Salt Pyramid

I love my new phone Aluminium so much that I have a special stuffed dragon whose only job is to cradle her all day. Was she in that cradle just now? No. Did I knock her over and make her fall on my keyboard screen first? Yes. Is she OK? Too soon to tell. She may be scratched. Her protective cover flap wasn’t pulled over her darling face. How do I feel about myself right now? Not super, dude.

I wrapped my king-sized chenille blanket around my waist and am wearing it like a sarong is how I am.

Sentence from my dream: Like gods in Greek myths, we are gilded, guilted, and gutted.

You’d think I’d put all my dopamine to better use, but no. I make fiddly spreadsheets.

I’m doing a deep dive into facts and fictions about the Osage orange is how I am.

A list of my bad habits:

1. All of them.

Had a wild night. Didn’t take my mascara off until 10:12 p.m.

I got stars on my ceiling, baby. I got a nebula. Come over and be one with everything.

I just read a poem about birds by Lisa Bickmore to two birders and their pet bird. Don’t tell me poems can’t be part of our daily lives.

The life partner to me just now: Will you smell my thumb and tell me if it smells like peanut butter?

From MedPage Today: Doc Has Sex Mid-Surgery.

This country has jumped the shark.

Social media was 4channed years ago. Our culture in general is more 4chan than most of us realize. Our politics are def 4chan.

To every thing there is a hot take, and a time for every hot take under Heaven. But once you have actual information, the time for your hot takes is over.

Intelligence in part means seeking out and synthesizing new information rather than clinging doggedly to what’s outdated.

What you left inside me: nail clippings, cigarette butts, used condoms, whiskey, anything that oozed from you and your friends.

When I die, preserve my mouth so science can thaw it one day and remember what it sounded like when people fought, when they screamed.

Print me out some new lungs so I can scream better, scream harder, scream longer.

I’m commiserating with the screeching white-tailed antelope ground squirrel is how I am.

Men, which I mean conceptually, stop trying to roll your word-stones into my mouth. It’s a Sisyphean task, and I won’t gag on your “wisdom.”

I’m listening to The Crystal Method’s album Tweekend is how I am.

The things you don’t know about are often things you don’t know about because you can afford to not know about them. Ask someone who’s affected by the things you don’t know about. Odds are, they know about those things because they can’t afford not to know about those things. Your erasures and omissions are another form of othering, one that enables discrimination.

Poets: Be aware of intrinsic sanism in the spaces you create when you bring poets together to share work, to create, to teach, and to learn. Try to identify sanism the way you are able to identify other forms of discrimination. Try to create spaces that welcome everyone, even those with mental-health diagnostic labels and lived experiences.

I rolled a ketogenic pizza up like a burrito and am eating the whole thing is how I am.

It gets worse: Joseph Massey wrote a poem eulogizing Charlie Kirk.

I’m listening to Depeche Mode’s “Clean” on repeat is how I am.

An unexpected Duran Duran song is like a drink of cold water straight from a hose in this dumpster-fire country.

You know who tells you the news before law enforcement and news outlets? Dictators. That’s who.

I dreamed poetry was a pile of salt the size of a pyramid, and I was forced to eat all of it.

Folks who discard you when you speak your truth? Duck ’em. Of course I don’t mean duck. That’s a typo. But come to think of it, also duck ’em.

I’m watching a bat drink tomato juice is how I am.

I love that moment when someone sees me as safe and code switches while interacting with me.

Hate speech is never free.

My seer stones tell me there’s going to be a lot of unfriending and blocking on Facebook over the next few days.

Your memory keeps my body on its knees.

It’s only 80 degrees here in the desert this morning WHERE IS MY PARKA

It’s like everyone’s trying to get through the gate even though there’s no fence.

I mean verse is right there in the word for all that is. It’s not the uniprose, for crying out loud.

I just saw a horrifying ad here on Facebook for an AI twin. It’s supposed to be a copy of your mind and train you to know yourself more deeply than you know yourself—by being you. Get me out of this skibidi timeline.

It just occurred to me that establishment poetry is a function of institutionalism. Institutionalists created it. Institutionalists perpetuate it. Institutionalists seek it out, dream about it, crave it, feel incomplete without it. It’s like a government in that way. Or a religion.

People are yelling at Mitt Romney in a Salt Lake Tribune post here on Facebook, and I’m all ready to go defend my man.

My doctor’s medical assistant sang me “The Name Game” song using my name today. So yeah. I’m going back there.

Corn moon has everyone acting happy in St. George, Utah.

Corn moon had me nightmaring about poets in the wee hours. I was doubled over from physical and existential pain on the floor of a library in Cedar City, Utah. Poets were kicking me as they walked by. A librarian finally opened a nearby elevator and rolled me into it so I’d be out of the way as the poets continued having their important discussions about poetry.

I see the poetry establishment as a nucleus. As cells age, the nucleus of each cell accumulates abnormal molecules that are toxic to the cells themselves. So yes. The poetry establishment—the core of poetry so many aspire to, which is part real and part myth—is a nucleus, and an old one at that.

He’s a comics scholar and one-time critical theorist who’s into graphic medicine and knows which way the toilet paper roll goes? Oh yeah, baby.

/me bites lip

I love the folks over at Bluesky.

This afternoon, I was listening to my favorite Bo Burnham song, “All Eyes on Me,” when the life partner interrupted me to tell me that—wait for it—I need to remember to change out the new fire alarms in 2035.

I’ll be dead by then, he said. You’re going to have to remember to do this.

And this is what I mean when I say ours is a household informed by various and sundry anxieties.

I’m watching an American mink open up Easter eggs filled with treats. This will carry me through the night and into tomorrow.

I just misread COVID vaccine as mood swing is how I am.

Through me, my mother is half alive. Through my mother, I am half dead.

In rooms full of men, my body becomes something other than my own.

Every word I write makes the world both more and less accessible.

What light is left in this world.

We are ghosts haunting our present with our past.

Bless the birds who are migrating thousands of miles to their winter lands.