what now

what did I do today. I went to westwego, la to the department of motor vehicles, it's in the smallest building and you have to walk around to the back where you're surprised to find it isn't at all the david lynchian experience you'd hoped for but a quiet smalltown city hall experience, endless waiting room all quiet with one or two voices on a cellphone and then the waves of murmur, people getting up to go because their ticket says J85 when we're only at J16, let's be honest. I was trying to read this ernest hemingway story called up in michigan when dan came traipsing through to say it wasn't going to happen today. or any other day, I didn't say. Let's go get a thanksgiving po boy, he sighed. and then he got on the phone with his folks and said he'd need a new birth certificate. this is the first time I heard the voice of his father. he had a nice florida drawl I could tell. sometimes I can taste it on dan, and it's like beach and it quicksands one in. sometimes I don't trust it, which shouldn't be, in fact I distrust that I distrust. no matter. but we didn't, we went to his house, we had to, he's getting $ in the mail and his peacoat, its 49 degrees outside, it's like burgeoning wintertime, louisiana style. it's alright with me, it really is... but for some reason I can't fathom it. I am a hard-to-please. I am like the version of me I regretted years ago. I watch myself with the hands on the wheel, no traffic to speak of. how hungry am I, will there be a second chance for a thanksgiving po boy? is it thanksgiving yet? 

I took some offbrand nyquil about 15 minutes ago. My left nasal cavity cleared itself. 

I went to the thansksgiving po boy place, I thought I'd get us one. I even made danny call them to order it ahead of time but guess what, me & everyone else. so I drove on over. I realized as I got on orleans avenue that I knew where I was, connected the 7th ward to treme to bayou st. john to mid-city to uptown. I keep blowing my nose against this hawaiianprint skirt I've been meaning to dye olive green. a sexy beyonce knowles song called speechless comes on the headspeakers.

The line for thanksgiving po boys snaked through the restaurant. way more people in line, reading menus, applying lipgloss, smartphoning than those eating po boys at tables. it felt almost empty of spectators, just mad paraders. I left. I wasn't even mad, but I did leave, it was like the dmv all over again but without numbers. this is a terrible lovesong but it's straight r&b '93 style but who wants it like that right now?

I went to rouses. I liked it immediately because no one cared about parking places anymore, everyone was shoved together against the yellow lined drive and I knew it was not the legal place to park but that no one would do a thing. it was a small triumph, the first of this holiday season. it's strange to think that I might have moved to nebraska. I almost never think about that anymore

In rouses I got cranberries which were floating in a red pool, scooped them up with a slotted spoon. some satsumas, couldn't find a fucking orange! save for a bag from- get this- california! can you imagine? with florida just around the corner? 

The drungs are starting to kick in. left nostril totally clear, right, hmmm... I lit the end of my hippie smoke and another shitty beyonce knowles song comes on- rather die young

Then I went back to dan's and I drank tea and we talked, I laid on his couch actually and we ate all these cookies his mom sent to him. I'm sorry I'm such a sobby I mean snobby person sometimes.

Anyway I hadn't had anything to drink since I had this one beer on sunday when we saw the puppet show about the history of the red light district of new orleans, which was amazing. and I only had a la 31 roasted dark ale and so tonight I dropped aja at her place with the firepit for tomorrow's feastparty. she made me a hottoddy and it was great... I only worry I might not be able to taste thanksgiving. but there are worse things.

aloneless

I woke up with a lot of you, and was most thrilled for Maggie Nelson and this copy of Bluets I had in my backpack, Kyle's, signed by the author, because what she'd read gives me the runs in my mind, and I was sitting there sweating in the corner of this strange room while she stood in the brights behind the orange & blue podium framed by the tall gold pipes of an organ. I sweated & didn't look anywhere, she faced me. But seeing her wasn't anything. She had a slight lisp which carried me through more maybe. She mentioned the root of the word etched- to be eaten. Etched in my heart. & I was thinking of all the things we've said, I've said & written over & over, and the songs, what they say,

  you own me

   you have all of me

    you can have all of me

   you have my heart

  you have a hold around my heart

                    so do you have two hearts in your chest? is that what makes you so loveable? (delicious)

After she read friends addressed me and I averted eye contact and said I don't know. Are you coming to have drinks? I don't know. They looked surprised, offended. I walked through the back of the gallery. Collages of matchbooks. Giant plastic windmills. A cyanotype of a bike, I yawned. And I calmed to chill outside in the sunset, where everyone smokes, and it's a smokefree campus but everyone's a poet or an adult so I smoke too & start hugging the women I love, and can't talk about what I'm thinking how I'd like to crawl inside of her mind & live there & have her pet me and this just from a brief forty-five minute rainy brain hug. We went to the river, same place I was with you when we missed Alice Notley & Jeff Mangum but didn't miss each other, and I sat on your flat rock, and I had a beer and watched the light on the water & thought about how I could write anything or read anything and that I wanted to be a knowledge tampon and a thought sponge and I wanted to vomit up beauty & honesty. & I did become very honest. Don't touch me, I can't be touched right now, okay please touch me I am ready for you. It got dark & we rode to the same bougie bar where I'd have the same sazerac at a different table, & you wouldn't be there, but the weather would be nearly same as when you were. Someone offered to buy you a drink but didn't. Someone asked what I was drinking, Jim with a Greek surname, & when I asked him for his surname he looked at me like I was too classy a broad no maybe he looked at me like I was old fashioned (which is at this time, what I was drinking) or British or old or young or beautiful or wasted. I didn't get a free drink, because he only wanted to buy me a pbr

                    
                 he asked me what I did in school & I laughed, and he said, why does that make you laugh and then I felt like crying.

Outside on the cement fence in front of the hotel. He said Maggie Nelson, if she'd wanted to, could have turned everyone in the room to weeping. Can you imagine having that power? he cried. I told him if he ever got the power to make us weep everyday to let me know & I'd move in & stay by his side forever.

He told me he schemes for love. And I said you fall in love for six-six-hours-at-a-time. That you told me once no one can ever break your heart. He doesn't remember saying that... two people have crossed his threshold. Physical pain at their nearness. And I said, I know you love me, I know I'm important to you, but why is it that I'm always checking up after you & you rarely ask after me? & that you're so easily distracted? He said that he & you, most of you, are better at communicating through the written word... which is an of course, so why even ask

                      

       It was a full moon & I was honest. I would have told you anything, if there was anything you'd want to know, and some did, and some didn't. I like what is conversational, the meaningful ease of listening to a lisped voice in a muted microphone, she being available through her writing & words & explanations & interrupting herself and the moment her voice failed at her last sentence. I still like what I do & how I do it, the true it, and I do take a compliment that I am such a fucking beautiful person because to me it means my heart still pumps gorgeous in my chest, that I am a whole. But I must also forget the lovesong cliches & the notion of being inside of someone else, or losing my organs to another, of being eaten. I have doors & they're open so many of them in my house that the crossbreeze sometimes makes my hair stand on end.

smudging time

I am good at everything I say, everything I see.

Here is a lovesong written expressly for you

for #24

Some sepia eyes

Colored matching just a scene,

Italian stilllife

for #23

Broadcast delerium

Swim sideways, Iowawise

Eye wandering lost

for #16

Cashmere coloring

Like a look softened by sludge

A smudge on the brain

for #22

Breakfast like cookies

Dirty bores kettle alight

Those pretty scab wounds

Iowandering but still unable to use avocadant in a sentence.