“He told me: No Cigarettes.
No Booze.
No Coffee.
No Tea.
No Sex.
No Sugar.
(Unless it’s integral…)
No Masturbation.
No Exercise…and Go to Bed Early, by 10pm…at the latest…and, well…”
“And que?”
“…and bueno, the fucking buzzing in my ears is still there!”
“…too much integral sugar perhaps?”
Latest
…:: HeartBeat ::…::…::…::…::…..
When my hands were cold
from lack of sun,
I stumbled upon this grate,
sprayed in the calle of my hood,
and found a heart
to match my hurt.
Dear India:
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
where knowledge is free;
where the world has not been broken up into
fragments by narrow doemstic walls;
where words come out from depth of truth;
where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
where the clear stream of reason has not lost its
way into the driery desert sand of dead habit
-Rabindranath Tagore
[ sleeping ] [on] [ trains ]
methodic desperation
draws her down, down
down.
goodnight train
goodnight strangers
goodnight moon.
El Regalo de la Perdida (Or reflections on being lost)
An ex-boyfriend once told me to “go eat a map” because my sense of direction left much to be desired… I admit that I have often shared his sentiments over my dyslexic inner-compass, to be someone who gravitates towards the wrong direction can be extremely inconvenient when you have to be somewhere as opposed to… lost.
That said, I now know beyond a doubt just how to BE perdida (lost).
As simple and commonsense-icle as it might seem, it is actually pretty challenging to be in a state of lost. How many of us deal with being lost on a daily basis? (“Define lost” – some of you conceptual folks might say…) But if we are speaking in terms of geographic location, being lost is not the norm. Most of us are exactly where we intended to be at any given moment.
Making me feel somewhat proud of the fact that I can characterize myself as an expert in being lost.
And, whilst it has its downsides, I tend to see it as a gift. How many streets would I have never had the pleasure of knowing had I stayed true to the right way? How many strangers would I have never been able to ask for help and share a small fleeting feeling of gratitude with? And how many moments of discovering some unknown and interesting place would I have missed out on had I eaten that map and never given myself the chance to simply be… lost.
the ride (part II)
Rest stop
Filtered black flies come into focus at rest on the wind burned glass
Legs peel from the seat like a dry tongue from the roof of mouth
I breath fumes watch the morning bloom over steaming lids
The sky blushes salmon in the distance repetition of sound
Doppler in the grass blades rode edges burned to ash blown back up into blueness
As the engine turns linears of big rigs reel start running one hollow hum
the ride (part I)
I rode shotgun
No one spoke for miles
Passed fields of pale blown wheat
Telephone pole crosses
Fluxing wires
I can’t forget
The daydream of death
My still reflection
Dark sky eyes
Over the quick blue
And stratus clouds
Upon my window
Inside the wind
The Batuman Saga: Final Chapters
somewhere in the Andes...
From my latest post on The Millions, Adventures in Reviewing Elif Batuman’s The Possessed:
Far be it for me to skive off my part in what was now clearly a swiftly escalating literary collaboration. “You drive a hard bargain, Batuman,” I muttered to myself…
