Qwel - 'The Highest Commitment (Live At UGHH.com - 3/28/07)'

This is lovely.

Burning Away

Burning Away

You can imagine most things
in my household as alien
to this country,
I do too.

Which possibly means:
my heritage is all bones.

Language, folklore,
the fermented fish developing
in a plastic womb, holocaust tales,

never properly fed—it rots slowly.

there is no substance anymore…

I imagine watching culture die
must be like watching your mother’s
house burn down,

the needless furniture,
her kitchen, your heirlooms,
all of it gone.

Can you imagine what it’s
like for a mother to stand guard
as her life amounts to just
furnace and frames?

How long it must have seem
for her before it collapsed.

It is so unbearable that you
begin to pray she was still
in there!

Everyday is like this,
and it is just awful.

Second Time

I mistook hair remover for gel remover again. Whack.

1AM, Stumbling, Drunk

Z ruined a perfectly bad party. Afterwards I walked with Z many, many miles back to his house. Throughout the ordeal Z kept making incoherent threats at me. I braved on.

Now I'm tired and reveling about how much of a genius Jack Gilbert is. His poem Odyssey starts of with the line, "this means trouble." Maybe I paraphrased it wrong.

Doesn't matter.

What the mind remembers best is a complete playset.

How we spent our time

R & I were having another heated conversation on privilege. R is really privilege. His father gave him 20G to play (learn how to invest) in the stock market. And there's more dough where that came from. This, afterall, is practice. I am, also, (to a lesser extent) quite privilege.

Anyhow we argued about what privilege was. Besides crooning to 80s and 90s tunes we debated. Privilege for me was the opportunity to realisticly succeed, i.e money, schooling, afterschool programs, networking, etc. To him it was success in the end. The hell?

Also it so happens that privilege comes at a cost. You have the possibility of becoming an asshole that nobody likes, take things for granted, have fake friends, think you will do better than you would eventually do. He is none of that. Except occasional asshole. It appears that he is holding the short end of the stick in life.

He does not understand how some people cannot get what they want. They just need to try harder. Which is to say privilege is up to the individual disregarding any flawed institutions which may factor in the decisions they will make in their lifetime. He loves to believe in merits.

Which is not to say his success now is due largely to his father. He has worked hard, however, he was able to work this hard because of his father's money. What he decides to do in the end is his accomplishment or failure. Others less fortunate than R will not have the same opportunity to choose between falling or flying in the end.

Later R catches himself using the venacular of "if" and "when". As in, "if person1 gets in they will do better" as oppose to "when when person2 gets in they might not want it as much".

Why am I arguing with R? It's because he's my best friend and we have nothing to do on our 30minute ride home from dinner and a bar with V. She just came back from Japan to visit.

In the car we laughed about him being in a fairytale with the music off. Other than that it was yelling. Many years later and we are still unrefined.

Recklessness

Your love was that of sedans
caught under trees, and
my love for you was a city
drought. All the poems about
us suffocated me like this.

Validating this relationship
with word was the labor
of sprites drowning a forest fire
with only wet blankets.
It never amounted to anything
and they've all perished.

And during these great fires: deer,
foxes, owls, mice and wolves,
forsake the burning oaks & sprites.

I wanted to use them
for a break up letter
if only they had survive.

Waking up

Today I woke up thinking that all language is humility. Why? I don't really understand it myself.
I might have dreampt someting.

Words don't really express what we mean but isn't that the beauty of being human?

Imperfect, raw, trying and failing? Wait. I remember now.

My dream:

She tells me how many people have left her life before I said my goodbyes. The multitude of it all. Now she droops her head to the left, "see, they have left only their baggage at my door."

And I place my hand on the small of her back. Telling her, "My dear sunflower--you are not on earth to note the wind or rain. But to push through soil."


When did I start dreaming of wack sayings?


Anyhow if I was her I would have unearthed their luggage to see what they hated most about me. Or maybe I'm just nosey.

Lineage for Mika

How deep can our rooms grow?
A woman was found in Czechoslovakia
Entombed with arrowheads and fur
And jars, but what of it?
She died over three thousand years ago.
The archeologists have examined her life
From the bones, assembled what’s left of hers,
Polished her stones, published the findings,
Renamed her Sally, and released it to the public.

Now look at her nose bridge, the sunken eyes,
Crooked teeth, feint simplicity.
Is this not your Grandmother’s wishful thinking?

You go through whatever photos you have of her
And piece Her life from the colors you can imagine
The black and white to be. The lithe green
Rice fields laboring in the wind, a woman knee deep
In brown water caught plucking or sinking crop,
Her hair red from constant sunlight,
what her voice could
Have sounded like, something sharp as a polished
Machete, as if her scolds had to submit untamed wild
To summon back your father as he wooed
A lover he’ll never speak of again with blue flowers.

This is what you imagine and pass of as
History or poetry.

Understand the dead do not visit us.
It is we who find them.
We search for them. We recognize a part of our
Many difficult selves in them. Overturn them.
Embarrass them. Display them. Speak them.
It is what it is.

So then why can’t our rooms
Dwell as deep as lineage, four stories underground,
Through bedrock?

Let us dig as deep as fireflies searching for
A way out in the sealed jars of their cusped hands
Because the human spirit
Is selfish and afraid of being between two giants.

Being broke

D and I, broke, had a lunch date planned. But we were both so terribly broke. It was like high school all over & I was $5 too short to cover him. A shame. Instead I ended up going with Matt. We went to Pho Boston which I have sworn off 3-4 times. I needed something nostalgic. And as always food was good. This time there wasn't hair, plastic, workers not washing their hands(didn't see), toenail in tea cup, or roaches. Yay.

Matt signed up at my gym and now I have gym a buddy. It didn't work out with Howard. Which was totally my fault for never showing up.

Many people are coming back into or emerging in my life. It's wonderful. I am waking up to a beautiful August.

I have several postcards done but still haven't sent them out. The hell. Must do. Must do. Must do! Aish.