Dear Rebel…

I encountered a disemboweled ice cube between china town and the east village, but it was too expensive to bring home to brooklyn. I can no longer afford old things, because aged goods have increased in price and the new stuff is too much too. So I search for the discards….the free……the treasures in the trash….since that’s all I can achieve with what little I’ve got.

Often, when I find money on the street, I leave it there, knowing even though my wallet is mostly full of love notes and directions, there are others without even that.

An almost-lover I once had mailed me a book without her name attached. I couldn’t figure out who had sent it to me. By the time I realized who it was from, she was no longer accepting my phone calls.

An occasional lover sent me a different book, which I had a difficult time reading, but maybe I’m just not smart enough for Proust; what do you think?

The one I now love collects keys and coins; I collect guilt and memories, bruised like pocketed fruit.

Who should we put on that $10 bill, Rebel? I vote for Lidia Yuknavitch. Or Kathy Acker. Or Audre Lorde. And why stop at the ten dollar bill?

Rebel, I’m thinking about putting my words into melted copper and nickel; then, I can pay with my collection of syllables. As long as I read and collect more words, I will never be poor again. I will horde dictionaries and thesauruses. I will play Scrabble every night to encourage the long and obscurely short words. Then, we can collide again and finally find that yurt and live off the earnings of our speech.

dear rebel (with regards to dressing the dead)

Dear Rebel,

Here is what you asked of me. You asked me to think about love. Then a body without dressing. Then death. Then words to send this person out with.

I think of gauze. The word and the cloth.

I think of a handkerchief to sop up the salt coming from me. Dripping onto the body. Creating a reflection of water one could not possibly swim in, but a lifeguard will still be needed to catch the ones who try.

I think of a zipper. To hold in what tries to flee.

“Be still,” I will say, even though there is nowhere for a body to move when it is no longer living. “Be still as I dictionary your skin.”

[I use this noun as a verb because it feels more like an action to inscribe every word and its meaning onto flesh that may no longer breathe, but it listens. It may no longer respond, but it imprints.]

“Be still,” I repeat once more.

I think of blood. I think of all the blood I extracted from my body. Wasted it onto bandages and hiding places. Now, I can’t even donate what I’ve got; it’s too tarnished and tongue-tied.

I think of that time I went with a friend when she wanted to donate her blood. I was jealous that hers was better than mine. Afterward, she let me eat the cookie and drink the juice they gave to her. I still have that pin, shaped as a drop of blood, that she gave me after giving.

I think of my friend, the oil painter named Lindsay, who asked me what is really meant by “the one” when love is mentioned. She questioned the validity of a soul mate. I think we have many ones….the ones who mate with our souls in that moment. And when they are gone, we change. And when we meet another, they become the one for that time.

I think that some moments last thirty-seven years or just two years or just a few hours.

 

***

Dear Rebel, we are meant to write. We are meant to wake up writing. We are meant to wake up questioning this as well.

When I was in Nebraska, I thought about all the ways I’ve been hiding myself. I took drugs. I had promiscuous sex. I lied. I denounced. I painted my skin in toxicity in order to scare away the ones who wanted to breathe against me. In Nebraska, I tried a different pattern of breathing. In Nebraska, I learned how to play brave. In Nebraska, I dictionary’d my soul.

I also think of music in the key of C minor.

privacy.

How many people have the key to your innards?

Dear Rebel,

I have given away my yell. Do you know how often I swallow seeds made of improper chokes? What‽ Let me pause a moment and rip up the shards of filament groping my tonsils.

 

Rebel, no one can be trusted these days, so I must speak to you in metaphor. Therefore, I’ve disconnected the wires holding me down like a well-trained dominatrix. These wires once connected me to you. And the one in Florida. And the music maker somewhere in Canada. And how is anyone going to know what I am eating now or angry about?

 

More importantly, how will I know how LIKED I am if there is no thumb beside my words to press and remind me I am good. 

 

Rebel, I play my ukelele and title chords I don’t know the names of. One is titled G-invert. Another is called C misbehaves and walks, slowly, out of the room. 

 

Rebel, when I play these chords, no one is listening but the mice hiding inside the walls of this Brooklyn apartment. Or the 3 year-old who lives with his folks on the top floor and he just may knock and ask to sit beside me. What I am trying to say is that this music is echoing like instrumental dust into my rooms and no one is telling me to continue. No one is telling me I am out of tune.

 

So…..if we do not share our latest WIN or fancy MEAL, does it still exist? Did it really happen?

 

Rebel, how many friends do you have. Now, write that number down. Tell me their middle names. And can you list their allergies and what pills they prefer. Do you know which ones used to be happy and which ones are visiting versions of “god” each week to find the answers? Now when you have that number down, how many of those friends have seen your home? How many of them know what keeps you indoors sometimes. How many have you shared a meal with or pot of tea?

 

We seem to be collecting friends these days. Last week, I overheard someone say:

I have 400 likes! And I’m nearing a thousand friends! Hashtag (#) LUCKY! (This was all spoken)

 

Rebel, I have a friend who lives in Minnesota who (sometimes) sits beside me when I poem; this friend is you. I have a friend in Brooklyn who has fed me when I cried so hard my body lost track of all its salt. It could only bend and barely stand. WAIT……

 

What defines “friend?”

 

Social media confuses us to believe a friend is someone who LIKES our outbursts. But how many of them rub our backs when we are engulfed in panic. How many will warm up a meal because rent removed all the money from skinny bank account and nourishment is just as necessary as breathing. 

 

Rebel, I told someone something and they told some others to get more LIKES and now I fear that this earth has turned into a giant game of telephone. 

 

Things are becoming twisted like intricate tree branches and perhaps I was born in the wrong time period. Perhaps I was meant to live in a time when privacy was encouraged, and not a hinderance from making “connections” with others.

 

Will I disappear if I stop pressing things onto computer screens?

 

Will people forget I am a poet? Will I forget I am a poet? Will the humans forget I am here?

 

Rebel, I am battling the war of privacy in my head. Here, within this screen, I feel ok. I know you are reading. And so is my Dad. And maybe my pen pal.

 

I promise never to include a LIKE button.  I want to remove the LIKE button and ask that you share words. Images. Questions. Or if you like something, let it push you outside. Let it call your friend so you can share your thoughts with them through voice contact. Let it tear out a piece of paper that you can fill up with your unraveled letters. 

 

We are spending too much time on these screens. And not enough time with the humans who give us something to respond to.

dear rebel, I’m turning off my tongue.

Someone told me that there is a chance that humans can be overexposed, so I seep out the iron and ink in my organs and allow my body to exist as a solitary stretch of invisible. I am going to let my spit go dry. Rebel, I left sixteen pounds of my bones on a stage in the west village on a friday when the moon was too shy to emerge from its overcoat of clouds. I broke a hip from the impact of silence after I placed seven hundred and twenty seconds of sounds on strangers’ laps. Then, on Saturday, my tooth fell out (OK, just a filling, but it still resembled the rest of me) from biting into the softest butternut squash and I worry that I am coming undone. Have you ever felt a peep hole housed inside a human? I met someone who looked right through me and then dug away at all my private passwords. Should I title this corruption or Sunday rendezvous?

lovers in past tense.

Dear Rebel,

My fourth lover has left the country. She has been traveling since I first handed her my weakest muscle over a decade ago and now I think she is getting closer to settling. The last time I traveled with passport and backpack, I was just getting over the Canadian. I was on a hunt for language that didn’t hurt when I spoke it. I wrote poems beside canals with the haunt of red lights in the nearby distance. I almost got arrested for possession for hash that time, but it wasn’t mine, nor did it taste my lips; we were just exchanging words for stanzas.

You are traveling over pages and memories. I want to know what it was like to see his tattoos and smell his distance. Do lovers change shape once they no longer belong to us. Or do they always belong to us? 

My seventh lover (not counting the ones that didn’t count) was difficult to get over. I ingested medicine cabinets and poetry books, slapped starvation on my tongue and called my collarbone a rail for many months until I no longer needed to think about the disturbance of breaths and bruises.

We mourn and mourn until suddenly we can longer remember what it felt like to hurt. Are you there yet. I am there.

I recently met a human who reminded me that there is no one way to approach someone.

And I wanted to retort: there is no one way to love. Each time is different because we all arrive with varying marks and allergies and desires.

Rebel, we love differently because we are poets. Our kind of loving simmers and boils simultaneously. Our kind of kisses pass through megaphones.

It never gets easier, but it can make more sense. Some love spends months or years trapped in a lost dialect that neither lover speak. I am finding that when you meet someone who has studied the rules and historical lineage of phonics, you can stop. That is the right one.

 

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.