never remains when fear is much stronger. To be ready for another, one must be ready for one’s self. These breaths are meaty and congested. This chalk outline has rusted. So how about now? How about this one? When do you really know that it is safe to take down the warning signs? To let go. To give in. To be at peace with an other.

how to be alone.

Thank you, Rebel, for reminding me the beauty of one’s own strength that comes from being alone.

“Society is afraid of alone. Like lonely hearts are wasting away in basements. Like people must have problems if, after awhile, nobody is dating them. But lonely is a freedom that breathes easy and weightless and lonely is healing if you make it.”   –Tanya Davis.

Wherever you may find yourself: in a town of less than 8,000 where breaths freeze against windows into oxygenated icicles or one in 8.3 million where the buildings are so tall, you can barely see beyond the door frames. Loneliness exists in crowds and in rooms full of only you. Loneliness exists underground and flying above clouds. Shared meals can be lonely and so can celebrations.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and books written in a foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers which cannot be given you, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then, gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” –Rainer Maria Rilke

Why must I exist like this?

Can’t I just ignore the bother of my bones?

If I stop looking into my reflection, will I forget about the stranger living inside?

What makes me a poet?

What if I’m not the poet I told you I am?

How can I lift weights to grow muscles in my heart and strengthen my scars into fierce survivors?

Have I lost one more chance at love because of because of all those times I pushed it away?

Will I ever accept my gender?

Now that I’ve spoken on the discombobulation of my body, how do I proceed?

Even though it’s clean, I still fear my blood as though it is an enemy; why?

How do I trust another to accept the disrobe of my body?

How do I trust myself to accept the disrobe of my body?

Does this ever get easier? Or will I ever understand why/how I have remained so long?

 

If I can just hold onto these words, like hands, keeping me safe and balanced. This language will help me to cross the street. These letters will dine with me at night and read alongside me. This dialect will be my guide. My musical accompaniment. This loneliness is my band-aid, preparing every part of me to heal so that when another enters, I will be ready.

 

 

 

 

Dear Elizabeth.

I recently learned that you kicked out one of your students because she was exhibiting strange behavior. You told a thirteen-year old girl with visible sadness and markings of warning signs not to come to school. Since when do elementary schools have a policy that pushes out the mentally ill?

When I was fifteen, I rubbed Plath and Dickinson into my skin. Could not compare how I felt with the others around me. So, I wrote. Carved poems into my notebook. Carved letters and lines into my skin. No one taught me how to hurt myself. It was a language I gathered with each collected tear drop. Poetry wound up [in many ways] saving my life, but it also turned up the volume to my invisibility.

Freshman year of high school, I read my first poem to an auditorium full of 13-18 year olds. I don’t remember the title, but it was so dark, the lights lost their balance and afterwards, teachers started worrying for my safety. This was the moment I realized how powerful words can be. I carried a book of Lou Reed’s lyrics with me and reread all the poems by Plath that made my skin feel like it was finally getting nourishment. The school guidance counselor started making appointments with me. The bloodied hieroglyphics on my skin were getting noticed. I stopped hiding.

Even in my saddest state, no one ever asked me to leave. When I walked out on classes because I needed to retreat, to lose myself against trees or carve out my grey into park benches instead of myself, no one stopped me. When I missed over forty days of classes because I needed to medicine myself toward something more safe, I was welcomed back without judgement.

Now, I’m the teacher. And I notice every student in my classroom and help them to feel and be present. I would never close the door on someone trying to learn. Especially someone having a difficult time remaining with themselves.

There is a school in Elizabeth, New Jersey that recently asked a thirteen-year old learner not to come back. I think that if every school pushed out those having a difficult time with living, we’d no longer have to worry about over-crowded classrooms. We’d also have a shortage of teachers and (probably) administration.

Kicking people out is not the solution. Giving them a safe space to talk is.

It has taken me almost two decades to manage and understand my sad. I have finally located the root, so now I work everyday to create and find safe spaces to translate it.

Elizabeth, New Jersey, I am disappointed in your approach to mental illness and unwillingness to look at this young girl as a wake up call. It is difficult to be alive sometimes; punishing someone because they are having second thoughts about it will only perpetuate these behaviors, not help to solve them.