Cousin Blood Lion

8pm 2/24/14

At my corner.

The weather doesn't fit the visual, the visual being unsnow.

The visual doesn’t match (it’s cold and windy and 30 degrees) the expectation. This is disheartening. Expecting one thing, getting another, that whole ho hum thing.

Like when the young child learns that her crush on an older cousin is wrong.

Or, as an adult, expecting to get X amount of work done, yet by the end of the day you haven’t touched half of half your intentions.

Or, expecting it to be a normal old Monday: library trance from 9am to 6pm, but it just ain’t so. Or maybe it is so, it’s just that the trance is a different trance, one you weren't expecting.

***

Today my cousin passed away. He was/is 32.

My heart is heavy. So is my head. And body, and this hand trying to write. Everything wants to rest.

***

Why am I here? A few years ago, I once told a friend who was considering an MFA, that the whole thing was self-indulgent.

Today I agree with myself.

***

Disheartening.

Diss heart-ning.

Dissed heart strings.

Dis heart hurting

Dis heart smears itself

Lightening bug

On a distant

disconnected

Blog.

Blah.

!

***

I am nobody

Who are you?

Are you nobody too?

***

The ink in my pen is frost bit, it’s not working with me, not recording what I want it to.

But then, I lift my notebook to the street light, and see that it was writing the whole time.

***

The yellow rectangle of my office floats above me. From where I sit three silhouette trees braid themselves in a conspiring thread to block my view. I am having trouble seeing much of anything, I huff to myself in Eeyor fashion.

 My brain says move, so I do. I come to a new angle and can see into my window, see the pieces of furniture that I imagined were there a few seconds ago in their visual absence. So I see the familiar, see what I expected and a mocking happiness washes over me. My confirmation of what I knew was already there seems so pathetic. Expectancy encourages a change of view I hear my body getting all preachy on me, but I’m in no mood. Expect nothing.

***

My leafs

Look at them holding on

                                         Look how they become “my” leafs when

 I personify them with strength

My leafs

My needs. To connect

I am connected to these “my” leafs (now your leafs)

What they hold on to, is the same thing they must leave

Leafs leaves or don’ts leaves,

Thank you girls for making your own

time thieves

Look how my leafs become “shes”

My she leafs

Our she we leafs

***

It’s a mixture of things—my sadness, the night, the cold air, my readings from earlier in the day—that allow me, right now, to allow nature to work its magic on me.

Tom Grimes said that it is not identity searching which makes us writers (this intrigued me. Weren’t the odd lot of us MFA’ers here precisely for this reason? To consider ourselves for an intensive two years? To study the ways in which we thought or didn’t think?), but something that precedes the quest of identity.

Check this out:

“Maybe what I wanted all along was what Tolstoy and Hemingway seem to have, which turns out, upon close reading, not to be identity, but negative capability, that mysterious Keatsian ability and desire to swim through confusion, and without  anxiously or irritably grasping after facts (those tempting transcendent things), keep themselves afloat…what I was really searching for was not identity, but mystery, reflection, doubt, a constant state of never knowing who I am, always testing, always weighing, always evolving.”

***

Self indulging? Depends on what day you ask me.

Confusing?

Absolutely, but perfectly so.

***

Cousin

Blood

Lion

Snow and Staccato Thoughts

11am Sunday 2/16/14

At my corner. Snow.

More snow.

Light snow like Splenda snow.

Beady snow like Floam snow.

Before I got to looking at this snow,  I walked around a young man in front of my apartment’s pine green dumpster. His music was clear through his hoods, hats, and headphones. The repetitive chants of a rapper’s meditations form and slice through the dry snow air. The voice has been altered:  it’s lowered, and injected with bass. The beat’s been slowed down. There’s something both unnatural and hypnotizing--incandescent even-- going on. The pull is like a moth drawn to zapper light, a zapper light being held by the hallowed arms of Sylvia Plath. Like a poem I think I get.

“I get bad bitches and bad money.”

I fluttered around him. I stepped from the slim deer path of packed down ice, a path of name brand boot prints and un-name brand breeds of paw prints.

I clean my corner and take my seat. I get to looking.

***

Why is everything I take in related to education today? Related to the classroom? This week at ACJ (Allegheny County Jail) my students (eleven men ranging in ages: 20’s-60’s) explored figurative language, simile’s and metaphors.

•    The Splenda snow, my students would dig that simile. They’d dog each other and get into a discussion about the taste of sugar.“Splenda tastes like shit,” one would say. Tastes like         shit, another opportunity to highlight the similes of our everyday speech. What does shit          taste like? I might ask, encouraging them to use more similes in their explanation. 
•         The Floam snow. There’s a culture/era marker. I’d have to check for understanding of this simile. Pictures help. This would be a good segueway into a discussion about the audience.

***

This snow has been trying my patience.

My thoughts on snow right here, right now:

 Snow the shape shifter: How it comes with force, with community, with the masses, demands its place to rest. How it melts, changes it shape and travels to those tiny veins of the unseen, the unconscious, freezes, unfreezes, calls attention to its expansion and contraction. How it calls attention to the blocked, water proofed, barricaded, impenetrable places of the soul. How it points its liquid finger at stunted growth. There, there, there, work on that, make that grow.

Snow the enforcer of absolute thinking:

White or black

Hot or cold

Good or bad person

Good or bad student

Good or bad teacher

Good or bad writer

Real or fake

Love or hate 

Snow the encourager of staccato thinking:

(See above and below format of this blog entry).

***

Somewhere during my writing the young man has left, taking his music with him. I feel a sadness, his bus hadn’t yet come, did my presence scare him away? Associative rhyme:

Good morning Mary Sunshine, why did you wake so soon? You scared the little birds away                    and shined away the moon.

To wake up is to scare the little birds away.

To wake up is to scare others away.

***

Light snow like Splenda snow.

Beady snow like Floam snow.

Blog snow like, like, like...

Connection

"Each year is a surprise to us. We find that we had virtually forgotten the note of each bird, and when we hear it again, it is remembered like a dream, reminding us of a previous state of existence. The voice of nature is always encouraging."
                                                  -Thoreau

9am Sunday February 9, 2014

23 degrees

Sitting at my corner. My first conscious capture is the lime on the wood planks: long stacked-like brick planks that hold the earth from falling into the street. The color links up with my memory and I’m associating:

color pop

push pop

ring pop

candy paint

jolly rancher

sour apple

jell-o jigglers

Pretty paint on barriers like paint ball splots on police shields, like tropical murals on condemned Philly row homes. Bright colors holding hands with drabness: winter whites and bland browns plus the mean mood of those cool winter blues.

The petite chimney of my wide apartment building is putting out a faint but steady puff of steam, looking tired, looking like The Little Engine That Could: I think I can, I think I can.

Pencil-tip pellets of snow drop to my notebook, demand attention: dandruff on a black dress. Plus they have a bounce to their step, a soundtrack to their entrance: Zing! Zing! Like those shoots of light that fall around Beast as he’s resurrected in front of an awed Belle, in front of an ensnared five year old watching through the screen.

I chase a fallen pellet with the tip of my fountain pen, inject it with ink. A tattoo. How this is beautiful and grotesque. The white pellet now a melted clump of black ink, like it never was once snow. How vision is an illusion, how it’s limited in its ability to tell the whole story, the whole history.

How history is an obsession of the writer (me).

 In this vein an image surfaces: crabs (writers) in a bucket. But the other crabs aren’t other writers, they’re me. All those claws, and clamoring for freedom. All  that truth. All those obsessions, and opinions-- they’re me.

***

There’s those leaves again, the ones who never let go. The ones who make their own schedule as to when. How they’re both brilliant and foolish. Tough-- but for what?-- they’ve already braved the winter. Ovid said: “Be patient and tough; someday this pain will be useful to you.”

 I’m thinking about my students at ACJ, how they embody these lone leaves: brittle, beat down, weathered, but connected. Holding on. To be a writer is to hold on.

***

One bird, then two, but they are far and unidentifiable. Then the giving of a red spot, a Cardinal. I feel glad to know his name-- this celebrity.

A school of baby stingrays fly over head and they dart nervously in unpredictable redirections.

As I focus on looking at/ for birds, it’s their sound that comes into focus. How could I have missed this?

It’s amazing, personalities galore.

-joyful

-whiney

-melancholic

-aggressive

-nimble

-friendly

-annoying

What’s going on? Why all the sounds?

I reprimand myself. I am silly to think that these noises are out of the ordinary. I feel further shame, in that I know birds are a big deal in the literary world. How quick I am to find birds and their metaphors in a text, but how blind I am to them in real life. That seems extremely disconnected to me.

The Cardinal lands on a lime log plank while I’m wallowing in my deficiencies.

Associations begin anew:

Christmas

Christmas in the Caribbean

Senses on a Rainy Night

8pm Sunday (2/2/14)

Night time, and the intentions now are different. Take away sight (or lessen sight) and my other senses would be required to do their thing. So I set out to do my thing, call upon my senses to show me what they got. Show me what you got oh put-on-the-spot receptors of my small reality. Show me what you got.

Smell: I take in three deep breaths, nothing. It smells like nothing. Whats nothing smell like? Deep breath again, and there it is: someone’s doing laundry. Somewhere a dryer tube is puffing out warm wafts of lilac, and I’m getting it-- ever so slightly-- emphasizing it and spiking it with narration. I register it to this moment: a memory in process. The mood, my mood, has taken a split-hair turn, enough for me to look at my ambivalence from a different angle.

 I’m thinking about aromatherapy, about lilac, about the book The Giver. In this story, the Giver lets Jonas experience memories of the world: fear, joy, awe, shock, ETC. When I smell lilac I am transported to a pleasant memory that’d be titled, for the Giver’s purposes, as “The Overwhelming Need to Share Something Beautiful.”

I’m five, and I’m snapping lilac. I’m collecting the spectrum (white to purple), holding them in my clutch. I’m barely holding on to my body’s movements in my excitement to share these bombs of fragrance and color. For my mother! For my mother! I can think of no one/nothing  but my mother.

Touch: It’s raining and I feel the cold moist air finding its way into my clothes. My hot skin, barricaded with its man-made materials (say for some cotton laced in the mix) confronts the invasion and tufts of truces erupt in invisible mushroom clouds of condensations and evaporations. Hot or cold, the feeling is wet.

Sound: There’s the drip!/drip!/drip! of water torture that isn’t torture at all. (Water torture provides a sturdy template of sound, but when its mold is removed is the uneasiness of the initial evocation of torture too powerful a residue?) Or maybe I like this idea of torture: going crazy to the sound/feel of water like a “would you rather?” game without an alternative option. drip!/drip!/drip!

Taste: I taste only my mouth. I taste my ambivalence. How I won’t lick the road, or the tree or the house or the human or the animal dead or alive. I taste my baby steps. I taste my taste in growth that’s only comprehended via a time-lapse camera. I taste my ambivalence. Hard headed and stubborn is a taste, too sure of itself to tag any type of metaphor.

Sight: This sight, which I thought would be lessened, is nothing further from the truth. Everything is illuminated with a light that shines not from the sun, but from within. So that dead tree: brighter and deader (yes, deader) and more alive in its deadness (and beauty) than I’ve ever felt.

No people or cars, but yellow/orange squares of windows and the flickering movement of a shitty (sorry-- Eagles and Steelers baby) Superbowl game. A bus (61A) filled with empty seats and bus driver who’s fair game to caste a narrative upon.

A burnt mattress leans against the slick dumpster of our apartment. I’m thinking about the fire that burns behind every visual, every sense, every story, every ambivalence and every open heart.