Joshua Tree

Assignment: Write a bilingual poem, with the subject matter of your choice.

The desert sands glowed with a dusty light

Gleaming from beneath

The sun only a meek competitor

Against the fire of the earth.

Los guerreros de la arena,

Mi seguridad

Tu seguridad.

We hoist our lives onto our backs

We plunge into another world

Where the earth becomes the sky

And death is a friendly hand

Placed lightly upon your shoulder

El sol te cubre,

Tu sabana de fuego

La luz, y el calor

Te cubren.

The great granite monsters are piled high

One atop another

Broken relics of a lost age

Their jagged silhouettes pierce the dusky moon

As we slap the cold from our fingers

And our breath goes sharp in our throats

Los ojos del desierto nos miran

Con furia, con tristeza, con amor

Y aunque nuestros ojos se cierran

El desierto jamás duerme

Es el vigilante permanente

Con sus ojos

Reflejando el mundo.

moody in june

Sadness, or this dull throbbing
Has rendered me slow and heavy.
Dragging thru the days like a dishrag

Punctuated by real emotion, for no, I am not a zombie! Not the undead. I feel stuffed tho.
Mounted, on a plaque or base.
Posed in my most natural postion in a box, painted to look ike my natural habitat

Where have the days gone?
Me a slow, comatose, cumbersome character.
Unsavory.
Ignoble.

What to say , are there real words?
There is lead
Where my vital organs should be.
I’d love to sleep in the sun, for years, months. Void. But not death, to feel the warmth of the sun.
Just void. Or perhaps to cry.
But not to sit, alone, cracked like dry desert mud, with nothing to expend.
I cant explode, for I am merely smoldering.

Who replaced my eyes with beads?
Who filled my veins with stones?

Who painted my life beige….who.

Sawdust, sand and granite all have more meaning than I.
I would not float in the Dead sea.

My summer soaked rant.

The old leather box containing the 1930's typewriter grazes my knee, as i bang away and the ungrateful pang of these plastic keys. The door to the toliet is open and the resedue of sourdough pretzels lines the pink insides of my mouth. Its a summers day, i am silent because I feel as though there is no noise needed. The sun is shaded by the murky sky outside, toning the ivy behind me in varing layers of illuminated greens. A list of phone numbers lay beside me, next to the krazy Glue i used to glue my bosses broken plate together. Phone numbers range from Pasadena, Van Nuys, New Jersy, West Los Angeles and Brooklyn area codes, beyond the list of estranged numbers associated with my list of friends lies a list of phone numbers of Psychics. That was my job today, psychics, finding ones good enough that would cure a writers block. This hasn't been glanced at yet, which is most of my feats here, only looked upon after the editors meetings, or the soundtrack teastings ecetera. Its nicer that way, because i hate when people read something i wrote infront of me, its the feeling of being mortally naked. As thier faces expand and wither with each word or concept you conveived and the perpetual neuroses of what you THINK they're thinking. I put on a Sylvia Plath outfit today, as i walk around in it i feel uncomparativly fashionably backward than anyone on the streets of Williamsburg. Was Sylvia Plath gone with that Gwenith Paltro film? Must i only wear gladiator sandals and jumpers? It is common in a Plath reader that you take upon her characteristics, I suppose in this moment of noise absence i have. Which is quite funny because im not really all that depressed. So the sun moved lighting this small apartment differently, allowing me to hide from its rays.
Im off to a studio..(i like when brits say with a linering j. Studjio: sort of like that)

anyways.
my rant.
thank you.

A Memoir Class Quick-Write

My mom's neck is not unusual. 

Sometimes I'll lie awake at night and think about African women with those rings around their necks, stretching them so far up that they look like ebony cranes, and I wonder if they work in libraries: the perfect helpers to grab those books at the top of the shelves. 

My mom does not have that neck.

DMV, you a dirty mistreater, a robber, and a cheater

Stepping inside of the DMV is like hurtling into the alternate universe of 1950's futuristic ideals. Lines of people bisect each other and move in diagonal conveyer belt formations, like some sort of avant garde production on the utopian freeways of the Jetsons, people symbolizing the pea pod automobiles. 

And in front of a flickering, 24-inch TV showcasing a plain blue screen with appointment numbers scrawled in block letters are a group of automatons seated row after row, all eyes strained toward their impending turn. I had the feeling that if I put a lighter underneath one of their noses wax would slowly drip off the tip and form a puddle on their lap, proving that I was actually looking at an exhibit in Madame Tussauds.  

The DMV made me inch closer to unlawful driving, if only to spite what I think is a house of horrors. A place filled with salivating teenagers straining against their harnesses to grasp onto a driver's license and shame-faced adults enduring chastisements from bureaucratic evil-doers.

Im far from it.

Last night I was caught in a New york rain storm. My copy of Bell Jar got wet. The black dye from my skirt seeped onto my legs. And I left my journal as i rushed away, in my friends bag. Everything was cinematic then.

Well, what does that mean?

For whatever reason, my recent dreams have been saturated with spit curled suffragettes who lindy hop their way down city streets. The kind of women who gather as many admirers as the number of glass beads that are draped around their necks, keeping those sailors happy with their penetrating, bedroom eyes. Whether these girls are living in the damp underground of the subway station or are playing figure study on a spread polar bear rug, they encapsulate the feminine prowess that all precocious minded little girls dream of attaining as they toss sand in a red-cheeked Junior's face. Already getting ready for the later tarpaulin of makeup with a

smile from grape juice purple lips.