(dance break)

fuck you

but mostly,
fuck me

today walking to get coffee before work the air was dry and wet at once, very non-emulsified, I guess. The davinci's on my block was flatulating out great smells of bready pizza and I was momentarily transferred back to the playground in elementary school, being outside in the chill and the humid pseudo-food smell bringing anticipation of lunch.

I had a bad day, which is when I wrote the initial fuckyou nonsense. These are periods of particular self-loathing; the trees looked like this when I was staring out of metal-mesh encased windows on the fourth floor of BryanLGH in the white room with no locks on the doors. I'm an adult now, I can't take a break from life for a few weeks anymore.

i hear

a sound like springs like

in a body-filled bed

no too rhythmic like

someone's jumping

on a trampoline,

remember trampolines?

coming around

I try to write funny things but they all seem to come out as grave and tragic as ever, the words snaking around themselves and becoming overwrought. I guess the source of writing is description and lately the me I document and self-describe is odd, sensorily overwhelmed; damaged.

ha ha ha, trite

Also: I was volunteered to read at this reading the 13th and have no idea what the hell i'm going to read and everyone will judge me harshly and i need mental support regarding this from my poetry ladies what should i read aaagh why did i agree to this no really i'll be fine it'll be great

gold morning

The structuring of days has shifted, some never

managing to start while others over-exist,

stretching with the same hollow trembling muscle sounds.

A boyfriend calls your phone, and starts explaining things;

embarrassed, you wonder, "Is this my boyfriend?

Did I forget about him?" You feel you must be the worst girlfriend,

to have forgotten, to have so thoroughly ignored.

His real girlfriend grabs the phone from you.

"Am I her, actually? Did we mix things up?" How awful

you are at being a person. There is a sensation that I

am slowly going deaf, but as my hearing goes my eyes

get stronger, or not eyes but seeing, bigger and brighter.

She is on the aluminum grating of a cold cement kennel floor,

hunks of flesh cut from her thighs and hips,

Oh well, I think, I suspected everyone felt them too large

but was being polite to spare me. She is now

lighter than your convictions, more pleasingly

malleable. Men pass in groups of two or more and

you feel when they are going to tell you something

about your body just before they tell you; they tell you,

she tries to counter-act by turning invisible but

their pewter monkey eyes see still, stinging.

I have decided to neutralize herself I mean, myself.

"I'm in love with a deer," she says, turning into

a deer. "He is tearing me apart."

The leaf-lost negative space presses too firmly,

you push back and are ricocheted and it hurts.

unrelated things that don't mean anything

G. Kuz. gave me this form today to give him permission to publish a wack-ass sestina i wrote freshman year in some crazy book of undergraduate sestinas. I'm in the stacks now and I just pulled the form out of my pocket and read it - he also wants essays from the authors and suggested we use the following titles: "How I Wrote My Masterpiece" or "Taming the Monster" or "I Hated It Until I Loved It." I started laughing really high-pitched through my nose to myself and then realized that there are people near me silently studying.

I have this terrible nightmare fantasy that if he publishes this sestina I wrote and later in my life anything else i've ever written or created is destroyed in a (insert planetary disaster) and the sestina book will be the only thing that survives of me, forever. I will probably let him though, so he stops making a b-line for and standing in front of me in the hallway of Andrews whenever he sees me then talking to me all manic while standing way too close while I am obviously uncomfortable.

I just counted the different fonts/font sizes used on the form. There are twelve.

It's been raining all day. I have a meeting in two hours and didn't to bike home then bike back to campus. This morning I experienced the first feeling on my back of "Shit, I am almost literally too spent to keep pedaling" because the wind was into my face with the rain and I was soaked and my thighs so cold and unresponsive. But I made it.

I lately have the impression of me as one trying to cram oneself into the ideal molds everyone worth pleasing has set forth. Not in a martyry way, something more lost and desperate. Please let me please you. If anyone were to ask how to please me, I would never tell the truth, but I would want to. Inside I am always wondering why nobody asks me. This may be narcissism.

I have been thinking about commonalities, the little threads that tie us together.

It seems that they grow brittle with time if more are not added. I guess I just see a day when we've all talked about the good old times too much, the Kuz, shared acquaintences, etc. Already some of the people we continually bring up in social gossip-style conversation, I realize I have seen these people maybe what, once? twice? in the past couple years.

That one thing we once did together, those times we had. We're just going to sit around talking about them forever, aren't we. This is what puts the dull in adult.

I fear the withering of things that used to please me.

reciprocity and symbiosis

i am bored, i am always so bored

Dear Neighbor B2:

I have only seen you about three times since moving in eight months ago. I have not yet discovered the reason why, on each of those times I've seen you, you have been wearing nothing but small black boxer shorts. You seem nice; polite and articulate and a little shy. It is possible I've only ever seen you emerge on laundry day. I just want you to know that I behave just as awkwardly with people who are wearing more clothes, and that I am okay with you, and what you wear.

I hope my walking and/or singing while doing the dishes doesn't bother you terribly.

-C

week-end

this feels okay i guess

girls, girls, girls

another week

when matters is mattering or

not mattering

getting up

somewhere the time of me has gotten off; 7:30-noon passed in a half-sleep half-dream as a baby kangaroo, traveling in a bed and a satchel with joey legs sore and jutting stiffly out.

a frosted glass strawberry pendant with gold seeds dangling over my head, the hair-stylist's fingers tracing heavy circles on my scalp and she floats above strawberry-blonde, bathing and singing sweetly to the music; a chasm of a dream opens and she leans while my eyes are closed and kisses me fingers tangled in my hair knowing it with more grace and skill than i who grew but cannot tend it

i always have these strange dreams of women who are paid to touch and groom,

and end up feeling vaguely like a john

i will be able to get out of bed soon, now almost one,

someone in my building is cooking something that smells so good and it makes the gray outside somehow less menacing

what a frenzy inside, always

feeling like a little poison one, a dis-ease bringer,

begging

in public

the muttering homeless guy saw me crying at thirteenth and p,

from behind my sunglasses i saw his eyes go wide and sky-blue with wonder

waste a girl

"The universe was once conceived as a vast preserve, landscaped for heroes, plotted to provide them with appropriate adventures. The rules were known and respected, the adversaries honorable, the oracles articulate. Today the rules are ambiguous, the adversary is concealed in aliases, the oracles broadcast a babble of contradictions. One struggles to preserve, in the midst of such relentless metamorphosis, a constancy of personal identity." (Maya Deren)

when i touch my cats the electricity in the air makes the speakers chirp

i can't seem to stay intoxicated enough

there is a song playing behind the wall

and somebody

jams and jars

in the general lability of things

i've again lost the vocabulary for me

preservation

can be so starving

amber hardens details

ice firms the frames

trips along

a flip book peep show

honey crystals

still sweet

buried deep in heavy

peat-moss

how can it last

long

-ing

weekend: autumn

i have no-body to impress