remember who you are

dark of his narrow hallway, nowhere to go
but into him, his kiss is so gentle and i think
it was my numb hand that wrapped around the side of his face

poetrying something new

a poem from cross outs; a three euro book i picked up at shakespeare and co. The Arena by William Haggard. dry, something about profit and greed. i've never done this completely. untitled yet, draft one.


Great chairman of a second
deprecatory hand who thought money was
the name of a place where he strained

for two frightful winter boyhoods.
History isn't information
for a partnership of paper:

it is something to be inescapably
burdened by. Contracts
pretend people ought to confess.

Self-pity is vice of a certain drama
and words look a considerable mess.
You are wrong—intelligence can't be solid fact.

The issue is four thousand delusions
of a shadowed man who keeps his appointments
with a priest in his box.

Peace had only one head in silence
so I thought tomorrow was
a ring in the morning.

tummy

bastille day. all the bars are closing. i can sit here and kiss my leg all night but that's not going to write my poem. and tomorrow i'm to meet with yusef, without drafts, pathetic and crestfallen, ready only to talk about jazz like tonight on the boat. he told me my work was interesting. i must've blushed, then: remember coleman's free jazz or on the corner sessions? his favorite is bird but i haven't been there yet. let me name drop all night, i can do it, but it depends on you to make a difference.

i've been feeling for new york. it has been an experience being in paris but it makes my city glow differently and from afar. the air conditioning, the all-night subways, the bars open 'til 4 am, but who am i kidding? i'm not that girl anymore. i miss already corona park, moses' to-scale model of the entire city--daunting yet lovely, i could even point out my apartment, my favorite place to buy pad thai.

there is a sprig of lavender on my bedside table, atop the pass navigo portrait i have yet to adhere. i watched blade runner this morning for breakfast. i have been studying the surrealist's in class. they were so madly in love with love, something real yet intangible, nondescript, amorphous. there is also medicated blistex on my side table. i used it to heal a scar in cadaques. cadaques, cadaques ghost melody of leonard cohen. i'm tired. i think i'm losing my head.

so help me, ira.

whilst trying to like that my friend liked ira glass on facebook, i sort of accidentally ended up "liking" ira glass. i try to keep the amount of things i "like" that are radio-centric to a minimum, although i'm not going to go back and un-like ira because that would just be untrue. liking ira reminded me of that very awkward conversation i had with the man, palms sweaty and mouth running unabashedly out of nerves--me trying to justify my independent major to him without sounding so desperate to be like "YOU CHANGED MY LIFE" although it may be true. when telling him how a teacher of mine used his show to advocate a tenderness with which materials can be treated he looked me sideways and said, "well, that doesn't sound like it would work too well." and i said, "but it did." i must have been ten shades of pink at that moment. i think i had a hotflash while almost crying and smiling too. i'm still feeling through the field, although i think..i guess i'm making progress.

dear blogspot,

within two weeks, please give me a reason not to retire you (for a tumblr) other than that i love you for what we have shared

I said too much in the little time I had and now I must go get a diet coke

I am riddled by so much nerves and so much excitement right now. On the one hand, I'm sitting on my bed writing in this much neglected blog when I have a ten page paper due in a few more than 24 hours which I haven't started which probably counts for a significant portion of my grade and another ten page paper due in a little more than 62 hours which I haven't started which probably counts for a significant portion of my grade. And Friday is the deposition and I've been dreading and dreading this since it got delayed the first time but at the same time it'll give me a chance to talk about it and isn't that what we all really want and need? Not when our words need to be guarded though--no--that's what journals are for.

So here I am sitting on my bed writing in this much neglected blog about how cold my feet are and how sweaty my palms are and how much I like the feeling of wearing a hoodie. It's like a sophomore-year-of-highschool saves-the-day-in-the-back-of-black-beauty kind of feeling when there was no such thing as 10 page papers or depositions. My feet are cold but the sun coming in through the white curtains is nice and I can hear the kids in the school across the street shouting and waiting for Mister Softee.

And on the other hand, I just booked my flight to Lisbon for a summer spent traversing Europe (or at least two months of it). Who am I to have this privilege over this or that person? No one really. So there's Lisbon and then there will be Spain--maybe Sevilla, Cordoba, Granada, maybe Valencia, Barcelona, Zaragoza. I'd like to pretend I can say those names as beautifully as they're meant to be pronounced but I can't roll my R's which has proven a detriment to my library of party tricks (alongside reciting the Hamlet soliloquy and/or sitting in the corner). And then there is Frankfurt then Amsterdam, or Amsterdam then Frankfurt but then, undoubtedly, there will be Paris. Paris is lovely in ways that New York can not be lovely. While New York is situated, more or less, on the Cartesian plane, the neighborhoods of Paris are numbered as they spiral out from the center, a sequence like Fibonacci discovered.

Someone once told me I sound like a Mexican trying to speak French, and someone once told me that all you had to do to get away with it was purse your lips and over-exagerate. I'm not as worried about it as I was in the winter of 2007, when my mom and dad and grandmom and I were visions of American's in Paris. I'd like to think I'm lighter-hearted now, that I care less, and less, and less about a mind spiraling out from the center.

Youth

Through all of youth I was looking for you
without knowing what I was looking for

or what to call you I think I did not
even know I was looking how would I

have known you when I saw you as I did
time after time when you appeared to me

as you did naked offering yourself
entirely at that moment and you let

me breathe you touch you taste you knowing
no more than I did and only when I

began to think of losing you did I
recognize you when you were already

part memory part distance remaining
mine in the ways that I learn to miss you

from what we cannot hold the stars are made

-W.S. Merwin