i wanted him fully and slowly, needed his warm approval, interest, his ignorance of my flaws, his shock and awe at my lack of self-confidence, his unability to understand why i would ever for one minute doubt myself surging ahead into a shining future one in which i would look as i always do to icons, Big men and women who see obstacles to their goals and choose to laugh at them. i wanted him to understand that that day i crossed the criscrossing sidewalks barefoot from the pain i was walking towards him although he'd already walked away from me i wanted him to know that my feet on the cool cement stood under a mountain of certainty that i could take his cynicism his yearning for youth his goading his uncertainties i could take them all into me and not skip a beat because i could see his beauty. he could see mine better and i knew as i drove him away that i'd be running toward him not even barefoot but breaking all the same as he took away the clearest glimpse of my self.
i want him but i cannot have him just now and so i have to be all of those things for myself

ooh...

more on this later...

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-steinem4-2008sep04,0,7915118.story

is this for real?

i hope to wake up tomorrow morning and to discover that this has all been a complete and total joke, this palin nonsense. john mccain has got to be out of his mind to put this woman on national television, let alone on his freaking ticket as next in line to the presidency. hypothetically, we are entering into war with russia as soon as georgia enters nato? talk about alarmist; talk about fueling the fire. this woman is ruining foreign perception of the US as a vice presidential NOMINEE!? and the bush doctrine--his worldview?! weren't prepared for that one, were you, sarah?
my god.
beyond that she appeared to be completely and thoroughly rehearsed--whenever charlie went off her script she was shaken, but then spoke forcefully to cover it up. she's faking it, and it's all such a ploy engineered by old white men at the controls--to appear "maverick," to pick off female voters, to give people a good life story to relate to. and something like 65% of american men have a positive opinion of her...hmm. wonder why...
beyond that, mccain is brilliantly and maddeningly picking up on the dissolution of the feminist movement. where the f is NOW and other feminist groups? why aren't they forcefully saying NO to john mccain/gop's blatant, sickening sexist move? ahhh, there's the rub--we're in a post-feminist world, yet we still have to be careful about what we say (note to barack: just don't say anything else about lipstick--we'll all be thrown off course again for like, 3 days)...i mean, how could we not be in a post-feminist world, when it is actually VIABLE that this WOMAN is touted as the candidate for women, against equal pay legislation and against abortion in all cases, even incest and rape? whatever your position, if you are against abortion in those cases, you're in denial: women are still victims of sex crime every day--1 in 4 women during their time in college. heaven forbid a woman is a victim of incest or rape, she must have that choice because she never made any kind of choice to be impregnated in the first place.
anyway, i'm getting derailed. the mccain campaign is brutally capitalizing on any way they can perceive obama/the media/insert big bad person or institution here of sexism, and the way their accusations will speak to the millions of american women who have been "deer in the headlights" (deer, i'm sure, that palin would like to pick off with her f-ing gun) about a crucial question for much of their lives: "are you a feminist?" because the word connotes such bra-burnin, man-eatin, hell-raisin anger that maybe it's better just to go along with the way things are. but come on, american women: how could you not be a feminist? the right to make choices about your body--even if you WILL choose to or not (who are you to deny other people that choice)? receiving just as much compensation as a man for doing the same job? or just economic justice for that matter...? not every woman can take their children to work like sarah...what will she do for those women working long hours as a lawyer, or in a factory? please, please, will someone in the media ask her the simple question: what will she do for women? because there is no way that's on her script (the GOP could clearly give a flying f about women)--and good god, for her to be in that position as the first woman ever, she had BETTER do something for us. her answer would have to be "nothing."
someone said it best on a post i read earlier today: "i hope god has a plan that sarah palin is not the vice president nor the president..." i mean, doesn't the hypocrisy of it all just make you throw back your head and laugh?
for the record, f=ing hell yes i am a feminist, and this is an outrage. and i intend to raise hell about it wherever and whenever i can.

more thoughts on quotes

"Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself, the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another's soul."
-James Joyce

See, so there's no way to eject completely someone you've once loved, depressing as it is (although I think Joyce is using a very exclusive definition of "love" here, only really talking about The Greatest Connection of Your Life--thus far, anyway)...they'll leave an imprint you'll carry with you throughout life. Of course, we have to muster up the energy to venture into another's soul. We're almost programmed to do it, and sometimes we repeat the same mistakes or, alternately, seek out the same wonderful qualities in our new partners.

Similarly, from Ulysses:
"Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves."

Because we astound ourselves continually like this, how is it that we can ever embrace anyone else's various characters, too? We're constantly navigating our own stories, each others', those of places, cities, nations, and must be constantly flexible. You've got to let others tell their own stories and get to know their own unique characters, because they're subject to change:

For the truth is that you can never simply 'go back', to home or to anywhere else. When you get 'there' the place will have moved on just as you yourself will have changed. And this of course is the point. For to open up 'space' to this kind of imagination means thinking time and space as mutually imbricated and thinking both of them as the product of interrelations. You can't go back in space-time. To think that you can is to deprive others of their ongoing independent stories. It may be 'going back home', or imagining regions as backward, as needing to catch up, or just taking that holiday in some 'unspoilt, timeless' spot. The point is the same. You can't go back. You can't hold places still. What you can do is meet up with others, catch up with where another's history has got to 'now', but where that 'now' is itself constituted by nothing more than--precisely--that meeting-up (again).
-Massey

What's left? A kind of patient consubstantiality, really--a constant state of being in another person's shoes as well as your own, sharing the same plight of self-discovery, on equal wavelengths.

van keeps me dreamin...

when i'm livin in a dream and it's gettin so late
then you call my name, and i'm wide awake...
you ask me if i miss you--i say 'not at all'
only every night, about this time, when evenin' shadows fall
-evening shadows

Men saw the stars at the edge of the sea
They thought great thoughts about liberty
Poets wrote down words that did fit
Writers wrote books
Thinkers thought about it
Take it where you find it
Can't leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
-take it where you find it

no wavelength, no mileage,
there's no current currency
no answers, only silence
nothing looks like it's meant to be
-school of hard knocks

A Writer's Fire

In your house
there is a fireplace
lights me at the spine
travels up the back
as you lilt across the room
to others I have not yet met
the spark flames at the neck
heating my face
dangerously moving red blush
behind wide eyes and tickled ears
lips, cheek, brain
infused
you sit
relaxed
rocking a chair
book in hand
you are a writer
a poet.

a short story i wrote a while ago...

Steeled

She stood at the base of it all, marveled, craned her neck upwards to look at the structure that was her bones. The strong, sturdy foundation shouldered the courageous task of controlling and patrolling the amateur water that would become famous soon as it flew down the falls and into the lenses of a thousand summer tourists' cameras. Then grew the green steel, pitching to find its peak just below its purpose: a thin, horizontal strip dotted with moving flashes of light and color, citizens of the world discovering the crown of the Parker truss just as they descended into America or began their climb to Canada.

She walked back and forth under that Parker truss on the Bird Island Pier until arriving at exactly the spot where he had pulled her to hand-in-hand years ago. It was an evening not unlike this one: the sunset struck over Canada, stacking the sky and water in a graduation of pale yellows, oranges, pinks. He'd held her just here long ago, asking in his gentle voice for them to marry. He'd finally gotten a job directing traffic for the bridge, corralling drivers into lanes and lining neon cones up in rows.

It was here in this spot and in this moment that she saw herself completing a perfect circle. Her father had fed her on the steel that lived in this bridge, and she would continue to eat from it once they'd found their way out of the magical road—these half-grown bushes and trees sprouting from deep crevices of large rocks banked on the sides of a poled-in path grounded in broken bottles.

Her husband was proud of the job even as the trucks rode their way into his lungs and the time on his feet saw veins protrude and pop into their places on the map of his legs. She saw that their children enjoyed their first international experience up on the bridge with their dad, gazing up to the flags marking the line they would straddle to be liminal. She tearfully thanked her father at his grave for his literal supporting of them in this dying economy—her home where she’d wanted so much to stay, to find peace underneath the connection he’d completed building not long before death.

The sun slipped underneath the horizon and the wind began to bite its only victim on the path. Night covered the calm, green Fort Erie to her west, and the beautifully gritty city to her east. She saw life here just as if it had happened to her, now in the moment when the bridge was beginning to be overtaken by plans for a new one nobody’s father would help build; the plant had died as the men who once lived its shifts and its furloughs faded. She thought about them in her writers’ retreat far away, carefully mining for words until they weren’t her words any more but those of her father, her father’s friends, her old lover. Their voices unearthed while she saw them diving deeply and faithfully into a city that couldn’t build its own bridges. She fed herself on their promise alone, dreaming quietly, as she could only have learned to do from her city.