underwater thing

if my insides were a video:

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 21:22:05 GMT

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 19:48:10 GMT

To The Woman Who Could Not Live With Her Faulty Heart

I do not mean the symbol
of love, a candy shape
to decorate cakes with,
the heart that is supposed
to belong or break;

I mean this lump of muscle
that contracts like a flayed biceps,
purple-blue, with its skin of suet,
its skin of gristle, this isolate,
this caved hermit, unshelled
turtle, this one lungful of blood,
no happy plateful.

All hearts float in their own
deep oceans of no light,
wetblack and glimmering,
their four mouths gulping like fish.
Hearts are said to pound:
this is to be expected, the heart’s
regular struggle against being drowned.

But most hearts say, I want, I want,
I want, I want. My heart
is more duplicitious,
though no twin as I once thought.
It says, I want, I don’t want, I
want, and then a pause.
It forces me to listen,

and at night it is the infra-red
third eye that remains open
while the other two are sleeping

but refuses to say what it has seen.

It is a constant pestering
in my ears, a caught moth, limping drum,
a child’s fist beating
itself against the bedsprings:
I want, I don’t want.
How can one live with such a heart?

Long ago I gave up singing
to it, it will never be satisfied or lulled.
One night I will say to it:
Heart, be still,
and it will.
{margaret atwood}

Mon, 11 Sep 2006 18:36:58 GMT

loneliness is the human condition. cultivate it. the way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. never expect to outgrow loneliness. never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. an intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. if you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. the best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way.
-janet fitch, white oleander

-frida kahlo, moses, 1945

detroit annie, hitchhiking

Mon, 03 Jul 2006 21:39:33 GMT

her words pour out as if her throat were a broken artery
and her mind were cut-glass,
carelessly handled.
you imagine her in a huge velvet hat with great

dangling black feathers,
but she shaves her head instead
and goes for three-day midnight walks.

sometimes she goes down to the dock and dances
off the end of it, simply to prove her belief
that people who cannot walk on water
are phonies, or dead.

when she is cruel, she is very, very
cool and when she is kind she is lavish.
fisherman think perhaps she's a fish, but they're all
fools. she figured out that the only way
to keep from being frozen was to
stay in motion, and long ago converted
most of her flesh into liquid.

now when she smells danger,
she spills herself all over,
like gasoline, and lights it.

she leaves the taste of salt and iron
under your tongue, but you don't mind
the common woman is as common
as the reddest wine.
{judy grahn}

take to the sky.

Mon, 03 Jul 2006 20:01:47 GMT

when i was four years old
they tried to test my i.q.
they showed me a picture
of 3 oranges and a pear
they said,
which one is different?
it does not belong
they taught me different is wrong
but when i was 13 years old
i woke up one morning
thighs covered in blood
like a war
like a warning
that i live in a breakable takeable body
an ever increasingly valuable body
that a woman had come in the night to replace me
deface me
see,
my body is borrowed
yeah, i got it on loan
for the time in between my mom and some maggots
i don't need anyone to hold me
i can hold my own
i got highways for stretchmarks
see where i've grown
i sing sometimes
like my life is at stake
'cause you're only as loud 
as the noises you make
i'm learning to laugh as hard
as i can listen
'cause silence
is violence
in women and poor people
if more people were screaming then i could relax
but a good brain ain't diddley
if you don't have the facts
we live in a breakable takeable world
an ever available possible world
and we can make music
like we can make do
genius is in a back beat
backseat to nothing if you're dancing
especially something stupid
like i.q.
for every lie i unlearn
i learn something new
i sing sometimes for the war that i fight
'cause every tool is a weapon
if you hold it right.
{ani difranco}