Village Grievances

As the weeks
and their distinctions
fall
as now
loose and recycled
paper across
the ground


I look about me


Just as
self concious I would a
literal situation
the center of a suddenly
attentive
crowd of complete
strangers.

But for this metaphor
there are no page
numbers
and only
stranger
after
stranger in each
possible
retreat.


It's been one month


(yesterday and counting)


since I've seen the stars.


I'm starting to remember them
only as you would
anything
you once
ignored
only as a
romanticized impression of the most magnificent form
you can
recall


(and that was next to you, in the hated california sand)

There are SO
MANY
SIGNS
around this
city but none of which can tell me which way to look
UP I

awoke
uptown one morning I can hardly
remember

The sun was
too bright
the view
too vast too
many towers to take
in I was suddenly a
name with no origin too close to
the sky
(since becoming foreign)

but then
a plane flew west
and I
wasn't
high enough

the bohemians have left me
and I feel like they promised
but they all promised no one
(The appeal, I conclude)

Outside my window
I only hear
echoes
and out on the concrete
see echoes of
echoes

Drop
the
names

yeah



wear
the
clothes


yeah


drink
their
booze


yeah


ensure your persona is screaming

"I'M MAD TO LIVE!"


yeah



but I'm dying
trying
to dig it.


One day long
before I was
born Bob
fled 4th with his
hollow body enough
was
enough
and
if the troubador
of troubadors can't
see the stars
where
is the light
for a
slowly
muting
poet?

Story of An Object

Inspired by Eavan Boland's Lava Cameo (A brooch carved on volcanic rock)
definitely look it up, you'll get your own experience out of it.

anyway, still in the toy stages, but I'm living it now.

Abuelita's Pearls

They were yours, connected
around your neck you
wore them to match
your 1950's length dress it was
beautiful and you
were a size
three
then, before a sepia
church in Tijuana. The curly haired girls
held roses. He looked at you and not
the camera.

They were yours
in Yureccuaro Sundays
after mass the town square
cracking eggshells on the neat parts of mischief
boys bright confetti spilling
onto their shoulders, rainbow trails left
behind squealing pastel blurs all around
town.

They were yours the first time you
saw me a silent
creature yellow-red wires
safety box and special
precautions.


They were mine
draped inside a velvet blue
box pure, fragile, cautious to
touch
fifteen years to that day after
you
decided you
loved me.

Ruminations on Simply Being

There are incomplete charcoal fingerprints everywhere
I’ve been today
the still scarlet i-pod has now a gray click
wheel I enjoy
its condition, (it doesn’t have to look as if I care
for you anymore.) There are clumsy
secrets to be had in the hills of dynamite
dislocation tonight. I’m content sitting out

This night,
we are the bookstore’s least favorite
customers staying for an hour point
five and reading not buying just absorbing new
book smell
I spill coffee in the poetry section and no
one sees except O’hara and Bukowski
and Frost misplaced by Bishop but they are
safe from Seattle’s Best damage.

O’hara open in left hand makes me fall for
New York again as if I needed
a poem to stumble
I have to put him down before my silly dreams
skip to sprint.

We both end up in the self
help section where spirituality and memoirs seem to
take turns by row not perplexing us
it’s sort of who we are save room for
drifter definition I’ve become my father
I notice in my habit of clutching
notebooks and compulsively pounding flimsy keyboard keys to
hear in the air what I'm thinking
and I think he knew it all along
comparing creative processes of songs on the
radio behind red lights, white ones to the
side, the way home, I don’t mind this inherited old
soul I don’t mind
at all.

The Return of Sir PTA

this is the cut
ting edge of reason I am
Dali's hanging eye ball and the lobster motif
at the other end of the
phone fingers through the holes swirl
that dial
and RING


In other news found a part of my stitching in The Calendar last week, came back to me as tonight's infatuation.


[Graciela Iturbide]

Sufjan stevens,Billy joel, and Simon and Garfunkel kind of day- Teach thinks I can pull off Vienna-ivories, vocals and all- by YEC. Now wouldn't that be dandy? Hand's still gripping on the guitar neck though- we'll see.
Still no Eugene Lang Essay...in time I suppose, can't force honesty.

Revival of the Blog- not really for you, I just think I'm going to need it again for a while (you can try and decipher it if you really want to)

This college application thing isn't hard. No, it's excruciating. Well it's really not- but it's like, you know how they give you those art supplements if you want so you can show how "really I'm a sensitive artsy kid but like, on the side because school comes first and everything"? no? well hell if I know what I'm saying. I feel sort of out of control mentally. In this time and space. Anyway, like I think I was saying- my applications are all like giant supplements for me. My writing is my art- and all I can do to express myself is harp on how damn passionate I am about it but at the same time, I have to be good at it. Flawless maybe. I wonder how it is for my friends who want to be doctors or scientists or have no idea whatsoever. I mean, I'm sure they still have to come out with coherent sentences with good syntax which is hard enough in itself sometimes(even for me)and it's not like they get off easier than me or anything...but I am trying to be a writer here. So its like....I feel as if I'm being twice looked over....but not two consecutive times, twice at once- so... less consideration. I'm probably just paranoid. Yeah. I know I'm just paranoid. I'm thinking of like at least three people right now who would agree with that statement. Yeah. It's just...I'm not saying state schools are bad, because they aren't but I've worked hard. Right, I'm not your typical obsessive mustbestandingonyourshoulderswithmyA++ ivy league brat, in fact, I'm probably a slacker in comparison...okay, I am. But I've worked hard. School hasn't been wonderful for me but I'm passionate about what I want to do. I may have the math skills of a ten year old, but my every literary lightspark is recorded in poetry lines onto scraps of paper. I want to go somewhere else so I can write about it. And not just visit- I just want to live for a while. So point is, I want out of California. And, I want into New York (New School- Eugene Lang) Boston (Emerson) Seattle (Puget Sound) or if I have to stay here San Francisco (USF). Most of the apps were a snap. Well, all of them really, except Eugene Lang. And I'm not keeping a rank or anything....(but it's number one) go figure. I'm trying to tell them in an essay question why and how my heart lies in New York City and all I get is poetry. It's all I'm feeling. I actually came back to my blog just to look at my accounts on the city when I was actually in it. Looking at the pictures made my heart drop and it's just more poetry. So no help there. Ah well back to chipping at it. Since this blog was originally for the purposes of posting my work here and there I guess I'll just leave with this:

Least Expected

A voluntary exile I
Fled to a city of personalities none who
knew me knew my
white picket
roots.

A voluntary invite
somewhere a living room
beat blue couches we
waved at boys from
white window sills
called to people below I
didn’t mind the close proximity
of each brick tower they were full
of accounts who hadn’t
seen me I wanted to
know this place this New
York City but no
one wanted to go with a girl who
hadn’t seen it all before

A voluntary exile I kept
in my room fearing
the sticky stains on
subways and
seedy eyes me
men alone cop
TV shows

A voluntary invite I
pushed myself onto muggy
116
Broadway riding
the 1 to Chelsea and back

An involuntary exile I
got off in Harlem fog walking the
only way back through
foreign streets
but pausing
babies on bikes
Sunday smiles
pastel balloons at
a gate I found my
soul on a gray stone
stoop. I was finally

Home.


^one random day two summers ago in the city. My reasons for my future destinations can only be articulated in line breaks. oh to carry your heart in your pen....

Drive up pass you- front and center.

I used to see him in the halls.
The nametag said janitor, but I don’t believe I ever saw him clean. Clean house with his charm maybe. It was always interesting- watching the girls of flat ironed hair and dark circled eyes swarm around him like kids to an ice-cream truck. He was a skyscraper to my five foot body and I thought he should have been playing basketball with Kareem instead of cleaning toilets (if he ever did). He was probably the only one over fourteen who still had the glint in his eye- his heart was probably as soft and cushy as his afro which nestled a bright green comb.
The man didn’t seem to like him. The man being the woman principle. He was gone by January. And the bubblegum surprise to our French vanilla splattered halls eliminated.
So I see him now in the passenger seat of a driving student’s car. He is laughing and as he turns to look out the window, he smiles. It was nice to remember you, my reply expression exudes.

Free From the Confines of Your Irregular Heart.

Elizabeth doesn’t like to talk about the day they stopped her heart.
It’s been two months since and it’s as if only and hour has past. Everything about the well sat in plush seats has been still since the night I held her head in my lap, brushing the red through my fingers as her chest heaved and you screamed, hands fumbling with the wheel.
And your palm never moves its stake from her frail shoulder- while we coast through the freeway in our silent box where breath is held. The wilting frame of who I remember her as sits in the passenger’s seat, her sunken blue eyes and milky skin turned towards the sun as it reflects its rays off her auburn locks. She is not in her eyes and I think they zapped her away with the paddles- but suddenly she sighs and says “I never realized the freeway was so beautiful” and I know she beats again.