SLUTS
IT'S AUTUMN
EVERYTHING IS DYING
TIS THE SEASON I PRETEND TO BE A CATHOLICK
BY DRINKING A LOT OF WINE

IMMA TEAR UP THE PROLAPSED ANUS OF THIS TOWN
AND OMG, GONNA RECLAIM THE SOUL
AS AN OBJECT OF STUDY
NO GODS NO RULERS
STILL SWIMMIN IN THE DIVINE

PIERCE MY HEART WITH THE PINPRICK OF THE WILLIS TOWER
I
WILL
BE
GOOOOOOOOOOOOD

after a few months fermenting in the crock...

the last time i wrote here i shared lew welch's chicago poem
yesterday i found some words in my journal from my time in chicago...:

wednesday may 2nd. 6:30am at sheffield and addison waiting for a craigslist ride to madison who never showed...

I have to be hard, hardened to live in this place.
if i care about others, i'll deplete myself.

in this city the poor are spat upon.
 ignored, told they are stupid
and dangerous and sick and wrong
 thrown into jail if they don't get killed in the streets first.

the sound of the el
is the sound of my ribcage cracking
tears of shock and pain leak
from the corners of my eyes
and i weep for the lost everything

for the four of us waiting in a tunnel
deep under the surface of the streets
for a monster to swallow us whole into
its belly
for the operator who spends every night

it is this cleaving
this separation
which makes us unsafe

how do you go out to dinner when so many go hungry?

------------->and Dear you, oh longtime
                 woodlawn englewood garfield park
                      lawndale west humboldt resident---
what do you dream of?
what is your tree of life?

one feeling

coming back from witch camp
2 days later we drove into the city
to go to a dance space
and have a circle, shared breaths,
pushing pullling sweaty fleshy sinews
dance dance
and i feel it so hard
so sad
to dance in the presence of humans as the only life in the room
no roots to tickle my feet up to my knees
no branches to inspire my waving arms
no tall grasses to nudge my inner thighs
no sun shining to squint my eyes
no insects to buzz and "disrupt" with their divine intervention
bird calls
the scent of broken yarrow
non-humans can be our greatest teachers
in this dance of living, of feeling

midnight mooning, here's the list

1. woah, it's going to be okay!
2. "you should know that even though all things are liberated and not tied to anything, they abie in their own phenomenal expression." (Dōgen--this is actually very comforting to me)
and
3. "as for cities--they are (to those who can see) old tree trunks, riverbed gravels, oil seeps, landslide scrapes, blowdowns and burns, the leavings after floods, coal colonies, paper-wasp nests, beehives, rotting logs, watercourses, rock-cleavage lines, ledge trata layers, guano heaps, feeding fenzies, courting and strutting bowers, lookout rocks, ad ground-squirrel apartments. and for a few people they are also palaces." (gary snyder in the practice of the wild which i am reading and really enjoying right now)
4. idleness and mystery and stillness and the full moon and curiosity are so important. i am stepping off my ambiguity pedestal and toward desire and fire and water and the steam and smoke where they meet and walking mountains and being on the internet at midnight seeing my memories and loves and desires reflected back in a thousand tabs--oh silly but sometimes true-feeling this tool of the modern world, of our increasingly visible subconsciousnesses--i believe in german transqueer radical radio and rilke and bread and work and magic and new tattoos across knowing flesh and pain and slowness and quickness.
5. things have been rough lately and often hard. in a knowingly privileged and marginally unstable kind of way.
6. of place: wood floors. the altar moved to the next room over. it is night and the neighbors are doing some kind of loud popping project in the garage and talking about race on their porch. the walls are red and i ate a tiny plum that dropped from the tree in our front yard. there is an herb spiral and kale plants and lots of tomato blossoms. the cherries are dropping in neighboring blocks and yarrow in flower. raspberries are out, gold and red! and salmonberries! and strawberries too! and oregon grapes not too far (not that those are nearly as tasty but still). it has been sunny off and on, rainy occasionally, gray here and there often, warm but never quite hot per se, the doors are open here in the day and closed at night--it is chilly but i will sleep outside tonight.
7. STRANGERCAT i will write a poem about you soon.

some windward tidbits

a day of brief brushes in seattlelands,
wandering eyes and hello's to burst open scarf-covered tunnelvisions.

here's two gems from windward, so you can see my world a bit...
farm life confessions from windward...filmed by ethan
windwardian farm life, music video edition (steve's the one playing the guitar)

a moment before.

readying
sweeping cleaning washing moving stacking chewing
transforming
the living room, once close and warm, is now echoy and the floors are aching for moving feet.
wondering, too,
and missing and loving
and aching and sneezing
and building and painting
making nests as we clear out hollows

"[the bride] walks to her husband's home, never looks back or she'll turn to stone."
i mean,
fuck some patriarchal short-sighted family-breaking family-defining bullshit,
but i think there's something about not looking back
after all, our history is in our skin and our skin is dead until we begin to dance.

tonight i will be gray with lust and love,
spirit-filled stone,
concrete and fantastical.
and we will dance and dance and if you doubt for a moment and turn, you will join my ranks.

b brought up a good point--
to be in nature is quite a thing,
hard to believe that it was always there and will be there whenever we want it,
or perhaps pause to wander with our eyes and hearts,
and in the mean time the city holds for us so much, something like tonight,
something like multitudinous explosions,
social experiments,
a different souvenier to take into the woods.

and like wide-eyed rabbits, strong branches, sharp thorns, tufts of grass, furry humans,
we can love many a stranger if only for a moment

fuck all states

i cant, i wont, i dont have time. im supposed to be writing, or thinking, or sleeping, or buying a plane ticket to singapore, or dancing,  or or orrr or

my visa expires in six weeks. i dont want to leave. i have to leave and spendspend spend sending my money to jetairways or kingfisher so they can buy petrol and shoot me over to the land of fast bureaucracy where visas are fast and plentiful, 

if i can

if they allow foreigners to put their life and lineage and intentions on a PDF and pay $150 and get a stamp in a book and get punted back across the bay, sea, ocean to the land of slow bureaucracy and classical dance festivals and trains to the mountains

at this point it's just cheaper to come home in six weeks

fuck everything

i have a 10 page paper due about ________ by sunday morning (it's friday night). i have one paragraph written. all my friends are leaving tomorrow by 7pm. alex and chloe are ready to go, samantha never wants to leave, hannah is going to delhi to meet her parents and "do" rajasthan. i'll see her in chennai later. then pondicherry, ooty, and back to delhi? names names names and places i've seen so many places. im writing about temples... when they are sacred and when they are not. ive been in 9 active temples, 9 places of ambiguous or informal worship, and 18 abandoned temples. if there is no image in the center shrine, and if the image is not bathed and fed and adorned daily by a brahmin, there is no normatively sacred space but i still take my shoes off and stay quiet like a museum. why are ruins museums? 

hannah has returned to use her computer

now my room is hoppin

life is complicated

i hate a lot of things

but am confused and feeling so many thingswordswordswordsss

snippets of tuesday

i wake early to attempt to gather myself.
it has rained over night
the trunk of the palm outside my window is dark
it is nearly 8
and the city has not quite woken up, soon the honks of scooters
motorcycles rickshaws trucks cars and buses will fill the air.
a child yells,
hammers strike unnamable somethings

i lean out
to smell the morning air and i recoil
this city smells
of exhaust, of processed food rotting in its packaging, soaked in
dog's urine, chewed on by goats and cows, rotting again in their
stomachs.
there are so many lives in this space, (massive banyon&mimosa trees
emerge from every patch of dry earth, green everywhere)
but i see little happiness.
except in the faces of the girls at the school where i go to play.

i saw two dead dogs yesterday. the first time i've seen that. lying on
their backs in the sunlit gutter, stinking, i wonder when they will
disappear.
also yesterday alex (a friend) asked somewhat facetiously where the
mystical india was that he came to find himself in. i said not in the
cities, hannah says i dont believe in finding myself.

i fasted yesterday, and was tired in the morning, but pepped up when
necessary. a good exercise for every month, maybe more. i am thinking, gathering words about the body, ascetism, renunciation, liberation, immortality, devotion, god, the everything. reading the upanishads (beautiful text) and bhagavad gita (krishna is an asshole).
this weekend is diwali. our class scatters for week-long breaks. i go
solo to delhi and the himalayas.

"what do you do when life can't always be beautiful?" writes alonso from cusco, high high in the andes. 

p.s. dunno why the formatting/line breaks are funky. we'll deal.

the sun rises at a different angle

not that i can see the sun.. i can see bicycles and palm trees and a cement building with bars on its windows from my window. also a pile of gravel/dark rocks. also a beautiful sleeping hannah manshel. she and i are roommates, by happy happenstance.
thoughts i have been thinking are...
i dont like being waited upon, but i live in a hotel so i will have to figure out a way to make it tolerable/have real human interactions with these guys.
also i miss the farm, and the way time functions there. here i am either in my room being an asocial dope, or "out" socializing, talking mostly about nothing (dont worry i'm not being too judgmental right off the bat-- except some of these kids i swear are toolstoolstools (in a generic sense)) so i miss the days of not having to talk unless i want to, and living with people where all of us had some sort of higher purpose than just being together, we were working on something, and being togehter was a nice plus. i like the kind of conversations that happen when picking beans, or planting garlic, or harvesting carrots, or walking out to the potatoes. but oh well. i'll wait 10 weeks here in pune and then go off again.

i have been relying bahut on faith in humankind ... it has been most rewarding. my ride from seattle to san francisco was great... we went down the coast, saw the redwoods, stayed at her son's house and ate the most deliciousest food, we went to hot springs and slept under stars...
actually my first night, last night i guess, sleeping at the ywca in mumbai i woke up in the middle of the night and thought i was sleeping on a hill in northern california. that the fans were the chilly night breeze, that the ceiling was an overcast sky, that the light on the tv screen was a star...oh wait, stars arent green, oh wait, this is a bed, oh wait, i am in mumbai,
spinned my mental globe around and zoomed in to the west side of this subcontinent.

anyway. maybe sometime i will write about airtravel and how fucked up it makes me feel. not just because my share was 10,434 pounds of carbon (and it only costs $65 to erase that from my conscience), but because of anonymity and proximity, privacy in public, how much it costs for planes to fly over iran. seeing the stars at eye-level. actually i think that's all i have to say.
have a good first day at school kids

i think the gay rodeo is this weekend

on saturday justin and i took the 8:10 ferry from port angeles across the strait of juan de fuca to victoria, the capitol of british columbia. 
where we didn't get any stamps in our passports, so we might have not gone at all.
we intended it to be a day trip-- most of the time we walked around looking for food. we found a vegan buffet called "green cuisine" which charges you by the kilogram! i ate 5 kilograms of food once. we bought yummy beer and wine and drank it, and then stole magnetic hematite from the royal museum of britsh columbia (which wanted to charge us $18.50  piece to get in). we have this new code of ethics where if you want something and it costs too much then you take it... i think i've only paid for chocolate once or twice on this trip. there was this AMAZING chocolate company called organicfair which we got a TON of different flavors. also got a baseball cap and beauty and the beast. basically the day was spent feeling bored and illegitimate beausewe didn't want to spend money and yet we spent a lot of it. 
we went to catch the 6:15 ferry but it was full! we decided not to take the 7:30 (and have to get picked up begrudgingly at 9pm) and just stay the night. immediately we began approaching moderately hip young people to ask what was going on that night. we got varied responses and decided to hit up the vegan buffet again before it closed at 8. we asked the cashier with platinum blond hair shabed on one side and 8 inches long on the other...she told us some new places and then we asked her the real question "sorry to ruin this pure exchange, but where can we get drugs?" "look, this is not a pure exchange, this is victoria." and she ran out to get a buddy of hers who had just left. after dinner we hung out with this buddy and 2 others behind a dumpster, drinking beer, smoking spliffs, and talking about rocks and breakups until it was time to buy acid from the bouncer of a nearby metal club. i have never so obviously bought drugs in my life... amazing. about 7 US$ for a hit, pas mal. then we followed colin and john (i'll call him john, i never learned his name the whole night!) to colin's house where a party was growing. colin lives in a magical relic from the 19th century-- used to be the mayor's house. wood paneled with a cozy kitchen, a co-op full of seemingly interesting hip indie mid to late 20s types. colin was growing kombucha in his room which was delicious. and then the DJ started. i danced and took breaks all night, learning so many names (mine was elliot- which i've used before i knew ali used it too. after all, our real names are similar), eating fresh mulberry cheesecake, talking about permaculture, dancing, not getting high (bogus acid grr), feeling not at home and out of place, being worried, turning down an offer to dance with megan who had just complimented my dancing because i dont think i actually know how to dance with someone. and realizing that no one there was actually that interesting to me...  that was strange. it was like everyone had died sort of. i would never want to live in victoria...
so at about 2:30 j and i approached colin and asked to sleep on his balcony. he made a nest of blankets and it was cold outside but we were very warm, burritoed in by our sweaters and comforters. we pretended we were on a ship, sleeping under the stars with sheets as sails and the badly played clarinet (somewhere in the distance) as seagulls.
woke up 5 hours later to creep out and catch the ferry, and uneventful and nappy ride. we weren't looking forward to hitching the 10 mile ride back to the farm (buses dont run on sundays), but we met a guy in country aire (the health food store) who drove us all the way home! he lives right in town and he drove us out to the farm... wow. people like him are great to find when you are tired of being errant and just want to sleep. his name is bill, he used to work for 20 years for the rock division of warner brothers records, in artist relations. he says john fogerty is a jerk and the barenaked ladies are nice guys. we gave him one of our many stolen chocolates.
it's nearly noon here and i haven't done any work yet. bean picking? uprooting canadian thistle? i hate working here. i just want to eat and play and hike. and find psychedelic mushrooms.
so that was my 26 hours in canada. a little alienating and a lot of chocolate.