!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Vitality is in the construction of channels for all the
neurotic and erratic parts of myself to flourish. My soul has survived by
managing a sense of purpose in the most seemingly shipwrecked situations, through
idle times, the grandest of dalliances and the haze of postmodern motion
sickness, overstimulation, ambivalence. Let my sanity be defined by the
functionality of my relationship with my emotions, belief in my anger, in my
sorrow, in my literal appetite. I have at times let them define me. At other
times I have defended fiercely a soveirgn state of simple peace, waging battle
against those defiant demons when they’ve arched their spines and clawed the
walls and burned the temple. I’ve let them have cake. And I’ve run revolutions,
sending my own inner terrorists off to the guillotine, converging and setting
up counsel and envisioning utopic dreams of myself. Mostly late at night in
small rooms with poor light and slim windows. Always waking up tired, estranged
by my own behavior, thirsty for a thread of cohesiveness or consistence,
critically aware of cycles and phases, needing more information, illumination,
more guts and follow through. Desperately chronically in search of solutions to
the paradox of impulse, what gets you there won’t necessarily bring you home.

Jake and I talked late into the night about growing up,
feeling lost, finding ourselves. When you’re young and searching, defiance can
define you. It’s completing to know what you don’t want to be. When you’re
older and gain an eye for nuance and complexity, one day you wake up knowing
that it’s not enough to carry you anymore. You know what you aren’t, but that
doesn’t mean you know who you are. You need vision, you need schematics to
build your dreams with. The engine gets worn and the old fuel doesn’t work
anymore. Or at least it doesn’t get you anywhere new. Whoever or whatever it is
you’ve succeeding in rebelling against– your parents, education, tradition,
the mainstream, corporations, reality, sobriety, hygiene—OK, awesome. You’re
there. You’re different. Now what the fuck do you do?

I once got a ride to Florida from Boston with a Criminology
Professor from Northeastern University. You get to talking on a 20 hour drive,
and he spoke about his life and career, how he came to the US on a handmade
raft from Puerto Rico as a toddler. He said something about how everyone is
motivated either by fear or by love, and that has stuck with me over the years.
How we can play safe and make choices out of anxiety or in the name of being
“realistic.” Or just careen through traffic because the sound of horns honking
and the pedals turning and spokes creaking pushing pulling against each other
and the world is a pulse, a compulsion and a lust.

The world turns on me when it turns all to dichotomies like
that. My new friend says baby, why are you spiraling into darkness? Hang out in
the sunlight with me. We have an ethos ride, revel, pay rent, repeat. Somehow,
he says, it works.

Nate says remember that saying, there is no way to peace,
what was it. A.J. Muste I say, the great American pacifist. There is no way to
peace, peace is the way. Well, there’s one for us he says. There is no way to
happiness, happiness is the way.

OK.

I have been anywhere and everywhere but
Somewhere I could return from saying
I have seen the other side
Of anything
Inquisitive acquantainces, well meaning relations
Holidays looming leering close and interrogative they
All friend and foe alike want to know
What, pray tell, have you been up to?
Yeah, I’ve been busy.
Busy like the phone, busy like a bee, like bees and birds
Feeding worms to my fragile featherless inspirations
Hoping they will fly away and leave me alone
Warm and smarmy in my empty nest.
Making honey with my workers like a queen
Till the hive is buzzing with stinging
Squirming pulsing little larvae living
Our lascivious dreams
High up in a poetree
Venturing swooping down only
To suck the nectar of rock shows
And bike rides
And liquor-lipped love lies over satellites and
Land lines through internets
The low spark of myspace looming forever
Faintly like an endless gloaming
Eager to connect, to build our network,
Our exodus, our legacy.
I’ve been playing guitar and
Scratching out this kinda stuff in the margins of
Tax forms and bus schedules
Like a dirty dog with fleas
I’ve been looking for you.
I’ve been, well, I’ve been kinda
um
Been waiting fiercely to field your
Fiendish attempts to break and enter my
Temple of confused motives and
Ambivalent aims with well parceled
Metered mailings of alarmingly charmingly
Infalliably aloof answers.
Ready to crack this jazz open
Like a drop-out coconut dangling loose
Full of white meat and sweet milk
Like some shit you never tasted.

If you drink a lot when you eat, they have nothing to grab
onto. They’re thrashing and sloshing around looking for nutrients to divide and
process. They drown and perish having wasted their potential. Then the food
sits in your stomach like a bloated corpse, blocking up your digestive track
and slowing your whole body down. He brings me a big plastic jug of little
white powder in clear capsules. Extra enzymes. I don’t dare take a sip of water
now. He says you can have a teacup full. But with none I feel free and
powerful. I want to chew it all into one big soft mass, let them gently wrestle
it apart and render it pulpy and alive. I feel it move through me electric like
fission. I want everything to even out and become regular. I want to throw a blanket
and a net over him and put him in a car. Drive somewhere quiet and colonize it.
I grow impatient as the days get shorter. Daylight Savings comes and I hide
like apples under the dough wing of a turnover. All of me cranking and buzzing,
churning out new growth cells and moving units through the machine. Fueling the
system while at the same time poisoning it with vile substances and unsavory thoughts. Wrestle the negative like enzymes. He loves me, he loves me
not. He is out to sea bobbing and weaving in the distance and I cannot reach him and grab on. How long to break down a mystery soggy with heartache. How much vitamin C
kills the X factors. How many days, how many nights, hope and faith, trusting
the wisdom of the body to complete its own cycles. Trust in the process, in the
vitality.

Somehow I managed to wake up
Though the clock
Rests in a shallow splintered grave
Against the wall, its dead machine eyes
Looking up at me pleading posthumously
Why god why
Shoot the messenger? My only defense:
I have done worse in the name of my 11^th hour
Of sleep, increasingly sacrosanct practice circumspect
To admit considering the world around
Teeming, bubbling, boiling, exploding, downright
Dribbling with projects patient
For eager doers and jobs
Meaningful, plentiful
Like ladies in waiting
To be snatched up and completed
One by one
They dim and careen from the
Stratosphere like dying stars
As I laze through a victory lap
Crowning myself once and future champion
Of early morning indulgence,
Somnambulant ignominy.
It’s almost 8.
In the time it takes
A tornado to touch down
I have packaged myself
As an unseasonal confection
Of sprinkled on layers
Glazing myself with wool and leather,
My cinnamon sugar hoodie smeared and crusted
From that summer painting stephanie’s boat
I’ll be damned if this cold will snap me!
I grunt in hasty defiance
Tripping down the stairs
On still pajamaed legs
Past ambient noise of all manner of
Briefcased and coveralled wage seeking world
Out to my car.
Only to be stopped in my stumble eyed,
sunglassed tracks
my unkepmpt perplexedness obvious and out of place
on the bustling sidewalk scene of the holy trinity
shopping, commuting and schooling
now in full swing
a bus full of kids long awake
and hard traveled in
meticulous uniforms sails by my
cavernous yawn as I do a frazzled
180, like a running back with a 40 yard carry
dragging my lardass
back to bed.
A miscalculation, off by a day.
Street cleaning tomorrow. For now,
The car can stay where it is.

It occurs to me lately
That despite my youthful
Visions of rugged adventure
Hitchhike backpacking
Vagabond pickpocketing
Through various hostile
Indiana Jones-inspired cultural milieus
Scattered across the beckoning globe,
My withered leaves and soft
Spined stem seem to lack
The resilience of the outdoor
Variety foliage that is to say
I have come to be known to
Myself and others upon such
Occasions that danger and / or adventure
(for they are such fastidious bedfellows)
present themselves
in my modest paced world
as a bit of a what do you call it
Hothouse flower?
Known to wither and fade
At the vaguest sign of discomfiture
The other day I had to take a cold shower
And I almost cried.
My day ruined, my outlook rendered
Bleak and apocalyptic, my thoughts
Ringing on suicides door the way
Neighbors pay a visit to the eccentric
old lady on the cul de sac
crazy, but always familiar and hospitable.
The army would kill me, I am sure.
Movies about triumphs of the spirit
Against overwhelming odds
Paralyze me with weeks
of oscar season nightmares
especially the ones where the fate
of a nation or the lives of many or
the dignity of humanity rests on
one poor son of a bitch’s courage under fire
I would fire myself in a minute
From that job
And in limp lackadaisical lust consumed
Tunnel vision leer at my warm greenhouse
Of slumber, sweet sedentary status quo.

It occurs to me this morning
revealing my feverish complacency
as firemen suit up to gamble with the
violence of death and flames
and mothers push strollers brimming
with fragile labor intensive life
and bakers toil in powder coated obscurity
to bring complex carbohydrates
to the histrionic breakfast crowd
that I would crouch in a foxhole
crawl under razor wire
pull the sword from the stone if it meant
I could revel in a moment like this
Staring down the no parking sign
Like Sampson and the lion
Realizing I am free if I so desire
With little in the way of consequence
To sleep another hour
Or if I choose until tomorrow
And tomorrow after that.

the night is late and the lifestyle exhausting. the lights
were right in my face tonight, turned up to eleven, like the bug zappers you
find on porches in the south at the high point of summer. big fake sunspouts that pound your
eyes back into your head like jackhammer beams of bright artificial glory.
trying to coo at, lull a dull ache in the frontal lobe down to a simmer so I
can sleep at least a few winks before I start over again in the crisp crystal
clearheaded morning.
lately I wake up inspired by your enthusiasm for seemingly
everything in your vicinity. even though its global warming you say, what a
good day for walking. when its cold you say it helps you sleep. when it rains
you get reflective and candid, saying you wish we could meet in a dark bar and
walk home together and take in a movie. you make good use of the weather. you
play in the mountains like the squirrels, sing soliloquies for the dirt heaps
blazing trails up and down and in and out like a farmer tills the fields for
growing. whatever you put your hands on you dig into and tear open like ribbons
and bows on wrapped up packages, eager to get inside and unravel the mystery.
you’re always on toward something invisible in front of you, never doubting its
presence, never needing a reason to plow on, loathe to tread water but content
with the wetness of just being, doing, going, because that is all there is and
all that remains when the rest is for the taking.
so another night dragging myself down the sidewalks through
the shut-down parts of the city, (the ones the tourists dont know or dont talk
about, yes, it happens even here. the lights get shut off and the gate comes
down and the loneliest shade of crimson neon blinks blankly "LAUNDRY AND
DRYCLEAN" to the eyes of no one.) my corneas are cold as blue steel
ignoring all the obvious imagery of desolation. peering into another realm like
a dream state green room where you or something represented by you waits
cloaked in still contemplation of the simplest, most available, most attainable
paradise that is all around. when I get home it has bubbled and boiled over and
crusted and I lay longing tracing it with an eager finger in my minds eye. I
hold it there since I cannot hold you. I remember everything you ever said all
at once. I hear it in my head and so much of it is familiar because I thought
it already.
and finally the music is quiet and the crowd is leaving in a
steady stream, solitude seeping back around me like high tide coming in. From
here I can slip into the true meaning of the words that rumble through me at
the frenetic pace of a freightliner in the empty countryside, echoing off the
barren slate of unmarked terrain.
I feel gratitude pocked with confusion, skipping holding
hands dancing inside of me. it is a face and a name and an idea that is yet to
be proved wrong. it is a twisted sense of simple sovereignty, wrapped up in a
facade of complex foreign occupation. It is you and not-you, it is the giving
up feeling achieved by conquering, and the overcoming born of surrender. I say
this though, lord knows tomorrow I will have to wade back through it, make pilgrimages to revisit
this logic and clean it up, see what it meant, be more cogent if I want you to
see what I see. anyway.
that is to say:
I’m glad, and that I’m tired, and as I fold
myself up and reluctantly shut down operations on this endless gloriously arduous
evening, I’m thinking of you and all that you have wrought upon me since you
came along and pushed the buttons that touch my soul.

Then came the draconian reign of telephones. Geography had staged a coup and outlawed physical touch. Do you miss me she said.

His answer was warbled by static and service interruption. He stood atop a heap of dead and gravely wounded batteries.

So she had to fill in the gaps. She brushed her teeth and carefully described each stroke to him through the satellite relay. In the nascence of their yearning, it was fascinating and new. Like no one had ever shimmied paste along their gums in such a way.

How does it taste? He asked. What does it feel like.

Different, she said. Lonely and kind of foreboding. Knowing if you swallow too much, you’ll be poisoned. What a way to go she said, and they died laughing.

Have you done this before? He asked.

Yes, every night before bed, she said.

No, he said. Not the brushing. The describing. The protruding urge to relay and to recount, ricochet descriptors off of something spongy and alive.

Spongy like you? She said.

Yes.

I will tell you later, she said. And she would. But for now she wanted to build a nest around him and keep him warmly hidden in her branches. They talked long into the night, until the sounds of stillness became the stirrings of morning.

In order to survive, he said, we’ll have to learn to sleep.
I know, she said. Though his words chilled her to her core, a cold breeze reeking of autumn on a warm August day.

They met, of course, on the road. In a town so small that your silhouette competed with the skyline. His leg, however, was badly bent in the wrong direction that night and he couldn’t feel his toes. His eyes were squinty and prostrate. “That’s alright,” she said. “Tomorrow I will see you reflected in the prying eyes of the inquisitors as they scan my performance, looking for a trace of themselves. Tomorrow you’ll sleep. But if I find you again, you’re mine.”

With that he fell into a restless slumber. He had seen a pattern in her colors and markings that reminded him of he didn’t know what. Something ancient, something nameless, without form. Later he went north searching for her in the crossworded jumble of tall buildings, swinging from concrete jungle vines and navigating the turnstile flood gates with the mad world pouring all around him like a dam had burst.
When he found her he took her in his arms and, with a strain of recklessness unfamiliar even to him, they fell down laughing in a laxative heap. The water weight of years longing beginning to seep down from them into the watershed. Then he blinked hard the abstemious solitude from his eyes and kissed her, once, looking, again. She felt the proximity of his gaze and for once, was not exhausted. She tugged his neck into hers and felt light and confessional.
“I don’t shave my armpits,” she said.

“Good, neither do I,” said he. “I do however, shave my legs. Makes me more aerodynamic”

“When they shoot you out of that cannon,” she said, “I will be there. I want to see what you look like up in the air, how fast will you go?”

“Fast. And I will come when they come to watch you,” he said. “When you make those misshapes, peddle discomfiture to your patrons, I will be there. Soak up the fluids from the floor. The blood and urine, the tears and the skin flakes from scratching your soul bare to save them. I will wring your jeans out later and fold them, corner and crease. Soak them in milk for the stains.”

This is how it started. She put on a Shirley Bassey record and he made love to her with a nosebleed. His arteries were damaged and too narrow in places.

“I love this song,” he said.

“I know,” she said.
He brought tissues to wipe her cheeks, but they were already beginning to stain a burnt sienna brown red where his leaking face had touched her.

Everyone is leaving Friendster like someone farted on the dance floor.
I don’t care. I’m staying here for now, even though it’s ugly and weird.
Peace out, mofos.

Summer is ending but I looked around today and realized that the kid
vow I made to make real life like summer vacation has come true. Though
it doesn’t feel quite exactly like a vacation. Actually, it’s kind of
like one of those be-careful-what-you-wish-for scenarios. Because you
realize that what makes summer summer is that it ends. And when you wake
up every day and do exactly what you want to do, even that becomes rote.
You get bruises from pinching yourself. You formulate a pinching ritual.
You begin procrastinating, think of joining the service. All manner of
tedium infest your life in whatever daily form it takes.

Similarly for this reason I had to leave California. All that sunshine
becomes morose after a while.

For this reason I declare this year to be the year of the outré. I am
going to blow my own mind with wildness. I am going to burst forth from
the seams of this life like gangbusters. Not because it’s not good
enough like it is, but because why not. In a t minus 10 world, I have
maaaaaybe 6-and-three-quarters left. Then blastoff!

New York is beautiful. The sky has been alive for days, brilliant hues
of blues and opaque clouds. People milling around magnificently like
some kind of mass retardation. Buying and selling and giving each other
sexual infections, emotional attachments, grudges, complexes, recipes,
pyramid schemes. Making art like it will somehow save us all. Perhaps
it will. I’m still hoping.

If you read this hello, I hope you’re well. We’re still connected
through this thing, good or bad. We just get sucked around all day
through wires and cables but we’re still real.
Here I gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

The Summer of Seven

I got a letter in the mail today. The temporal mail, the
touch and feel mail. From a new friend in Yonkers. I met him at a folk music
conference in Philadelphia this winter and he sent me 2 poems. I wrote him a
letter to thank him and tell him that the poem reminded me of my grandmother
(best person ever) and I sent him one of my CDs. He wrote back a whole page of
feedback, some good, some hard to hear. Wow! This never happens. People rarely
take the time or effort to find ways of being gently critical. I am tempted to
call this a “blessing”. Would you call me a hippie if I did? I don’t care.
Happy day.

I also got a care package from a dear pal in the Midwest.
Let’s call her “Megan” because that is her name. I mean, full on, real deal
Care Package. Including a homemade card, energy bars, socks, the prayer of st.
francis on a bookmark (yes, not only am I a hippie but a wannabe Christian too,
please kill me), chocolate bar, roasted almonds (they heal headaches! So sayeth
the post-it note attached.) I must have cured a degenerative bone disorder in
another life to deserve such kindness. For Christ’s sake I don’t even pick up
my dog’s poop sometimes. Karma schmarma. I call bullshit.

But here comes the Moral. Oh yeah, I decided that all my
writing should have some kind of a moral now. Part of the new leaf I am turning
over. More on this in a minute.

Anyway the other part of the package was a letter
apologizing for not visiting me when I was in prison, and a candid, unflinching
explanation of why she didn’t or couldn’t. So the moral is I spent a lot of
time pretty upset and hurt that she never came. But you have to trust that
these matters will unfold in a meaningful way eventually. Years later, you get
a yellowing envelope with an overdue explanation and an apology that’s no
longer even necessary (I forgot this injury long ago), but there it is anyway,
and the world makes that much more sense. And all that time you spent pissed or
wounded, when you thought no one cared or understood, it just wasn’t time for
it to work out yet. But it did. An answer came, all in due time.

So there was the Moral. I’ve been reading a lot of good
blogs lately. And Aaron Cometbus stories. And a book about writing by Ariel
Gore. Now I’m thinking about character journeys, lessons, story arcs, themes,
etc. I feel like I’ve just been putting my hand under my armpit making fart
sounds with this blog. I want to be serious, you know? But not too serious.
Kind of chatty. Not so abstract. I want to talk politics, art, travel, work,
human nature, poetry, literature, fame, culture, sex, relationships, current
events, the whole nine. How do I do that? Is it possible to change course
mid-stream? How do I get off of Friendster? I don’t like any other
neighborhoods of the blogosphere particularly either. They’re kind of homely
and weird and awkward. Most importantly, which voice is more compelling?
Confessional? The lusty, somewhat aloof film noir character with mirrored
shades and French-inhaling a plume of cigarette smoke from taut curling lips? Or around-the-way Mimi, the bicycle mechanic, activist, shit-talker, the
obnoxious girl at the party trying to get everyone to chant the most
irrelevant three word phrases at inappropriate times?

Some combination of both? Can it be done? Should it be done?
All of it is real, I think. Just each
voice expresses a different part of me. I am open to suggestions, please.

In actuality though I guess all the blogs I like are bands,
pretty much. (myspace.com/cankickers, myspace.com/whokilledamandapalmer and
myspace.com/christhile.) But I don’t travel the world or make hit records. So I
have to work with what I got. Amanda’s making an album with Ben Folds. The
Cankickers toured Mexico all spring with Polka Madre. Chris Thile, I don’t
know, I think he is opening for Jesus on his Resurrection Tour. Me, I walk my
dog, play guitar and sniff my own butthole. If there is anything left of me at
the end of the day, I try to squeegee it out into something tangible. Not worth
the stroke of the keyfingers, but hey, waste not, want not. A little for
posterity, something to show for my troubles.

So here is the advice I got in the letter. He writes:

“I think you can afford to make less sense, (lyrically), to
let go of being understood. (Me too.) I sense you’ve been encouraged at some
point in your life not to take yourself seriously (like so many artists) and
you really can.” He goes on to mention that rhyming game that kids play on the
playground, “Shabooya, sha-sha-shabooya, roll call!” I taught it to a bunch of
grizzled stuffy old folkies to loosen them up in a workshop one time and he was
there. He says “The shabooya thing, even that– it’s serious too.”

Is it serious? I don’t know. I just want everyone to have a
good time. He is right about letting go of making sense. I like Jeff Magnum’s
songs, they are silly and deep at the same time:

“For I am an engine and I’m rolling on
The world is all bending and breaking from me
And sweetness alone who flew out through the window
And landed back home in a garden of green.

You’re riding along in the back of a steamer
And steaming yourself in the warm shower spray
And water rolls down off the round captains belly
Who’s talking to tigers from his cafeteria tray.”

I told my sister my plan to re-vamp the blog and she thinks
it’s better to be abstract. She says its brave, because there’s the danger of
losing your audience when you get all kooky purple iguana on the melted ceiling
hot rod milk stain. Now I’m all confused because I abide by few rules in this
life, but one of the most sacred is “do whatever Justina says.”

So I guess we’ll see what happens.

Shabooya, roll call!
My name is Mimi
I am for real
I like bananas
They have appeal
Roll call!

****

Prayer of St. Francis

Lord make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
Where there is sadness, joy.

Grant that I may seek not so much to be consoled,
As to console;
To be understood as to understand;
To be loved as to love;
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

If you work all day on the railroad, then you gotta give the
night away
to the cranks and the pistons and the echo and the sway.
If you spend your life building bridges then you know that
one day
You’ll be pitching candlestick and I’ll be on the golden
gate
Everything’s so fragile everything’s so hard
Everything’s so tiny and everything’s so large

Michael Richards kicked the footlights out
On the grand old opry stage
or so he thought like Johnny did
Secret raging publicly hysterically displayed

What makes a man so cumbersome
So righteous unprofound
Another one so fearless he could grow a woman from the
ground

What makes me look for shelter from my own sights and sounds

Maybe that I see myself in every ugly thing
Maybe that I hear the ringing in those very words I sing

But to live your whole life in shadows, you have to give the
right of way
To the formulaic bastions of status quo and age
I want to live among you brethren with myself
I want to live outrageously outlandishly withheld
Everything’s so easy quiet and aloof
Everything is possible without any proof

I live up in the canopy I never see the roots
I live and breathe the infamy of every sordid truth

“now I’ll sow up my skin and sow the land with my blood/
and I stained up my clothes pretty good/
and I turned the dirt to mud/
and i cannot help to close my eyes and lay my body down/
cuz i heard it takes forever to grow a woman form the ground” –Tom Brosseau