Plathological

i need to do more photos soon (notice the placement of the mask's horns . .totally unintentional!)

baby, baby, i love you

Having booklets of stamps and stacks of privacy-lined envelopes around the house is a good idea – if your condom breaks after some particularly vigorous intercourse and the white South African doctor you see the next morning about an emergency contraceptive treats you like someone who’s there to colonize for old time’s sake, you can politely say excuse me and leave the clinic in tears and, after swallowing an obscene level of hormones in the café bathroom across the street, can type, seal and send a letter of complaint to the medical Registrar in Vancouver right away. Within a couple hours, you will feel redeemed. And proud that the letter wasn’t the least bit whiny, melodramatic, or overwrought. You have a witness, you use the word misconduct – you don’t mention the doctor’s heritage, though keep the sneer like a plugged yard hose bulging with water in the back of your mind. You make your voice heard in the system for the first time since you started to feel victimized by its faults. You hate babies and small life - the doctor could or could not sense this, your face unloaded blanks the entire meeting.

An afternoon passes, another night, and you wake, perhaps still drunkenly after the 2-6 of vodka, your boyfriend beside you and for a moment think you were sleeping next to a butcher the whole night – his white collard shirt’s covered in dried blood. The source of the carnage is his now bandaged finger and all he remembers is the initial sensation of pain after you'd lightly collapsed, unwakeable through shaking, into bed, then the run to the bathroom to clean the wound. The initial cut has fallen outside memory’s parameters. Neither of you spends too much time thinking about the possible cause of the slice. Both too weak to stand, you fall back asleep, and you, at the very least, still waiting for the first signs of any of the grave hormonal side-effects you were warned about in the accordion folds of the baby-blue pamphlet that accompanied the two nearly impossible to unseal pills – nothing comes, save for a brief, heavy feeling in the abdomen that normally accompanies a period. Each time it dissipates as soon as you say the thing – the sensation – aloud. The numb impression of a wet, curling animal, and it’s gone as fast as it's named. Yet another day passes and the radio says Heresy - the word comes from the Greek meaning, 'To Choose'. You cannot legislate morals in a material world. All sacraments replaced with the subtle tenets of matter, a limited ceremony.

panic @ the disco

Thank you, life, for this pre-emptive Friday the Thirteenth strike. One narrowly avoided disaster after another. Either all that�s out of the way a few days ahead of time, or I am dutifully prepared for what may well come in fuller force, come the end of the week: PREORDAINED, DESTINY, MAY AS WELL BELIEVE. My alarm, set for seven AM? Did not go off. Left me to wake, through natural causes, less than an hour before my class, fifteen minutes before I had to catch my bus. My printer, dashing off my two page poem, during those fifteen minutes of panicked dressing and page piling, before I literally sprinted as at the Olympics to class? My printer decided the second page of my poem wasn�t pertinent enough to print. Did I notice I only had one copy of my second page before I got to workshop? Yeah, right - I barely had time to see if I was wearing underwear or not. For some reason, the printer�s joke on me was to only print one copy of the second page, which I photocopied thirteen more times during the fifteen minute break in the middle of my three hour class. Photocopied using the fine arts copy machine, after asking the secretary to unlock the door to the copy room. Workshop is a certain breed of time and place: you have to have everything in front of you at all times � being even five minutes late (which, thankfully I wasn�t because of my mad downtown sprinting) is a grave transgression. Not having the two pages of your poem stapled is another BIG NO NO. FORGETTING THE SECOND PAGE OF YOUR POEM AT HOME IS, IN ALL RESPECTS, THE MARK OF A KAMIKAZEE, SUICIDAL LAYABOUT. Thank God my printer was kind enough to grace me with that one copy of the second page. Thank god for the photocopier in the department building. Thank god the bus didn�t leave two minutes early, as it sometimes does. The day can only get better, and much more well written than the rush of this useless, frantic entry. Fantastic. I�m getting myself a NEW ALARM. Today.

I don�t know why, exactly, but THIS has somehow been keeping me sane(ish) throughout this day.

Oh. And THIS, as well -

happy North Korea nuclear bomb, everyone. happy poison carrot juice. happy . . . I'm not asking what's next.

thread(ed)

The poem’s internal logic, or spine – as I myself put it last week – is so totally what I need to grasp and am actively grasping. So totally.

A long conversation on the bus about progressively internalizing the structure and approach of the epic, then coming to terms with that process through mortality, in concept and displaced recognition – what was said on the bus may ostensibly be wintered down to that, though it took twenty minutes of exchange. Replacing deconstruction with reconstruction - it pleased me, my lack of modern dying.

The phrase remaining: not quite overworked – we don’t use that term here, don’t say it. We don’t like it so much. Though today, I am tired. Not due to work so much as a focus on it, placing a grid. My contacts have arrived at the eye clinic, things like that. Things like picking up your year's supply of eyes. Kind of has me going. Do I really want to pay for this??

Really???

Right now I want nothing more than a nap and I shall have it. I was sleeping wide awake last night – you know the one. The one where you're in bed and can’t tell which state you’ve fallen into or have been shaken out from. The one where, when you wake at daybreak, it becomes impossible to pin-point the hour within which you actually fell asleep. It may have been three in the morning, but who knows if that's right - so much on the mind.