Pandora

This day is plotting grey, the clouds shrouding their true intent. I wish it would just rain already--heavy, icy drops that demand regard. I would offer myself bodily to such elements today; pray to be a human lightning rod, convey heaven to earth and back again--decode life from electricity, kindle my every dermal cell back to life, because I have forgotten my skin. I have forsaken feeling for thought; crucified my soma on a distant ridge. And so what I want to know is if it is possible to stop thinking and just feel. I want to know if your bodies ever seem estranged from you, like perhaps your brains are despots holding the rest of you in exile, or worse, have disappeared you altogether. I took Ecstasy for the first time when I was 19 for just such reasons. I wanted to know what it was like to *feel* for more than a minute or two. I wanted to overthrow the autocracy of Mind. I wanted to channel Orwell and impose punishment for thought-crime.

This day is plotting grey and grey is the loneliest abyss; black and white, light and dark, collided and confused. Grey is a Difranco melody that brings me every time to my knees: 

     "I feel right at home in this stunning monochrome, alone in my way. I smoke    and I drink and every time I blink I have a tiny dream, but as bad as I am, I'm proud of the fact that I'm worse than I seem. What kind of paradise am I looking for?" 

But see, I don't even need paradise. I don't trust perfection; I will inevitably constantly be flinching--always anticipating the fall of some invisible axe, precariously placed just above my head.
Do you ever get so tired that the world around you intermittently switches between cartoon and Hunter S. Thompson-Land?  And you can feel every pore on your body dilate like some kind of subtle acid trip? So tired you can't eat, can't unlock your jaw, and can't will your well-educated fingers to find the right keys? 

It is the dreams that do me in; take the natural cycles of body and mind and rearrange their DNA creating twisted mutations. And so I spend hours, nightly, trying to fight off the incessant insomnia that has plagued my ever-twitching eyes for as long as I can remember. I know that routine sleep is laced with chemicals, both legal and illicit, that tweak my dreams into vividly felt landscapes of tumultuous struggle; I know that 'natural sleep' is a psychopathic stress test that tries the limits of my sanity and my endurance and finds me often "stuck" in my dreams, forever battling one incursion or another. It is easier to forsake dreaming altogether. My body has taken to acting out seizures in desperate attempts to ward off dreams. 

It is because of this queer relationship with sleep that my viewpoints are askew. I imagine my lens to be slightly autistic--or at least I relate to that particular brain dysfunction. I 'get stuck'...on inverting words, by bright colors in cacophony (cereal aisles at the grocery store are one particular nemesis), the fluid train of syllables bleeding into each other...(other-otherworldy-wordy-worry-wry-rise-highrise-rise above-beloved)...and these spasms happen frequently which makes other people think I am not hearing them; zoning out...but really I am honing in-- on something they have said, or a word that I saw on a billboard, or a phrase I heard in a song that is playing in the background, and it hijacks me for a moment.  But I don't mind it most of the time, because I have been indentured to words since I was quite young, and I often wish someone else could articulate the labyrinth I wander daily; could navigate the topography of a brain that is both menaced and blessed by a chronic, tectonic grinding.

Poetry knows me and accepts me for my particular tilt. She is my midnight blues. My sad jazz saunter. My subterranean sonata. Ever since I read Ginsberg's 'Howl' for the first time, I have forever associated the slow, aching supplication of brass and bass and beat with the fervid fornication of words pulled bodily, one into another; a magnetic collision which leaves one flinching, waiting for the inevitable shatter.

"...and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow

            of  the band and blew  the suffering of America's naked mind  for love

            into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered

            the cities down to the last radio

with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies

            good to eat a thousand years."

My screen name, confessionalpoet...it is an obvious homage to Sexton, Plath, etc. I began studying them and writing my own first tenuous pieces at around 13 years old. I couldn't absorb enough of their words. It had something to do with laying their blood and guts on the altar, naked at the pulpit. Smiling. There is so much power in smiling in spite; a justified smirk and a tacitly clenched fist. I want to be able to dissect myself in words like they did, forsaking the euphemisms of Woman altogether.
The confessional poets were a clan. I envy them that. But there is an unnamed,  relative responsibility between communing writers. There is the responsibility to integrity, and to truth; to blooming, mutually. It is community (albeit an endangered one). It is collectivity. But I am devoutly committed to the belief that it is also a lifeline to sanity sometimes. Also, consider alchemy--the (in)fusion of elemental substance. You never know how you might extraneously create gold.

These thoughts...these fragments of desire and mental meandering are but a few contents I keep neatly wrapped, stored unassumingly in my head. My tongue doesn't know the way to this place, and so I am labeled uncommunicative. Is this simply a predilection for compartmentalization; boxes impounding the arsenal of memory under manually disabled neurons? 

Boxes. Boxes. Boxes. I must invoke this mantra and say with a stoically stiff upper lip: Even Pandora was given hope to assuage the sorrow.

Al Franken makes the outrageous claim that rape is wrong...

Rarely do I want to punch my television. I am not one of the overly-exuberant viewers who can enmesh the two realities and therefore talk myself into having arguments, and/or fistfights with the tv. I do not watch sports (if I can help it), and people who yell at the tv make me flinch. But every once in a while, a story will come along that will so overtake me with immediate anger, my rationale has no time to catch up. I will not infuse this particular blog with my usual prettified language. I will simply state the facts and ask for your help in passing along this disgusting news to your friends and family.


Al Franken introduced an amendment this week which would financially punish government contractors (read: Halliburton, etc.) who, in essence, drafted employment contracts containing fine print prohibiting its employees from suing if they were raped on the job. One such woman who was stationed overseas with KBR (a Halliburton subsidiary) was gang-raped and then stuffed into a shipping container for days on end without food or water. Her employment contract contains just such fine print, because, let's face it, being a woman is a liability. A pre-existing condition, if you will. Enter Al Franken with an amendment to eradicate these punitive, pugnacious practices. One would imagine that his amendment is the kind that would receive multilateral, bipartisan support right? Well...let us never overestimate the humanity of our Republican repre(hensible)sentatives who suckle at the teat of Papa Halliburton. (I know...'what does that make the teat', you ask?) Thirty of them (yes, apparently 30 percent of senators can make the case for rape) voted against Franken's amendment to defund government contractors who participate in this type of behavior. These senators are, by the way, the same guys who for weeks now have been salivating over the defunding and delegitimization of Acorn for a much overblown scandal.


Senator Jeff Sessions (R.AL) has been one of the figureheads coming out against Franken's amendment. I wrote to Senator Sessions because I was livid, and I have included a copy of my email. I have also included a list of the 30 (men) republicans who voted for rape in the workplace. (I apologize for the pandering rhetoric and for the gross oversimplification I just employed...I was merely borrowing a favorite republican trick for use against them.) I digress. Please feel free to pass this information along to anyone and everyone you know. I invite you to write your own letters to these (assholes) public servants, or feel free to copy and paste mine and sign your name to it. I intend to write to all 30 of them. Plaster their names on your blogs, your Twitters, your Facebooks, etc. Fuck them and the elephant they rode in on.


"Dear Senator Sessions,


I was more than disheartened to learn this week that you and 29 of your colleagues (every last one of them Republicans, go figure) voted against the Franken bill that would in effect help rape victims. There should be NO clause or fine print in ANY contract preventing rape victims from seeking justice. The woman who was gang-raped overseas and then stuffed into a barrel should be able to sue KBR for every last cent in their coffers. And she should win. In a time when playing the party lines is drawing nothing but contempt from all but the wing-nuttiest of citizens, I think perhaps this was a bill that everyone should have been able to get on board with. Rape is wrong, Senator. Halliburton should be held to a slightly higher standard than Acorn, don't you think? Or is every last Republican these days completely and utterly blinded to their own pungent hypocrisy? The 30 who voted against this should be immediately ousted from public office. Moreover, they should be tarred and feathered. I wonder what your wives and daughters, your mothers and granddaughters have to say about this repugnant vote...and I hope for their sake, they sign no employment contract with KBR or any of the other rape-mongering companies you seek to keep in business. Shame on you, you unfathomable dick."




Is your Senator a prick? (Senators in the case of: TN, WY, KS, KY, GA, OK, MS, ID, SC, AZ, and AL.)


As promised, the list in its entirety:
Alexander (R-TN)
Barrasso (R-WY)
Bond (R-MO)
Brownback (R-KS)
Bunning (R-KY)
Burr (R-NC)
Chambliss (R-GA)
Coburn (R-OK)
Cochran (R-MS)
Corker (R-TN)
Cornyn (R-TX)
Crapo (R-ID)
DeMint (R-SC)
Ensign (R-NV)
Enzi (R-WY)
Graham (R-SC)
Gregg (R-NH)
Inhofe (R-OK)
Isakson (R-GA)
Johanns (R-NE)
Kyl (R-AZ)
McCain (R-AZ)
McConnell (R-KY)
Risch (R-ID)
Roberts (R-KS)
Sessions (R-AL)
Shelby (R-AL)
Thune (R-SD)
Vitter (R-LA)
Wicker (R-MS)

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/07/meet-the-senators-who-vot_n_312976.html

Mosaic

Dear Lady Lunar,

I know how treacherous dreamscapes can be...our footing consciously solid in the waking world; our steps in a cadence of onefootinfrontoftheother, our mantras anchoring us through years of effort and tears and therapy. And then here comes this world every night besieging us from behind our eyes, and our iron-fisted grip melts into something elusive and mercurial. What can we do but gather the visions into words? Your post about dreams (re)minded me of this poem and of the solidarity the world of women share across all lines and lineages, across all languages. Here are my pieces, (re)arranged:

Mosaic

>>“Please, don’t hurt my daughter!”<<

...Did those words come before or after
the beer bottles shattered against the dumpster
making abstract mosaics under a half moon midnight?
Does it even matter?
Because the anger
in her voice was indiscernible
from a desperate fear
squeezing her pitch to an arcing high
cracking her voice, the air
a canyon in time
dug across the parking lot
rocking my never snug sleep
through obsolete single pane glass,
and my vigilant ass was up.
One hand hyper-dialing 911 while one split the blinds
finding focus on the girl, her mother
calling to her in broken English
“Mija! Come home!”

In the alley: two men beside a truck,
swaggering drunken posture calling to her like a dog.

“911. What is your emergency?”
“I’m not sure. Send the police—there are men breaking bottles
and threatening a girl!!”
Races. Ages. Vehicle. Address.
“Ma’am, police are on their way.”

But five…
eight…
twelve minutes later ’til they drive down my alley
spitting spotlight on glittered glass
floating stale beer lazy circles in a pothole.
Spotlights down the alley, up my house, across my bed
the silence insincere—
a mustered
broken
pause
strangled and nauseous as two
cruisers
crawled
to a stop a block away,
side by side in opposite directions
so the officers can
…talk.

But the girl is five minutes gone,
half-bent and slinking
into a truck fucking rubber into pavement

as her mother melted up the stairs

with her head in her hands,
trying to push the tears back inside,
to push
the tears
back inside
past her eyes rising moonward
to her God,
down past her sinus
and into her throat to coat the words
hinged on rusted pain.
A refrain.
A lockjawed crimson chorus
crying “please”
chanting “please”
she's sobbing “Please! Don’t hurt my daughter!”

*******

“I Don’t Need Anyone!!”

Those words, my mantra.
My steel spine
refined over the years,
my opaque prayer
cloaked by words
broken
by swelling sobs,
half-choked on
held
-in breath,
all the way to the bathroom mirror,
still the only one I own.
And then the stone gaze sets,
quivering lips go stoic,
and though some tears fall
it is silent and heroic.
And only I
ever watch this scene.
Hear the warbled hiss
of syllables krilled
through teeth bared at my reflection
tangled on old steam, streamed
and dried a deviant
vertical.
I try to look past the warm, fragile cracks
into my eyes reflecting eyes reflecting eyes,
but only see the
fractures,
the oblique seams that push apart,

that never seem to pull

together.
My face abstracted,
made mosaic beneath the shadows
beneath the steam.
Maybe if the mirror weren’t screwed into the wall...
maybe if I
could
just
look
behind it,
I could see backwards,
behind the woman,
to the tongue-held girl
who knows why
she only cries in front of herself.
Who still knows the weight of three boyswillbeboys
constricting her breath, the breadth
of a decade.
The weight
of a secret
so lead-heavy in her gut
she could only ever hope to float it.
On vodka, on whiskey, on rum,
a numb and blunted
chorus of callous
sentry standing guard.
>Standing guard<
>Standing guard<
From my gut to my gullet comes the cadence,
“I don’t need Anyone!!”
“I fucking don’t need anyone!!”

*******

“I just wanted to see the Holy Land” you said.

The tremor in your hands
hijacking your voice,
poised on silent abyss. A bliss
you mainline modestly.
But I pry.
Because beautiful isn’t big enough
to wrap its gossamer wings around you
when you dare see me seeing you.
I mean, into you.
Through you.
That hot July day.
That Jerusalem afternoon
when you set out to meet your God
on the fragile breath of faith,

bathed blonder by that exotic sun than anyone that day.

That is when he first saw you.
He with a name you never knew until the trial.
The denial must have been severe
those first few hours.
The bass-line of that last song you ever heard a virgin
following you out of the club,
crucified on a Judas kiss,
and onto foreign sand.
His hands dissecting every part of you.
Your body made mosaic
underneath your splintered God.

I know...
You have bared the scars
when I promised not to look,
and I didn’t.
I swear.
Because I don’t need eyes to map your scars,
my fingers are enough.
They know the way,
can trace the breaks
in my own skin, where
even now
those boys
can
still
get in.

You tremble “stay with me tonight.”

My arms wrap into you,
caress the breath from you
because I think tonight
you would die if you could
just
stop
breathing.

You tell me you wish I could hold all of you.
I say “I am”.
And in the most delicate exhalation
you say “no”.
You tell me “no”.
“Mandy what you don’t understand
is that I broke myself that day.
Split myself over and over again,
like cells in reverse.
Because I would rather be in a fucking million pieces
than let him take me whole.”

And then I knew.

They will never get us whole.

She, Me, You.

We will focus our fight

to manipulate the shadows.

We will focus our light

to articulate our shadow.

They think that they can break us?

Leave us severed,

scattered,

scared?

Well tell me…

what is a mosaic

but some uniquely focused parts?

Girls, rearrange your pieces. 

Breathe them 

into Art.

Kimberlite

This is a proverbial message in a bottle. I don't know who it might find, but there have to be others out there who speak my indigenous tongue...


I once wrote a very heady poem about diamonds (sort of) and named it 'Kimberlite'. (According to Emily Dickinson poems are children, and so thusly, we name them). Generally I would spend the current sentence giving a brief description of what Kimberlite is, clenching my teeth to seal the intangible yet somehow vast space between my lips and my tongue; between what I want to say and what I actually do. I live my life in a *constant* state of self-edit and redaction. Muted out of habit, out of necessity, I am often accused of being a poor communicator, but the truth is I suppose I don't trust the thoughts to amalgamate into words properly. I have become accustomed (but never comfortable) with the way that people often look at me when I speak freely. My fingertips however, are well versed at acting as Interpreter, and so here I sit, trying to forge a treaty between the Poet and the corporeal. 


I know well the Loneliness that settles, ghost-like, in the periphery of quiet; the hazy aching that life becomes when we are reaching for something intangible. My mind is a drifting island. I can give my friends the geography; the longitude. I can show them my customs, but...I can not teach them my language, so I have had to learn theirs. I can only stand my inner cacophony for so long before I drown it in Whiskey, or distraction (or both). I have chronic synesthesia, so I feel things others don't. Or maybe I just feel them with a part of myself that many others don't possess. I don't read as much as I used to...I have no appropriate outlet for the intake. Poetry is the exception. It cultivates my patience. It speaks to my over-stimulated ears in throaty whispers. It bends language because it knows I covet flex; flux. 

And so, digression aside, I have to re-mind myself that nobody probably cares that much what Kimberlite is, let alone the metaphoric implications that I spent 3 typed pages excavating (no pun intended) from my manic-tinted brain. I find myself wanting to believe that someone might actually look it up; might understand the metaphors humming a lonely, tenor hymn between the lines of bleached scientific jargon. Or I could just state directly what it is and what it means to me...but that wouldn't be as rewarding, would it? 


I am fascinated by diamonds, or rather, by diamonds in the (no, not rough) raw. The finished products do not interest me for both personal and political reasons, and I silently apologize to Africa frequently for the many misguided proposals that have forgotten the symbolism is in the ring itself. But, engagements and engorgements aside, I am compelled by these Janus stones. Diamonds are made of pure carbon, the elemental God, the base of all life. It is immense pressure over countless years that produces these stones from graphite. Graphite. Lead. Coal. Add a little unrelenting pressure and a perfect ratio of oxygen...voila. Diamonds.   

My hands are dirty; permanently stained a chalky soot. I have yet to not press too hard and find that what I have touched has turned to sable dust, my fingertips ghosted by a smirking, perennial irony. I am a modern day Midas. I have prayed too hard for words; for the medium. I have committed the sin of gluttony and now I am left with nothing but a mountain rising up out of pulverized coal. What can I do but smear it on the walls of my cranial asylum? What am I left with besides onyx hieroglyphs to tell my story?

Scientifically speaking, to sublime is to evaporate. Diamonds in the absence of oxygen will sublime. The fists I make around words...the clench I wield...does indeed sometimes conceive a gem. But human nature can not extort Mother Nature. Eventually, I clutch too hard...asphyxiate the ideas with my own hands. Is this some kind of twisted, mythical punishment? Am I sibling to Tantalus and Sysiphus?

I have a second home in this remote, hollowed out cave where slave songs crawl listlessly, like phantoms in the walls. Maybe you find yourselves peering out from within the cave, too. Maybe your journal-words surround you like that musty, pitch-black ether. Maybe your hands, seeking a tactile communion with this catacomb have stumbled into the fractal grooves; human made notches, betraying days--weeks--years here, removed in self-induced patterns of both exile and reprieve.

I know this place where diamonds and coal coalesce. I've marked my times here with neurotic compulsion...and I know there is always a way out, because every cave, like every human has a mouth.

(Dis)articulation

With a heavy exhalation of breath I am admitting defeat. Or rather, I am succombing to the gravitational pull of the blog phenomenon. I am a few years behind. I admit it. I am shelving the journal; surrendering my periodic diary of dys(fun)ctional diahrrea to the internet, and all the advantages and lack thereof that ensue. To all you voyeurs of emotional and intellectual (in)stability, perhaps this small effort will keep me more faithful to writing. I have turned my back and I'm regretting it. Too much builds up and I am feeling the pressure at the back of my throat which means I am going mute until I bleed this urge. . . 


I have been thinking a lot about fractals. Fragments. Disarticulation:

I have always been fascinated with this word. I was reminded of it again recently, while watching the Discovery Channel. The show was about the search for a man who had completely dismembered a woman, until she was unrecognizable; arms and legs in four separate bags; torso in another; head in another; skin and nose removed from face. 

Do not think me morose because I was not at a loss of compassion for the woman. In fact I felt deeply wounded by the story, but my emotion was fittingly disarticulated from my captivation with the [word]. Because it means, literally, dis    jointed; amputation with a surgical precision that avoids contact with bone entirely. 

The funny thing about the word is that it seems at the surface to mean the opposite of it's definition. To dis-articulate seems to mean making something less explicit. But the very definition hinges on acts of the utmost precision. I am going back and forth with myself as to whether it would fall under the guidelines of Janus words which are words that can be used in two instances having diametrically opposite meanings. (Like 'cleave' can be to join or separate, or 'screen' can mean to show or hide.)

Disarticulation can also apply to the emotional realm of life. For instance: I feel like this week has disarticulated me to the point of gestalt. (Funny. I am merging the two words in my head. Gestalt and disarticulate. I keep coming back to gesticulate. That is important somehow, I think.) I digress. I feel like this week has disarticulated me to the point of gestalt...that is, something that is unidentifiable by it's pieces. 

                    Something that only makes sense as a whole. 

I think all the wrinkles in my brain have been unravelled and pulled out my ears and stretched skyward like gravity was curious how things felt handstanding for a while. And I'm not sure if I'm trying to climb back to the top, or fall up, or just avoid the tangle of the noose.  

I hate when I feel like a Salvadore Dali painting.

I am coming into words, which means that outside of the page, they evade me. There is one to whom I have committed the crime of utter omission. And everyone keeps asking me what is wrong. And everyone keeps asking why I'm so quiet.                                     And far away.

I guess, what I mean to say is...here I am. Or, I am here.  And it is really hard to leave (this alone). How can this exist, fragmented and whole at the same damn time? There is one to whom I have committed the crime of Janus. 

Forgive me

                                                        that I

                   might be,

                                                                              slightly,

      disarticulated,

                             

                                            (you).