But where I come from withdrawal is easy to forgive. — William Stafford
She said she loved me
she loved me
loved me
it became an anthem
a melodic hook
stacked like clouds
fists tucked
ready for a fight
bent over or
how horizons form
don’t believe me
study the moon
and sun’s partnership
a story of graceful friction
literally magnificent light
now wild from abandon
AN ARMY OF LOVERS SHALL NOT FAIL – title on cover of The Lesbian Tide, Apr. 1973
this feeling of war is different from other war feelings I’ve had.
it is a conscious scan of knowing where the exits are located.
it is a wanting of quiet and stillness
inside all this (up)loaded aggression.
it is a particular kind of collaborated knowing.
bodies bend closer in fantasies without violence.
a genre of collected mundane details:
dishes in the sink
airport air thick with fancy perfume
the memory of water.
I study nothing, obviously.
I like that space
in between.
crowded spaces. public spaces.
being ignored in isolation.
strictly speaking, we think we know
what is happening
because we study history.
if we believe we are more manipulated today,
do we fulfill our own prophesies?
In three years and just shy of three months I intentionally curated one hundred hours of aesthetic meditation. For six thousand minutes, I listened and watched the ocean perform. Thirty-nine months of my darkest fears and saddest days were added to the epic drama before me. The consistency of each unique breaking wave reminding me that this, too, is living. That doing the same thing over and over for no purpose other than pleasure is the goddamn point. Time worth its exchange in salty kisses. I’ve written how empty landscapes are familiar, safe. Home. Blank page, empty horizon. Now, neither scare me.
I respect the crash and appreciate the ability to pull back into myself. It is energy in motion. To swell. To release. To be seen. To be heard. To be so elegantly agitated. To retreat. To join. To rise. To start again. Already good enough.
Home is here—and out there. I wish to never lose my quiet roar.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
title is Dorothy Allison’s Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (1995)
maybe I do want you to feel intimidated by me
I want a revolution as reckless as cowboys with broken backs.
Throwing restraint to the western winds, a favorable direction,
& towards that edge where darkness is shaped into possibility,
I wait familiar in shy quiet impatient.
I want a revolution as prolific as chants for collective safety.
Born from burn scars so large you can see it from a distant
universe, a reminder we will never be in control so long as
money motivates our hustle for pretentious liberation.
I want a revolution as tender as loving in present tense.
An immediacy that respects our inherited kinetic energies.
Until then, I’ll gather productive & discover curious tensions
sensual as thunder replying to lightening’s transfiguring danger.
In protest and in wealth, I want a revolution that gives as much as it takes.
I. Writing; an act of stroking paper.
II. The aggressiveness of buying and selling resistance, as seen on TV, makes me wanna disassociate.
III. Competitions of sadness are trauma tiers.
IV. It’s ok that I don’t fit in she says.
V. If I write a word today, just one, that must be enough.
“writing…is a process of relying on immediate pervasive feelings, not an escape from them…” — William Stafford, Writing the Australian Crawl. pg. 88
I haven’t found a way to say I love you that isn’t complicated, so I practice loving you every day. Sounds of terrorized children broke through all those hours of visual noise. Hope is a map. A place to begin.
The distance of decades doesn’t always make things quieter. Calendars are more form than function. I learned early and repeatedly that love must be earned, and value is measured by others. An intimacy of detachment.
Addicted to seeking approval is one way of saying yes unconditionally. Instead, imagine a private collection of silent hymns. These days, I take care to mend memories as a way to create acceptance. A public chorus swelled.
Broken into speculative practices, writing things down reinforces pleasure and importance in tandem. Together, through famine and fortune, what stands out is love. An oxygen where sacrifice is not born from competition.
“When someone tells us something, we don’t know how many versions they have tried out inside before the one we hear.” — William Stafford, You Must Revise Your Life
It was nothing but ordinary how the day started. The sun crept above the horizon like any weekday likes to unfold. Yesterday a seismic shift happened — two degrees right to the center. Trees noticed the ambient vibrations immediately, then the birds. No one noticed the subtle ways computer grids had wiped clean negative balances and dropped zeros while spinning out complex equations for how to love beyond reflex.
It took seventeen years for scientists to confirm the shift occurred. Pundits had convinced the public that such a change could not occur simply because they had no imagination to the contrary. Scattered conversations slowly and remotely extended what had been idle reservations around the basics of grace as understood as time. It was a dramatic revolution. Men were not brave. We found their excuses strapped to the back of westbound bus seats.
We considered multiple ways to drown ourselves in the meanings of what we had known and what was now. Immediate and sharp like a broken tooth, we rejected regressive poetic frames. In some places, it became fashionable to sell boredom while others practiced local rituals that buried light. By all accounts, we now live immoral lives. Only the youngest birds have yet to learn not to take from the most fragmented rumors to make their shelters.
Thursday was a broken conversation.
My voice silent as the air around me.
Buried and born again,
I made the day useful to me.
Friday was open secrets.
My voice tuned the melody of a cable car.
Found ideas inside words,
I made the day useful to me.
Saturday was repetition of witnessing.
My voice cracked open at its spine.
Threading connections,
I made the day useful to me.
Tomorrow will absorb sounds
of irresistible landscapes
each graceful expression
making the day useful to me.
and where
did that love
I gave
go?
arousal is an anchor
like empathetic inquiry
or side show hustles
echoed relationships
redirected
form finds its subject
we commit to process
over outcome, again
shift to abundance of solutions
technically we are identical
with differences called out
our unconscious a shared language
the news repeats:
rot
patterns
it is a drowning
a baptism
an act of mercy
“But your pleasure understands mine.”
— Clarice Lispector, The Sharing Of Loaves
at 39,000 feet clouds rose like mountains
fading to dark as the blushing sun set
then black as the thinnest winter ice
we learned to turn our wheels into those slick black icy slides
when done correctly, such surrendering was active evidence of a survivor’s effort
in spring, we planted rosemary to remember our deepest buried beliefs
we harvested fresh-picked bundles and revised our most shadowed secrets
like wanting nothing but distant empty horizons and bodies that do not betray
we sculpted altered thoughts and declared them working dreams
trusting that our shared wishes for a braver future were coming true
we gathered sacred
“And is is strange how experiences blend and enhance each other.” — William Stafford
It is not that what I know today is necessarily different from what I knew yesterday, or that I have replaced prior knowledge with a brand new extended spectrum of understanding. It is more subtle than a transaction, more gracefully defined as complexity. This feels like transformation. A shift.
Love fits into this equation as a multiplier. The critical variables that come next are a matter of routine, a particular and conscious genre. A ritual.
There is always more. A compilation.
Weary from earning credits to fund a future not designed for us, we took respite from all that manufactured exclusion. We hustled accordingly. In reciprocated seduction, a feedback loop was internalized as a request: have we earned this?
Decades of surrender to such indulgent, as in generous, voices now finds a meditated willingness to forsake finding definitive answers from exposition. Today’s passing landscapes & their formidable distances no longer automatically produce the same fears. Illusions whose progression had previously enjoyed blending into a chorus of learned temptations. As new rituals envelope our evolving existences, like being witness to twilight’s ease, our time together has become dedicated privilege.
These shadowed elements, mostly past & some future, are their own repressed celebrations. It’s been a pleasure to give when so many took. We are tender & brave every damn day.
It’s sweet
And it’s sad
And it’s true
– REM, Oh My Heart
waves mimic earth’s rise and fall
a frequency known as home
Here
hills slope at similar angles
nearly invisible expressions
Here
fog settles thick as love
a passive reflection
Here
place contours memories
the body an unreliable narrator
Here
we are
whole
what weeping hearts we have
always moving
like the ocean
a perpetual reclaiming
what if we used gravity to resist
creating a soft tension
its own function
an opening, a fulcrum
expansive horizons become essential
as we unravel tragedy
spun into inspiration
like slowly peeling oranges on a Sunday morning
News cycles are dominated by Russian dramas.
No one mentions rape in context anymore.
We’ve taken solace by decoding mass rhetoric.
I can imagine you beautiful and calm.
Our wandering like scrolling.
This landscape so literal.
Receipts as evidence as expressions.
Fisted conclusions neglect.
A rote search for light in darkness.
Time stretches into manufactured units.
By heart standards, this feels eternal.
Populist hyperbole interpreted as desire feels
dangerous
Some argue identity is residual.
You know it by its attributes.
These compulsory dreams are viral transfers.
Motives unmoored as debts to consent bloom.
Layered political pontifications soothe like lullabies.
I dare you to find love in this absence.
Liberation aside, how does this make you feel?
Inductive reasoning seduces. It penetrates.
Yes, this conversation is a calculated intermission.
Wait. This is my understanding of your manipulations.
A respite of obviousness – of borders unarmed.
Let us, both, reductively fade into this capture.
It’s familiar. A disguise as common as the East Bay Bridge wrapped in a nest of clouds. We learn early to reinforce reductionist tendencies into a path of least resistance. They deny rules have been written down. We witness endless unrequited anticipations.
Promises of love remain unfulfilled. Your acts of caring were abusive. An informant, linguistically speaking, is the expert of a community. When I tell you the sun broke the clouds, spread them, cracked them open I want you to believe me.
We harvested each other. Consent became an avalanche. Absorbing your urges felt like being wanted. It was a match. A pattern. Magnificent corruptions of circumstances. I woke up afraid and believed I was loved.
These edges are sharp yet relaxed as confidence.
My hand holds your fist. Repetition an arc.
Self-care is self-defense.
Isn’t history just repetition and accumulation of power and influence? This is about understanding why you feel so wronged. Don’t you know it takes the Sun and the Moon to make the tides? It’s also true that roaring cats don’t purr. In this specific instance, it is either roar or purr. There is no both.
Cities showed up 6-figures deep. A people’s definition of amazing. Folks are asking if this is another revolution for a problem with no name. Pre-conditions find themselves in dispute along with feeling safe, not comfortable, but safe. You do not have my permission to share this. Pussy is on sale.
Expressions exchanged, uploaded, tagged. Bravery, morality, aggression slants.
Today we celebrate 44 years of codified privacy and personal (white) choice. An axis of origin. To be fair, there’s no standard agreement on how many simultaneous wars we are fighting. Drama should be reserved for love. The noise, the roaring noise, has been the most reliable of our tensions. Hair-triggering sensitivities. Isn’t it ironic?
Let’s hold each other with a tenderness we never earned.
I humbly confess I have no strategic solutions, today.
Tomorrow does not exist within our current embrace.
Messages were slow to be received.
Communications were tangled passing through enemy lines.
All arbitrary and always binding, like paper hearts.
Solicitous profit tied up with bright strings of gratitude.
This time of year pulls tension to the height of joy.
Shadows flash, sparkle even.
Conscientiously objecting is expression beyond fragility of emotion.
There’s a masculine way to do this or something more powerful.
Place bets on queerly stacked decks as panic breeds discos.
All this, and more unsaid, guides us like the promise of beginner’s luck.
Glory bound towards trust towards you towards truth.
Come back. Let’s fight.
If you are a private poet, then your vocabulary is limited by your obsessions.
— Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town
It’s a fact. Cycles sync. It is October, 2016. The word pussy is in our mouths again. Full and heavy bodied, it’s paired with a specific violence as naturalized as an inherited ownership tone. This is the fetishized frequency of law and order.
*** you’ve got to stack it so it’s stable – Low, No Comprende ***
So this is what whiplash from a mass capture of imagination feels like. A forced common image. Pussy, for now, functions as an ironic partisan anchor, while still maintaining its gendered significations.
What is the whole of this historical objectification of our parts? Patriarchal logic argues that this violence of disassociation is necessary and even desired. This detachment is inherent in our economic theories, consumer-based language, and mass-produced representations.
We learn, repeatedly, there are far more serious and urgent issues to concern ourselves with than ritualized gender-based violence. We are dismissed. We are told to question less and obey more.
*** underneath this hood you kiss, I tick like bomb – Perfume Genius, Hood ***
We perform this idealized creed through a perpetual liturgy of demure expressions in a culture that protects mobs of high-volume denials. This contemporary shrill masculinity is socially recycled into discourses that tap into an idolization of individual perspective. For most, this illusion only creates isolation.
Manipulating the dark side of vulnerability isn’t a new strategy to win elections, or maintain control. What feels different this Presidential election cycle is the dredge of cultural material to mine and the hypervoyeurism that has been produced. Public and private boundaries are as unstable as our contemporary understanding of when virtual becomes reality.
As we bare witness to the misogyny that rages beneath all our sacred institutions, may the soundtrack to this ride to November include Magnet by Bikini Kill.
I’m keeping this advice on a loop: I’ve got the love that’s strong and not weak.
experts have named our environment “rape culture”
fueled by an economy that exports & imports incertitude
funny how even the state’s gospel won’t accept no
even with a sovereign request
another way fringed borders bleed reciprocity
thick as oil as war as water
desire can transform anything
corporeal physics as vim and vigor
like soft kisses melting hard intentions
it’s why embodiment alludes enlightenment
& landscapes matter when our eyes close
horizons become their own grounding binary
pressure is a gilded warning signal
jouissance its own casual experience
how deeply our metaphors inform us
as angels, as deviants, as complicit
love is in here somewhere, or should be
Summer, by academic and capitalist time, is over. The light, the light, the light shows phenomenal nominal change.
There are silences bestowed and silences unbecoming. We are taught we are broken: mind, body, spirit. This evangelical conservative belief that the future is not yours is an organized robbery of imagination and self-determination.
Conceptually, we must collectively conceive our own destinies.
I’ll look deep inside to see if I belong with the men – Tarnished Angel, Silkworm
Danger and excitement can feel similar
to tensions at decades, leeward shelters.
Threatening as clouds as love is laissez faire.
I love you more today than yesterday.
The day starts with blessings, with sacred reminders of what I know and why.
I’m grateful for the person who tagged “gender fucked” on the border of east and west bay.
This form of witness bears repeating.
I start packs on Sunday, bleed on Tuesday, and plan for French Fridays.
There are four core love asteroids: Amor, Eros, Psyche, and Juno, also the queen of Heaven.
There’s a desire to write from a place of softness, from sentimentality.
To record; to repair.
Make visible; resolve.
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself,
beloved on the earth.
–Raymond Carver, Late Fragment
just because they know your name doesn’t mean they know where you came – cat power
I rediscovered grace through curated understandings
some spoken, explicit, but most often held in breath
in glances and in rhythmic exchange of metaphors
a particularly classed communion
quiet clung to the lake’s edges
marred only by wandering hymns and mornings with thunder
I thought about all those places that made us
an acceptance of motion as hard-luck blessings and raptured devotion
this is the tenuous nature of belief
in effort, a maintenance of fallibility
oh holy day: in haste, but with love
__________________________________________
in haste, but with love – Raymond Carver’s closing in an unpublished letter to Bob Adelman December 13, 1987
Have you noticed love is always on sale and violence is on demand?
she dug deep, and still,
my hips held position
walking through clouds of words
hearing only “baby”
performing radical distortion, always inward
personally speaking, “no” is aspirational
** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** **
Lately, this fevered responsibility begs for:
** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** **
She wore tights the color of sun-hidden skin.
I stole touches. Even in stillness, the body has a beat.
Oblivion’s call such a tempting response.
underneath the ocean
a quiet roars
we all have an edge
soft margins with sharp centers
fiercely contoured boundaries
we sanction ourselves
we insist love is provocative
as we make our homes museums
every day and every night a tender eve
books left marked to forever hold place
“We need, each of us, to begin the awesome, difficult work of love: loving ourselves so that we become able to love others without fear so that we can become able enough to enlarge the circle of our trust and our common striving for a safe, sunny afternoon near to flowering trees and under a very blue sky.” – June Jordan
I knew a long time ago.
I shouldn’t deny that I don’t practice conscious love. I do.
All those times when I said no.
All those times I said yes.
All those times worth was mine to know.
A land of only oxbow lakes.
A land where delayed gratification is a religion.
A land where there is no sympathy for the devil.
Come prepared.
Always dress your best
for the world may end.
Flashbacks are low-grade returns.
There is seduction in being loved.
There is always something you can learn from an interruption.
A moment when clarity finds you knowing.
All my dreams have wound around need.
This time of year the radiator sings at night. The gray mornings are carbon copies of Cleveland’s skies. Those years full of bravado that only darkness holds or youth demands. To the east, the pastel light spins out into easter yellows, baby blues, and softened ripe peaches.
I watched him dip his boots into the fountain, one at a time, muddied from the urban forest he was paid to curate.
When we talk about the work be explicit.
Do you care
enough?
We all have somewhere to be
someone to hold (ourselves mostly)
accountable for what happens today.
our days have been brighter
an optics, a behavior, of being awake
this year’s declarations:
* occupying neutrality is poetic nuance *
* embody love as deep as it can go *
* shame has subjective exchange rates *
* judge listening and justice as actions *
* what feels good and safe is happiness *
* it is ok to change your mind, to leave, to quit, to cry *
* apologies and forgiveness are patterns of endless appreciations *
“show me how to love and I’ll show you how to beg”
– Lullaby for the Working Class
anthologies of thought curated by universal themes:
resiliency, worthiness, credence
move from punishment to acceptance
towards complexity or, if fortunate, erasure
say yes when you beg
when you solicit
open inward (like a prism)
intimately filled with your effort
we are our own private property – B
The voices most common to me end with the sound of a question.
It’s that curl at the end, a curiosity unspoken.
There’s a particular consciousness when I hear that familial cadence.
Prompts that possess risk and assumed uncertainty.
The sun was an escort that morning.
A morning with purpose and mummified mandarins.
This and other routines becoming orientations –
a private relationship with temporality.
In silence, I see violence.
In breath, I think sex.
In the pornography of my dreams,
you know you can’t fuck me like that
and then act like I’m fragile. That is
a subtlety best reserved for detachment.
I don’t know why we love differently. Why we are still able to find love.
There is an essential unfairness in you not knowing me.
In New Orleans, I observed the tourist’s shoes. There were also discarded squeezed limes, sleeping homeless bodies under quilts, and stray cats eating street meat. How quick things can go hard!
So instead, I collected curiosities like watching her eat giant grapes in half bites.
Are you the aggressive one? The one I ask for?
I never finished bell hooks book about love.
The body speaks. A language born of vigilance.
An effort that does not deviate. In the same way
cyclical is about more than repetition and less
becomes obvious. Those times when scarcity
is a luxury of desire (thought) or when home
is opposite of feeling (being) love. Seasons nested
between gaps of wants, things you don’t need,
taking without realizing its cost.
What is left behind in this wake?
A free fall. A slow fade. A disclosure.
What is it that makes us different?
Tracing boundaries of shared recognition.
wanting nothing more than everything
all day windows look at each other
expert witnesses
breathless inside anxiety
our arms crowns
the days are hard, but ours
no longer so tightly holding on
It’s harvest season.
Conscious of renewal,
we plan for what we need tomorrow.
This is the time of year to honor defeat
celebrate the shifting light
embody lived experiences
transform our perceptions.
We love fiercely, in this community.
I like words that can be soft
like peach preserves
saved for cold winter mornings
over hot buttered toast.
Words that mend hearts.
Pleasure. This should be our lifetime pursuit.
Following horoscopes like choices, prioritizing sharing, locating power and minding interpersonal boundaries.
Matters of the heart extend beyond erotics.
We dare to say please and ask to end with thank you.
The summer days draw strength from warming slowly.
It is energy saved to make those days that seem to find you.
Peaches says living is more important than making sure you write every day. My mom told me the prairie is the ocean. Both are true.
__
rückkehrunruhe n. the feeling of returning home after an immersive trip only to find it fading rapidly from your awareness, which makes you wish you could smoothly cross-dissolve back into everyday life, or just hold the shutter open indefinitely and let one scene become superimposed on the next, so all your days would run together and you’d never have to call cut.
I haven’t finished reading The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure.
Does that make me a bad feminist?
The Rocky Mountains were sunny
as snow fell thousands of miles
away from you.
It’s felt reasonable
to learn about scale
as a measurement
of time and impact.
We carry those
worth holding onto
get what we deserve
and survive by making
room for more.
