Writing

Rootball First

I dreamed I was in a seminar, and the speakers kept making jokes about a man’s appearance. He’d answer a question, and they’d say things like, That’s a pretty good answer for a bald guy.

Finally, I’d had enough. Quit saying he’s bald, I said. That’s body shaming and has nothing to do with his answers.

They replied, Of course you’d say something like that, Barbie Doll.

I was like, Take your seminar and shove it where the sun doesn’t shine.

The seminar was “The Care and Cultivation of Miniature Palm Trees in the Desert.” They gave each attendee a miniature palm tree. I’d already managed to kill mine. I’d only had it for an hour. I pulled it out of its pot by its dead canopy and threw it to the ground rootball first like I was some kind of wrestler who was about to leave the wrestling federation on principle but wanted to get one more slam in.

My friend Rethabile Masilo was there. He grabbed the dead palm tree and said he’d bury it for me.

You just go, he said. Take the fight to the streets. So I did.

Bloatano

I lost my phone for a while today and had the exact same feeling of being untethered that I experienced when my mother died. Unfortunately, this played out in front of my therapist, so he no longer has some image of me as a moderately reasonable or quasi pulled-together person.

I wrote a poem. It’s not about my phone, but I do have a poem about my phone because I love it. I mean her. I mean Aluminium. That’s her name. She and I have bonded over the fact that we both contain lithium. She has a little case with a cover on it that’s kind of like the leather pocketbooks my mother’s cigarette company used to give its customers for free. I love her. I also love my mother, who died on December 20, 2004. Oh, that’s what’s happening. That anniversary’s coming up in two days, hence all the big emotions directed at Aluminium.

This Calibri T-shirt is getting tighter as the night wears on. It feels like a corset and not in a good way. Bloatano has entered the building. I mean my body. I mean I’m bloated, but Bloatano sounds better, like the monster that GI distress is. The internet says I’m the first person ever to use the word Bloatano, so that’s kind of a big deal, which means I’m kind of a big deal. Bloatano also affects my ego from time to time, clearly.

I blocked three people today. It was super. My image of the medieval badge gave me the courage I needed in the precise moment I needed it. I can’t wait to hold all those little phalluses in my hand when the actual badge arrives. If phalluses really ward off evil, I’ll have ample protection.

Mistuning

We seem to have lost the ability to comprehend, to reason, to infer, to extrapolate, to synthesize, and to contextualize just about anything other than maybe song lyrics, and even then it’s iffy.

By comprehending, I don’t just mean understanding. I mean interpreting things like tone, which is essential for grasping meaning(s). We’ve lost that, too.

We’re taking personally that which is not personal and not taking personally that which personally affects us. Instead, we deflect, defend, deny, derail, dismiss, disparage, detonate. I’m tired of that pattern. We’re giving birth to mistuned responses in the driverless car that passes for communication.

We’re reading and listening too fast or not at all, at once too little and too much, leaning into things like AI to do our work for us, even when we aren’t using it actively and may not be aware of how it’s shaping our communications and changing our brains (and in turn our minds).

We’re tired and angry and sloppy in our reading, writing, and responses. I don’t mean some we that’s far away or out there or that doesn’t include poets. I mean all of us. The past 24 hours on Facebook have been unbearable for me. I’ve tried to talk about two issues that are significant. It’s clear from many of the responses I received that Facebook isn’t the place to say anything that matters.

So why am I there? Why are any of us there? Maybe it’s time to not be there, at least not in any significant way, whatever significant means these days. I’m afraid it doesn’t mean much.

Bad D(a)NA

I took a genetic test last year. It said my overall health score is in the 74th percentile. I was like, That sounds about right. Well, I looked at my score again today and saw that it can be broken out into DNA and lifestyle. My lifestyle score is in the 99th percentile. My genes? Only the 49th percentile. Half of the genes they look at promote health. The other half strongly promote illness, disease, and disorder. And I do have a number of health issues, rare diseases, syndromes, and one big, fat disorder. So it’s not off.

So far, the company has identified 149 potential risks based on my DNA. I recognize a bunch of them because they aren’t just risks. They’re acute and chronic issues I have, like heart arrhythmia, thyroid inflammation, dyslexia, and mania. It even picked up on my sugar cravings, tendency to worry, droopy eyelids, rosacea, TMJ, and obsessive-compulsive tendencies.

And that 149? It’s not even factoring in things like postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, common variable immunodeficiency, and follicular thyroid cancer, all of which I’ve had or currently have.

I can add labs to my report to bring my overall score up. (Aside from my TSH lately, my labs are awesome, mostly because they miss a lot of things.) But I can’t get over that DNA percentile. How am I a viable organism? How am I here? Am I dreaming this life? Are a groin hernia and leaky gut really in my future? Do I have a future?

In the words of my fellow Gen X elders: What gives?

Barnacled

I dreamed barnacles were responsible for creating and destroying universes. Each universe was cast out into spacetime like one of the nebula projectors Bo Burnham uses in his performances. I was part of a group that was combing intertidal zones all over the world looking for the barnacle that was casting our universe. We needed to figure out how to make that barnacle live forever or how to transfer our universe to another barnacle before the current barnacle died.

The barnacles had been doing this handoff successfully on their own up to this point for the past 500 million years but, because of climate change, their ability to keep our universe, and therefore all the universes that our universe made possible through other barnacles, was in jeopardy. I know this makes no sense. It was a dream. There’s a lot more to the dream that I don’t remember. I did think, This is the most amazing dream ever, and I can’t wait to tell everyone about it, as I was having the dream. I’m pretty sure the parts of the dream I’ve forgotten wouldn’t make it make more sense.

Yes, I know barnacles are younger than the universe. That’s one big problem with my dream. Maybe some other system was in place before the barnacles took over. Or maybe the barnacles weren’t the whole story but rather a subset of a larger experiential phenomenon organized like a social network with an infinite number of dense, centralized, and fragmented components that are loosely tied to one another and maybe even jostle loose from time to time.

Maybe the barnacles were dreaming worlds much the way humans dream worlds while asleep and awake. Maybe every living thing is casting out universes every moment, ones that either do or do not die when they do.

Image: Acorn Barnacle Anatomy #1, a photograph by Science Photo Library that was uploaded July 12, 2016. Link in comments.

Exiles

Three nights ago, I dreamed I was living in a cultlike community that I couldn’t leave. I had no idea how I got there. I was just there, and I didn’t want to be.

Everyone had to do work to earn their keep. I tried to learn how to spin yarn, but I was so slow I barely earned any water, let alone food. The machine that dispensed the water was complicated. I kept putting my cup in the wrong place, so water went everywhere other than my glass, and I squandered my portion for the first several days.

When I finally got my cup lined up properly, a sugary bright-blue liquid came out. I was told it was better than water because it would give me the energy I needed to work faster. You don’t want to have to do what those who aren’t productive have to do, another community member, a little girl, told me.

Everyone slept in a basement that seemed to go on forever. Maybe it was a converted tunnel. There were no walls. All the furniture was honey blonde and part of matched sets that marched into the distance. Heavy headboards. Mirrored dressers. Worn, earth-toned bedding. All the beds were adult-sized, but there were no adults here. Everyone in this place, other than me, was a child.

Toys and children’s books were piled high with even higher drifts off to the side. I tried to make room for the belongings in a small bag I had with me. I somehow knew these toys and books were important, that we needed them, and that I needed whatever was in my bag, but there was nowhere to move anything to make space for my things. I propped my bag on one of the dressers and thumbed through a box of photos, pausing to look at several of my sister when she was young. I wondered when she would come see me, come save me, knowing she wouldn’t.

I held up a photo of myself that was taken at my grade school when I was seven years old. I had bright blond hair pulled back on one side with a barrette that had cherries printed on it. My dress was burnt red and made of velvet. My front teeth were oversized and still had a gap between them. I looked happy and desperate.

Someone who seemed to be both of and not of this place called my name and took a Polaroid photo of me when I turned around. The entity appeared to have a degree of omniscience. When the photo developed, it looked like the one from when I was seven. How can this be, I asked. I’m an adult, not a child. I looked in one of the dresser mirrors and saw myself as I am today. How could I be one thing in the mirror and another in the photo?

That’s when I realized, with the help of the entity, that everyone in this place was one of their exiled parts. None of us were children. We only looked like children because our exiles are children. This wasn’t even a real place. It was a liminal space we inhabited collectively as exiles. I didn’t know how to leave, so I woke up and left my exile there with the others.

White Salamanders

We invented numbers, then we assigned meaning to them, both everyday meanings and special meanings when they show up in a certain way, like 11:11. That’s how everything we do works. We make something up. We agree on what it means, or at least some of us do. We find aberrations that appeal to our cognitive biases and imbue those aberrations with magic, extraordinariness. We can’t just accept that everything is extraordinary all the time, no sleight of hand needed. No tall tales.

But we love stories, don’t we? Stories like the white salamander letter. (Look it up. You won’t regret it.) Even I love that story and am terribly sad it was based on a forgery. A real untrue story, fully committed to, is better than a con, I think. It’s close to poetry. Maybe it doesn’t matter: origin, intent. Something in us needs stories, and we’ll get them one way or the other.

I dreamed I was in a large, tiered, auditorium-style room looking for a place to sit so I could read a book and drink some tea from a demitasse teacup. I was dressed like Alice from Alice in Wonderland. Everyone else in the room was male or male-bodied. All the seats were leather and moist from the glandular skin of those who’d recently sat in them. None of the seats were right for me.

I suddenly felt scared and ran out of the room into a long hall. It was a secret part of the library in my hometown at the university where my father worked. Red carpet and decor. Brown spines. Brown wood. Books covering every wall all the way to the ceiling. The smell of dust and leather and cigars. The air hazy.

A man in a tophat and his rabbit held open the curtain to an adjoining room. The curtain was maroon and heavy, with thick twisted gold fringe, the kind where each twist is under constant tension from being held in its contorted shape. I walked through it. I have no idea what happened next, but I know something happened next.

I write stories in my sleep, that rich world I visit every night. What comes to me is essential, life-giving nonsense. I couldn’t live without it. That world is loose, vivid, surprising, and informed by every moment of my life, all outside of time. Ah, time. Now, we’re back to numbers, their rigidity and our desire to break them out of that box they must live in most of the, ahem, time to serve us and let them walk through the curtain into who knows what, who knows where. All we want to do is follow.

A Pound of Honey

There are black vultures in parts of Oklahoma. Tell me that’s not a reason to move back there.

Your near rain is my far rain. You, there. Me, here. Native sparrows gather in the wildlands behind my house as winter surrounds yours. They say what you won’t, what you can only feel. Cold, they say. Seed. Wind, they say. Wind.

Something happened a couple of days ago that has me so shaken I woke in tears this morning. It’s related to poetry, to poets. Of course it is. For my health, for my life, for my future, I need to limit who I’m intacting with, where I’m publishing my work, and where I’m spending my time in poetry and as a poet. I support kind, generous, compassionate poets and the journals and presses they run. I will continue to support those poets, journals, and presses. But all the rest? It doesn’t have a place in my life. I’ve seen enough. I choose a different approach to writing, a different community, a different way of being in the world.

Watching a baby goat take a shower is how I am.

For only $69.99, you can send a bag of mystery bones to someone you love. So there’s that.

I’m spending Thanksgiving with my loved ones: the life partner, our dog, and Bo Burnham.

Despite everything, I’m thankful for everything.

My poems are like webs I weave under every bridge, every cliff, here in canyon country. They’re not just for me. They’re for everyone who lives here and needs something to catch the light when they look down, when they find themselves leaning forward.

Ironically, I really need a paperweight right now.

In a stunning turn of events, I don’t like handblown glass paperweights as much as I thought I did.

I dreamed I was made of cotton and kept pulling parts of myself from myself until there was no me left.

Marbles are so emotional. One member of the marble-identification group shared a note a woman wrote about the marbles she played with when she was a child in the early 1900s. Her name was Lulu. She kept her marbles and note in a face-powder box. Another person found a coin purse at an estate sale with three wheat pennies and a single marble inside. The poster writes: This was somebody’s treasure.

I dreamed I married my husband’s brothers, even the dead one, and was also an evil clown is how I am.

I just joined a marble-identification group on Facebook is how I am.

The life partner woke me up eating a pickle on the other side of the house is how I am.

I don’t have a lot of words right now. It took me twelve hours to get out of bed and onto the sofa today and another two to make it to my desk. Now, I’m headed back to the sofa and then back to bed. It is very hard to be outside of language. It means I’m outside of hope. It’s going to take some time to come to terms with that feeling, if that’s even possible.

I don’t know who Facebook thinks I am, but it’s trying to send me a vacuum-packed cow brain in the mail. Also, a pig heart in its pericardium. A sheep-organ set. A turkey gizzard. Petrfied snapping turtle feet. A cat in a box, a skinned cat, an economy cat, a pregnant cat, a small cat, and a cat skull. A cut-open dogfish shark. A sea squirt. Half a sheep’s head.

I just misread something as Mr. Bananajeans, and now I need to find an animal I can call Mr. Bananajeans.

The life partner saw the two-person steam sauna I put in our Amazon cart and removed it is how I am.

In my despair, I put a two-person steam sauna in my Amazon cart is how I am.

Lines from my dream: Alive to the moment, / unaffected by the heat, / penetrated by the Midwestern sun / pocked with chicken-laden pastures, / I wait for a rapture that never comes.

I’m a little bit grumpy. The life partner and I are having a funeral tonight for the part of me that can no longer live safely in the world, but he keeps saying mixed weenies over and over because, hours ago, that’s what he thought I was saying when I actually said McSweeney’s.

Grammarly says I wrote 122,765 words last week. Really? Where are they?

I live in poetry. I survive in prose.

Maybe I cast light on poetry’s shadow. Maybe that’s part of the problem. Come to terms with that shadow and with what you are in response to it. That’s the work that must be done before understanding and integration can occur at the individual and collective levels. Don’t blame me for the shadow. I didn’t create it. I am not it. You’ve conflated me with a system, with you.

I dreamed my ex told me he couldn’t choose me because all choice is limitation and restricts freedom. I’ll take you for now, he said. But I don’t choose you and never will. He said this as I cleaned the dirt from his boots off his favorite ottoman.

Ten years is nothing to eternity.

I don’t think I’m ever going to heal. I don’t know if I’m even going to survive.

My love is in my feet today so it can hit the ground as I walk.

My neighbor blows all the dust down the street and back into the wildlands.

As hard as it is at times to live with empathy, I wouldn’t want to live without it.

During the election coverage, I rubbed my boobs on the TV.

While you sleep, bees will honey your lips the way they did when Plato was an infant. Then you will kiss me sweet, love me sweet. I will die sweet on your vine. Oh, sugar. Oh, conjecture turned confection. Do not tell me why you are bad for me. Waggle. Buzz. Make my whole body vibrate. There, there, little love, little bee. Feed me.

              Two million flowers
              make a pound of honey
              a riot of blossoms

If those who are being harmed refuse all collective language to describe those who are being harmed, those who harm will continue to harm. Collective language leads to being seen collectively. Being seen collectively leads to acting collectively. Acting collectively leads to change.

              Sand at the foot
              of the mountain forgets
              it was ever part mountain

Pill Fight

Because Thanksgiving somehow marks the start of the new year for me, I spent part of the day doing what people do as they move from the old year to the new one: creating a schedule for the thirty-three vitamins and supplements and five medications I take.

Half of what I take interacts with one or more of the other things I take, so putting this schedule together feels like getting a poetry manuscript in the right order. It’s also like doing calculus, which I vaguely remember. Math was always fun and games for me until the answer invariably came out wrong and I had to start all over.

I have diagrams with things that are crossed out, things I’ve moved multiple times, pictures I’ve drawn of pills fighting with each other, little swords in their little pill hands. My floor, covered in sticky notes, has been transformed into a pink-paper sea of faded, flattened blossoms, each a failed attempt to meet every substance’s needs without compromising any other substance’s needs or my needs, which is the whole point of this undertaking. I have to be careful about how and when and why I introduce new substances to the watery admixture that is me.

I have a bunch of tabs about chemical interactions open on my computer. I have a brand-new Trello board full of notes. I’m very close to writing a raggedy-edged poem ranting about pills and people in the style of Charles Bukowski.

The Trello board has a white-stucco background depicting stairs leading to a colonnade whose immersive columns rise all around me, or so it seems, like bleached bones. I chose the photo for all my boards related to my health. It makes me feel safe somehow, like I’m inside my own body, which is at once dead and also impenetrably strong. It’s almost like one of the liminal spaces in my dreams, but I never futz with pills in my dreams or boluses I empty under my tongue or sticky fluid made from other people’s plasma that I absorb under the skin through needles I jab into my upper arms. I’m too busy running in my dreams or flying or falling. Unless I’m in the grotto. I could stay in the grotto forever, and I will if we get to choose where we go next, once the pills stop working and the cathedral of the body collapses and someone burns me like a banned book, like a bra, or maybe like a flag.

Dissolving and Emerging

My severe hypothyroidism is taking a toll. For the past two weeks, gobs of hair have been falling out every day. I’ve been in bed since Friday. I need to have blood work done to see if the new dose of thyroid-replacement medication is improving things at all, but I didn’t have the energy to call the lab to schedule an appointment because the required opening up the cabinet where I put the lab paperwork, pulling it out of a stack of papers, finding the phone number, dialing the phone, and talking to someone. Too much. Also too much: doing my immunoglobulin infusions, the ones that keep me alive; preparing for the support group I’m facilitating that starts this week; hydrating; exercising; bathing; eating.

In this hypothyroid state, which has been creeping up on me since last fall, I’ve also been thinking a great deal about poetry and what I’m doing as a poet. A hypothyroid state isn’t the best one to be in when having these thoughts, but anyone who’s been hypothyroid knows these are the kinds of thoughts one has when hypothyroid.

Here’s my conclusion. Poetry is, at its worst, a discriminatory and harmful system. I’ve experienced discrimination and harm firsthand. But the system being what it is doesn’t make it one I can walk away from. I’m a poet. Being a poet isn’t something I chose or can unchoose. It’s a way of being.

When I was close to death in 2022, writing an imitation poem after Richard Siken is what brought me back to life and what allowed me to continue living. There was no question for me then that I was bound to poetry, to being a poet. It doesn’t matter that it was a Richard Siken poem. It could have been any poem, imitation or otherwise. I time-traveled in that poem. I found my way into and through time itself, not because I’m special or any given poet is special. What’s special is poems: who we are in them, who we aren’t, what we see, what’s beyond seeing. That dissolving when we need to dissolve. That emerging when we need to emerge. That liminal space between dissolving and emerging where we can live more expansively.

I came back to poetry. I can’t leave it again. I think my presence makes poetry better, not worse. I’ve written about what happened to me in poetry and beyond. I see issues at the systemic level and call attention to them. Because I’m older, I have a longer memory than a lot of poets do, which gives me insights others may not have. I make choices about where to send my work and who to associate with accordingly, which is necessary when poems enter the world of poetry, that less-than-optimal system that can and does do damage.

I’m neither a sycophant nor the poetry police. I call things like I see them. I’m not trying to make anyone feel bad about the unexamined biases that exist in poetry or the ways in which they may be contributing to those biases or at least not helping alleviate them. I do think we should all pay more attention to the institutions and organizations we support, the people we defend, and how we talk about those who are exploited and otherwise victimized within the system. But I know I can’t change anyone or the system as a whole. I can only control how I navigate it and who I am within it.

I suspect things would be different if poets didn’t have jobs to worry about or tenure or getting published or securing money for their projects or any of the other pressures that keep the system humming along without much change over the past several decades. I’m not fettered by any of that. I just read and write poetry.

I still remember Carolyn Kizer telling a group of poets that another famous poet tried to rape her. It was at a dinner before a reading she was giving. I also remember how the other poets at the table responded, which was to react in a flustered way and quickly change the subject. That was nearly thirty years ago, when I was just starting to write poetry. But what happened to her occurred decades earlier.

Poetry has had systemic issues that affect individual poets for a long time. These issues didn’t start yesterday, and they won’t end tomorrow. That’s why I’m not going to stop writing poetry or talking about what I’ve experienced and seen in the poetry community. Carolyn Kizer was talking to me that day in 1997. She was warning me. I heard her. I try to hear everyone who speaks.