the vapors, the expectorate (draft)

i am stream of consciousness
i am a moment in time caught in a net
stringy, sticky, and always moistly wet
I am hocked up on city side walks, mixed with dirt

once while walking down the street
you laughed and said "my god we're contemporaries"
I imagined thick anthologies written years from now
I imagined my diaries sold at auction, letters bound and leathered

did ginsberg and kerouac and plath and burroughs know?

I can't help but smirk
think of the man who proclaimed me brilliant
"the epitome of the new generation of the New York school"
and when he asked me whom I read
I could only say "no one." or "they are all dead.
and I haven't visited them in ten years"

names fly by, spouted and spurted
I do not know them, I do not know them
is it vain to hope they will soon know me?

I know I am of no consequence
I do not torture myself with perceived importance
I have pride, I have ego
wrapped like bacon
salted and spiced with merry delusion

it is all a giant game of pretend
I am the unicorn
I toss it out
crusty tissues
do with my DNA what you will

the poets we learned about in school
do not compare their verse to bodily fluids
they spoke in deep symbolism and painted with flowers
(perhaps I am more stamen and pollen than petal)

I shall go down in history
as declaring my poetry the orgasmic splatter
that rages and erupts
spilling over your thighs and rampaging through
the pubic mountainside, clumping the trees
and bushes and twigs with ectoplasmic love and disregard
for the way words, the way sperm were intended

I feel in bursts, I am wave-like, and I am sinew
I am finger snaps, I am late night blues
At another time perhaps I was to be born
but delayed in utero, I grew fat and ripe

I am mouthfuls of juice
I am dew and sugar water on your chin
Delightful both tasted and worn like perfume

Like any human that soaks in their own juices
I am marinaded but yet sour on the tongue

I am sputum, mucus, phlegm
I am snot, I am spit, I am cum

I'd rather be a violent, vicious, passion-laden pelvic bruise
then cheap dollar store lipstick smeared on virgin lip

I am a pretty farm girl overladen with perverse conceptions
I am a hermit city girl that speaks in pixels and pulses
I am that girl that you notice only after she has left the room
I am the vapors
The mist and the fog
I am the vapors
and the expectorate

the language

i speak static
am fluent in typo
but despite my attempts
despite thirty years of study
I am unable to learn
the strange idioms
the illogical conjugations
the irregular and bizarre
language that is love

i am faux pas
i am slip of the tongue
i am twisted contractions
i am translation failed
i am constantly insulting the natives
i don't even know how to ask
where the library is
or "how much is this?"

i still travel the land
i still navigate the transportation system
i am, at times, able to un-lose myself
amongst foreigners in their homeland
and the mountains and gutters and steel

however, the tongue alludes me
and most of the time
all i can do is point, grunt, shake my head, or smile
and hope for the best

threshold

you preclude me
invite me then lock the door

i will knock
once, twice, maybe even three times

but sitting on your stoop
just to get out of the rain

i just will not do

tango

i can dance with the most skilled orchestrations
i am inept in all other matters of the heart

walking provides frustrations
constant terror due to weak ankles

skipping, I am afraid, I grew out of years ago
and running after you has never been my agenda

Letting Go of Crazy

I. Sunday Morning, Upon Waking Alone and Thus Not Distracted

What do you do
When it hurts to move
But if you don't move
It'll just hurt more
And you'll eventually
Never move again?

What do you do
When pain pills kill you
But if you don't find an alternative
You'll grow crippled
And eventually
Die anyway?

(repeated overdoses leading to lethal allergy. bittersweet irony)

How do you find the energy to run
When the energy to walk alludes you
How do you explain that you are rotting
You are atrophying yourself
Forty feet above the street
in a crumbling rented playhouse

How do you explain to others
That you just may be slowly killing yourself
(albeit lazily and without any conscious and direct intention)
As you crawl away from society
As you hide from the light
As you accept the seizing of organs and joints
And you are ashamed
You are so ashamed

II. I Hate This Part. Disney Movies Have Poisoned Me And Fucked With Life Expectations.

If I don't call you and you don't call me
It must mean it wasn't meant to be anyway
And I have proved the world right
In this model it is you
It is never me

But then no.
It is both of us.
Me being the Ursula, the disgusting sea-witch
(and thus obviously not deserving of love)
and you being the asshole Prince
who won't even try to peer past the supposed evil and ugliness
and who'd never attempt to kiss a toad
just to see if a Princess would appear

where oh where has Ariel gone?
I used to have red hair, too
but it wasn't the same
it never was the same

I'm more Sylvia than Walt. More Plath than Disney.

Something else
Hauls me through air ---
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.

I find joy in being right
That it is you that is unfair and unloving
but also that I am not worthy
of attempts to slay dragons
and struggles through briers and thorns
to rescue me in my castle tower

(does anyone know her real name was Aurora?)

no, indeed it is proof
it is logic and irrefutable facts
that i am no sleeping beauty
and I can dream myself quietly
into gentle, un-fettered death
undisturbed by attempts
at resuscitation

III. I am a masochist and a sadist. I like the color of my own blood and the taste of my own tears.

Perhaps I am an ugly creature
Perhaps I am a sloth, a mole woman, a warted witch
Perhaps I am best suited for dark internal rooms
Perhaps there is reason why nature has
Declared me not suited to breed (if only by omission)

Depression and self-loathing are nature's way
it's neo-Darwinism
my species has no place for party poopers
only the happy and well-adjusted survive
and let's face it, I'm not the best specimen anyway

IV. Self-pity parties are the cheapest to throw and saves you hundreds of dollars in catering costs.

I turn back into myself
I waddle and huddle
into my cave with the view
I am retreating from all that I want and love
And for the life of me
I don't know why

I am thirty and arthritic
I am thirty and obese
I am insulated and safe
And eventually life will leave me alone
With its disappointments and pedestals
And other high places I can no longer place others
Only to watch them fall and roll away


V. A reflection due to a lack of objective mirrors. with an acceptance of distortion.

Go away
I will run from you
I will hop a city bus

My motus operandi
is to hide and to be the center of attention
at the same time

My own paparazzi
my own shampoo-bottle Oscar speech
I don't take photos
of myself anymore
and the pills that have half-helped
leave me bloated, thin-eyebrowed, and
still probably damaged goods

I still play Guyville on never ending loops
I listen to the music of my youth
becaase I want to be mesmerizing, too

VI. A review of conditions, disorders, medications, and attempts to diagnose and pinpoint reasons why I am not responsible for my own self.

So many labels I have tried on
They never fit, they curl and split, tear and crumple
As if one term can explain all that is Janice
and one reading of the DSM-IV can find the cure

Can it be Effexor, Depakote, Topomax,
Paxil, Celexa, Klonopin, or Xanax?

And how do I get off and how do I get on?

Serotonin syndrome
Withdrawal syndrome
Suicidal crisis
Black box warnings
And me spending the early part of my twenties
on cliff edges with no FDA advice or knowledge
and no doctor's notes to get out of life

I have embraced crazy, creative, poetic, different, chaotic, tortured, misunderstood for so long
to properly see they are excuses, not personality

Thirty years of chicken or the egg
Is it my thyroid? Is it my parents? Is it genetics?
Why so fat so early?
Was it emotional abuse on the playground?
Are my class mates to blame?
Or the gym teachers who forced me to run
and balance my bulk on gymnastic beams

Borderline, Bipolar, Depressed, Eating Dis*ordered
Crazy, Agoraphobic, Obsessive Compulsive, Emotionally Unavailable
Spinster, Self-Medicator, Binge Eater, Post Traumatic Stressed

Unstable. Warning. Do not enter. Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred dollars
Approach with Caution. Unpredictable. Check any applicable symptoms. Be aware of any
potential side effects. Please sign here, you have been informed.


VII. Here is the part where I'm going to scream. I might even curse. Bear with me, gentle reader.

Look at ME.

Hey you, hey you, mother fucker!

Buy a book, support a true artist.
I am entitled, you see, I have suffered
And thus I deserve your attention
and your money, your penance

Please.
Please.

Understand that I hate you.
I fucking hate you.
But ....
I am fighting demons you can't see
And thus I am important and raw and
DAMNIT
I have something crucial to say
that YOU
that YOU
could NEVER understand.

And look at me!
I am better than you
because I am vulnerable and did i mention raw?
I am talented and memorable and
(please please please don't forget me)

I am bad genetics, I am bad environment, I am malnutrition, I am a memorandum
of psychopharmacudical pamphlets, I am simply a product of rape, cruelty, of a society that doesn't love me.

Nothing will ever be enough.
You can never be enough
I am an imploding star
a black hole that sucks the air from your lungs
I am a car accident about to happen

It is inevitable that I will crash and burn

I will be spectacular, a fucking cosmic event
And you
will
NOTICE.


VII. I'm sorry, you see it's not my fault. In fact, nothing's my fault. You see, I....

I am incapable
I am a writhesome, fucking anomaly

The doctors told me
they assured me when i was locked away
when I was twenty-three and institutionalized
they told me it was not my fault

and back, at nineteen
my first psychiatrist
during my first mind-fuck
proclaimed me "chronic" and forever diseased

i never forgot.

it's my excuse for everything.

i never was one to question authority.
i was always took the drugs i was handed
my mother raised a good, polite girl
that understood her place
and rarely ever thought for herself

VIII. New perspective spoken by an older lover who has a good eye for such things.

"You have issues with growing up."

I laugh. I say I was menstruating at eight
I was wearing a bra on the playground
I have an apartment, I pay my own rent
I have lived in New York City on ten thousand dollars a year
I am an adult, my licence proves it
I have the scars to tell
I am responsible and independent and quite capable
I am in a union, buddy, and have a hundred thousand dollar education

I consider a past boyfriend who'd accuse me of manipulation
of crying instead of talking and screaming instead of communicating

"you're a fucking child! a bratty, immature, emotionally crippled child"
he'd say and I'd act out more, I'd slam my head into walls
bruise my hands and head and use that as proof that i am just "troubled"

I'm sick of being sick, I said five years ago.
But I never grew sick of talking about it.

And I never took off the hospital ID bracelet

Perhaps at thirty, it's time to seal my juvenile record
Pack away my Liz Phair cds and wear long sleeved shirts
put away childish razors
and stop drinking myself to amnesia

This world owes me nothing
despite my shoulders, so deeply chipped

I am refusing to drink the Kool-aid
That I so routinely spike

I am letting go of crazy

Janice at Thirty (draft)

I. Sunday Morning, Upon Waking Alone and Thus Not Distracted

What do you do
When it hurts to move
But if you don't move
It'll just hurt more
And you'll eventually
Never move again?

What do you do
When pain pills kill you
(repeated overdoses leading to lethal allergy. bittersweet irony)
But if you don't find an alternative
You'll grow crippled
And eventually
Die anyway?

How do you find the energy to run
When the energy to walk alludes you
How do you explain that you are rotting
You are atrophying yourself
Forty feet above the street
in a crumbling rented play penthouse

How do you explain to others
That you just may be slowly killing yourself
(albeit lazily and without any conscious and direct intention)
As you crawl away from society
As you hide from the light
As you accept the seizing of organs and joints
And you are ashamed
You are so ashamed

II. I Hate This Part. Disney Movies Have Poisoned Me And Fucked With Life Expectations.

If I don't call you and you don't call me
It must mean it wasn't meant to be anyway
And I have proved the world right
In this model it is you
It is never me

But then no.
It is both of us.
Me being the Ursula, the disgusting sea-witch
(and thus obviously not deserving of love)
and you being the asshole Prince
who won't even try to peer past the supposed evil and ugliness
and who'd never attempt to kiss a toad
just to see if a Princess would appear

I hate you.

I find joy in being right
That it is you that is unfair and unloving
but also that I am not worthy
of attempts to slay dragons
and struggles through briers and thorns
to rescue me in my castle tower

no, indeed it is proof
it is logic and irrefutable facts
that i am no sleeping beauty
and I can dream myself quietly
into gentle, un-fettered death
undisturbed by attempts
at resuscitation

III. I am a masochist and a sadist. I like the color of my own blood and the taste of my own tears.

Perhaps I am an ugly creature
Perhaps I am a sloth, a mole woman, a warted witch
Perhaps I am best suited for dark internal rooms
Perhaps there is reason why nature has
Declared me not suited to breed (if only by omission)

Depression and self-loathing are nature's way
it's neo-Darwinism
my species has no place for party poopers
only the happy and well-adjusted survive
and let's face it, I'm not the best specimen anyway

IV. Self-pity parties are the cheapest to throw and saves you hundreds of dollars in catering costs.

I turn back into myself
I waddle and huddle
into my cave with the view
I am retreating from all that I want and love
And for the life of me
I don't know why

I am thirty and arthritic
I am thirty and obese
I am insulated and safe
And eventually life will leave me alone
With its disappointments and pedestals
And other high places I can no longer place others
Only to watch them fall and roll away

Fuck, I think I hate myself

V. A reflection due to a lack of objective mirrors. with an acceptance of distortion.

Go away
I will run from you
I will hop a city bus

My motus operandi
is to hide and to be the center of attention
at the same time

My own paparazzi
my own shampoo-bottle Oscar speech
I don't take photos
of myself anymore
and the pills that have half-helped
leave me bloated, thin-eyebrowed, and still
probably
damaged goods

VI. A review of conditions, disorders, medications, and attempts to diagnose and pinpoint reasons why I am not responsible for my own self.

So many labels I have tried on
They never fit, they curl and split, tear and crumple
As if one term can explain all that is Janice
and one reading of the DSM-IV can find the cure

Can it be Effexor, Depakote, Topomax,
Paxil, Celexa, Klonopin, or Xanax?

And how do I get off and how do I get on?

Serotonin syndrome
Withdrawal syndrome
Suicidal crisis
Black box warnings
And me spending the early part of my twenties
on cliff edges with no FDA advice or knowledge
and no doctor's notes to get out of life

I have embraced crazy, creative, poetic, different, chaotic, tortured, misunderstood for so long
my arms are cramped and my view too close, too blurred
to properly see they are excuses, not personality

Thirty years of chicken or the egg
Is it my thyroid? Is it my parents? Is it genetics?
Why so fat so early?
Was it emotional abuse on the playground?
Are my class mates to blame?
Or the gym teachers who forced me to run
and balance my bulk on gymnastic beams

Borderline, Bipolar, Depressed, Eating Dis*ordered
Crazy, Agoraphobic, Obsessive Compulsive, Emotionally Unavailable
Spinster, Self-Medicator, Binge Eater, Post Traumatic Stressed

Unstable. Warning. Do not enter. Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred dollars
Approach with Caution. Unpredictable. Check any applicable symptoms. Be aware of any
potential side effects. Please sign here, you have been informed.

I sit in the back of the group therapy session
The titles and faces change
depending on which condition, which affliction
I have decided this week
has made me its victim

VII. Here is the part where I'm going to scream. Bear with me, gentle reader.

I am not a part of everything you think you know
By proclaiming this so loudly and so fucking righteously
I am stepping outside of this society that I am rejecting

What the hell do you think of that?

Look at me!
Get your fucking eyes off of me!
I am a passive aggressive whiner
LOOK AT ME!

Please.
Please.
Understand that I hate you.
I fucking hate you.
But ....
I am fighting demons you can't see
And thus I am important and raw and
DAMNIT
I have something crucial to say
that YOU
that YOU
could NEVER understand.

And look at me!
I am better than you
because I am vulnerable and did i mention raw?
I am talented and memorable and
(please please please don't forget me)

Buy a book, support a true artist.
I am entitled, you see, I have suffered
And thus I deserve your attention
and your money, your penance

Can't you save me more quickly
stop giving me crutches and pills and kind words
Won't you feel awful
if some years after this night
you read that I am expired and moldy?
See this?
This is your responsibility
I am a just a voice and a series of letters on a page

THIS IS YOUR FAULT!

I am bad genetics, I am bad environment, I am malnutrition, I am a memorandum
of psychopharmacudical pamphlets, I am simply a product of rape, cruelty, of a society that doesn't love me.

That's what I used to tell my mother.
Sent to a corner, punished for sassing
I'd cry and whimper
why don't you love me?

Nothing will ever be enough.
You can never be enough
I am an imploding star
a black hole that sucks the air from your lungs
I am a car accident about to happen

It is inevitable that I will crash and burn

I will be spectacular, a fucking cosmic event
And you
will
NOTICE.


VII. I'm sorry, you see it's not my fault. In fact, nothing's my fault. You see, I....

I am incapable
I am a writhesome, a fucking anomaly

The doctors told me
they assured me when i was locked away
when I was twenty-three and institutionalized
they told me it was not my fault

and back, at nineteen
my first psychiatrist
during my first mind-fuck
proclaimed me "chronic" and forever diseased

i never forgot.

it's my excuse for everything.

i never was one to question authority.
i was always took the drugs i was handed
my mother raised a good, polite girl
that understood her place
and rarely ever thought for herself

VIII. New perspective spoken by an older lover who has a good eye for such things.

"You have issues with growing up."

I laugh. I say I was menstruating at eight
I was wearing a bra on the playground
I have an apartment, I pay my own rent
I have lived in New York City on ten thousand dollars a year
I am in a union, buddy, and have a hundred thousand dollar education

I laugh because he is new, he is not yet proven mal-intent
although me, ha, well I just assume it's coming

I consider a past boyfriend who'd accuse me of manipulation
of crying instead of talking and screaming instead of communicating

"you're a fucking child! a bratty, immature, emotionally crippled child"
he'd say and I'd act out more, I'd slam my head into walls
bruise my hands and head and use that as proof that i am just "troubled"

Yes, we're walking down the street
My new lover casts me a sideways glance

I'm sick of being sick, I said five years ago.
But I never grew sick of talking about it.

Perhaps at thirty, it's time to seal my juvenile record
Pack away my Liz Phair cds and wear long sleeved shirts
Perhaps it is time to look ahead
Get off my couch
Get off my high horse
Walk off this anger
Cry out these tears
And say good bye

Yes, I need to say goodbye

It may mean I walk about for awhile
With no past, no papers, no history
I am growing up before I grow old.
Being an adult is more than meaning
you can eat ice cream for breakfast
And not getting carded at bars

I am letting go of crazy.

Baz-Catan

baz-catan! the wiles of man!
I am being all I can

then i laugh, i laugh, laugh
i dis-helm this matter
and toss it over board
feed it to the sharks, matey!

baz-catan! the wiles of man!
I am being all I can