Monday, December 16, 2013

Dreams

The night before last I dreamed I was on an island hopping from resort to resort with friends. Each resort was more beautiful than the last. Alejandro was there and Jax, all the slo children. At one point Jax told me about his dreams the night before. I was hearing about his dreams IN my dream.

Then last night I dreamed I was hanging out with John Cusack. We rode scooters to a club. It was a great time.

I love being able to play out Fantasies in my dreams!


Wednesday, December 4, 2013

4th dimension

Reading Jonathan Lethem's book Dissident Gardens, set in Sunnyside Queens where we have taken up residence. Meanwhile I'm listening to Donovan's Spotify station. The main character in the book tells another, "Wear your love like heaven", a Donovan line, and the mystery deepens.

Monday, October 14, 2013

Dream of dream (after Mike KElley)

Lste afternoon asking Matthew about his plans (he's going to Marley's soccer game) eventually turns into Late night drunken wandering where I run into random friends. 

Diandra tries to get me to go to another party. We talk about surfing and i picture her entering the wave. My brother jeremy too.

Someone else i run into is performing. 

Then i run nto Katy Lederer and she is also performing later. Singing, she is glowing.

 As I I am talking to Katy I realize I am dreaming.  Everyone is delirious and happy but I am sad that the night- the dream- LIFE is ending.

 I am saying goodbye to people  I love knowing that when I wake up it is a kind of death. The death of the dream. 

Then I wander into a pizza joint . Fucking James Franco shows up drunk. I want to tell him to snap out of it and REMEMBER this this LIFE. I know he will be gone in a flash. He smiles and says smell that? I tAke in the smell. Pizza I say (and think, yes he gets it!)  No, he says, it smells like shit. his face cHanges to a scowl. I can smell it as soon as he says it. and I think NO James you can CHOOSE what you smell! This is just a dream this life!

 Another friend shows up drunk. He's a mess.  I try to involve him in a plan to help him out, some kind of scheme we cAn do together. But then He leaves in a car with a bunch of fools  and I realize it is no use with him. 

It's okay, just a dream.

I wake myself up.

Saturday, October 12, 2013

Magic in a streak. I've noticed that they come that way. Why I don't know. My dad is visiting. Maybe that's why.

Finding the coffee table yesterday, just what we needed. And then deciding to buy a second copy of Dissidents Gardens at Jonathon Lethems reading today, as a gift to a friend. Finding a $20 bill in the book later. So the gift was immediately returned to me by the universe!

Dissident Gardens text place in New York Sunnyside where I have just moved to. It is full of the dream of lost community. And yet it is ironic because that is where I am finding community now. After the reading I saw several people from Sunnyside Gardens and the gardener who tends the community garden behind the Sunnyside Gardens. I said to them you are the real distant garden. They all laughed. And it was a golden moment.

Sunday, September 29, 2013

Strongly feeling the need for some collaborative art. Make it happen.

Thursday, August 22, 2013

Driving north and feeling down
When on the radio a sappy blues
number, Unhappy little girl blues.
Hey line comes on about Counting raindrops on the windshield.
I look at the windshield and notice the raindrops.

Song is taunting me for being an unhappy little girl.

Suddenly I am thinking Prospero giving up his magic and becoming a new prince again.

And a siren from behind me and I jump out of my skin. Too jumpy. Paranoid. Because I am in standstill traffic and texting. Because I am always under the gun release days. Mostly because I am not very smart when it comes to the exigencies of living day-to-day life. But that is the price of being me, no? So then how to be me and to please a worried perfectionist.

Then there's just becomes a journal entry and not a poem.

Step back and notice how pain led me to think. Also take a breath and stop thinking. Then I feel better. But that is the crux of the problem. How do I not think and enjoy, when I have to think all the time?

You just heard, sometimes I'm happy, the DJ says on the radio.

Radio as Prospero. Prospero as. Shakespeare as writer. Writer as self.



Friday, August 9, 2013

Romantic comedy

My friend Chris sent me a play list he made for his new love, and the playlist she made for him. I loved being in the middle, his gaze on her and hers for him, both of them presenting their best vision of the picture through the music.

And I was thinking about all of the nuances, his long intro, certain lines that I know he was putting emphasis on, figured that at some level I was picking up more than she was. I was deeper inside of the romance between the two of them from my objective third-party subjectivity, than either of them could be, Love being blind and all.

I feel that way I read literature too, like tonight watching Shakespeare. to be an attentive lover to Shakespeare I have to plumb the depths of the play. I have to get him. And so he gives me is all. I Fall in love with either side of the equation as presented by the two in him.

Monday, August 5, 2013

91

This morning dancing down Queens Boulevard towards the city. Just trying to dance among people comfortably. Yesterday my Liverpudlian neighbor Jamie stopped us as we were leaving and asked were you running earlier today? I said probably. He said, and were you dancing? As he said he went into a little dance. This made my wife and her sister laugh. So he hammed it up and danced a little more. I think my wife was embarrassed and impressed at the same time. Ha!

This morning African Internet Radio. AIR. I have been listening to the station for a long time and every once in a while they give me a magnificent Set. That is what I got this morning. A mix of African dance music and club music. "It's Will I Am and Britney bitch."

I have a surreal glide son where people just disappeared and the music was everything and took me into the beyond







90

MIA first album is a classic. Maybe a top 10 in terms of dance-ability, originality and political importance of lyrics. My body was buzzing after dancing to it in grave yard.

I danced with a black and yellow butterfly. It really seemed as if it we were dancing around each other. Magic.



Sunday, August 4, 2013

funny how that works

My sister in law is staying with us for a few months. Because she goes to mass it means Sofia wants to go which means Genevieve goes. So an unforseen consequence of having Catherine stay with us is that our Sunday mornings are now given over to mass.

I have issues with the Catholic Church anyway, so was grousing about this to my brother Matthew on the phone while walking back from the church with Lucia on my shoulders. He said, "You'll find that's it is good to have your kids raised with some kind of religious education." I said, "Yeah, maybe, but I didn't choose THAT one."

Right as I said "THAT" I walked into a rock on the curb and gashed my toe open. 

It felt like such a brutal, funny reminder that I don't get to choose. It was a reminder not to judge someone else's path. It felt like the universe zen master whacking me with a stick.

I am always amazed at how the universe lines up like that? Like, was I subconsciously aiming for the rock? Or did the rock just so happen to be there because the universe is really 4 dimensional, with everything connected by angles to everything else?
--

Friday, August 2, 2013

Shakespeare in the park

The park across the street, Sunnyside Gardens, hosted free Shakespeare in the park. The Tempest. Very well done. I loved how the cast was so multiethnic. And so talented! New York, got to love the talent. It kept the kids attention and mine too. profound for me, Prospero's plight. Thinking about How Shakespeare can work on so many levels. Amazing. Also free cupcakes. My neighbor bought me a beer after the show. The weather is temporare and perfect. I wonder how I got so lucky as to be here. A highlight.





Wednesday, July 17, 2013

79

Ended up dancing back from Starbucks, to the gorillas the sites which I happened across some haphazard way oh yes through the poet such and such is Spotify page what's her name sister something she's fabulous and thick.

But I was so deleted from my writing tonight, first of children's short story and then if you chapters and my young adult novel, that my desk was extra charged almost machine like precision. Although I still let my freak flag fly pretty hot.

But then walking out of Starbucks and conditions to the comfort zone of hell, first level., And into the sweltering sweaty heat of heaven. Priceless. Mike priceless. Make priceless.

It all started when I walked out of Starbucks, no before that with Matthews cakes. Crones. But then walking out Starbucks, the air-conditioned world, into the sweltering sweaty night. Priceless.

Omgjd

Poetry reading at Marlene's one wed per month. Big names classic series so easy!

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

One of those days



Gen happened to bring my backpack to the hospital yesterday. I didn't ask her to bring it, so it felt destined when this morning I looked in the pocket and found some space cake crumbs.

I ate them and then spent a few hours with Sofia painting in the children's play area. Then we went back to the room and watched my favorite movie (along with Elf) of all time, Happy Feet.

There was a moment watching the movie that Sofia was intently examining me with her stethoscope.
And I nearly floated away in bliss in that moment. Could've died with happiness.  I am sad to leave the hospital and feel I could stay for days and days with Sofia just being in this place. 

I can barely believe the fantastic places life takes me sometimes.

And speaking of barely believing, later tonight a rough fight with Genevieve. She just comes at me, tired and frustrated and so angry and condescending and righteous, for such seemingly little things. (Like I left some tupperware at the hospital for instance.) So upsetting. I take it to be some kind of balance to the magic and the bliss, like the necessary other side, but it is rough. Three year old Sofia is just yelling for us to COME ON! COME ON! COME ON! And I know just how she feels. Genevieve can be extremely hard to take sometimes, but no doubt she must feel the same about me.

The question is, what gets born in the moment?

Another moment today that felt significant was reading Lapham's Quarterly and coming across a fragment of Beryl Markham's "West With The Night" in which she talks about delivering a foal. It was a stunning account of not just the birth of a foal, but the process of birth itself.

All of this feels like aftermath to seeing Amma in NYC a few days ago.

Go figure.

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Proustian Sonnet for Marcella, Anna, Erica and Ronaldo

Newly published Proust poems read
from the river, lower west side.
The words weave through the small
fountainfall of water behind me, while
all around us the sounds of the city
quiet down to just the harmony
between Marcel translated by Marcella
and then Anna and Jennifer, flaw
lessly, except Marcella turning a quack
back into something more than a duck.
The duck lands in the fountain to keep
me company as I take a leap
Into eternity, as evening encloses,
The murmur of summer breezes

now joining the murmur of friends.
The evening, for now, never ends.

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

noggin toboggan

Somewhere up in your Noggin
There lies a big toboggan

sliding down the merrypole
with Uncle Aladdin

Somewhere on the course of life
lies the green

with the 18th hole
if you know what I don't mean

Sometimes there is a fish
caught in a loop

You got the squinties
and everytime I play it loud

but I got the rhythm that is keeping you
my child

Friday, April 19, 2013

Upscale Poetry

Upscale Poetry



"Doe, a deer, a female deer"


There you hold in your head the image of a deer

A female deer

Hold it there for a moment

Look how beautiful she is


"Ray, a drop of golden sun"


Now we have added the sun to the picture

 The deer is there in the sun

 You can Feel the sun

(Note the adjective "golden")


"Me, a name I call myself"


Now, by juxtaposition, you have yourself

You have the thing that you call yourself

This "me" escalates from the "doe" in the "ray"
 
You are a female deer outside in the sun


"Fa, a long long way to run"


You are a deer running in the sun!

And you have a long, long way to go


"Sew, a needle pulling thread"


Now the metaphor scales up another level

Imagine the needle is the deer (you) leaping as it sews

Can you see the needle leaping there in the sun, sewing a crazy quilt?

The images, too, are a thread being sewn into a poem

 The trope takes another leap:


"La, a note to follow So"


The very notes of the song are pulled into the thread

The notes are the leaps of the deer, you, the needle,

leaping up the mountain, up the cloth, up the scale


The deer slows, near the top of the mountain now, tired,

her voice straining to reach the next note


"Tea, a drink with jam and bread"


Then you, she, deer, calls for a rest,
to stop for a refreshing picnic


"Which brings us back to do do do do"

The food brings us back to our self,
nourishes us, literally becomes us

Once we return to self
we are ready to start again

Escalating up the endless scale


draft 6

"Doe, a deer, a female deer"

You hold in your mind the image of a deer


A female deer

Hold it there for a moment

Look how beautiful she is

"Ray, a drop of golden sun"

We have added the sun to the picture

The deer is there in the sun

You can Feel the sun

(Note the adjective "golden")

"Me, a name I call myself"

Now, by juxtaposition, you have yourself

You have the thing that you call yourself

This "me" escalates from the "doe" in the "ray"

You are a female deer outside in the sun

"Fa, a long long way to run"

You are a deer running in the sun!

And you have a long, long way to go

"Sew, a needle pulling thread"

The needle is the deer (you) leaping as it sews

Leaping there in the sun, sewing a crazy quilt

"La, a note to follow sew"

The notes are the leaps of the deer, you, the needle,

leaping up the mountain, up the cloth, up the scale

The deer slows, near the top of the mountain now, tired,

her voice straining to reach the next note

"Tea, a drink with jam and bread"

You, she, deer, calls for a rest,

to stop for a little picnic

"Which brings us back to doe doe doe doe"

The tea and bread brings you back to yourself,

nourishes you, literally becomes you

and you're ready to start again

escalating up the endless scale


draft 7


UPSCALE POETRY

"Doe, a deer, a female deer"

You hold in your mind the image of a deer.

A female deer.

Hold it there for a moment.

Look how beautiful she is.

"Ray, a drop of golden sun"

We have added the sun to the picture.

The deer is now there in the sun.

You can feel the sun.

(And note the adjective "golden".)

"Me, a name I call myself"

Now, by juxtaposition, you have yourself.

You have the thing that you call yourself.

This "me" escalates out of the "doe" in the "ray".

You are a female deer outside in the sun.

"Fa, a long long way to run"

You are a deer running in the sun!

And you have a long, long way to go.

"Sew, a needle pulling thread"

Now the metaphor scales up another level.

The needle is the deer (you)

Running and leaping as it sews,

Leaping there in the sun, sewing a crazy quilt.

The trope takes another leap...

"La, a note to follow sew"

The notes are now the leaps of the deer, you, the needle,

leaping up the mountain, up the cloth, up the scale.

The deer slows, near the top of the mountain now, tired,

her voice straining to reach the next note...

"Tea, a drink with jam and bread"

You, she, deer, calls for a rest,

to stop for a little picnic.

"Which brings us back to doe doe doe doe"

The bread and tea brings you back to yourself,

nourishes you, literally becomes you

and you're ready to start again

escalating up the endless scale. 








Friday, January 11, 2013