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.