learning to affirm

I always speak the worst into the world, and then I’m surprised when the worst of my desires happens. Because of this terrible power, I’m afraid to speak the best things aloud, the things I truly want. Why? What if I use the wrong terminology? What if the universe takes my words too literally and gives me something strange? What if I were wrong about wanting what I said? I have a lot of fear of the unknown since it’s so pervasive.

I am slowly realizing that being afraid of what I don’t know and can’t control does me no favors. I am slowly learning to be unafraid to admit that I don’t know how something will turn out, or I don’t know all the answers. I am learning to let my heart speak during prayer in case the wrong words spill out of my mouth.

Now, if only I could learn to stop using the computer when I no longer want to be online during the day…

Sometimes.

http://foundationcenter.org/pnd/rfp/rfp_item.jhtml?id=248800002

There are times I wish I tied my name to my online work. I wish I didn’t feel so far removed from my community. I feel as though a lifelong track through school has changed me for the worse instead of for the better. Now I’m graduating from school on May 11th, planning to start a job with lots of tedium and very demanding clients. I’m thousands of dollars in debt, swimming in my own indiscreet spending to keep up with my colleagues or to improve my immediate condition. i avoided reality through gold cards.

All this week some very raw feelings and thoughts have taken hold of my consciousness. If I really don’t want to be distracted by other things and I want to focus on my work and duties, I have to put in the extra work to clear the distractions. No matter how hard it looks, no matter how long it takes.

i want to be the kind of sexy that says
i’m actually naked
these threads and seams are just
superfluous

i'm too sexy for my life (#2.)

The problem is I can’t go up to a person and say that I want to have coffee with them when my honest thought is I want to have an orgasm with them. I would feel like I’m lying. Coffee, gratefully, is not orgasmic for me. (Get me the right tea brew and some creamed honey and we might get somewhere.) But I’m already grappling with sexual repression, recovering from sexual abuse, and sheer fucking negotiation between learning the legal system and civil disobedience through personal autonomy, and if I can’t walk up to someone and say that we should engage in some good sexin’, then I have to learn this ridiculous cat-and-mouse game of relating between being. And it’s such a fucking STUPID game. Can’t we just fuck?

I think I’d like to believe the cultural assumptions about people hold true so these games work well. But I know so many people for whom the most fundamental cultural assumptions are the most damaging. The most endangering. The most inaccurate and malignant. But cutting the bullshit when you live as a visible and invisible minority feels damned near impossible. And very often, doing the impossible is how I live day to day. I hate how many circles I find myself tacitly reinforcing as unproblematic just to get from home to school to assignments to work to bills to home again. My care is subordinate; the world’s precious processes become paramount.

Would it kill me to say “hello, how are you, let’s share a coffee and share some superficial banter” and be done? No, theoretically. But the crass, uncouth, home-training-lacking, ign’ant, silly, horny part of me wants to say, “look, you are attractive and pretty damned awesome — let us fuck.” The last three words coming from Zack and Miri, yeah, but… the point is why aren’t we fucking right now? These words are replacing quality boot knocking time. I can’t look at your face without wondering what your skin tastes like. It very likely does not taste like coffee. Therefore, I would be wasting my time.

And in my backasswards mind, this all makes sense! It makes perfect sense even as I know socially this is very, very stupid and wrong. I can’t simplify it to nothing because for me, when I am attracted to someone, it is a big deal. I’ve been through a lot and the acknowledgment stage is very difficult. I don’t understand how to exist in a society where I am always already a sexual being by my very existence as a woman, and at the same time downplay that sexuality for the comfort of others like me and unlike me. At the same time, I can’t adopt a totally sexual presentiment; I still carry my damage on my back like an invisible explosive vest. But I am not repressed in that I am very aware of my physicality. I am very aware of what arouses me. And it is very difficult to fight the urge to shut it off when I feel it, to be in the moment, to avoid the desire to harm myself so I can stop feeling.

And in the midst of all this, there’s some coffee I’d love to be grinding.

And moreover, there are obligations I must meet, other issues I must address…

I wish I knew where normal was. I’d travel there to live, and I’d pack my neuroses, my aches and pains, my fantasies and desires, my avoidances and undesirables, and my favorite music. I’d live in normal and everything would have its right place.

résumè

easier if it were a job
a real job with applications
a pencil process and review board
sharpeners for questions
wearing a severe blazer and
birkenstocks blue eyeshadow
peering down glasses suited
for ave marias and not memos of
understanding but interviews aren’t work

and i’d say “and now i will take a look
at your résumè your curriculum vitae”
except i wouldn’t say it
i would sing it
because the rhyme is too delicious
to put down to work
in this town
can’t eat just one
too much fun to rhyme like this

eyes then trace the words and phrases
composing the corpus delecti of your life
punctuated by raised eyebrows and
approving noises
“ah” i say “i see you have a dimple on
one cheek and not the other” as if
it were a preoccupation
“tell me about that and do you know
i see it now”

the page distracts with abstracts
everyone looks good on paper
those on plastic luckier still
but i check references
without external resources no phones
hold my calls no reach to brush the
blemish of the past off the page
to start over no bravery to
study history linearly so i cut the line

“so tell me about you”
but i have no offer
there is no real opening here
just wide eyes and pierced ears
but if i can work it out
for you
from what’s here and
what’s beyond reach
we’ll keep in touch

new moment.

at *this* moment the shards and jagged edges in my eyes have traveled down into my lower back.   it hurts to move.  it hurts to adjust.  it hurts to breathe.  i have a cold water bottle shoved down the back of my pajama pants because it’s the closest thing to an ice pack i have.  and there are spasms.

i surely surely know how to study for exams in style.

the tiniest pieces

At this moment, if I looked in the mirror
and I’d see glass shards and jagged edges
where my brown eyes used to be. I’ve
become too intimate with my teacup, and
I ask the swirls of honey to deliver my
stories, credit my sources, and carry
me to a hive of serenity. It’s another late night,
different from the others because I’m upright
and I’m not crying into my false hopes for a
tolerable tomorrow, not even better, not really.
I only want to do something beautiful, and no
matter where I turn, I see beauty is a full-
time job, an impossible standard, and I puzzle
over fearfully and wonderfully breathing life
into a new world order, a genesis of revelation
for a gaggle of glassy-eyed brown nympho
reclusive legal divas like me. I wonder if I’m
the one who will make my beauty known, and
how many laws I must break to live my truth.

The truth is hardest to pick up; it breaks into
the tiniest pieces of biting light…

intermixing lit-tra-ture

i’d rather get poetry in my prose
then prose in my poetry
because being prosaic is formulaic
and you can’t play as hard
as you can with poetry
love flowers from my poet-tree
that’s how you know me
my poet-tree blooms

and sometimes when i write prose
i talk to poetry and i say
“yo, purify that shit” and
a missy elliott-like cry shoots out:
REEEEEWIIIIIIIIND
and i take my honest hatchet
to a poet-tree and branch it into
my formulaic prosegri-la
build a cabin of words and
double meaning (multifunctional)

and then i rub out my thicket
of poet-tree and solitude
before the reader knows
the equation’s unbalanced

escape from broken soul pass

i needed a place to write
an ungraded unbroken screed
not condensed and referenced
not footnoted and endnoted
where i wouldn’t have to worry
about bluebooks and alwds and
mlas
no letters telling me how to write
no one telling me how to give credit
no one diluting my voice and a place
where people would take my voice
my words
my life as proof
that what i’m saying matters
that my scars are my references
that those scars serve as cite checks
and site checks of where i’ve traveled
a travelogue of pain and love
and fear and joy
and where i don’t care to go without
immediate reciprocity of identity
without someone looking at me
and saying without the help of
a theory or a prescription
“woman, i know you”

so strange.

from drunk men tranquilizing a huge horse to a man choking a woman to a woman kicking his ass and getting blood all over the van she drove to pick up three kids from school to driving in the midst of devastating tornados to finding refuge in an open semi-underground house to a weird lecture on STDs with hotel courtesans to walking naked in a field of lightning…

i could never make a career out of remembering or living my dreams.

How Illegal Aliens Took Over Wall Street and America

After the recent historical meltdown, an astute Tweetizen reminded me of the harsh truth that all Americans must face at this time.

We are all investment bankers now.

This crisis has brought us all together under one banner: the mighty American dollar.  And in the span of a couple of days, we all must sit down and think critically about how we reached this juncture without realizing the dire dangers of our risky spending. 

It started with the ambitions of a single illegal alien.  

That’s right.  I said it.  We have no time for political correctness now. If Sen. McCain can suspend his campaign, I can suspend my intelligence to state things plainly. And plainly, my investment banker siblings, it always starts with one.

And we ignored the signs, even when it appeared in the news way back when the Mexicans first began ousting CEOs.

Immigration: The Human Cost

We all shared some chuckles at this early glimpse into the source of the collapse. “Oh, it’s just The Onion! Funny story! So full of layers, like that cartoon character… Shrek! Yes! Full of layers like Shrek said!” I know. I said it too those many moons ago.

But how would we have known then that the takeover would be slow yet diabolically calculated? How would we have prevented the onslaught of countless, hardworking CEOs and bank boards falling prey to the Alien Menace?

Illegal Takeover of Time Warner, May 2008

I think I can say with confidence that we simply forgot what illegal aliens are capable of.

The United States first encountered the illegal alien in 1979 when it sent a few of our brave men and women to the final frontier to look for more resources. (Before my time — not that I’m trying to blame you guys for what’s happening now, but if the fail-shoe to recognize an Alien Menace fits…) We did not have the knowledge and technology to add and subtract until the Windows Innovation in 95, and then again in 98, and then again in 2000. So until then, the aliens had an advantage over us that we could not combat. We lost our ship to their persistence, and their oversexed ways found new methods of penetrating our financial glass ceilings.

Aftermath of Lehman Brothers Hostile Takeover, 1979. Fmr. board member succumbs to internal misgivings about economy.

After that tumultuous time in 1979, we had not heard anything more about the illegal alien threat. Starting in 1982, we encountered new friends and slaves helpmates: the legal aliens. Friendly. Ambitious. Took care of our children. Limited English speaking skills… but that was okay! We could work with them to understand their intentions, subject them to our whims, and send them back home where they belonged. They were funny looking and not quite like us; but that’s why we cared for them and extended our hands in solidarity.

Alien names were only initials then. And home was a phone call away.

Five years passed, and one man saw the horror of the illegal alien resurgence with his own eyes. He wrestled with him. They were equally matched in skill and strength.

That one man is Arnold Schwarzenegger, current governor of California and staunch fiscal conservative. A man who knows financial problems are not solved in a day. Woe that he rules California alone, especially with his exceptional foreign policy experience!

The man who stared market irresponsibility in the face without blinking. And survived. And entered politics. Predatory lending in the housing market begins, 1987.

1987, folks. That year is the year that led us to our current state of discontent. We could not choose the right threat. And now it all crumbles around us and ravages our government, takes our tax dollars, and brings us low… low… low.

How the market crisis really began a few days ago. The truth the media is hiding about immigration. Everything you know is a lie.

So, that’s the brutal history, you guys, in a short and hard hitting phocumentary. Illegal aliens are running amok, and we have a very short period of time to deal with them before they deal with us. We have a very tough fight to secure our borders and our securities, to learn really hard math and take reckless chances, to protect four of our five homes from foreclosure. And fighting the illegal aliens is the only way out. Call your congresspeople. Let’s take back Wall Street. Let’s take back America.

Breaking: Google Earth! Not you too!