monday oct 29th

...How beautifully the nights pass out here where there are no cars...
I'd like to think
In my bed beside a busy street atop a hill that overlooks the whole of the dirtiest city of them all
The big bad dirty mama city of them all
With her lovely lights that have tried to rival heaven in number and brilliance
But never elegance
This city is a woman in high heels
Big and brassy
Sad mad paved misbehaved and sassy
crazy
But never a lady
I am seeing chaos in all the facades
Her drive to create a new reality will lose
She can’t rival the stars

night's outside and i keep thinking that my days seem to be blending into my nights more and more in a lame fast view of the world spinning kind of a way and i start to wonder:

when do i start my life ? 

and the i here is supposed to be me but i think and wish it was an indirect and passive "i" so someone else could start it for me because then maybe there'd be a beginning.

i'm not in my dream, on track to it, or even following it and more importantly i don't think i can even see it through the mess of jeans and optometry (which is not a metaphor for omniscience.) and i wish i could find a way to listen to myself without my father's voice playing as the soundtrack in the background that doesn't even fit the movie.

duke is crying in his sleep and it makes me wish i could cry more like my mom who is free in her tears even though she's quiet in her life. 

in two days she will watch her father be put in the ground and dirt which makes me wish she had god who has been absent from her or in her since she was little and watched her mother cry and drink, silently screaming throughout life. and it all seems very morbid but i guess that's what happens when birthdays and funerals come at the same time because it isn't easy to forget that birth and death happen all together 

but i'd rather not have them put together all the same.

sat oct 27

The naughty boys and girls had a party tonight charging 20 dollars at the door for foster kids and booze. Decked out and sweaty from dancing to disco, mixers spilled and props waved, booties wiggled, men standing about. One women dressed as a street vendor sold real tamales for real money. I was stubbornly fighting against the tide of awkwardness. Trying not to drown. i think I left when it got fun. Walked past the pretty houses like small palaces and drove the10 minutes home. I looked at my shadow in the streetlight and smelled the night blooming jasmine even as my high heels sunk into the ground.

oct. 24th

I imagine the poet waking up in the morning with the love of god upon his skin taking god in with this tea and honey on his lips. Does he go to work? Does he ride trucks all day making deliveries of wood or food or tables and chairs? Or is the poet fed and clothed and housed by those who do those things. Encouraged to write and love and nothing else. Write and love and nothing else. In my heart the poet is embracing the beloved in his arms, holding and rocking in the crevice between the breathing and the beating. Holding and rocking breathing and beating.

A moment of bliss...

It's raining. Finally. Thank god. Maybe now I might actually get some work done. Might. No, definitely. Absolutely. It's a funny thing to love your work and to do it and to never finish. I am totally stuck in Borges' Library of Babel. But I think I could live here, if I got zen about the whole thing. How does one get zen anyway? Meditating? I could meditate on the rain. And the cold. I've decided it feeds me soul. Which? Both. The rain AND the cold. I wish I could keep them locked somewhere inside me and call them up whenever I wanted. Maybe I can. Maybe that's what zen is.

a few from last week

a few from last week... the beginning of the project


monday
On the way to the mailbox
I walked down the hill from my house
To where the roads mesh into one and I am always afraid I will get blindsided
where the language of the signs changes
And the shops are light brightly but softly from within
Smelling of incense and laugher as I pass
I watched two men carry a covered crate out of their car and onto the street
While three men stood aside to watch
I knew it was a rooster
Because of the secret look in their eyes
And the care with which they lifted it.

tuesday
Today was non stop madness
I composed you a poem in my head and forgot it
That is how crazy it was
I think I called 20 people I have never met today
And asked them all for favors
My office was a coffee shop
I was high off caffeine shaking and typing madly
Typing that you are a beautiful spoken story told from you to me and then from me to my inner heart. before you become a written one. before i try and translate you into words my mind understands.
jumping off splashing in and ... the day.


wed
Yesterday which I am a day late to write about
Was a mess of missplanning on parts that were not my own
And I kept noticing little striking things about los angeles
The editor’s huge gold ring
How I wanted to just write about the blues and whites of the bathroom tiles
This massive city
And what I noticed yesterday was how uncomfortable I felt when I was driving
And saw people out of their cars at night
Sitting and talking on the side of the road
Because they were not protected
On these streets where bodies are so fragile.