For Lu

I feel brattiest in how often I forget to admire

I am trying, vigilantly, to Problematize and to Be Needed.

selfish me, even this dedicated poem is about myself.

Lu, Selfless is a thing you are that I am not.

Lu says, publicly, that she likes what I do

and she uses this word

inspires

that I just straight out forget about

to be a person who yearns to make nonprgamatic things

(as pragmatically as possible)

and to forget the word inspires!

this is an insanity that I falsely think makes me tough.

Lu says she has been watching me work this week

this week I am the crunchy girl doing the eco-thing so publicly

this week I am wrestling quietly with the impossibility of consciousness shifting

as something done in one push, by a visitor, or something done en masse.

It is painful, what change is not ready to be made.

I whine all week that this feels thankless, like no one is watching

but when I get what I say I am craving I feel wriggly

why aren't you loving me by stepping up to say what I did wrong?

Lu doesn't do that,

she is smiling and honoring and saying,

the way you should respect me first is by how graciously I treat you.

She embodies this dignity so deeply I almost forget to stop and look at the work she is doing,

she is organizing young people too,

and she is singing to them and supporting them, quietly. one at a time.

She is so good at this job that I could never do.

Participating fully without taking up any of the space that we are saving for the youth to shine,

she steps forward only when modeling stepping and I say, damn there is someone

who commands badass space with her gentleness and love.

There is someone who is girly but not saccharine, who is tough but not aggressive, who is strong but not mean.

you don't need to do this thing, friend, my ego doesn't need it.

What strikes me is not the nice things you write,

but how tuned in one must be

to make space to just take what's good from what you see, and to just honor openly.

and that is what you do.

summer camp

I do not say

step in to the circle if

more than once or twice

I am not digging deep

I am not sixteen anymore,

and amidst all these sixteen year olds

I can't decide if I lament that.

What I'm feeling is not nostalgia,

but the certainty of time not moving back.

I stood on this basketball court and ate cereal before.

how deep does my owing of that past learning go?

how much do I owe this place and how much can I push it?

When do I push on forward and when do I push back in?

the point is

the day has come when my father is texting me

and not only that, that it is not surprising

and the medium is not even the point, the point is:

he is on the Bart in the Bay, and

I am shaking my head at my longing, thinking

wanderlust is what makes wanderlust,

why did I leave here and return only to miss being there again?

and that is not even what's making me achy, what aches is:

what this week shows. what this week shows is:

the enactment of ideals does not equal bliss.

today was a day about processing out through my body

This week is called:

beauty in what's achy because it's complicated.

and I write that in the facebook thread with old friends about

'what is your week called?'

and the point is not even that it's on the computer, now.

The point is not even who that is excluding

the point is not even what the ideals are.

the point is.

the point is not.

These days

maybe my body is not here yet,

I hurled across the ocean, after all, and those things should take time.

I sleep, involuntarily and repeatedly,

and after a day maybe I wake up.

Does a thing become strange from too much looking?

or is it my mind racing, pouring out through my eyes?

it comes as a surprise:

I can spend hours, days, alone

leaned over the bicycle handles and makeshift drafting tables

ink stained hands, snack strewn kitchen

it's urgent when it's urgent,

and the days move slowly, resisting hurry

when it's only me.

despite the looming Fall of not knowing.

I think I can be okay today because of the Just Enoughs:

space to strew

bouts of company

phones to answer

food in fridge

sun in sky,

cash in wallet

yes, that's it. always. that's the one.

embodying the transitive, love for my love's partner

your girlfriend is training to be a dominatrix,

wait until I fucking tell our friends back home!

your wide eyes, you speak just as slowly

despite that same writhing silence, I marvel at your considered words.

you were like that at fourteen, my friend.

this privilege is called continuity:

She explains why domination and I explain why you

the shell-shocked new city boy, I did not have the words back then

to say that I liked you because you were not a brat like the others when you walked home.

but it is more complicated because to her

you are that city boy

This is learning called making friends.

On the whiteboard in the house you share he wrote

plurality of affection

I watch you reckon with it

and want to say, this is what's wrong

in order to feel more ease that what I do is different

but there is no flaw there

this process that I am witnessing

this is what success looks like

this witnessing, reckoning, plurality.

But am not your plurality, on this slow time frame that we are

I am one testament to the inherent openness.

I love you, you love him, and I ache with love

for both of you, watching this life you are making

that I have not chosen and would not chose.

I call you back home to make sure you have the memorial's address.

we have not spoken in a year, old lover, but I want to make sure you know.

you do.

the dominatrix is working at the brain tumor society and I think,

all things are connected, if superficially so.

love begets love, and even amidst embedded goodbyes

I know you are not going anywhere,

and so the people you bring in to the world are a gift that you share.

culled personal truisms from the month of january:

guilt is an important motivator

ironic consumption is consumption, too.

you already made that decision,

you already know what to do!

when you don't know, its not time to know.

it's urgent when its urgent.

everything is an example.

pruning the family tree.

what does success even look like?

the internet is space.

information under-represents reality.

I am not reinventing what it means to be human.

we are all capable of embodying the opposite of our self conception.

its a question of bottom truth.

complicity in everything you think is wrong with the world.

embodiment of an ideal,

misplaced morality,

lack of model,

smart body,

unapologetic as its own end,

it's a question of bottom truth,

fulfillment of an ideal,

persistent lack.

You tell me Alice Walker says:

Let us bring attention to George's mother.

She who came weeping, and picked up the shattered pieces of her child,

as black mothers have for so long.

May you be free

May you be happy

May you be at peace

May you be at rest

May you know we remember you.

For learning to make rituals for hard things that will happen,

for those structures that explain but do not justify.

honoring aching in abstraction and in specificity:

This is a space where a poem was

for your patient who did not come in last week.

and this is for your father,

and for my uncle,

and for my uncle, and

for your father,

and for your father,

and for your sperm recipient's wife, and for your father.

notes on a chart on/in a cabbage patch

The cabbage, my love.

enough food for a feast, an abundant bloom in shades of green and purple

utilitarian stalwart of the enchanted brassica genus,

those healing prodigies of the mustard family.

cabbages! and their ability to break down and become

exactly what my stomach needs to feel good

the food that makes it possible to eat food

who would think that such a pungent specificity would belay such edible altruism?

you, cabbage, are the center of my attention and then repay me, support me, throughout my every eating day.

oh cabbage,

In the popular imagination, what other vegetable still grows in a patch?

I am honored by my derisive association with your home,

don't be so cabbage patch must mean something like don't be so saccharine or so uncool.

but I am embracing you

I'll imagine my covers are your outer leaves and I, I am in a cabbage patch. sweet and exhausting.

I choose to immerse myself in you, cabbage. it's time I know you if you model me so well.

But wait, there is something exciting happening at the base of the Magic Crystal Tree.

Code Green ... Mother Cabbage is in Labor!

The sonogram is glowing pink, it looks like it is going to be a girl.

She has green eyes. Our intern remembered to fertilize the patch so this baby has auburn curls!

It's a beautiful Newborn girl. Would you like to help name her?

woah. um.

this?

fascinated, I preemptively apologize to myself for intrigue looking like irony,

guilt is an important motivator, because ironic consumption is consumption, too

and I don't know even of it is- which is a whole different story.

but what is the relationship between repression and the cabbage patch?

world of euphemism and false sanitation. are these my people?!

and how do I Own It when stating the phrase aloud makes me try to be tough and

ownership is a possessive concept that I don't want to foster too deeply.

and I do not like euphemisms, I don't even like metaphors

my vagina is not a cabbage that gets fertilized to grows babies while sitting under the magic crystal tree.

sleep

Eardive in to the pile of coats in the back seat of the car, and sleep until the rest stops. There is not much safer than knowing I can tune out that inanity, mom and dad will keep each other company and I am the kid to be cared for, I can sleep.

I could: be attentive and time it just right, try and get it wrong, not try and get it wrong, not try and have it fine. Sleeping with your hand against my stomach, or lying there wishing you'd wake up for our routine. There is power in yielding to this contingency, there was power in letting it pass.

The returned luxury of not sharing. I find books, needles, socks, hats in my bed, and it does not matter that they were there all night with me. It's cold but I'm comfortable, and I'm grown here, relishing the absence of another set of luxuries, of a body to share gone and all the opportunity to be my own elation at myself swathed in blankets. Some nights, I sigh.

Headfirst in to my own lap soft spare sweater side of my teaching bag turned upwards towards my forehead. It's really just me here, elbowed in to the crowd. The comfort of asserting that I feel safe, burrowed on my valuables and witnessed unconscious by strangers. They come and go, and I am so somberous as we go over the manhattan bridge. It must be something I breathed in the city air all those years, I have never overslept and missed my stop.

In honor of a snow day.

First you wipe out the residue of yesterday's egg from the pan. Then you turn the heat to #4, and put a tiny bit more coconut oil in using a fork. leave the fork next to the stove.

Get one half of a frozen dumpstered bagel out of the freezer. Put the bagel in the toaster, set to 10 minutes at 450 degrees.

Go back to the fridge, get out one leaf of kale, the carton of eggs, and if you have them at the time- a jar of left over carmelized onions and the avocado out of the fridge. Wash and cut up the kale, using the little cutting board and the little blue knife that are on the counter.

The pan should be hot by now. I f you're not sure you can check it by rubbing your finger on the faucet and flicking the bit of water in to the pan.

Find the spatula and use it to spread out the oil in the pan. Leave the spatula next to the stove, and crack the egg in to the pan. Plop the kale on top and smush it down a little bit, to crack the yolk open. Using the fork that has coconut oil on it, sprinkle a little bit of carmelized onions on top of the egg. smush them in too.

While the egg is cooking, fill the kettle up half way with water and turn it on high heat on the back burner.Dump the contents of yesterday's tea in the compost, refill it, and place the strainer back in the tea pot.

Flip the egg over with the spatula. Get a little plate off the drying rack. Cut a tiny sliver of the avocado with the little blue knife and leave them both on the plate. Put the rest of the avocado and the eggs and the onions back in the fridge, and get out the kimchi or the sauerkraut.

Your bagel should be thawed and just slightly toasted by now, and the egg should be done. Turn off the heat on the stove and the toaster. Remove the bagel, put it on your plate, spread the avocado on top with the little blue knife. Bring the egg from the pan to the plate with the spatula, and put it on top of the bagel. Get the fork from next to the stove, and use it to put some kimchi or sauerkraut on top of the egg. You can decide whether the egg-side or the kale-side is facing up. They're both good.

The water in the kettle should be boiling by now. Fill up the tea pot, and go find your mug from your bedroom.

Eaten in the vicinity of breakfast and/or lunch, this meal will set you up for a day of perfect digestion and possibly total bliss. When implemented as one's primary nourishment, this abundance reveals itself to be both surprising quick to assemble and affordable.

Leave adventure for dinnertime, start your day the RachelBreakfast way! With a balance of protein, fat, carbohydrates, vitamins, fiber, and probiotics, this meal is designed for the gluten tolerant but dairy-sensitive, and is especially helpful to those with anti-biotic trauma in their digestive past. It is mushy, crunchy, sweet, salty, sour and spicy, when you want it that way. After more than a year of almost continuous allegiance to it, it continues to reveal new levels of deliciousness and satisfaction.

this momentous thing

Today I cleaned my computer and eliminated the folder called 'art stuff'.

because it had everything in it.

contents dispersed yield:

this momentus thing,

another poem about

Being an artist!

that I have written so many times before.

say it in hushed tones or swallow. when I say it I cringe.

it feels so much like what I was already doing,

except now (fulfillment of an ideal) I don't feel so much like I'm waiting for something else

to come along.

it's self-packaging all the time these days

a million opportunities for rejection. mood swing revelation.

these moments with myself that I wonder are connective or delusion.

you already know what you'll say to yourself, so does it count as a poem?

writing it down messily on a scrap of paper

and putting it on her wall. waiting to be made:

you already made that decision,

or, you already know what to do!

or, when you don't know, its not time to know.

or, it's urgent when its urgent.

or, everything is an example

or, pruning the family tree

or, rachel comes up with a truism for everything she imagines she'll ever experience!!

and then,

writes it down messily on a scrap of paper

and puts it on her wall, waiting to be made

second date

I want to say to you,

I am so totally psyched about this

in whatever formation, for

whatever duration.

But!

I'm not saying it yet, I'm playing it cool.

for, of course, the hope of a duration that doesn't end tomorrow

and some super social superstition in those dumb games.

this week,

I am in love with the relationship with myself that I am having because of you.

new thoughts with you as filter,

new problems,

I get all nervous but its hypothetical so I can say,

oh, no! everything will be great!

and everything is great. some day spring will come.

I do not use 'in love' lightly

and I will not ever say those words to you.

but to myself, my own primary p., my own wope,

me and my inky hands that I won't scrub for you next time,

I hope there is a next time,

I must be some psycho for learning. this is going to be hard.

the touching point of the assymptote: it does not exist.

But, I am empowered with potential and

totally preoccupied.

you are a big, busy bird and I am

filling my little belly,

drooling on the subway

moonie mooning, gender identing,

(complicit in everything I think is wrong in the world)

and everything that's just totally annoying

expert voice postulating, ringing around and leaking out my ears

rolling my eyes at myself and unselfconsciously dreaming out,

wet all the time, hair twirling,

it is so much easier to go anyplace when there's someplace internal so nice to go.

to think about what might happen and say

fuck it if I jinx this by fantasizing,

if you call it off tomorrow I'll always have

how I felt this week and what could have been.

if you could shrink

someday I, too, will have old friends that I will have fought with,

with all of it behind us, now.

the oldest actress on the stage says

when I was in my 20's I would have these panic attacks

uhyea. me and all my friends.

I am not reinventing what it means to be human:

just an hour of this trembling,

not so bad...compare it to:

compare it to!

oh, you know. enough.

it is

so

far

from

not so bad.

space heater. nutella. miso soup.

subway delays. fights with my mom

always getting home, always making up.

again, I ask myself the embarrassing question of my comparative maladjustment.

the question is the answer itself:

not so far gone, yet!

which is what makes this cringeworthy,

that that's not what I want to hear.

if only I could hold my friends as children,

if only I could walk off the ledge and know what it feels like,

and get real big and know what that feels like,

and if only I could see myself as old.

not good

I am so nervous

this isn't even fun

I can't even

think about anything else to write about

I am wasting an opportunity for a poem

I am wasting space on the internet

the internet is space

it is made of plastic, metal, takes energy to run

I am wasting energy on this internet on this poem on being so nervous.

today as expert at nothing

the tone when Leon says

and fairly

Laydee Gahhh-Gaaawh

calls all perspective in to question

don't go mope in your room,

find the software to

the whirring of information,

all things connected to all other things,

self representation bang my head against the wall

my distaste for aggression

cannot fit in two dimensions

what many experience as erotic or humorous

appears to encompass

invent something, this american message.

I am afraid my desires

approached by the kin of those

aren't kinky enough to please you

on killing sprees

and fairly

is a myth

empathy is

those who have also gone cumbersome,

don't mope in your room

the system is supposed to be efficiency:

go invent something!

this might be more personal than I am willing to admit but,

the piano was the moral equivalent

the wealth of america

the computer today

the agricultural paradigm

not tied to

either erotic or funny.

or

dumb luck

celebrity appears

nothing but

encompass what many experience,

________________

the tone when Leon says Laydee Gahhh-Gaaawh

calls all perspective in to question,

and the whirring of information, all things connected to all other things,

cannot fit in two dimensions.

find the software to ease this self representation,

bang my head against the wall,

don't go mope in your room, invent something. this is the american message.

I am afraid my desires aren't kinky enough to please you.

my distaste for aggression is so fervent sometimes that I experience it aggressively and it encompasses what many experience, and fairly, as either erotic or funny.

empathy is being approached by the kin of those who have also gone on killing sprees.

efficiency is a myth! the system is supposed to be cumbersome

this might be more personal than I am willing to admit but, I like girls with tits.

big ones.

the piano then was the moral equivalent of the computer today.

the wealth of america is no longer tied to the agricultural paradigm

celebrity appears as the representation of nothing but dumb luck.

the week after penis dog: is a bad message better than a mixed one?

do young people like limits?

I wonder this as I lay it on thick, this week.

no you may NOT go get a drink of water down the hall.

you will GO to the spot in the line where you started and you will

NOT run. you will NOT skip.

I am waiting for a STRAIGHT line against the wall.

I do not like to be this way.

But in 10 minutes,

my class of crazy creative terrors are humming away at their projects.

I said,

Today you MUST work at a table.

and they are all working at tables.

and they are making these great masks and we are talking about what you can do with a hot glue gun that you can't do with tape

and no one grabs the hot glue gun

and the kids are happy, and I am In Control.

BUB- big ugly butt!

BFWP- butt filled with poop!

SSP- super smelly fart!

SBP- stupid butt penis!

PDD- poopy dum dum!

this is not last week.

this is not last week:

we are not making up bathroom acronyms. I am not laughing.

they are not jumping out of their seats to start the project.

they are not so excited about the piles of materials that they're grabbing

they are not making crazy sculpturepile messes under tables,

they are not so involved that they cannot keep their voices down.

they are not hurrying through their projects to start a pretend hot dog stand all together

they are not pushing furniture frantically around the room.

they are not yelling PENIS DOGS FOR SALE!! PENIS DOGS FOR SALE!!!

they are not grabbing the yarnpilepenisdogs and throwing them around the room

they are not riffling through the trash and discovering the curious little wooden sticks.

they are not exchanging and jabbing each other with sticks

they are not refusing to put the sticks back, even when I explain that they were used for lice checks this morning. even when I explain what lice are.

they are not stopping until I call the supervisor.

This week is not last week.

This week is a Good Week.

and the children are Good.

notes for chart shaped like a snake vomiting up its own tail: assymptotally towards complete symbolic entropy.

in union square on tuesday there is a protest.

LESS CRIMINALIZATION! MORE MEDIATION! their posters say

on computer printed signs, all of the same font.

strange.

but sure, computer age protest.

and sure, mediation with a polished face.

reclaiming negotiation from its crunchy image?

in this world, sure, there can be a place for that!

they are all wearing the same white hats and scarfs.

wow, people are weird.

DON'T GO TO COURT GO TO KATE they chant.

kate?

sure, some enthusiastic endorsement of a private mediator.

strange, but.

They hand me two things.

a black and white cookie

and a flyer that says

LESS LAWYER. MORE APPEAL.

FAIRLY LEGAL.

NEW ORIGINAL SERIES

PREIMIERS JANUARY 20

THURSDAYS 10/9C

CHARACTERS WELCOME. USA

UGGGG

they disappear in to the park.

on further inspection the cookie is grey and white.

on further inspection the cookie is disgusting

I wonder:

if it is possible for a medium not to get eaten and to maintain its authentic resonation, and

(what does success even look like?)

what the intention of such an action would be, and

who those poor actors are fauxtesting, and

if the cookie will poison me.

it just had to come out

angsty late night in the mirror,

I am not a fat girl.

if I ever was one.

and I experience this revelation as a loss.

rachel, it's just really a question of how far you'll let yourself go.

if you are ever to be a good shape it will be because you are doing something different, because

you are more willful than

could not ever imagine holding my head up while yielding to this change.

now that you've got a nice body

fuck you even more. between what two days would you draw that line?

there has been no catagorical... just plotting away at bettering.

and I am not categorically...

if I ever was anything but that.

lets go.

sleep off those late night worries

that something has gotten lost along the way.

teeth city

at the dentist they'll put this stuff on your teeth.

then you brush your teeth and they put this other stuff on your teeth,

which illuminates what's left of the first stuff,

showing you all the places you do not brush.

this is snow.

we put it everywhere and then we go everywhere we go

we're so sick of it it's like its invisible

until you look and see it's marking every bit of unused space.

This city is no larger than it has to be.

the space between parking spots, the edges of the sidewalks, the tops of buildings, the high-fenced rims of parks.

do not exist again until we step on them.

There is a pile so high on the loew's parking lot that you could hollow a palace inside of it.

I cannot imagine it will ever melt to nothing,

and yet we step on them, the rain and sun step on them,

and it will.

bee keeper seeks

we are all capable of embodying the opposite of our self conception:

short skirted sweat heart gettin what she wants,

or

pliable passive mushy lump of mush?

yielding to whichever way the unknown power leads,

or

yielding to some internalized shouldonyourself thing.

It's new to feel like I'm not sure what authentic feels like.

you wouldn't be much help here, Robert

you wouldn't even know what to think,

you're out of your league.