17:13 .... where do I even start?
Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter17:44 finally got around to resetting her twitter password.
Automatically shipped by LoudTwitterSimon is gone.
At about 8:45 this morning a blot clot wedged itself in the aorta that feeds his back legs.
It hurt for a little while.
Then it paralyzed him from the hips down. His back legs and feet went cold as they had no blood flow anymore. He couldn't move his tail.
The vet said it wasn't something they could have saved their own pets from. And that there wasn't much hope of doing anything for him.
His heart's apparently been bad for a while. It's entirely possible he's been throwing clots forever, and it's just that today one lodged in the wrong spot.
I can't scream enough or cry enough or ANYTHING enough to do anything with this crawling THING in my chest.
He's gone.
The moon has fallen from the sky. I will never see the moon again.
“By looking inside yourself,” Zia said. “Even if you have to look into a mirror that’s outside yourself to do it.”
“And you know,” Maida added. “That mirror can be a story you hear, or just somebody else’s eyes. Anything that reflects back so that you can see yourself in it.”
-p 324
But anyway.
I’ve never been much for Native American myth/history/tradition/etc… Always had a deep and abiding respect for it, but it’s not my pond, so to speak. This book made it feel a lot more universal and approachable? I dunno, I’m groping here.
But the crow girls rock hard and I want to name things after various characters in this book and I want to read more of his stuff.
This book made me want to draw. That’s pretty high praise.
So, I've been trying to memorize this poem... because it reminds me of Karen, and our divorce.
Losing Scout seems to be bringing all this back up for me... Grief is a spiral, right?
-----
Sharks
By Tara Hardy
I love you more than all of the oceans, but I wouldn’t give them up to keep you. I love you more than all the wind that has ever reached me. But without it, there’d be no weather, just constant, static, pollution – the ozone stretched past elastic capacity towards collapse on this fading green city. For without the wind, there’d be no flora, just pollen gone impotent on vine.
I love you more than all of my work, but I can’t get myself to leave it. Or you. Leave it. Or you. Are you leaving me? Either one of us has woken up sweaty to beckon the other on the hundred or so nights since summer. Apparently, when wolves grieve, they hibernate, tuck away in the dark, to howl silently, whisper screams into their fur. This month, the sun is intruder, the leaves look funny, and our dog has been under the couch for days.
Today, the clock ticks, behind me, the one that hung above us for the windfall of our wedded years. I wonder how many seconds you lay sleeping next to me, and wish I’d kept my eyes open to memorize the rise and fall of your back, the way your eyes fluttered. You are beautiful in the morning. I wish I’d kept my mother’s tongue to myself, my father’s silence under the bed, where I still keep the jar in which I collected the lint from your belly button. It’s not even half-full. You’d say not half empty.
We can’t even agree on that, let alone – who left who? You to your life, or me to me? You concede that for too many months in 2003 you may have led me to believe you’d be home for dinner. But didn’t I have my art? There’s a shark on your back, it took 10 hours to tattoo. When I stopped waiting, it was his shadow you turned on me. His enemy any wall built by anyone but you, your blame, indictment, fear, logic, bones through them.
I came from a long line of enduring women. I know how to feed a family on a carcass for a week, to leave the oven open when there’s no heat. I know how to sit in chrysalis for years until the future blurs into one long rocking chair night, where virtue equals sacrifice. So, looking back at you from the door, I have two equal instincts. The first, to rush towards you, dim, pledge my light. Because no one I could hope to love will ever be as worthy. The second, to jump the track of my ancestral line. If the opposite of death is desire, then let me invite this slice as the original welcome to hunger.
I love you more than all of our futures, but I’m giving them up for daylight. For my pen in the morning seducing paper to noon, until I meet myself under the streetlamp. If moths can mistake them for sun, I think wolves might howl these streets half empty, or full, depending on how you look at it, of girls half drunk on grief. Nothing but the down of our arms to keep the wind out, to keep the screams silent of how we’ve had to leave again, or been left again – depending on from what angle you howl at it.
I know you think I left you for another shark; there were a fair number circling – clocks in their mouths, timeshares of attention, affection. But I never left you for a shark. I left you for something far greater. The sea. I’ll write you sometimes. From beside her. Still loving you more than all of her salty kisses. But sailing on full gusts because I love one thing more than you. Me.
I wasn’t there. Not for Karen. Not for Scout.
I knew this was coming, but I had no idea exactly how horrible it would feel… And I don’t know how long it will take me to forgive myself.
The Queen is dead. Long live the Queen.
Sadly, because of some lacking mutual clarity, we did not get to have Dusty Rose at the 5th Annual Marin County Fair Poetry Slam.
BUT!
John and I made it, with the last minute addition of Heaven, and a good time was had by all. Heaven got to be a judge, and given that she's an actress, I think her firm stand on memorization is totally understandable. (Don't get up there with a poem on paper if you want Heaven to score you well. I'm just sayin'.)
They even gave her a free ice cream. (We were at the Ben & Jerry's stage. All hail the Vermonster.)
I did not, in point of fact, get around to sprucing up OR re-memorizing my sign poem. But that was okay, since I didn't make it into round 2 and "Words" is county-fair-safe.
The best part had to be seeing Jen G reinvent THIS POEM into something that was also county-fair-safe.
Jen G; to the filmmaker with the dark curly hair from Jen Toal on Vimeo.
County-fair-safe AND perhaps the most beautiful surrealist extravaganza of my life... Wish I'd taped it. :)
15:54 Sometimes compassion for other people's realities is like a kick in the stomach...
Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter22:51 Behold the wonders of a bath - 2 blissful hours spent alternating between warm water and cool air and I feel like a real human.
Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter20:30 It's not always shade and roses - spent the day being crushed by depression. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.
Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter~love to poets
(click to get to the more)

16:48 ... So basically now they're paying me to be an extrovert? Talk about working your strengths!
Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter09:15 Am I TOO brave?.... ~shrug... It could only be a horrible mistake.
Automatically shipped by LoudTwitterHere... This is my sex poem.
Jentle; Again
Click at your own risk. :)
That night, at Dusty Rose's insistence, I scribbled out several pages of free writing about the experience and then she and Baraka helped me tweak it a bit until I guess it's a poem.
I performed it tonight at Berkeley Slam.... (I didn't tape it. Who am I?)
I got my first 10 from a judge, the feature for the evening talked to me from the stage and several poets I really admire stopped me in the crowd with compliments...
And this impossibly cute girl (sadly from Santa Cruz) said, "Oh my god... do you SHARE with that one??"
"YES! I'm actually kind of advertising."
".... that's some GOOD advertisement."
Hee. I know.
00:58 Helped Chey paint her room. Pink, green, stripes, flowers, oh my! Her - "Why do you keep LISTENING to me?" Me - "Um, it's your room?"
Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter16:46 Just found a ziploc leaned against my door with my name in Mamaw's handwriting... Her jewelry. I don't know a word for this feeling.
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