I've been corresponding instead of blogging, writing enormous letters back and forth with some folks who are really helping me see things in a different way.

I forgot how much just talking to another writer and hearing about the work they're doing inspires me. In the past few days, I've gotten pretty fired up about the whole thing and made a few decisions. I won't write on the computer anymore. It lends itself to too much self-editing, and that destroys the momentum. I get hung up on deleting and rewriting a line a dozen times, then forget what I wanted to say next. So I'm going to stick to the journal, and the typewriter. The typewriter, which will be pulled out of hibernation shortly.

On Saturday I went to my first reading in over four years (probably closer to five). It was a good experience, I'm going to do it more. I'm going to finish transcribing the old journals into the computer, so I don't have that looming over me. Then I'm going to start collecting and editing recent stuff to make a little ghetto chapbook, or broadside at least.

So, I'm sorry that it's been quiet around here (I know you were just chomping at the bit to see my next entry appear!), but it's been for good reason, I assure you.

Now, here's a little bit from the journal for 2000, edited only slightly, which I'm starting with. Some poems, and then a little entry I wrote about someone I cared for very much.

A Body in Motion

Drive faster.
Leave your indifferent heart
behind me.
The tangle in my throat
is the hard part.
Knowing I’ve been used
too late to take it back.
A little water
wells up in my eyes
but I’m
driving faster
than I’m crying
so the wind’s whipping
those teardrops
into the big black nothing
behind me.
Just a bit of dew
floating in space,
a little moist star
without a constellation.

Drive faster.
Hurtle from one affair
to the next
because if I stop
it’s all going to come
pouring out.
I’ve got to outrun
the mistakes
gaining slowly
on me.
I’ve got to keep
my face dry.

Drive faster.
Even if
every now and then
I find myself
in a pile of wreckage
steering wheel
jammed through my heart.

Blooming

You make me
feel my womb--
where once there was
a disappointed
growing emptiness
(like the pink petals
of a stargazer lily
dropping one by one)
But that was before you
Before the seeds and bulbs you brought
to make a luscious jungle with
Your green thumb
leaves a print
on the barren wasteland
I once called a heart
and rows of roses
spring up behind
filling the air
with their sweet scent
and not a thorn among them

Vigil

It used to be
that soap was just another thing to watch,
the slowly diminishing supply
a source of concern,
the final sliver
urgent as a fire alarm.

But being with you
changes all that.
We share the soap
that you have purchased in bulk.
It sits under the sink
like a reassuring sister.
And when I step into your shower,
there is a cake of it
waiting for me
with its edges sharp
and new.

I don’t have to watch
the soap here.
Not the soap,
or anything.

I could love you
with my eyes closed.

Sitting with Albert

It's been more than a year since I saw him. He is on florazapam, a sleeping agent. I’ve never been one for pharmaceuticals, but he takes three while we sit on the stone seats, the first time I’ve seen him in over a year. In a tone full of sarcasm he asks, “Don’t I look great?”

I look at the skin of his face, gray as ash and full of blemish. I respond, “Yes. You always look handsome to me,” and feel better, because the last half is true. He shows me three photographs of himself with a great-aunt and cousin in Thailand, from his recent trip. In each of them, he is smiling broadly, with an aquamarine towel draped around his neck like a prize fighter. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen him smile that way.

I say, “You are just dashing when you’re happy. You look so happy.”

He answers, “Yes, I am happy all the time there.” And at that moment, I am so sorry for him, thinking of his having to come back to the States, back to Los Angeles. Having to leave the jungle and return to his indifferent wife, and dirty bathroom floors, and lawn-mowing. It’s too much. But the reason he got married is four years old now, and there’s not much he can do about that.

He must have read me. “If not for little Monica, I would have stayed.”

“Yes,” I say, “If not for little Monica.”

We spend two hours talking about the mosquitoes, and toilets that are only holes in the ground. Then we talk about books, and our own current projects. He shows me the 254 Haiku he’s written in 6 days, thanks to another little blue capsule. He is trying to pawn a few things so he can get money for groceries, and some more pills. He is very sad that he’s finished them off, and I can tell he will not write more today.

He’s not the boy I knew at 17. I’ve seen his genius atrophy, turn yellow and wrinkled. I wanted to save him, to love him, to be his muse. But I lost him to obligations and prescriptions, to secret meetings that only widened the rift between us.

Still, I got my typewriter back. And that’s what I came for.