mopkins

 hello, it's winter now. the first grey sun has come, purple in the evening, perpetually foggy. it snowed! a lovely friend hosted a poetry reading in the trees. feeling thankful for the encouragment to focus on nature, as a presence of comfort and love always there. it was a beautiful afternoon, and as our friends gathered in the crisp wind reading laminated papers, ana had hung mirrors on little strings from he trees, and all of the bodies, of mostly young women coming together to make and appreciate art, reflected eachother and the setting sun. here's what I shared. the last fragment is the beginning of an new communal art project. more to come... but i'm trying to bring people together in writing a modern epic, a sort of generational manifesto, for new york, our generation, our time. please  contribute to the poem here! okay.  Tree poems At the end of a long rope lies a tree felled.  It (like you)  Is compelled to braid itself into the earth  But  L...

I'm sorry I missed my section of intersectional feminism, I was stuck at an intersection where an accident occurred . I know it began promptly  at 4:10, but I was witness to the accident, not involved  directly, exactly, but I had to speak to my experience (when the police came). So I'm hoping I may attend a later section to make up for my absence, since I had to be present for a trial occurring   in absentia , as the defendant was presently intubated at Mount Sinai. I attended  her bedside and actually did do the reading. B esides , I thought a lot about the intersection of the various nurses, all women, and the history  of women a caretakers, I myself touching her head gently. It was her nonresponse which made me think about how women are systemically  silenced, being that her brain stem was, according to the little computer thingy, at the moment silent. I wondered if she could think, even though she couldn’t (or didn't, or wouldn't?)  respond  ...

 ever since i posted this blog i've stopped writing in it. well, life has felt fragmented, so i'll only share fragments from this last week, and that will have to be enough, and this space will be a tiny exercise for you and me -- sort of like friends gong to the gym together except we will never be that -- in me saying that has to be enough and you maybe saying that to yourself somewhere far away.   --------- what it feels like to be asked a question Hi to you,  what are you? Good, down two.  You too!  What are you? I am how  Up and down  Have you been to how?  No, just to one.  Just fine,  How good!  How hi up you are! ----- two edges i appreciated the sun for doing this. it felt like a bit of a 'fuck you, you know less than you think you do.' and the park was beautiful , and most things are simple, if you sit there for long enough, letting flatness become something more dimensional. i have a special love of reading contradic...

at least they were upfront about it. the white cube the gallery space is not in service of a higher tabula rasa, it is meant to be stark-raving white, madness white, imposingly white. It is not even the world of order but of money ensuring composure.  but there is nothing that can contain the raw emotion and power of tracy emin's work.  i take my friend with, and little do we know as we walk across the park we are preparing ourselves.  in 1990 Emin drew in pencil a ghostly, naked, female figure on one half of a printer-sheet-paper. the other side reads: "pethetic little thing". (i found this drawing randomly last year.) pethetic little thing, pethetic little thing.  the words used to ring in my head. why did changing the spelling turn the admonishment into tenderness? a phrase i almost wanted someone to call me, and maybe pet the side of my face? to let me admit? but then a woman's body stares back at me in it's bursting fullness, it's unending rawness. it is ...

Each place in the world has its own sense of time. They are best described by how people interact with windows and pavements, the way they react to a change in the light, the patterns they make in public spaces. How much noise is there? How much of that noise are you invited to hear? And maybe what the food is like.  I met Juwelia because a summer storm arrived so violently and suddenly over southeast Berlin that I was forced to take shelter in the orange light radiating from studio's doorway. She was hosting an open house. The front room was maybe ten feet both ways, the walls covered to the ceiling in her art, the lamps covered in boas and lacey pink-orange cloths. But she is the real piece of art most people around here are interested in seeing, photographing, and buying. She's shown and sold her body, but claims she's not good at sex. Her English is shrill but grounded by grovely "jahs" "uhns" and the likes. She has a small man-servant who apparentl...

Noise seems central to the question of how time moves. When I moved to new york, something changed without my knowing it, suddenly living in this new sense of time. I lived on a high floor and would open my dorm window to hear the city from above and know it as distant. The amount of dedication per time unit can work like vanity bra sizing: if you were very focused in one unit of time versus dispersed among hours. I’m reading the Bhagavad-Gita and Exodus in the same week. In both time is correlated to effort. According to my famous professor, no one wrote diaries in Shakespeare’s time, but I wonder if it’s true. There’s no way to prove it. A clock was not the centerpiece of a town square, mantle, or wrist. I think these facts are related. Time is the $15 Casio I bought on Amazon to try to get free from my phone. I don’t think enough people know that there is a speed to the human body. It’s 50 m/s. And that the Internet works at 200 million km a second, so whenever you use it you are f...

My mother left this morning. She wakes me up around 4am to say “Mama’s going” and it breaks my heart. Not the leaving but how devastated she is. Both of us with our fear of being abandoned – she has been, and I'm just getting to know the feeling. I’m trying to write in this seminar class so I don’t have to listen to these people talk about fucking punctuation, or rather the lack thereof punctuation. It's important to learn how to focus in the midst of unwanted noise. We’re reading a pretentious, obnoxious, and occasionally profoundly beautiful poet. The professor says things like “a point in their career where they can get away with it” and I don't believe in that. Somebody is describing sally rooney’s normal people in excruciating detail and with the implication she invented dialogue or something. I sound stupid when I speak too, so who am i to say.  I've come here from trying therapy for the first time in the psychological services one floor up. What service they pe...

It’s amazing how strongly piss smells. In the subway, the stench of piss feels actually airborne somehow, like maybe it evaporated and lives in droplets. It's truly Hell: hot and subterranean and certainly your soul would be trapped in limbo forever if you perished down here. But one can, as Sartre wrote, live in Hell quite comfortably. One can get used to hell.  It's amazing how new yorkers, for all their cynicism and narcissism, really must believe in this city to continue to accept things like the daily violation of every orifice with airborne filth. It must be the very people who blow by you wearing noise canceling headphones that inspire you to keep going. A man is sketching all the riders. He seems inspired, or maybe mentally unstable, or both. His hands are scribbling, eyes darting to and from a built latino guy with a military style buzz cut and athletic wear, who is applying mascara.