Sketch

a gumbo is a definition of a hot mess.

My new cousin, akwele sat me down
in front of the "clopot". She stuffed
peat into it. then coal. It stank acrid.
She swatted at hole
of the base , with a palm frond fan.

We were out in the dirt, dodging damp laundry
as it swung on its line. I was young and
sulky. Thinking all kinds
of fucked-up thoughts, like
"why am I here, and what do I want
to learn to make Gumbo for, anyway.
. . I'd rather be reading and. . ."

Akwele cracked her only smile of the day
when she held the wriggling crab to my face,
Her hair, drawn in sections and wrapped in black wires,
had angled-neat-spikes just like
crab-legs. her slant-boned
teen-face went pretty-- and crinkled as she snapped
one claw off the crab; I jumped, she laughed.

She popped him in with greenstuff, okra,and a cousin
of sassafrass, the crab was in a swamp
dying a glutinous death, going bluer, I'm thinking--and
---I'm so damn young and sorry for myself
that I think I'm like that crab, stuck
in the muck, all legless and nasty and changed.

Later, at lunch, my step-dad's pleased
for the first time. I'm doing as I ought, I'm
bringing him a pot of bubbling stew, a favourite,
--never mind that I think it looks like snot, nevermind
I'm gagging it down as it separates into strings,
coats my hand and stains me with red palm oil.

But when was the day that I liked it?
I can only tell you that I learned to like it.

(*********Research tastebuds)

Blah blah, go here?

A gumbo is an everything, glued all together--
a Louisiana-Africana--
toss it in a pot thing. A mess. An honest to god-hot mess,
Delicious, indiscriminate, historical mess. I can't tell you
how it starts out one thing, and then becomes another. You get
stuck in some muck, and you like it.

(?)

Si Possible, Je

Le Temps

i met an older tipsy lady in a place,
she said, honey, it doesn't really come clear
'til you're sixty. she wouldn't say what.
the tv was going on about chimpanzees.
some bigot said our president was like a chimp,
and meanwhile, a chimp named travis had just sipped
some wine, and then, tea laced with xanax,
before his 'unprecedented killing spree'.
the reporters said travis' had no history of violence'
but one of my students, who'd grown up in that town
knew a guy travis had once attacked,
back when they were kids. Gene, the bartender
checked it out on his i-phone, and there were photos
of travis' owner, or should i say 'mother?'
snuggled up close with the chimp before bed. . .its
a modern tragedy, they said, and there seems to be
so much unlocalized outrage, i just can't
figure what i'm feeling.
yesterday i sat kind of across
from justin timberlake. he had juice. i was eating
a cuban sandwich. i wanted to tell him that my sisters
adore all his albums, that he cracked me up in his leotard
when he danced on SNL, that I'm not really sure about his
clothing line idea, but i didn't have the nerve.
Can any of this possibly
come clear when you're sixty? The lady was ripping pages
from magazines of Sotheby's. she said, "you want them?"
"i took the good art out." and i took them gently from her
because it seemed polite. She'd left La Misericorde
which is a man in a suit, whose head
is an eyeball, and near him there's a fire
in a strange blue plane. The caption says Magritte
shows the modern man
cofronted by fetish, the timeless, unknowable.
There's a squarish object in the great, healthy fire--
its not at all clear what's burning.

My Refurbished Self

I just stole that from Noel's off-hand comment. But its true. The evil coldy-sinusey thing is diminishing, I can feel it shrink down as my immune system gets the upper hand, and suddenly things are not so bad. The semester is still worth some reflections, but perhaps they need not be as "coming-to-a-reckoning" as I thought.

Function Through Disaster

Finish in Style.

I'm pulling out the motivational slogans: it's that time.


Backed up, burrowed in the corner chair of my bedroom, I wear a straw cowboy hat and pajamas,chew the hell out of a cinnamon-flavoured toothpick, and read the strings of words unfolding in my hands.

But I'm distracted with my own reflections. Did this semester go well? Why don't I even have a clear sense of that? I know that several students made great leaps in thinking and writing, some without even being aware of it. I don't mean "what did the students think of the semester" exactly, though that's part of it for sure. But was there a theme?


That's the thing that's scattering me. I dabbled in four or five notebooks over the course of the semster, and did the in-class exercises with students on scrap paper sometimes. I have, myself, notes for everything. Notes for an essay about nude photography; notes for one about the process of becoming a white woman; notes about Obama, about nations; notes about Tennessee Williams and Adrienne Rich; half-poems about Frieda Kahlo and Romaire Bearden. Two poems and an instinctive sense that I have to write some prose about Louise Bourgeois this year. Notes about trust fund babies and Thanksgivings. Notes about best friends who get married, notes about falling in and out of love so slowly that one doesn't notice.

I look over the blog from the last three months and see that mostly I have been writing about not being able to write. Meanwhile, that's not true. I've written scads and scads of words. One good poem, and several revisions. But mostly, I've felt unable to complete a thought.

And that is what has made me nervous about my teaching this semester. We were constantly Doing things: reading, drawing, diagramming, discussing, disagreeing.

But is it coming together?

I secretly named the second essay I teach "The Unsatisfied Mind" before I even started the semester. I named the first one, "Art and Ethic". I named the last one "The Body and the Thinker"

But it's the Unsatisfied Mind that has hung as a cloud over the whole semester. Is it my own unsatisfied mind? Is it the unsatisfied minds of my students? I mean it both in a good way, in the way of endless curiosity, and in the bad way; in the way of feeling incomplete and unfed.

But back to it. I can't do the work and think about it at the same time all the time. But I need to do some clarifying work with myself soon, because I feel somewhat off-track, scattered, and my mind keeps gobbling and spinning, but. . .

la misere that is not really so miserable.

a while before thanksgiving, i caught a cold and fell behind on my work. now,almost three weeks later, i have conquered neither the cold, nor the enormous pile of catch-up work. and so i am meeeezerahble. but it is physical and intellectual, not emotional or a deep-down break-down, luckily. i can sense the very superficiality of this particular misere, aknowledge that full health, a sheet of bubbled-in grades, and the shut-down of the semester, would bouey me up immediately. I'd almost dance in streets, or wander them. looking for movie theatres and cafes.

But in the meantime, everything is hideous. My lips are chapped, my nose is rubbed raw, I'm getting chubby because I live off of roasted chicken and never swim, and the papers I have to read seem like a faraway parade I have to peer at from the end of a long hall.

I hate this. I want to be a good teacher, a good writer. I want to not be at war with my achy, slow body. I want to look a tad less gruesome in the mirror.

But that's the thing about a cold. It makes me whiny.

Too sleepy to be happy, but happy anyway. . .

i have entered a state of exhaustion that borders on the absurd.
according to the "how to live your life" books, and womens' magazines, this state
is my own fault for not keeping on a regular cycle of exercise, water, vegetables and rest, eschewing all coffee, smokes, booze, and potato chips. . . .they seem, also, to want you to have sex, but not in such a way that it interferes with the work, water, vegetable, rest cycles. i'm not sure when the experts want you to have sex. 9 o'clock maybe, or 10.

the semester is at the zenith of its crazy.

And so here I am and i want to say akimbo, askew, possibly at the cellular level, a series of tightly wound-nesses, followed by flailing, and then scrunching again, and exhausted! bone exhausted, brain exhausted! i daydream of flat surfaces i could lay my head on. .. I'm drawn to all things horozontal, even street pavements, and tables, and the rug of my office floor. . .It seems dowright cruel to be upright and thinking:

Or, more accurate, to be unable to think! Because if I could think, I'd think more about Obama. I'd think more about what this means to me, my family, to my whole worldview. I'd think and think and enjoy thinking, but now I am a sad halloween costume scarecrow. Oh, if I only had a brain!

Notes for the essay I will write Later