apologies in advance.

444

a good many people remark on my way with words. I should admit right now that I don’t know how I do it; I come to the page ravenous, unbearably malleable, and I unleash. my (admittedly, unhelpful) advice for writers is that 'you are or aren’t one.’ 

for me, that’s invocation, not an irrevocable predisposition. 

like, I don’t know, damn. write! what, the page might bite? you have shit to say, say it. you’ve got stories? wind away. you like it in the morning, when no is looking, and the edges are frayed, or late and flowing like all you imbibe; no one is listening on the page except you.. maybe that has been the fear all along. 

someday, after we’re sick off the toffee-sweet glorification of our delay, of our withholding, of our rose-tinted, fear-grown poetics tinted by aged nostalgia and sacrificial rhetoric and plain old doubt, may we then say with full-throated clarity, YES OF COURSE IT IS OK IF ALL THESE POEMS ARE FOR ME ONLY!  JUST, I ALSO WANT MORE. 

this place (The Internet™) and its ardent fans seem hellbent on demanding we live, interminably, healing. that because we can hold consciousness around cyclical processes or because we anticipate another inevitable impetus to heal (that is, because we predict a coming wound), we must succumb to the assertion that healing is interminable, constant.. 

I’m not a healer. like, that’s not my magic. indeed, I came to a healing practice because it was forced upon me. it befell me. it overcame me. I was saddled with it. like language, really: medicinal, curative, necessary, but grown outside of me. that is how healing feels. and writing. art-ing. loving. teaching. all inevitable and essential and exhausting and primal to the molten core of my soul. 

I don’t know.

it comes through.

probably semantics matter. sometimes I tell people that I feel introverted on the inside and, after their laughter subsides, we talk a bit about perception and duality and ego. like: I’m not a poet; I’m very simply and deliberately a woman using gestures or proximity, sometimes, but mostly breath and phrasing, or space, maybe, and tonality, as strategies, not to mention topics.. which means sometimes my practice is about denying the impulse to word it. or, restricting that. choosing silence. articulating silence. translating illegibility. invoking distance. refusing generation. wifing dormancy. 

the soil does this well.

coral too. 

outer space, probably.

anyway, I wrote to say I owe you an apology.

unfortunately, in my seasonal hibernation and general distance, in my mossy quiet, in my mushroom softness, in my coral silence, I compiled my pontifications, theories, digressions, obsessions, and uncanny proficiency to make anything e v e r y t h i n g, and wrote a twelve-week syllabus. 

& I sincerely regret it. 

it was an accident. 

it started mostly as notes. 

I thought it was processing my own learning. synthesis. summary. release. I’ve been facilitating an incubator for some time and I figured it was closing preparations for our container. 

no. 

out-of-body bullet points. then, I began pacing it out. I could see a shape forming, containers to hold and sharpen focus; an exorcism of ideas. regrettably, I now have the curriculum for a class.

I’m sorry.

I didn’t mean to. 

I don’t even want to, but I’m not in the practice of ignoring what’s here now even when the horror is of my own making. so, yeah: I don’t have the time, I always do the most when a little would suffice, and I definitely have, like, graduate work looming. I’m navigating seismic shifts in professional realms and a man just fucking lingers around the doorways of my consciousness. plus, I absolutely cannot with the threat of more virtual community. I just wanna see maybe six people ever and often. 

so we’re all gambling on what’s to come, but Imma call it mother/tongue.