My First Collage

Do you name collages? I thought this kina captured some of my everyday life, incorporating a fast pass from last year and a small rendering by local artist Ursula Young of SF victorians.

Découpage

I am tired again.
I have lists and lists
of things to do. I take up
the juvenile art of
collaging.

This helps my hands feel
as if they have produced
something. Perhaps
they will sleep at night
instead of strumming
with regret.

I cannot cut straight edges.
This requires a tool.
I am buying tools for
an art I performed in
elementary school.

The woman at the store asks me
if I’m working on decoupage, and
I don’t understand her, even
though I speak French.

But what have I saved up
all of these scraps of
fabric and paper and buttons for
if not this?

It’s true, I kept them
knowing there would be this
return, this curving to childhood
pastimes.

My grandmother tells me
she would collage anything
when she was a housewife.

Tired

I can’t see you
sitting in front of me
I’m blinded by your
dominating beam of light
that shoots straight through
my past.

Here is what happened
after seven years,
we were tired of trying
to maintain… we broke
away from each other,
I met someone new
you met someone new

she wasn’t so unlike me
but not so much like me either
you are moving in together

We both stop following our
delicate vegan regimes
because we are so tired

Tired of the carefully-
worded explanations, the
uncomfortable moment
when you refuse a seemingly
harmless dish and end up with
dry salad.

We were always prone
to giving up. Each night
when I got home from work
and you were on the couch
watching television, I knew
you had given up something.

These are just small things,
The deaths of animals,
the endings of relationships,
they are so tiny
on this planet
in this universe
it makes me tired
to think of it.

Face to Face

You said to me you preferred face to face contact.
You kept my number in your phone for two weeks.
It waited there with all the other numbers awkward
and uncomfortable with a feeling like having to pee
in a place with no bathroom.
Then, our faces did meet, and even though my number had
given up all hope and become the depressed outcast of your
phone, you said let’s have dinner and you used my number
the next day to set it up, and my number experienced a
renewed sense of meaning in life.

So, our faces sat across from each other over a meal at a
Moroccan restaurant and had a very pleasant conversation
and they walked back to my apartment and there
continued to talk, and you said how you liked
human interaction and tangible products and angry music

all of which my face and my phone number approved of heartily
and in fact, our faces liked each other so much that they were
drawn toward one another at the end of the night and for one moment
we couldn’t stop them from touching.

It’s only the next day, but my face is thinking of yours, specifically my
lips feel that there was some unfinished business, and they have
stubbornly formed themselves into a semi-colon waiting for
the second part of their sentence, creating another awkward
feeling and forcing me to send you an email,

even though I know you prefer to speak in person. I am much more
articulate and secure in writing, and my message
is pleading with you to read between the lines or
rather to complete each sentence as you would in the SAT test
The longer my email stays in your inbox, the more
it begins to identify with my phone number,
which still hasn’t completed enough therapy to really be
over the trauma you caused it.

I try to comfort my email, saying there is no reason to be so
dramatic, email, you hardly even know this guy, so don’t
invest too much hope or desire or longing in him, because
it is a waste of emotion and you are probably just hormonal, email
so stop nagging me all day with your wants.

My email talks back, saying this is the first time in a long time
it has any chance of getting something resembling what it might
want, so it’s important not to let that go, and I have to agree
with my email’s logic, because my email is, after all, a part of me
and like me is floating in an in-between sort of world hoping
to grab onto something.

Trompe L'oeuil

You changed your facebook status to
in a relationship with her.
In the 7 years we were together we never did this.
I never felt like declaring it.
How funny to find out now in such a brutal and
electronic manner,
that you didn’t love me as much as I loved you.

No wonder, my dear, no wonder I kept asking
all the time for your reassurance, I would say to you
Do you love me? until you had to tell me to stop
and I changed it to a suggestive, I love you
question mark, dot dot dot.

Sometimes you have an animal instinct telling you
things you do not know in the manifest world.
How real and tangible your love seemed
I wanted to reach out and grab it, but
I could never get a grasp on it. Mine was
so much deeper, dear, so deep I had to let it go
for the weight of it was crushing my chest.

*Another one of my breakup poems from a while back.

Used

His great aunt wanted someone to be there
when she went to the bathroom,
even this became an uncertain journey,
she wanted to be a little girl again,
with mother to nurse her.
But there were no mothers there,
only daughters, and one was willing
to sit, and wait, for her to push something through.

My great grandmother said to me,
Don’t worry, you will get used to the boat
rocking and rocking, your legs will adapt.
That was an ugly thing to say, so ugly
I can’t even write it.
She was the one stepping onto a boat,
learning to lull and creek and disappear
and cross an ocean.

His great aunt’s house was white with blond wood
and dolls and collections of glass shoes
and tiffany’s lamps.
Everything so used to being in a certain place,
and wearing and wearing into that place
that nothing could be moved.

There was that clinging, you could feel
the pillows clinging to the seats,
and the plastic flowers set in so tightly,
and that feeling, that long feeling,
that used and no more using feeling.

*A poem from a few years ago.

La Femme a la Guitare

My hand is the hand of a woman
in a cubist painting,
la femme a la guitare,
an encrypted shape
groping for the strings
that are now a part of it.

The music is all modern jazz
and bumping off the air’s
serrated edges.

Where is the faithful, round
pluck of the guitar?
the hand’s dance
weaving itself into sound.

The music is now a ribbon
in the gut
around the thigh,
pulled through the ancle.

To dig or scrape,
obsolete.
Instead the hand
must learn a new way
of moving,
a new articulation
bending sound,
and blurting a backward call.

*A poem from 05

Dentist Visit

My heart throbbed
in the dentist's chair
so hard I could see
the whole apparatus
vibrate each time.

This followed an
injection that
spread like spilled
ink down through
my chest.

Numbness is a
commodity, he said.
It wouldn't come,
so he slid the needle
in again.

When that didn't work
the nurse said, Nitrous
for the love of God,
we are tired of her
squealing.

And they placed
the elephant gray
mask over my nose,
and the doctor said
you may feel queasy.

That wasn't the right
word at all.
Disoriented, I said,
loopy, not queasy.

It brought my eyes
and my thoughts
inward enough
for them to finish

scraping away
the blackness.
And replace it with
a bright and plastic
white.

*From a couple years ago

Idyllic

I confess
I’ve been corrupted
by the seduction
of the pale hand
of darkness
shaking like an old man’s
rattling with old smoking
and holding of coffee cups.

This dream is a lie
but a good one
told from a delighted tongue
at a dinner party.

I am both sexes
all races
all religions
in one.

There is an unwrapping
of a newborn
perfect as a doll.

Never mind the crawl
of the three footed cat
wobbling back
for food
in heat.

Nevermind the beads
of sweat inching from
your belly
to my chest.

I contend
I woke up humping the bed
screaming a name
in a foreign tongue.

Anonymous one, I said
love is but the clenching
of two pinkies.

*A fun one from my college days.

How To

Don’t you see, the materials for these poems
are the one gift our breakup gave me
freeing up my chest of that good
and wholesome love I had for you
left room for all of this black ink.

Loving you was so fucking hard,
because you were such a good man.
You never did anything wrong,
never looked at other women,
never wondered what life would be like
without me. I did enough of that for both of us,
and it was exhausting.

Now I poke at your fleshy parts with a stick
trying to provoke life from you.
I plead with you to be human,
to show me that our years together
didn’t just dissolve on your tongue.

I ask you to break my heart again,
because I was too shocked to believe it
the first time. Can you show me
the mechanics, exactly where did you
make the incision?

And please give me direction
on the way you were able to swallow
7 years. I keep choking, my dear,
I keep choking on those years.
They are so heavy and so sharp.
How did you swallow them so easily?

Toy or Art?

This new toy sort of bridges the gap between toys and art. It's a mini Munny DIY Toy that Tara McPherson, an awesome artist, signed and designed for me during her book signing at Kid Robot this week. I love the drippy heart. A lot of her works feature a cut out heart or some sort of other manipulated heart. While heart imagery may be cliché, there are always new ways of doing it, and it’s such a universal symbol that it’s sure to evoke some sort of emotion. And, that’s what art is all about, right?
Lately, contemporary artists are inspiring me more and more. I have zero ability to paint or draw, but I think some of my poems and ideas could be translated to a collage or diorama type format. I’m hoping to try this out some time soon and post the restults here.

Here is another fun toy from Kid Robot, not so artistic, but still cute and fun. [Yes, it and my other toy are photographed with a backdrop of poetry books.] It’s from the Cannibal Fun House line of toys. I kind of enjoy the irony of adorable little cannibal guys.

And so,

You died, and so
I can never beat my fists
to your stomach.

You died, and so,
I can never tell you
all those words and words,
grown stale and moldy.

It was so like
leaving again,
on the tenth anniversary
of the first time.

It is not so different
for the hand to take
the blade across
than to dial a number.

or to write out a letter.
I told my wrists this many a time,
and now they are useless tools.
And so, you are dead.

My memories are even a bit stolen now,
and so, you were like a father,
but so what, because you are dead,
so there will be no father talk
between you and me now.

So, you are dead,
you thought the leaving and leaving
wasn’t permanent enough,
so, you thought you would leave
someone new for once.

Not the same women and daughters and
small sons, so you took leave of yourself
For the first time a new feeling.
So, now, there will be no talk,
no sobbing letters.

And so, we will never brush
shoulders, in a crowd, I will never
look up to see your graying mustache and
dark green eyes.

And so, I will never say; and
weren’t you a stand in for my father?
and didn’t you get tired of the role
and run away?

So, you chose to die,
I can’t picture it, the bottle
to the mustache, the blade
in your hand.

No, I suppose I can,
and you selfishly took
all those moments and dreams
and dreams and dreams,
so many I dreamt in a decade.

Why would you steal them
Just like that, just like you stole
yourself from me before.


I can picture it, the hand placed
upon the blade, so like a telephone
so like a pen, writing this letter,
speaking this poem into our ears.

Painful Tools

They say I have a dual heart, you know.
With two compartments, one filled
with clean and wholesome love for you,
and the other holding a love fashioned from
worn out memories and old shadows.

I’ve heard this is a dangerous contraption.

But I am used to painful tools, like the shears
I used to cut myself away from my former life,
and the needles I used to stitch myself
into this new one.

Sharp objects don’t scare me anymore.

What’s frightening is when I can’t tell
the difference anymore between shadow
and truth, when I hear his voice in yours
and find my hands very neatly sewing
your flesh into his place.

Northward

And so, you followed
the girl to a
grayer place.

You, more a thought
than a person, more a
dream than a hand

that touched me
one night in the grass
that tingled
on my back.

You followed that girl
to a place with more rain,
more cold, darker green.

You faced north
and opened your arms
to the blankness of snow.

I am not hidden
in the ice.
I cannot crack

but only chisel and sand
away at
the bone.

*This is a poem from a couple years ago.

My Performance

I will make all the mistakes
I will tell you I miss you and
I’m lonely, and my heart
keeps making this horrible
cracking noise, and I don’t know
what to do about it.

I ensure you will never,
never love me again.
I give up my power
for you. I hand it to you,
whatever I gathered,
from my discontent, from
always being just a little less
devoted than you were.

I hand this to you on a silver platter.
These are my organs.
These are my inner workings.
I never gave them up when we
were together, but now
that we are both vegan and celibate
I gift them to you like raw
and slithery meat.

This is my performance for you,
I break and re-break my heart
with a hammer and chisel just
for the show of it, the way
it explodes like plaster and glitter.
I do this ten times for every year
we were happy and a hundred times
for the years we were not.

I perform surgery on my own
organs. No anesthetic necessary.
I will give you the best
seat at the window, so you can
admire my steady hand and neat
stitching.

I become a side show freak for you
the girl with one arm, half a heart
no stomach, can’t contain anything
anymore.

I write disjointed poems
with no set theme or meter about you.
I plaster them everywhere, flyers
for some hopeless campaign that
catch your eye as you walk
home by yourself and make you
think of me.

*It was inevitable that some of my breakup poems would end up here, so here's the first.

End Up

You spoke words often
spoken before, don’t end up
like me, darling.

If I could cradle your face
in my hand, perhaps
I could bear those words.

As it is, there was a time,
when I said to you,
Father, today I learned

the word empathy,
and how it is different
from sympathy.

You had a lesson then too,
don’t grab and clutch
for a dream that is over.

Maybe it wasn’t
until you said it
out loud.

Poem for Tao Lin

Your poems remind me
of my dreams, mostly
the ones stuck to my shoes
like old gum groping
at my worn down heels.

The heels are so tattered
you can see their metal roots
encircled by white bony plastic.

Last night I dreamt
I lived back in the co-ops.
There was no place for my stuff,
the room was full of old
leather chairs, and rejected
stuffed animals.

I thought, this will do, but
the showers, that is what I
didn’t think about when I
agreed to live here again.

In the dream there was
a dark haired boy,
he kept touching my stomach.
We were laughing and I looked
at myself disapprovingly.

I woke up surprised again
to be back in an apartment
in San Francisco with sore
teeth from the night’s grinding.

I had two root canals this year
and I lost my favorite hat.
I’m not sure which is more upsetting.
The hat is quite important
for its symbolic nature.

A black scholar cap
that makes people call me
frenchy, and I wore it
in France all those cold days
with sputtered rain and the
gray old buildings.

The teeth are another story.
They take your living
slithery roots out, because
they are damaged. Something
electrical, the signal isn’t
getting through, and you
can’t feel cold anymore.

So, they replace them with
steel rods, drill them straight
into the gum. Steel doesn’t die
like living electric nerves.
My teeth will be secure,

And I won’t have to wear dentures
when I’m old, but I will have to
live with a cold and plastic object
inside my mouth that is not
human. They don’t seem to

understand that emotional
attachment. Dentists, they think
a living bone is a bone, a hat
is just a hat made of material
and who cares if it traveled
to France and back, and who
cares if you must live with
a prosthetic your whole life?

*This is a poem from early last year when I first discovered Tao Lin.

He must have gone mad, tearing or clipping as he walked.
He must have used scissors; each little bundle of silvery black hair is about three inches
long, cut neatly.
Every lock a testimony to his existence, a protest against nothingness, a prayer to
loneliness.
He said, I will leave little notes up and down the street to whisper at the toes of walkers,
to keep them guessing how long this manifestation lasted.
Sprawling both sides of the block, they will tell my story, because I cannot write it down.
This might have been a liberation; he was welcoming spring, running, screaming,
breaking some inane traditions.
Or, perhaps she said, these are my last pretty days, and I don’t care, I will show beauty how little I care by letting it blow away in the spring wind like
nothing at all.
These pieces belonging to someone, someone who wanted to grow lighter, head bare to
earth, humble sheen of the scalp, greeting the sky, honest for once.
Who is this, leaving love letters or suicide notes. They left a frantic feeling; this was
an event, this was something that happened on an otherwise ordinary day.
It happened, the sharpening, the discarding of a part of one’s self, it happened like an
unplanned modern art exhibit, where the crowd breathlessly asks, what does it mean?
Like a foreign language spray painted on a wall, some mislead soul scraping from
within to send an encrypted message.
This is the body, so small, so fragile, scattered over the pavement, and it lasts only until it
is swept up by other hands.

*This is an old poem from one of my college classes. I was talking about it recently and decided to revisit it.

River

Doctor says, no more
silence for you.
We didn't think to
warn you.

Of course, you
shouldn't care, as
the drum and the
cochlea are marching
away finely.

There will be those
moments when
you wish to be
so alone,

like the
earth or the trees,
away from others
and sound,

but don't worry
that will fade, as
this constant
high strung
hum of the body,

reflecting the tingling
that is your anxiety,
becomes a part
of your brain.

You see, it is only
a river shooting through
your mind,
through what you know
as time

to something so
far, so dark, you would
never recognize it.