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. 

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.