Allen Ginsberg makes me cry at my desk sometimes.

In San Francisco Ginsberg saw a $1 an hour psychiatrist, Philip Hicks, who asked him what he would like to do. "Doctor," as Ginsberg recalls his answer...

"I don't think you're going to find this very healthy and clear, but I really would like to stop working forever. Never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I'm doing now, and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends. And I'd like to keep living with someone - maybe even a man - and explore relationships that way. And cultivate my perceptions, cultivate the visionary thing in me. Just a literary and quiet city-hermit existence. Then he said "Well, why don't you?" I asked him what the American Psychoanalytic Association would say about that, and he said . . . if that is what you really feel would please you, what in the world is stopping you from doing it?

A brief excerpt from David Burner's Making Peace with the Sixties (Princeton University Press, 1996)


Oh god. My thoughts exactly.

those who don't never will. but those who do?

Rise and shine to you.
For you
The moon and the stars and
The sky. There is always
Quick heat in mouths touching, built
with brick around
frost, and hung
with a thousand particles of
light around brick.
Stolen, not taken. My world
is the same as any other (because
what is a world?) if a look is taken
at the brick and
the frost, the lights
in the dark.
But between? There, in the
tiny, apparent barren space that
no one bothers
or, maybe, looks close enough
to see?
There is a rise
and shine
to you
For you
Always sticking.
It is steady, it is even. and
I?
I have seen what a world is after all.

A year, in review.

This season. It doesn't feel like a single one that's come before it, not that I can remember.

Last year, same day. December 21. I wrote this.

Months and years past of train ticket machines click-click-clashing my passage to and from a place that I knew was my home. I took a train again this morning in a sweater two sizes too large for me, and stared out a frostbitten window knowing that I don't know where that home is anymore.

And, far more significantly, knowing that it's alright to not know.

I expect that having figured everything out at the age of 23 would make for a horribly dull, albeit easier and more manageable existence. I could be wrong, of course, so if there's a 20-something (or 30, or 40, or ever 50-something for that matter) out there who believes that they've obtained such clarity, please send me an e-mail...I'd love to hear all about it. So, for the time being, I'm unsure as to what direction this is all going in, and I mean that in the broadest sense possible. Past, present and future blogs, schools, careers, homes, shoes, cigarettes, planes, trains, automobiles, holidays - you name it, I've probably not quite figured it out. And the great clarity I've been seeking for a longer time than I would like to recollect kicks in when I remind myself that it's not something I even want. I'm in love with not knowing, and for right now that's good enough.

A few days ago my oft-alluded to man and I sat in our beautiful tropicana coloured kitchen nook, where we sit most every evening and enjoy the beautiful meals we alternately prepare for one another, and we talked. We always talk.

It's nice, being with someone who likes listening to you talk, likes the way your face moves when you listen to them talk, likes talking to you.

Our talks range from making silly noises and singing at one another to examining existentialist treatises to congratulating each other and ourselves on the accomplishments of the week (songs, chapters finished, meals made, dancing fun had). This time we talked about happiness. What it means, where you feel it, whether it's in your chest or bones or stomach or skin or brain or all of then at once. How it doesn't change who you are, it lets you be who you are. And even though I still don't know what it is, or how to explain to anyone how to feel it like I do...

Happiness. We came to this conclusion. When you can just be, it just is.

And this? This I know.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Not Here.

There's courage involved if you want

to become truth. There is a broken-

open place in a lover. Where are
those qualities of bravery and sharp

compassion in this group? What's the
use of old and frozen thought? I want

a howling hurt. This is not a treasury
where gold is stored; this is for copper.

We alchemists look for talent that
can heat up and change. Lukewarm

won't do. Halfhearted holding back,
well-enough getting by? Not here.

- Rumi

Us.

People sometimes forget that every beginning is an ending, too.

The change, the change...it all happened for a reason, didn't it?

I've made it. I'll keep it.

It's you, always.

half the world away

Don't accept anything less than big love. Massive, consuming, fast-paced, scary, wonderful, overwhelming, huge love. The kind of love that makes you want to put post-it notes with sweet nothings written on them all over his suitcase when he goes out of town for a night. The type of love that makes you suddenly understand why your mother has made you take your vitamins and fed you beautiful meals your whole life. Because long days and heavy eyelids don't matter when you've got big love. Nothing can keep you going like big love, because there's nothing in the world like it and once you find it? Oh my god you'll know.

Be-in.

Everyone should know how it feels to stand around in a muggy August hot kitchen, drinking wine too fast, talking too fast, changing songs too fast in the company of friend-love and love-love, wiping the smudged eyeliner out from under your eyes to see, so clearly, exactly where I am.

To be 23 and on my own was great. It was great, terrible fun. And it was what I needed, even when I didn't know that I did.

But to be 24. To be 24 and not on my own is more happiness and more sadness than I've ever known. And everyone should know how it feels to feel both.

Because when I'm wiping the playground sand off my best friend's shoulders as he runs off into the night, chasing something that even he can't say, I wish these moments of swing set park declaration huge, massive, overwhelming happiness for every living, breathing, thinking thing in the world. I watch the rest of them jump off picnic tables and let their feet take them where they're going. I know that just because I've been found...well, that doesn't mean that so many aren't still lost.

But the greatest thing about a love like this?

All it takes to heal the world inside my head is having him, at the end of the night, to rest it on.

As promised.

I wrote nothing to actually write here today (and for that I do of course apologize), but being the woman of my word that I am, here's one from the archives that was published earlier this month. Enjoy, darlings.

Make Out

phones with broken buttons

call back with broken words

typo send backs

on his back in my bed

for four days on end our heads

are not quite right but nothing ever

is when you're in the thick of it, wanting to live inside of a perfect

silver book of things that cannot be named until

you've at once known them, felt them and lost them

if only for a moment

in time.

It's not what you think.

Given my last few posts on here it may seem as though happiness has, to a certain extent, depleted me of my creative resources where writing is concerned in consideration of the fact that my posts have been...well, virtually non-existent.

But rest assured, my dearest few readers, I'm actually writing more than ever. The novel is coming along at a pace that surprises even myself, the short stories are being banged out on the weekly, the poems don't stop falling out of my fingers and it's all actually getting published. Which, of course, means I can't publish it here first due to the simultaneous submission rules. Such is life, and such are the consequences that I'm more than pleased to live with.

Alas, I am going to attempt to be at least a bit of a better blogger, starting today. Just don't expect anymore boy-directed nihilism, as I'm quite simply and honestly more and more in love with my man with every passing minute.

Real post tomorrow, cross my heart!

Darling.

You're my partner in crime on failed hotel pool romps, with my back up against the brick, spilling pop on city grates during garbage strikes and cherry flavour shot stickiness.

You're the Clyde to my Bonnie (circa Beatty and Dunaway because, like me, you wouldn't have it any other way) in Floridian seafoam green, clutching my pool blue fingernails and holding bottles of wine on my couch. Telling you stories of worlds I've never let anyone understand.

I'm in my war bride dress wearing a half-stupid smile running into my room with you, leaving traces behind that napkins could fix but in the meantime it'll make us laugh, laugh, laugh and I want to laugh with you forever.

We're in a bubble with books about Hollywood vs. Aliens, sunflowers and azaleas on the windowsills smiling at us while we curse my late alarm and break into someone else's place.

And as I sat there with salty hands and cupcake lips, shelling pistachios to the drifting sound of the gates going up next door, I knew in my heart that I've never really loved like this before.