The Tallest Man On Earth - Thrown Right At Me (Live In Joburg)

secret projects

I have so many secret projects that I don't share with you on here because I want you to see them in print. I want you to hold these worlds in between thumb and forefinger. But I've decided to let these words dissolve into the ether and pile up in your stomach like dust.

take these dusty words, and know that i am writing so many of them!

secret project 1:


TENDER:


 A double narrative of my time spent as a volunteer in hospice, and my journey to understanding how much i love women.

Today we knew each other. He is starting to trust my stranger’s face because I can repeat back to him the moments of his life. I will do this every time I visit now. I know he wants to die remembering that he has a son that also shares his father’s name. I smile at him while I reconstruct his timeline, and he sighs deeply—instinctively I take a deep breath too. He says in his brutal voice, a carcass of a voice, “ That        was        beau ti ful” My breath? My breath is beautiful? I take another breath, and this time I relish in it; I close my eyes. He nods and says “ E ven     bet ter.”

In the beginning, when we first were roommates, when we first starting calling each other best friends, it was hard to say goodnight. At the end of the day when she would have to make the long trip up the stairs to her room—the room so high above mine, it seemed to be balancing on the full moon—it was too much. Instead, we turned off the lights in the living room, or in my room, and let the purple of the night dye our faces. We wrestled out the sticks of our loneliness that were heaped inside us. We pressed our faces into each other until we left red marks. I held her hair in handfuls. I held her by her waist. When we slept, I wrapped her so tightly I grew new muscles over night. I let my breath be open on her back.

secret project 2:

PHOTOEMS 365

strangers and friends are sending me their black and white photos. I am writing poems to them.

when he was young his body liquid, it spread out wherever there was space. No sensation was too sandpapery to keep his loosely screwed limbs tucked in. He was like an animal unabashed—ignorant. That’s why him and Bif befriended each other; everything could be understood in a shoulder’s yawn, the peninsula of a knee.

This Gentle Surgery by Malachi Black : Poetry Magazine

This Gentle Surgery by Malachi Black : Poetry Magazine I like this one.

A Glass of Water--DAVID MUSGRAVE

A Glass of Water / Poem of the Day : The Poetry Foundation

poetry makes lots of room

poetry is a wish

                     we are all wishes waiting to be blown away in all directions.

poetry is a small house

 

we are alone/we are 7 billion

we are alone

we are 7 billion

we feel alone

we are crowding each other

we feel alone

we are 7 billion

it’s so crowded in the cities

we feel alone anyway

we feel scared

we feel unsure

we have been around for centuries

we are 7 billion

we feel alone in our families

we feel alone in our relationships

we feel alone at work

we feel alone at school

in our churches

we feel alone

we are 7 billion

and we feel alone

we are doing it wrong

our friends or strangers  are doing it right

we are 7 billion

we feel alone

so we want to be categorized

we want to feel the nest of assigned identity

we feel alone

so we build houses

we build houses on top of houses

we build walls with nooks

we sit in the corner so there is no space for loneliness

we feel alone in our neighborhoods, in our cities, in our slums

we are  7 billion

we repeat ourselves

we feel alone in the streets

we feel alone in our cars, but we know we feel alone in our cars

it is very hard to stay vulnerable

it is much easier to brace ourselves and protect our hurt

we are 7 billion

we feel alone in our belief`s

we try to match them up on blind dates

we feel alone in our thoughts that are not politically correct

we are 7 billion

we feel alone

we are afraid of each other

we feel alone

we long for each other

all opposites share a body

we feel alone

we are 7 billion

we are 7 billion

our lives look very similar

our lives are very similar to lives hundreds of years before us

our poverty, our starvation, our babies, our war,  our sex, our communication

we are 7 billion

we are skeptical of anyone understanding us

we are 7 billion

we feel alone in the number

we are 7 billion

we feel alone in the concept

we feel alone

because its much easier to keep eyes shut than to keep them open

there is only so much a muscle can take

we feel alone

because it is easier to feel sheltered in resentment

than it is to be exposed by our injuries

we feel alone

we are on the internet

we feel alone

and we get hair cuts

we feel alone

we take pictures

we want other people to see our pictures

we are 7 billion

we are anxious about existence

we are 7 billion

no human can survive alone

we feel alone in our voting booths

we feel alone so we march

we are 7 billion

we feel alone in our habits

we have so many of them

we feel alone in our guilt in our shame

we are 7 billion

we feel alone in our mistakes

in our choices that we make and don’t make

we feel alone in our apathy

we are 7 billion apathetics

we feel alone

we are not sure if we are invited

we feel alone in our sex

we are 7 billion sexual partners

we are 7 billion I-have-a-headaches

we feel alone in our loss

we are in more than 10 wars globally

we feel alone in our bodies

filled with viscera having pain holding

other bodies filled with viscera having pain holding

we are 7 billion

we feel alone in our sleep

we are asleep

we feel alone in our sins

we are 7 billion and we are perfect

we are 7 billion eating the planet like spores

we are 7 billion, we are destiny, we are perfect

we are 7 billion, we are perfect

we feel alone

we are perfect

we are 7 billion

collaboration on white

So I'm writing these poem-interviews on white. she's a real trip, white is. And I thought...white can't really be herself hanging out inside language all day, she really likes to get wild and spill some of her bleach. So Larissa Canney came along, she's a Mills graduate too, and she's like "hey-- i want to take photos of white, and film her, and be with her too. So together we are making this thing to show off white's [ahem] colors. This is something Larissa made. Pretty cool right? 


http://player.vimeo.com/video/40993654" 


Stay tuned for our book! It should be really amazing. And for a sneak preview, you can read some of my poems from this project here.


I love collaboration, it's a way to really get the blood moving. we are such lovely jam-packed creatures.

w.m.l.l. 10

he was born in a woman's body                              thats what we say



but the he is like a shadow in that sentence, faded by
the sun of body


his eyes on you is looking into the soothsayer
at once you feel:    hurt and      faithful and       honest and                             brave

he walks with the shoulders of someone whose carried around a heavy set
of memories                                       his forearms are hairy      have sharp corners
his hair is dusty like a man's

his skin is pink, unhardened
where the sideburn-shaved sticks out like a gravel road

sitting there in his baseball cap
he looks like a boy                                                                                         he feels like a man.

dinner at cornelia's

tonight i fell in love with a window
the chest of it opened in two doors, one balancing on the old blue mexican antique

it showed how much wind and green      body is made of
shooting out & tangled up     a history with such a sense of humor.

BTW, getting my hair cut kind of feels like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfzKfsX7Fag

w.m.l.l. 10

he is a gray bearded man


                   washing his windows at the gas station


      he smiles at me






                                                                                          i want to smile back but i can't

                                                                                                         i want to look him in the eyes,
like he is human



                                                                                       but i know he will take it as a signal
           



he can't help himself

a little something for occupy oakland

the physics of the world are emmeshed into the philosophy that you are holding like a rock in your hands, and you have to let go of that rock, you have to let gravity do its work, you have to become vulnerable. vulnerability, revolution is all about becoming vulnerable, about caring about something that is being threatened about believing in something that has never happened before. You have to give up on the logic that has kept you safe behind walls you've built yourself. in order for change you have to take down your home. revolution is about opening yourself to the weather. its about getting rained on. its about the deshell, remembering that 'true' is a thin watery membrane, or that it's mythological. that work, which  takes labor and hours and hurt, could actually change. it's about remembering that the entire world is balancing on moving plates. revolution is about coming out of the house, its about coming out of the walls you've built yourself. its about being afraid and showing your intestines. revolution is about emptying your hands of something you have been holding all your life, that you've been working towards, something you've put your sweat into, you've campaigned for even. its about letting those things you held for so long leave the warmth of your clutch and decompose.

a collaboration between Terra Brigando and me

She had been waiting all her life to see the sea. When she was young, her father, a widower, painted boats around her room. Every night she imagined the sound of the sail arching its back in the wind, the sound of pulleys and ropes. Now her father has passed. He did it just as he lived. Quietly, humbly closed his throat and went. She drove two thousand miles in two days in his old chevy. She sung Neil Young the whole way. And now her heels are wet with the salty pacific.

Poems from UNdoing Poetry 2012

sex and death

the sour animal beloved
eats the decomposed
in the cool day of rapture
it eats the wet soil, the wet souls
repelling like two currents




identity


they are siblings
she is a timid thing       hiding
in the dark mobile of bones and arrow

he is a morbid thing
a body of foothills and cubbies
a place for snakes and beetles

she is a bird
fear carving her like a tomato
fear is his sedimentary path layer of mud over layer of mud

w.m.l.l. 9

this is what i see when i close my eyes and see him
these are clips from movies that i cannot forget        not for my own good.




[he is rubbing his penis on her back in the crowded subway]       next scene    [she is has a bloody nose]





                      [he is a child molester, he is jerking off in a car with a woman
while looking at the jungle gym in the dark] [ he says "tell anyone and i'll kill you]




                                                                                  [they find out brandon is 'woman'
 and brutally rape her against the car]




[she is knocked out, but he is too drugged to notice,
so he has sex with her]






I group him with all of these images
because if i don't,

Don't Just Sit There/ Lucius

2 Photoems.

w.m.l.l.00

we are holding each other's faces in one palm. we are telling each other what it's like to be encased in this body we live in. we are facing each other in sloppy clothes, sunday clothes. his face is calm. my body is breathing. we are laughing.