I Was Reading a Scientific Article

They have photographed the brain
and here is the picture, it is full of
branches as I always suspected,

each time you arrive the electricity
of seeing you is a huge
tree lumbering through my skull, the roots waving.

It is an earth, its fibres wrap
things buried, your forgotten words
are graved in my head, an intricate

red blue and pink prehensile chemistry
veined like a leaf
network, or is it a seascape
with corals and shining tentacles.

I touch you, I am created in you
somewhere as a complex
filament of light

You rest on me and my shoulder holds

your heavy unbelievable
skull, crowded with radiant
suns, a new planet, the people
submerged in you, a lost civilization
I can never excavate:

my hands trace the contours of a total
universe, its different
colors, flowers, its undiscovered
animals, violent or serene

its other air
its claws

its paradise rivers

-Maragret Atwood

Of Cabbages and Kings

Cabbages & Kings Literary and Visual Arts Magazine

Ending this last semester was a bigger weight off my shoulders than I could have ever imagined. By the last couple weeks, when people asked me what my plans for the summer were, I would tell them "I'm just going to fall over...and I'm not going to get back up." 

True story, as it turns out.

I'm lying here having discovered a couple things about myself in the last month. Mostly weaknesses that I knew existed somewhere in there, but I had yet to be confronted with their actual depth. I've never had to stop and accept that I was in a state of honest dysthymia like I was as this last month came to an end. I managed to lose a lot of academic ground in the withered mindset I got myself stuck in. Not to mention my fading ability to trust the voice coming out of my own mouth, or continuing to ignore the inevitable misfuckery I constantly try to keep on the (distant?) horizon. Plus I managed to misplaced 15 lbs due to stress/poor diet/etc somewhere back there. 

But hey, it's over.

I'm doing alright now. 

Moving on.

Jay and Silent Bob My co-editor and I on a 2am city romp
through the glorious subways of NYC.
I might be singing something.

The one good thing I can say about this last semester is that my magazine team and I really put out an excellent publication over at Cabbages & Kings, and had quite an adventure making it. 

Nearly the entire staff was relatively new to the magazine, all of us serving our first terms in office. Including myself at the head of production as the Editor-in-Chief. But we still managed to craft a solid magazine that's been well received by every department that's seen it so far, traveled to NYC for hands-on training as current and future publication editors, and even fostered a small community of artists by hosting open mic poetry nights on campus and developing writer's workshops for students in the coming semester. 

I just got back from a dinner meeting tonight with my officers to plan and schedule for the next school year, and it's safe to say that the goals we've been fomenting for this next effort use this last issue as a catalyst to reach excellence C&K may never have achieved before. It's something I can get excited about; a refreshing feeling considering where I've been lately.

I've come to the conclusion that I am not an excellent student. It's okay. Not everyone is cut out for this. But at least I know that I'm a damn good editor, if nothing else. And I've been given an opportunity to bring out the best in the people I work with, through managing the publication itself, as well as building a grassroots effort on my campus to connect and cultivate aretè in the artists of my community.

It's something to look forward to.

Almost done with this.

As straightforward as we are,
My bewildered brother
[and to separate him so far from myself is blasphemy]
doesn't find in the same light
what the both of us know
to be true.

Or at least good intent.

This makes many things
difficult for me.
His hands are mine
until I paint them another color.
He thinks the best of us
without compromise.
He read all about
you and I, in
the Sunday paper.
What he sees, he sees in the bolded blacks and whites
when all I can find is the underlying
permanence of gray.
Anticipating the inevitable yellowing,
the browns never considered by human eyes
pink young worms eating headlines and compost.

And this is what gets me.
That it mattered as much as anything could,
and doesn't.

The Setting Proposal

Rudd gave us a strange in-class assignment today.

We started by writing out images that we connect to a place from our past that we hold familiar. A place we've spent a lot of time with. Then, switching to a place we also hold important to us but have only been to maybe once or twice in passing, we continue writing associated images.

Then came the interesting part. Write a few lines alternating between the first and second settings, and intertwining them together. Making a collective thought out of otherwise isolated parts of the mind. I went for it. Later that afternoon, at a Starbucks, I went ahead and finished what I had started.

I've been having a very hard time lately getting outside of the moments I'm in. At least enough to say anything about them. This exercise was a nice release from that mindset, even if it doesn't look like much on paper.

________________________________________

The Collective of Past and Present Lives I Have and Have Not Lived:

My bar was bare. No child collected
greenglass thinglass liquor drained or half-not
there, in the back corner. Bitter escapism is to be seen, not heard.

Nothing grows down here.
It culminates.

It retracts my sandpaper tongue into the cat's mouth.
(She walks away)
It traded my walls for a t-shirt.
And now I'm looking around this room.
Over the years, it's become as big as I am.
The splinters in my hands
from wooden walls I secretly return to
sink farther beneath the skin
each time I press palms against the glass table,
painting over keratin shells.

Remember that old wooden bar?
The small box dreaming of static snow,
rescued from obscurity to live
in the basement, unplugged.
Moisture over years leaving
a glaze of scum
under fingernails, dust
over collective memorabilia
enshrining 4am prayers
spoken face to face
in warm silence, in waves of blood

And yet...
Touching splintered fingertips to serrated wrists,
it's still hard to imagine being so young
in this place.
So old
in this place.
So tired
so long ago.