eucalyptus.

1. the drunken pendulum of these trees in the wind
is something without intelligence. It's of the body or
of the supernatural. A home under a tongue, a trance
devoured into the marrow where there is not one inch of doubt
uncovered.

2. four servant women
have their hair loose after dinner
like pheasants balancing upon freckled necks
leaning towards each other
with crooked elbows
and knees that are skinned pink and shell
these women gather beneath the rounded
hunch of this lead mountain each night
its spine bowing at their dirty feet.

first song ever.

Truth in Our House

D A
Father you are so blind
G
your on the brink
G D
of loosing your mind.

D A
I am, I am so sad
G
I'm on the brink
G D
of going mad

"
Brother you are so small
your on the brink
of changing it all

"
mother you are so faded
your on the brink
of getting jaded

**
G D
And i am, calling us out (2)
C G D
Cuz we need some truth in this house (2)

"
Father you are so white
we can tell that
those knuckles are tight
"
I am, I am so red
I think it
it was something you said
"
Brother you are so blue
it makes me wonder
how you do
"
Mother you are so black
Sometimes i wish
you wouldnt turn back

**
G D
And I am calling us out (2)
C G D
Cuz we need some truth in this house (2)

did you know that I edit these poems after I post them?

Yep, I look these bodies over and i change them all the time.

It's a phenomenon that only now I am starting to pay attention to. I am staring in the face of a poet's addiction. Tension, tightly strung rope, each fiber a rifle. Poets are like those trainers on reality TV who are just down straight disgusted by flabby, lazy bodies. I am also asking some cream curdle bodies to work out eight hours a day, sometimes more. I am holding up their drunken skin, close up to the TV screen, the skin that will get tucked away by stitch and knife. I am performing plastic surgery, except without plastic. Just desperation and compulsive vision. I am sewing up the muscles and sometimes even rolfng them into place. I am the sweaty doctor's eye that can see your perfection, sweet little poem. I can see how you almost ring out like 10, 000 bells on key (minutes before snow), (and never under water). I can see how you almost are about to make your wings finally work. I can see how with a few tweaks i am going to make electrons cause fire in a glass. I can almost ask the rock to stop in mid air--I saw it wait before it hit the beach. I guess this is a an apology of sorts. I know how unhealthy it is the way I watch you in your virtual and paper houses. I know you feel like subjects of an experiment. Staring into your the windows. Trying to see how long you can stand on one foot. Or how well you plan christmas for the family. I know you feel me hovering over your reading shoulder. Over your cutting carrots. I am trying to gauge how perfect you are. What can I say? You are so close, it makes iodine stem cells in a petri dish somewhere quiver up a smile of worth. Maybe tonight, instead of showing off your ponytail and coy gestures, you might invite me in for dinner and let me measure your ankles?

long time tweenie

we humans have no sense of time
i mean, we haven't developed the bell curve


for the map of aging
how you grow
and learn how to manage mortality
become a better person
that can number things in order

until the line starts to curve in on itself
and then we are teenagers for the rest of our lives.

pubescent little terds
but with babies who need us to keep things racked.
and house paint
that comes with electric bills
all those garages for our crap


we must be afraid of it


I have epoch in my day alone.
time for flame
for fathom
for the pot to boil
for plant to sit or swing
time for laziness
so much time for that
time for vanity
time for tightening up
time for worry scramble
and time for avoidance
some voids
clearly caked by bad food choice
and online television.

time to read three thousand pages of
trashy novel
to go with the door open.
pray quiet and curse loud
time for dingy music over paper


to prepare time like chicken stock
getting thicker over the minute
sweet salted butter of day
would break you all out in hives.

the way to words, is to read.

for sarah; for lindsey.

trumpet of july night
is how i feel about our love affair
that has slowly started to belong to us
like possessions you keep in boxes
you hide them
because they remind you of a time
before now
something you can examine and make peace with.

thats where i am holding you
against me, pressed up
sternum to sternum
like a fence.
i am holding you so tightly
but away from here
in the second growth
after winter
but before now.

now is like being pressed up against
the glass
the breath against sand
causing
immediate claustrophobia
and blindness.

when i feel that i love you
i am not telling you here, now.
i am telling you before
when your hair was different
and your hands swept my body
like ink in water.
spreading out like wind over salt
when everything you said
i believed in and kissed.
and hung up in my doorways.

wimpy lonely

i don't want to forget this loneliness;
this bone absence of sound
i want to remember this anxiety
of piecing together the seconds of a day
making enough racket in the kitchen
to overwhelm the fact that
no voice has yet been raised.








yesterday i pulled the hair out of the drain
and it was only one color.
when we lived together,
my twiggy net of gopher hair
always had a corona of
corn husk silk, now
that was a union.

to be an american, edited.

I always give advice on things
that I don’t know anything about.
I only know things that will make a person miserable
and actually don’t know much about what makes things glow.
(I don’t know why I do that;
I really don’t know anything about poetry
or anthing about ethics
the outdoors,
or healthy diets.)



I don’t leave the house anymore,
because my house has become the only real company
I love.




I feel the soft walls curling their Michelangelo
stone palms with the fat square tips
they are gently scooping up the bed, which is empty raft of lights
and the Christmas lights that are not evenly
hung around the door, and hang like fats in some places
each have an egg raising
a story of an innocent bird inside.
the smell of spices and hot food just cooked
and plates that sit under suds and tomato water
making purple coal rings that stay forever
in the porcelain sink
and the heavenly lights under their paper lampshades
the burnt guitar always ready
round faced
gold thin teeth
to play its brawny bourbon sound with tin cans kicked




she made me feel so alone,
even though she was my teacher.
she made me feel small and hard
& cold, a sad line in a barcode
or something even more obscene
like ignorance and boring ideas
she made me feel embarrassed
& confused, like I had used a word wrong
at the table, and everyone knew that I had been
faking that I know things.
but she had thin arms like my mother,
kind of flaky like hers,
and she had on this watch
of my mother when I was still in my odepus phase
(when told her I was in love with her and stroked her triangle face.)
those thin arms, with the anorexic wrist
with the deerskin pearl that sticks out,
and she was rubbing her own arm the way my mother did
rolling up the same silver band with
the dime glass face
up to her drying clay elbow.
I adored her then
and I felt like she could love me.
because she has the same arms as my mother
with the same sliding watch


to be American is to be lonely
so I make these dream stories of village people
who don’t know what lonely is.
(and its another thing i know nothing about,
and i only want them to exist,
to balance out the american in me)

So I’ve given them faces
with homes and sons and
gossip.
I’ve given them warm nights with stars
and heat beside chill

their communal duties
with the disappearing space of joy
I imagine
this woman
with bundled pounds of hair
and marine eyes
these big new york cheese cakes
I imagine
her sitting on her stoop
in the dirt
watching children in baggy clothes
kick a muddy ball around
ricocheting precariously upon potholes
occupied with tan soup water
sometimes almost hitting the baby
in the face.
there is a real sense of commotion here
with bodies and movement
and wind.
but she is quiet and still
she knows why things are &
who she belongs;
everything is remembered in
the lines in between the skin of the village
written with blood
and heard in the wilderness
which still exists there
and she doesn’t have to figure out anything.
figuring things out, isn’t what life is about.



to be American is to be a stranger
but you can still remember a time when the check-out-lady
would tell your about her nights with boxed wine and tv shows
or when they didn’t need to check your ID
when people waited for you to cross the street
and when it was easy to have people over in your home
to play music and share a meal that looked like
it was cooked in sections.
when art didn’t mean anything
and your talk didn’t mean anything.
Being an American means you can remember this
when you were a part of something
but now no one remembers you.

i said i was gunna write about nature, so i did.

I like sunflowers, so I put them in different colored bottles
and place them on my flesh colored desk where I write.

its getting cold now, and there isn’t enough sun filtering
through the smudgey glass window or screen

the petals were getting whiskied and wrinkled
and the yellows were circling on the table like synchronized swimmers

so I threw the stinky things out
except for one that was still dreaming and looking up.

I put him in a green flute
and opened the window to give him air

he stared at me all morning
and while I stewed apples

and he looked so singular
wide eyed abandoned

his hair is getting thin and flat
and his throat is hanging out like a tongue

he is stretching neck outwards
as if to be noticed in a crowd








wait!
he is trying to say something.

doubt is the epidemic of poets and we will all die on cinco de mayo

I am feeling again like an island far off in the lonely ocean; far from the rest of the poetry community. They want procedures, and I want messiness. They want found language, I believe that my own language was found--a treasure even, buried deep within my neuroses. They want statistics and multiculturalism. I think stats are an invention of the past because they only tell lies, and sometimes i think that multiculturalism was a word made up by middle class white people so that they could endorse cinco de mayo. i believe in knowing and navigating the world by looking within. looking out towards the external world i see nothing but fragments, and distractions, and noise--who can get anything out of it? They want innovation. I say innovation is driven by greed. People at the Mac store use the word innovation. What's wrong with tradition? What's wrong with using what we know, which probably different than what anybody else knows. I want to write about Nature damnit... and I want to use the pronoun "I" too AND mean it.., damnit. I am afraid, a real white-girl fear, that if we only use appropriated language, if we only want to use math and science and made up fields like sociology to speak in our art...we will not only forget the under represented humans of our earthly family, but we will forget that WE OURSELVES are humans. We will forget the parts of us that make us beautiful. I am really nervous about living in a world where all the art and poetry will be only created by a addictive desire for seeking out the new. This is the same mentality that people have about their possessions. The desire for newness is toxic for us. I say lets look to the eternal-- if nothing is eternal, then at least we will stop trashing the planet with new things.

here is a series of questions that i posed to my classes. So far, No one has responded.

warning: this may be unnecessary and otherwise.

I'm thinking about the words...research...representation....and emotional:

1. I've been thinking about using research to represent the other, instead of using the internal landscape ie experience/ emotion/ insights.

2. I'm thinking about how statistics have often been used in history as a way to persuade us into ideologies that are often driven by racism, misogyny, fear, and discrimination. How can we make someone more human in our poetry by using someone else's numbers? How do we make other lives have their own voices?

3. I'm thinking about narrative poetry when not examined while its being crafted and how it can also be dangerous.

4. I am thinking about different knowledges (ie. wisdom versus knowledge or religious/anncestral/metaphysical), and if a person can examine their internal landscape deep enough past the surface of our cultures influence past the breakers of our own paradigms and penetrate into a place where there is no "other". And/Or how can I let multiple kinds of knowledges come into my poetry?

5. I am wondering if i will ever feel _okay_ with representing the other.

6. If our poems are coming from the funnels of our perspectives.... is every poem that is transparent about the funnel labeled...emotional?

***I am sure that these questions are problematic, and loaded, and clumsy. But I've been thinking about them with limited language to express them... and I wanted to turn to you for your thoughts about these ideas/language.


PLEASE, if you have ideas about where and what poetry is and should go or do, why you write, and how you feel about writing about people who are different from you... comment here.

for the boys

it is cold outside
and i am on the floor of my old room
one cloth knee tucked in
one leg stretched out beyond the books and carpet
the boys are in my doorway again
holding twin beers
and leaning on opposite sides of the wood

One is seven feet taller
than me
with a chin like a good pork roast
and the long face of a lumberyard
his socks show, because his pant legs
are short, and his teeth show
because he is happy.




the Other is
looking up to him
and grinning
he is barechested
and showing the way muscles wrap around
his shoulder
that he has leaning against my door.
his curly gold hair absorbs all the light
and the room is a little dimmer
because of it.

new poetry

I am writing for the first time... every day, and the words are changing their metallic flavors in my mouth as i am writing this. the words i thought tasted like pennies, now taste like soil. others that tasted like milk, now taste like rubber. who knew this could happen again, anew in existence. i have a whole world, cities with buildings and pedestrians, and cattle rolling around in my hot mouth, over the tongue. is this heaven?

fall number 2

Fall
how luminous you are:
a bright green door thinking
during a pickled morning frost

the gray morning sky
the same as the evening
Time has hushed her hair and mouth
clouds turn
placid tentacles
of silver milk placenta moving
like seaweedacross the tall horizontal plain


contrast

ignites the treehills on fire
with electric green from the october coil
green white yellow hum
charred the light and infused it
with sun from a wild dream that smelled like Jasmine

and the smell of stamped
wet tracks; the red rusty footprint
of the dead old pine needle
on the damp black pavement (slate oil)
(in a line they look like racoon hands painted autumn

the sweet dog smell of rain
skirting the road, you know
the trees love this smell
and they quiver in dazzlement
of their new radiance
against the brood





the light through glass
makes translucent lace
by shadow dance
on the bright cream wall.

part of a longer poem about fall.

n the fall, i played soccer.



the grass was cold and wet and smelled

like moon

over jade.

we sat in silence

rolling up our socks

over our little

beggar knees

bruised around

the cresent

and ribs showing

the red and white cleats that slipped on our skunky tongue feet

seal skin

the feel of the

rubber knobs

press into soil

our duffle bags

smelled like road kill

flat over

luminous white

line of wet road


the sweat.

the sweat

made our noses

pink gums

and my curly sea hair

blowing upward smoke

feel tight tshirt

twisiting against

my side

the short orange cones

glowing houses

under the crucifix

field lights

like planet arm

silent

the legs moving oil rigs

silent

the trees bending over

over the fence

silent

the huff

from our lung,

silver fog

silent

our ponytails.

the sweat

in the cold

8 o’clock

nothing left

but gasps &

the slap of the crumbly rubber ball

against thigh

made the skin

go red

bumpy

and sting

among

the frost

bad poetry.

This blog makes room for bad poetry. And I feel so lucky to have that room.

poured right through me.

how many things do we do each day to keep from being alone

how many things do we do each day to keep others from undoing the laces of our faith

how deep must we hide to believe that pain will never find us
each day
we hide:
at our jobs, in our hearts where we lock away
our prayers behind the throat, tucked under cheek bone, in the liver.
in our houses with locked door,
in the lists we put on our fridges telling us we are thirsty
how many things must we do to stamp out time
like a balloon
stretching our precious breath, and nothing else but dust?
how many lists must we make to
feel like we have done enough?
should I stop before home and get milk?
what should I do before the tv show is on?
in our cars behind steal armor.
in our minds full of smoke and bees.
how many years of a life must we spend checking our phones
our digital calendars?
before we realize they are empty
or should be.
why are we so afraid to feel wind in our teeth?
to let these shoulders down, and hands go empty
why are we so afraid of the quiet night,
because its loud if its silent and
the stillness will burn holes right through us?
just nothing but the slow breathing stars.
the freeway and the coast laid out a lumbar curve
nothing is here for you to hold on to.
nothing but the sharpness of solitude
in verisimilitude of open


hush.
let me whisper.


before I fry my brain with radiation
before I eat cancer
before I have worn out every last ambition to keep moving


I hope

the blade of loneliness will cut the shackles of this fear
so I can live.

ten days.

Today I went to the mountains, to walk by the creek
and be surrounded by warmer solitude.

it wasn’t far on the trail, when the feeling of your hand
in mine was missing; and the ache returned.
the memory of kindle, leaves turned transparent
insides exposed to the sun

it brought on the kinetic memory in the nerves
of your hand holding mine.

the longing, for your calluses
for your flat-end fingertips
the orange of your palms from too many carrots
the human weight under the webbing of my hands
became so unbearable

that I reached out for the nearest appendage-
an evergreen. with its platiscy feel,
held my hand in hers.
the green lace fingers bent themselves in between
my fingers. they were the lightest things.

we held hands for a while.
and it did not suffice for yours—
but it did feel like an old friend
who knows when I am sore.

the song of a room.

how tender it is to spend a night in a new room
to warmly greet the froth
& capitulation
of the bed.
to light a candle and pray
back the company
remembered by the heart
to speak up in the kitchen.

to put up the frames
patient workings of the wire
to hook on the nail.

to breathe in the new silence
smell in the new thoughts that come.
wipe a hand across the edge of a new counter.
the hot air over the tea mug
slumped in a chair that belonged to someone else
and consider

that soon these walls
will be able to predict your gestures
they will have learned you

the walls will begin to breathe more slowly
& the sound of their exhales
tune to your life.
the walls are of course watching still now
they are timid
but soon you will see their white plaster bellies
sigh in and out when you come home
when you take time to inhale the
song with them.

gentleness

by mary oliver.


Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

© Mary Oliver

my job is hurting me?

its not their swollen hands
that are multicolored raw
open layered skin like scales

it is not their eyes, that blink repeatedly
that pulse when they are looking at things they
hate and desire.
the deep brown with no pupil
focused all on their prey.

its not their stories, their reps

stolen in the night
little glass pipes eroding under the seat
babies with goop in their eyes and mouths
or the smoke that will flush the windows.

pockets that hold knives in convenient stores
and the hot oiled pans
thrown in the kitchen
the loudness
the pushiness upon floorboards
that give.


it’s the sound of their words.



unlaced by quick to whip.
desparate sound that comes out
fast & nonsensical.
stubborn defenses
behind them
wrap around and around like veins
until I forget who I am.

its their tone that will eat me.
the energy of a summer storm
behind each mumbled word.
ready to tear off roofs.
wash over my borders
it’s the way they talk to me
like I am younger than them
and I believe it
when I sink in my leather chair
behind the old desk
which counts as no barrier because
their words
are falling in the drawers, all over my shoulders.

its their words and the tails behind them.
that embarrass me.

to explain the picture of a tree

I am writing on my yellow pad (that I stole from
dad’s desk), with large pencil
cursive that is too tall, too fat
in the blue lines.

I am sitting on my yellow and blue striped bed
two mix matched socks
(one with the toe part hanging off)
sweep the hardwood.

it is dinnertime, and Ray Charles croons
up the stairs, down the hall
into the tuna meat of our sandwiches.

Summer is has settled, and the smell of wood smoke
comes into the house

comes into the house with the Indian yellow light.
from my bedroom window
I am watching the shiny copper
eucalyptus sway her head
and the pendulum motion of her curly hair.

two mantras;

There is no me. I am dead.
There is no me. I am dead.
There is no me. I am dead.
There is no me. I am dead.

This is exactly it.
This is exactly it.
This is exactly it.

death it seems--as I sit kneeling buckled, palms pressed--is harmony;

Buy this book or This blog will make me famous

This is the blog that is going to make me famous.



I now live in a house of five including myself. The moving process almost killed me, my back is broken, and Mariah still is in deep defense mode, as if for a few hours I was a possessed during the move and she's not sure if the demon is still in charge of my body or not. AND there is still a ten ft volcano of crap sitting on a front lawn.

My new landlord seems cool though. He looks like Val Kilmers hawaiian brother Hal Kilmer, and he is doing a bicycle race in Tahoe on Thursday—cycling 140 miles in 10 hours. On Saturday, I told him I saw a man cycle straight up a mountain that looked 90 degrees from the base. He replied with, the trail I was speaking of was a: beginners trail. Every since, the only time I see him, he is either coming from or to some kind of kill-yourself work out.

**I debated this morning for longer than I would like to disclose here, if I should drive to the level I-II yoga class down the road.**

Needless to say, between the tragedy of summer ceramics, and the realization that I burn 30 calories a week by panic attack, I was feeling a little down. The familiar melancholy feeling always sounds it's three alarms. Its time to write in my graditude journal, its time to write a poem, and its time to be quiet.

#1 on my thankful list is I am thankful for my internal emotional alarm.

But this is where the crucial advice comes in. Pretend the next few sentences are in red bold: I am so glad that I have a ritual that I conduct when my center feels far away from where I am residing. I am so glad that I know I have a home that I have wandered from. I DO NOT want to taint the natural healing mechanism by bringing the same ‘you ain’t ever good enough’ attitude when I finally sit down.

On the way to a July 4th party I was talking to one of my new friends about writing. We had one of those new friend moments when you point your index at each other and feel perfectly validated that someone else in the universe sees things like you do. I admitted bashfully that, “every poem I write…in the back of my mind I hope that this will be the poem that gets me famous” That’s when she held on to her hat in sheer delight. I guess she had just seen her reflection.

After the pain in my bowls of Lopside, & after my landlord showed me up by 130 more miles that I have ever cycled in my life—do I need a critic that is demanding masterpiece every time I sit down to write myself back home?

I pray for my writing to be safe from the part of my mind that wants to hate on things. To be free from the heavy desire of approval. Constantly, I am wanting for people to prove to me that I am great, and talented, and full of love. Please show me in your eyes that you believe that I am special. But... if I were being honest, I’d tell you that it doesn’t matter what you say to me, because I never believe it anyway.

So, instead of trying to get my mind to see my greatness. I am going to let go of wanting greatness all together. By breathing ins these mantras: I write because it heals me. I write because it helps me to see clearly. I write because it’s what I do. That’s all. I will write poetry, and I will write this blog just to pass the time—because there is nothing more noble than doing what you do to find the moonlit breadcrumb.

Buy this book above... immediately if you are suffering from the same noise in your mind when you sit down to find your way.

I love you.
K

Processing Sweat Still.

I feel like I should go back to a practice that I was into when I first went crazy in 2006. That was the summer that I opened my eyes for the first time to personal responsibility, to pain, to worry, to becoming fully human. I am sure that i will talk about that time in my life many times after now. That practice is tallying the moods of my days in long scooping arcs above and below the neutral horizon. 9:00 am, line going up. 4:24 pm line going way down.

I want to start now, to see where my feelings take me because after the Lodge, I find myself unbuckling loop by loop.

On Monday, I had my first ceramics class. The class ended up with my sitting by the UCSB pool watching the violent kicking of children feet and professor feet, watching the colored triangle flags quiver over them. I had to leave class and sit alone on my lawn chair. The whole thing was overwhelming. I could have been blind the way I fumbled around the studio. I could have been handless the way the clay felt so foreign on my skin.

So I cried, putting up a steel hand to tell my love to disist from soothing me or helping me. I should have sniffed out the feeling that I would be so overwhelmed by taking this summer-for-fun class. Ceramics is Mariah's home. She did it through the dark period of her life, as a meditative reminder that she-no matter what- always molds her life. Her bowls and mugs make eating full of ritual, spirit, and magic. They are so natural it makes you feel as though God gave you palms, just to hold the line of her pottery. I have never really handled clay. I have never spent time in a studio, with clay spit all over my jeans, or watch my hands become unfortunate features of the human body (uncontrollable and unmotivated). I didn't know the landscape of the ceramic artist. I was completely new. The cement room could have been Mars.

It's true that I am still dehydrated. It's true that I am living in a one bedroom with four people. It's true that maybe I was negligent in tending to my shaken insides from the intensity of the Lodge. The whimpering prayers that may never truly be composted in these bones. But Still-

But still- the class was still too new. I had hoped, in my high expectations, that I would step into the hands of my soulmate by doing her art. I hoped that I would understand her better, and know her inside my own skin. I had hoped that I would build a community of willing adults that were brave enough to try things that are clumsy and awkward in the beginning. The class has exactly three students: Mariah, Me, And Wendy a sixty-something lady who has taken summers and summers of adult ed ceramics. I am a spectacle, a human with new legs.

What I am trying to get at here is that this class that made me sob next to a man in a speedo, is the perfect medicine after the Sweat. It was the universe was trying to show me again that everything will dissolve into something that I won't recognize anymore, and it will be new, I will be new. And I will have to reorient myself in a world I don't know.

For example. I have been afraid of the ocean's powerful force my whole life. Yesterday-I swam to the booey. I have always been afraid, deathly it seems, of closed black spaces. Today I sat in my own coffin. The more I do, the more I see, the less I can count on the world-or me to be the same. And yet I am constantly here. So its the here part that I want to get to know, the part of life that I want to invest in. NOT the successes or the failures. Not the references points of my false personality map. Just that I am here and I am here again and again, during times of complete disappointment or freedom.

So Dear Lodge, I grant you the will to unbuckle my latest reality. Because it will teach me that I am here.

Poem.

two voices.

That was wrong…




You are such a fuckin’ idiot.
still so little,
not yet learned the difference.
first feels and thinks are not
going to hold up this boat

Did you ruin it?
You are small and they know it.
& now They are going to talk about it.
And its going to be dirty
It’s going to stain your love
the one that you have broken your hands for

Now its just something for people.

In the spaceship lit hallway
I smiled before I knew,
“Joseph-I love you”
to the boy with hickeys
and used knee jeans.

The shape of last sound
was thin and white.
an accidental rubberband in the eye.

the other teachers were listening
till my spine unlaced into cold sea
I shut the door and
faced my classroom waiting.


I am just human.

and he looked beat sad.

and teachers want their easy smiles

I just wanted him to rest.

Ten Pounds of Gratitude

I remember when Sarah invited one of her best friends up to our house and he told us stories of transcendence. One story was how a man went insane because he was suspended in water in pitch black, and the absence of any reference point to his physical space made me go insane. Another was about a man who proved to the CIA that his powers of ESP could end the Cold War. And my favorite, because it scared me the most, was about the complete eradication of mind and time in the dark deep realm of Sweat Lodge. I remember Sarah's glass blue eyes get fat in awe. I remember saying that I could never do something like that.


Yesterday I conquered Sweat Lodge.

Heather Tiddens is the yoga teacher that I go to to get my healthy dose of Yin Yoga. The Dark Yoga. The Moon Yoga. She used to be a pro surfer. So the sun bleached hair and the Marlon Brando arms make sense. But still when you look at her, you can tell that she is a hybrid. Part Surfer, Part Native. Her hair with is tied in a deadbeat bun that swings at her shoulders, or it is down, laying on her back in twisted tobacco rolls down to her sacrum. I like her, I trust her because she isn't showy and she laughs at herself. Plus her teachings are simple and direct and they make sense inside me. Heather has had different trainings in her lifetime with a wide spectrum teachers to guide her. One of her certifications is Sweat Lodge Keeper.

For a puny 45 dollars, I spent 11 hours at Heather's property preparing and sweating and letting go of my fear. Dividing her property is clearing with stacks of woods, dirty broken plastic bins, and two skeletons made of willow bone that arched into domes. When I saw the natural curves of the branches, and the space for the door I felt the beginnings of dread. People stood around awaiting commands of the Sweat Lodge Keeper.

This is how you make a Lodge. Willow dome made my the strong and bendable stalks of the tree tied by leather straps. Laid over the bones, painter tarps. Over that, dirty matted quilts. Over that, army blankets. And Finally canvas tarps. The participants (who I have vowed not to speak about) nervously wrapped our new home.

We said our intentions. We bestowed our wish into the Grandparent Rock which was going to blaze and ponder our wishes in the pit. We exhaled our wounds into the logs that would be incinerated. All of these prayers that we made with such gentle asking were done clockwise in a circle. I tried to believe in my prayers, as usually I don't or at least loosen my doubt. It felt good to let down my arms and let the Spirits from all directions hold my humanity. I prayed to be fearless. I prayed to finally let go of the sorrow that I am no longer a child. I prayed to be gentle and thankful. I tried my best to believe after years and mourning the death of my fearless self--she might resurrect.

Then the fire was ready to burn, as our Grandparents and our Suffering came together to find a solution. The fire needed time, so I slept in the grass. When I decided to let the crawlies in the lawn wake me up from my nap I came down to put my commitment ring on the altar. and to wrap up my tobacco offering in black fabric. Black for the West Direction. The Direction of death, of winter, of refuge, of letting go.

And then, after hours of praying, and listening, wrapping and resting, there was nothing else left to do. The Lodge was going to be heated by seven volcanic-hot stones, and be surrounded by pure terrifying blackness. Absolutely no light was let in.

Round 1: Singing, Welcoming our Healers. The singing was loud and haunting, and I sang without insecurity because I had too. The uncomfortable syllables, and the loud peaks of music kept me from thinking about how my molecules could have been floating away and I couldn't watch. It lasted maybe 15 minutes. The songs sounded like they came from ancient peoples who loved both joy and pain. Who cherished all marks of life; even scars. You could hear the mourning's and surprising joys of histories. The heat began to rise, began to swell like a hot open mouth of a whale.

Round 2: Five more stones were brought in (instead of seven). The heat was almost unbearable. Never have I felt so humbled and vulnerable that I would shove my face into a swampy mulch of weeds and mud. For the next two rounds I will be in the same fetal position. Praying. This round was for ourselves. Praying for our healing. Praying for our courage. All of our whimpering prayers sounded the same, and it was the only thing that comforted me.

Round 3: Each time a round ended we would open the flap. Finally the air and light would flood in, revealing the muddy tears, the completely drenched bodied. The wet ragged hair stuck to mud, stuck to sage, stuck to sticks. This round was for others. And we prayed for every being, for specific individuals, for the future population of trees, animals, and famlies. It was so hot, I begged mercilessly in my mind for the others to refrain from going through their entire family trees and pray for them. But the praying was relentless. When it came for me to speak, I could not calculate my thoughts nor my words. I spoke completely spontaneously. it was short,stuttery, and completely from heart.

Round 4. The rocks have cooled slightly but the heat is still something that I could never imagine. But with each prayer water is poured on them, creating thick clouds of steam, crowding our fears and wishes to the outer walls. This round was for gratitude. And this was the round that I was sure I was going to live, and that in itself brought on rivers of thanks. I had heard maybe hours of prayers (the time in Lodge is unknowable) and in that time I had been stripped of the ugly abuse in my mind. I still thought the same things, except my thoughts lived without the heavy shackles of shame. No shame, there wasn't even any room for it under the smoke; the sweaty limbs. I had my face, nostrils, and all in the new mud that I had created with my own sweat. I had the pincher bugs, the weeds crawling where they pleased. I didn't care. I didn't care about my judgements, I didn't care about anyone or anything. I could only care that I was still breathing and that I was going to come out the same person who went in. For a moment I realized that I would be the same person no matter where or what. No matter what happens I have myself (whoever she might be) to come home to. And then I had the way trees will always stand tall. I had the way my lungs breathe in and out. I had my memories, all of them good and bad. I had the earth to walk on. All these things could never be taken away from me. No matter what, I have a home.

Aha, it's here. I have found my gratitude again.

Round 5: This was supposed to be a short additional round to get out anything we needed to say. All at once the prayers were muttered, and it sounded like a circle of Wiccans, or something breathing from the supernatural. The water was poured, and poured, and poured. Until my chest was pressed, my ears seemed to meet. The heat became pressure that squeezed the last bits of doubt right out of me.

The flap was opened for the last time. I crawled out of the small white lit hole, jello legged and armed. I felt like an animal being born. Out of a sticky womb, I squeezed out. Covered in mud. Cold from the ten pounds of sweat i had shed. On all four hands and knees, I bent and touched my head on the cool earth and said " I am here"

Debbie Downers

The past week I've been reading stories the way binge eaters eat oreos. All exstatically and high, while I am accompanied by my good friends calories and fats.

These are the stories gists: a pediphile, a sad lonely mathmatician that overhears people saying sad things about him, a couple that their best friends stand them up at a dinner party and they almost break up because of it, a couple who decided to have a baby that was concieved in a brutal rape, two hospital orderlys that get high and kill baby rabbits, and a man who gets pushy on a 900 number.

Jesus, Someone guide me to the contemporary author who is writing with the same ball-grasping exstacy that John Muir felt for the wilderness. Or that Walt Whitman felt for man. Do you agree that the same total naked baring reality can be found here in this moment of silence in front of a canyon and a hummbing bird in the lavander? I know too well the feelings of loneliness, inward shrinking insecurity, and confusion. I would like to feel rooted.

Where do I Find those stories?


Ps. I love you. I love you because you have eyes, and are breathing, and are beating hearts.

Can There Be Anything Else Besides Narrative

This is an essayish that is not meant to persuade you to do anything, but to relieve some of the fear and judgment around writing whatever comes out of you.



The only experience I have with poetry is the kind that wells out from the fingernails, from the gut meat, or the purple crevices of the mind. Some sense of it comes from my reading too, but let's face it I wouldn't even know where to look for poetry outside the canon. In guidance to where the poetry of the people lives, I don't trust the motivated insecurity of hipsters, and I think I trust the white knuckles of scholars even less. **This is a guarded confession of my little study in the area of poetic theory and criticism.

However! I still count on my hypothesis that: the conventions of staying away from sentimentality, staying clear from harmless egotism has taken a stronghold on a very natural well of creativity--our own sloppy experience.

In my personal understanding of the way things work, Poetry has a very similar evolution as Feminism. What a miraculous voice it was that spoke out of the first people that said, " I am not these lines in which someone else has drawn with a very clumsy pen" Avant-garde, I believe was in some degree the same statement. Both must have come from a first peek of light that belongs to a universe of stars. But it was not the message that made them true, instead it was the vulnerability behind these claims that caused the earth to quiver. The desperateness. It was the boiling energy behind these ideas that made them so human

If you silence a people, which means if you keep them from expressing what life is, in the language most accessible to them-- you are in a sense murdering these people. Feminism, and other ideas of expanding our awareness, usually come from feeling of immediate threat. A voice of utter urgency. " If I cannot use my voice, I am invisible, I am dead."

To devalue Narrative Poetry, is to kill many people. Our personal senses are the only means to understanding our physical world. Our experiences are the only means of understanding our minds. Why, then are we so critical of trite, over sentimental, cliche poetry? I say, if
you are writing simple words about your heartbreak; about your sorrow; you are merely keeping alive by the very small and brave whisper inside you.

Our voice is necessary to live. That is the lesson in any movement towards a compassionate world. Disband the judgmental dialogue around 'good poetry'; dig up the poetry from their graves in the Canon. Let us write poetry that completely involves ourselves.

Oy Vey, with that said:


Just, Fuck you.

A man cussed me out
for parking to close
to a car that wasn't his

& I felt a shiver all day in my elbows
the kind seventeen year olds have
until I blossomed
a very important fact
in this fable.

There are people
who are more unplesant than me.
a-men.

I heard Lucille Clifton

First Year.

At my workplace

if you can call it that,

I am alone in a ruin

of dusty blue gray

houses where the war

has been

and is still flickering

nearby

No one looks at me.

The students stare at me

with numb

distain or hope

that I may not recognize anymore.

the teachers stare at me

from above their desks

and I feel young and

dangerous to the barcade

in which they made

to keep order

and empathy

close to the bullet ash floor.

it makes me doubt

if I still love this

or ever did.

But then

I heard Lucille Clifton

“ I think it’s affirming that

after a tragedy like this

I continue to write, that

I still have poetry left”

Intention of this blog

I think we all have a hard time centering in on our lives. And it seems that the more we try to focus, to bare down, to eat in one bite & enjoy it-- the more broken and distant our lives feel. This is my attempt to write poetry every week; hopefully a gentle way, and for me, an intuitive way to feel closer to my life. So that I may feel an atmosphere of life breathing in my skin, to feel my muscles unsqueeze themselves in the warmth of knowing (not conceptualizing) deeply that Life is always patient.

I have this hunch, we all have hunches on how to live the best life, thats why we have writers and dictators, and families--I have this hunch that poetry specifically can untie us from our anxious holds on our desires and destructions. Because to write a poem, one has to utterly love the poem. You don't need to necessarily love the subject matter all the time, or even the action of shaping clay words; but you must love it the moment you are writing it down. You must love it so much that it becomes real for someone else to hold. For example, if you are writing about how much you hate your mother, you must love the moment when you are brave enough to write it down, you must love all people who hate their mothers, you must love the unbareable sharp tinge when you contemplate why God made bad mothers in the first place. This love is what is going to free the words from your history and allow someone else to make use of it.

You can imagine how painful and difficult it is to love things like your poems, and completely. But I believe its exactly this practice to unbind me, to relax me hating thoughts, so that I may surrender into a place of ease. Maybe it will work for you. I will never tell you what will work for you; that would be counter-intuitive.

And so this is my intention for writing a blog. To love my poems tenderly, and hopefully have that love overflow into other parts of my life. The public aspect of this project, is to love myself in everyone, and in that begin to love openly my human family. If I can know that all people crave the things I do, maybe I'll worry less about us.

** I heard Lucille Clifton is a poem I wrote about my year as a Reading Tutor for Americorps.