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.