Baboon, I Get a Kick Out Of You

I am on the patch right now- you know, the one that releases tiny dosages of approval until you no longer crave what it is you truly don't need. The Portuguese call it Saudade: a deep emotional state of nostalgia, one where something so indefinite has to be inconceivable. You have the love affairs and the miseries of life; the way things were and the way things ought to be; the what-ifs and the what-nots; the depleted bodies and the empty bottles drowning in sea, filled with unwritten love letters and released with dopamine. I am an emotional plagiarist. I want to drape my body in the middle of Times Square. I want to lie there in deafening silence as the deranged rush to their destinations and I want to lie there sober with nowhere else to go and no one else to be. I want to lose control. I want to be stubborn and domineering and so fucking persistent. I want to rip that patch off and I want to deprive it of my skin.

Because you might as well face it, we are literally addicted to love. The brain's love-bitten counterparts resemble those that generate the euphoria induced by drugs. Love is Rock 'n' Roll; love is Jeff Buckley clinging to his last good-bye, twirling on a stool of consolation; love is in Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan; love is the narcissism of Kurt Cobain and his ability to simply love people too much, (too much that it made him feel too sad to live).

Love is sitting back and taking in this sensation that feels so good you wonder what you may have done to deserve this. Just like the prairie voles, just like the admirable snorting cocaine and blaming their cravings on the most innocuous occurrences- you know, like the smell or the pattern on a tie, or the diminutive mother spilling baby powder on her infant or the close propinquity of an eight-ball of prime Colombian just to feel shitty because Love is Rock 'n' Roll; love is the last dance; love is the one-way street but the only street in the whole goddamn town; love is getting dumped to only make you love the person even harder.

What 'tis to love? Shakespeare asked. Helen Fisher knows. Love is powerful. It brings its rapture to an unassuming wallflower, with a hunger so insatiable we can fulfill our anxiety by blaming it on the hypothalamus. We can blame it on the walking dead. It projects romantic fantasies on strangers more readily than we fall in love with people we already know. It chooses when we are ready to sell our beauty to men, our wealth and power to women.

Love drove our ancestral women and men to come together long enough to conceive, and long enough to produce offspring through attachment. Love drives us with exhilaration and into three systems simultaneously working toward dangerous results. We can feel deep-attachment to a life-partner and we can feel romantic love for someone else, to only feel a sexual drive for neither. This independence gives us jealously, adultery and divorce; it gives us polygamy and promiscuity and maybe a few extra children here and there, leading to a bigger stake in the genetic future. Love is a stronger craving than sex because people who don't get sex don't kill themselves. Love does not build us to be happy but to reproduce. At least that's what Helen Fisher told us. At least someone knows something around here.

And if shit couldn't get any more complicated, we turn to a bunch of equity theorists as they examine intimate relationships and introduce some sort of profit and exchange point of view. In Liking and Loving, Rubin states (ever so eloquently) the notion that people are "commodities" and social relationships are "transactions." It makes sense. Just think about the depth and breadth of information exchange. Think about the social penetration and how in casual relationships we usually only exchange the sketchiest of information, while intimates are roasting around campfires sharing personal histories, values, idiosyncrasies, hopes, and fears, oh my. They're feeding each other gourmet marshmallows while the rest of us are diverging in the he said she said bullshit. As if gift-exchanges weren't enough, we're now obsessing over the dynamism of reciprocity in order to feel adequate. One word: dog-eat-dog capitalism. (Ok, that was four, BUT AREN'T ALL MEN CREATED EQUAL????)

Nothing in this world is single. The mountains mingle with the river and the river with the oceans. The lungs mingle with life and life mingles with death. The pennies mingle with dollars and dollars mingle with sense. It's complicated and it's exhausting, but if we all just cancel our vows and shake hands forever, at any time we meet again our former love will always retain. At least we can blame it on fantasy. At least I can blame it all on the oxytocin because these are my thoughts and because it's better to burn out than to fade away. At least that's what Cobain's suicide note told us.

Chapter 1 Page 1 Paragraph 1

On the outside we may look light, dripping of sugar and saccharine--we may even be corn-fed. But in our hearts we're dark and cynical and dangerous. We want others to humor us and tell us we're Anna Magnani and Grace Kelly--to tell us anything but the truth. We want to do different things and be better people but we're going to keep on doing the same old things. We're going to be the same old people clinging to our destructive and mutilating habits because our emotional tie to them is so goddamn strong. This is all we have; this is what we long for.


If only life could be more like the movies, where we fall in love in the hands of characters who are hell-bent on pity and survival, suicide and love. In Closer, Larry loves everything about Alice that hurts, because without forgiveness, we're savages. We're drowning and the punk stage before us is collapsing and eventually we realize that everything is a version of something else. We're phenomenal; we're clever; we're deceiving but we're exquisite. And we're in for a long wait.
In Meet Joe Black, love is passion and obsession and something we can't live without. We learn to forget our heads, to listen to our hearts, to make the journey and fall deeply in love. We learn to love making love to someone much more than peanut butter, and better dressed in a black suit. In Vanilla Sky we learn the pleasure of Sofia Serrano and that every passing minute is another chance to turn it all around. And even in another life when we're all cats, the saddest girl to ever hold a martini will eventually open her eyes to only realize that the sweet is never sweet without the sour. She knows the sour. We know the sour. I know the sour. Open your eyes. Open your eyes. Open your eyes. Open you...


We're wasted and we taste it, our broad nipple is burning but it feels good. It tastes so good. And eventually we all return to the same old lipstick shades and sunglasses, with the same great expectations and cruel intentions. Eventually we realize the only way we can declare our autonomy is to be bad, because bad is where it's at. Bad is such a good thing. Because eventually we do change, but we do it ever so lightly. So don't fucking move.


Don't look at me that way.

Glycerine

I get paralyzed sometimes. My body submerges in forty feet of isolation and sixty feet of water, but never drowning, never even fearing drowning, but only floating in deep history. Perhaps Romeo and Juliet, maybe Tristan and Isolde, maybe Catherine and Heathcliff felt this intense folie  à deux too. Maybe amongst the playpen, the crossing paths at Crembebe', the egg hunts in front of the Holy Temple in the days before Christ, we remember meeting one another. Maybe at the Parthenon, maybe we remember meeting at the Parthenon. Or maybe we're just a bunch of people falling down a place from where we can't be retrieved. Maybe we're stuck here for good.

I listen to the sounds of the Gypsy Kings and the Volare and the Bamboleo, reminiscing the man who has spent majority of his life searching for his long lost La Maga, rummaging the streets of Montevideo and Artigas and into a country that lends itself to the incubus and paranoias of fiction because love and life and death is everywhere. It's everywhere.

Because we're all lost aren't we? We can't choose what stays and what fades and we can't even predict the revelation and the revolution, and it's not even a conversation we want to think about really. But there has to be someone looking, someone searching for us. Maybe we can find ourselves a nice antique rocking chair to rock in or maybe one of those days when we're unshowered and unadorned and sleeping in a tent built of duvets and pillows to hide in, the one person we've been longing for will wake us. Someone, somewhere, is longing for our crazy ideas and graniloquent needs and the paralysis of lying with us in that perfect insane asylum of a tent and under those perfect, white crisp sheets.  Someone could walk into that very room and say our life was on fire and we would remain motionless, still waiting.

The time has made us so damn warm, hasn't it? But it feels good. The good shit hurts, but it hurts so good because someone, somewhere, someday is starving for our copy. Someone has sniffed us out and sensed our emotional rawness and saw us across that crowded room and found us because some things are just meant to be. Someone has craved for that dirty sip of our martini and for that single opporutunity to suck on our green olive. Someone has made us the very thing that sedates them into happiness and into a victory march filled with cold love and a broken hallelujah. 

Because F. Scott will always recognize his Zelda. F. Scott will always find his Zelda somewhere, even with no poems, no prose, no words.

Fragment One

Fulcrum

I want a futon. One with a thick crimson-colored bedspread where I could make love endless nights through sleepy mornings, with a man who plays hackysack and the guitar and me. A perfect stranger who reads Wilde and Faulkner in my living room filled with crisp daffodils spread across hardwood floors, as he touches my splintered heart and traces my soft skin. I want to feel the sensation as he cracks my head open and gently scratches my cortex and the warmth when he realizes what he's really looking for is the best goddamn green he's ever seen. My iris.

I want to be Ali McGraw in Love Story and Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman and anybody else in anything else really, dancing in ominous rain and plie-ing over puddles of mud and rolling herself into deep earth. I want to never be afraid and to stop running every time I unfurl myself from fetal position right before I stick my feet in wet sand of the undertow. I want to drown in the harmonious sound of young folks building sand castles and collecting seashells, of infuriated gentlemen unable to reboot my sanity and delete me from their history. (I want to browse her too.)

And I want the black wave of mind games to evaporate and to fold over right in front of the dimensional sand, with just enough water to keep it thirsty. And I want whomever is inside to let me in, to let me sit on their world as I watch them build a playground for my neuroses, with enough diligence and grace to slide the wind against my face. And I want to feel. I want to feel the senselessness and the dance of the salsa in Barcelona and the guitar strings wrapped around my tongue and the taste of Ankur pressed against my liver and the outline of  lips against mine and the darkness of light right before I fade into distraction.

I want to be lost in vertigo and in penny loafers m o v i n g a c r o s s the rubbish and the fogworld and through revolving doors. I want to be in love and incoherent and I want to know it, to feel it, to never let it subside even for a minute or two. I want a perfect weirdo and I want to be wrapped in each other the way dried, harried flowers stick together after a week in a vase. And I want him on a styrofoam plate and in a cliff note on top of my dresser and in my mind because a mind in love is such a terrible thing to waste.

I want to be wasted all the time.

kim addonizio

a few of my favorites...a few new, a few old...a lot blue.
if you understand addonizio...you understand me.

FIRST POEM FOR YOU

I like to touch your tattoos in complete darkness, when I can’t see them. I’m sure of where they are, know by heart the neat

                lines of lightning pulsing just above your nipple, can find, as if by instinct, the blue       swirls of water on your shoulder where a serpent twists, facing a dragon. When I pull you to me, taking you until we’re spent and quiet on the sheets, I love to kiss the pictures in your skin. They’ll last until you’re seared to ashes; whatever persists or turns to pain between us, they will still be there. Such permanence is terrifying.

                So I touch them in the dark; but touch them, trying.

You with the Crack Running Through You

I can seep in, I can dry clear. And yes it would still be there. And no I couldn’t hold you forever. But isn’t it drafty at night, alone in that canyon with the wind of the mind dragging its debris—I wanted to put my mouth on you and draw out whatever toxin …—but I understand. There are limits to love. Here is a flower that needs no water. It can grow anywhere, nourished on nothing. And yes.

The First Line is the Deepest

I have been one acquainted with the spatula, the slotted, scuffed, Teflon-coated spatula that lifts a solitary hamburger from pan to plate, acquainted with the vibrator known as the Pocket Rocket and the dildo that goes by Tex,   and I have gone out, a drunken bitch, in order to ruin  what love I was given,   and also I have measured out   my life in little pills—Zoloft, Restoril, Celexa,   Xanax.   I have. For I am a poet. And it is my job, my duty to know wherein lies the beauty of this degraded body, or maybe   it's the degradation in the beautiful body,   the ugly me groping back to my desk to piss on perfection, to lay my kiss of mortal confusion   upon the mouth of infinite wisdom. My kiss says razors and pain, my kiss says   America is charged with the madness   of God. Sundays, too, the soldiers get up early, and put on their fatigues in the blue-black day. Black milk. Black gold. Texas tea. Into the valley of Halliburton rides the infantry—Why does one month have to be the cruelest, can't they all be equally cruel? I have seen the best gamers of your generation, joysticking their M1 tanks through the sewage-filled streets. Whose world this is I think I know.

For You

   For you I undress down to the sheaths of my nerves. I remove my jewelry and set it on the nightstand, I unhook my ribs, spread my lungs flat on a chair. I dissolve like a remedy in water, in wine. I spill without staining, and leave without stirring the air. I do it for love. For love, I disappear.

Good Girl
Look at you, sitting there being good. After two years you're still dying for a cigarette. And not drinking on weekdays, who thought that one up? Don't you want to run to the corner right now for a fifth of vodka and have it with cranberry juice and a nice lemon slice, wouldn't the backyard that you're so sick of staring out into look better then, the tidy yard your landlord tends day and night — the fence with its fresh coat of paint, the ash-free barbeque, the patio swept clean of small twigs —don't you want to mess it all up, to roll around like a dog in his flowerbeds? Aren't you a dog anyway, always groveling for love and begging to be petted? You ought to get into the garbage and lick the insides of the can, the greasy wrappers, the picked-over bones, you ought to drive your snout into the coffee grounds. Ah, coffee! Why not gulp some down with four cigarettes and then blast naked into the streets, and leap on the first beautiful man you find? The words Ruin me, haven't they been jailed in your throat for forty years, isn't it time you set them loose in slutty dresses and torn fishnets to totter around in five-inch heels and slutty mascara?

Sure it's time. You've rolled over long enough.

Forty, forty-one. At the end of all this
there's one lousy biscuit, and it tastes like dirt.
So get going. Listen: they're howling for you now:
up and down the block your neighbors' dogs
burst into frenzied barking and won't shut up.

What Do Women Want?
I want a red dress.

I want it flimsy and cheap, 
I want it too tight, I want to wear it 
until someone tears it off me. 
I want it sleeveless and backless, 
this dress, so no one has to guess 
what's underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty's and the hardware store 
with all those keys glittering in the window, 
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old 
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers 
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly, 
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders. 
I want to walk like I'm the only 
woman on earth and I can have my pick. 
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm 
your worst fears about me, 
to show you how little I care about you 
or anything except what 
I want. When I find it, I'll pull that garment 
from its hanger like I'm choosing a body 
to carry me into this world, through 
the birth-cries and the love-cries too, 
and I'll wear it like bones, like skin, 
it'll be the goddamned 
dress they bury me in.

the heroine.

lightly. you've been on my mind. heavy. my eyelids closed. my body entwined in fetal position, legs replied against the body, arms crossed, head bowed, abrading knees. but this is where i want to be. right now. diminutive. immature. inferior. i want to lay right there licking my wounds. naked. i want to lay right there in anticipation. revelation. in altered perception and forced cognitive self deception. let me lay there closemouthed in deathlike silence. let me lay there invincible. and when i awaken, let me lay there abandoned peeling tracks of rubber and setting fire to the rain.

right there is where i want to be.