catching up

Yeah, I know. She disappears for weeks and gets some fucked up infection and is out of work and huffing too much on the green and cigs and then she comes back and posts all these crazy ass emails on the blog.

She being me, and me being someone for whom sickness is like a stew I can't avoid eating, no matter what-- take a draining, puss-laden ear and add childhood neuroses, a smattering of really bad experiences with incompetent medical professionals and a heaping teaspoon of no one-ever-believed-that-I-was-sick-until-I-couldn't-stand-up any more...and you've got my life. Sorta.

I couldn't write for a whole week. I sat in my garden and watched ants crawl up a leaf and back down again. I took pictures of my hands, obsessively picked my fingernails, watched gay-friendly LOGO channel programming that I'd downloaded onto my computer. Once I could actually read for an hour or so at a time, I devoured Annick Smith's In This We are Native, read the whole of Best American Poetry 2006 (again) in one sitting, reworked some of my own poems. I was in another dimension entirely for long stretches at a time. I only cried once, when I really really wanted to keep working on revising a piece called "New Kitchen" (I hate the title; it's a working title and nothing else has availed itself to me yet) because it was starting to move in the right way but I had to stop. I was getting a migraine from the slight, barely imperceptible moves of my head (that usually I don't even notice) and I needed to lie down.

So you see, now that I can actually sit down and compose without blowing chunks I am making up for lost time. I am thankful to be feeling better. No, I am amazed and humbled and curious as to why I was spared.

You ask
what is my bonus gift
and I say

being able to reach
for the olive oil

feeding the dog

the thought of getting back on a bike
maybe soon

too many acts of possibility to list.

I ask
what does
this hell of dizzy
have to do with desire?

No amount of wishing could make it so.
I pushed through in the beginning
and ended up spinning like a top for days.

Never received an answer.
Then you called.

In recent pictures I am always
wearing the pants you sent me
the blue linen ones. If I was out

of bed I was wearing those pants.
I was stuffing the pockets with tissue
and cough drops and stems.

Your sample outgoing message?
Your title?

Perfect. Fuck all y'all.