these concrete walls weren't made for you and me

these concrete walls weren't made for you and meeeeeeeeeeeee

if cats could talk if cats could talk if cats could talk

o’malley pleased me with ancient tremblors
stirred cream in secret crevices
depapered my wall

his lazy keys banged a tarantella story
a potential disney masterpiece
at every corner

his arched back was an unending broken prowl
a daydream long forgotten
ferns and vines

semaphoric interpretive sniff
one inch from the point of tears
or howls

all along collecting whiskered trophies
a lonely dinner for one
the secret life of cogs

passing back through in november

okay, i went back to school (twice, maybe three times) and i missed you! and i remembered what i forgot, forgot what i remembered, and came back to visit.
i wanted to tell you about how i spit recently, in a rehearsal room;
i wanted to tell you about the deep feelings of failure i wrestle with;
and about how i went into the woods and then came out to think about the woods.
there's so much i want to tell you!
i took a class last year on art as political change, like this: http://artaspoliticalchange.blogspot.ca/
i have seen a thousand thousand things since i have seen your faces
i have gotten lost a hundred times.
maybe getting lost is my artistic practice.
maybe i'm not lost at all.

i wanted to tell you about how my mom is getting older, and my grandmother has dementia,
and i made a solo performance piece about how i asked my grandmother about slavery in our family history because i am trying to think and fight my way through whiteness and my own personal history, how whiteness happened to us and to whom i owe reparations yet somehow also acknowledging an inherent worth...anyway, i made a piece about it.
i wanted to tell you that i am living in toronto! in a second-floor apartment that isn't a commune, but it's nice, and it's above a vacuum cleaner store.

i wanted to tell you about my dreams and how i'm scared of getting older and i'm a kid forever and i have like these waves of nostalgia and i also try to thank my way to falling in love with the world just about every day, or every week
i'm taking a break from falling in love with a person; i have fallen so hard so many times and for now i am flying solo and it is strange and different;
i'm reading papers on queer ecology and books with titles like "why we dance" (ha) and "research theatre: the ecocide casebook." i'm studying performance ethnography--like how to know people by making performance with/about them. i'm reminded heuristically of my obsession with communalism and my love for making things with friends.
i notice being older! like, seeing people in their early 20's and i'm not there!
that is another post.
i made a zine about being 28; but i think i lost it. now i'm 29!

things i still love: cooking, love, patches, edges, exploring, laughing, sitting on the kitchen floor
things i'm trying out: graduate school, institutional affiliation, living closer to my parents, menu plans, making soup stock and freezing it, having a smart phone, not going to therapy, being 'single', cycling back to posting on this blog.

desire: to create a third, a fourth, a fifth woman out of shadow

problem: buttered potatoes in tupperware for days, a tax bill, a paraphilia for my alone body in high ceilings

desire: everything should be beautiful and glass cut and fine

problem: the front facing camera

i have snatches of it - coming over late at night to tickle me in my bed and complain about my elbows digging in, trying to remember any of the names of the characters from how to get away with murder. a fast morning and my lungs pushing up against the day at the beach feeling. the sun in everything. but what if i don't get to own myself?

"like, i’m a poor mentally ill person whose life seems like it’s lived on a different planet from day to day and whose goals and future are dependent on a million precarious factors beyond my control. i don’t think people like me experience ‘fulfillment’ in the same way as other people?"

the mosquitoes are huge this year but i'm not covered in bites. i'm surrounded by people wanting so much all the time. and i want so much all the time. 

desire: to belong only to me

desire: to never be alone

desire: to never need temperature regulation technology

i wrote a photoessay about communes i've lived in

feel free to read it if you want; but i'm posting here to let you know that you might be in a picture or two in the early parts of the essay. please let me know if you want me to blur out yr face, happy to do it. but let's not forget that yr face is beautiful, as elz would say.

https://medium.com/@elialbert/adventures-in-post-scarcity-capitalism-d9919f06d1af#.jubhpibk7

resolve

1. make no hot baths out of misery when you run out of your own.
2. so don't try to reach for god for other people.
3. getting what you want is a reaction. 
4. women women women oh women
5. let your body lead you into prayer. it knows. it can speak the fluttering, the thin sheet of glass, the immovable wall, the silk dress on the chaise lounge, the stubbled knee, the breath stealing icy wind, the cornflower sigh. you don't have to.
6. keep your promises, keep clean, keep going.
7. deep Emma Goldman jewess
8. it simply has to cost. no way round it.
9. speak up but not over.
10. godly and ungodly AT THE SAME TIME.
11. stop performing when you're fucking. ugh
12. the dreams fantastical don't make you good.
13. when a person tells you that you hurt them, you don't get to decide that you didn't.
14.  hummmmmmm ahhhh mmmmmmm
15. get towed under by beauty once a day
16. not so many things quite matter as much as you think

i.
mira, my gerald ford landscape
the wide out flat kissing the fingertips of hurricane season
far from the shadowy wingspan of gargoyles
pricked by the spines on fallen palm fronds

there's the possibility of children in my body
who leave home too
and the diaspora rings its way back round the globe
wouldn't that be funny.
some child high above the Pacific, eyes looking to China
hoping to get away too

funny, i guess, if you believe that's where it started

ii.

she's got our names curled into an old piece of vellum
tucked into her fist as she strides down to the river

and on that mud-caked bank
she tosses us high in the air
and we sink and we sink and we sink

some royal Wilhelm gets an idea

iii.

grains of sand piggybacked on an old hex
make me
violet at the throat
salmon in the head
white for all my bones
where's the first cocking of the fist?
nor you nor i can say what sun shone on the first slip

iv.

a few months ago, i started thinking something like this. if we all repeat enough together, we're bound to hit something that works. it justifies all the bad. or it gives it a place. now, was i being charitable? most of all to myself? because i am no longer in motion.

"Poor little sausage- dedication, passion, beauty, empathy, emaciation, lack of self worth, desperation and abuse. Exploitation from men and jealousy from other women...poor little sausage... but is this exposing the dark underbelly of what it is to be an extraordinary young woman in a misogynistic world or is it glamourising and eroticising it? Is it exploitative itself? Lets see shall we, its a fine line."

"she leaves one cage for another with gilded bars, she must excell or be forced to return to that monsters clutches, poor little dove...I do hope they don't break her tiny wings, here's hoping she finds her strength and doesn't end up becoming some old rich guy's play thing"

and with her hand on my face, again "are we liberated or are we...liberated"
kissing her fingertips, strands of hair in her face
oh god

v.
it is hard to be alone with myself, though i am practiced at it