"porn and cigarettes"

The subjectline is also, not so coincidentally, the subjectline of Rorycat's latest email to me, with a small spelling correction for the c.i.'s. So anyway, it's not even 9 o' clock and I'm that tired wired from diet Coke kinda caffeinated, but I am also very excited.

The reasons for my excitement are manifold. First, of course, is that I survived art class. My final project (which I manically finished all of today) turned out rather well. It is a creepy double series in conté, charcoal, and ink of a view out my window into Cushing. Very voyeuristic, and *way* too influenced by recent women's studies classes. So anyway, we spent all art class doing crits and eating bagels and fruit and weird brownies made by Georgie Porgie, our professor. Actually his name is George Rush. He is a great man. At first I had a (*very* lesbionic, haha) crush on him, then I hated him for his bitchiness, but now he's redeemed himself with his charmingly terrible brownies and endearingly random sense of style.

I realized what makes his style so *great* is that he wears his pants too low. They are usual brown slacks, or something, and they highlight his little ambiguously-30-year-old butt. Because his pants are too low, his torso looks disproportionately long in his buttondown checked shirts. He has curly hair. All together he is, objectively, unattractive, snarky, and without orientation. And yet...And yet.

When he kept referring to "crit" I kept thinking he was saying "clit." Fancy that.

Which leads me to the next point of excitement: porn! Yes yes, that's right: RK and I may actually do our Squirm shoot tonight! For those of you not in the know, RK is my oh-so charming boy friend. And I use the term loosely. :) Oh, fellow Jewish queers. Anyway, we are doing an extremely *straight* shoot: the usual boy/girl scene, 'cept he's doing drag as a very glam woman and I will be dragging it up in white briefs, a "partnerlover" tank which has yet to materialize, and (ahem) other accoutrements. Which may or may not (which is to say they will) include purple silicone, leather, and buckles. Good Goddess.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah, excitement. I guess on a less-excited level I'm feeling good about getting over Danielle. I saw her yesterday evening at that disappointing lecture by Iraqi women and it was the strangest thing. Her round little head that I used to love to cup in my hands sat so annoyingly atop her little leather-jacket clad body that I just wanted to boot it off her neck. That's weird, cos I was (am?) still sad that she broke up with me, feeling deceived and dropped and like the only things approximating my emotions were lyrics. "And I wonder if you even meant it at the time"..."Just don't treat me like something that/happened to you"...etc etc. And now I see her and want to kick her head?

I guess I don't really want to. It was just a visceral reaction. But perhaps a sign that I'm pulling out of sadness and beginning to see that scar as healed and old, just as likely to be weeks months seasons as 10 days ago?

On the plus side, I saw the drop-dead Julia Weldon as I was leaving art tonight. Sweet mother of God.

Surely I'll get better at this concision thing as I write more entries. From henceforth, they'll be more succint. Probably. Lord, I was born a'ramblin' woman--what can I say?

"And my beer tasted like chalk..."

So wow, I can see how this journal shite can get addictive. So I'll cut to the chase, for once.

The night that Danielle and I broke up was a Saturday. We had seen Dar sing songs to us all in the chapel. Dar was like a substitute teacher with a folksinger past and she stole my heart with her sweet lyrics. At any rate, the night ended with me choking back tears in Su's room and covering it up with bravado as I walked with Su+the-rugby-dykes to the infamous deli. My beer tasted, indeed, like chalk. And then I crawled into my peony comforter and listened to the Melissa Ferrick songs I'd swiped from Danielle and cried.

Alack alas my mateys, that was many a moon ago. Days, I tell ya. But obviously I'm not completely over it otherwise I wouldn't be mentioning it. The brief span of our togetherness was pretty good, and now it's over, and it feels so fake. Rather than get into this boring (and sorta private anyway) relationship shit, I'm gonna post a couple of poems written in the interim between when I thought of D-dog as my girlfriend and when I don't. La da.

(I can't fucken figure out how to shrink the font size, which means the lines of my writing will get fucked up, which means only poems whose lines fit into this dialogue box perfectly will go on.)

This was written Saturday the 22nd. It doesn't have a name.

* * *
To write about Persephone is, I know,
a cliché older than dirt.
but I just want to talk about the pomegranate
the kernels ruby + so sweet + sharp
tart like blood pricked on a thorn
and drawn into your lover's mouth, sucked like fruit.
Yr finger a fruit.
She ate six seeds, but I would have cracked the honeycomb membranes
to release the red
and not stopped til my fingers were stained.
The stain is pink, the seed is red.
Yr fist a fruit.
Yr heart a fist.
I would be in the underworld all year,
for that fruit.
my teeth piercing the seeds' smooth shells,
hands pulling clumps of them from rind like
the ripe words of a poem
or a heart found buried in dirt, over + over again.
I would be in yr otherworld all the years of my life.
Spring would roll over the hills + my roots would
reach
deeper + darker towards those veins of juice in the earth.
My heart a fruit.

* * *
Cut to the next night, Sunday the 23rd...

maybe you are a guardian at the gate,
2 months and now I've passed through.
maybe you were just there to initiate me,
show me the bitter taste of trust
like glue hardening in my throat.

To this poem I added the jab, "You could never write good poetry and now I can't either." Ouch.