words, words, words
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
If I begin to detail myself here, will you understand?
P. I am me
Q. I don't always know exactly who that is
R. I am Quaker
S. I like words and playing with them
T. I like genmaicha tea
U. I like the word napkin more than most others
V. I spend time walking my neighborhood
W. I cook rice often
X. I sleep well most every night
Y. I eat large amounts of fruit and vegetables
Z. I munch, sleep, write, create, cook, bike, watch, walk, listen, hope, learn, drink, live, breathe, touch, know, question, taste, copy, read, stare, carry, talk, dance, finger, try.
raisin@gmail.com
albums:
Magnetic Fields: 69 Love Songs
Erasure: I Say, I Say, I Say
Depeche Mode: Black Celebration
The Beach Boys: Pet Sounds
Marvin Gaye: What's Going On?
David Bowie: Hunky Dory
George Michael: Listen without Prejudice
George Gershwin: Porgy and Bess
Yo La Tengo: And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out
songs:
Wild is the Wind: Nina Simone
Come Undone: Duran Duran
Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini: Rachmaninov
My Funny Valentine: Chet Baker
Feeling Yourself Disintegrate: The Flaming Lips
This Must Be the Place: The Talking Heads
Hyperballad: Bjork
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
Thursday, June 26, 2003
oh, and i have some purple in my hair, i think. i can't see it, but that's probably due to my difficulty in color vision. so maybe i'll go get some more tomorrow. still, i feel cool.
3:20 PM
everyone knows right? a new step towards our freedom.
and this: "Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote, 'A law branding one class of persons as criminal solely based on the state's moral disapproval of that class and the conduct associated with that class runs contrary to the values of the Constitution and the Equal Protection Clause, under any standard of review.'
amen and amen
3:09 PM
Wednesday, June 18, 2003
ah, summer, that hateful season of heat and humidity. it came late this year, delayed by some wonderful force of winter trying to hold on. some blamed it on me, said i was forcibly holding summer back like jean grey keeping her ship safe from the flood. but summer's here now, and i'm scared to go outside. i'll have to turn the air conditioner on tonight, i'm sure, always wondering how people survived seventy years ago when such things were not available. did they sleep then? maybe not. the next few months are why i keep dreaming of leaving st louis, as much as i do like it. I'm not sure this city is worth the pain of such a long horrible summer. there isn't much about the summer that i like, although, granted, st louis summers are better than sacramento summers. at least we have clouds and rain every once in a while. but i still have to jump into an ice cold bath every night so i can sleep. and usually several times during the day so i can stand being alive. it's my only respite, the memory of winter that still remains in my brain even though it seems impossible that i was once ever cold, that i once ever double layered my coat because the weather was so chilly.
i realize the summer gives us good crops, pretty flowers, and um, something else good surely that i can't think of, but just let it pass quickly. i'd like to find a cold basement and hibernate until the season ends, but i suppose i'll put up with it, just like most of you put up with winter.
3:07 PM
Tuesday, June 17, 2003
i'm sorting through old books and things down in the basement today. i must purge in order to move to a smaller apartment this fall. all these words that i've carried with me so far. many of them i've spent hours with, some i bought in the hopes of reading them without ever reaching that goal. i have always been a bookworm, since my brother taught me to read before i entered school. i protested but my mother let him force me to read out of the big book with the pigs on front of it. when i was in elementary, i would walk with a book in front of me, to class, sometimes even during recess. my dad used to kick me out of the house to go play, and not let me take my book with me. i never knew what to do. i dont' read so much anymore, having found so many other things to spend my time doing, like writing, cycling, talking, cooking, and playing. but i still have books, ghosts in a way, of a reading past, the words of so many dead people, mostly white men. but i've been preparing myself for this purge, repeatedly convincing myself that this stuff is worthless, that i don't need to own as much as i do, that carrying such baggage is a waste of space, time, and the angst revealed when trying to give it away. so now i have three boxes full of books i'm giving away. i probably still have that many that i'm keeping, but at least i'm making a good start. maybe in a more advanced state, i'll be able to give more away. there aren't too many things i need to keep; i've been filling my head up with so many ideas, i can flush all those physical things, quite happy to entertain myself in the freedom of thought.
1:56 PM
Saturday, June 14, 2003
I grew up listening to John Denver. I still grow up while listening to John Denver. maybe you don't know him, maybe you haven't heard him say that it's goodbye again, how a relationship he has is in trouble again, right before he has to go traveling. maybe you haven't heard him sing about a sunny day, glorifying the day for everything it is, not what it could be or what it isn't. maybe you haven't heard him sing about rhyme and reason, and how some mountains are his friends, how he knows them better than many people. maybe you haven't been to colorado and gotten to know the mountains for yourself, those peaks and bulges sticking out of the ground like some beautiful wonderful god that simply exists. but i have. i have heard him croon over the flight from LA to denver and remember the feelings of skiing down the flying dutchman or looking up to the mountains while in college, how they shone in the morning after a snow while the sun shone from the east and glinted off that fresh snow, trying to blind you. but what glory and beauty! even if it does blind you, you want to look, and you want to forget that you hate the life you're in, and you start to love the life you're in, simply because the mountains are there, friends of yours who never leave.
4:44 PM
Wednesday, June 11, 2003
go Hillary go!
2:07 PM
Tuesday, June 10, 2003
I mentioned earlier that I had found a link to my uncle, who was gay and who killed himself when i was young. I found the book today, written by Rev Troy Perry, the founder of the MCC, with letters written between the two of them. there were words from my uncle telling me he was gay, telling me that he loved his children, my cousins, but was afraid his soon to be ex-wife was going to take them away from him, telling me about my grandparents and how difficult it had been with them, reminding me of the stories my mother told me about how they abused him, because he wouldn't do what they wanted and because he was gay. but i want more. i want so much more. i want him to be alive so i can run to him when i'm scared of my family, so that he can help me talk to my mother and help her to understand this, all the pain that she's caused me. i want to talk to him, the only out gay person in my family, on either side. i want to know how much I am like him, to hear his stories, to understand why he killed himself, to help my mother understand that it wasn't because he tried to be gay but for so many other reasons, so she won't be waiting for me to die, too, because i'm gay. i just want his help, want someone to say, I know, I understand; I know the pressures of growing up in this family and how much fear is inside of you. it hurts to know how he must have felt, so lost and alone then, having lost his first sister only a few years before, the only one who probably accepted him. even my own mother saw the pain he went through from his parents but couldn't stop it, and apparently, can't bring herself to forgive him for abandoning her. how did it feel, mother? when you found out he had left you, alone, to face your horrible brother and your parents? why are you punishing me for that pain you felt? can I help you to understand him better, and thus to understand me? how can we heal the wounds we both have? it hurts inside me, and i know it must hurt inside you, even after these twenty years. all this pain we go through. can we help each other?
11:45 PM
Monday, June 09, 2003
Who are you?
I don't use that word often,
you,
too focused on I, repeating the pronoun
obsessing like any gay man who knows he's too hot,
the desire of so many men and women
I know it so well, I disregard you
busy digging beneath the self I knew
down to the mineral ore,
so quickly I unearthed too many demons;
I had to rescue myself, be my own best friend,
so I learned to heal myself, love myself.
Now that I have lowered the walls
between myself and myself
I shine through my skin like glass
attracting more than physical.
Yes, i gloried in it, soaked in it
because I was so dry
squeezed by my father and the air force
who pushed me into shapes
I didn't fit, ignoring my my-ness
Now you're here, with your own life
I am curious for once, though ignorant
having licked all my own wounds, now can see yours.
So who are you?
the answer can't be easy, can it?
You've been telling me all along, haven't you?
but like Liza Doolittle, I don't hear right,
don't distinguish between my speech and yours,
your stories that I pull into mine
as if you exist only to spur
my memory of myself.
But you have stories I don't recognize
when your father forced you to
watch him abuse your sister
when those high school boys mocked you
for your awkward figure and quiet soul.
So I have to lay myself down,
lay down all that lust thrown at me
so I can see your gold,
dig for it under your skin.
I know how to play the game,
tossing a hungry glance, looking away
but not how to love,
the realness that demands sacrifice
staring into your eyes, inside you.
I promise I'll try, past the first, third, fifth,
and tenth failures
until, like Helen Keller, I feel the water
on my hands and know it has a name
a meaning, a language in itself
until finally, finally,
I understand who you are.
9:48 AM
Saturday, June 07, 2003
next time you're feeling angry at the world around you or maybe your significant other, or want to let out some repressed energy, find a local slam poetry night and listen to the spouting rage at the world around us. I spent an evening at St Louis' grand slam, the night to choose four poets to represent the city at the national slam competition this August in Chicago. talk about words, they came at you like firepower, burning everything they could. And yet, I don't think it's unhealthy. They often have good points of view and express those liberal parts of you nobody else shares. I was brave or silly enough to stand up and read my poem to them, full of questions, self-meditation and longings for love, which they actually respected more than i expected. having not really been to a full slam before, i had a hard time guaging my own comfort level which changed through the evening, depending on who was speaking at the moment. I didn't have a chance to memorize mine; most of this pack had been writing for these events for years, seemed to live it with their breath, a niche society in the middle of the rest of us.
but that's how it always is, isn't it? we keep ourselves in our own groups, keep company with the same people, get comfortable in one situation. what i love most though is when you find a group that is both close-knit and welcoming to newcomers, when the spirit that moves between them can grow to accept more, as if you had always been there, as if you were suddenly able to be a part of their lives. hard to do, to leave you life open to the new, whether it be people or experiences.
but what experience for me to stand in front of them, and receive enough welcome that I might just come back. if only to hear some more spittin' words.
1:16 PM
Wednesday, June 04, 2003
tired of your city and think you've seen everything? bike around it at night, late, like 2:30, when nothing moves and the screech of your brakes seems like an ambulance siren. it's beautiful, all that stillness, the coolness in the air, the knowledge that so many are asleep while you're alive. you'll see different colors, as if someone changed your city while you were working too hard. it may surprise you how well the street lights work and the needlessness of a bike light. listen to the trains and the trash trucks, imagine the lives of all those people who just aren't around, maybe a nuclear holocaust that you're immune to, the rapture of every other religion but yours, everything frozen except for you. its' all new, all that you knew, new again.
3:48 AM
Tuesday, June 03, 2003
Who are you? you is not a word i use often enough, you is not a pronoun i understand, and it's just like me to take you and put you into a word or a part of speech instead of a person, utterly confusing and different from myself. instead i concentrate on i, repeat the word until i reach obsession, a typical gay man who thinks he's so hot and the object of adoration. and yet, i've been deeper too, digging into the mineral ore beneath my surface, unearthing demons, digging so quickly that i have to stop, breathe, and heal before i begin again. having done this so much, i have both well polished my surface and enabled a good view into myself, so shiny that i attract even more people than i did before, but now people who aren't satisfied with the physical but want more of me, want affection and love. what can i give them when i'm only used to giving to myself, soaking up all of their energies because i was so dry, after too many years of my father and the air force squeezing me into shapes i didn't fit, without regard to my self. but now that i've lowered the walls between my self and my self, and licked all my wounds, i am curious about you, as if you're some new alien i've never encountered. But I know this time that when i ask who you are and you begin to tell me about your first crush on the guy who would never talk to you, i won't be able to hear well. you've been telling me these stories all along, haven't you? but i've never heard them, too like Liza Doolittle who couldn't hear the difference between her speech and her tutor's. so i have to train my ear, listen again and again. I promise I will this time, will try after the first, the third, and the fifth failure, until i hear, until i am helen keller putting her hands under the water pump and realizing for the first time that water has a name, with letters being spelled into her hand by her teacher, until finally, finally, i understand who you are.
1:47 AM
|
|
| |
|
|
|
