Bookends

Pick yourself up,

but I can't

get up.

I can't see clearly

while hunched over in pain.

My stomach is fighting some demon.

And my mind is having colorful dreams.

Of entering my mother's house

and holding her new-born baby,

white-dress-in-white-bonnet
just home from church

and so happy to see me.

I am fasting

but only because it hurts to eat.

I have been shitting rivers of

membrane and blood

every-other-hour.

Thinking

Maybe I am getting it out of my system,

maybe I am purging my past,

maybe I am letting go,

maybe I have food poisoning.

I don't want to go back to that place,

with the constant hum of the television,

children screaming and every

time I try to explain something

there seems to

(literally)

be a language barrier.

That.

And my grandmother

died yesterday.

peacefully.

How she devoted so much time

to loving her family

and her community.

How I am so deeply saddened

by her departure.

So much so that her pictures make me cry.

And every time I think a story of her,

I laugh, and then cry again.

I say,

"It's ok, you're ok."

Until the pain goes away,

and I try to get up once again.

January 10th

In Castellammare Di Stabia, Italy.

Things from my mother-

like a past life.

But I am alive.

Take a run through the citrus fields,

past the olive trees-

run around the town castle-

past the burning fire of a

vagrants breakfast

preparation.

Past the ornate alters of Mother Mary.

Shrines of Mary, mother.

Exit on the porch to the

large marble steps

it's not fair for me to fall in love.

(because)

Missing people hurts too much.

A reflection of current and past jobs.

A sample of some of the jobs I have had in my life: annual report editor for a French non-profit working with folks with disabilities in Hanoi, Vietnam. I have poured cob in a raw foodist family's circular mansion in Central Oregon, been a Resident Assistant on the 15th floor of a Portland State University dorm building, worked as an organic farmer with Osmogaia farm trading work for knowledge and food, cleaned a metal sculpture studio in NE Portland, guest taught art at Portland Community Center, and now a live-in English nanny to two children in Southern Italy.

I hung out with Italian kids all day today. It was great until some of the kids at school found out I didn't speak so much Italian and then started talking in what seemed to be a nonsensical language, to which they started laughing profusely. If that's the worst it gets than it is really, not such a bad job.

update: It gets worse. Today I cleaned up puke that was a mixture of snot and pasta, after which I had to hold the little girl while she screamed, telling her that her mom would be home shortly.

The video below was recorded after leaving a couch surfing experience in San Cugat, Catalunya. That day was a holiday, The Three Kings, where kids get candy if they have been good (that would have made the date January 6, 2011). I would soon be walking the streets for hours, somewhat lost, but enjoying it, to soon peer down at the city of Barcelona and later meet up with a friend in the lovely neighborhood of gracia.

And As Such (poem at 7 am)

In Rome, Italy.

To arise (to come up from) the ashes

Post war apocalypse

Adorned with rhinestones and pearls.

And a memory of you.

to leave it as that,

A memory between us

As stable as five stones in an emptied ancient sea.

Who have experienced- side-by-side

Only that which they will truly understand.

I told you, drunkenly

That if one day you decided that

You wanted to meet up, I would.

(I meant that)

I know that the probability that we will

Collide in patterns of

Mixed up day-to-day

Agreements of life

Is endless ly – so short

Seem too slim especially considering

That we may never meet again in terms

Of singularity.

As of, similar to, now.

Our bodies post pictures of the then.

Our bodies have not forgotten what has been.

And my childless womb knows too that she yearns for this special

Type of person of

Whom you fit the bill.

I also feel simply and sweetly fond of being held in your arms.

You are not a place.

You are not a symbol

Of a person.

You are special to the likes of which

I have never known.

And I know that life gets only better.

For this,

I feel gratitude

(I hold tight to my confidence that I will

last much longer and as such

stronger than what was

previously imagined

of myself).

2010 turns 2011

In Florence, Italy.

She spit him out but not out of malice.

Out of a can-foil submarine

Shapes that you couldn’t make out

Even if they were right in front of you.

Your kiss I had once.

Laying into me like I was a...

prize you had won.

And I liked that.

those kisses were

Soft

those kisses were

simple

Those kisses are

Echoes of we once knew each other.

It was once just as we had left it.

I put the colorful beads in an emptied jar.

Let’s re-scatter them-

Scatter them under the rugs from Africa-

Pavement of ruins- under lids-eye-shut,

Put them in/under, just to…

Just to sneak them back in the jar like

That wafer- that no-one saw me eat.

As if it had never happened.

I’m fucking lost like I never thought that I could have been.

Hand to mouth!

What language are you speaking?

Did you forget your name like I decided I would when I left your city?

Would you remember your name again if everyone started speaking it to you?

Are our fire feet in the front or in the caboose?

Oh to make love whole-heartedly somewhere deep within the intestines of this place.

My heart jumped when I thought,

“You are going there, with nothing much at all.” And you are going there without him.