Sad Brad Smith - "Help Yourself"

what i can't put my finger on

is why everything seems to be unraveling even as i have seen and heard and breathed more consciously more profoundly than ever before. where i believed a whole, there are cracks and spaces minute, but there is also a zoom function and helplessly i'm transported into further into deeper these pockets of empty until i no longer know where i am and 'it' is no longer representative of anything because there is no means of identification.

do you see what i mean?

what i really mean to say is, i'm lost.

what i really mean to say is, i don't know why.

what i really mean to say is, i've lost the why.

what i really mean to say is, i thought i got past all this and was somewhere else all together. but this somewhere else is suspiciously looking like the there of before, the here and the then confused and merging.

maybe not having furniture and 20 boxes to unpack is affecting my sanity. or maybe pulling out dusty, old faces of love is tipping a perpetually precarious equilibrium. or maybe silence to an unreasoning need is stirring clear waters murky.

I still need to write about Rwanda. I haven't forgotten. it's still processing, still. Maybe it will be forever. but what do i know of forever?

tu me manques

c'est tout

(c'est un message prévoyant si tu peux voir l'heure, en fait c'est 21h48 et j'ai recemment retrouvé michelle et on a pris nos billets!!!!!! ^^ )

^^

Nat

come to thailand

fun fun fun

ive spent so much

but so fun

12:24pm Me

o_O

spent so much doing what??

what have you been up to !!

12:25pmNat

haircut, face treatment

karaoke

movies

and eat!!!!
-----------
aiya, so typical nat !

WASHING THE ELEPHANT

by Barbara Ras

Isn’t it always the heart that wants to wash
the elephant, begging the body to do it
with soap and water, a ladder, hands,
in tree shade big enough for the vast savannas
of your sadness, the strangler fig of your guilt,
the cratered full moon’s light fuelling
the windy spooling memory of elephant?

What if Father Quinn had said, “Of course you’ll recognize
your parents in Heaven,” instead of
“Being one with God will make your mother and father
pointless.” That was back when I was young enough
to love them absolutely though still fear for their place
in Heaven, imagining their souls like sponges full
of something resembling street water after rain

Still my mother sent me every Saturday to confess,
to wring the sins out of my small baffled soul, and I made up lies
about lying, disobeying, chewing gum in church, to offer them
as carefully as I handed over the knotted handkerchief of coins
to the grocer when my mother sent me for a loaf of Wonder,
Land of Lakes, and two Camels.

If guilt is the damage of childhood, then eros is the fall of adolescence.
Or the fall begins there, and never ends, desire after desire parading
through a lifetime like the Ringling Brothers elephants
made to walk through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel
and down Thirty-fourth Street to the Garden.
So much of our desire like their bulky, shadowy walking
after midnight, exiled from the wild and destined
for a circus with its tawdry gaudiness, its unspoken
pathos.

It takes more than half a century to figure out who they were,
the few real loves-of-your-life, and how much of the rest—
the mad breaking-heart stickiness—falls away, slowly,
unnoticed, the way you lose your taste for things
like popsicles unthinkingly.
And though dailiness may have no place
for the ones who have etched themselves in the laugh lines
and frown lines on the face that’s harder and harder
to claim as your own, often one love-of-your-life
will appear in a dream, arriving
with the weight and certitude of an elephant,
and it’s always the heart that wants to go out and wash
the huge mysteriousness of what they meant, those memories
that have only memories to feed them, and only you to keep them clean.

my dear we're slow dancing in a burning room

i had an awful, awful nightmare. haven't had one in a long time and this one was fucking terrifying... (its actually funny on hindsight because i see where a part of it came from.)

but the moment i forced myself awake my heart was just pounding -- and then i reached out and called jy. i called him on his bday 2 days ago, i guess i've been thinking about him since. he sent me a message earlier today saying he thought i shouldnt visit after all, and there was another msg that was incomplete that i couldn't read. so he said he'd send it to me again, and this time i deleted half the msgs in my inbox so i'd have space. when we were on the phone suddenly i thought maybe he found someone else and was seized with a panic. what a selfish bitch i am. but he said it was quite horrible, when i asked if it was, and i just started floundering in deep anguish. the nightmare had disoriented me already i guess. its weird but i can go so long without really thinking about him except in a fond way, then suddenly, bam. it's like j1 or j3 again when i'm drowning and the flooding is in my core, from my deepest being. and i'm thinking... not again, not again.

i know i'll get over this by tomorrow morning and everything will seem bright or at least light. it's already starting to fade like the nightmare that was so excruciating and overwhelming and all surrounding for those moments...

i don't dream about getting married to him anymore ... although i know what song we'll sing/play at our wedding if we did. i don't imagine him as the father of my children (fuck the biological clock) i think about new exciting romantic encounters i might have everyday / in the future but then i can't efface this other plane of contained irreality, a refuge of the mind, where he is mine, and i just love him love him love him. i do love him and i always will. i know that the fact that i don't worry about our seemingly very separate destinies anymore or consider the future or our inherent differences means that i have isolated this love and consigned it in some fashion. i have removed it from the unravelling thread of my life and stored it. but i can't give it up, i know i should, but i can't.

my quiet heartbreak

Hi Li Jun,

Regarding the rest of that packet of poems etc. that you gave me,

I like the graphs. Regarding the rest, it's frustrating to be honest. So much

good stuff-- wonderful stanzas of suprising language or phrasing or

syntax (or all three) and then clunky passages, misspelled words (except/accept),

clauses with weird shifts of syntax, purely silly stuff. There are flashes of

remarkable talent that I wish I had been able to work with you to highlight,

but we didn't really get the chance. You should hook up with the writers

connected with Double Change in Paris. The often have events at Pointe

Ephemere which is a good place to discover anyway. If down the line of

yr life, you decide to shift courses, I think you would really flourish in an

MFA program in poetry. I hope you'll keep writing in any case.

Yrs, F

:(