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Trail Map

Do you understand it when I tell you that you’ve got the heart of a trail map. that your spirit smells like hickory campfire?

And when you told me I look like the wilderness, I just wanted you to know that you would never find yourself lost in me. And you’ve always been an outdoors girl, and I’ve always been a forest of bramble, I want you to find your way through me, I want to be your Appalachia.

Trace every course, even the ones left by hunters. You could go on great adventures through me. Swim my rivers, whose currents would carry you gentle.

Track boot prints on every bank, I will cake them fossil with sun. You are the taste of sunlight to a canopy of leaves.

Come into this wilderness.

You make me feel endless, impossible to cut down.

Take your telescope into a clearing, a field in my forest, and search out every constellation.

I would show you the secrets of an infinite sky.

I will let you in, point out the scorch marks patches of wild fires. You are campfire hearth, home. I will let you touch scars carved by bowie knives. Because your fingertips are not mazes, but maps. I’ve never met a trail map with a heart so big, compass so clear. I want to know your texture, topography. Come into me. Into this wilderness, in which you will be loved.

And there will be other trekkers, explorers, outdoorsmen. And if you are a book of maps, there will be other forests, mountains, jungles, deserts, shorelines.

But I will always welcome you into my forest friendly, familiar.

You tell me you’re an outdoors girl, and that I look like the wilderness.

So this will be a great adventure.

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This is a poem about privilege. I’ve got a lot of thoughts about it, I’ve got a lot more than anyone ought to have of it. And I wanna talk about it. Cause I’ve never heard anyone stand on a stage and say this. I am cis-gendered. Fiscally well-off. Able-bodied, young in an age of ageism. I’ve never lived in the wrong parts of a city. I live on the right side of social biases with which I disagree. But that doesn’t matter. Don’t let white people tell you it isn’t easy to be white people. That reverse racism exists. I am thin enough, cute enough, fill this in enough to get to be a woman. My skin is the white and pink of a peppermint. In a world where not everyone loves chocolate, caramel, marzipan. I do. But I don’t like cinnamon. I’m a poor little rich girl. Pretty young thing, I am white devil, devil on my back because I know exactly what this is. It’s privilege.

I was born to a fortunate son and a Daughter of the Confederacy who, when I told her I had dated a black dude, had three questions for me: Does he had AIDS? Is he a heroin addict? Would you have wanted him if he weren’t a poet? I was silver spooned blue blood and peachy cream cheeks have never come with a side of apology. I am sorry. I often wish skin were invisible. That we wore the veins and arteries that stich us together like a sweater. But skin is really just a beginning. I have lived in a house with a white picket fence. I live in the Third Ward now, in what my housemates call “The Ghetto Mansion.” And I cringe, but sometimes I still joke that I’m the face of gentrification. And I am. And I am sorry that I stand on this side of class warfare. I’m sorry if I am making any of you uncomfortable. Why aren’t we all of us a little more uncomfortable anyway?

And I can call myself heterosexual, And if I were to say I weren’t that would make me a bisexual. And pejorative pornography preaches to me is appealing,

so long as I am still a woman. I don’t have deal with dirty looks from the Ted Cruz types or bullshit from Michelle Bachman bitches. Michelle Bachman, who once said that, were public schools to teach us that homosexuality is not an aberration, it would lead to "sexual anarchy.” Which sounds fucking sexy to me. Underscore me ‘cause I’m too privileged to be a poet. Because this isn’t a tale a woe. I can’t write those. I am bland. I am fit into a crowd like jigsaw puzzle piece. I will never be told to sand myself down, to scythe something of me off. I am not living proof of people robbed of their homeland. A WASP doesn’t have a holocaust, a genocide, bigotry, prejudice. You see, I'm supposed to be the one to perpetuate it. This is a poem about privilege. I’m sorry if it sounded a lot more like a “humble brag.” Who wants to win at something rigged? Who wants to feel like it’s a rat race race war? There’s a lot more to this than an apology. There is anger looking for a way forward. Away from mindsets like my mother’s.

My skin comes with slurs like “poor little rich girl.” “Pretty young thing.“ White devil. Spoiled brat. “Bitch, please… why are you even complaining?”

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If the Body is a Universe

Daoists have a funny way of looking at life. They say that the body is a universe. If that’s case and I am a cosmos, My veins are tiny little milky ways. carrying my blood made of the rust of exploded stars. My heart is a nebula, birthing out a thousand more stars each day.

If the body is a universe, that means that the scars and bruises we carry on our skin are the craters on those outlier planets. The ones we study from our telescopes, as we dream of terraforming brave new worlds. There to remind us of the terrifying impacts that we have survived. That the universe keeps ticking away like a pulse-line.

If the body is a universe, it doesn’t come with apologies or excuses, it comes with gravity and an idea of the infinite that our human minds may never wrap around but we can all embody.

If infinity is inherited, my mother is the goddess I have always known her to be. My father the emperor he’s always called himself. [My sister will always to be a constellation.] And I have a birthmark the shape of Beetlejuice, because there are galaxies in our genes. I have never envisioned that God has any genitalia. But we do, so maybe sex is as sacred as we are taught in our temples. But the body is not a sanctuary. It is constantly dynamic Cosmos and there’s a flux in the fleshy distance between us. If a body is a universe I don’t think it knows how to say, “I’m sorry.” And I’m not. I am all jutting out awkward cacophony. But I’ll blame my mood-swings on the moons of Neptune. And I’ll say that you are being sulky because Uranus is in retrograde. We can start re-conceptualizing complements: Thank you, miss, for the meteor shower in your cackle. Excuse me, sir, but you have a little north star in your smile. Baby, your eyes are the color of Venus. Let’s call Carl Sagan a prophet. Stephen Hawkins a messiah wheeling among us. We can rename Einstein, St. Albert. And none of those words will mean anything anyway. What are titles to totalities onto themselves? What if when we hold ourselves we are holding onto the universe? And it is soft and fragile and animal. Blood and bone, body. Why would it be anything else?

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Word Porn Poem

I have been following a thread on Facebook, word porn. I thread the words through us. Sometimes I think it’s the story of us.

Holophrasis: (n) the expression of complex ideas in a single word or phrase This is all I’m looking for. Kilig: (n) the rush or inexplicable joy one feels after seeing or experiencing something romantic. Do you remember how I read to you on stage? No, you’ve never seen it. Tarantism: (n) overcoming melancholy by dancing; the urge to dance. Would you dance with me if I asked you to? Would you hold me at a distance? Tacenda: (n) things better left unsaid; matters to be passed over in silence. Maybe we could dance like our lives deserved a soundtrack. Track marks scars of Bright Eyes and Bon Iver, golden oldies. And you call your band New Mercies, but that’s what you’ve never been.

  Accismus: (n) feigning disinterest in something while actually desiring it. I don’t miss you. I wouldn’t trade you for the state of Texas. Pluviophile: a lover of the smell of rain. I sought out rejection like storms seek out drought, like a renewal.

Petrichor: (n) the scent of earth after rain. I sought you out like rain seeks soil.

Scripturient: (adj) having a consuming passion to write Can I write you back to me? I have written you so many sorries.

  Selcouth: (adj) unfamiliar, rare, strange, and yet marvelous You were the Johnny Walker to my Jasmine Tea.

We tasted like a sweet mistake tastes to an alcoholic.

Abditory: (n) a place into which you can disappear; a hiding place

You were trouble, and troubled never had a face like yours. Eyes that I disappeared into. You kept them closed.

  Niedosyt: (n) a lack of sufficient satisfaction of one’s need. You were forgiveness on spent sheets. Sometimes just an anticlimactic apology. I’m sorry for the scratches. Do you remember how the bite marks bloomed on me like clamshell butterfly wings? It’s because I bled too well for your teeth. And I know my heart was hickey-shaped before it ever met yours, scar tissue riddled.

Alexithymia: (n) And inability to describe emotions in a verbal manner But your laugh came with a question mark. My lips are held up by a bow, Quiver full of arrows, strung tight, unused. Tips dipped in poisons of your taste.

Anagapesis: (n) No longer feeling any affection for someone you once loved. I am trying. You’ve done it so well.

lalochezia: (n) the emotional relief gained from the use of profane language. Fuck you. Fuck her, I know you’ve fucked every cunt you could. Lethologica: (n) when you think of something but the word for it escapes you. What if that poem about four letter words that sting worst spell out, L-O-V-E, P-A-I-N, O-V-E-R me.

Lethologica: (n) when you think of something but the word for it escapes you. You are a dictionary too heavy for me to throw at your head. Words unsaid. Induratize: (v) to make one’s own heart hardened or resistant to someone’s pleas or advances, or to the idea of love. Our armored hearts made war, and I wasn’t warrior enough. Finifugal: (adj) hating endings; of someone who tries to avoid or prolong the final moments of a story, relationship, or some other journey. Word Porn Elegy of Us. Enough.

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On the Range

My sister and I spent the summers of our youths  at a cabin in the woods beside a horseshoe-shaped lake.  Two little big city girls camping out in the country,  can you imagine how magical it was?  We made finger paint trail maps and played all the usual games: pioneer women living on the range,  how many minnows can you catch with just a hook and a grub?  Who can hold her breath underwater longest?  It’s crazy how many different ways children can find to have fun.  I went up to that cabin after she pulled a Ted Kaczynski and got Committed.  I was cleaning up any evidence of her illness. What I found was that her brand of insane is just the same as mine.  Washing lipstick graffiti messages off of the walls  addressed to an old boyfriend and to God,  my thought was, “these are just like the letters I wrote from that Institution last year.”  We move around the memorabilia of our separate lives as if we are playing the same game of treasure mapping out our mania.  Maybe there was something in that lake water which both of us were drinking in as the sunshine peppered us with freckles.  There is madness burning up in us both like a bonfire.

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Hope

We came.  We came to.  We came to believe.  That a Power greater than ourselves  could restore us to sanity.  A man named Joseph  with three missing front teeth breaks down the 2nd step like that and realigns my universe.  Jerry chooses our meeting’s topic

And it’s one word: hope. As in how does hope restore us to sanity?  Jerry had brain surgery on Wednesday  and he’s back in the NA rooms on this Sunday afternoon.  He says, “if you start to feel all-powerful,  go to the ocean shore and try to stop the tides.  Cure brain cancer without chemotherapy, without surgery after surgery, without prescribing even a single pill.  Lucky is a hipster kid just getting clean,  new to our rooms, and he inspires me when he says he hopes to someday inspire an addict with his story of recovery.  When it’s time for my share, I tell them about how I was raised without any high hopes, about anything.  Plenty of love, but our family’s way  was to argue analytics and issues at the dinner table.  The arguments for hope are few and far between, and not particularly persuasive.  A year ago to this day I had lost every last hope.  So I took an overdose of a prescription  and tried so hard to let everything go.  But when the OD symptoms started up,  it occurred to me that I was shuffling off of  this mortal coil with some unanswered questions.  Couldn’t think of anyone to call, so I dialed a hotline and I met Monica: 18, college-bound in the fall,  no history of depression or addiction and no opinion at all about having hope or how to let it go.  But she did let me know that my call had been traced and the cops were on their way.  So I’m alive today and still left with some questions.  I do have one hypothesis:  that addicts are born with oversized hearts. It takes more love and yes, hope, to fill us with anything.  I don’t hear a higher power, haven’t since I stopped using.  But hearing Joe, Jerry and Lucky  spilling out their full hearts, I feel restored.  And you have to have hope, to surrender to sanity

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Love Affair with a Nightmare.

I’m looking for a dude with a dick like  burning sage.  You see, I need to smoke him out of me somehow.  I have no idea of how to fight  this phantom.  But I can’t keep on haunting all those  abandoned places,  in search of someone  who was never mine.  Paranormals like to tell you they aren’t  into “parameters.”  So I’m searching for a man  who can double as  a psychic.  His memory lingers, still, on my skin;  like Dr. Braun’s soap smell and the aftertaste of an excellent cup of coffee. I can’t let go of the memory of getting weird  with all of  our clothes still on.  The way he would  look at me like a monster  at the end of  a chase.  I’m having nightmares  of drag race  disasters.  The worst part is always  the long-haired harpy  in his passenger seat.  Sell me that  snake oil sex,  if it promises to  erase this angry  shade.  I’ll trade  moonstones,  wolfsbane.  So, I’m gonna  go ahead and go out  looking for an exorcist  to fuck him out of me.  Find any way I can  to let go of  a ghost.

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n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate...

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Pagefright

I think I'm becoming afraid of tumblr. I can't understand the relationship I want to have with having an internet identity, with laying out my bones and letting other people fill in the blanks. I've always been the type who tweaks and tweaks, nothing is ever perfected and I hate deciding whether to go back and alter those works or preserve the proof of process. The idea that people can see so much of my naked newness in pixilated flaw form made my stomach turn last night. Vulnerability, not sure how to do it well if I spell it out on the internet but can't summon that up in real time.

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The Bride of Dionysus

I mix honey into our wine and call it heaven. We drink each other in and he and I are never sated. He tells me I make him feel fizzy. He makes me dizzy, but love is never sober. The only problem is that there aren't any answers in alcohol. And intoxicating is another word for  poisoned.

When our stomachs turn, he decides he needs something stronger and I go out looking for an antidote. After our deluge, he stirs battery acid into our coffee and calls it a fond farewell

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After that Fight

Wait eight days to call. Suggest that you two make dinner at his place. When you show up, look beautiful. (You are so beautiful.)  Ask to choose one of his records to play. Pick something foreign. Something funky. Sing along, if only to remind him how much he loves your voice. Cook something with chili peppers in it and add Sriacha like it is ketchup. Volunteer to chop up the onions, in case he ends it over the course of your kitchen prep work. Talk about the poems you have been writing and how happy you are that life has been getting a little bit hectic lately. Wait patiently for him to bring up the subject of 'us'. Don't allow him to apologize. Remind him that he was never really in the wrong. Say that you have been thinking about him, but you've been too bashful to say anything after that fight. Smile sadly when he grimaces. Squeeze his hand and assure him that you still feel so comfortable around him. Say that the basis for a beautiful friendship is definitely still there. Hope that he agrees. If he cries while he explains that he got lost in his last relationship, sit next to him and cry along. Tell him about the boy who broke you. Remind him that we are all so much more than the sum total of our damages. Tell him he is beautiful. (He is so beautiful.) That he gives you hope. Even if your mistakes have already overwhelmed your chances, that his heart has touched yours. If you need to say "I love you," add in all those words to temper them. "I love to be around you," "I have so much love for you." You'll need to leave before midnight. Cite an early morning. Do not stay.  Remember that you may always regret how quickly you held him all too close. Let yourself hold him close tonight. As if this will be your last moment in his arms. Do not kiss him. And when you kiss him, count to three. It's okay to press your thumb onto his earlobe  the way you always have, but do not linger. Tell yourself that this is temporary, a hiccup in the life that you will live together. And if you cry over this goodbye, let him see those tears. He has always told you that you are beautiful, so beautiful even as you cry. Thank him for the evening. Say it in a way that says, "thank you for every evening,  every morning." Say goodbye.

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With the lights out, windows up wrapped in his navy sheets the cicadas' hum and skipping beats of a spent album our cacophonous backdrop, he asks me what I am afraid of.  I don't tell him the truth. Which is that I have never been afraid of anything, apart from him; that until the idea of the morning after this whispered midnight chatter, nothing has ever mattered enough to strike me as particularly terrifying. So I'm lying as I tell him that I am afraid of arachnids. That eight-legged scorpions and spiders haunt me. It's closer to right to say that I identify with them: thick skin, sharp pincers,  so many eyes that never miss much. They say spiders mate for life. I know they don't live all that long, but in an of itself, that's terrifying enough. And lying beside him, I understand the impulse. It's frightening stuff.

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micro-commentary on my disaffected reality.

post-post-continental anti-rationalist appropriation aesthetics, ontologized sublimity of affect-networks, augmented spirituality, the withdrawal of the identified-object into an abundance of the sensory (there are always more affects than objects/objects are multiply-anchored w/ affects),...

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To Jesse Willms

Dear Jesse— Thank you for defrauding the global economy of at least 500 million dollars.  For the credit card fraud,  and all those pseudo-pharmaceutical scams.  Thanks for the Shake Weight.  For those Green Tea Acai Diet Pills, the ones I took until I passed out,  and then kept in my kitchen cupboard,  just in case. For what you did to ecommerce,  and to consumer confidence, Truly, from the bottom of my piggy bank,  thank you. We all needed another reason to doubt. What’s one more cringe-worthy charge  on our credit card statements?  I want you to know  that I joined Wikipedia this morning.  That my only intent in doing so  was to illuminate you. The Dark Lord of the Internet.  It’s time we celebrate the creeps,  The crooks that have preyed on everything  anyone’s ever secretly loathed about themselves: Our less-than-brilliant smiles,  the dimples in our derrieres.  I never did learn that one simple trick  For reducing your belly fat.  But I never gave you my 16 digit identity,  so I guess I’ll never know.  I guess this makes us even. I guess I wish there were a hell for you to rot in forever.  From the desk of your biggest fan.

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How one of the most notorious alleged hustlers in the history of e-commerce made a fortune on the Web

Never knew this guy was out there, fueling my hate fire.

[coastlineoftypeface]

(In Response to Charles Warnke’s You Should Date An Illiterate Girl.)

Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a...

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Children of God

This is a poem I never planned to pen,  until, over a drink, he tells me about the girl  I noticed him watching from our pew.  She goes to his 11 am ecclesiastic service,  and I swear she does it, in part,  just to ignore him. 

His eyes light up as he explains how, this past Sunday,  she offered him her handshake  and a "may Peace be with you."  I take steady sips of my wine and start to wonder 

if what happened is that she saw him through me.  I know I stuck out of that Sunday service  like a sore thumb sticks out of its palm.  Shakespeare called palm-to-palm

holy palmer's kiss.  But, I've never held his hand.  He's never offered it. That was the Sunday I gave God one last shot.  This man I silently adored  stepped up to take me to his church.  I chose him as my shepherd;  I've always felt like a part of his flock. 

Did she wonder if she might no longer be his preoccupation,  if he fell for a doubt-filled question mark disbeliever like me?  That he would he forget his favorite, his faithful period.  That peaceful piece to end to his every doubt. 

She has no reason to worry that he will ever stop sneaking looks at her,  whenever he thinks she is too absorbed in a psalm  to notice the impiety in his glances.  I watched him staring at her throughout a sermon entitled,  "On the love in our hearts for every child of God."  I always fight the urge, of how much  I want him to hold me in his heart.  I've prayed I could be his punctuation mark,  whatever character to take away any disbelief.  But I know that no amount of my devotion will ever make him hold me as if I am anything,  except another one  of every  child of God.