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.