What are you holding that isn’t me
Know that the waves always come back again.
I’m still here
begging my mind to let go
thinking back on glaring mantras at the ceiling
I’m here, no better place to be
searing without reason
seer-ing, begging my mind for peace
and latching hard on to joy
bound by extremes
tides swell and never recede
the question: whether I will drown or enjoy it,
or suffer, or be pleased, or pleasant.
It’s getting better
You keep telling yourself
I’m still here
begging my mind to let go of
the other me
who dreams of pillows and masks in a fisbowl
and wakes to glare mantras at the ceiling
the other self strangling time and
clenching happiness, latching hard
to those moments I’m surprised to
be laughing out loud
uncontrollably and I see my own
bewilderment at letting rip like
anyone else and I latch on hard with both hands
strangling fists at my chest to hold it in.
Tides swelling instead of receding
the floods expand in two directions
the only question whether I’m drowning
in joy
you keep telling yourself it’s getting better
“I wouldn’t want to do that to anyone
to be the scar on anyone’s back”
What are you holding onto that isn’t me
Know that the waves of energy come back again.
—Feb 8, 2022
08/02/2021
It’s hard. Getting through to the end. Going to the last. How many gorgeous folders of lined paper filled and unfilled again with ink so you can get better? It’s hard to stay the course
To keep going until the end instead of closing the book early,
Get going. The flow’s gonna come.
07/19/21
Like a cumulonimbus come
down to earth
snow bright hair
a story of HER without HIM
born and born again
Get going again already
a million fantasy stories
write stories like nobody’s watching and fill notebook pages with pink glowing winter skies and irredeemable loss, resurrection and repair.
The healing is just as real as in a fantastic world.
The suffering in a dream is just as real as in reality. All is healed in the end.
03/31/2021
Those nights they talk about
like something out of a novel
or a myth.
05/07/2021
I don’t know if I have anything new to say about the moon. No one believes me that I used to break out of my third story window as a child and climb onto the roof. The truth becomes more farfetched with every detail. How I lasooed the chimney to have a rope to hold on to and ascend to the peak.
How in multiple trips I would bring up there a flashlight and a book, and a blanket or sleeping bag to sit on because the roofing was rough against the skin of my legs on summer nights when I wore shorts. Memory can’t tell me how many times I accomplished this. Once or twice? Every day for weeks? Somewhere in between. How old was I?
Old enough to be reading the Warriors series on the roof of a tall three storey house, young enough that our broken apart family hadn’t downsized to a squat two storey a few blocks away in a less desirable neighborhood, which had a much more accessible roof out the front window, to sit on the windowsill and (only once) smoke a joint. Possibly the only joint I ever had to myself, alone. (Or were you there? Or her, was she there?)
Yet my earliest memory of trying to get to the roof in “the old house” I know I was only four years old—I took a pair of scissors and cut a block out of the screen in the window. I wanted to go out onto the ledge and be closer to the lilac evening sky —my mother found the cut open screen and screamed, she yelled at me afraid of what was going to happen, what had been about to happen.
07/19/2021
Two things that have been on my mind lately. Tweets by people who have a cold and make no reference to possible Covid, and tweets about global warming causing floods in subway stations and being like “so we’ll have to drive our cars.”
03/10/2021 One Year Later (Earlier) (March 10, 2021)
I act like it all started
everything ever started
on march 10, you know what year (2020)
March 10, 2020
when nothing is ever a true beginning.
That’s the date I wrote “home for coronavirus quarantine”
Back when we had tendrils reaching out
with sensitive nerve endings We’ve since
retracted out of fear When near-strangers’
picture perfect cocktails get passed
in a circle on the bar table
for seven drinkers to taste seven
different drinks—the night before
lockdown I refused a handshake,
from a new friend but sipped from
hers and seven others’ masterpieces,
masterful craft drinks, (not to mention the air we gulped down)
in a crowded semi-basement japanese jazz bar lounge)
and I worried she would worry that I didn’t shake her hand because she might be from THERE (or here, or there,) only far later, when it Was really because I myself was feeling sick, a little flushed, perhaps feverish, and ashamed of the pressure that brought me out that night.
(“There’s 8 cases in New York do you think you are number 9?”)
A friend I hard shared soup “dumples” with revealed he had asthma and feared the complications of the virus (while I felt ill)
so I shrank from him and kept my mouth shut
(except to breathe, except to share dumplings)
except to sample his delicious tangy sweet beverage.
02/24/2021
The park where raised voices overpower
the Black musician’s amp and a mixed up singing voice
tries to put a Black woman mayor on the mayoral ballot
(Remember Maya Wiley)
02/23/2021 A record of graffiti tags
all you can think about is the sun that won’t get through your mask
and all you’re missing out on
except this park bench right here
that we’ve been driven to—
this is better than real life,
the before times when you never
got any fresh air
on a Wednesday
And who among us had a conversation with an elder lifelong New Yorker that started up because she wanted to know whether the park had wifi and a man took it upon himself to teach her how to set up a cellular hotspot while telling her about his job as a lifeguard at the Y, and you wondered if you should become a swimming instructor, but later learned 20/20 vision is a requirement.
We’re pitted together now
Everyone who can go outside
for a spring Wednesday hour
is here.
We’re making history
and memories of history
dining on the road where the panhandlers can get us
mid-meal and if you didn’t make it to a table in the road
while there was snow on the ground,
you missed it—
and heaters on the planks of exposed wood beam ceiling,
and a blanket (freshly laundered, they promise)
waiting on your chair,
—you missed out.
It’s not about what you could have been doing this year if it weren’t for history. It’s the frigid rained on bone cold memories we did make.
(doing more with less and all that, being grateful
for what you can have,
and all
that.)
02/11/2021
You and your irony.
Tender healing heart growing
safe new tissue in the spring light
as if under a growing lamp.
Choosing to have it both ways
because you can’t tell a story straight
about breathing and noticing,
chasing endorphins and oxytocin,
the love hormone—it’s better than dopamine—
and regulating the speed and intensity of your
“mindfulness jogs” (don’t call them runs, don’t hulk out
don’t get — “hot headed”).
Mindfulness jogs along the river between you and Brooklyn,
and feeling the extremes of gratitude—
not everyone will get to glance down at the
oily water, turbulent, waving, beyond the
peeling paint hand rail and across to the abhorrently
cartoonish futuristic gleam of new condo
constructions across the east river in williamsburg
—one absurdity with an entire square cut out of a cereal box and think,
“It would be cool to live in the building with a hole cut out of it,
what a conversation starter,” (except when I try to explain it to a friend,
he has no clue what I’m trying to say), and so the residents can have floor-to-ceiling windows on at least two sides and one of them facing into the unit across the way, on the other side of the gap, when they will never bump into each other in the hallway after spotting their entire naked body emerging from the soaking tub in the window, as if no one would be able to see—
anyway,
the choices you make for conversation starters,
like “My motivation to run is that on my death bed,
I don’t want to look back and think I once ran on the East River,
but rather,
for a time in my life I ran (mindfully jogged) year round so many times until I can picture the footsteps of every track in rain abandoned or the summer of fleets of naked backs and sweated through shorts — I can still smell the garbage and piss under the scaffolding on my route to the walkway over FDR, see the painted murals to save CHARA, save the CHARA building, an old school between B and C, 10th and 9th, that once was a school and once was a community center and ought to be a community center again.”
this started out a poem about spring, healing, restorative, infusing my skin with a tinge of toasting tan from its previous remarked upon pale, (“Are you getting enough sun my girl you are so pale white” she (my friend) said to me), and embuing my nervous system and so on, and dopamine. But I’m warning you, I did warn you, that I am addicted to the irony, to the reversal, the cynical. (Don’t hulk out, don’t be a hot head).
Actually, I will say something about spring . . .
04/30/2022
That first time the sun’s actually hot again
so you sit in the thin pole that beams
through the window uncomfortably
bright and think, the guide to sleep says to get natural light every day as early as possible. I’m up and it’s 10:40. (I’m not up before 10:40.)
I stand in the shaft of sunbeam for mental health reasons.
Vitamin D may not come through window glass, for that you must go to the park, find a bench where no one will talk to you and no one is going to bother you. and read a book because Deepak Chopra said that every decision we make is a choice between happiness and / resentment
and to avoid the latter you need some alone time to crush your list (reading list, todo list, shopping list, friend list) into a ball with your fist, not to mention you’re choosing not to be in a position where you will resent all of these strangers for distracting you by living their lives out loud.
Today,
I wouldn’t want to do that to anyone
to be the scar on anyone’s back
