I don't know what I was

I wrote this today -- a few moments ago. Of course the themes are the old, familiar ones. But I have been musing on them again, as I always do, when it seems like the world expects something that I don't know how to give.

I don't know what I was

I don’t know what I was

if I lied, or how much; sometimes just covering your face

is a lie.

Did I change my shape?

Did I walk through a portal? Was I engulfed by fire?

Did I speak in tongues?

A body isn’t a diamond. If I fall on the sea, I become sea.

I think all we can do is dedicate ourselves,

like how flowers dedicate themselves to opening,

to holding what we love.

That work is hard enough, with ravenous

mysteries around each corner.

You, Asleep

I have been ruminating on urgency lately, and feeling like I live with more of it than most. I don't know why I am impatient, why every moment sometimes seems like "the end of it all," but this poem (from a year or two ago) says something on the topic that I think I like.

You, Asleep

You, asleep
wrapped and turned to the wall
the fan the heat and the sounds of roommates –
Breakfast. Doors slam. Lost keys found.

You don’t move.

I watch the universe expand through blinds,

wedging itself into moments

and even when I go –

when I have to go –

I’m still fighting it –

you, asleep.

I want to shake you

I want to drag your clawing spirit from its bed –

Get up!

This is the only morning,

the last morning

the last chance

the end of it all

the stillness

the love.

It rained so fast in Sydney

As will be painfully obvious, I wrote this poem sometime after Michael and I broke up; I'd roughly guess in the spring of 2010. Despite that and everything else that has happened since then, I think about my trip to Sydney (in March of 2009) often and with a healthy amount of nostalgia. I found myself talking about it to someone today, and was reminded of a few phrases from this.

It rained so fast in Sydney

It rained so fast in Sydney,
faster than I could have dreamed,
we were only ducking from one pub
to the next – so we unraveled.

Is it sad to say I was happiest

when you weren’t prying at my hinges? I drifted

on the subway while you worked, buoyant in the tide

of strangers. Mysterious fish darted in the harbor.

Even the trees were alien

and fragrant.

I often thought, stepping into a square,

or changing money, I am a free citizen of the earth.

I am an unbounded cloud,

a part of the water cycle. Michael,

there are so many births and lives.

Was I really the only thing

that ever made you curious?

Cats

I actually had never titled this poem, which I obviously wrote sometime in the winter of 2007-08. I think "Cats" is appropriate, though, despite the fact that I hate cats. In the interest of full disclosure, I also admit that I have gone back and changed some of the capitalization here. But I think it reads just as well, and I like it for what it reminds me of, and what its simplicity evokes.

Cats


Pink-cheeked San Francisco
arches its back and
yawns, its Bay and
Golden Gate Bridge whiskers twitching.
We are recent converts here, stretching
our legs on its hills,
pitching our voices to its graceful rhythm,
lolling rough tongues in
and out.
“You’re pretty,” he says between trolleys.
His lithe feline figure
could teach this
city
a thing or two. 

More Technological Advances, or: Analog to Digital

More technological advances, or:
Analog to Digital

you decided to
mute
the thousand-broom sweep of
traffic
the knights-in-armor
silverware
and my oyster-soft tongue
behind my teeth
with your iPod.
(which, i’m pretty sure,
even the cars resented.)

you were Picasso. an in-
complete man, one ear-
bud, painting you half-
blue
with the static of rock and roll.
nodding nodding nodding
maybe to me, maybe to the music
(but never really quite almost but not quite ever fully
here.)

i don’t know why i took that vow
to stay out of the
technological river.
all these years, clutching my walkman
like an anchor as
CDs, then
Mp3 players
flowed turbulently past.

but when i learned that the
cerulean drone in the closet of your inner ear
had a name –
Faye –
i bought a goddamn iPod. 

Technological Advances

My own last entry made me curious, so I went back and tried to unearth the names of all my previous blogs. I was successful, though I did notice that there have actually been nine, that this is the ninth version, and that somewhere back in the very beginning, I must not have counted one. The tallies have been wrong since before my archives begin. Anyway, here they are.
The Underground (2000-01ish)
Faded Broadway (2002-03?)
Reflections of Hannibal (not Hannibal the Cannibal, Hannibal in reference to the town where Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn come from, 2004-05)
v.3 - Madness (2005)
v.4 - The Rainstorm (2005-06)
v.5 - The Easy Kill (2006-07)
v.6 - The Science of the Indie Romance (interestingly subtitled "Harmonium," in reference to the tiny piano in Punch Drunk Love, 2007-08)
v.7 - In Case of Success (2008-2010)
v.8 - Harmonia
The nice thing about having archives, too, is that I have found a few poems that I otherwise have no records of. I'll post the first one today; it's from almost exactly five years ago, February 2007. The second, which I'll post tomorrow, is from approximately one year later, early 08. (Also I guess both are from a time when I really wasn't into capitalizing.)

technological advances

a cassette tape
intentionally gutted by
destructive fingers
reached for my shoe
to remind me of our similarities:

i loved cassettes – which is to say
they served me well,
sung me through autumns
and preserved my brother’s laugh.
no CD will ever laugh like that.

so next time you kiss her you can think
how you and i, too, will become extinct.

I have been blogging for 12 years. (Harmonia)

And this is the eighth version of that blog, the eighth permutation of my online life, and everything that means.
I don't know if I can remember all my previous lives...they had names like "The Underground," "The Science of the Indie Romance," and, most recently, "In Case of Success." I had intended to keep ICoS until I actually was successful, but as it turns out, I'm not yet. And eventually I just began to use that blog for the poetry I was working on, and to post excerpts of things I had written, have written, over the years. Lately, I've been posting my poetry on Facebook, and it has been drawn to my attention that that's a less-than-ideal arrangement. Thus, here we are. Harmonia.

The poem in question is below. I wrote it last night at a band practice in Echo Park, and it's rare that I'm as pleased with a poem as I am with this. I think I often write about the same things, with the same ideas, the same images, the same words: light, space, stars, time, houses, mountains, and animals. Some of those images are here, too, of course, but there's something else here, too -- finally, a name for the elusive girl I'm always chasing, the luminous, magical child I remember myself being. I'm sure we all remember ourselves in a certain way. If you knew me then, I don't know how you remember me.

Harmonia

I discovered sex was nothing but making music

and making music nothing but swimming

and swimming nothing but breathing

and breathing nothing but the hard taste of desire.

Harmonia, I called my childhood, her sharp

quivering lashes, her eyes open so wide. We put things

in boxes, as though pain is not a light

animal, landing on our shoulders at unexpected moments, or like

love is not sometimes just a tree and sometimes

a strangler's hands.

We are never not touching

each other, never not stretched across the keys

of life, the taut strings of longing.

You can stand still all you want to.

Your humming goes on. I am tied up in Harmonia,

not dead,

not dead,

aching,

and not dead.