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Theda Bara

and…

(photo by Mel Nichols)

At the end of last week, still so fatigued in flu’s aftermath: why is it so decimating? But most major symptoms are gone, even if I’m pale, easily tired, and just generally still Victorianly pathetic. I did drag my sorry ass to Friday’s dance class after a two-week absence, and yesterday’s unusually balmy faux-spring offered some succor.(Say that last word out loud. Funny, right?)I suppose then that things are on the up-and-up, even if the trees remain resolutely leafless.

I did, though, manage to wear myself out further last week obsessively working for hours on end on a new project in a new medium. I made a collage movie out of $1 DVDs from the local discount store. It’s called “You Won’t Ever Learn” and it’s just under 23 minutes long. It’s really, in the common parlance, “fucked up,” as in “deeply disturbing,” and I love it. Major themes: desire, education, mortality (you can’t go wrong with those chestnuts, right?). There will be more, and I’m not sure if that’s a threat or a promise.

Clips of yesterday’s terrific Segue readings to come very soon, maybe even today.

Thinking, like everyone else, about the not just stagnating but plunging economy, and what it means, or will mean, for our lives. It means that even if we are not suffering (yet) from it, we can make fewer choices at least about our external conditions. It creates a stagnancy in the possibilities we can impose on the quotidian. Who among us now is starting a business or taking a year off to travel?

Well, I’m glad I have basic life skills, by which I mean I can cook and sew, and that I can entertain myself so cheaply by making movies with $1 DVDs from Pergament. And grateful that the only mouths I have to feed are those of the little felines, oh and Gary’s, too (but he, of course, pitches in).

Poetry’s basically a very cheap endeavor, and one can only rejoice about that.

I dreamed this morning that I was growing all these extra toes. They were a little shorter than my other toes kind of budding up in between. Seven total on the right foot and eight on the left, I think.

(yes, Lynn, sure, go ahead and take this)

Lovely Human

I am not an Exoskeleton.

Prancing as if I am a prancer
Sallow with great desire
I am not an exoskeleton
Replicate me as I am should be

Love makes me wander
Walking around the corn
Finding hidden holes

Is love only for Mexicans?

My Lap

Love me like an intriguing notion
Love me velvet-creepily
Search my sour turmoil…
Have I now be your sour mate?

My lap…
I try to write you down my frantic annotations
into the bottom of honey ‘till there’s no more travesty
This love letter shall remind me
Love fabricates (fellates) us this far and it should be!
Well, I edit out the best of you
to see you receding always…

Ovaltine Love Feeling
or
The Beauty of Love

The beauty of love that I feel in mimic of eyes’ slippage
Into the “cubistic environment” of my soul
As if my body ripped the experienced chaos of everyday life
By the deepest of love’s neglected child.

Understanding love as a more fundamental set of dualisms
Translate life into a visual corollary of a word trap:
A perfect feeling like an echo chamber.
There’s nothing impossible: I work with ephemera.
I walk with passion, oar buckets, shovels, etc.
Try to stand with the power of love and artichoke suppers.

Have you waiting for my damn thing or my big star-studded names?
And say love words in language as a damnation of human sensibility into the blinder mouths of politicans?

The legendary John Giorno reads his poem, “It Doesn’t Get Better” at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City on 2/28/09.

High art and low art are pals. I guess I’ve always found that in art but now, this has helped me to find it in my reality, that the world full of TV and come-downs and stresses and tests, is all part of the beauty. It mustn’t be chained away some place, it mustn’t be victimized, it mustn’t be labeled as diseased, it mustn’t be cured with a pill. It must be first embraced, as much as it embraces us.

Here’s a REAL diary entry I wrote at seventeen in a miserable little room in Oakland across from the Siddha yoga ashram at which my mother was a devotee.

The fantasy here is out of control, of course, but what’s fascinating to me is the number of things that have come some tempered version of true. Do we write our lives into being? I always wonder…

May 19, 1981

Good morning. Today is Malcom X day, and there’s no school. Isn’t that a joyous fact? Well frankly, I haven’t got anything to do. Anthony was supposed to come over last night, but he didn’t; didn’t even call, either. Very bad boy. When the time comes, I won’t be mad enough at him. Wish I’d written down my dreams. They were strange & awkward. Well, and what shall I do? Sit around and let my hair grow. I always think it’s come to a standstill. Maybe it just grows at a snail’s pace. YUK – SNAILS. I’m mad. What’s to do? I wish I was rich and lived in New York. I would go out and buy the most interesting clothing imaginable. I’d ride around in a red convertible. Yes and I’d have a beautiful house filled with food and cute boys. My closet would be a whole room. My shoes alone would take up ½ a wall. I would always have clean underwear. And about 200 sweaters – intricate, original, mohair & cashmere patterns. Leather pants and jeans in every color, almost. At least fifty gorgeous vintage dresses, all of which would fit perfectly, in taffeta, cotton, silk, etc. Plus I would have tailored tuxedos in rose and grey and gold. With the most elaborate of antique lace blouses. My hair would be twice as long as it is now – red, yellow, and brown, like fire, and in a hundred tiny braids. I would wear a lot of extreme but lovely makeup. But best of all I would always have something to do. I would give parties and invite sweet brilliant people. Lots of food and music. Here’s a typical day: upon awakening in my lace canopy bed with the satin comforter and 100% cotton sheets and fluffy perfect pillows I’d be served breakfast in bed by one of the many cute boys in my employment. I would have ordered it the night before – anything I want, from eggplant parmesan to Cream of Wheat. All the cute boys would be very cool, in bands, and this would be their way of getting extra money, which I could spare. From a list of thousands of records I’d pick one. After eating I’d bathe in my gorgeous fern-filled bathroom, which had music piped in. It’s a Jacuzzi and bubble bath, of course. When I get out of the tub and dry off with a soft plush 100% cotton towel, one of my friends, a girl, comes to help me with my hair and makeup, arranging the braids, choosing the best shade of magenta lipstick. But I don’t get dressed yet, not till the late afternoon (unless of course, I have plans), I go into my beautiful study with the comfortable chairs and couch and the antique desk and electronic typewriter and I either read or write. I have a beautiful extensive library to choose from and I read several languages. Then I’d get dressed and go out in my red convertible to have a late lunch with friends. Or else I’ll invite them over. Then we all go out to see complex foreign films or live theatre or a museum or we’ll just plain bum around (I’ll still be young, you know) and talk to people on the street and go to old bookstores and clothes stores and cafes or whatever we feel like doing. And maybe I’d go home and maybe write or sleep for a while before I dress in the height of interesting-ness to go out to some wild art party where I’d invariably have one or two (at least) romances going on. And sometimes I’d bring home a cute boy or girl, but not very often because all the time I’d be wondering about Anthony who became a gypsy before I got rich and I couldn’t contact him, although I’d traveled the world looking for him. And so although I’d be happy on the surface and content and all that I’d yearn for him, and that would be the tragedy in this life to make it realistic. I would have gotten rich from writing, of course. Novels and poetry and non-fiction and stories. And then one day Anthony would appear at my doorstep, needing a shave, and I’d support him for the rest of our lives, until the world ended or until we’d committed mutual suicide.

The end.