Lighter

Sometimes, I smoke pot because it's fun.  I'm not talking about being high--I'm talking about the actual, literal, smoking of pot.  I love everything about pot.  I love the way it smells, the way it tastes, the way it looks when I singe my fingers and wipe them on my thighs.  I love the way a new lighter sounds, that first spark of warmth against my eyebrows.  I love that first breath, thickness funneling into my chest until I can barely hold the heat, then feeling the ricochet of blood through my temples as I exhale.  I love my tongue, dry, the parched cavern of my mouth like cotton and cracked sand.  I love the way my eyes burn.  I love my pipe, love my gorgeous bong, tigers and snakes and Amazon breasts sandblasted into the side.  I love wiping trichomes from the inside of the Ziploc with my finger.  I love everything about the process of smoking pot.

Sometimes, I smoke pot because it's FUN.  And here, I AM talking about the high--dizzy, swirling, lightheaded, insatiable, every single second of the high.  I love sprawling on the couch, my limbs nitrous-weightless off the edge, against the floor.  I love talking to myself while I make Pop-Tarts.  I love standing up and feeling blackness creep into the corners of my eyes.  I love hearing my heartbeat in my ears, tipping my head back and dropping,

dropping,

faster and falling and spiraling into the carpet, a rollercoaster of my own design.  I love the way food tastes, the way the breeze smells, the way light filters in through the trees on the other side of our sliding glass door.  I love everything about being high.

And sometimes, I smoke pot because I don't want to feel anything.  Because the panic and the tension and the shame are overwhelming.  Because if I think about the work I've put off for the past three weeks, I'm afraid my heart will stop.  Because I don't belong here, and I know it, and everyone else knows it even better than I, and if I stop to think about it too hard, or for too long, my coach will turn back into a pumpkin, and the mice will scurry away into the shadows at my feet. 

Sometimes I smoke pot because it's easier than not smoking pot.

Sometimes I smoke pot because, when I close my eyes, I can't feel my breasts any more.

Sometimes I smoke pot and fantasize that my name is Tony.  I smoke and imagine myself with a mustache, a beard, a cock, a flat chest, bigger hands.  I listen to taped recordings of myself at fifteen, at eighteen, at twenty-two, and I realize that years of smoking pot have gradually--almost imperceptibly at first, but more and more prominently with the passage of time--lowered my voice, deepened it, dropped my childhood soprano to a raspy contralto (at best), which just makes me want to smoke more.  Sometimes I smoke and honestly believe that my clit is a penis.  Sometimes I smoke and fuck, unleashed, hungry, devastatingly free, and laugh out loud because the shame and discomfort have finally evaporated.  Sometimes I smoke and get anxious, agitated--sometimes, I see and feel and know too much of myself and have to smoke even more to forget myself again.

Sometimes, pot saves me. 

Sometimes, I think that I need pot just to be able to live with myself.

Sometimes, I realize that without pot, I wouldn't know myself in the first place.

Now with 100% more LESBIAN poetry!

I found a bunch of poetry assignments from undergrad on my old hard drive, and figure this is as sound a place to store them as any.

Poem Beginning with A Line By Thom Gunn: 

And it draws so oddly on the sexual that I am confused,

confused by the stilted spill of breath across my fingers,

by your lipstick, slick and glossy on my palm.

We steep between cool sheets, all my intention

stacked and thick upon my shoulders, my chest wracked

with the effort of your breathing.  White lace-wrought gown,

no paler than the peppermint-rose lacquer of your skin, whispers air

into the space between our hands.

I wrap a shaking palm around your knuckles, strain to

swallow my own thirst.

We struggle through a soft and hollow breath that

lifts my name unbitten from your tongue, pulls

syllables through lips as smooth and foreign as the melted

sweet of Swiss-pressed chocolate petals, the tender

sheen of Asiatic silk,

and when exhaustion melts across your cheeks,

your ankles fused with mine

in sweet impermanence,

I close my eyes, remember eight and plucking

April lilacs from a tree, smearing pollen on my forehead,

trailing home to file them between Jude and Revelations.

I pressed them between half-transparent pages, slammed

the cover:  let the weight and dust leach oil from their perforated

stems, the subtle dampness that loss carries curling thin

throughout the chapters as veins faded, petals pale and driven flat,

until I rifled through the text, unburied treasure,

lifted weeks of effort slowly towards the window, watched it crumble

into powder on the rug.

It’s odd, I know, the business of salvation:

the chalk-streak line we hopscotch between pressing close and pressing on.

Now with 100% more poetry!

It was the imperceptible bob and swivel

of her wrist on the return, like links of

anchor chain as they descend to depths

that few will see.

Those fingers splayed, unfolding as she rose

like petals, and as pink—this gold and silver

lash in rigid light, the eyes that fell in rhythm

with her posture as it arched across

the floorboards, a morning ray above the sea.

One recalls the rippling tautness of the shaft

that breaches surface, peaks on sinking

coils, echoes further still into the deep.

And all this while, Camponovo’s fingers folded

still and risen tight against his lips, a boulder shafted

firm against a crevice wind, or duct tape

in a hurricane.  Too much light, those eyes,

and all the tension that one breath held, two, or

three:  his tongue, elastic strained against the weight,

or kindred to a spider’s web, the firmest of the fine.

Meanwhile,

it is all the younger one can do to still her arms,

taut and shivering against the echoed sting

of autumn in the pattern of her breath.  She pulls

her coat in close and trudges forward,

rails of sand and dried grass trailing in her wake.

As failing summer light arrays itself

across a tangled spill of hair, she turns her face up,

swallows light like too-tart lemonade,

and knows, at once, that this footprint trail is wider

than the one she left in last December’s snow,

that as the leaves turn shade around her she will lose

her teeth and feel her shoes grow tighter,

spend her strength to solve for subtle x and y,

and she draws a breath, feels time pass in her chest.

She matches step with the tempo in her

ears and pulls the nylon jacket tighter, sees it stretch,

like someone’s shorted sheet about to tear.  Dust

cresting now in waves around her ankles, she

pivots back to loose herself, slams her lips against the wind,

and as she starts to run she looks ahead, looks up,

her sweep of hair electric in the breeze.

Learning

I feel incredible.

I feel tight, brittle, explosive, every single fiber of my body electric with possibility.  I ache, straining, throwing myself against the walls of my own body, the inside of my head.  The wind is cool, raging, sharp against my eyelids and the cells that edge my upper lip, and when I breathe too deeply I can feel my breasts fold hard against my rib cage, the lycra sheer, breathing with me, aching like my skin.

I had no sense of this body as my prison.  I defied it, eked out a narrative against it, pledged myself to the endless spectrum and the desert of the in-between.  But by mistake, I closed my eyes, and when I wasn't looking, this person erupted out of me--starving, desperate, relentless--and took up residence behind my eyes, his pulse beating in my wrists and at the hollow my neck, hungry, insistent, alive.  I catch my breath, and the air he draws pools inside my throat.

Am I going crazy?

Where did I come from?  Why am I here?

I slam my eyes shut, stare into the dark, look helplessly at that little girl.  I wait against the heater, invisible, the promise of a future yet to come, while the teacher reminds her that Jesse is a boy's name, tells her if she insists upon a pseudonym she will need to add an "I".  It was never "I."  It's never been "I."

Who is this guy?  What is he so hungry for?  Why has he been so quiet?  Why is he so afraid?

My narrator, my patron saint, my epigraph eternal.  Your voice inside of mine, so clear and tangible that it echoes above my own in my own ears, so close against my tongue that I'd assumed for twenty years that it was mine.

I have no idea what I've become.

He has stolen my past.  I flip through baby photos and his light burns behind my eyes, his hat nestled in my hair.

Change

It's been five weeks to the day since we moved out to Ann Arbor, and I thought it might be appropriate to finally sit down and hash out a post on the disruption, chaos, and eventual resettling this move has brought into our lives.  Now that I actually sit down to do it, I find myself so full of conflicting emotions and lost energy that I'm not really sure what to say.
 
It's been an up-and-down ride.  No more than a week ago, Travis and I were fighting tooth-and-nail over his inability to assume responsibility for his social skills and professional conduct.  I was literally moments away from being ready to put him on a plane and ship him home to Mom and Dad.  Now, six days later, he has an appointment with a psychologist, a part-time job, and the possibility of full-time work looming on the horizon.  Things seem temporarily stable.  The pendulum hurtles through the valley and swings back up.

After the next crest, though, who knows where we might be?

Things are different here.  I don't just mean that they are physically different, although they certainly are--the apartment is larger, the buses run on time, the people are friendlier (when they aren't on the road), the weather is warmer and less predictable.  What I feel most deeply, though, isn't a surface adjustment--I feel different on an elemental level, fundamentally changed, perhaps forever, even within this short time.

It didn't begin when we moved.  It might've started when I got the e-mail from the NSF, telling me I had won the fellowship that 8,000 other people had yearned for, but never received.  It might have started in March, when I got those first e-mails from Ann Arbor and Chicago, letting me know that I would have somewhere to go in the fall.  Somewhere in the spring, a vista opening up onto a world I'd seen a thousand times, but only through plate-glass:  tasting the air for the first time, smelling the grass and water and renewal thick at the back of my throat, ready to be born and to stand and to be for the first time in a world I thought myself unworthy of.

Things are different now, and I think the difference has everything to do with a new awareness of myself as "worthy"--a sense of myself as critical, as important, as someone who "matters," as ENOUGH.  Adequate.  Sufficient.  Perhaps--delightfully, dizzyingly, terrifyingly--much more.
I've felt this way before, but the QUALITY of this feeling--perhaps just my perception of it--has changed.  I remember the electric crackle that coursed through me in my senior year of high school, not so very different from the sensation that floods me now:  awake, alert, conscious, present, ready, alive.  I remember how my excitement and confidence back then seemed to startle me, to take me aback:  a loud, effervescent, glittering self-awareness, like a string of firecrackers bursting against tarmac.  Everything seemed so rapid-fire, always spiraling up and up and up with sparks exploding all around my shoulders, sometimes the sharp ecstatic bite of fire against bare skin.  But most of all, I remember the terrible aftermath of it:  smoke coiling up inside my chest, straining to see, moments of blindness from the brightness or the smoke or the darkness that followed after, the sky darker for the spark's absence, the pavement stained and charred from the explosion, everything around me filled with the weight of the denouement, the sense of darkness and suffocation and loss.

Everything is different, now.  What I feel today is not the firecracker enthusiasm of adolescence, but something else entirely--something softer, stiller, but no less powerful, like a river swelling against the channel that restrains it.  I feel fluid, like my thoughts and feelings are as rapid as they've always been, but gentler, flowing, consistent.  There are sparks reflected on my surface, the same glitter that has always shimmered just beyond the edges of my consciousness--but it is muted, now.  It is just as visible, but it makes no sound, intangible and floating--and because it does not burst, it does not disappear.  What is even more important is the river, the surface that bears the sparks and helps them to survive--deep, strong, coursing, profound, sometimes overwhelming, and although it is "stable" in the sense that it is structured--not random, now, no longer scattered, but bounded by the edges of the riverbank.  Tt is still FLUID, still changing, ever-mutable, finally in keeping with the rest of me, while consistent enough that I can trust it not to explode or spin away.

I wake up excited to get out of bed, excited to confront another morning.  I feel like all the gratitude, the appreciation, all of the wonder inside of me cannot possibly be made present enough--that no one will ever know how lucky I am, how miraculous it seems that I could ever be considered worthy of this chance.  I am strong.  I am capable.  For the first time ever, I trust my body.  I trust myself.  I look in the mirror, and am satisfied with the shape of my shoulders, content with the way my shirt falls flat against my chest.  I am prepared, expectant, exultant in this process of "becoming."  My binder braces my shoulders against the oncoming storm, and I am ready.

All I can do is hope that, come wintertime, the river doesn't freeze.