day 20: alphabet

The Greeks called trees alphabets. Each one was a step closer toward a meaning. They scraped and dug toward the many layers of flesh behind the wood and sap.

A  is for axis. How the tree is identified.

T  is for the thickness of each trunk, which alerts the one who views it how long it has been around.

S  is for sunburn; trees are sensitive too.

“Of all the tree letters, the palm is loveliest. And of writing, profuse and distinct as the burst of its fronds, it possesses the major effect: falling down.”    –Roland Barthes (“Barthes by Barthes”)

Even in its massive sturdiness. Even when a tree is accompanied by hundreds just like it in a place called forest or preserved park. Even when the strongest of humans tries to chop it down, the tree remains….even when it falls.

How? 

Listen to the alphabet of the trees; they are the best teachers out there. They are the ones who remain even when hunted or burnt.

If you lose your speech, go follow the trail of roots. They will guide you toward remaining.

burgundy.

Dear Rebel,

I am hoarding wine beneath my tongue. I’ve disarmed my hips for another and this one seems to be carefully slipping love notes inside the marrow of my bones. How do you nourish your memory. In what ways do you feed the scratch-outs on your soul. Eighteen years ago, I paid a stranger to press purple ink into my lower back through single-serving, vibrating needle. He joined circle and lines into a universal woman sign. I carried that female insignia for all these years, which slowly turned from friend to acquaintance to stranger. Are there indentations on your body that no longer belong to you, Rebel. Recently, I paid a guy from Bolivia to alter my gender marking. He told me all about the places he traveled to and the days he scarred his thighs with illustrations to practice being an artist. What would it look like to practice being human. Last week, I carried a rock resembling a tiny egg and an eight line poem by Vera Pavlova. She reminded me that if there is something to desire/ there will be something to regret. But in desire, there is so much breath. The weight of our exhales, Rebel, can turn our forearms into paved roads. Our shoulders into mountain tops. Our chests into stationary reservoirs. Let’s swim in all this burgundy lust, which can be found in Poets, Chefs, Former Monks, Music Makers and Hippies. We can climb our way toward the tallest tree top and swing from the branches of its origin. I am finally digging myself out of all these roots, untangling and recognizing the hybrid in me. Let’s eat up all these question marks and digest the answers that come.

an electrical surge of implanted perennial

a tree hides inside

globular structure of light

flick on dim of roots

This is what was waiting. Behind all those Brooklyn traffic lights and spray-painted stop signs: you. We must be reminded of what hides in order to remember what we have been seeking. Get lost in order to be found. Even when it rains, there is enough sun saved up for you to get tan lines beneath a thunderstorm. Don’t be so afraid of love. As a child, you climbed enough trees to grow splinters from your veins. And when you cut yourself while making meals for others, one could certainly measure the sap stored up in your blood to classify your species. To the ones you matter to most, they call you Major Oak. The one who loves you loudest calls you Sacred Fig. Stop running so much. The roots of your gender are endless. You may need to replace ink with lead during this phase of existence. You are in constant revision. Even when all the lights have turned themselves off, there is enough glow in you to survive a forty-two hour blackout. Remain because the ones who came before this one prepared you to grow up.

what to call this: gender.

Imagine body as a tree. It begins as a shape that never remains just that. It hardens and expands. It changes color and thickness. It lets go; it disrobes; it houses other living things inside it; it mourns like a weeping willow; it has many names and occupations.

This treebody drips its sap into mouths and palms. This treebody exists in various ways all over the world. This treebody has no gender and it has many genders and it loves through shots of slurped up sun and rain and is rooted through the rings which wrangle it open.

We’ve got all of these options now of what one can be called and ways to bend and love and present. What happens when we exchange our customary outfit from masculine or feminine garb to something else.

How to harvest the hybrid of genders within us.

It is a Monday. I am suited in tie and vest and button-down shirt. My pants are tight, but could be worn by any human in search of warmth down there. I’ve got boots on with unnecessary laces and a zipper on one side. My hair is messy and unbrushed. It houses several yells inside each knot that are stored up from the ones who cannot seem to understand why I have decided to wash my hair less. I wear no make-up, nor does my skin glow. I might feel comfortable if you called me androgynous or even boundless.

I present a vocabulary of stereo-types in front of a room full of learners. We disrobe what we expect boxes to look like. I ask them to remove their swiss army knives from pockets (for those who carry them). I ask them to cut open the ninety-degree angle squares that force us to choose. I tell them that suddenly, we are no longer expected to choose from just two options or [gasp] other. I said that now we have options that represent the spectrum in which humans have always been but never had the opportunity to announce.

I want to out myself as the type of human some people have a difficult time understanding. I try to explain to my mother later on that day that gender is not something we should wait for people to learn. In order to remove the hate from speech, we must educate each other as to the impact of understanding one another.

As humans we come out many times in our lives. Sometimes it is just our names we change. For some, it is more bodily. Shapes and voices and language of parts change. Some of us change our sexual orientations.

There is not just one closet that we come out from and then IT is over.

I have been closeted by lovers; I have been closeted by myself. I understand the impact and necessity to be as loud as I can in order to pave the roads beside me for others to come out and make noise.

I have intentionally surrounded myself with humans who are gender construction workers. Smart, sexy humans who have taken these boxes into their hands, crumpled them up and turned them into other shapes. I have fallen in love with the ones who celebrate hybridity.

This earth may be over-populated, though it is big enough to hide. But who would want to do that when there are so many ways to seek out the truths and translations of our selves.

 

 

a tale of several beautifuls

Blame it on symmetry. How near are her eyes to carefully constructed bridge of nose. Does she starve. Are her hips like the horizon, without fault or curve. Is her skin more mocha than medium rare. What blooms in the months outside of spring or autumn and when the leaves go away, how sturdy are the branches. Does your grass wilt or does it arrive like green erections plunged out of earth’s pores. Blame it on what distracts us. Call it brushed air. Call it removed particles of mistake. Her smile is white and heterosexual. His hair is without recede. That home is window’d and gorgeous due to its skylights and built-in 401K plan. Does her cellulite show. Does your health plan cover the creams you will need to rub it away. What is your routine. How many chemicals have attempted to peel away your skin; I think you might be beautiful under that fifth layer. Keep ripping at yourself. Scoop out and where there is tunnel, there is possibility for better. Blame it on tents and drawers and the tenacity of lies. Collocate implant with imbalance. Remove your girdle now. Help the redheaded dancer with her zipper and linger your looks at the way she folds like love letters. Quietly ask if you can dance your language into the cleavage of her mind. And the other one with painted eyebrows, thicker than the remorse from your 20’s. She is beautiful too. And that graffiti’d church that might be a bank now or was but has become a collaborative celebration of dripped paint now. And her nipples. And that cloud that kind of looks like your best friend from tenth grade. And that fence, painted turquoise. And your neck. And that meal you fed me when my palms were too tired to lift and curl. And that Wednesday you fell asleep inside me. And that rooftop garden. And the smell of patchouli you snuck inside magazine. And your sodium. And my blood. And that too.

i want to pretend away the cupboards

Here is the challenge. I want you to tell me why you do this. Explain in clicks and coughs exactly how you got your neck to wrap itself inside that silk.  I am going to press my mediterranean wrists into your suburban ones. It is too much of a commitment to ask you for your reasons, so I’ll spill fire-soaked whiskey in your lap to gauge what type of communicator you are. Your ankles are showing and I thought those were shadows from Sunday or gardening, but it seems you only offer up select parts of your body to sharps and grooming. But aren’t you a woman and can you tell me in advance when I am allowed to touch them. Beneath the crinoline and itch, far beyond the striped slacks and even the panties, which can be worn beneath boxers and stuffed behind the fibrous and burly, is a cabinet. OK, call it closet. Shelving unit? I know you store your tax returns there and collection of parking tickets. I know about the love notes from that artist who drew you in black ink swirls in barrooms across Connecticut. You hoard stamps and amputated limbs from rejected family trees. Your inconsistencies make others uncomfortable. You will need more wood to build more shelves to hide more things to keep more lovers. I want you to drink that. I want you to drape your body against mine like an evacuated corpse. I want you I want you I want you not to look like that so much. All I am really asking is this. Don’t politicize your gestures. Don’t flatten what should be lifted and gawked at. Don’t hide your pretty. Don’t raise your arms. Don’t you want to be hit on? Don’t you want to be aggressively handled by eyes that validate the performance of your beauty? Now, put all that away. Get out your potpourri and smell it up like flowers like baby powder like well-how-girls-should-smell and make things easier on yourself. It is better this way.

notice what you notice when you notice it

Notice a tree.  Write about it.

Bark  infected like homeless mother’s limbs with skin weathered from winter and bed bugs. 

Go outside.  Write about it.

I stare at an open field and search for the bodies held captive by tall wheat or poison ivy.

Visit amusement park for children called zoo.  Write about it.

 

I see an elephant and describe its skin as heated crust. I count each fracture disrupting the smooth. I call it monster call it mammal of wild grey call it me in the evening when enough bodies have rubbed against me to feel bloated and heavy, a swell of weight.

Climb up staircase of memories in body. Question what needs to be questioned.

 

Why do humans violent away their childhoods?

 

 (instruct)

search urgency

     

Treat body like leftover supper and microwave toward normal

 

(an urge)

I want to remember the days when nothing occurred.

a friday haiku

tree.house.

what knots knuckle through
this animal of splinters
go gather pain sap

how to remove the claustrophobia and turn it into a poem.

Awake to the sound of too much memory inside me, clogging up the zippers sewed into my skin called scars.

Before sleep, I heard a child speak about beauty. How it cluttered up her mind and confused her into obsession. When I was a child I wore pants until they fell off of me–threads becoming undone. I couldn’t wait to wear make-up and then when I could I preferred looking ghostly or homely or colorful only on the inside.

People rarely remain inside their disfigurations. They cover it up, melt it, insert or take away or laser it off.

My roots are showing; let me paint them a lighter hue. My belly is thickening. Instead of poeming, I’ll sit up and down and up and down and crunch and crunch and force tension to form.

How to live inside a moment. Really. Do we do this anymore? Are we present inside a sight? Though I drink coffee, I am also writing a sentence and catching up with a friend and reading a letter and washing dishes. How to remove the claustrophobia of multi-tasked rushing and slow down toward just one breath or bite or swallow or word.

Hello.

First thing I notice when I am present is the haunting of black ink on my skin on my hand on the left one near my thumb. Reminders because my mind is so webbed, is so crowded is so removed from itself, I must write on my body to remember how to live or what to buy or what to eat:

fennel. pickles. magnets. newspaper.

I look down and notice my lap, covered in borrowed brown writing blanket. I look up and notice nude tree outside my window, bark wrinkled like elephant skin. I look inside myself and feel hunger, body gathering breaths, pushing them out like invisible babies floating into the air. I gave birth to those inhales and exhales. They are mine! I do not answer phone which rings. I do not click on anything outside of this box. I am singular-tasking. I am present. I am here. I am I am slowing down.

Inhale the disfigured stains

I am creating spills.

Dig floorboards into canvases and leak brain juice.

That tree is a rorschach.

I see decomposed childhood. I see sexual intercourse. I see salted kneecaps. I see an orgy of bones.

What hides deep inside the blot of jawline?

Oh blemish.
Oh spot of bloody Malbec, curled into ceramic mug.
Color of her hips, all camouflaged and curvy.

Blackened hippocampus discredits memory.

Taste where it is darkest. Notice how your mouth responds.

Place fingernail between teeth and bite off a crescent of keratin. Use as a weapon to wipe away or wreck the stain. Write what it becomes.

Or.

Place moon-sliver-fibrous-hangnail and replace as genitalia. Rename gender as phalangeal. There are no colors attached to this one. No designated toys or career paths. Bask in relaxed prescriptions.

I take a puff of blue in my lungs. There is a choke of winter here. There is a collapse of worried contagion.

How many shades of sky hide against your wrist, which weeps daily?

You are only disfigured because you gave away your love like sneezes, uncontrollable body urges.

Listen. The reputation of a stain is persistent. What is the sound of its echo? It haunts your eardrums. It’s out of tune and it hums. Write it’s music.

I’ll sing a little louder in your ear because you’ve requested my top 40 melody. I thought I was screaming, but it was just the sound of my footsteps scraping.

Look up, will you? High above is where the kites go. Where bodies hang. Where birds nap and bugs hide from the researchers looking for a discovery. I’m heading there. Leave your kiss on my right ankle or behind my thigh and you can head there too.