dark cartoon apostrophes, bad marriage mantra, etc.

I am busy with almost no time to write anything, that drives me crazy, too busy looking for comma splices in student papers

Found on new sweetheart’s bookshelf an extremely obscure CD by a close friend of the someday-soon-ex-husband.  The title?  “Bad Marriage Mantra”

He, the new one, so beautiful with eyes like dark apostrophes. Dark cartoon apostrophes.  A pleasant ache about his beauty, just sitting next to him.

So beautiful, but so private.  I’m not allowed to write about him, although perhaps I can write about not being allowed to write about him?  This is a conundrum for me. When I love, silly me, I want to sound trumpets.

In general, I enjoy speaking up, making noise. What’s left uncommunicated hurts. Because we have…language.  Privacy troubles me.

Every day I am having internal conversations with a cruel triumvirate of absentees.  It isn’t as if I imagine any “outcome.”

They haunt me, those three. Sometimes there are more. Others. But mainly those three.

So hard to be “buddhistic.”

What is “friendship.”

What is "marriage."

The conversation has nowhere to go but swirling, or rather banging, inside me.  It’s not so much conversation as something furious. I am always having this too much internal activity, that’s how I wrote the last book.

When I don’t have writing time the internal activity gets too noisy and exhausts me, I’m sure many of you can relate.

A reaction formation like that of a dog who has beaten by a man in a green shirt and reacts with fear, anger, etc., to men in green shirts thenceforth.

Except that instead of men in green shirts it is Asian women.  How unfair to me!  Since they are also my friends, my history, my livelihood, etc.  (Even my therapist is an Asian woman! This is a good thing because it will perhaps help the reaction formation.) His new “lifestyle accessory.”  I count several pictures there in his new public self: Asian women. “I’m not into that stuff,” he often said.

Sitting at the bar at a sex show in Patpong, Bangkok, with a boyfriend, then later, with another boyfriend.  A woman comes up to me and compares the color of her arm to mine. I experienced this scenario precisely twice.

I had to walk out of “House of Bamboo” when it got to the line, “All the guys have kimona girls [SIC].” 

 creepy

Anyway I need to work through this reaction formation since it is my desire to move through the world lovingly, no matter how badly I have been treated.

Back to "privacy." Want to read my journal? Here is a journal entry from 7/27 of last year.  I just came upon it in a notebook:

Think of it as opening a little door inside the head.  Then there is this cadenced world.  Making the collages, I started hallucinating collages.  The book is making me a little sick, or that might be the moon, or a combination of the book and the moon.  I rarely go back through my books and read them – do you? [who was I addressing? who am I ever addressing?] Whole pieces, sections, I’d totally forgotten – in the older books. I don’t know if this forgetting is good like postpartum chemicals or bad like not being sufficiently invested in my own productions.

and then this one I found also… really kind of freaked me out, since it was two days before I found out about the betrayal.  I was staying up north in a motel in Barryville New York with other poet friends, and G. had chosen to stay home, for reasons that soon became obvious:

In dreams  – things materialized next to me ­ – a snuffling St. Bernard – Gary ­– a stranger – so real – also so real:  the terror on the bus ­ – thinking I had got on the wrong one­ –  along a dark highway ­ – afraid even to ask the driver for fear it might be true.

I’m going to go dance. Along a dark highway. For fear it might be true.