Space Age Bodhisattva
i once read
that if you cut
a ping pong ball in half
tape the halves
over your eyes
and look into light
you'll achieve instant
meditation
so i did that
for a year
24/7
achieving bliss
some bruises
a concussion
a reputation for being
detached
and
when i finally removed them
an appreciation
of the perfectly imperfect
lost and beautiful world
of everyday life
Describe Yourself (I’m Still Scared To Use Hinge)
Pretty bitch (when it’s three am and i’m looking at myself in the mirror and my ego is getting the better of me, otherwise i think my face is too ethnic—the ancient aztecs would’ve loved me though—and too white at the same time)
Compulsive—
I compulsively and impulsively do things
(do i have adhd? should probably get tested so people stop asking)
I am staring at my body
At the funhouse mirror in the county fair
All long hair and petite and wide hipped
(some white lady once told me i had ‘mexican hips’ and i should’ve clocked her if she wasn’t so old and i’m still not entirely sure what that means but that’s a weird thing to say to a latin girl when she’s nineteen, no?)
I feel observed,
In public
Like I am constantly being baited into social error
I crave and detest attention
I like to read
(and at night i will gaze upon such nonsense it makes me sick and i begin to hold a personal grudge against Garth Ennis)
I want things I can’t have, (like, i want lemonade but not this lemonade, the lemonade from two summers ago)
Would you still love me if I told you everything wrong with me? If I told you my fixation on religious imagery stems from—
I like to paint
(if i love you i’ll make something in your image and also i can’t really remember when i was eight years old and my favorite color is a green i’ve tried to find my entire life and will probably never be able to see again because it was the center of a lake on a roadtrip through the yukon when i was small)
I’m young and dumb
(but i feel so old it hurts—I blame this ⅖ on the expectations of the religious sect—cult??? jury’s still out—and all the guilt and the violence that came with it and the other ⅗ on bad blood and familial tradition)
Would you still love me if I was a worm?
Would you still love me if I told you I couldn’t sit with my back to doors? Or that if I don’t check behind the shower curtain, I am confident that I will be Psycho-ed? That I can’t stand loud noise in or outdoors? That I am a slut but only of the soul, because I want you to eat my mind or some other dumb shit I might confess on account of a sleep-deprived high?
Would you still love me if I said men scared the living hell out of me? On account of the reception of violence from them since I was just a baby? That I once crashed my bike while trying to get away from catcalling and rode home with gravel stuck to my bleeding knee?
I’m good with animals and small children and my roommate’s cat literally won’t leave me alone
Would you still love me if I told you I hated vulnerability? That if I said I loved you, I’d immediately ask you to take me out back and shoot me? That I feel like I present the illusion of it and so people always tell me everything because I'm just so goddamn trusting? Because all people want to be believed.
(And, like religion, i believe until it makes me sick.)
That,
my favorite songs are Ethel Cain’s unreleased, and AC/DC, and Gaga and just about everything except country (best friend gets in my car and is stunned by the rapid switch from Danzig to Pop Smoke to Dolly)
and every sibilant sound that my mind latches onto
and i also latch onto you
I really like trees and the beach
(please want me,
please like me)
In Blood
Dear Plexiglassfruit,
Of all the letters I may have sent, I have never written to my mother-- my real mother. I suppose I never believed that she was there, waiting, as recipient, and I'm not sure what I would have said, in years past, on paper.
My mother-in-law says she cannot imagine, as a mom, not being proud of me. She is very kind. There is pride, and Pride; and I have understood that for my mother I am on the cold inverse of the sentiment. Mother puzzles over me and makes comparisons. I tacitly admit the rationale. I make odd choices; everyone voicing an opinion, has told me as much.
Mother has graciously let it go after all, as notable, but uninteresting. We both know that I don't have anything to offer her--- I am useless as a backscratcher. There is simply nothing I can do for her, pragmatically. She has lived life as a sort of barter, with the eye on always coming up ahead. Having expected a man to take care of her, she has learned that money takes care of her. She steels herself to this state of affairs.
She told me a few years ago that, for Enlightenment, I am not ready.
(*My sister, yes; She has paid her dues, I suppose.)
I can only marvel at the confidence of the proclamation. I lay no claims, and wouldn't dare cast judgement... I guess I hadn't much thought about reaching Enlightenment, sitting out here in the dark peripheries of our misunderstandings. My childish hope was that we take care of each other.
If I were to write to my Mom, in abstraction of all that binds us in our interpersonal experience, I would write something she would likely dismiss as "dispassionate essay:"
Dear Mother,
Motherhood is not at all what I expected.
You cryptically said to me, a couple years in, when my child was almost three that "Now" I understand, and know. Truly, I do not. I rather sense some discrepancies in our perceptions and acknowledge the inaccuracy of my own viewpoints. The insinuation I feel is that, now, presumably I understand what it is to be pegged. Saddled. Of course, with affection and responsibility. Because that is the sentiment that I associate with our family reflection of child rearing-- The burden wrought.
And I observe the key differences that may or may not have been fully voiced. That motherhood "happens" in different ways. It has been expressed as lament, in our family circle, as the limitation of self. The facts remain, Mother, that you yourself said you were "not ready," and my sister though eager, was "surprised" by pregnancy. You've each countered that I was so reluctant and calculated as to "sap the Romance out of it"... well, certainly everyone's notion of such fantasy is varied. I have never doubted anyone's Love, in the short- or long-term.
I understand that having a child, or children, is tiring. The state of being on alert, all the time, is not necessarily shared by all parents though. I have learned this in watching the families of my preschool students. I also know it, from being left, so often unattended as a child, without adult supervision; under the care of my sister, two years older, and sometimes not even that. I understand the impulse that sometimes overwhelms and makes a parent want to withdraw. I have felt it.
For whatever it was that made you want to pull away, Mom, I am sorry.
I hope I never hit you, pinched you, scratched you, spit at you, demeaned you or otherwise made you feel faced with contempt. I am wracking my memory for any such incident and cannot remember. And I cannot think of a thing more heartbreaking, abusive and demoralizing. A form of domestic violence that has no legal recourse, the abuser being a minor and outside of the law.
So, as you have doubtlessly wondered: what then do I think of Motherhood? I have not found that being a parent is aww and diapers, sleepless nights, and adventures. That was understood. To be sure, I expected it to be, for lack of a better word, "work." I hoped for Motherhood, as an ideal; an opportunity I suppose. I was looking to be fully present, and now, have these constant questions: ...Have I done the right things? Where have I gone wrong? ...What can I do to make a correction for my apparent, yet undeciphered, errors? ...for surely, the evidence shows, if only in my own sight, that I am doing something not right... to have fears about my child.
Of all of this, naturally, you are unaware. You are not here; pictures sent show only smiles, and I have said nothing, except the underlying truth that yes, I am happy to be a Mom.
Perhaps it is of these misgivings that you speak of... when you say, "Now...you know."
M.
A mess
Don’t you hate the life you killed
I’m proud of you still
I was horrible and almost let him in
You made the big mistake of dancing in my storm
Let me die in your arms
I hate the way you hold me, nervous as a cat
I’m baptized in your name
So rear back, and take aim
You are my sunshine
I need your grace to remind me
There’s nothing in that town I need
Forget the sun in his jealous sky
I was so sure what I needed was more
Come and gaze upon my shadow at your door
You were always on my mind
I’ll work hard ’til the end of my shift
Food for Thought
God.
____________
That is my longest poem.
Not for what it doesn't say but for which also goes without saying. That is, "all that's said" that "goes unsaid." I know this is a snarky way to make my entry to the challenge, but I wanted to make a point of how one small word can fill volumes of words in my mind. Disqualify me, certainly. But you'll never be able to memorize the whole thing or set it to music.
White Wall
I purchased some
thumb tacks today
to hang
my fractions
of time
Attached by
thick red
string
and blood
soaked
cadmium
Inspired by
true crime
and Goya
Raygun
snapshots of
this life
deconstructed
and dismantled
until the victims
all look the same
a collage of
emotional
Man Ray
a psychological
mural of
Monet
2011
I'm 31 and I live in Florida in a one bedroom apartment I share with a coworker. I sleep on the living room couch.
If you follow me I can show you exactly where it all went wrong…
It was a cucumber sandwich on the beach of the Black Sea.
Sand in my teeth
or wait maybe it was the watermelon seeds from last winters last meal.
In any case
I was mixing low grade ecstasy into a glass of whiskey when all of the sudden
I remembered my best friend yelling over a pay phone at me 9 years prior “this isn't a fucking Burroughs novel Julia” and slamming the phone.
I dont know about that, it could've easily been a bestseller, except he was dead and I didnt have a pen to write with.
So there's that,
I thought
Yeah
Let's see
How words survive…
They can spend centuries atop our barbed wires
Render us useless in our mutterings
we make in the hopes to retire in a quote.
And
Eyelids are fenders
That crash
Into strangers
In the hopes of explosion
But all we end up getting
is ourselves caught in crypts and gravestones
And here I am
Where the fire escapes are fire hazards
Where the alley ends and meets my throat
sore from screaming into a scream and 2 blocks past the pizza parlors,
coffee shop teenage tragedies
and hipsters with cracked voices.
I’ve got a morticians lens eye view of the strangers finely tuned to a beat my heart forgets to ache to
Crazy impossible nothings
This is the border
I come to at the end of the page
This is my impulsive army
All the incarnations of me
This Morning’s Train Thoughts
I feel a thick layer of afterthought crowding my mind space and I want it purged. I crave clarity and singularity of vision but everything is blurry or smudged.
How do I move from this place, from this space I can’t see well enough to tell if I’ve outgrown?
How do I flip questions into answers like a coin from heads to tails? It’s the journey that’s worn me and now I just flail.
My cloak of protection is threadbare. I feel the piercing wind of depression and I want to lie down and let it take me.
One good day or two can’t fix the damage winter had caused to my mental cage.
I dropped the key and it’s too murky to see. I drop to my knees and feel for it but being this low, it’s so much easier to just lie down and sleep til the sun comes out.
I drink away my doubt but the drink fuels the depression and I continue to slide. My descent is faster than my struggle to stay on top can overcome.
I know I’m halfway through but my reserves are spent. I know what to do but I don’t know how to make myself do it.
If this seems like a cry for help, that’s because it is.
Returning Through Time...
Times change...
I'm here at the airport
Making my baggage claim...
Gathering up what's left
After airlines, and glad hands,
And kamikaze pilots
Have tore into my treasures
Like packs of wild dogs...
If I have one thing left
It is how I can feel
And see over mountains
To the place where birds soar...
I've been witness to burnings
That were well out of hand...
Where the fields were scorched,
And the pines wouldn't stand...
To the dust I returned
With new hope sprouts would grow...
And I dreamed of your love
Underneath moss and loam...
If I have one thing left
It is how I still feel
And see over mountains
To the place where birds soar...
Take my hand and we'll wander
Until we fall down
While the days lay beside us
Like leaves from a tree...
Yes the times they may change,
But our love is profound,
And it pours out like sap
Filling cracks in the street...
And we mustn't forget,
Though the cold that breaks rocks,
And the wind batters frames
Scattering building blocks...
We mustn't forget how to hold out
And crave
Every mystical moment...
Every incoming wave
In this ocean of feeling,
The vast sprawling now...
We inherit raw light...
Every inch we allow...
1/31/24
Bunny Villaire
Edit #2
Lost Lament Of A Former Catholic Schoolboy
High school was,
A barren womb,
Ungainly dressed,
In mottled wounds.
Where winter’s sickness,
Slept around,
It’s fevered cage,
My burial ground.
High school was,
Choice rotting fruit,
It’s nuanced slice,
Skinned trauma blue.
But I could never,
Breathe it in,
To suckle fast,
On soot and sin.
Oh mother Mary’s
Wishing well,
Lies leagues above,
A crater’s hell.
My angel wings,
Grew scabbed
Then sore,
And halos shrank,
Fell to the floor.
Superior mother,
Buried in black,
Sheol has rung,
It wants you back.
For love is hollow,
If sprung on clod,
It’s withered roots,
Upturned to God.
Now shackled to,
These memories,
In earnest want,
And grievous need.
I might have been,
Rued royalty,
Anointed youth,
Of bitter breed.
But such never was,
Nor willed to be,
An arcade angel,
In stained glass bleed.
I dragged my heart,
In catholic guilt,
And slipped on blood,
That Jesus spilt.
For He did turn,
My frame of bone,
From gargoyle slate,
To precious stone.
Now the stride of years,
Do paint wrongs right,
For the keenest eyes
Are second sight.