Radical Muffin

i keep a Skybright Studio canvas pad propped up on the table against the world map. It has a hot pink cover with a distant lighthouse under a full moon seen through sparse trees rendered in white lines and smudges; it is 16 x 20 inches. I write impulsive poems on it in sharpie marker. They often come from bits of conversation. It started in the fall sometime, and it is now full. Below is part of the resulting poem, annotated with links. Visually, it is beautiful on the pad, haiku format one to each sheet, but a ribbon like that would make the blog space too long so the lines are longer here:

she would ask, did you have one big love? What does love mean to you now?

she was radicalized around ideas of nation states & nationalism in high school English Lit class where she learned

America is a constructed country

American, an invented identity

with myths & traditions made in patchwork & whole cloth

the latest experiment

i get paid what i got paid in dc but now i live in new york.

i’m choking on it.

he was angry, when she asked if he had slept with a prostitute

after he said he had lived next door to a brothel.

residual feelings, she called them; like semi-sticky dust leftovers of love

“writing is like marriage—one should not commit one’s self until one is amazed at one’s luck”

even our complex, artful, deranged & joyful sexuality seems hopeless in the maw of this poverty, war & isolation
a fundamental human challenge
you are here; you are an agent of change; you are the butterfly effect

a flock of greckles in your face; a hawk circling far away

a pink plastic flamingo, an origami piece crane, and a hummingbird—

all in the same sky

i’ve only slept with 9 people, she said.

But how do i count the 6 dyke orgy in high school, or

that play-party where 20 people fucked the prince

while me & another femme pet him—how do i count that? She took the prince home the next night.

i count that

well, dunk me in buttermilk & call me a biscuit—

you’ve got grits, kid.

i like being part of a grand history. like she said: i cross the police line &

join the past 2 decades of AIDS activists

“writing saved me from the sin & inconvenience of violence”