What do I do with all these letters I wrote to myself

I know it's not a lost cause (you probably are, you know that?) but it is tangled. Weeds to cut through, sidestep the roots.

I'm having a hard time understanding that it's 7pm.

I slammed my car door shut today and caught a glance thru someone else's window. I thought it was you. Such a visceral thought, a synthetic jolt through my already tense body. The same nose, the same slips of hair shaping the chin. How could she have your nose? It's plagiarism, art-copy, motionless irreducible fallacy. Her hair was short, shaped differently. I've rationalized this in the several hours that have passed. It wasn't your car. It wasn't you. "Why don't you just grab her and kiss her?"

Tying your shoes is easy.

We spun NYC in the palms of our hands and somewhere in the spins of the park your teeth let go of my heart and I haven't seen it since. Off somewhere with my common sense, my practicality, my way of making life work. I Freudian slipped anyone for anyway and I told you this class was going to further instigate my natural inclination to think.too.much.

It's not an accident / you meant to touch me

I'm trying to get past this, you know. I'm trying to let go and forget and not meet your eyes (which is something I've never been good at- not even when it's the mystery of just us and four imposingly warm walls and a gloss of chatter running over, under, all through the mess of unspoken theories and hypothetical feelings). I gave word that I was tired of having these feelings. Sick of the absurd unrequited nature of the propelled-by-lack heart/swell I'd grown of you. And I am sick of it, I'm just not sick of you. I gave word. My word. And the very next day, you drew me back in with such a simple gesture, a natural movement that shouldn't have turned my insides to pulsing warm marbles. The original grip, the surprise gentle slide of a caress reserved for my picture perfect romance (the one where I keep putting you in the role of my Other, my mirror image, my like opposite). But there it was: that prized movement, you against me, so simple as we are but so unnervingly complex (as we are). And not moments later, that dead-lock eye to eye match of wit against authority. A moment tangled between reason and desire. My yen suffered the blow of time and place; my security won again.

It wasn't an accident.You meant to touch me.

IDR and I talked about it/you last night. We were covering Lacan in class, one of my favorites, and the idea of the Lack was at the front of our minds. IDR said my confused want for you is due to what I'm lacking in my life. Of course it is. I mean, it makes sense beyond sense. I don't have what I want, I have something that I thought I wanted and simply cannot handle, and I see in you, crazy maybe, what I want. Need? I don't want to need anything, especially you.

I can't get you out of my head.

We only ever do the same things twice

A slow waking. I wake to sleep and I take my waking slow.

There's no mystery anymore. We dissolved it months ago, put it all on the table and massaged away the ugly remnants of things that should have never been. And so now, the words lie evenly, surrender slowly. We make sense. I know you (how/ time // resolved fascination, and I just do). I like it just as it is.

A lazy day [productively lazy with laundry, grocery shopping, tying up of loose ends, filing taxes, going to read for class] restores the soul.

Our latest conversations sit sweetly in my brain. Nothing more, nothing less. It just is.

I stood my ground this week and was, somehow, subsequently rewarded. Thing is, I'm not a doormat. Maybe I was, in that stifling debilitating "former life," but I've outgrown those roots and settled into something less malleable. One of my whimsical fantasies came to life. Fantasy/wish. Semantics.

Day to day, I watch things fall apart around me. Lack of will, lack of want, overabundance of lack of care. A desire for destruction.

You may never change // I already have.

You're onto me / all over me

I am realigned in fragments of your voice;
the tenacity between us stretches,
bends with breaks and flowswith outsourced rhythm. Undulating,
absconding, rudimentary linguistics
that fail my schema and imagery.
Outside the air bites with ferocity;
inside, my limbs weaken with misplaced
modifiers and the tangle of my heart
within your incisors.

I dedicate a vivid hue

The problem posed:
If xy - 1 = 0, then y=
A) -1/x
B) 0
C) 1/x
D) 1
E) x

Math(you) has/have never been my strong suit,
my forte diminished to synthetic nightmares
coursing through fanatical dreams.
Cyclical words and lack of action.
I vote for D or E,
and it's a fragment of a wish that
still dangles from my frontal lobe.
This mess of mathematical unlikelihood
would be exponentially easier
(our unspoken balance, faltering firepops, integers to syllables)
if you were here.

I've had enough temporary acquisition

VI.
Snap. Focus. Step back, second glance. Tentative click- second guess, click. Erase. Zoom. New lens, wider angle. Zoom. Focus. Refocus. Realign. Pose. Motion. Shadows. Refocus. Snap. Snap. Snap. Setting sun. Focus. Erase. Delete all. Empty. Search. Zoom. Focus. Still.

October
My fingers are stuffed down the front of your jeans and all you can think to say is: "I don't remember where I left my keys." My teeth grip the edge of your shoulder. I can't remember where we began and you can't recall who you are. I fuck you and taste a stranger. Your keys are in my pocket, your fingers are gripping my ass, everyone is leaving and I want to disappear.

Exhume
We ran digital analysis over our late afternoon bodies. Numbers glinted in the awkward sunlight beaming through the blinds. I couldn't add and you laughed through the multiplication of our limbs and digits, identities and secrets. The night I met you, you scribbled a poem on my inner thigh and told me to follow you home. I chased your coattails up W 181st onto Fort Washington Ave. You were a blur of red and black, bursting through parked cars and errant cabs. I watch the movement of life now, gridlocking on the GW Bridge, and wonder when I'll find my way home.

The sweetest sadness in your eyes

She took my hand and we slipped on misplaced starlight, discarded daydreams littering with sonata-ringing wishes. My brain ached from the fusion of our dangerous souls- those perforated egos lined with shark-sharp zippers- that rude clash of tenacity versus clutchingsenselessheartattack. Bare feet, bare arms, bare wrist to your bare forehead. The fever between us ran cold. I never did care why.

Why don't you touch me where I'm rusty / let me stain your hands

Backwoods and dirt, my fingernails bitten and tangled with the weeds that scraped over your mouth. We fought for words and tangoed with illusion; reality was a smeared landscape that trailed us for miles through the twists and curls of state by state, landmark by escaping fuel. We had a thread of dignity left over from months ago. A notion of how it was and what it could be but we couldn't stand together, alone, in What It Is. And I fought you, line against rhythm, joke butting up against pretense. My knuckles skinned to misery and blood-sweat rimmed my clavicles. I busted through a memory of What I Wanted This To Be; my teeth were bared and my ribs cracked open to reveal an unfurling knot holding my heart inside my chest. Together, alone, we sat mesmerized by the shredding reeds and split-end hemp fibers. You smoked my danger, my energy, my last wit. In the glow of your midday high, you told me you loved me and I whispered that I don't.

You always play the madmen poets

Despite my self-imposed moratorium on imbibing alcohol, I totally imbibed last night, and happily so. I haven't gotten that phone call where I say, "Hey chica, ¿que pasa? ... Oh my God, this must have been from Saturday night. I was so [drunk]. Who do you think got it?" [Cue laughing teenage girl receiving the debaucherous picture. Cue my mortification.], so I must be in the clear for Embarrassing Moments of '08. Actually, okay, let's be real. Yes, I had several beers, and subsequently lost track of exactly how many beers I drank. And yes, I did a Pass the Jell-O Shot Power Hour. And then I probably had a few more J-shots. HOWEVER. I avoided the Dirty Girl Scouts because I knew from my Mind Eraser experience a few weeks ago (note: the cause of the self-imposed alcohol moratorium) that I would definitely not so much lose my mind (or the sensation that I have legs, as happened with the Eraser) but would probably lose my shit.

And you know what? No thanks on that.

As always, flutters of Lesbian Drama abounded. I'd told Quack pre-party that I was going to leave at the first sight of L.D. but nothing escalated to the point where I felt the need to flee. I amended the fact that I'd been going around saying that T was dead to me. I observed more than anything, except for when someone was telling me to strip and then, obviously, I became very focused on that. I also gave a lap dance or three to the Obligatory Straight Guy -- in my totally un-serious lap dancing way, of course. I lectured, I laughed, I bemoaned, I challenged, I rocked at beer pong, I avoided, I received a heartfelt inebriated chat about my self-esteem and how I am amazing and deserve better than what I have, I wish I had chocolate chip cookies right now, I saw some of my favorite females, I called first dibs (again), I did not lose my shit. Truly a successful night.

What happened then, are my dreams from last night. Morning. Whatev.

The major dream was the glacier/dock/Olsen twins debacle. I was on the dock, leaving someone somewhere, and the Olsen twins pushed me off of the dock. I landed on a huge sliver of a melting glacier [source: I watched/listened to "An Inconvenient Truth" yesterday morning because I now have 10 channels of Showtime and am basically never leaving my house ever again, what with my Robe and my TV and my general distaste for sub-par human beings] and started slowly gliding away. The water was an intensely dark, deep blue- but not a typical ocean blue / not one that I've seen, anyway. We're talking deep royal blue with silvery flickers of ice. In the dream, I'm thinking Mothereffer, what's with the Titanic eyebrow-freezing? Is this my penance for going by the name of Rose's tortured, pennyless lover? [Side note: Leo & Kate are teaming up again for a new movie. Something about a dysfunctional marriage I think? A glimpse of what life would have been had Jack not perished via an untimely frozen death?] As I float away, perhaps to my own untimely death, all I see is water, that deeply blue should-be-haunting water. My glacier drift bashes into a much larger glacier and I have totally shifted tense which is something I nail my students for all the time but whatev, this is my blog. I shall squash the need to remain in a singular verb tense. /// So I'm now a little, well, soaked from the glacier-bashing incident. But that doesn't matter so much because the water crests over me, pulls me under, and now I am drowning and shaking myself awake with my half-asleep (half-dead?) attempts to inhale properly and deeply.

I'm tired of drowning. Are drowning dreams the same as falling dreams? That whole If You Don't Wake Up Before You Hit The Ground, YOU SHALL PERISH thing? I've had my share of those, too, though not in a while. This is the first nearly-drowning dream, which goes hand in hand with my nearly-choking-to-death-on-my-own-saliva experience from Friday.