directed by desire/happy birthday

the heat here, my lovely friend, is missed slightly. Just off to the edge of the street, there's wind and sun, flowers. the shock of the still slightly cold ocean after a day in nice shoes and a bright cardinal to wake me up on the day of her birthday. says Baby. And within the story of the earth outside my red curtains, a thunderstorm. early morning. it's too windy to fly, easy to grab a cup of coffee. Make little marks in the bedpost above my head, watch the light filter through clouds. changing the species i am for the day, a code-owner. a light in my own kitchen before my eyes are in "i don't have what you said. I don't feel what you said"

I can smell the rain, that's all I am.

someone today, asked me if i could find a specific poem. on the web. What the shit? many things were annoying as fuck right then, but this one seemed out of the blue. we are in the damn age of google, work it out. i don't want to go into it, but really. the request happened at the wrong time, in the middle of a thousand things and i was like, "nope". and then went back to writing an extremely low key email full of subtext and hate to a vendor or whatever.

ok, actually i did do a search myself and i couldn't find it. so i had more of an issue with the failure of the goddamn internet then anything else. because, word. who doesn't like to find a poem on the internet for someone who asks politely? i would love to, but the internet is failing today. FAIL.

ok, so because i'm me, i toodled home and got the collection off the shelf and flipped through it like a good little doggie, because who am i really to deny such an obvious request to pay attention to the Mountain and Sea and Singers and Just Stop Gods that rule my soul haha. uhm so it's a good poem, and i sat and read it to myself, and i read it with her voice and laugh, and she was there with me, and it was nice. she's dead. but you can still hear her giggle at the end of the stanza, the last breath before she comes home, and looks up. she read it to me over the phone once, in the first or second edit of the book it eventually ended up in. it turns out, the poem really was for someone else, at the asking. an allowance of someone's consciousness, the impulse behind asking. not my business. i am not, sufficient unto myself. i've always taken her words as scripture. who would want to be alone without them?

ok, so i found this:

WHAT IS THIS thing called love, in the poems of June Jordan, artist, teacher, social critic, visionary of human solidarity? First of all, it's a motive; the power Che Guevara was trying to invoke in his much-quoted assertion: "At the risk of appearing ridiculous . . . the true revolutionary is moved by great feelings of love." I think also of Paul Nizan: "You think you are innocent if you say, 'I love this woman and I want to act in accordance with my love,'but you are beginning the revolution. . . . You will be driven back: to claim the right to a human act is to attack the forces responsible for all the misery in the world." Neither of them, admittedly, was claiming the love of a woman for women, the love of a man for men, as revolutionary, as a human act.

Adrienne Rich, forward for Haruko/Love Poems by June Jordan

she said, who wants to write love poems? Not me. Neruda is the only one i can stand. Speaking for your highest good, I will say more to you, who have listened with joy.

I don't know why I sent you Neruda a couple of days ago after reading your post, but now I know. (via Patti Smith, of course. She's on Frida Kahlo today, but not for long.)

Unnecessary, seeing myself in mirrors,
With a fondness for weeks, biographers, papers,
I tear from my heart the captain of hell,
I establish clauses indefinitely sad.

Now I know. Discern me first in the Manifested Many.

xoxo