an excerpt from my book “meant to wake up feeling”

Books are meant to be read! So, read this short excerpt from my book, “meant to wake up feeling“ and then, buy the book to read the rest!       (feel free to leave a review!!!)

 

from “zoned body”:

 

those are not freckles

but dust

from convulsing stars

what it is to lose

When I was thirty-four, I lost my mind. It had been ten years since the last time, and I found myself ransacking my bedroom for the map—torn up and burnt—which would guide me toward my bearings.

Outside, the air was gathering up its new identity. Its nametag of Winter had been removed and thrown away; it was now calling itself Spring. The yellow daffodils, though beautiful, were just confusing to me. All I could see and feel was emptiness.

The last time, which was not the first time, I was twenty-four.

The first time, which may have not been the first, was when I was newly sixteen.

I have lost my wallet once, dropped during a bike ride in Boulder, Colorado. But a considerate Samaritan returned it to me, several hours later. They knocked on my front door and handed it to me.

I lost my favorite red scarf somewhere in the Museum of Natural History during the first week of January. Then, I found it near the photo booth by the bathrooms. A few months later, I lost it for good somewhere in the halls of a community college.

Losing a mind is tricky. You can’t exactly retrace your steps or ask a friend to ask their friends to keep an eye out for it. You certainly can’t put up fliers or ask the subway conductor to make an announcement:

“EXCUSE ME, PASSENGERS, A LOST MIND, WEIGHING IN AT ABOUT THREE POUNDS WAS LAST SEEN IN CROWN HEIGHTS, BROOKLYN WEARING A NAVY BLUE SHIRT. PLEASE CONTACT LOCAL AUTHORITIES IF YOU LOCATE THIS MIND.”

When I lost my mind at sixteen, my mother found me. I was sliced up and unconscious. My mind slowly crawled its way out of my body. I was gathered up and sent to stay in a hospital for twenty-one days.

I was confused how I would retrieve my mind in a place that caused me to lose it even further. It grew blurry and the signal was weakening. I was around others that encouraged me to remain lost. I was given tiny capsules to swallow that slurred my mind into curious shapes. My appetite, that I coveted, was lost as well. It simply vanished, leaving me bony, translucent and weak.

Six years ago, I lost a brown, corduroy cap, which I had borrowed from my then-girlfriend. I left it somewhere between a thrift store dressing room and a bike ride throughout downtown Denver. That night, when I told her of this loss, she cried. It had been in her life for a long time, with memories stitched into the fabric, visible only to her. She asked me to go and look for it. By then, it was nighttime and all the lights had been turned off, but I jumped on my bike and began retracing my steps. I begged the moon to point me toward the direction of this hat, but it was barely a sliver of light that night. When I got home, we mourned the loss of her hat and slept in silence.

When I lost my mind at thirty-four, it was due to various factors colliding. It felt like a gang-bang of bad news. I had lost my partner, then my therapist, and the dark in me was growing like persistent ivy all throughout my body. I could feel my sense of direction weakening. Food, which once gave me such pleasure, was making me sick. I couldn’t chew. My skin was beginning to show imprints of my wandering mind. My white skin with old scars was turning red with new scars. My tongue was no longer being utilized and my spit dried up. I may have stopped swallowing; what was there to swallow?

One day, on my thirty-fourth year, I awoke deciding to no longer search for it. My mind was gone and I could feel myself slowly slink away, like a snake slithering out of its skin. But I was not looking to regrow anything. Instead, I was ready to disintegrate.

When I was somewhere between eight and ten, I lost a moccasin in a brook behind my best friend’s house that we weren’t allowed to wander in, so I couldn’t tell anyone of my loss. I can’t remember how I explained my arrival that night with one bare foot. I can’t recall if anyone even noticed.

When I lost my mind, no one asked me if I wanted help looking for it. People don’t tend to talk about this kind of loss.

I got it back. My mind. My skin of scars. No more new ones though. I’ve given up on the pills, so I’m free from the side effects. I’ve got my appetite and my voice back. I wouldn’t say I feel complete ease that I’ll never lose track of my mind, but I’ve hoarded enough maps to make sure I’ll at least find my way back to it sooner, if it tries to bail again.

(can you) LIKE this?

When I was a junior in high school, I liked a boy called G. I was too shy to ask him if he liked me the way I liked him, so I gave him my Enya CD before class one day, because I had overheard him saying he liked her music.

He smiled and took it, but never really said if he liked me or even the album and I have a scar on my right forearm from the day I drove to that park somewhere between where I lived and didn’t and cut my skin until I felt touched by something.

Grade ten in high school and I am told by my best friend that while he was in the gym locker room, a bunch of other boys were making fun of me. They said they wished I had just killed myself already and I began to wonder why my friend was relaying this to me. He said, “I defended you,” because he liked me, even though no one else did. Four more scars were born soon after.

First grade. A boy called D passes a note to me via three other people and asks me if I like him back. He gives me a choice: Circle YES or NO or MAYBE. I circle all three; even then, I had a difficult time making up my mind.

Nowadays, we are LIKED at least once a day, sometimes ten or thirty depending upon how often we ask through typed-up messages and photographs. We unravel our scars, dig them out like time capsules and put them up onto our computer screens, so that someone will press a button and deliver validation we’ve grown to thirst for.

Nowadays, we walk around with instant validation. All one has to do is post words and wait.

LIKE.

LIKE.

LIKE.

Two minutes pass and you’ve acquired three and then two more and suddenly your lack of employment or depleted bank account or untreated-but-diagnosed depression does not matter.

You. Are LIKE’d. Simply because you posted words above a button making it very easy for others to press it.

You tell people you have grown sick or gone to hospital or stopped eating or what you are eating or how you sit or how you lean or the delicate drip of your nose or who you are dating.

You tell people about what you just did or what you are about to do or what you plan to do next week.

LIKE.

LIKE.

Nineteen years of age, I am swallowing a boy’s body part that does not feel safe or comfortable in my mouth. He did not ask me if I LIKED this.

Year twenty-seven of living and I leave a place that I never recorded after my body is broken into once again and there is no button, but if there were I would not press it.

Seven years later and I try it out. I gather up some words like a bouquet of flowers stolen out of someone’s front yard. I take these words and thrown them onto a computer screen. And I wait. And I hold my breath until the first….

LIKE.

It feels good. Adrenaline of acceptance rushes through me and suddenly it does not matter how much I meant what I wrote. It doesn’t matter that I never spell-checked or fact- checked. All that matters is someone LIKE’d it, which means someone LIKE’d me.

And all my scars began to faint away or I pretended they had and it did not matter I was alone or lonely or hungry or still depressed. Someone pressed that button for me.

LIKE.

I take all these LIKEs and crush them up. I press down firmly to smooth out the hard bits. Like gristle. Suddenly, I’ve got a fine powder of LIKEs. I lean toward them as though about to whisper something worthy of a click to them. I get so close, I almost blow some of the LIKEs away. Then, I glide this dust toward my nose and snort them up like the drug it really is. I inhale. My chest beckons. My ribs climb themselves. I inhale every last drip of LIKE that exists and revel in the aftertaste of anticlimactic emptiness.

 

day 26: read (some more)

Reading a book is like being in a relationship. There are moments you do not want it to end, yet there are also times when you feel more than ready to walk away from it. There are disappointments, but also surprises. Sometimes, there are sequels, which just elongates the pleasure.

I’ve had entire summers dedicated to writers, unable to say goodbye to their language: Mary Gaitskill, Haruki Murakami, Charles Bukowski, even an orgy of Pablo Neruda, Kazim Ali and Hafiz.

It is easy to use the excuse: there is just no time to read a book, but time must be paved and watered.

When I read, I travel to countries and territories I may never get the opportunity to discover. I meet characters who help me to understand myself and the world around me. I read poems that expand my vision. Reading reminds me to always believe in magic.

Here are just a few great books I read this year and highly recommend:

Nevada (Topside Press)  by Imogen Binnie. Throughout this book, I felt like I was part of the bike gears turning over bridges as the narrator, Maria, traveled toward and away from herself. I was significantly blown away by this novel and the honest, funny and emotional writing of Imogen Binnie. After reading this book, I purchased, The Collection, which is a phenomenal anthology of transgender writers, including Binnie. I just didn’t want to let go of her yet.

Man Alive (City Lights Publishing) by Thomas Page McBee is a memoir exploring masculinity and a highly focused dissection of the past. It is poetic and brutal and exploratory. I found myself folding over the corners of pages in order to go back to his words. I even underlined some things, faintly, since it was a library book. This one I need to purchase, so I can reread and rediscover.

Prosperity, A Novel (Dog Ear Publishing) by Jenna Leigh Evans. I was blown away by Evans’s vocabulary and cinematic approach to the ways in which debt can be overpowering and (oddly) funny. It is beyond relatable, since I want to believe that everyone is slathered in some form of debt. The entire time I was reading this book, I felt like I was watching it. Her mind is so illustrative and she crafted a place that I could see in every scene, down to the color and smell of it all.

For Today I Am a Boy (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)  by Kim Fu explored the complex relationship of gender and culture. I fell in love with the protagonist, Peter Huang, and loved being a part of his journey away from and toward home. Kim Fu brings such dynamic characters together up until even the very end of this novel.

An Untamed State  (Grove Press) by Roxanne Gay has infiltrated my dreams and has sewed itself to my palm. I am forever changed by the horrific accounts of the protagonist, Miri. Roxanne Gay already had me with “Bad Feminist”. I fell in love with her frankness. Here, in this novel, she captivates my core. I feel bloodied and battered from the scenes she creates.To write that I could not put this down is not exact enough. Even when I put it down, I was reading it. I want to ask Gay: How did you leave these scenes while writing them? How were you able to move through the world (eat lunch with friends, watch a television program, sleep) with these images crafted by your mind and fingers. This book MUST be read.

Retrograde (great weather for MEDIA) by Puma Perl surprised me in such marvelous ways. I’ve been a fan of Puma Perl’s since moving back to Brooklyn almost five years ago. Her poetry is gritty, like rock-n-roll slurs of graffiti against the page. I’ve seen her perform many times and she slides her words out seductively and authoritatively. I have read most of (if not all) of her books and find that this collection shows such immeasurable growth that makes me an even bigger fan than I already was.

the pedestrians (Wave Books) by Rachel Zucker feels like a walk through the subconscious mind. This is what I imagine it might feel like to hold hands with another’s frontal lobe, interlocking fingers with mood and behavioral status. There is a saltiness to her prose. A desperation drenched in almost-stale tears. It is a unique experience to read a book of poetry and want to call it a ‘page-turner’, but this one definitely is.

Here (Mariner Books) by Wislawa Szymborska became my travel date on a long walk through Greenpoint, Brooklyn one day. I carried her words around and could feel the seep of her line breaks saturate my skin; her words drip. I feel full when I read her, like I’ve just eaten a meal full of protein and starches and my insides feel bathed. There is an optimism in her writing that also reveals a bit of loneliness as well.

day 6: poems out loud.

Here are two poems I read at Parkside Lounge at an evening celebrating the great poet, John Sinclair.

Several years ago, a poet said to me: Write the poem that will get you in trouble. So, I immediately thought about the first time. Freshman year of high school. I was still practicing Sylvia Plath’s name on my tongue. I was falling in love with Bob Dylan and Lou Reed and I had enough sadness to melt the sun into a puddle of tears. I read a poem of mine in front of a room full of strangers during a school assembly. Teachers who did not know me started worrying for my life. The guidance counselor called me in. Everyone worried about me and my safety. Do you want to hurt yourself? Do you have a plan?

I had no idea the power of words until that moment. I didn’t exactly get in trouble, but I did get noticed.

There was that time I thought I hated men, so I wrote a poem that would taint my breath for years. It was one of the first poems I ever read at an open mic. Strangers called me angry.

The one I wrote about the only boy I ever loved. It didn’t get me in trouble, but those words haunted my palms for years.

I’ve written poems that have outed my sexuality, my identity, various jobs I’ve accrued that I’ve left off resumes. I was never looking to get into trouble. Instead, I just wanted to feel heard. Like that first time at the assembly when finally people started to see me.

Words clarify the blurriness of our existence.

I smuggle poems all the time: in my pocket, against my hips, stuck to my cracked heels. I’ve swallowed so many that I have a permanent ache in my gut. I’m not looking to harass anyone’s eyes or brains. I’m only looking to cause a commotion with your one-way thoughts. I want to twist your mind into questioning what you think has only one answer to.

OK, maybe I am looking into getting in just a little bit of trouble.

a protest against plagiarism or citing sources of the body

Maybe there is no reason I did that. Anesthesia. Tobacco dust. When fire escapes. Exhaustion fumes from kissed range. You are in first grade and that boy with collapsed-syllables for final name turned around and forced his penis into your pupil.  Who did I become after that moment. Sarah McLachlan. Short hair. Harmonica against lips because breaths needed a place to escape into. Juggling jobs and genders. With barrette on left side above forehead, imprisoning chunk of burgundy hair, man still refers to you as sir. Ben Folds Five on repeat in room above basement on dead-end street. Fishmonger forgets you are a human with boundaries. Each time someone called my hair sobeautiful instead of brain as sobountiful. A need to overeat to cover up the slashes. Hippie strokes forearm and calls it an art project. That time we showered together for the first time but it was the third time and sometimes drugs remain in bodies long enough to blur the ability to remember. Remember? Warm orange juice during a snowstorm in November in Queens. See page almost 16 and refer to not-quite 25. A room two floors below rooftop in Boulder where someone stole a piece big enough to still echo from every direction that I hide. The girl with confused teeth who fell in love with me somewhere in Connecticut. That time I was seven. When I was fist diagnosed and then that next time. I thought I was born on a Friday because I confused F with a day of the week. A refusal of breast milk. An allergy to self-esteem. That time in Vermont. Blood can mystify us into thinking we are close to death, especially during menstruation. Whiskey and pickle juice. A black-out of body against confused cold tile in barroom bathroom and bedroom and dance club balcony and her lap. Tuesday morning. Panic attack on eastern parkway. That afternoon I forgot what city I was born in. See footnote (omitted). Refer to chapter it-hasn’t-happened. What version of earth is this; I may need to download a more durable version.

a meal of plath and tikka

I used to read “The Bell Jar” each year until I landed in the hospital in Connecticut. On a Saturday, curry is cooked in a washed-out red and black pot. A welcome of cauliflower, onion, kale and cumin. Later, an attempt at brown rice that never tastes as simple as white. I think it’s all that death that can create a relapse of sad within the body; I remained there for almost two weeks. It is never as spicy as I need it to be or I receive third-degree burn on the ledge of my tongue. Like love, there is no easy interpretation for piquant or peppered. She needed to call herself Victoria because illness is metal and it is necessary to protect oneself from the possibility of rust. I am solidified in silence as I chew alone. No one asks if I like it, but into the air I still speak out: for the most part. Plath parades her grey so effortlessly and I wonder if I can fall in love with a human who knows how to blot my weep with palms of heal. Meals may be annotated and books can be digested. I should have used more garlic.

“have you ever made love to your story?”

for Rebel: my mystical and magical inspiration. 

 

Ok, here I go.

“I built this. I made this body out of leaves and mountains and sriracha and bargained treasure from stoop sales. I climbed up onto this rooftop of curls and said notice my ukelele because music can be like universal health care when strummed with intention. I built this body out of literature and smut and the poetics of Dickinson and Gottlieb. A lot of Bukowski’s persistence and so much Gibran. This body has cracked open some bars built into the windows. This body is a high rise flambé of reconfigurations. I built this body from love. I found my fire through the border crosser whose lips were salted and revived me like flesh-covered defibrillator. There are muscles built from carrying myself over lacerated love affairs. What it means to be sectioned and partial like split apart mandarins. And there is a drip of skin that is bitter. And can I tell you the unabridged memory of my queer; I think I might need to be alone for this. How about this? I am unsure if this is a date. There is interest and beauty and I have so many questions. There is supper and napkin on lap and Malbec and later, coffee. There will be dessert when I am ready. I hold my hand and lick my mouth to remind my tongue that it can be sensual to the human it belongs to. I wonder if we will see each other again. I know that this has been tumultuous. I know all about the slashing and attempts of murder and mangle. How many second chances can we offer. What does peace really look like. What is its smell and can I purchase it through dedication to meditation, healthy eating and careful-construction of (self) confidence. I am raining. I am hurricane and flood. I am wound and weathered. I am drip of sad and grey and do you understand now when I call myself elephant. This body is attempting new ointments. This body is working on a works cited page, an annotated bibliography of how all this happened. This body is a natural disaster healing.”

this is where stars go to die

You thought it was a shooting star. You thought you could squint your eyes into a version of evening and wish upon and wish upon and wish upon

You thought this is where love derives from

You thought this is a sign from planets to validate your existence

You thought     this is beautiful

You thought this was a necessary explosion of transported lust

You thought this was a sign of romance and rust of musical movements

(but)

This is actually the death of plasma and gravity

This is just an American-made jet fighter

This is a collapse

This is just a calculation of patterns

This is an adventure of sky and planets and you are trespassing

This is actually just a whisper of meteoroid

This is just a British drama with or without laugh track

This is just a novel

This is an airplane full of over-worked travelers and screaming babies and some guy who is flying away from his life down below

This is just a song by Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, Elliot Smith before the stabbing

This is an explosion of heat and third-degree burns and unless you can donate your skin, stop watching

This is just a scratch in the sky

This is strange and innocuous but also toxic and may cause permanent damage

This is just a bully of light

This is just a formation not an evolution

This is just a repeat from yesterday’s indigestion of cloud consumption

This is not beautiful

This is not marvelous or made to help you arrive at a conclusion

This is not love did you think this was love this is never going to be about love

This is not smashing; this is just smashed

This is drunk

This is sky addicted to flash

This is just sky

This is just a light

This was never going to be about wishes or wishing; you can remain down here for that.

neglect the map or gust of origin.

“Experience is not what happens to you; it is what you do with what happens to you.” Aldous Huxley

I come from white walls white thighs white mother crust of malady and abandon.

I come from culdesac dead ended romance with calm and how to collect a thousand fireflies in just one summer with scoop of blond hand and curious wrists. Spell out help with the death of smeared illumination.

I come from guilt. Guilt of murdered lightening bugs. Guilt of murdered hair follicles through bleach and rusted scissor clip. Guilt of murdered childhood through the erasure of memory. Guilt of each kiss claimed by mouth without manners.

I come from New Jersey. Concrete and sod. Hangings and ambulance whispers. Suburban boredom collapsed into self-harm. That time that time that time that time that time that time that time that time that time. That time there was a need to gallop body into medicated bones and bruise away hatred of self.

I come from stages and poets dusted and banned. I come from Ginsberg and Plath and Kate Bornstein and Gertrude Stein and Bukwoski and Mapplethorpe and Serrano and Valerie Solanas and every teacher that tried to teach in a way that kept the windows open and doors unlocked.

I come from appetite and birth and love there was some love [once] and Brooklyn and boroughs and grass stains and hyper.

I come from shift and gender and clutter’d queer disrobing through each climb of love and affair.

I come from that place within the body that thieves. Call it basement. Call it butcher shop. Call it handsome. That’s where I derive.