Entertaining writing requirements, forcing myself to sit down and put something on paper, I understand that urge to just fling up your hands and refuse to create, refuse to push a small pocket open in the fabric of unknowns. Quicker the better. Numbered paragraphs. Goose honking seems to be upset. And yes, I have a headache. The ache of loneliness and isolation—but is it really desire, the desire for recognition? here we go again. Maybe that goose is honking-honking for her mate.

I am interested in—

  • online poetries
  • blog as poem
  • applied poetry, particularly in the office
  • poet as one confronted with the unknowable, unspeakable meanings
  • primitive rhythms
  • experiments with art
  • how to make digital art look non-digital
  • splotches of watercolor (ink on top)
  • daily practice
  • gardening/writing intersection
  • spirituality/writing intersection

We eat—places like Red Bamboo, Mamoun’s. We drink—the tea shop, the Angelica juice bar. Potent ginger flavor seems recurring. I never learn my way in Greenwich Village. I do learn how to zero in on Union Square from any direction.

The Queensboro is a very attractive bridge with her own set of turrets and a suitably tortured manner of approaching her. I think I had to wend an underground exit like escaping from a conch shell off the FDR and rise up then at least two blocks, maybe 3, to 2nd Ave, where a hard left led me to her skirts. Lower Roadway. Don’t know if I ever accessed the upper, not sure if it exists. As the frame of fall progressed sunsets off the bridge grew more inflamed to less, then stopped.

39th Street in Queens. Parking was a challenge every night, except the first, when I stopped in a spot right outside the building.

I don’t know whether to pull or push the doors. I don’t know how to get in. I don’t know I can enter the little lobby and push “7D” to pay the magic entrance fee. I don’t know any of this stuff the first night. It’s exhausting figuring this out. I get better at it.

I don’t live in New York.

Unseen baby, unknowable one. You don’t invite them to be a bad mother. You don’t correspond with mother. You don’t know the alignment, the starsign, the angel of mother. You don’t ask and the mother won’t retreat. You avoid the mother. The tattoos, the breath, the side dishes. The lack of respect. You are eternally grateful.

november 9

Still sad. Sadder than ever today. I want to throw myself on your mercy. To wander into your crowd full of people I don’t know. I set up a conflict with people around me. I don’t stake my claim.
I don’t taste my own sauce. I guess I’ll leave here now.

I heard about Immaculée praying the rosary to survive while shut up in a bathroom for weeks, hiding from murderers.

Something I want to know? Don’t know.

I said the rosary everyday for a year. Maybe it was a school year. My sophomore year. The cheesy pearlized paint flaked off my little white first communion beads. Once I lost the rosary—it fell from my pocket. That immediate pang of irrational loss— desperation. I retraced my steps and found it, on top of a desk in a classroom. I was ashamed that someone had found it on the floor, maybe even identified it as possibly mine, and decided to place it on the desk for the owner to more easily find. It meant another person was thinking about my things.

Returning to the sadness, the persistent sadness. The sadness of short sentences. The sadness of employees. The sadness of elderly eyebrows. The sadness of muted achievements. Of not knowing your place. The bewilderment of multiple remotes.

The fear of not ever having a home. Not at home here.