12:20

There are no ghosts left in New York.


I have been dreaming, but my mind is interrupted by life, anger, and animals, so I have only known physical rest. The air smells like shit in the city and the trees are thin, without souls, their vein-arms reaching into a sky that wears pollution like a wig, human voices drowning the sound of thought.

There are old churches, but I do not believe that the dead are interested in stones; the bodies of the living fill their muscles with ego and worry until they bulge out of the skin like tumors. People keep speaking like their voices will build antlers but the sounds dissipate into the air, uncalcified, strengthening the smog. Artists lose their minds cleaning tables and sweeping the floors of bars, remembering a time when the avenues were full of clay that embraced the curves of their feet.

I am tired and hungry and I feel concrete pouring down my throat, cutting into my intestines and breeding with my blood, charming its way into the valves of my heart.

I am leaving with my lover, to a place where the air is full of water.



Jesus has left Brooklyn. The graffiti has been washed off the brick to make room for works by paid painters; the words of prophets were cleaned from the streets when the people of color were taken from their blocks.

Ask God if New York deserves your prayers.

10:15

Dream -- May 05, 2014

I buy an army bag at a yard sale from a woman with messy, cropped, bleached hair, who looks older only because of her desperation to sell her belongings. I like the bag because it reminds me of the one I own now, but thinning and stained; I rummage through the pockets, watching the muscles on the woman's arms stretch the dried skin around her tattoos. I find handfuls of beautiful crystal jewelry in the bag and I rub them in my palms, hiding a pair of square-cut earrings surrounded by diamonds that I can see my reflection in.

The woman panics, searching for a specific piece with enormous sentimental value. I deny knowing about the jewelry while fingering the stones in my pockets, the edges wrapped in an antique silk scarf covered in gold script.

9:30

May 1, 2014.

Where are all the ghosts in Brooklyn? It is 2pm and I am drunk on wine, writing with a pen given to me by my partner. A beautiful man is sitting across from me on the L and I want to see him as a mirror, reflecting my face and tattoos back into my eyes. I want to see myself; I want to know how I have the same neck and eye sockets I had as a child.

I have dreams about snakes and human teeth found in the fossils of ferns and I think about my partner, a person whose loss of gender gives them the strength to grow fur.

How do we know ourselves without animals? Where does the tissue of dead minds rest between all the boroughs and brownstones? It is easier to find ghosts in grass and deer.


May 2, 2014

Life is alive in Bushwick -- I have skin, capillaries, oxygen, and ice cream.


May 3, 2014

I do not remember my dreams from last night, but I know I drunkenly moved through Manhattan, my laughter disgusting, fouling the air.

When I think of wanting I find novels, animals, and Matt's limbs braided with my bones.

3: 19

Dream:

I am watching a group of people take pictures by the ocean. The waves began to move, throwing them to their knees, and they smile, feeling foolish for not watching the tide. The water grows thicker, taller, and eventually they are killed by the weight of a breaker, heavier than cement. I hear them scream and I place my palms over my eyes while others laugh, pointing at the cameras bobbing near the surface, the film ruined.

I covered my eyes, not my ears; I listened to them die.





I have had a night of intense dreaming, and I now feel intellectually and physically clean -- I read without difficulty, with understanding and passion. Paragraphs come without struggle, smooth, rinsed with Haitian water. I see myself as an adult woman, full of a self-empathy that is maturing into artistic discipline, and a personal form that is losing its markings of adolescence. I look forward to aging, because it is all I have left; I have developed enough to understand that life is a victim of circumstance and the chaos of my being-born happened almost thirty years ago. I should learn to stop suffering over it.

I woke and wrote and read, wanting words and my own imagination, which is made of beauty, comfort, solitude, femurs, murder, and blood. I wanted to talk about death because I feel it is a part of me as much as my legs and hands; I wanted to tell you about the nightmares of rotting teeth, the disintegration of health, the inability to eat, the fingers poking out of the jaw once the roots broke off, as if another person was trying to come out of my body, wearing my bones.  Molding incisors are a part of my mythology; I am made up of the accumulation of genetics and cellular horror, and when I am quiet I feel a progenitor removing an abscessed molar or giving birth in a small stone home, staining the wooden floors red, listening to the dogs sniff beneath a closed door. The fairy tales of the future will be the translation of dreams and science, a hypnagogic, Jungian view of the soul being alchemized from the animal's experience. People will view life as if through a cathedral window, praying over the bulbs of flowers; magicians will be known for teaching their spirits to clean the petroleum out of food and water. We will not be eroticized without the thoughts of semen gathering into moles that can break the soil or cracking ovaries against the side of a glass bowl to find a small yellow bird singing. Culture and sex will be expressed with the telescope-eyes of the perverse, those who cross boundaries and their child-fear, who fall asleep and speak to the bears in Tibet, who are becoming bodhisattvas. 

I look forward to the future, because it is all we have left. I drop the aversion to insanity to become curious, to give my vision of time so I may have a voice for the development of the years after my death, when I am an immaterial apparition of intelligence. I want my blood to soak into the soil so when a young woman eats food that grows above my body she dreams of sea foam bubbling from her mouth and screams coming from the ocean.  

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.