Jerusalem (after one year)

 

Words swirl around in my mind, taunting me with the idea of sleep, while my eyes, wide open in the dark, threaten to shut the words with their lids, though we all know the threats are idle, the words are the one with the real power here.

I’d like a soft-serve silence and sleep swirl please, and yes, that’s to-go. I’d like to eat it at home alone.

Bills, apartment, single, women, god, Israel, Palestine, guns, pot, government, culture, art, music, creation,  lazy, outside, inside, international, friends, loneliness, constraints, anarchy, rabbanut, violence, bourbon? bourbon, streets at night, rape, anxiety, fire, family, health, sex, no sex, books, silence, oppression, suppression, depression, remedies, healing, friends, love…. each word, rife with my life experiences, with cultural connotations and expectations, each one a subject of much mental work, each one so general as a word, yet so specific to my reasons for still being awake.

I curl closer into my pillow, trying to scrunch it just right, hoping that some magical combination of pillow, blanket, and stuffed dog will bring about an end to all this.

Plan out my day tomorrow: wake up, Facebook, coffee, brush teeth, Facebook again, blogs, shirt, gmail, pants, change shirt, feed cat, put on the first shirt, why can’t I ever just leave the goddamned first shirt on, Facebook again, Skype with mom, roll eyes, no mom, I’m not seeing anyone, not anyone you want to know about anyways, more coffee, twitch, open fridge, no eggs, no breakfast, still hungry, more coffee, change pants, pet cat, spill coffee on pants- dammnit, I just washed these pants, put on skirt, dance around to swirl skirt, glimpse underwear in the mirror, back to pants, pushups, pullups, situps, open books up, see words swirling–

words still swirling in my brain, losing meaning as they blend into each other. Bills becomes eating in. Bourbon becomes stomachache. Silence becomes erasure. Sex becomes uninteresting. Depression becomes routine, Books become antisocial, Blogs become escape, Single becomes failure.

Bills bourbon silence sex depression books single

home alone sick erased bored routine antisocial failure.

Plan out my day tomorrow: press snooze, throw on old tshirt, go to work. Come home, read blogs, feed cat, beer self, bed, eyes open, words still swirling.

 

Still Itchy

 

I gave him my Calamine lotion, and I have bug bites on my thighs.

We met for drinks, for kisses, for sharing a moment, knowing it would all end,

knowing we would both go back to our lives of searchings and commitments and already-established friends and lovers.

But then, as so often happens in these cases, we started… cuddling.

At first it was out convenience, sheer exhaustion, our sweaty bodies would collapse one onto the other after release, and panting, we wouldn’t move away from each other immediately, but let an arm drape over stomach, or a neck rest in the crook of an elbow.

Slowly, it started becoming a bit more dangerous; we would hold each others bodies, still quivering, feeling pulses and hearing breathing and watching pores leak leftover pleasure.

And then it happened: we’d meet and cuddle as foreplay. FOREPLAY.

Every week, he would go back to the wilds, to tents and plants and thick sun and warm beers and naturopaths.

And I would go back to concrete, the sidewalks and sweating buses and credit card machines and  sales reports.

And every weekend he would come to me, bitten, burnt, and between weeks of weeding and welding we found each others’ arms holding our own selves in tighter, each making sure the other didn’t fly away too soon, too quickly.

One day he came over and we just held each other in, clothes on, and then I knew: I knew he had to go before he had to leave, I couldn’t keep holding him in until the day he left and then just let go of both of us. I needed to hold myself instead.

So when he left, for the last time, I gave him my Calamine lotion, forgetting that we too have bugs in between the dumpsters and the grocery store aisles. Forgetting that scratching off my skin is no way to keep myself in, to keep myself whole.

I gave him my Calamine Lotion, and I have bug bites on my thighs.

When I itch, I think of him.

 

my goodbye poem

This is my goodbye poem.

My goodbye poem to you and to who you showed me I could be.

So many nights when we lay together

the words wanted to come out

I wanted them to burst out like fireworks, and light up your face with wonder at how something so explosive could still be so beautiful

I wanted them to caress your back and lull you to sleep like a mother’s hands calming a newborn still not used to the dryness and light of the world

I wanted them to fill your veins, to pump through your body and keep you moving when you wanted to stop forever.

I wanted you to love me back. I wanted my face to be the only thing you saw in a crowded room

I wanted my touch to be something you would swim across the ocean for.

But I never told you.

Nights when I would lie holding you as we comforted each other about the absurdity of the world, I forced the words down like a doctor injecting a vaccine. I swallowed them and I told myself it was for you, because I wanted to protect you.

I didn’t want you to know how much losing love hurts.

And now that I am across the ocean, in a world where I cannot stand the dryness, where I am always dehydrated, I just want to know that you miss me as much as I miss who I was when I was with you.

becauase

I was light, I was air, I could breathe.

Now

I am regret, asthmatic and unsure.

Unsure that the love I lost was ever

love for you too.

-2010

 

25 June 2011

Taken in Namal Tel Aviv, where the Yakron River empties into the Mediterranean Sea

(click through for full image)

 

Solitaire

I am sitting in a room full of people, a room full of my friends and my laptop is on my lap and I am playing solitaire, yes, playing solitaire in a room full of people I actually like, which is a rare occurrence for me

because I don’t often like that many people and when I do like that many people

they don’t often all get along with each other  at least not to the point of all being a in room at once,

so I should be talking to them all but I’m not.

Instead of talking to them all I’m clicking cards into spaces and cutting losses when necessary.

And I start thinking about all the people who aren’t with me, all the people who won’t ever be again

and about all the people I never knew well enough to be missing them now but I miss them anyways

and I wonder how come I miss people I never even talked to like that one girl from my youth group

the one who drank her photo-developing chemicals after she had an abortion

and I wonder if she hated herself so much that she was trying to make an image of her baby with that drink

and I don’t know if they ever developed that picture in the coroner’s office but what I really want,

the picture that I really want to frame and to put up on my wall and look at every night before bed,

I want the picture of her brain when she decided to mix her Developer and her Stop with Cran-Orange juice

I want that picture so I can put it next to the picture of my brain when I’m paying solitaire in this roomful of people

I want those pictures so I can make them my computer background so when I take a break from playing Solitaire

so when I take that break to actually talk to that group of people I actually like who are all in one room together

I can look at those two pictures and convince myself that they’re somehow entirely different.

 

 

-2010

 

Part of It

this poem is dedicated to the Ger Chassidim who are harboring a convicted child molester in Jerusalem,  and to R’ Levanon, who said that the only reason former President Moshe Katsav was indicted for rape is because he didn’t voice enough opposition to the disengagement from Gaza, and to the communities who reassure child rapists that they will be protected, and to anyone who has ever been told to be quiet, to not “make waves.”

let’s put all this on the table

come listen to it if you’re able

to do so without running away

‘cause nothing I’m about to say

is anything new

and it’s not any different just because we’re Jews

I know girls who been hurt raped and killed

I know addicts and drunks and still-

they deny.

This doesn’t happen to Us.

I know folks so depressed they cut themselves

I even know a few people who touch themselves

we got rabbis who hate and rabbis who lie

we see graffiti begging the “aravim” to die

we got abusers and rapists and molesters

we shut down the accusers, let the problems fester

we got jews who fuck, and students who duck

out on their service to their country because they have service to god.

But maybe this is all a little broad,

maybe you think this table is too long

maybe you think I should have a baby and blonde wig.

instead of using my mind to dig

into our secrets and lies

into the grit and sighs of my brothers and sisters

but this faith I have is flickering.

all the bickering.

the pain.

the nights I lie awake haunted by cries of those we failed.

We push it aside

try pretend it’s all  lies

that this doesn’t happen here.

but I will keep helping others raise their fists

to resist

all this shit.

because if we don’t talk about it,

if we don’t stop and think about it

we are part of it.

 

Meditation at Lagunitas, by Robert Hass

Meditation at Lagunitas

BY ROBERT HASS

All the new thinking is about loss.

In this it resembles all the old thinking.

The idea, for example, that each particular erases

the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-

faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk

of that black birch is, by his presence,

some tragic falling off from a first world

of undivided light. Or the other notion that,

because there is in this world no one thing

to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,

a word is elegy to what it signifies.

We talked about it late last night and in the voice

of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone

almost querulous. After a while I understood that,

talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,

pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman

I made love to and I remembered how, holding

her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,

I felt a violent wonder at her presence

like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river

with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,

muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish

called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.

Longing, we say, because desire is full

of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.

But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,

the thing her father said that hurt her, what

she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous

as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,

saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

 

 

Hang-Ups

“I’m coming home,” she says to me, and annoyed, I open my eyes and feel my backpack starting to edge under my shirt strap.
Adjusting my top, I ask her when she’ll be here.
“Tomorrow, maybe the next day. We’re in South Carolina now. I want to see you when I get there.”
Close my eyes again.
Her hair any body are full, not thinning as they started to do when she stopped eating. Arms clean of track marks. Pupils a human size.
But I can’t lie to myself.
Opening my eyes, I see the “end” button on my phone, and will myself to press it in, cutting off her questions about what we’ll do, and what I’ve been up to. 

Two weeks later, I find out I was the last person she called before the metal of her car wrapped itself around a 200 year old oak.
Her voice fades from my head faster than the calculated speed at the moment of impact.
She’d hit the end.
Sometimes I wonder which hang-up was her death sentence.

 

angry

(except from “Yes, I Am Angry,”)

Yes, I am angry,

and no I will not smile

nor beguile you into thinking that I will just quiet down

I am not here to look pretty for you

to be consumed,

like some cheap  and  trendy slave-labor made piece

of fuel.

and maybe I carry too much on my back, let it all sink in  too deep

but that doesn’t warrant an attack

and who are you judge why I should lose / sleep

while you’re trying to budget for a bigger big-screen TV

there are children out there worrying about / food security

while you’re deciding which cheese you want to grate

there are women, 3 every minute, maybe more being / raped

….

so the next time you want to know, why, I always furrow my brow

take a look in the mirror, let me know what you see now.

 

I learn to be afraid of death.

and how can I not?

Everything in my home screams of the end of life,

from the blood in the shower to the smoke in the ashtray and the brown cracking stick in a pot of dirt.

And everything in my country screams of the end of freedom,

from the tear gas on the children to the shootings of mothers and the thick, rock-proof windows on buses.