did i do that

I ate mushrooms last night

I wouldn't recommend it

because being alone in your hair, trying to keep your face in the sun 

or the table candles

while something so frivolous happens behind your warm eyes

like a buddha 

like a shiva

like a bunch of women on camels with eyes in the centers of their faces

and pyramids

or million-eyed aliens depantsing themselves in a fractal,

and all you're trying to do is recognize where you are inside

or maybe I wanted to "open my mind"

but then I realized my mind is wider than the sky, 

that you could lay your head athwart my hips & plunge your tongue into my barestript heart

while I read leaves of grass

and I didn't trust anything, not the lemons & bananas on the countertop, or the cigarette

or even the tea

and especially not the hippies who, and this is the only thing I wrote down, "with their fancy drugs try to distract you... reminding you of things like Egypt"

so my mind tunneled and

and then I thought I would write a poem,  

so I laid my head on my book

and I ruined the pages with watercolor tears

and when Nickey came home I told her I had written

the most beautiful poem in the world

with just my tears

and I thought that was pretty hilarious, that I'm pretty good

and I remembered that drugs can try

but I'm not a festival-goer

and I won't be feather'd

and wing'd

and glitter'd

and halo'd

and bindi'd

or distracted

that it's okay to give up sometimes, just so long as I don't have to

this, mostly

I was thinking, am thinking of color. I am always thinking of color, and was reminded even more of it at the reading of Bluets, and am reading it now, and it is about color, and it's about sex. An old boyfriend once told me that one of his favorite things to do with me is to talk about color. We had been on it for hours, watercolor. This winter I printed some kitsch scenes for presents, giant bats hanging above palmtreed vistas, pyramids sitting dumbly in the background. Maybe I did this was for the mixing of inks, for making a green grayer with red, and  photographed each tightening flush of color into itself. It gives me chills too. I keep ink as a pet. Sometimes it gets rancid if you don't tighten its container. It ends up the bottom of the barrel smell, not like anything in particular rotting. Mildewy, maybe. But I keep them... add a little iridescent gold, I think...

When I spoke last night at the bougie bar to the pbr salesman he asked, do you know what my favorite color is? and I said no, how could I. Black & White, he smiled. I see. Nothing in between. No uncertainty. But my favorite color is vermilion... and he asks if it's a blue. There are birds with vermilion breasts worth finding as examples. The color of 2012. 2012 is over. I overheard my friend last evening at the sunset on campus tell a woman that I have a checkout roster for my personal library. I do this so people can be held accountable for my books, for returning them. There are books signed away that I will never see again. It's  more likely I won't see them again when they go through these proper channels.

Jim the pbr salesman said there are two types, mechanics and creatives. But of course I have to argue. I need rules to dictate what I do creatively, how creative I get, all of it. I could never be a painter. Paint on a blank canvas to me is too hopeful & eternal. I am an extremist I want it all of it right now all of it, all of the time. I think, he loves me, or he hates me. I think I am beautiful or I am so terribly gross. I think I am a genius, or I am the stupidest. I have the most full heart or I've never learned a thing. Black & white have all of the colors in them a scientist says. It is sort of beautiful. But I got a yin yang calendar to color as a gift. & I've definitely been coloring everything. Vermilion, turquoise, chartreuse, gold, pale pink, magenta, ultramarine, my yin/yangs know no lacks/infinities of color. They everything me

before I went to this reading last night I dyed most of my clothes a deep bright blue like