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this ridiculous love for dysfunctional males:  “poo-la-la”… I needed to learn to lie down in the clover by myself, with the muses and absent presence swirling around me as pirate ghosts. the beagle scratches his mushroom-shaped butt in a spiral on the ground, all the dogs cock their little heads importunately, the foxes just slip out of the headlights: you can’t ever get a good look at them. I have half a mind to have half a mind, the wind makes me layered, the markets are full of foods I can’t reach and if I could reach them I couldn’t eat them and they probably wouldn’t be good for me anyway. A general all-round slipperiness, but without the bliss. Large steel sculpture with interesting acoustics, but I can’t see over the top, and it makes me dizzy, but then, everything makes me dizzy, and don’t think I don’t notice anything, because I notice everything. Consider that a kind of arc, but I don’t know yet if it’s comic, tragic, or tilted, only that it’s curved, and I don’t know if the curve is pleasurable or uncomfortable, if it butts up against my cervix or reaches points of delight. Nibbling on the cookie of mortality, daily, until it is done, every last crumb, like winter covering your mistakes with snow and wheels spinning in furious squeals until the rubber parts wear out and I’ve run out of frownies and indigenous miracle oil to put on my scar, but I don’t mean to sound pathetic since I’ve not been beaten by a husband when five and a half months pregnant so that my water breaks and I give birth to the child prematurely and then he threatens to burn down the house with me and my other children in it, and I’m not as far as I know being taken over inside my body by any horrible diseases and the sun is shining on the seagulls as if nothing disruptive had ever happened. Still I want to take you and shake you by the shoulders, what the hell is WRONG with you, until you see clearly the feathery mists in my solar plexus that you either chewed like jerky or twisted into long drooping braids dripping with salt crystals. I don’t know. I rub a little sage between my fingers. The seasons are wrong. These loves are like ticks or tapeworms or barbed and tapered darts, they wiggle into the layers of my clothes, go up through my foot in the slimy creek, I try to pull them out of my skin like the swan girl in the movie but there are always more, and I can’t just spin and spin in the stagelights until I have grown great black wings, I remain myself except a size O and in a state of drugged and gaping bewilderment, like WTF? Poo-la-la. It was so red and sticking up, I was afraid he was going to hurt himself. “I’m just working on my translations.” The pile of plush animals. United: untied.

Deer, egrets, cows, calves, horses (playing), dogs, seals, hummingbirds, squirrels, geese (in formation) (honking), a black cat, seagulls (their aplomb!), a kite (bird), butterflies.

Cow parsnip, fennel, mariposa lily, tower of jewels, tea roses, orchids, camellias, bamboo, juniper, chickweed, iceplant, California sage, pampas grass, agave.

Breathing it in.  Now this is air.  It is like in Brooklyn there is no air.

Eating so many varieties of mush I am coming to love mush.  A feast last night of portobello soup with goat cheese and little bits of roasted garlic, a Persian dish called coucou (sp?) of parsley, cilantro, dill, and eggs, tofu pesto, garlic mashed potatoes, avocado, papaya, chutney, olives, mashed artichoke hearts with garlic mayonnaise, and pumpkin pie. Happy Festivus!

I feel a little like Frankenstein with this welt.  I took it on the chin, as they say!

In Brooklyn it is like there is no air.  I will have a big party and fill up the haunted space with celebration and bodies.  I am interested in joy (what’s that like?). “Don’t postpone joy,” James said.  Sometimes he is very wise. Sun is glinting through kinetic eucalyptus leaves, I would like to be a dog today and roll on the wet ground underneath them. That smell. Pinched life of betrayals, begone.  Closed-in, morose feeling of waiting for things to get better or at least change, begone. Febrile obsessions, begone, unless they are amusing. I need an ocean to stare at now and then. Don’t you?

Auto-husbandry: the way of the future?

waiting for my camera battery charge up and my hair to dry a little more before I set out on my mesa adventure. why don’t I live here? I don’t understand why/how my life evolved to put me where I  live now or why I am at this juncture or what on earth is next. was it my “choices”?  this, people, is the grand question. don’t you wonder this? about your life? bright sun through eucalyptus leaves. Elia’s art around me everywhere. ocean air. California. little red light turn to green, I wanna go outside.

I feel like a piece of kelp
with a glass jaw
floating on a goth ocean
listening to sentimental christmas songs
unwillingly now I’m a cormorant
and they are forcing the songs down my throat
but I can’t open my mouth because my jaw is
broken.  Stupid solo bird-kelp not oblivious
to the idiocy of men. Six geese a-laying,
presesnting their butt tufts to the aggressive
ganders: this makes me want to weep.
She’s not pretty, skinny legs and fat cheeks, bug
eyes and relatively thick waist…I asked him
if she was beautiful and he said doubtfully
I guess. I look like an ash now.  Clothes as
smooth coatings for this depression, like
the red part on a bitter Advil. He won’t
be able to focus on her either.  She “isn’t an artist
of any kind,” as if that was a kind of boast.
Bounsouaysana.  A kind of rotten pacifier. His
egolust as a kind of machete cutting swaths
into people, blind infantile subway rat, that
hunched pose, the cravenness of dogs in
fear, where is that bold-as-love love
that keeps munching my dreams? We all
fall down.

I can’t embed it… but so funny…

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of having a sweet potato baby food stain on my chin gauze

that everyone keeps saying looks “christmas-y”

Off to your circle of hell, you cowardly infidel.
Good luck with him, you slutty homewrecker.

Here’s a fuller version of the story.  There’s been a lot going on for me lately, good stress (a reading, a wonderful book party) and bad stress (I don’t think I need to spell that out), plus finals and the confusions of doing something every night and talking to many new guys as a distraction from this tenacious brooding and anger.  On Wednesday, I went to my therapists’, and we talked about how I needed to slow down and take some deep breaths and not be in such a hurry to “solve” everything.  After my appointment I stopped to buy cat food and groceries at the bodega. By the time I got home it must have been after 8… I spent some time e-mailing and cleaning up… I was very keyed up, very wired… and by the time I looked at the clock again, it seemed too late to make dinner… I had some almonds, some oat bran pretzels, and then I took my customary bedtime pills (magnesium, 5htp, progesterone, and a Remeron… a whole dose rather then my usual half because I really needed to unspool, and besides I’d taken a whole one the night before)… and then… sitting on the toilet… I found myself feeling nauseated…and dizzy…. I remember thinking, I’m going to pass out… if I can just get to the bed, I’ll be OK, so I got up, and that’s the last thing I remember

because I didn’t make it to the bed… I came to lying prone next to the bed… there was blood around me… I wondered, did I get my period, after six months? so I went into the bathroom… and looked in the mirror… a gash on my chin like a flap… about two inches wide, and pretty deep, and I started to freak… held a towel to it as compress, and called 911… shaky… somehow managed to get jeans and a sweatshirt on over my slip… and unlock the door… and buzz in the EMTs… they came quickly… they got my coat and a few things… my phone… my wallet… my keys… swaddled me in a sheet… took me in the ambulance to Lutheran Hospital in Sunset Park… went through triage .. interviewed by a woman with amazing tattoos… they asked me what day it was, where I was… I knew… then they brought me to a cubicle in the emergency room… where I lay for almost 24 hours… many doctors came to see me… to ask many questions… over and over again I gave my history… a surgeon came to stitch up my chin…

I could barely sleep with all the monitors beeping and the constant activity outside… I remember telling myself to just pretend I was at some avant garde music experience… the beeping in waves… people’s hearts, doctors’ conferences, busy floor staff conversations, and sick people moaning miserably… I think there was someone with Tourettes… there was nothing to read… not even a magazine… I had no paper or pen to write with… I just lay there until the next round of doctors came by with questions… I had blood under my nails, blood in my hair, blood on my ankles and shins, blood on my slip… they didn’t clean me up… I tried to sleep, must have slept… a little… they brought me a muffin… I had to take tiny pieces of it off and let them moisten in my mouth because I couldn’t chew… so then while Thomas was visiting they brought me some puréed stuff… it tasted like meatloaf & mashed potatoes and candied yams… it was gray and orange… and I was so hungry it was the most delicious thing I’d ever eaten… also the Greek yogurt Thomas brought me… and apple juice… many tests… I mentioned them earlier…

and finally finally the next day they gave me a room, a miserable little room on the cardiac floor… and gave me more and more and more tests… I had to scrub off all the little glue marks from the nodes and tape from the tests and IV bandages… riding about in a stretcher… one transport guy actually tried to pick up on me… I had never looked worse in my life I’ll bet… we were in the elevator… I said are you working the night shift?  he said, just so I could be with you… I gave him my phone number… I must have still been in shock as that is not my normal behavior… the MRIs I treated as an extension of the avant-garde music concert… but I was getting so sore from lying around on that awful bed… the nurses coming in to bark at me… and for some reason they put me on a “liquid” diet… pudding and jello… and I was so bored, and achy, and unclean… I didn’t know if I could take a shower with all those stitches… I tried to wash myself…

I kept hoping they would let me go… and Friday evening Marianne and Jim came over with bags of groceries and a change of clothes… panties!  new panties!… and they entertained me… I sang them The Frozen Logger… my hair matted at the roots with the gel they use for EEGs … and I’d had a cardiogram… seen my heart beating like some undersea creature… and I saw my brain scan!… like beautiful cauliflower florets… oh, I have the most beautiful brain… and the next day, I so hoped SO HOPED they would let me go…  and I started to put up a fight… because I’d been there since Wed. night and it was now SATURDAY…. and finally finally at 4:30… Mitch was visiting… they let me go home… never was my apartment so exquisite, never a bubble bath so adored… I made soup… took possession of my life again…cuddled with Nemo and Dante, and slept in my regal bed…

trying to push out the thoughts of anger and betrayal… that if I had not been so overwrought… so very sad… and trying to fight it… and if I had not been alone here… this would not have happened…

and the fearful thoughts, too… of how much worse it could have been, if, say… I had not come to… or if I had hit my head and got a concussion instead of “merely” a split chin and a jaw fracture… so OK, I can’t eat solid food for a few weeks, but I’m here… my friends are incredible, really incredible…. and I…will… heal.

finally.

This is outrageous. This is my fourth day in this miserable place. The first entire 24 hours I was in a cubicle in the emergency room surrounded by monitor beeps, constant activity, fluorescent lights, and not even a magazine to distract me. I’ve had two MRIs, a CAT scan, several EKGs, a thorough sonogram of my heart, my brain waves measured, panoramic dental x-rays etc etc. The doctors nurses dietitians and orderlies don’t communicate with each other. Of course all my damn tests are coming up clear. I could have told them that. They knew I needed thyroid meds and antidepressants but they didn’t provide them. Yesterday a friend brought them to me from home. The nurse wouldn’t let me take them, said she had to talk to a doctor. I said screw that and took them this morning because I am getting almost unmanageably distraught. I didn’t need all those tests. I could have told them that I passed out because I didn’t eat enough that night and because there is too much language in my head and because I am trying to do too much and fill up the awful hole in my heart too fast.

— Post From My iPhone