5:00

I feel grateful to wake beneath the snow, to witness the adornment of nature as it is, with my only involvement being my personality and the necessity of translating material into emotion, into other matter like thought and words and internal images. It is almost night now and while I understand the oncoming evening, through the windows I see a white sky on white snow, all resting on the fingerprints of trees, quiet, full of mercury and hallucinogens. None of it is black like the a summer's eight o'clock, which is chaotic and cruel, the screaming frogs like dying women, the smell of algae on old water, mosquitoes entering the body without permission and leaving marks like burn scars, disease, mouths like needles and cocks. The birds are gone now and I am no longer deafened by the ceaseless sounds of life, and I have had the experience of being the only animal in the forest, watching snow hit dead limbs, my footprints filled within minutes, my body meaning nothing in the ocular throbbing of winter, where the saints have an open view of neoteric humanity, with its stone architecture soaking the light out of the soil. 

I am pulling words out of my cells to keep my fingers warm as December meanders and I just told my lover through a satellite that I feel like this huge, throbbing flesh of wanting, like all of my fucking bones desire. I have to speak to my lover through phones and metal and I expect to cut open my arms and find microchips mixed with the blood and when a man slits my throat there will be a microphone attached to a recording cassette, my voice stolen from another woman, because perhaps I have never known how to speak, God's little marionette. I am sometimes surprised to find that I have a mouth and hands, as if I will wake living in freezing water, made of scales, swimming and eating and having dreams of being human.

It is 5:46 and the room is full of a proper dark, like a genetic 
memory from Poland, brought into my temporal lobe by the snow. I 
feel the woodsmen of my genetics moving through miles without light, stealing pitch resin from spirits in the Puszcza Biała, using witchcraft to protect the cattle from wolves.
  

12:01

"Ask me a question," I said.

"What was the best day of your life?"

"I do not know how to answer that. There have not been good days, but moments: snow, reading with an animal near my thighs, drinking wine and feeling my mind open briefly, watching summer through my lover's apartment window while I am on top of him. This is ridiculous, I know it is, all of these Mozartian examples trying to say something which is a feeling which may be only mine. Romance. The meaning behind flowers.  

Moment:

Noun.

1. A very brief period of time.
2. Importance.

Moment. Money. Monet. 

Monet and his water lilies, whose symbolization depends upon their color, not unlike humans with impasto strokes beneath their skin. 

Orange: hatred.
White: virginity.
Yellow: quixotic.

Universality. Restoration of innocence after death. Large canvases of petals with their smeared bodies on museum walls, acting like mirrors to the pigmented prayers moving between the ribs of the girls in sweaters like air; bones painted like rainbows and kaleidoscopes. 

Born: November 14 1840.
Profession: Painter. Atheist. I one day found myself looking at my beloved wife's dead face and just systematically noting the colours according to an automatic reflex! Clairvoyant, reading the souls of the audience, freeing them from their psychedelic limbs."

"And what does the soul look like?"

"A vampire once told me it is like Bordeaux, but that is only because he is in love with blood. My fingers say my lips, but that is only because I am aware of them touching each other. I heard a man from Asahikawa say it reminded him of winter, but only because he liked to see snow on the maples. The permanence of consciousness is painted red, like scorpions rising from constellations."

"And the flowers in the garden behind Camille, the poppies in Argentuil?"

"Stem cells, cleaning out diseases of the eye and mind."

"But not for Monet?"

"Cataracts are communion wafers, moments of ocular brilliance."

10 : 22

5:41

The weather is colder and I do not mind November and winter and the birthday of my lover because there are birds despite the snow. This month I have understood the words I do have because we have sat alone together at dinner, staring at each other across a candle while the beginning-imagination of January (which shows itself as shaved ice in the rain) moved against the kitchen windows. It was not like having a meal with myself (rather something that I did not want to see) but I watched the words because I like the dark and want to speak to all of the things I should never be attracted to. 

The morning is moving too quickly and I want time with my poor mind that is exhausted, stretching and contracting, and I should have more thoughts than what kind of flesh is the brain made of but I have those words and they are honest, a different weight of truth, which is like the heaviness behind a conversation. 

5:32

Autumn is too bright, the sky too blue because all things like to shine brighter to compensate for death and why should earth -- who is the beginning of our own life -- be any different, or rather, why should we (whatever we are) be dissimilar.

I do not know if I like exuberance that was born to counterbalance monochromatic animation -- the genuine has always satisfied whatever is left of my soul. I do not eat with my words often enough so they become fingers on plastic, bones and joints in flesh, cold from the jejune autumn. 

I have no intention of being cruel to the seasons but the falling leaves are nature's clock and does Persephone remember her rape as time passes? 

I want to know why the walls of the subway are not stained with ancient Greek murals, why artists do not write lines from the Book of the Dead on STOP signs, why recreations of Egyptian prayers on papyrus are not pasted on shop windows, next to wanted ads. 



I am allowed to rest even if I dream of a different structure to my own body, nervous to see my face when I wake in the morning. I hear the wind blowing and the young girl picking flowers near a cleft in the soil is about to scream. I will cover my eyes when all of the plants die. 

10:38

I can't remember my dreams from two nights and I have slept too late. I woke wanting to write something to you and my first thought: My Mouth is Full of Cavities. I have holes in my bones from wine so I put mercury and silver in them. I have the elements of the earth in my body and I wear them as well, because I am proud of what earth creates; I am satisfied with oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon. I am happy with fur and hands and paint. I am quiet in the company of animals because there is no need with speech when they smell my abdomen for what is beneath my skin which is something besides blood and arteries and veins and the places where sperm and fingers and tongues have died. There is more than acid in my stomach: the lining has graffiti which tells the future and there is a red fox resting in my intestines, chewing my ovaries, which are made out of the horns of bulls.  I think of the nights that I can not remember and I feel that something must have bitten me and now the saliva of god is running through my body, turning my organs into moonstone.

5:48

I wanted to write as soon as I woke, to say something as I have no one to speak to, only living fur to put my hands against and long, useless hours of work. I have ridiculous words that are like stones in my palm and I have to be up before our star because I wanted to tell my lover that I had a dream about them, or that their spirit was with me in every image, sticking its fingerprints into my brain. I watched horror movies before I slept, but my mind was still my mind and it was left with its rolling trees stuck in the dirt, completely untouched. I am sometimes unsure if it is mine as those trees are too large for my age and I almost know that I have a home in the forest given to me by much older women.

I have believed that god's subconscious was a landscape in Russia. I have wanted tea sweetened with cherries and vodka out of a freezer during a snowstorm. I like cherries because they are interesting things that leave marks behind, like injured bodies.

It does not matter because I still woke telling myself to gather strength for life. I love winter because it has bold moments of beauty and imagination in its vacancy and the mind does better in the dark, where in sleep it has the animal's full attention. Good minds wants more than the audience of limbs.

5:26

Dream, October 16, 2013.

My best friend comes to visit me for my birthday and the entire ground is covered in snow (I was born in June). She pulls 60.00 out of her coat pocket and hands it to me -- I am reluctant to take it, but she pushes the money into my palm and closes my fingers. We drive to a nearby town for dinner and I can only see the world through the windshield, the car lights focused to the middle of the road; we are swerving through the yellow lines and the tree branches pushing into my vision are covered in ice. 

At dinner we are playing a game with arrows drawn on paper, although I cannot remember what it was because I was already drunk in my mind from the bottles of wine, blackberry and honey and something pink pouring down my friend's throat, visible through her skin. 

The bill comes to 60.00.

She drives me to my parent's home and I walk past my mother sleeping on the couch. I go to the computer and play a song on repeat, although I have never heard it before; I play it so loudly that the speakers crack and I dance until my bare feet hurt from the hardwood floors. I realize it is 10:40 in the morning and I have not slept. I look at the pines through the kitchen window and watch the snow fall; I panic because I can barely remember the night before, but I calm myself saying that it what happens when you keep pouring glasses of wine.

I go into a bedroom and start dancing to the song again. I only stop when my sister walks through the door because I am embarrassed to have her hear the music. 

12:48

Dream. October 5, 2013.

I wake on a couch and feel an ache in my back. I walk into a bathroom and pull up my shirt in front of a mirror -- I have scars across my shoulders, spine, and ribs, cuts still stitched and crossing over tattoos that I do not have. I search my skin until I am able to find a stab wound and with two fingers I pull the injury open and watch the blood gather in the fabric on the top of my jeans. My back is covered in a white medicine that I remember a Chinese man massaging into my while I rested. I rub some of the medicine into the wound and throw my stained shirt on the floor, falling back asleep on the couch.



I am still in the place where I woke but I needed to feel my dreams roll out of my abdomen before I put my fingers on plastic keys so that you could read my thoughts. I feel myself behind my skull with that weird ache that comes from lack of rest, the muscle-speak where my body folds itself into delusion, thinking that laziness is health. I moved my limbs and through the window I saw a male and female cardinal in what is left of the blackberry bush, swamped in the still green leaves, their feathers plump from the heavy water morning. I watched them search for food and move circularly, natural geometry. I drank coffee. I caught myself in the bedroom mirror, near my dried plants and bleached skulls, looking for scars across my shoulders. 

People used to believe that hares were able to change their sex during March. I have five months before I am allowed to lose myself.

All of this is no different than birds searching for food -- I am searching for the right thought, looking for the correct way to move myself around others. I feel frail because I feel I have used all of my strength to stay alive. Nothing is worse than the desire to love, true love, with its sacrifice and skin peeling, where being an animal loses its romanticism and your self is shown to your self, your osteoporotic mind that is dying because you will not eat, you will not eat, the desire to live is so severe that it is burning through your immateriality, because you are not strong enough to handle your own passion. 

I have no thoughts, just this unyielding, limitless expectation. I am exhausted from being human.

The feastday of St. Francis of Assisi, who preached to the birds, has passed. He was said to give sermons to the little people with their healing, hollow bones, but I feel that they told the saint of the christ in their vocal chords, the color of plumage, eggs, seeds, human hair in nests, and the stories passed down from cranes, who are the first creatures to greet the sun.

To speak to animals is to know all the secrets of god.



Dreams of violence on my shoulders, where the colored appendages were removed, my body filled with heavy, mammalian coal. 

9:08

I found a ghost under the bed that looked like me as a child.
She was crying, fluid shining on her round face, holding a stuffed animal that had fallen apart while being washed in my past, her future. My childhood cat was curled near her soft stomach and I held my breath looking at his fur and when I reached towards him he growled and scratched my palm, trying to keep my skin away from the little ghost. I could smell the dirt of where he is buried in my parent’s yard. 

"Who are you?" she asked.
"I think I am you."
"Then why aren’t your eyes blue?"
"They changed color when I grew."

She stared at me, her long curly hair sea-waving over her shoulders.

"Are you a boy or a girl?"
"I don’t know."
"Eyes do not change color. Girls do not have yellow in their eyes."
"I think I became an animal after I watched an animal die."
"Where is your hair?"
"I wrapped it around my brain to keep it from breaking."
"Why aren’t your eyes blue?"
"They changed color when I grew."

I heard the snapping of her bones as they lengthened into my body and our cat chased the insects crawling out of his mouth while the noises of birds came from the morning and the lining of his stomach, which was slowly becoming grass. She screamed and I covered my ears while her face lengthened, her teeth falling on the hardwood floor, clacking like marbles. Her hair gathered around her fingers in circles and mice that came out of the cat’s ribs gathered it to build nests in the walls, where they died years ago. 

I looked at myself as I am now underneath my bed, the long arms and tattoos, wearing my lover’s ring. Her eyes were lighter, clearer, a resolute shade of blue.

I watched myself shake, the soft jaw trying to push from beneath the skin.

"There is someone on the mattress pretending to be me," she said. 
"How do I know who is who?"
"Her eyes are no longer blue."

I crawled closer to her so that she could recognize the lines of our face.

"They changed color when I grew."

7:28

I walked outside this morning with coffee and my aching breasts and I stood with the cat in what is left of the garden and our bodies were pink from the September sun and I immediately understood why he cried for me to come outside and rest my feet in the rain-dirt. I felt everything there, everything alive and calm. The words were coming up through the skin on my fingers and they were not much different than my veins although they were dark and scripted, but tubes that carry blood can change color with different limbs and my body could have broken its bones while I stood there (perhaps I was the cat or one of the birds) and the words were nothing more than flesh and biology, the cat's strong voice a pentameter, as language is the same as dead leaves and the beauty of the upcoming winter, where my culture decorates the frozen soil with artificial light.

There are crows and ravens in the pines near where I sleep and I want to look like them, their long black bodies and deep songs, every part of them spread out over the break in color where the tops of trees lose their density, like smudged, breathing paint, paint that moves and glides, aerodynamic oils, large invisible hands with magnets moving pieces of metal like a child's toy.



Life is obscene in the sense that it is excessive and that is why I feel words have to layer words until they are too sweet, running over the edges of a sentence, decaying your teeth. Writing is the most anarchistic art form because it requires no formal training, no callouses on the hands from years of holding a horsehair bow. I feel that communication through beauty is my only prerequisite and I love the obesity of paragraphs, the icing of adverbs and alliteration that crawl acid up your throat after you finish reading the work because you are too full, exhausted, your organs and blood full of sugar.

12:29

I told the person I love last night that my chest and bones are full of them. I am not scared to admit that I feel them in my eyes, which are watery, aging, and exhausted. My eyes, once blue, now green gray yellow and brown, eyes that mean nothing: muscles, blood vessels, a nerve, and jelly. Three coats encompassing three transparent structures, poetry, soul, illness. A conscious sense organ. Words that mean nothing, like my heterochromia, these words that are confusing you because they are my personal language that I am using to translate all of the parts of me which communicate with their own voices: ribs with expansion, liver with detoxification and protein synthesis, a subconscious with movie reels, the blood that bathes every organ in my frame. All of my organs have a say in the story of my limbs because they whisper to me while I sleep that they are autonomous, self-contained, and one said that if a surgeon searched through the upper left of my small intestines that they would find the bones of animals I once ate, etched with runes, resilient to acid.

7:25

I sat with my friend while they spoke about themselves and their soul, high on the edge of the road, listening to the traffic below us and the animals around us, my fingers tapping against the sidewalk because my legs were hanging sixty feet above the ground and I am terrified of heights, but I tried to listen with the early September night wind in my skin and ears. 

They asked me what I had dreamed and I told them about the burning trees and old apartments where I walked inside my bedroom to find it covered in grass and moss, mice moving through my mattress.

I asked them about nighttime-thoughts and they only told me about their broken heart.

"Why do you write of horror?" they asked.

"Why are your eyes blue?" I replied.

"I feel heavy metal around my neck," they said. "I am trying to crack it from my body, but my flesh-fingers are not strong enough. I have to learn alchemy to melt the silver and gold."

"I do not see my mind as an organ," I said. "It is electric, dark water, full of sea plants and amphibians; if you cup your palms and drink, you see visions from the mold growing off of the feathers of drowned angels."

"Why do you write of horror?" they asked.

"Because I have too much love," I replied.

"Love is not horror!"

"Then your heart has barely been broken."

I tried to tell them that even when the leaves were becoming ash in my dreams that a young boy helped me save the branches. I gave them memories of Los Angeles, standing in an old black coat beneath of neon sign, alone and my skin cracked like fins from the January ocean and watching the blinking green-glow and laughing to no one, because there was no one to laugh to but myself and god and friends on a different coast of the continent. I told them how I sat on the roof of my car and drank gin from a bottle and stole food for a homeless dog that rested beside me that night, watching the sun roll up the Pacific.

"Why do you write of horror?"

"To break free of slavery you have to disgust your masters."

"That is not an answer."

"I want to be able to truly kiss my lover."

I kept my back to the ground after they left, letting the insects crawl into my clothes to be next to the songs of Solomon that have survived thousands of years, in my blood and in theirs, the words of ancient people falling asleep together in silence, listening to the mechanical rhythm of the cars below.

10:53

I have had to live with all of the time and experience of this past week inside of me and now my body is swollen; I touch my skin and water moves through the organic fabric and it stays over the muscle like damp paper, my tattoos stretching into bruises. My ears feel clouded with fluid but I hear every sound. I am inside-out. I recognize everything.

I continue to drink, cups next to my bed, green glass bottles all over my bedroom floor and I have to walk on them, my arms outstretched, balancing as they roll and shatter, pieces of whatever is left over stuck in my feet and the marks on my thighs. I have kaleidoscope soles now and when I sit in the sun I can stretch my arches and toes and compare the color of shrapnel (some are clear, others opaque from the bridges of cell growth), which is like reading the future and the past together, as if I had gone back to create my own life.

I map my face in the same manner, the lines around the cheekbones from starvation, the scars on my chin from an empty stomach. I have tried to pull of the expressions, but they are attached to the nerves and my body rejected different cartilage, even the black and peach powders, which rolled off of my soft jaw with the liquid that was already gathering inside of me before I knew what it was, blaming my river-body on the heat and sweat. I can feel the bacteria in my abdomen and the beginnings of bones. Only my lips stay static because they have remembered you, even if we have just met.

I have more to give you but the water is still leaking out of the source into my chest, its own mouth like a cervix, dumping out mucous and blood. I am horrified to see myself cut open and only find organs and a spine as I know the worlds in my capillaries, the cocoons that look like marrow, the foxes that crawl out of my liver, the apples and sugar and genderless criminals hanging from my neck. There is a surface with the microscopic, fertilized egg sharing its space that can create life or rupture a fallopian tube.

I want to write prayers to emotion, because that must be what exists once the limbs decompose, and in my mind gravity and mathematics and animals and heaven are made of the matter of feeling, the force behind full connection.

3:15

A psychic once asked me what I was fighting against, and I could not really answer her with honesty, but I gave her some part-truth and she accepted it while blinking her eyes. I realized today (which is the past, which feels like early-fall) that I am trying to tear away from myself, from my limbs, which feel too fleshy for what is inside, which I know is more than tendons and blood -- blood, which should have a powerful plural as it can come out of my skin and eyes, and I see its blue-purple shine in my veins that are thinner than my own fingers, and perhaps yours (I do not know as you have not touched me). All of the things I have called hell are inside of me, wanting my attention. I may never have children but I am already a parent to those images and if I ignore them, they come to me while I am sleeping, like infants, and I give them space. I can be gentle to evil because I sometimes feel that all of human loneliness is radiation from god's abandonment of the angels.

I tried to read William Blake yesterday morning but he gives me too much space and the sexual texture of his work is like speaking to god when you cum, but without the physical expression I shook until I thought about him/her. I do not understand why drugs are necessary when there are organs close to your palms which have a natural direction towards un-reality, a communion to the outside of yourself where you can connect to the very ancient of our species, which is the same as writing your name on the water.

I am not feeling much because I am full of practicality, scared to know what I am and why Rabia cried. I want to cover my head and go to Japan and have books of my own work and the work of others on my arms and legs and coming through my eyes and sometimes my mouth (although only my truth should fill my lips when they thin with age) but I know the need for a straight mind so I wear simple diamonds and sapphires--part of the poetry of earth--instead of the spines of deer.



I need to rest again and pour water into my body and over my head until there is not another sound and I notice myself. 

7:37

I have wanted to give beauty for days, sentences whose characters spill over each other, twisting like proteins; clean skin, warm eyes, smooth clothing, real gemstones, kindness, softness, knowledge and wisdom and limbs not pounding with with exaggerated muscle. I have wanted to fill my life with truth and discipline but ended up vomiting on my lap, my fingers covering my mouth but holding nothing, fluid and acid moving out of my lips, more honest than anything I have ever thought of creating. I need to be loved and taken care of, held when I am ill. I would rather cry on the bathroom floor than release some of my pride and ask for companionship.

I have separated myself from my craft and I do not know if it is because I need to concentrate on what I have already cut out from between my legs, what I have put on paper, what is in front of me and cracking inside my aching stomach. I am pushing too far, giving the world a stillborn idea that cannot move its body, the umbilical cord like wrapping paper. My mind is lobular, sick placenta.

I don't want to eat, I don't want to breathe, I don't want to clean off the film on my teeth or remove the crust around the corners of my eyes that make my intestines turn the coffee and water and sugar when I catch it in the mirror. My blood is jelly. I am in the place where husbands rape their wives.

I think the acne on my chin is imitating constellations; I will follow the red spots with a scalpel, mapping my face with scars.

I want to wear the fur of my dead childhood cat. I want the molars that are falling out of my grandmother's jaw. I want to cry until I find myself swimming in water at a place that I can only see with my eyes turned inwards, where mutilated, lost animals recognize me as their sibling.

I felt you watching me in my dream, naked in the blue-black tide, the waves full of eggs and insects crawling into my body. I am as fecund and vain as soil, sprouting life from my salted pores.

9:59

Perhaps Jesus was Mary's creativity, fathered by god, sliding into her body while she slept or ate. It gathered wisdom as the years passes, teaching and healing others, curing illnesses, feeding the hungry with words and images, bringing a man back to life after he had fallen into the death of his own subconscious. The productions of her mind were so clear and impressive that they had to be mutilated, tortured, displayed for her entire community. She may have cried at the feet of her own destroyed passion, which she entombed, and within days it came back to her, strengthened, moving rocks and soil despite its scars and cracked joints. Perhaps Mary wrote the gospels, daring enough to suggest that her work should replace the mythology of her own culture. Perhaps all of Christianity is a celebration of the intellectual pregnancy of an unwed teenage girl. 

Crucifixes are worn to remind us of the inevitable resurrection of poetry. 

5:03

There are loud voices all around me driving me mad with their inflections and elongated pronunciations like there are other words underneath stretching out the sentences, about the universality of life: loneliness, the delicacy and fragility of time. 

I need silence and novels and whiskey. I need this storm to be the only noise in my head as I become wearied of the internal-speak with its flashing memories that are totally useless, telling me things of childhood and cutting me open so that the ghosts that try to get inside my hips and float between my fingers can pick inside my stomach for the food I have swallowed because they are not strong enough to hold their own. I am reading cards over coffee and learning Muslim stories, writing prayers to Joan of Arc for people who may have not existed, but who want to have their lives told to those with different shapes of arms, clear faces, people who did not come out of the sea but sprung from jagged rocks and soil. My words may not make sense, but I promise that they will form into proteins, clouding your eyes while you sleep; you may see redheaded women with bruised teeth and grotesque, mutated animals in your dreams. Think of me in the future when the doctor pulls the milky cataract out of the lens.

Assist the things that terrify you with their power, work with your fear, stretch its plasticine and chew its calories. Whatever causes horror in your animal-mind is simply trying to welcome you back to what you are.  

My bestial temporal lobes are full of lunacy, an ecstatic form of sanity; I am a true lunatic, talking to the moon.




I do not know what I am writing I do not know my body and my mind I do not know gender or the ecosystem of soil but I know the rotation of emotion in the color of sonic, neon blue that exists in the ridiculous gray matter that sends electricity into my spinal fluid. I will raise my shirt and show you my breasts and the glowing indigo in the curve of my back.



I leave my journal open on the back porch and ghosts come out of the fog, wanting to read my work. 

"No," I say. "It is not ready yet."


I have to write of the things that wake me from sleep and leave me alone at 3 am, cold in the cruel July heat, all of my dreams sucked from my ankles. Writing is the only thing that saves me from death. I am inundated in my own sensuality, I have fed my blood to demons and flowers and replaced it with chemicals; I would not have survived any other way.


I am a witch. I belong in water. I have created my own personality, carved the angel out of marble, freed Botticelli from Hell. 


There are oceans turning on Venus. I live for beauty and freedom, two words I cannot even define. I hear the singing of androgynous women and see a person with dark circles underneath their eyes move their thin fingers and write poetry in the air that I can only read when I sleep, words my mind wrote while I was busy living. What is inside of me?





Women who pray often wear veils. They split their knees on the floors of holy rooms, tearing open their skin to be like a dead prophet, their wrists and foreheads dripping onto the ground.

Abyssus Abyssum Invocat. Christi crux est mea lux.

9:35

I had a dream that my journal was full. I turned the pages and saw words upside down, pictures, prayers. I always see when I close my eyes with enough images and lunacy for you to wash your body with, drink in the hot July, massage into the bruises of your feet. My head is hungrier than my limbs and I desire the filthy words of Anais because they have more honesty than the poems of a mystic starving his cells of water in a desert, the coyotes refusing to come near because his sweat is so sick. I heard once that only women can be close to god, but I did not listen, because I feel that I should have been born a man with a man's freedom, his hard body and strong jaw. My lover calls me a beautiful boy, a prince; my brain is full of ambiguity and non-reality. I understand that part of my happiness is accepting that I will be lost forever.

I do not understand myself, I do not understand this gray-morning sky with its lights turned down, I do not understand how fruit is grown and how the cut on my leg healed without me paying attention to it. There are ghosts everywhere. The sound of the ocean may be the oldest thing on earth and I hate being locked in the mountains because they are often too beautiful and I live in the bathtub because I am a witch, a womb-man that needs to be close to water. A creature that desires beautiful skin.  For the first time in years I miss California with its loud waves and the surfboards on the porch, the pot full of jasmine rice on the stove, the sand in my mouth that I thought would suffocate me. I could fall back into the sea, but I am scared that it would spit me out, and I could never live with that rejection.

I only want to write to you, whatever you are. 
I feel that these words can be useless, a waste of time.
I want them to pack into your joints like cement.
I want to cut into you skin and lick whatever is underneath.
I want to replace your heart with an apple, eat your thoughts.
I want to give you keys, but tell you not to open the room.
(The key will fill the house with blood if you do)
I want to translate the myths in your mind.
True poetry is cruel.
Wild animals have been waiting for us, at the edge of the desert.
Move through my body like air.
If you turn me inside out, you will find fur.
When I die, remove my fingers and use them as runes.
God is red.
Use what is between my legs as cream.
I want to disgust you.
I want to terrify you.
I want to give you the words that make life worth living.



My skull has been cracked open with a hammer and I am seeing things in the grass that are not there. I am sewing emotion and plastic into my skin. I detach soul from body and go back to a life on ships and in lighthouses, eating fish and sleeping in hammocks, surrounded by water that I cannot drink. I want to be free from Hell.

12:42

I have been awake for hours and I feel as if the day is almost done and in many ways the life outside of myself agrees with me, as the sky is a perfect and soft and reflecting off of the leaves gray. There are times that I see the color of blood in everything, mutated to greens, purples, and yellows; blood is subjective, ageless. I feel it in my thin wrists shining blue through the skin, branching up into my palms where the lines are supposed to reveal my future but I only smell the perfume from this morning and see my grandmother over fifty years ago before my birth--which was an accident--with her small wrists that were not yet ruined by gases filling her lungs that I am sure carried memories...what happens to what our cells remember when the organs are removed from our bodies?

The new novel is moving slowly and I have not found that rhythm that coincides with the genuine of my work and I feel that I am creating a structure that is not for myself, but the demotic idea of literature, which pours rubbing alcohol onto the human brain (and perhaps those of other creatures, because interconnection begins with how we view our environments through the filter of our personalities, which is just an encompassing word for the genetics of emotion). We need new books full of insanity. I want to create words that stick with the reader and drive them mad because only through the lenses of fear and anxiety are you able to see the disease in the marrow of your bones, rattling in your body like rosary beads.



I hear the lonely echo in the cavities of my skeleton while I walk and the sound reminds me of an empty hospital hallway. I sometimes do not remember that I am made of flesh because I am not sure if I am human -- my father speaks to apple trees while I silently rub my fingers along microchips, writing pages for satellites.



I like insects and love letters written by sane-less women in the 18th century because they are microcosms of a different universe than the one I experience now with my inebriated eyelashes and numb fingerprints. I am obsessed with anatomy because I have bruised molars and as a child I watched a man play a man speaking to the skull of a man he knew as a boy, his words written in 1600 on a different continent by someone that also had eye sockets and pupils. 



I had once believed that reality was the hallucination of my diseased brain but I now understand that life is true because I could have never imagined the fractals of trees.



We decided to trade bodies, talking over phones that were made by slaves. We agreed to share fat and muscle, lose fertility, but I think that we should keep our hands, as they are coded with the mechanics of our neural signals, maps that can be used to identify our numbers.




I do not light candles at Mass because of the normality of prayer, but only because I have fingernails and that are clear and thick; I touch the useless statues because they are made out of the elements of earth that hold the bloody-blue salt-water where organisms pop out of the surface like ideas. The earth is turned inside out and we sit on the beach laughing, listening to the sounds of the waves, which is only the rush of fluid through veins.

6:41

I did not know what to write first, so I thought of words and dreams, William Blake, the man in the suit walking in front of me who turned around and said:

"You are raving mad, Mr. Artaud."

There are sentences I want to give to you and sentences I want to give to him and her and those I know who encompass both. I stood naked in front of my window this morning and saw a infant male cardinal eating insects off of the side of this home; I walked in the high grass of the woods yesterday and prayed to a mushroom growing on the side of a log. I saw a white oak that was 150 years old and much larger than my body and life and perhaps more beautiful with its innumerable limbs and green-brown hair (or eyes, I do not know what trees use to see), its skin a better shade than my own. 

I love cardinals because their feathers are better than blood (synonymous with what is fundamental and of the greatest importance), holier than any ecclesiastic wearing their chemical colors of life, the mutilated and erotic body of a mystic hanging around their necks. All of god is flesh and fingers and I do not understand how Catholics can believe a human's soul is more important than that of a bird -- the stretching of the cosmos (god's subconscious) is made for all of life, which I feel is more abundant than marble statues of saints and water blessed by lonely, sick men. 




I do not know what it means to dream only of ghosts but I wake in the middle of the night saying:

"His eyes! His eyes!"

"Daniel, you should of come home."

I sleep and speak to men I have never met, Spanish noblewomen who wear the faces of goats. A woman orgasms inside of me and hands me a rosary made with bright red beads, made from stones more precious than rubies and not found on Earth. I see the water we feed to hummingbirds, as if we are giving them Christ's blood.




Green and Red are sisters, they say. Green, the color of Life; Red, the color of god.




I have finished the novel and started another, full of different words, and now I am back in the room of my own mind, speaking to a cursed animal that is a Sufi. I am writing letters through plastic and satellites to my split-heart on a different continent. I am awake in a morning where light is yellow and the sounds of water are deafening; my fingertips on my own lips feel like a hymn to the power of molecules and the sensation of touch.

11:00

I had a dream last night where I was escorted to see a man in a laboratory, who was trimming the dead branches off of a small plant. He was speaking Latin and I asked him what he wanted; he told me to forget my ideas and my mind.

"Why should I lose what I know?"

"Because," he said, "I am going to teach you everything."




I woke up, repeating his words in my head.




I feel my thoughts falling off of with my skin and I am happy with my hallucinations of imagination where I create scenes and lines that are something of beauty, even if they have been filtered with the dirt of my ego. I am only full when I write, like I am sticking cotton back into the empty spaces of my organs because I have eaten myself; I have cannibalized my limbs and fingers, my eyes are made of marble, phosphorescent from future pollution. I am born again and again and again, but with the same mind, whose frontal lobe is the only piece I have fingered. I feel like I cannot think through the close-to-summer rain which is just imbricated color, layered like a person. My own universe of friendship, work, idea, and love (which I have only had patience for) is so expansive when I braid my eyelashes that I laugh over my desire to understand the Cosmos and the order of G(g)od, which may be an expression of the same thing, like how science and poetry are split embryos. 

I am giving most of my possessions away, even my library, as I do not want to feel responsible for any of it; I have the weight of sanity and words on my uterus, which is all I can bear. It is raining and I am alive, and I am born again and again and again and I am in everything I see; I am alive and in a female body, which means I have chosen happiness and beauty. I live to touch all beautiful things. I want to celebrate by talking, and making love.

I was born with a violent and dark thing inside of me, but it has grown intelligent; through time, it has become gentle. Or perhaps all of this is fear, which is only a thought that can be easily disregarded.



I have coffee and cream, sparkling water, and cake; I have hands and fingers and dried skin on my lips. I am surrounded and stitched with the complexity of life.

2:36

Taken from my journal on June 1, 2013:

Poetry is a way of translating the mystery of life, but it will always remain a mystery. 

The absolute miracle of life.

Sitting beneath the apple tree and understanding the particular set of circumstances for human evolution, which includes the ability to appreciate the taste of fruit and the color green. I am taken in by the fascination of experiencing the universe as this person and the universe having an experience of sentience through me. I am a part of existence as much as an exoplanet full of oceanic mammals; I do not say that with arrogance, but as a statement of reality, which is a prayer to no one in particular--I sometimes feel god is the name we give to the sensation of corporeality, staggering and ordinary.

My existence is the result of absolute chance. I am thankful to microbes, salt-water, death, sex, time, language, and medicine. I am thankful to the knowledge of past humans, who are now intangible, except in my DNA.

To say god, whisper carbon oxygen hydrogen to the grass, your clothes, the dry skin on your hands.

I am purely human--by biology and the spirit given to me by god. 

June 9, 2013. 2:47.

I am full of words and useless emotion and when I sit silently I hear a still voice say that it no longer wants to live; I wake and feel the absolute excitement, and beauty, of life. I love summer and the word June, which feels like an exclamation of the neurotoxicity of warm air color and fruit and I love birds because they know their purpose is to breed and sing, with no thoughts on the glorious voice of their songs; I love my white blood cells because they know the pleasure of untangling pathogens and the comfort of bone marrow. 

I am here with my thoughts in the middle of the elegance of science and do not understand my own design. I feel weak and unaware but reading the first line of poetry sparks me alive and I have begun to notice a seal-song in the ocean of my subconscious and the deep, androgynous notes are full of a longing and understanding that horrify me, that may not even belong to my person, but to the millions of years that have created one woman whose gray organ protected by a fragile skull contains the amino acids necessary for creating life.

I can do nothing else but listen to the thunder and sit in the sun (a ridiculous star in god's own dark mind) which is not precious in the complexity of space but it was there to create my body and burn my child-skin. 

I can become lost in the ecstatic experience of a star tearing the layers of an organ off of my body. Eyes are like planets, an angel's jewelry.

Dream Poetry. May 19, 2013.

Months ago I had a dream
where ghosts laughed at me,
pushing through my skin to lick my ribs;
they said my husband had died,
that I will marry
a dead man.
I saw you then,
your sweet face
crying underneath the weight
of their smiles.
The air was lavender and
pastel-gray above your head,
a delicate, polluted afternoon.
I walked through the noise
and told you a secret:
I have never been in love.
On my knees I promised
to carry your bones
on my back, make clothes
out of your skin, and place
whatever is left of your fingers
inside of me.
You kissed my hand
and the ghosts crawled on the floor,
looking for their tongues.

This morning I stood naked
in the kitchen, listening to
the silent May,
slicing a pear in half
and placing a plate in front
of an empty chair.
Sitting across from you
I reached to the middle of
the table and felt your
open mouth against my palm,
your fingertips playing with
the strands of your teeth
tied around my wrist,
dyed a soft purple from
the rising sun leaking

through the window. 

11:25

There are birds screaming at me because I am sitting near their nests in the pines, but I do not care; I speak to them, give them words whose tone of voice reminds them that I am an animal without claws and eyes too similar to theirs. They leave me alone.

I do not know what to say think feel so I spoke to my lover--who is like my own soul--and he told me he did not believe in the separation of body and mind but that the electric current of thought was no different than my automatic circulation of blood and that I should pay no attention to what is mutated and swims in the lobes because the water of my brain does not match reality. I agreed, and we kissed, but I thought that imagination itself was of god (even if It does not exist) and that the reality of my experience of the universe is absolutely ordinary, but nonetheless remarkable. There is not a division between the fantastic and the mundane.

I began to think of myself and to whom I was speaking : who is the I that talks and how have they lived and died, do they have gender (a word that dissolved when speaking of the ego), what is between my marrow and will I remember what happens after death because through fantasy I sometimes feel my conception. My skin crumbled in my palms so I listed all of the colors that reminded me of my lover's skin and semen: aero, amaranth, azure, bone, byzantine, cardinal, champagne, deer, eminence, french wine, gold, harlequin, indigo, jade, jasmine, june bud, lemon, lust, magenta, misty rose, moonstone, palatinate blue, silver, patriarch, peru, pink pearl, psychedelic purple, rich lilac, saffron, seashell, silver, soap, timberwolf, ultramarine, violet, white smoke.

Truth came back with its clouds and technology, warm thick May-storm air and I breathed because I am sewn into the fabric of reality and I watch the infant birds come out of their nests to the grass with their soft mouths and I understand the anger of birds more than my own language. Their feathers are more expansive than thought, the stretching of their wings cosmogyral.

4:25

I have many minds.

I feel that sanity is split into two shores with an ocean in the middle, where I rock and glide on the waves that look like lucid icebergs but never touch my palms to the sand. 

I bring myself back to reality, back to my real life and all I feel in the morning while in bed after hours with friends and wine is my broken heart and loneliness, not only in my own body, but filling the room all the way up to the wooden beams and fans that are no different than me, that came from the same ground. I touch the dirt, I touch silk, I touch hair and knives and computer keys and holy books and I know it all through the sensation of an absolutely broken heart, which is not sadness or anger or depression, but eyes that are being cracked like eggs, losing their shells, coming back to their reality of malleable, sensitive organs.

The color of spring was too much before I fell asleep and all I could see was the brightness of green, the thick grass, the ivory-diluted-blue sky. Color is stimulating and I feel it around the letters I put on paper and I know that I am nothing -- human -- but I am also everything and I have no sense of god but myself and all that is around me, all of which is boring and ordinary. I think my cat's fur is metaphysical because we were next to each other one night and I was amazed that two different species with varied bodies and ideas of normalcy that grew on separate forks of the evolutionary branch in our milky fingered galaxy came to be resting on the same blanket, loving one another, sharing air and water. However, there is nothing more common in our culture: I paid money to adopt her from a shelter while in college and I am imprinted as her mother. That does not our meeting any less remarkable. Sometimes I feel that I need no other god but the simple, glorious intoxication of reality.

I am inundated with paradox:

I am full of enthusiasm for life and laughter, but sometimes the water feels like suicide.

I am alone, but found in everyone.

There is no sense of "I" but the thoughts and words keep coming, the desires, wishes, and fantasies.






I am driven, but I do not know towards what; I want to give you something, You, with your varied luminous faces and hands that I know I will love once we touch.

10:54

I do not have time to feel to let my fingers gain moisture, to close my eyes and open them to something I have created which is my only comfort as I live in my insanity, the back breaking madness of my fucking mind that pushes me to the corners of what I consider to be reality and forces me to create words and images that are so awful, so thick and fat with terror that I do not know who could love them or bear to touch the person whose skin they fell out of.


Last night in my sleep I told a German man of how to recognize ghosts. I said that you will feel them slide across torso and every hair on your body will move, especially the ones on the lower back. I said that you have to speak to the air, ask what is there, and try not to be terrified.


I have so many more dreams, most made of love, that I do not remember because I give myself to meaningless tasks and my laziness. I give myself to fear which is in every cell of my body like DNA and memories and the semen of men who lived thousands of years ago in some cold land of Eastern Europe and I wonder if they cared for the women they were inside of, if they liked animals, if there was some beauty in the ceaseless snow.


I said to my lovers Hey, let's go get a drink and we barely eat so after a the gin cleans out our cavities we are laughing at the chilled May sun and the loud blue jays and I tell them I can't breathe because of the claustrophobia of the mountains, that my heart is turning blue, and they laugh and touch my skin and I wonder what has happened to real romance, to the soul-song dance of communication between the emotion of the given people that kiss not only from the genetic desire but because there might be a piece of poetry to be shed as summer comes and the orgasm of my words and clitoris are not for my pleasure alone, but because I think I have found something so beautiful that it will give you a reason to stay alive.



How do you dissolve fear, like fur in acid? How do you experience true intimacy?


I hate that what I work for and love most has been learned and did not come from my lips as naturally as a crying and vomit. I took all of the words in, digested them with milk, created something already known but smelling of my thighs and fingerprints. I like to think that if I never touched my mother like those great beautiful children who lived in forests with their furred siblings and matted hair that all of the words would still exist in the voice that had never been touched by language, born deep in the body, lower than the bones, in the true, quiet dark. I read a story about an abused child who could not communicate but when she heard classical music she stood still, full with the experience of real emotion. 


Syllables are the piano pieces of my soul.


Chilly, Mohammed-May sun.

5:52

I was looking at a cardinal yesterday, beautiful red, watching the rain fall down the lines and clumps of its feathers its body  rounded and the water was delicate like liquid cotton and I thought he was beautiful and so dignified. How embarrassing to be human.

The novel takes on new forms and ideas with passing weeks and I sew them together (no wonder my fingers are blistered!) and feel relaxed because I finally smell spring, lithe life-full, the healthy scent of dirt and now yellow flowers are spotted on the side of the road and I have patience because if the buds can survive their winter mine will eventually pass and I will stand with my bright blossoms the only grace against a background of trash.

(punctuation is unnecessary, words are flowing like strands of streams all over each other).

There was something so human about watching the blood-bird and when I am called back to New York I can't imagine sitting anywhere but in the claustrophobia of mountains with my lover and my bones and my insanity, my insanity like a song. New York has forgotten its artists and its witchcraft and the drumming of feet on its cement sometimes does not feel as heavy as the silence at 3 am, my mind cracked open like an egg, blood and words rushing against the lobes like currents. I was given to the city during winter sitting in his apartment in his shirt and underwear and sweat, reading the paper and watching the snow fall onto the roof next door but it was not as lovely as this rabbit fur rain and his furniture has been moved, a young family lives there -- I hope their children sit where my thighs were, keeping the snow company. 

The words call me back. They drown me past all emotion to the very bottom, to the true dark where I find oxygen in the sea-salt cold, my throat expanding and contracting, language losing its construction like the unzipping deoxyribonucleics so that with angel eyes I can see all of time, exactly what I came from. 

4:26

I am trying too hard to finish the second draft of the novel before it is ready. I feel pregnant and my stomach is tearing at the stretch marks -- the ideas come, I wave their smoke down into my cells and wait for them to become saturated, finally pumping through my body. I am impatient. I know the emotion of a new theory but not its details and I stay awake at night running my fingers over threads that have not been stitched, losing rest over the excitement of a potential gown.

I sit, I breathe, I ignore my lover and create new ones. I read, I clean, I buy beautiful clothes. I meditate and feel frustrated with the instructions from a book given to me by a friend because I do not relate to my body in terms of solar plexus and opening the abdomen which seem alien and not blown from the place where words and relation share the same architecture. I am bored with the pictures of waterfalls because they are solid and do not have the music of true water, pebbly splash wave; I want to concentrate on the pleasure of orange and blue, men with acne scars, soft velvet pulsating fur. My anxiety is ratting the veins in my toes.

My desire to create is so strong and last night during dinner with friends I counted the hairs on their heads so I could write to each strand later and afterwards I fell in my bed and watched a documentary of the "destructive acts of god" floods and hurricanes which are nothing more than cries from a cracking earth. Pollution poetry.

I imagine rivers were once sweet. Air puffed pink lungs and deer wore silver crowns. Strange and wonderful to be alive when boys put coca cola cans on their altars and our gods wear lipstick. We are still ultimately human.

I want to read Van Gogh's oils made from the ovary of a Madonna. I want to write with the same colors, have my letters be in constant, organic motion.

I am watching as all shades of time blend into my own.

6:50

I have barely been sleeping, but when I do my vision is in an unimaginable shape with new ideas and forms of people that come from some desire I have not yet spoken to. There are things that exist inside of me that I do not know, that I call darkness because of its understood presence but vague body, layered beneath the light and clotted with my old, useless memories. Everything that I do not want to see comes from there with some grotesque mask and when I speak to my lover I want to put my index fingers in his mouth and tear off his skin, find what is underneath.

He has been calling me insane and perhaps I am. I thought I would be excited for winter on the east coast, but the sequined snow is the only elegance in this town and I let it run through my small fingers, slide in the space between my breasts. I miss New York but I love my sister and last Saturday I heard the birds outside the kitchen window singing. I could lose my modernity, my comfort, but if the birds did not come back for spring I know I would die. I am proud that they can survive beneath our wires to make nests in the corners of our gray buildings.  I am so weak that I struggle to keep my eyes open in the cold breezes.

I may not have much love (that is a lie I am full of it) but I have nature and art and beauty and poetry and I feel that is enough. I pack it in my broken mind like cement, plant words in the unnatural soil. 

I am struggling with accepting the work I have created which begs to be very modern, full of unrestrained lines and different genders, murder, shedding limbs. It is graceful and comes from a desire to evolve my surroundings. As a culture we need new experiences, mythologies, gods; our minds and insides need female priests and presidents with HIV. We need creation stories of how the world came from the blood of a prostitute as much as microchips. We need to come home to our own intelligence.

I do not know how I feel I have the right to express such sentiments when I am hiding from the world on my little farm, waiting for warmer weather so I can be fucked in the sun. I waver between my desires of soft clothes and skin to the needs of novels and art never understanding to allow both room or how they are practically the same.


I resent that I am very, very human.