Penelope

When Penelope goes to a party,

The men remember.

They do not expect to see her there

And are shaken out of their slumber.

They are now grown used to seeing

the women freed from feeling

Women who are only echoes.

They remember without truly remembering,

Odysseus does not recognize her for he never got back to Ithaca.

Ithaca is no more, now is only a vast mainland,

And Penelope the orphan,

The wanderer among men.

She carries her knitting and weaves and unweaves it obsessively.

She has no stories to tell.

She carries with her the spider womb and that’s what wakes them,

Odysseus remembers being tied to the mast.

Penelope would not forget even if she ate the lotus-flower,

And she is immune to the voice of the sirens.

She brings this with her as a heavy but soft truth on all of them.

The other women are stirred and grow defensive.

They don’t know what it is, for they don’t see the charm in her:

Penelope looks haunted by shadows and whispers,

She’s not quite there.

She speaks with no gift for interaction,

She can only interrupt.

Her words are lullabies, they soothe with their musical strangeness,

But none do sleep from them: they are awaken to their own words.

They don’t really think much of talking,

They speak like they fuck and like they hunt: to expel from themselves a weapon.

"How can we deny the self when all of language is exploring its existence?

How can we ask "why" without a separate self?

Penelope must ask herself in silence.

How can we learn to not fool others if we do not study

the ways that we fool our selves?"

Postmodernism, please don't kill the self,

She begs.

You kill all the opiums, all meaning.

Penelope does not understand violence because everything is touch to her:

The contact of two eyes the basic and most meaningful.

She searches with her eyes around the room,

Hoping but no longer expecting to be caressed.

From her exudes a hum that all do fear but can’t resist, the hum of memory,

The hum of time suspended,

And all approach but turn away at her twitchiness,

Her nervous thirsty body.

She may not remember how to love,

And really it is tragic.

Only in the trance of music

Penelope sets her compulsive knitting down.

In one great exhalation of movement, she swoons somehow:

Two bodies are close together and the light that exudes them seduces.

After all, he is a man

And she is a woman.

They will go to a quiet place and he, pleased at her soft features,

Will kiss her without much thought,

But she will in passionate anxiety emit through her body a tremor of urgences:

We must look in the mirror and succumb to a waterfall of forgiveness,

we must cleanse and treasure our selves to be true,

and be a different color of the rainbow in the different types of light,

which is not, in fact, as blank as being black.

“If we stop relying on theory,

If you don’t forget you and me

And that you and me is not a temporary thing...

(I am not dead if I have only gone away,

You men do not know how to wait)

and return to being, quietly and thoughtfully,

it will happen without us even trying to understand...

And that's when we'll go back to childhood,

to the fantastic exploration and admiration of the Other,

the true God who is not Ourselves, in heaven!”

That is her climax, 

In her heart of mind,

She is not interested in half-shared climaxes:

No climax beyond the warm cocoon of a body around her.

She’ll still love with the strangely dignified love of woman

That knowingly loves what is unworthy of her.

That way, she lives in the world of shame,

But is free from the world of guilt.

Heaven, the end,

is just a promise to the return of Paradise,

the beginning,

only supreme in that the sunset is more “meaningful” than dawn,

Or so they say.

Penelope sighs.

Guilt is a rush to earn that future paradise,

and shame is the bitter but secret knowledge 

that we could just have stayed with the dawn.

"We could have stayed in Ithaca..."

Anti Fairy Tale

He didn’t like her
And she didn’t like him
She was a flower
And he was a rock
She knew how to talk
But he didn’t know to listen
He knew how to lead
But she knew not to follow
She needed affection
He needed patience
She was sad and
He was angry
She teased him
He rattled her
She burned
He turned her ice
She wanted to smooth his rough edges
He wanted to eliminate her quirks
She would try to make the food more spicy
He was thinking always of his health
She had never met anyone more rigid
He no one more volatile and frayed
She would attack him with her rancorous words
He would attack her with his silent indifference
They clawed at each other trying to change each other
And they lived happily ever after.

Heima

All is accessory.
A vibrant energy enfolds me when I look upon what cannot be resituated,
And in this place, I cannot separate myself --
My body
My clothes my glasses my hand--
From it
Like smoke and exhalation intermingled.

There is a music of home and it
Is a music of the fullnes of isolation
Just like there is a taste of the home
That comes from the kitchen and the frying pan of the home.

The beauty of home is the beauty of the sacredness of stuff,
The sacredness of things
Both dust and what we put in shrines.

Home is a dizzying place of endless inner adventure
With no fear but a subtle, pleasant suffocation
Where every thing is also an idea.

Hymn

Pain is a loud party next door
And the ceaseless sound of the buzzer,
Sleeping not in your own bed
And finding a stranger in (br)others.

Beauty is crying when all you can think about
Is "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"
And knowing thirteen is the number
(Has always been)
Of ways you could choose not to hold him
(The general him, even the Father Him)
Without ever escaping your prayer
Without ever escaping your need
Without ever truly believing
That you can survive without him.

Truth is the intimation
That even in his arms clasped tight,
You would still be lonesome.
You would still breathe night.

Devotion

Let me see you in all kinds of light.
Let me analyze your nervous and your boisterous laughs,
And see the way your lips drink from the bottle,
The way you stretch your legs while reading,
And how your face twitches when confused.
Talk to me of art and your ambitions,
With a serious face but warm warm gaze,
Displaying all the tenderness of your ideas.

Let me cuddle with you on a sofa to feel your nooks and curves.
I'll ask you to take your clothes off slowly,
Letting me observe your sequence and the self-consciousness that may or may not glitter in your eyes,
So I can absorb each inch of skin and stem of hair that grows.
Let me feel the skin in search of silk and paper,
Outline your fingernails and smoothe the ridges,
Worship the small roundness of your breasts,
Taste the texture of your flowing locks.
Let me even smell your hidden caves to know the quality of your salt,
And if you are willing,
Kiss me so I'll passively experience the theatrics of your seduction..:

This way I will feel more near to him,
And understand she that he loves, and why.

Vampirism

You can't figure me out entirely. You think I'm pretty in a bizzare, unsexy way and with the wrong clothes on. It's not that they don't go with my personality, but it's a bad style. You know I get good grades, and you guess I'm smart, but you think I have a fragmented, unorganized way of speaking and it shows in my messy writing. You hate it when I laugh nervously as I say serious things that I'm not sure about, or when I think I've said something scandalous that actually made no sense at all. It makes you nervous, you get a vibe almost of hysteria from my part, and you also conclude that I'm very self-conscious. You were surprised at my essay in English and how it was considerably better than my Spanish paper. There are things that don't add up, you've been surprised at me and my unpredictability is the reason you don't discard me completely, but you'd like to see some of my finer insights taken to their full potential. You feel I'm so unlike you, so unlike your rigid boots, stern stares, and straight-up posture. But you're sometimes amused. Even if you don't show it, and you tell me to sit properly, you find it refreshing that I put my legs up on the bench during class. You think I have a lot to learn, and not just in school.

You find me warm and smart. You've always seen me so much as a woman, soft (if not flabby), so prone to tears, ridiculous tears for tragedies you think are past or should be irrelevant to me. You do believe I get carried away, and like any woman, am a bit spoiled, and you think I belong to a more delicate and privileged social group than I realize. But then there's the boyish side in me that surprises you. My large sweaters and the need I've always shown to be part of the guys. You embrace that and find it endearing, but not at all attractive, for when it comes to sex I am at the bottom of the list for you, not only because of my clumsy movements and lack of sensual awareness, but because you have seen me in all kinds of light. You see my destiny and see a bright future. You see promise in me (you don't like the word potential), promise that you know will be kept, but you've seen me slip and fall, and become more human, and you hope not too much so, because you love people who are unearthly and strange, who dizzy you with their articulate doubts and observations which are your hidden doubts and observations and who are so unlike the people you grew up with who sat in the sun and smoked away their disquiet. My way of talking and weaving and twisting and unweaving make you feel like the passive listener but not at all less of a man. You respect my words but in the end I'm just a woman who blabbers on and on...

You hate yourself for still seeing a goddess when I appear before you. You try so hard to make me unattractive, but you are seduced by my softness, my flowing hair, my innocent (you would say naïve) smile, my quirky expressions. You see the ether, the lotus flower, the growing peace and maturity (is it maturity?), contrasting yourself, making your darkness, your cynism, your stale and rotten ideals sting. All of this your eyes give away. You feel angry about my existence in general; maybe not angry anymore, but certainly annoyed. You know that I am fake, my whole persona is somehow an elaborate mask created by this bland insecure girl who has no identity, no voice, no self-esteem. And it is all the worse that you were influenced by me in the past, that you trusted me, opened up to me, bowed down to me. For you that is unforgiveable, something to be buried and denied. You still see visions of me lost in the heart of darkness, hysterical, naked, dragging myself. That is why you can't believe that I still strike you as the lotus flower. You take pleasure in my blunders, which remind you of the things you have always rejected in me: my high-strung ideas that the teachers don't fail to bring down to size, my dumb, childish mistakes like putting metal in the microwave, and you don't know if deep inside those things do charm you (for you once truly were, in its complete sense, in love with me) or if they are turn-offs, because there is no depth to your soul anymore. You know that we are inescapably connected; you feel it when we laugh, in spite of ourselves, at the same joke, or when we still manage to read each other's minds.

You know we are two sides of the same coin. You may be smaller, and thinner, and know how to dance, you may have never doubted your roots, or your loveability, but you are chaotic in a similar, pure and tormented, girly and sexless, contradictory way. You would never write about me though, and you know I would hate writing about you too, recognizing this "thing" that unites us intsead of trying to forget it, ignore it, deny it. You are over it, you believe. You always thought I was the crazy one, the erratic one, the impulsive one. Monstrous even. Yes, monstrous. But you are allured by my taste, my style. A captivating monster. You think I am too much woman for mankind, but not because I am the feminine ideal taken to the extreme, but because I am literally TOO MUCH WOMAN, too many thoughts, too much breast and belly and legs, too much face and cheeks, too many senseless words. You shrink at the comparison to yourself, and know that I have shown you sides of yourself unexplored, possibilities of being that in another scenario, you would have been curious about, and would have undoubtedly befriended me, and you know in another life we would have been intimate friends, and you hate fate for punishing you by showing you, through quick flashes of coincidence and unsought for encounters, pieces of the person you have missed, of the person who will not figure in your life as a friend, but as a rival.

I am the poet of self-consciousness. When I am with you, I don't see you. I see a variation of me in your eyes, in your thoughts that permeate into my subconscious, and from that image I can make out yours, like a shadow. I could write about you, through the ways I feel I am seen when I am with you (from my family, to the woman on the subway) and fill volumes, volumes that would make up a cubist self-portrait, without ever really talking about myself. A self-portrait in which I would be the object, but not the subject.