100,000 Women

Episode One

2011-08-11T10:40:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while we are presented with an unmistakable message. It is no doubt a rare occurrence, and what's more, the precise meaning cannot always be discerned. We sense, though, that a communicative event is taking place, so we stop and pay close attention. I was privy to one such message two nights ago, on Tuesday, August 9th, at approximately three in the morning. At this time, I had what could be considered my third manic episode.

In 2007, around the time my mom was suffering from breast cancer in its advanced stages and approaching death, I began to gradually separate from reality. It was like the advancement of her cancer was marked by a commensurate letting-go of my mental grasp on the external world. Activities that had once demarcated time for me--namely school, spending time at home with my roommate Stephanie, and movie-watching--became incomprehensible. I slipped more and more into a state of mind that robbed such events of meaning. I felt like Ophelia dipping into the brook, inch by inch, if only to float in what no longer made sense. Daily tasks and pleasures lost appeal and felt hazy; what was considered normal slowly became inscrutable. I struggled to maintain my station as a student, friend, and daughter, though it seemed like I was scaling a hill of an increasingly impossible grade. Eventually, I had my first complete break with reality, which the UCLA psychiatrist I was seeing at the time labeled a "manic eipsode."

The term frightened me at first. True, I was no stranger to the realm of the mentally ill: my grandmother was a paranoid schizophrenic, my mother had drudged through overwhelming bouts of anxiety, my aunt is bipolar, and my cousin is frequently struck by paralyzing panic attacks (all women, and all on my mom's side of the family, by the way). Furthermore, Peter--my boyfriend back then--had been undergoing treatment for schizoaffective bipolar disorder. At 22, I felt like mental illness was my bizzarro cousin, always hanging around the house in disquieting positions and leaving dirty clothes in unlikely places. I felt like I knew the ins and outs of disorders like manic depression. And even though I had harbored a secret fear that the dark hands of genetics and experience would one day pluck me from the happy world of the sane and throw me into the milieu of insanity, I still doubted. I didn't really believe that the random dart of psychiatric need would hit me right on target.

But it did. One night in April, while studying for an exam at a café on Wilshire Boulevard with Peter, I ran into my roommate Stephanie and our mutual friend Chris. I had been experiencing a heightened discomfort all day, like I was standing on a razor blade, the edge slicing into the soles of my feet. Though I was already ill at ease, it was the act of being caught off guard that shoved me onto the sharpness of the steel. I felt a seething embarrassment start to roil inside me. I don't have a physiological explanation for what was happening, but I felt a buzzing electricity begin filling my body like a quick chemical drip. I spoke hurriedly and disjointedly to Stephanie and Chris; I guffawed in uncomfortably loud bursts and averted my gaze. Peter sensed that something had snapped, but he didn't know it was my mental state until after we left the café.

While riding our bikes down Wilshire toward UCLA, I suddenly hopped off my seat in front of a vacant lot. Three students walking by glanced at me as if to ask, "What's up with her?" But after eying us for a few seconds, they turned around and kept going. In hindsight, its curious that I can remember any details of this episode, because I felt like a maelstrom churning so fast that all external manifestations of life would be lost to me in a blur of anger, violence, and destruction. By this point, the frequency of the buzzing had become so great that I couldn't breathe. It was like a diesel engine ripping through the air in my chest. My entire body felt hot and then cold; I was simultaneously sweating and shivering. I felt like my blood was an extremely volatile liquid trapped in a still container. Then, in a sense, I exploded. Raw energy, in the form of high frequency buzzing, bubbled up from my feet into my hands and head. An extraordinary desire to hit random passersby seized me. I wanted to bite, tear, wallop, and jerk around anyone that came within five feet of me. I tried explaining this to Peter through outbursts of words, but the contortions of my body were evidence enough that reality, for me, had shattered.

He grabbed hold of me, his right hand locked in a vice-like grip around my right shoulder, his left hand squeezing my left forearm. He held me against the chain-link fence that surrounded the lot behind us. He looked me straight in the eyes and explained that it would be all right. Carefully, but forcefully, he helped me take hold of my bike, wrapping his left hand around mine, which was gripping the handlebar. Steering his bike with his right hand, he led us to the Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital. Those few city blocks to the bulletproof sliding glass doors of the hospital felt insurmountably long.

Once inside, the routinized process of patient check-in helped quell some of the fury. I still had trouble breathing, but my skin felt immediately cool and alive. I couldn't wait to have my broken reality sensor realigned and snapped back into place. I wanted to wrap normalcy around me like a soft blanket and fall asleep on a gurney, preferably in the arms of a cooing nurse. Finally, a psychiatrist would be there within the half hour and listen to the jumbled jargon of my mania, parsing some sort of meaning from it. He or she would inject me with a powerful cocktail of tranquilizers and mood stabilizers; it would feel like liquid meaning, its coolness seeping into the heat of my rage, absorbing it entirely. This is what I envisioned while filling out paperwork and waiting to be called. This is not, however, what happened.

One Small Thing, Day 2

2011-08-11T10:13:00.001-07:00

a for abandonment / sidewalk soup / tinny letter / fresh out of a / where did I put tht?

One Small Thing, Day 1

2011-08-04T16:40:00.001-07:00

slick piebald / mottled gastropod / shelless mollusk / of the order of ramshackle speckling / of the domain of parsed waves / emperor of terse tentacles

Quantum

2011-02-11T20:30:00.000-08:00

Protons collide in a bowel.

I awake to worried

television, thinking: I’ve never

been good.

Chaos in the trillions.

Regularity is out of the question.

I stretch out from

beneath the awning, one sun-

splattered limb at a time.

Photons scurry around

my fingers, then puddle my face,

hot waves cradling

my languorous tongue.

To yaw(n) in a photograph

is to be an effigy of the

action of the universe.

Auspice

2010-06-19T21:10:00.000-07:00

new movement wedged
outside fiberglass—infallibly
aerodynamic, oh

unit of suspension in the curvature—relative
fiction—

i have word: lamentation

i run a check on the system:
Cygnus, swan,
long-necked silhouette
tucked braindeep in each unit—
the original imprint

i report:
a swan wing flaps fire-white in a dive
toward a quiet water of others

they form the points to a polygon on the ground,
in air, a sweeping V

a swansong is artless

a herd is movement pulsed
with blood-pumped musculature of year million

tuck it in packets of recombinant design

i fall within the hull
of the tasseract, control,
my two fists—not birds—tucked in the metal box—not aviary—

word: brusque

the system gauge tips
cocksurely low, do you copy,
functionally aware of distance toward impending impact
with swanned lake, temperature 6 degrees Celsius,
5,

trajectory terminus, life cycle release—conclusion,
encode the mission message,

what do they call the nearest town, 3, system fail,

i think this moment is to be
special, 2,

order: store it in lamentation

they have a relative fiction for the tessellation
called universe

i remember now, polymer, 1,

the message will be lost in auspice

Becoming

2010-06-02T11:12:00.000-07:00

I

windwhipped eucalyptus,

wingquick patter—

patterned sounds of becoming
like copious blood, forestdeep—

eardeep, an interminable beat

a timely cleavage of cocoon, here—
hatchling-fractured eggs, precisely
there

II

in a distant maw of heat,
blackbacked men chortle out a collective
deathcall

hungerled, targetlocked—

the shadowmimickers
cannot camouflage
fast enough.

Bloodhurried arms can backbeat fractures
of a second
prior to a timed kill

III

heftheaved chaos:

emergence of the hungerglitch

IV

Dozer, mossedover and enrooted in a still
arboretum of steel,

reanimates, uproots, cleaves flowerbeds like coiffed flowerheads—

pulseless, it eats with a new kind of claw and croup

V

segments of road,

hewn highway insects—

rejoin in slow, predetermined pulltogethers

VI

Death Professor clicks a map of tributaries onto penumbral lids—

neuronal pathways
trigger in response to Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor

VII

mitochondrial coils
unbraid, reduplicate, fuse hungrily
)( )()( )(

…………………………………………………...

in the undead spool of an agared Petri dish:

this, our becoming

Según Lorca

2009-10-17T08:56:00.001-07:00

What's your favorite form of transportation?
Night

How do you feel?
Ballad of One Doomed to Die

Describe where you currently live:
Your Childhood in Mention

If you could go anywhere, where would you go?
The Laid Out Body

What is life to you?
Rider's Song

What's the weather like?
The Interrupted Concert

What's your greatest fear?
Desire of a Statue

What is the best advice you have to give?
He Died at Dawn

If you could change your name, you would change it to:
The Faithless Wife

What's your favorite time of day?
Ode to Walt Whitman

Are you male or female?
The Old Lizard

Describe yourself:
Silly Song

Describe your relationships:
Narcissus

Foxy Ladies

2009-06-08T14:37:00.000-07:00

In this photo, taken at the beginning of November, we see two females – though they are of different species – warmly socializing in the park with their newborns: a Vulpes vulpes-malasañas and a Gray Iberian wolf, or Canis lupus-ibericus. They have come to take advantage of the autumn sunlight before winter's speedy advance. More prone to changing seasons than the males, they have already put on thicker coats to prepare for the coming cold.

Mating Season

2009-06-08T14:32:00.000-07:00

The Malasañan fox is a creature primed for reproduction. In the last weeks of October, his reddish fur becomes beige and then tans, mimicking the forest trees. The female of this rare species is more attracted to lighter colors, and so she is more willing to approach the male in the fall and winter months. In December, his coat will take on a nacreous sheen to catch shafts of winter light and thus the attention of even more mates. In this photo, the sheen appears in its first stages.

Vulpes vulpes-malasañas

2009-06-08T14:30:00.000-07:00

The Malasañan fox, or the Vulpes vulpes-malasañas, tends to be a solitary creature. Here we get a glimpse into the private world of this terrestrial hunter as he prowls through a nature reserve by himself, no doubt in search of food.

Just One God Damn Word

2009-06-08T14:23:00.000-07:00

Your steel-eyes reach into the morning,
coronae of blue advancing into that familiar
Charcoal Portrait of Night.

You brocade the distance with an
awareness
of its unfamiliarity:
who drew; what advances?

The answer would astound
every daily declension,
but still you wait all day
for one legible
word
to jolt through the sky.

Road matron in Maranchón

2009-06-08T14:12:00.000-07:00

Still life-fire, little dark prick.

Spurt of health in the lung
of earth.

White-shoed tramp of the north.

Black buoy of ardor in water.

Stopped song.

Middle mark

nowhere, unknown, in winter.

Photography & Poetry: Collaborations with Pablo García Albacete and Stephanie Gonot (findable/viewable at Flickr.com)

2009-05-12T02:53:00.000-07:00

lorcan moon mouth
belly of pale fire
whittled satellite
flung ping-pong
sleeper’s fried egg
harvest disco ball
buzz brainström

devil grip slingshot

i of the storm
hotbox

heart furnace opening

wringing light
from fire

hurdle of sky
shockwave

trompe l’oeil of entropy

sunlit patera

teased up up

fly away girl

delta photon song
tesla gel harbinger
nuclear warming
cryogene bubble
lassoed cloud
whipped pie of giant unrest
dragged glass eye
cowbell of god
nyx work in dead field

trudge through smothered sky

Dig on these tunes:

2009-05-12T01:54:00.000-07:00

http://www.myspace.com/bitchinroommatesmusic

Here you can find several incalculably hopeful songs performed by Nicholas Pasqua and Björgvin Benediktsson of Bitchin' Roommates. I wrote the lyrics to one of the songs (mostly); it's humbly or quite simply called "The Sun."

In a small clearing

2009-05-12T01:00:00.005-07:00

At night, a hole in the ground
becomes the most neighborly gesture:
in a small clearing
Fabian hides a large wooden box.

The next day, he says to the Bratislava girls:
“I’m an old German farmer friend,
heh.”
He pours sugar into a gunny sack
as they watch his shifty eyes.

“Birgit is dead – my dear Magyar wife.”

Snuff: he scrapes honey filth off a burnt jar lip.
Daguerreotype: black hair in a silver still
makes him sensible again just before
the horse bolts out into the night.

And with the Pleiades light
the ants resurrect their collapsed sepia hills:
soft sounds against a wedge
of blood-covered pine;

don’t come to the edge of the wood today.

On pleading with the light to take a suffering life

2009-05-12T01:00:00.003-07:00

Enter this room, moth-colored dawn;
the curtains are opened to let your slowlight
in.

No—
be night’s death train.
Be rapid.
Be a bat and fling against each speechless wall,
baffling, screeching, and then
shut up.

Over there, see, the body
on the breathing bed machine:
take it.

I’ve stuck the last ache-pick into the ice
now crash the mountain down to the rush-water.

Fork her shriveled Jew body
onto the forget-heap.

Gut the unloved woman.

Now leave
now shut the lid down tight
over us.
Make it stick.

The last brush with your fire-whipped hair

2009-05-12T01:00:00.001-07:00

I splay over your tempurpedic,
years after the clown gown
forced my mushy head against your heart.

Ino, you fretful Munchian buzzard
with cudgel tongue,
at least let me command your flexible bed
if you won’t allow me to fly
from the red horizon
in your room.

But I’m demanding my retreat as Helle,
daughter to your gambling hand
and deadmouth drying from the inside out:
let me leave.
Let me feel up the length of your legs
and your breasts one last time, let
me squelch my fetal memory.

I’ll count down from three—the unlucky
declension of your life after the draw forty-nine
years ago:
three, down from Torrance where you plucked
a dangling fleshpiece from your cunt;
two, down from France where you shoved
your love into the boulevards of Monte Carlo;
one, out of the entrance to this room

I step and walk away.

Ishtar’s pallet knife covered in Phthalo Blue

2009-05-12T00:59:00.001-07:00

I feared your atropine tongue might someday
come stinging me through.
But now, dread woman in a diaper,
I see your dried mouth:
don’t waddle into this scent
of your daughter’s pleasure
like a wounded she-wolf,
thirsting for the Nyx touch.
Don’t assume that animal entitlement
or blindly fang the air around our heels.

You cannot drag us from our bed:
the blue pours from my eyes
like a liquid fresco,
and he like an erect cypress
collects every drop in his hair.

Then we rub the colors everywhere,
blue-white under the wet-birth moon.

A glimpse at the future: an uncomfortable sequence

2009-05-12T00:58:00.000-07:00

*One: in spring the danger of erosion increases; she views a dark glass sea.

Your demivolt limbs
solidified
as soon as climbing the stairs was mentioned.

A strange man is still waiting at the door.

For once you cry out loud,
as frantic as Caravaggio’s Thomas:
is it possible to doubt
with a finger now jammed into the hole?

Below your window
overlooking the Pacific,
the hush-slosh kelp
floats above the dark red, demersal fish~~ ~ ~~
The lepidopteran cocoon
stirs on the fig tree.
The cardiac apparatus
keeps fluid swimming through the (f) b (l) o (u) d (i) y (d)
somewhere,
but then the sterol.

A hovercraft lingers far overhead—
non placet, still,
opposed to any movement
below.

Over the course of several decades,
Diossina descends
to hum over the whirlpool
like a slowed draconic cloud:
the drupes cannot be eaten anymore.

The shoreline machines exhale with catacomb precision,

t___h_e_______s___t__a____r_s
release their droning electrode couplings..

**Two: it would be Autumn now in Hanoi; nations come to conclusion.

A lynx-eyed girl halts in the field,
then darts off into the forest.
Her shadow hesitates an instant.

A lag screw of bursting light
pegs a color in the air and
there’s a scrannel shrill
right before the boom.

The clouds
are swiveling now,
pulling apart,
spinning still;
the silage pouring out of the farms,
the silencer torn from the dog’s mouth,

& then

the first droplets signatory,
Siloam spilling over

&

the silt flinging upward
to pulp the rain,

silicate in the air

&

siderosis plaguing the vacant strip mall
lots,

too much to

pastiche to scrap heap

scramjet

t o o m u c h t o

***Three: these were, are. These are errors, terrors he said.

Your eye flickers at the light flooding in around the edges. Years ago, the doctor thinks as he peels back the lids, registration must have been a lot easier. From across a medicinal room, they ask you to identify points on a stitched Pangaea: “Talcahuano.” “Montreal.” “Stuttgart.” As your eye comes rising out of the water in your head like an extended periscope, it connects to a motorbike ride.
Then there’s a dreamer’s winter. A bit farther down, there’s a crisp beer that tastes like honey.

Words like “optoelectronics” slip around and sink under.

They laugh and tell you that making love to a woman is just like the hydraulic press—the liquid builds up and is forced through the aperture.

But when the Wortschatz man behind your head jolts your occipital lobe with “hyacinthus,” the Arctic water in your brain gathers, skirt-like, rippling away to reveal a dazzling blue flower. They rub big hands over their faces, then peer with more intent down the shaft of your pupil. You mouth something inaudible, but they keep staring: the larkspur unfolds from the darkened sea like an azure gel.

Todesinstinkt, or Dead as a Doornail

2009-05-11T14:20:00.001-07:00

Ashes too absolute to manage alone:
I need cling to your hair.
Not hapless hair or dissolution___hopeful
^sharp our bodies make^ against the web of hours.
I outline the magnanimity.
The dog’s head in the corner you
pummeled with a Coburg stone,
its snarl held on at awakening angles.
Rose-colored steam off the hound
fleshes the dusk.

The bark whiskers our breakdown. I have teeth for arms and gnaw the sky.

I remember mother’s conjunctiva – her rough German filth.
What loveglares she relegated to absent
Hunde, not the arms we offered her
staunch Deutsch defense. We never
could schizoid like she.
Walpurgis light from memory
starts to snowboard down the mountain.
I grip your hair.
We ^make our bodies sharp^ against the web of death.

Nyx Pax

2009-05-07T08:46:00.000-07:00

This poem began as a translation of Blanca Varela's Escena Final, then it became a bold "response" to the poem. Blanca passed away in March of this year, so even though I shook things up here I still hope this works as a respectful tribute.

My Feminine Side

I.
I stalk you through
thick folds of night

and drag
my gutted young
across the snow,

marking spots
with their purple
spillage.

Dogs retreat
when they sniff me out,

as should you.

II.
In the daytime,
I am a thorn of blood
jammed in the eye
of your unfolding rose.

Favors

2009-05-06T09:46:00.000-07:00

D.C. Madam:
I was mother-extinguisher,
I put out the barking mad ones
who fucked like fish
or talked of fishing metaphorically.

I kept my girls clean and ran a quiet,
motherly service. The rules were simple:
pursed cherry red lips, limbs and breasts
tight and neat, like arms akimbo.

I did just as you asked
but it wasn't enough for the clamoring
man.

Devil:
1. Madam, a carved breast is the best
cure, sometimes.

2. Who can blame the clanking appetite
of chirping men?

3. At the moratorium for
Blanche's dead daughter,
they will remove their caps like gentle-
men.

4. We thank you for having done us these huge
favors.

Single White Female

2009-05-02T07:03:00.000-07:00

Like clockwork I drive to the outskirts
of the river of doom. There is a witch
and a bewitched broom,
nothing more.

Of course sadness means nothing;
wreckage must be just beautiful.

Of course life is an attempt
at cleanup, but beauty can be
only obfuscate or untamed.

I fly to a shed of laughter
and weeping
underwater, near where I first
dropped from god
who then went dormant for two years
multiplied by a thousand.

(I landed on my funny bone
then.)

And like clockwork
I will swim again,
I will come back to this dull dowsing
and grab at nothing for a while.

I'll be back in a lifetime, nothing more.

The American Hercules, Inter Alia

2009-05-02T06:53:00.001-07:00

They say he once carved
the Grand Canyon from the water,
grunting lightly under our central star,
with one of those infomercial knives.

And it's rumored that he slam-dunked
Alaska from our country line, into the blue,
his heart all Chinook pink and true,
pumping full of cherry-flavored vitamin.

And now our Alaris Medley machines
lend him a Norco-Zophran dream,
his nostrils subtly twitching
to the patriotic tune in his head.

How well we were loved by this hero,
and how nice his health benefits surely are
as he dreams of Alcestis in color,
in a bikini,

and of eating burgers on a vacation Lanai
with the Hydra’s last head
cleaved off:
a job so savored in our mouths.

Bearded & Mustached

2009-04-30T10:57:00.000-07:00

beardface isn't just
evidence of testes,

it isn't
ooga or fist
or iconoclastic;

beardface is a
scratch pole

for the catwomen,
where they can cooly
paw fuck.

Husbandry

2009-04-13T10:48:00.000-07:00

Small muscle of your back to me
I whimper like a dog in heat.

You must let me mount you you
simper live heat from that thigh.

Don't tell me you have secret lives.
I won't suffer some doggy diphtheria

or get chew rags all soggy
over your
bright pair.

Little boy
with wooden sticks, if you strike

or try to run remember that
fangs on a necklace trained me.

Electric Shock Timber Glyphs

2008-09-12T11:58:00.000-07:00

The following started as a kind of "free" homolinguistic translation of Adam Kirsch's "Now that no one looking" (please, Adam folks, forgive any copyright infringement! Nothing but respect is meant by this!) Basically, I responded to each line in Kirsch's poem. However, after several drafts it became a complete monster the likes of which I'll never understand:

City piss sky eye still
tie-dye Daguerre night

Cat prowl now car
Babylonia belly undone

Gazer extra large
foraged stars

Read space: electric
shock timber glyphs

God sphere
science sombrero

Fattest tuxedo
glare-blue jelly eyes

Frozen Greenland fish poke
bright coverall children

Sarah Palin's GOP convention speech, interpolated with "Henry V"

2008-09-10T07:29:00.000-07:00

The idea here comes from a former creative writing professor of mine, Cal Bedient (UCLA). I randomly selected words from Palin's GOP convention speech and smashed them all together. Then I selected, as randomly as possible, phrases from Shakespeare's Henry V and shuffled them into Palin baby's words of wisdom. I started out with tercets but ended up with quartets, quintets and sextets. Here y'are:

No ; for my manly heart doth yearn privelege of harder, graver
McCain pundits enlisted a babble of green fields, special love i
have a message: as clear as is the summer’s sun,
commercial fisherman Yup’ik with a waxen epitaph.

elementary Sally Heath Usurp’d from you and your progenitors
German habber-dasher, unlikely PTA governor We are no tyrant,
“community organizer,” This the Dauphin speaks. Washington elite,
the mute wonder lurketh in men’s ears. Right reason

pray you to proceed integrity power brokers of Alaska, we shook
And whipp’d the offending Adam out of him. Control
surplus a billion dollars in vetoes. The Gordian knot of it he will unloose,
basic fairness Descend unto the daughter. Private-sector Gulf of Mexico on

imported heating oil Abqaiq; the mute wonder lurketh
in men’s ears. Facility in Saudi deliveries
Edward the Black Prince, Slope of Alaska got lots
excuse administration, ‘twixt Elbe and Sala, geothermal ingenuity his

dramatic speeches in the book of Numbers is it writ:
our opponent cloud Styrofoam, As did the former lions of your blood
to accomplish to reduce arm to invade the French,
against forfeit delay more too plan payroll with hot assays,

so work the honey-bees, by hundreds of billions of dollars built
like millions With sunken wrack and sumless treasuries face
landmark speechmaking Comes sneaking and so sucks
her princely eggs, lobbyists prospect of 2000 herd

do-nothing gentlemen fellow not though high and low and lower,
just a community Like music.
“Fighting for you” The poor mechanic porters squarely nightmare
suffered a six-by-four compassion Lieutenant Commander Fly to one mark ;

interrogations my fellow This the Dauphin speaks.
Americans inspire inspired Tennis-balls, my liege.
hope the theme may God bless America When I do rouse me in my throne