roach

”But there it is, the neutral roach, without a name for pain or for love.”

“For I was exaulting. I was coming to know the violence of the happy dark — I was happy as a demon, hell is my maximum.”

“Oh God, I was feeling baptized by the world. I had put a roach’s matter into my mouth, and finally performed the tiniest act.”

“Through the living roach I am coming to understand that I too am whatever is alive.”

“That was when the cockroach began to emerge.”

“The cockroach is pure seduction.”

+++

nearly done with my first chapbook, the memoir of a cockroach. I have plans for this little lovely when done. currently: seeking an epigraph from the astonishing book The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector (the source of all the above quotes), which I highly recommend.

on skies + colours

Journal:

"Reading Daybook: The Journal of an Artist by Anne Truitt & thinking about all the skies I have seen, all the different types of air. 

Thinking about how the air looked in different places & how you might lay that out. 

The warm wet yellows of New Orleans.
The steeliness of Paris, grey almost like iron.
The cold blue/grey of London
The brownishness of Brooklyn. 

& Los Angeles is bright--like primary colours, with a kind of occasional yellowish twinge. 

Why I think I never went much into visual art is because I could never get the translation right between my head & the execution of it by my hand. I can think of the yellows, but I cannot make them."

letter on running

journal

"fall starts in two days.
another fall, more time passes. & me in exactly the same place.
I'm tired of standing still.

but it's as if my arms & legs have atrophied. they can't move. maybe they never could.

I'm starting to think that the only movement I've ever done has been running away.

I ran away from Oregon. I ran away from New York. I ran away from every place & responsibility in between. I've only run.
now I'm getting that feeling again. that tingling under my skin. I want to run. to abandon everything.
staying still feels like staying stuck & that feels like dying.

but maybe you can never really get anywhere if you keep running. maybe that feeling I've had--that my life doesn't add up to anything--is because nothing can build if you're always starting over." 

idols

all our idols
are dead

their lean muscles curved
in on themselves like too long
fingernails beckoning
us to the stage made
of bones & blood sacks

our awakening
our funerary pyre

journal, 2016

"curled under blankets ratty with age. I lean against the hollywood hills. perched like a gargoyle at its edge, I'm not making the climb yet but also not at the base.

it's a kind of limbo between the hills & the world below--not completely in either, not separate either.

do I feel a sense of belonging? have my skin & bones taken root here in the sand?


it clings to my ankles. exfoliates. I shed my skin around los angeles like a snake."

two cities

New York City folds, Los Angeles curls like long fingers tipped with pointed nails.

New York City pants, Los Angeles practices meditative breathing.

New York City hunches its shoulders, Los Angeles struts with its chest pushed forward.

a poem

roaches

I love cockroaches

the way they breathe

through their skin

if you submerge them

in water they hang limp—

a simulation of death

but once they dry out

their antennae twitch

& they sprint into the dark.

I am saturated— 

all my orifices shut 

laying in stasis

entombed like sewage 

I wait for the sun

to dry my flesh

excerpt from a letter

"[...] I must disagree with you that one does not turn to modern poets and/or poetry for theory. That the merits of poetry are in its craft rather than in its philosophy, and that a poet can “fail” at being a poet while succeeding at being a philosopher. A poet and a philosopher are two sides of the same coin, one cannot fail to be one and succeed at being the other. A poem approached merely by its “rules and traditions and the like” is dead. It is a flat surface, a mathematical equation with no lifeblood. This approach is born of the “fear of poetry” which Muriel Rukeyser talks about. We feel that if we can approach poetry in a cold, detached, and scientific manner it won’t threaten us quite so much. Perhaps this is true, but it does a major disservice to poetry and to ourselves. We are capable of being “amateur philosophers” and it is that capability which poetry seeks to bring out in each of us. The ability to question on a philosophical level is desperately needed in times like ours… and poetry is the mechanism though which we can begin to do this… if we will allow it."

n