Glad

I want to wear happiness like a flowing summer dress,
And flaunt it.

Chase balls in the park like a spotted lassie off the leash.

Sharp like a Raven with its beady eyes on a big fat worm,
(Fun fact: ravens recognize human faces,
So don’t piss them off.
They will remember.)

Joyful like a worm in its final hours,
Writhing and feasting on things,
Both dead and alive.

It’s a beautiful summer day.

I’m glad to be here like the sun is,
If only briefly.

Joy is a sensation that spreads,
And among other things,
It makes you want to live.

Maybe,
Joy is fucking to come not to conceive,
Maybe,
Pleasure by itself is an unequivocal good.

Question to self: What if where I am is what I need?

It’s easy enough,
To wax lyrical melancholy,
But ordinary devotion…
The pleasure of abiding,
The pleasure of obligation,
Of dependency even.

That takes practice.
So we leave empty spaces,
So Soul can rush in.

I stole this poem from Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London. augmented man has inspired me to try my hand at stealing.

“Become thieves instead! Not of verses pieced together
From others’ voices echoing eerily down empty halls;
No, steal inspiration direct from everyday life itself.”

London has so many grey days. When the sun finally shows, people are extra grateful, extra giddy. They smile on the streets even. They wear summer dresses!

I just finished reading Maggie Nelson’s “The Argonauts.” Since reading the book, my understanding of queerness has expanded. Eve Sedwick redefined “queer” to hold all kinds of resistances and mismatches that have little or nothing to do with sexual orientation.

Maggie Nelson, who is married to gender-fluid artist Harry (Harriet) Dodge, is convinced that pregnancy is the queerest experience she has ever had. Watching your body transmute before your eyes, to watch it shift, contort, and change to make space for another human body.

It must be so wild. The part of yourself that rationalizes your humanity is confronted with the part of yourself that is wholly animal.

I’m starting to think there’s something inherently queer about poetry too. Poetry — The art of using words to color outside the lines.

To hold space for the contradictions and multiplicities (the squiggles) in language. So everything that is also is not. We are at the frontline, waging war against everything defined, everything materialized. We are warriors of the ethereal! I heart spectrums.

Love & Company

For Judyko

I’m done with New York,
But not for the reasons you think.I’ve been looking up for stars or,
A familiar breath or a breeze,Only to find the cost of this dream —My intimacy.

And although life is truly,
In the daily acts of living,
Those parts of myself deemed ugly,
Where I’ve also found faith.

Yet peace eludes me,And pieces of me lie scattered,
Distorted by city lights,
So that which makes me pure,
Is almost no longer,And that which makes me weary —Creeps up on me like a cat on certain mornings,
To make me beautiful,
For no apparent reason.

For Carly

Many things have been born in New York,Like the word Bystander,
To slip into the background like,Rain dripping from a broken pipe,To rhythmically stare at someone’s distress,Because someone else,
“Ought to fix that mess.”

So this love stored in a pile of crates,Waits for someone else,
To tell that story,To break another heart,
While mine steps over the heels of fate.

But the safest bet is rarely the most rewarding,
So, a bystander's heart,Will meet the pain of inertia,
Moving on but never,
Lingering for a while,
So meet me here,
maybe,Where the sun sets and
maybe,
In the time that it takes,
We’ll fall in love.

For Carola

I’m only just discovering,
All the flavors of self,
And oh these thoughts seem to,
Stay with me way past my bedtime,
Since I never knew all the ways,
Pleasure could make itself known to me.

So thank humanity,
For taking a name and giving it color,
With which to bathe my dreams,
And bless that skin,
That skin that is unfamiliar,
But instinct knew I would hold this hair,
And graze this neck and whisper sweetly,“life is capable of small beauties.”

Maybe your touch will feel more like myself,And you will light a torch where,No one else has yet been,And maybe desire has always carried a red purse,
And lipstick to stain my bare belly burgundy,
And leave your mark,
The promise of whispers,
On my left ear.

For Olivia

Love comes in seasons,
And seasons,
Will always come to pass.

Time separates winter from autumn,
And summer from spring.And distance (despite the latest tech),
Is the antithesis of touch,And only through contact can,
The seed become the tree.

I will find ways to forgive love,
For not ripening,
For neither have I.

And just like time turns leaves brittle,
It makes trees grow strong,
And when the season is right,
So too,
Will love come along.

For Emel

The unbearable lightness of being is more than just a title,
It’s that immemorial feeling,
That wakes you in the middle of the night,
To ask whether God is still around.

Burden brings life meaning,
In ways little else does,
Love; when folded into itself,
Creates a life that is now my own.

My little joys are hidden,
Where burdens bares me down,
Like the whistle of a kettle —
carries the certainty of tea,
Or the laughter of children —
Turns sacrifice into something,
I breathe in.

I want to occupy the same lightness from which,
Art is born,
To no longer be defined by love,
And rejoice in lust and rebellion,And still,Life would have no meaning,
Lest my burdens,
Give me a home,
To call my own.

For Anthony

Love seems to await those who are patient,Those who find time to let people linger,
Way past our bedtimes,
Since those are the ones who stick around,And as long as you’ll be there,
I’ll find a way to make eight a.m. breakfast,Taste different every day.

And I’ll find a way,
To awaken with a new smile,
And I’ll even make this laundry feel fresh again.

Maybe love is that balance that gives,
Routine flavor,And bathes habit with the scent of spring,So, as long as I choose love over lovers,
I’ll taste the gift of chance all over again.

The purpose of Art is to render the ordinary strange again. Henri Bergson came up with this word that I love, “infraordinary,” which I understand to be a certain quality of attention the poet brings to daily experience. Recently, I had the chance to listen to a few strangers talk about love. In return, I turned their experience into a poem— turning their Love strange again.

The end goal of this observation process is to unlearn categorical thought and see things in such a way that widens the gap where real change occurs. Poetry maladjusts us gently; it mirrors our uncomfortable truths.

Unpacking our beliefs about love is a hard pill to swallow. The more one digs into the multiple experiences of love, the more one realizes it's a true co-creative process (and a rather strange one at that). Love — even in the pleasure of solitude — brings with it a deep sense of belonging that keeps us from falling into the vertigo of loneliness.

Love can be the instinct telling us to go out of our comfort zones and try red lipstick for the first time; it can also be what gives routine meaning — like a mother who finds in her child's laughter the most beautiful of sounds. Love is the fracture that lets light in, invites us to let go, to take the jump, and to risk venturing off in Solitude (but never alone). Love is always an invitation (never an excuse to check out) and, in its truest form, will always hold up a mirror with which we can see ourselves more clearly. For those brave enough to engage, the gift of this co-creation may be something shameless and extravagant (like only life itself can conjure up).

A Chinese proverb says, “An invisible red thread connects those destined to meet, regardless of time, place, or circumstance. The thread may stretch or tangle but will never break.”

In conversation with D, a friendly stranger, he pondered, “I think my red string has eluded me in this lifetime.”

I doubt he’s the only one who feels they are dragging a loose thread, leading nowhere. Maybe the problem is that our imagination of love has become too narrow, contaminated by cinematic portrayals of romance. Maybe love is vast, and those strings do not venture far off into the distance but bind us to those who dare ask the difficult questions that will lead to depth.

Love is found in intimacy and the people we share it with, of all times and places.

A quote

“A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment. This is the most precious gift true love offers — the experience of knowing we always belong.”

— Bell Hooks, All About Love.

Perfectionism and the Right to Rest

I used to say, “I’m a perfectionist,” with a mix of self-criticism and condescension — as if sacrificing my body and soul to meet deadlines was something to brag about.

There was a time when I would wake up at 5:00 am and complete a full ashtanga practice, read the Economist with a cup of coffee, and then go to the library to work on a thesis. I had this fully formed image of who I had to be to be successful: disciplined, smart, hardworking, driven. Pursuing this idealized version of myself kept me working my body to exhaustion day in and day out. I got so good at ignoring my body’s needs I hardly noticed when my period stopped coming, and I fooled myself into believing that the constant injuries were a sign of discipline (Must be doing something right).

Grind culture’s idea of success centers around constant overworking. Whenever we check that box, we get a surge of validation — starting with our inner judge that congratulates us for working hard—such a good girl.

Tricia Hersey recounts how we are socialized into becoming perfectionist agents of grind culture:

I would volunteer in my son’s third grade classroom weekly and notice the young children being told “hold your pee. Bathroom break isn’t for another twenty minutes.” I watched in horror as an eight year old squirmed, attempting to wait the twenty minutes until he could relieve himself. The teacher, obviously overwhelmed, continued to ignore his cues until he eventually used the bathroom on himself.

The disregard for children’s bodies and the unnecessary embarrassment we suffer in school are how we learn to ignore our body’s needs. Many people believe grind culture is this faceless thing directing our every move when in reality, we become grind culture by internalizing a mechanical standard of perfection.

Machine as Metaphor

The machine metaphor is everywhere.

Just today, I picked up a book by Rick Rubin and read this:

The universe functions like a clock (…) The artist is on a cosmic timetable, just like all of nature.

This quote is taken out of context, but still, you get the point right? The idea of nature being a cosmic timetable ticks me off. (ticks me off…Sofia, really?)

Humans love to build metaphors around the latest technology.

The invention of the first crude mechanical clock in the thirteenth century shaped Western thought in ways no one could have predicted. By the late twentieth century, watches evolved into measuring not just hours but minutes and seconds. At Bethlehem Steel Works in Pennsylvania, Frederick Taylor used a slide rule and stopwatch to determine how long each task should take to a fraction of a second.

Philosophers, anthropologists, and industrial designers concluded that the human body must also work like a clock. Like clockwork — our bodies were dissected into smaller and smaller units so that our movement (that unpredictable je-ne-sais-quoi that makes us more human) would reduce to the endless repetition of a single task. Easy. Predictable — just like the minutes in an hour. However, most of what gives life meaning comes from unpredictability, chaos, and serendipity—that which cannot be quantified or mass-produced.

All our technological utopias, and our dreams of machine-mediated immortality may fire our minds but they can never feed our bodies.

— David Abrams, Becoming Animal.

Perfectionism as Toxic Self-Worth (In praise of uselessness)

Perfectionism is a form of toxic self-worth — It asks you to compare yourself with the latest time-saving technology (I refuse to compete with Chat GTP).

It’s also a tell-tale sign that you may be suffering from capitalism.

Underlying your impeccable work ethic is a desire for validation in a culture that celebrates punctuality as a moral virtue and condemns laziness as a cardinal sin.

Perfectionism feeds on external validation; it ties our sense of worth to how much we can do for others at a given time. We’ll likely feel unworthy of being loved when our efforts fail to meet expectations.

The trance of unworthiness is cyclical. You work for validation, but you must always do more since you have not done enough. It will never be enough.

Productivity is a story about scarcity — making you believe that there is not enough of anything: not enough time, not enough love, not enough peace, not enough attention. Most importantly, it convinces us that we are not enough.

Underneath its capitalistic guise, worth is about life’s impulse to keep living.

Life cherishes the continuation of life, and your body is the vehicle for that emergence. Being in constant dialogue with our bodies, asking them with all the kindness we can muster, “What do you need today? How can I make space for you to rest?” is vital to unlocking an alternative sense of worth — one that is innate and unquantifiable.

Unhinging our sense of worth from productivity means embodying somewhat fuzzier ideas, like the importance of non-verbal communication and the mere experience of life as the highest goal. It means celebrating a form of self that changes over time, expanding, meandering, and unraveling.

Old assumption: I am not enough. My worth hinges on my doing.

Reframe: I am abundant. My worth is my life’s impulse.

Shaping the Space for Refusal

I started practicing somatic movement a few months ago to de-mechanize the mental and physical patterns I took for granted.

Soma is engaging with your body as a process in constant change rather than an object. It’s tapping into your human animality—observing the nonverbal ways your body communicates with you.

This week my theme was sensing perfectionism — as it weighs heavy on my shoulders. It’s an acquired heaviness that comes with the feeling of having to be everything to everyone. Having to contort myself into whatever someone else wants me to be. Having to be on all the time. Being everything, everywhere, all at once (subtle pop culture nod).

In my practice, I asked the other person in the room to close their eyes, removing myself from that external gaze. I moved slowly. I drew a circle around myself, representing all of my needs. I stepped gently on the imagined contours, then circled out until the diameter grew larger and larger. This was the designated space for my needs, and I danced everywhere and all around it. By enlarging the area through movement — I allowed myself to express something critical — “I have needs, and they are many. Sometimes they won’t align with your needs. That’s okay.”

Through movement, I give myself permission to respect my needs and boundaries, embody abundance, and tell people I’m not available today.

Here’s a haiku that I wrote:

Please hold on my dear,
While I’m busy blooming,
Basking in the sun.

Blooming/resting your body is about holding open that place in the sun where serendipity occurs and perceiving life as more than an instrument.

Life cannot be optimized.

Accepting your softness is radical; it’s more important than ever. You are crafting a space for refusal where you will grieve. You will grieve the version of yourself that is deemed “productive” and “successful” by machine-like standards.

Productivity that produces what, though? Successful in what way and for whom?

Embodying resistance is to make oneself into a shape that a capitalist value system cannot so easily appropriate.

In How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell retells a 4th-century Taoist story about a useless tree:

There was an old and crooked oak tree by the village shrine, every branch twisted and gnarled. Passing the old tree, Hui Tzu, a carpenter’s apprentice said to Shih, the master carpenter:

“What a useless tree that is. Its trunk and branches were so crooked, so distorted and full of knots. The wood is so beautiful, but it cannot be cut up.

Soon after the tree appears to him in a dream and asked “are you comparing me with those useful trees? If I had been of some use, would I ever have grown this large?”

The tree balks at the distinction between usefulness and worth made by a man who only sees trees as potential timber. Similarly, a new culture may emerge by tending a forest of useless trees — creating a restful space for resistance.

An Alternative Value Scheme

The creative space for refusal is threatened in a time of widespread economic precarity. Who can afford refusal is a matter of real concern. The question “how can I rest and pay the bills?” is evidence of the depth of the trauma endured at the hands of grind culture.

In the words of Tricia Herst, “I hear so many repeat the myth of rest being a privilege, and I understand this concept and still disagree with it. Rest is not a privilege because our bodies are still our own, no matter what the current system teaches us. I don’t belong to the systems. They cannot have me. We have a lifetime. We can go slow. We can go deep. We can go into the cracks.”

Let us tend to a garden of useless trees and watch them grow — maybe that is something worth living for

For me, this is a life impulse that makes sense— grounding ourselves deeply in community, anchored in care. I want to be surrounded by misfits, people deemed too weird, and non-compliant. A forest of gnarled trees that take the sun in when needed, drink water when needed, dance, play music, and go back to that place of deep rest, which always leaves the door half open. I want to live in a twisted forest so dense that it offers protection to all those who come to reclaim their right to contemplation.

This is my alternative take on success (for you to enjoy and hopefully add on to):

Living in natural time — I listen to my body’s natural rythm and I am attuned with the seasons. ie. Wintering — like nature, I rest when it is cold outside, this is a time to gather the strength needed to blossom come spring.

Embodying abundance — I am enough, I am abundant. This body is enough. ie. Humaning — the body as a process that takes its time, and which cannot be optimized — my instinct is my compass.

Love for another being — I ground myself in care and community. I voice my needs and trust that others will help me when needed. ie. Reciprocity — giving what you can give, and allowing yourself to recieve.

Maintance art — I maintain the seeds that I have already sown and will water this patch of land to watch them grow. Maintaining (instead of disrupting) is a life instinct.

A Pile of Poems

One.

Can adornment be an offering,
Dandelions,
the “zenith of the sun,”
We deconstruct and reconfigure,
So knowledge can un-become.

A habit worth having: Commit to trying things out.

A thought worth having:“One day you’ll look back,
And see how all your loose threads,
Made sense.”

Subway Interlude

I wear privacy like a thin veil wrapped delicately on long commutes. Like an indulgence —privacy has acquired the heaviness of guilt through Culture’s grinding, crushing my soft parts into plastic molds. Intimacy — such a thin, ethereal, untouchable no-thing. So hard to recognize and, therefore, so easy to lose (like the thing that keeps your earring in place) — we only notice its absence once it’s been gone a while. I must wear privacy loudly, like a delivery truck advertising the latest “fresh.” Keeping mine fresh requires maintenance. Watchfulness. Boundaries etched in indelible marker, also calendar blocks from seven to ten p.m. That will be my time to think thoughts worth thinking about (none of which are any of your business.)

Two.

“Fastina lente,”
To make haste slowly,
One metaphor that opens things up,
Like a point in time,
Stretching to become a moment,
And the idea of time,
Draining out of your cells.

“Measure twice, cut once,”
Another metaphor,
A form of wisdom,
Called prudence.

“Solipsis,”
The loneliest thing,
When we project our thoughts,
Onto reality.

An Intrusion

J knows exactly who she is married to, and A knows that she knows. It’s an unprecedented feeling — to be both the charity case and a perceived source of competition (as if there were a shortage of men). I sat across J on a sprawling dining room table. “Where is home to you?” I asked. She said she doesn’t feel at home anywhere. Home doesn’t exist.

“Have you read A Room of One’s Own?” she asks. I nod.

A room of one’s own and money are needed for women who aspire to write fiction. A space to create, an oasis with few sharp edges, but those that remain make sharp incisions — accessing the stream of your innermost self. The space that stores the tools with which you will craft life by working, walking, choosing carefully, and moving with the tides (when they come and when they leave). While we trust these tides to smoothen the surface of our being — etching wrinkles on our skin like watermarks, It’s our prerogative to let soul set sail, making space for a life of our creation. To extract meaning from experience is meaningful to me— to name that which we bear witness to. We illuminate the night sky with constellations — we animate them through mythology and eroticize our senses, rendering emotion tangible through pleasure and breath.

Maybe art is in the living — in the carving of space — maybe horizons can be touched within the four walls of a room of our own — Open like a boundless sky — mine to hold close where the end of the ocean meets the end of the sky. I’m trying to access the metaphors behind form — the ones that make home sound like an exhale, and make wonder sound so much like water — the original malleable clay.

I’m removing the bandages binding my feet —to finally see what I feel, I need to know what moves me to externalize motion. I need to walk with “los ojos abiertos,” to find home in horizons and surrender these choices to master peace (a masterpiece, if ever there was one.)

Three.

Everything is in New York.
A building someone built to look like Paris,
The Bangladeshi street vendor selling vegetables,
The street that is Amsterdam’s namesake,
The Orthodox Jew standing between 72nd and Broadway,
The very long food line on Monday mornings,
Also, the very long commutes.

A Portrait

Susan was twenty-five, working as a photographer for the Philadelphia Inquirer — a bi-weekly publication. It was the eighties. She had dyed her hair pink and gotten a septum piercing a week prior. Young, energized, inexperienced — she was sent on assignment to the Annual Architects Costume Gala. “A good opportunity to dress up.” she thought and, with a roll of black duct tape, fashioned herself a costume covering only her breasts and crotch. “Like a censored picture.”

With her borrowed Nikon camera swinging over her barely-there garment, she walked in to find an overflow of fur coats and canapés to feed the hunger of the tuxed-up people. Suited men and diamond-studded women lined up for the parade in their respective caravans adorned with laser-cut replicas of Frank-Lloyd Wright, Maher, and George Grant Elmslie.

Susan covered her belly ring with one hand while she snapped pictures with the other.

Finally, the evening’s host stepped on stage to announce the best costume winner with a portable microphone. “The photographer,” he said, not trying that hard to hide his self-satisfying smirk. “The photographer wins.”

She went pale and blank-faced when the host approached her, “what’s your name?” he asked.

Nothing.

A person in the crowd hollered, “Flash!” and Susan mumbled, “Yes! Flash! That’s my name.”

“Last name?”

— “Rosenberg?” she replied, her voice going up an octave.

I met Flash Rosenberg a week ago after a writer’s workshop. “I’m not a writer. I’m a comedian,” she told me. Also, “I’m a laughing feminist, not a serious one.” That’s what I want to be when I grow up, too.

An Update: Life has been piling up lately, much like this post.