I’ve known that I’m no good at keeping a blog since for-ever. It can be anything I damn well please, just geez. Can’t this just (just, just) be like Instagram but with poems? A picture every week and a few words that aren’t too obnoxious.

I’ve been stalking a handful of tattoo artists. I am blown away at the artistry. Finally threw my name in the hat for two tattoos today with the hopes of getting one. Feel like I’ve just sent in my resume. I hope they like me! Better clean-up the social media to seem likable and able to take direction.

Then again, they labeled the hyacinth a delphinium. Maybe that’s what I’ll remind myself of if I don’t get picked.

(Bird image ≠ tattoo.)

I’ve been quietly adding poems from my last chap to the site this month.

Now my poems menu is too long, so I have to find a fix. Either find a way to make the menu scroll or categorize the list to make it shorter. Hm, ideas, hmm, action. And since I’m chatting about web design, do I really need to think this much about a font? I don’t want to get caught in the tedium of fonts. Haha, every time I come to the site I rework it in my head. Sorry if too many posts mention my unfulfilled goals and shortcomings as a web designer.

An old friend just told me she didn’t know I wrote poetry. I told her I keep kind of quiet about it. She noted posting to the Internet is not exactly a quiet thing to do. True, true. I look at it as hiding in plain sight. Most people in my real life don’t know about all this.

A few weeks ago I stumbled onto this song. The strings that come in at about 3:30 reminded me of another song. It was driving me nuts. Finally figured out it reminded me of this at about 1:54. I know it’s kinda dumb, but little sonic mysteries and quirks make me really excited. That and I just love Warren Ellis. Saw him in The Dirty Three years ago. I wish I had paid better attention at that show. I just remember he was clean shaven and seemed drunk and lonely. Kept his back to the audience most of the show.

I can’t remember how I heard about The Occasion. I love their album Cannery Hours and can find minimal info on them online. Cannery Hours came out in 2005. In 2005 I was drinking the days away to find courage to leave my husband. I wish I was of the mind to see this band, if they ever even played Chicago.

The weather is supposed to warm up, so I want to get this out – the visions of bleeding out, sticky, tacky, freezing to the icy concrete. I imagine my foot instantly freezing to the ground and when I move, my leg breaking off at the ankle. Falling over the stump, over my own sock and shoe, the blood working as an adhesive to glue me dead to the sidewalk.

I have disgusting thoughts all the time. I’ve tried to figure out why. The best answer I can come up with is fear – there’s a rush from the fear of the thought. It’s adrenaline. Adrenaline from fear of the imagined event, and fear of myself for thinking these thoughts. Sicko. Throughout my 20’s I was obsessed with the idea that I would enter some sort of waking dream, and when revived, I’d look down at the bloody stub where my thumb used to be, with the missing digit in my mouth. In junior high I went to bed thinking of someone cutting my feet with a knife long-ways as I slept. (I think this was heavily influenced by the Nightmare on Elm Street movies.)

In the past year these grotesque thoughts started to morph into ideas of biting my daughter. My teeth would ache and need the pressure of a bite to relieve them. Of course this idea scared the shit out of me, but like any good horror, the more I tried to suppress the thoughts, the more prevalent they became. I started not to trust myself around her. Her skin was just too soft, softer than a flour tortilla. So finally I told myself to go fuck myself and my dumb idea – “if you really want to bite something so badly, go bite yourself,” I said in my head. I told my daughter I had to go to the bathroom, lifted her off my lap to the open couch cushion besides me. In the bathroom I locked the door and put my hand in my mouth. I sheepishly bit down. Not hard at all. “Wimp,” I thought. “Do it harder. BITE.” I went to do it again, but it was just too stupid. I removed my hand from my mouth, wiped off the spit with a bit of toilet paper, and stopped thinking about biting my daughter.

I’m wrestling with the idea to post poems I know I’m not going to use for any other purpose here. Poems that don’t make a lot of sense or ones that are unpolished and coarse. Is posting poems on the Internet really more fearsome than taking a bloody chunk out of your daughter with your teeth?

Listening to the BBC documentary on William Burroughs narrated by Iggy Pop. I like William Burroughs and Iggy Pop, a lot, but they both have highly nuanced and annoying voices. Burroughs whines and Pop sneers. I can’t tell who’s doing the put-on from here.

Little experiments help me learn how little language works. This reminds me of a time on the red line. The red line is where performance platform and mental illness often collide. One man was going on loudly, aggressively, about the Injustices, and I couldn’t tell if his rants were meant as commentary, satire, art, or if they were the byproduct of mental illness. I decided to write down every spewed word to see if I could make something of it. I pulled out my journal and began to transcribe. Below is just a cut-up from the radio show. I’ll have to dig out an old journal for the red line guy.

people should read
swift-cover
your bullet has hit her forehead
appalling pages
search along the incision
I was his reader
Nixon
watch out, baby
close associate
apologists
all the big names
the books
I cared how he spent
ignite
the day doing
accepted domestication
drooling on
late American
isn’t that great?
salute
magic forest
sitting on the sofa
intelligence and sensitivity
is dying
poison ivy league
likelihood
here to go
either one
and we are
the damnedest
pioneering capitalist
the whole
as fuck
protector