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.