No work today.

It only takes me a day or two to sustain a mad feeling. And all of the reasons to hate fly out the window rather quickly. :P

An old high school classmate pops up in FB and says that the one conversation he remembers me by is me telling him I don't like seeing his cheekbones because they make him look skinny. This was in grade school. I do not even remember talking to him about physical appearances at all. The random things we remember. Surprising.

the morning after.

Don't be polite.
Bite in.
Pick it up with your fingers and lick the juice that
may run down your chin.
It is ready and ripe now, whenever you are.

You do not need a knife or fork or spoon
or plate or napkin or tablecloth.

For there is no core
or stem
or rind
or pit
or seed
or skin
to throw away.

I thought I had a slight fever last night but the supposed sickness didn't last. The stench of the smoke didn't last. Even the annoyed feeling that banned person inflicted is now just something to cringe at.

There was a time when Erson and Mayo and I were almost inseparable. We saw each other everyday. At that time, it never crossed my mind that we will eventually break away from it all.



Looking back, I wasn't too interested in looking at the future.There was a kind of a standstill then. Nothing else mattered but the thesis we were writing and Zuma, I guess. The simplicity of it all is almost unreal.

Photos stolen from: http://bubudynasty.multiply.com.

This is my poem for the day.

I Know the Way You Can Get

I know the way you can get
When you have not had a drink of Love:

Your face hardens,
Your sweet muscles cramp.
Children become concerned
About a strange look that appears in your eyes
Which even begins to worry your own mirror
And nose.

...

Even angels fear that brand of madness
That arrays itself against the world
And throws sharp stones and spears into
The innocent
And into one’s self.

O I know the way you can get
If you have not been drinking Love:

You might rip apart
Every sentence your friends and teachers say,
Looking for hidden clauses.

You might weigh every word on a scale
Like a dead fish.

You might pull out a ruler to measure
From every angle in your darkness
The beautiful dimensions of a heart you once
Trusted.

...

From: “I Heard God Laughing"
Renderings of Hafiz: by Daniel Ladinsky.


+

I know now why I have never liked you. Or been frustrated about you. Because when I look at you, I see myself. We always have "one feet out the door". 

Yesterday was full of surprises. But they weren't all that good surprises.

Today, I fell inlove with a photo.
This one:

It must be the lighting. Or the beer bottles on the table. Or the atmosphere. Or how one person can be confined to his own space, even when he may be right smack in the middle of Mogwai.

I have absolutely no idea why I love this photo. All I know is that it's something I like looking at, again and again and again.

It's raining dinosaurs today. Boo. I don't want to go to work and get my feet wet.

There really is no substitute to the feeling you get when you surmount seemingly insurmountable things. :) 



And to remind me: 

For the young who want to
Marge Piercy

Talent is what they say
you have after the novel
is published and favorably
reviewed. Beforehand what
you have is a tedious
delusion, a hobby like knitting.

Work is what you have done
after the play is produced
and the audience claps.
Before that friends keep asking
when you are planning to go
out and get a job.

Genius is what they know you
had after the third volume
of remarkable poems. Earlier
they accuse you of withdrawing,
ask why you don’t have a baby,
call you a bum.

The reason people want M.F.A.’s,
take workshops with fancy names
when all you can really
learn is a few techniques,
typing instructions and some-
body else’s mannerisms

is that every artist lacks
a license to hang on the wall
like your optician, your vet
proving you may be a clumsy sadist
whose fillings fall into the stew
but you’re certified a dentist.

The real writer is one
who really writes. Talent
is an invention like phlogiston
after the fact of fire.
Work is its own cure. You have to
like it better than being loved.

Went to the embassy today and this time they actually took the mound of papers I photocopied for them but they still didn't keep my passport and I went home with only the reassurance that they will mail me a notice re: the status of my application. I went home drunk with coffee after the embassy thing.

Went out yesterday night with cousins and my long missed siblings and we got here past two in the morning. I really cannot quit smoking. I can't. I used to think that smoking was a rebellious whatever everyone goes through but I was wrong. It's not easy to quit and it's not a phase. And, it's addictive.

I no longer had any hangover on the second time this week that I got home past two the following morning. My belly is now showing signs of becoming a beer belly.

I want to get a haircut today, and a real boyfriend -- someone tangible.

I am engulfed in thine words, oh Rumi.

The smell of pride and greed and lust
will betray you when you speak
as much as the onions you have eaten.
Many prayers are rejected because of their smell;
the corrupt heart reveals itself in the tongue.
But if your meaning is pure,
God will welcome even your clumsy expression.

-- Mathnawi III: 166;169;171
Version by Camille and Kabir Helminski

Today I learned that it's very wrong to confine your knowledge of a person to only a certain extent because people change. 

I talked to someone today -- after years and years of boxing him in a single demeaning thought and then I find out he is really so much more than all my prejudices.

Glad to know I was wrong.

It's not fun to be always sober. 

I am drunk and you are insane
tell me, who will lead us home?
How many times have I asked you not to drink so much
for I see no sober soul in town.
Come to the tavern my dearest and taste the wine of love
for the soul is joyous only in the company of lovers.
The tavern of love is your livelihood
your income and expenses, the wine.
Be careful, not to trust a sober soul
with even one drop of this wine.
Go on playing your lute, my drunken gypsy but tell me,
between the two of us, who is more drunk?
As I left my house a Sufi approached me,
in his glance I saw a hundred gardens.
He swayed from side to side like a ship without an anchor,
while a hundred reasonable men watched on enviously.
Where are you from? I asked him.
He replied, "Half from Turkistan and half from Farghaneh,
half from water and clay and half from soul and heart,
half from the edge of the sea and half from the depths of the coean."

-- Ghazal (Ode) 2398
Translated by Azima Melita Kolin
and Maryam Mafi

I have never been totally drunk  in which I couldn't walk anymore. (And I'm already twenty four. How pathetic is that.) When intoxicated, I still know what it is that's happening and I can still think straight. What the hell. Where's the fun in that? I've never puked infront of anyone, never emabarrased myself in any drinking spree. When I couldn't take the alchohol anymore, I fall asleep and then again, where's the fun in that? 

I'd like to be stupendously drunk one of these days. 

Death Comes to Me Again, a Girl
Dorianne Laux


Death comes to me again, a girl in a cotton slip.
Barefoot, giggling. It’s not so terrible, she tells me,
not like you think: all darkness and silence.

There are wind chimes and the scent of lemons.
Some days it rains. But more often the air
is dry and sweet. We sit beneath the staircase
built from hair and bone and listen
to the voices of the living.

I like it, she says, shaking the dust from her hair.
Especially when they fight, and when they sing.

At the rate things are going, it would be close to impossible for me to fall for anyone again. 

Yesterday night, I decided to call them the Residue People, the ones whom I have always known existed but never got around to sharing any decent conversation with, much less given the opportunity of formal introductions.

Then years and years after being in the same circle with nary a hello, I meet them finally, in another lifetime or another phase if you will. The familiarity overwhelms me to be seeing them strewn across my path again. 

There must be a reason for the reiteration, I tell myself. Reiteration, repetition, recognition. They must mean something. Otherwise, they wouldn't have been here again. 

"Abschieds Symphony"
Dorianne Laux

Someone I love is dying, which is why,
when I turn the key in the ignition
and back the car out of the parking space
in the underground garage, and the radio
comes on, sudden and loud, something
by Haydn, a diminishing fugue, and maneuver
the car through the dimly lit tunnels
with their low ceilings, following the yellow arrows
stenciled at intervals on the gray cement walls,
I think of him, moving slowly through the last
hard days of his life and I can't stop crying.
When I arrive at the toll gate I have to make myself
stop thinking as I dig in my pockets for the last
of my coins, turn to the attendant, indifferent
in his blue smock, his white hair curling like smoke
around his weathered neck, and say Thank you,
like an idiot, and drive into the blinding midday light.
Everything is hideously symbolic,
and everything reminds me of cancer:
the Chevron truck, its rounded underbelly
spattered with road grit and the sweat
of last night's rain, the dumpster
behind the flower shop, its sprung lid
pressing down on dead wedding bouquets--
even the smell of something simple, coffee drifting
from the open door of a cafe and my eyes
glaze over, ache in their sockets.
For months now all I've wanted is the blessing
of inattention, to move carefully from room to room
in my small house, numb with forgetfulness.
To eat a bowl of cereal and not imagine him,
scrubbed thin and pale, unable to swallow.
How not to imagine the tumors
ripening beneath his skin, flesh
I have kissed, stroked with my fingertips,
pressed my belly and breasts against, some nights
so hard I thought I could enter him, open
his back at the spine like a door or a curtain
and slip in like a small fish between his ribs,
nudge the coral of his brain with my lips,
brushing over the blue coils of his bowels
with the fluted silk of my tail.
Death is not romantic. He is dying,
no matter how I see it, no matter
what I believe, that fact is stark
and one dimensional, atonal,
a black note on an empty staff.
My feet are cold, but not as cold as his,
and I hate this music that floods
the cramped insides of my car, my head,
slowing the world down with its
lurid majesty, transforming everything I see
into some sort of memorial to life,
no matter how ugly or senseless--
even the old Ford in front of me,
its battered rear end thinning to scallops of rust,
pumping black classical clouds of exhaust
into the shimmering air-- even the tenacious
nasturtiums clinging to a fence, vine and bloom
of the insignificant, music spilling
from their open faces, spooling upward, past
the last rim of blue and into the still pool
of another galaxy, as if all that emptiness
were a place of benevolence, a destination,
a peace we could rise to.

 I feel loved today. :)