Holy Fucking Shit.

This Fucking Shit is In Fucking Sane.

http://www.survival-international.org/news/3340

Lake Ouachita is MY lake.

You can smell the lake before you can see it. I know just when to roll my windows down. First there's a mountain to climb which peaks and then the road goes down, turns, goes down again. That's when to roll the windows down, breathe deeply, let the bliss start to work its way under your skin. Then through the leaves you'll start to see the water's reflection. Come around a curve, ignore the first gravel patch but before you get to the second slow down and pull off the road. This is the sacred spot.

I feel the healing begin as soon as the key turns off. Gather up materials - towel, shoes, sunscreen? Oh guess not, bummer. No goggles today either, damnit. Alright, well, it's the first real swim of the year, it can't be perfect yet. Get out the car, bury the keys in a hidey-spot, and begin my trek through the woods. When I find myself at the edge of the water, if there are people around, I crouch down and shed my layers apologetically - if not, I'm brazen about it. I like to sit down and scoot into the water as the drop-off is quite steep. When I'm almost hip deep I'll take a huge breath and dive on in.

Oh my dear sweet lord. I'm home. I push and push and push myself under the water, trying to see how long I can make the breath last, how far out I can swim before I have to surface. I can feel the little things start to wash off - the fact that the grill man must have burnt seven orders today is gone. Hating the chemicals I have to clean with - gone. I push and push until I'm sure I'll die and only then allow myself to surface. I heave out the biggest sigh and immediately begin pumping legs, pumping arms - I have some distance to cover.

I was previously sure it was a quarter mile across the lake where I swim - Google maps tells me it's more like a tenth. It feels like a full mile. Hand over head, hand over hand, kick kick kick... and I like to switch it up. I'll swim forward, belly down, paddling, then start spinning like a top, swimming while I spin left left left, then right right right, then lay on my back and kick and throw my hands over my head and pull the water down my sides.

You'd never know I was an earth sign.

But apparently my Chinese astrology is full of water. And I love it. I love the feeling of being near weightlessness, the power, the strength I feel when I swim, the way my body moves in the water. Halfway across I forget the fact that I've just worked nearly seventy hours in five and a half days. Then I realize I'm not even halfway across yet and I get a little thrill. I won't let myself stop, won't take a break, have to swim the whole way without stopping. I get tired and I don't care. I keep swimming, keep spinning, swim front swim back swim sideways, just keep swimming and do not stop. Boats don't frighten me - I frighten boats. They can't figure out how I'm doing what they're doing without paying thousands to do it. I'm doing this myself. My own body does this by itself and it is a miracle.

When I finally get to the other side, it's interesting and hillarious watching myself try to pull my body back onto land, trying to remember how it works to be on land again. It takes a moment. This being the first swim of the year, I just collapsed until I remembered how to breathe again. Stood up and walked around to my favorite little spot where no one can see you sunning topless. Hung out until I got my breath back and then... back in, back across, without stopping once again. Gone is stress, gone is drama, gone are bills and unfulfilled obligations and chores, there is nothing but me, the sun, the water, and my breath...

Nothing but me, the sun, the water, and my breaths.

I'll get to the other side and touch rock, but usually cannot climb out just yet. Something about my body just isn't done with its water experience yet, doesn't want to do the land thing again just yet. I'll play games with my body in the water - try and float and see how long I can keep my toes above the water. Try to spin like a top without moving my arms. Try to swim with just my arms, or just my legs, try to turn somersaults without getting water in my ears.

I am wholly myself again, friends. Varsity Lake Crew tryouts begin now.

Thinking and Reading on Love...

My dear friend Christopher took me to a bookstore. Not just any bookstore - the Strand, with eight miles of books, mostly secondhand. If you know me well, you can imagine how much time I spent just drooling over shelf after shelf...

I've been fascinated with the Napoleonic era and its mindset for a while, and I've recently developed a celebrity crush on poet Edna St Vincent Millay. So I found two books, one with quotes of Napoleon and one with poems of Edna's. Here is what I want to share, and it's been helping this denying-lovesick poet these past few days.

"I do not ask you for the definition of love. I was in love once, and I remember it well enough not to require those metaphysical definitions that merely confuse matters. I do more than deny its existence. I believe it to be harmful to society, to individual happiness - in short, I believe that... it would be the merciful deed of a protective divinity to rid us of love and to liberate the world from it." -N. Bonaparte

"What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more."
-E. StV. Millay

Then Marty McConnel, a poet who regularly gives me Explody of the Brain, wrote a poem containing this line... "the ones who sing you love songs/ are never the ones who stay."

I'm just meditating and reading and wanted to share this with you all.

Maypril is the cruelest month.

April, oh April! You exhausted me!

Writing a draft every single day... I didn't know if I'd be able to do it, but I did, and everything holds promise. A very select few are ready now, I'd even be comfortable with publishing a couple of them... the rest... well, they need work, revisions, rewrites, edits... but what a lovely bunch of coconuts I'm sitting on top of now.

I'd thought I'd carry into May, writing and writing, and keep churning out drafts - at least a couple a week. But April left me so worn out that I've written nothing so far this month.

I had previously intended to pull all the drafts down... but I think I'll let them stand. It was an amazing time, and I want it to stay up. I'm still copying them into some word type document, still printing and editing and rewriting. Still intend to turn them into a new chapbook at some point, but there's no rush.

Next week I fly to New York to visit a good friend and make a few more. I'll explore a city that I've only ever glimpsed previously and hear amazing poetry and see amazing sights and eat and breathe and walk and see...

Day 30: LISTEN. STOP.

when your ears are full
already of your own words
you will never hear.

what i mean to say
is that i am growing sick
of train-like speakers.

i'd rather you talk to yourself against a wall
in the mirror, into your phone, open but not on.

if all you want to do is talk, allow half a response,
then interrupt it to talk more, go flap your gums
all by yourself. i'm absolutely sick to my stomach

to my lungs to my heart i have become
sick to my ears of the sound of your voice and

i've always warned people who should know
that when i am at my most quiet i am also at
my most dangerous, most angry. i will float

in my silence allowing you to verbally masturbate,
lost in my own fantasies in which i reach out

and grab your jaw and tear it off of your face,
declaring you unworthy of your words, walking
out the door with it held high over my head like a
trophy, baptizing me with every step. i will
take it home and string every one of your teeth

onto a necklace, bleach the jaw and attach rubies
and diamonds and make of it my crown which
i will wear when i intend to do nothing at all except
listen.

Day 29: I've been watching movies.

Damnit if I didn't just watch Away From Her. Damnit if I don't keep hearing about this whole "love" thing and wondering where mine is exactly already. Damnit if I don't write a love poem nine out of every ten.

------------------------------

You will say it first, accidentally,
instantly apologetic, and then we will
become awkward, sitting in silences
perched like parenthesis around the words
I will not acknowledge, for the remainder
of the evening. No, I won't say it first,
and probably not even second or third:

You'll have to repeat it a few times,
make it start to stick like a sacred mantra,
before I really believe you. Poets have
this predisposition, you see: poets put
more value on words than we do
on water, on oxygen, on gold, which are
good words to use in this metaphor anyway

I will not say I Love You until I am sure
I can commit myself wholly, blissfully,
unwaveringly to its meaning. I will not tell you
I love you until I have already imagined
each and every way you could hurt me
and reconciled myself somehow with surviving
all five thousand and three of them, in detail.

Day 28: The girl who looked like me

A girl went out wearing my skin today I know it was mine because the cheeks were still wet. She was too thin for it; it didn't fit quite right on her bones but she wore it like she intended to mean it. She had gone out for breakfast: two eggs over medium, floppy bacon, biscuits instead of toast and a small side of gravy. She smiled once or twice, the girl who was not my self, laughed with people she could not call her friends but felt comfortable eating with. They laughed with her, too.

She ate slowly, this girl who used a voice like mine, sipped her coffee with just enough sugar and just enough cream and didn't worry about a single thing. As she talked and listened and listened, her face dried and the smile began to stick, first in the corners of her mouth, then more and more around the temples. Her conversation became animated and I watched her speak with her hands using gestures that made ballerinas look like newborns.

The girl with my hair on her head stood to leave, and one more person in her young life with advice for her decided to approach her and give it. The reasoning was invalid, but it was heartfelt, and finished off with "You'd be happier if you did."

"I don't know," I heard her say. "I'm a pretty happy person."

She said it like she intended to mean it, and I suspect she did.

Day 27: Why the Queen of Sheba uses disposable dishes.

This is in the right format to become a sonnet... but I wonder if instead it will become a... sestina? vilanelle? slam piece? Anyway, the idea has started like this.

----------------

Makeda spat in the dishwater; swore never again.
It was the water, you see, that started it all:
When she woke in the night with a desert-sized thirst
and reached for the pitcher there beside her bed.

And then, there he stood to make good on his threats.
Said if she'd broken her vow not to steal from his house
then he could break his not to take her by force.
Jerusalem hadn't enough water to wash off his crime.

Makeda took to bathing with oil.
She would not swim or tavel by boat and when
the yearly rains came, she stayed inside until
Ethiopia's golden sun dried it all up.

Her solace was knowing her son would be king,
did not know Solomon's son would be called a god.

Poetry Month - Yesterday's Poem

Didn't get home until nearly two last night, and I was a little marinated. Sorry. Here's the poem. Oops, I mean draft. Have I said draft ten thousand times this month yet?





Final victory: Ninth victory:
I thought the time might be right.
I laid down on the ground, on his level,
to make of myself less a threat,
and sure enough, gods be praised,
he began to climb his awkward mangy body
all over my face, giving kisses out wildly;
it was then I was allowed to pet him.

Eighth victory:
As I was walking away, him chasing behind,
tail wagging, he jumped up and placed
both paws on my leg and pushed.
He initiated contact, you see.

Seventh victory:
While he was eating out of my hand,
I allowed my thumb to carefully, slowly
graze the side of his puppy face and he
pretended not to notice.

Sixth victory:
One afternoon after the meal and I
was walking back to my door,
he actually followed me, chased
me even, tail wagging.

Fifth victory:
The day I tried holding food in my hand
and he cautiously ate out of it before
running back into the alley.

Fourth victory:
When my car pulled up, his tiny matted tail,
previously perma-tucked, popped up and
even wagged.

Third victory:
When I threw the food closer and closer,
he came closer and closer to get it,
even if he snapped at my hand when it was
too near for comfort.

Second victory:
He came back
every single day
at exactly three forty
when I got home from work.

First victory:
He chose
the alley alongside
my house.

Day 25: Wailing Sin

It's been a twelve-hour shift. This is the roughest rough draft ever.

Please know my plans: I'll delete every single one of this month's posts when the month is over. That's right. They're effing rough! I'm still working on that day I still haven't posted, because I can't decide if it's a letter I'm writing to the future lovers, a letter my ex is writing to me, or a letter my ex is writing to them. I'm posting these drafts now as a... jeez I don't even know. As proof that this is actually even happening - proving it to myself as well. But then they'll get edited, rewritten, cleaned... and then will come my fourth chapbook, with each of these in order, dates at the top.

Until then, this is how it stands.

------------------------------

Bob Marley is getting tired of turning over,
can only do it so many times a day,
six feet under ground, but atrocities are
happening, man, and rolling over is all he's
got left he can do. Tuff Gong sang
to us of redemption, called upon us to be
buffalo soldiers, to get up, stand up.
I need answers, Bob, but you're not here
to give them. Music is freedom, is movement,
is revolution - or should be. Why, then
did I hear today on the sadistic speakers
at my job the elevator-jazz version of your
sacred call to action, somehow sedated,
the magic removed and it became
Sit Down, Lay Down instead of a rigteous
charge. Whose signature made this possible,
Bob? Roll over and speak me some truth.

Or rise up, and find these dollarsick bastards
whose idea it is to make this happen. Let
your ghost descend upon their households,
whispering into their children's sleeping ears
until they wake to grow their hair out
in locks, quoting scripture to their fathers,
wailing out against oppression, buildling Zion
in every backyard.