Hey loners,
I have so many drafts to you — postcards unsent piling up on my desk and notes, lots of notes during this season of heat — the glimmering hope that comes with Vitamin D and that crushing defeat that follows the singe of ultraviolet radiation.
I wrote poems everyday in May and a few of them got published here.
From May Poems - May 23
Have a dream where I am Saturn devouring my young and the young are just parts of me I created to survive. I can’t return to who I used to be and must await a new incarnation to break free from my skull, thigh or bowel. Each time I give birth my palette lubricates, jaw unhinges.
After man got new gods — he got a sense of propriety, new rituals to justify why the Earth turns, burns. God is angry at us and shackles up the daughter of Rain. God wants us dead and takes the daughter of the hearth and leaves our field barren and cold. We trade these selves in, we give up the ghost of many and I am created in the image of that which controls me. I am created in the image of the God that swallowed me.
Have a dream where I give birth to myself and my throat collapses— esophageal ruptures and the cycle discontinues. Don’t shit where you eat— an Old Testament energy but surely Abraham knew of the older Gods, the ones that sacrificed their children to rivers, monsters and stars. No more talking, no more first person. Body fails and becomes black matter and crooks into the shape of a ladle and the story of me becomes a constellation.
Good-morning— I am pouring olive oil into a warm pan. I add crushed garlic, shallot. I add a bit of sundried tomatoes and vegetable broth. I add cooked and rinsed butter beans. A little msg. I let it simmer a bit. A little mirin. I pile some charged kale on top and let it wilt. I serve it on toast. It’s good.
Today was a good day. I’m wearing my Polarview tee and I’m sitting at the kitchen table. I get six rejection emails in a row and despite being reminded by the world that I am too much— there’s a litany of ways I feel myself expand and swell in a world— I do not shrink. I sit in my chair and I eat my breakfast and I make the calls I have to and I do the things I said I would today. I take a picture of myself. I go to bed my actual size— I haven’t shrank myself or made myself larger than life to survive. I’m just me as I roll over. It’s a good day.
I’m sitting across from Anna in on the MARC train. She, Chuck and I walked down H street and I said it’s the last time I’ll do this I think. She said, “Maybe but maybe it’s just right now.” I was so happy to say I made something but it wasn’t concrete so I couldn’t hold it and I don’t know if it was real but I say to a room full of people that I’m grateful to everyone I get to meet and all the books I’ve read in the last year and all the words I’ve gotten to hear and the songs I got to sing and now I can feel the ache of melancholy I’ve only narrowly avoided calling me home. I tried to outrun— I extended myself and tried to revisit thing but I recall a time when my mom sat and said “you try to get clean and live a good life so many times and it catches up quick when people start to see you as someone that died.” I’ve sat with this thought that you can fail— early or elderly— people and things move on. I find out disappointing news. I tell Anna quietly. She says softly “I’m sorry, Pal.” I say it’s okay because it’s what I always say. When P. called me in Los Angeles in January and said “I don’t think I can do this anymore” - I said “It’s okay.” I cried for six months. I get off the train and head home alone.
I’m topless near the Chesapeake and I’m alone or mostly. I am in child’s pose. My palms are up and cradling drops of sunlight. I’m prone and kowtowing to man-made horrors that cause my stomach to boil and bubble. I am eating warm cantaloupe and remembering when I cared if things were organic or not. The knot in my throat is organic and the malfunction of my neurochemistry made this anxiety and I’m basically home brewed despair on the precipice of summer. I swallow grapes and hope they ferment in my brown round belly and my toes are deep in the sand. I imagine myself become that hardy grass that grows on the bank and I imagine being able to stay somewhere. I feel impermanent.
Here’s a photograph of me and I am in a Photo Booth in the Ace Hotel in Brooklyn and I’ve got a Smashing Pumpkins shirt on (I can’t name five songs) and I woke up in a room of two people I love but also a devastating feeling of surrender. I saw the Photo Booth as I left and thought this will remind me of the good time I had but suddenly I couldn’t see it for what it was so I hope you’ll keep it for me so one day you can show it to me when I can see myself respectfully and fully. I have some sorta wooly dysphoria— not totally gender but the discomfort of regret and shame in trying to take compounded failures and rejections that it leaves this permanent oily smudge on your mirror and in reflections.
There’s a photograph I haven’t seen yet but you’re the first— Nedda took it and I’m holding her and Ross’ baby. I gotta be geeked and my cheeks of full of joy. I take a call from Mark just before and I walk around in circles. After I leave Ross and Nedda, I walk straight to the train and I take it to Pasadena. I walk from the train to Huntington Library. A sweet boy I met the night or two before said “I work there— just hit me up.” I do. I hit him up. I walk through an over-bloomed garden in Pasadena and everything is holding on—a gorilla grip on beauty so close to exhausted. I cry a bit in the rose garden. I take this other photo— this one so you can see me smiling somewhere I’ve never been.
Braiding Akil’s hair in the backroom of a venue before his set in San Diego. I’m hunched over and it reminds me of my kid sister that I don’t talk to and I haven’t in a long time. It’s been years. You know there’s only one photo of me in my possession of when I was young and so I always feel so full of regret and remorse when I think of our young faces. I recall her scalp under my equally young hands and her shouting “be gentle.” Akil just shrugs and says “I gotta a big head. I’m hard headed honestly.”
Look at a photo from this time last June. There is a full moon. I get my period. I lay in the grass in an empty soccer field. I imagined being rooted and not nebulous, ominous even but mostly disappointing. Maybe I can become a tree. There’s a point where I work so hard and I keep saying I want to do it on my own and then I realize I don’t know what I’m doing but I try and I try and I try. I am corrected by an elder: you do or you do not— what is trying but an excuse before crying?
On a midnight train; single and alone in my thirties and I am irrelevant. My phone is dead and it’s raining out. I walk home and feel wildly, impossibly alone. I catch bronchitis along the way and remember that bacteria is always with me even when the world’s against me.
I am walking near a lake. It’s been a while but I take a seat near it— a commemorative bench immortalizing someone so beloved they deserved a park bench in front of a beautiful view they enjoyed while still alive. I sit and I watch the lake ripple. I close my eyes. I breathe in freshly cut grass and gnats. I am certain there’s an ant crawling up my bare legs. I don’t move. I just sit there.
Tonight at the gym as I struggled through my sit-ups, a woman smiles kindly at me across the gym and she gives me a thumbs up. I chatted with her early between deadlifts and she described her love of kettlebell to me in Spanish— I am agreeable despite the fact I’m sweaty and suffering. She says something like “I can lift the weight of the world” and keeps tapping her thighs and says they’re made of steel. I am going to give up. I’ve got hives blooming on my ribs from overheating. I start thinking about how I don’t really belong anywhere.
There’s a cloud over my head and chip on my shoulder. I don’t know what I’m doing with my life. I am in the midst of spiraling and she calmly walks over to me from where she was sitting and holds on my feet. She actually kneels her legs of steel onto the tops of my feet and commands “OTRA VEZ, HAZLO OTRA VEZ.” She says “VAMOS” and starts counting. She kneels the hard earned muscle of her shins onto my feet and I can feel the burden she’s carried. I end up doing 15 more reps than expected. Two women across the gym yell at us “YOU GOT THIS! MAKE IT COUNT.” We are sharing space and suffering and joy. I can do it again. I gotta make it count. This life has so many chances. You can do it again. There’s a woman with shins made of steel and she’ll deathtrap your soft hairy calves and say “OTRA VEZ” because you can begin again. I got this, I got this, I got this, I got this. Again.Godspeed,
Kx
alone in my room is a dispatch by kelly who loves you very much.
10. is where I'm at right now. I love feeling burned by UV.