Riding in the First Car

I teach poetry at this alternative school on the lower east side. Actually they call it a “transfer school” a place that houses students that have been kicked out of other schools or students who have dropped out. The students there are anywhere between the ages of 16-21 and with a paltry amount of high school credits.

I love this school. The class sizes are small so the students get a lot of attention. They’re separated into groups called families and they have an advisor. They are really working to bring the arts into their curriculum, which is why I’ve been hired to teach poetry there for 13 weeks.

It’s been a wonderful experience so far. I’m going into my fourth week. (Or is it the fifth?) These students are sweethearts. They are tender with tough exteriors. They have the edge that I like in students and it’s clear that they’ve experienced much more than say the high school students at the college I teach at, who are like little bunnies.

I have a really good vibe with these students, and from the first day. This week I wanted to talk with them about the narrative poem. So among the examples that I was going to present to them, I decided to perform the most intimate and vulnerable poem I possess. It’s a narrative poem about the abortion that I had back when I was 17. I couldn’t believe that I was so ready to open up to my students in this way. What is it about them?

I went in there and I did it. I performed my heart out too. I held nothing back and surprised myself by my own intensity. When I finished, there was a big gasp and then applause. Some of the girls were wiping their eyes. They were so shocked. They loved the poem so much. They kept saying it over and over and over like they couldn’t believe it, “that was so good Ms. Oh my God. That was soo good. Oh my God.”

And then the questions came, as I knew they would: “Was that true Ms?” "Do you regret it?" We ended up having a fantastic conversation about abortion and regret and the difference between safe sex and smart sex. Safe sex=using protection. Smart sex=not having sex with losers.

I love watching students write. Some dive into the page like it’s a swimming pool on a hot Florida day. Others approach it tentatively, like something they don’t altogether trust. Some court their pages like lovers. Others discard their pages like lovers.

One young lady, Ashley was stuck, said, “I don’t know what to write about Miss.” I said, think of a scar on your body and tell me how it got there. Someone came home and turned the light on in her head. She put pen to page and wrote furiously. We put on some music and they wrote to the bobbing of their heads. As I watched them, I thought of how much joy it brings me to see young people engage in the act of writing, and knowing that they're writing poems. Some knit their brows together in concentration while others remain placid with their peaceful swan-water faces. Either way, there's an inexplicable look urgency in the face of a writing poet. It's a different look from someone writing an essay or solving a math equation.

Time was up. Time to share. Ashley was ready. She said, “ok, this is very personal, so whatever goes on in the room stays in the room.” The whole room made a pact. We made sure the door was completely closed. She read this poem about her boyfriend last year who also happened to be her best friend. They were looking for something in his mom’s room—her credit card I think—and they accidentally found his adoption papers in one of her drawers. The problem is, he didn’t know he was adopted. Later that night he got the story. His natural mother died while giving birth to him and his father died on the way to the hospital— an accident.

The next day, Ashley found out that her boyfriend/best friend shot himself in the head. The dramatic situation in the poem was of her slicing her wrists with razor blades after receiving the news. One of her opening lines was: “my grief is a roller coaster, and I’m riding in the first car.”

After she finished the poem, the whole room sighed with respect for this young woman still standing. I knew I was asking for a narrative poem but I had no idea what I was really asking for...we never do. We talked about her story for a while and she was open and strong and answered all of our questions, like I did just minutes before.

After class, I walked through the windy leaf-strewn streets, in awe of all our losses—the ones we inflict on ourselves and the ones bestowed onto us. I thought of the seven year old child ghosting at my side. And the wind—the dead’s greatest excuse to touch us.

El Dia De Los Muertos

Tonight I will be celebrating El Dia De Los Muertos with friends. At the party, I'll be making pina coladas. Yum. I'm waiting for my homegirl Jessica to come here so that we can leave. Jessica is that friend that you always find yourself waiting for, no matter what. I wait. I love her company but waiting for her is slightly infuriating mostly because I hate waiting for people and to my credit, I hate the feeling of people waiting for me.

Rene just left. God, today was something close to love. Things are so good between us and our bodies are absolutely in love with each other. It's incredible, our chemistry, and it gets stronger with each passing day. Last night when I got off of work, I met him and his friends in midtown: rod, ame and ray. We had drinks--i drank really strong margaritas and started throwing lettuce off the balcony. Amy threw limes and almost hit a bouncer. We almost got kicked out. I don't really hang out with Rene's friends that often so this was fun. I clicked with Amy on a superficial level. I won't be calling her up to do drinks anytime soon but she's fun to be with.

It's cool to observe Rene with his friends. He's so alive, so animated. Fun to watch. I feel a sense of wonderment. Then he grabs my hips spontaneously and no matter what kind of music is on we dance. Times are good.

I drank too much. I took a cab home last night and as we sailed over the Williamsburg bridge, I felt so horrible, my stomach, my head...oh, why tequila on an empty stomach, why? As soon as i got out the cab and he pulled off I expressed my dinner to the concrete. Again, and again. I don't know the last time I threw up in public. I don't know the last time I threw up from drinking too much.

I felt much better though. I brushed my teeth and snuggled into bed and closed my eyes to a spinning world.

2:30am. Rene called. On his way over...

Sex olympics till the sun came up. Yum.

He spent all day here. Exquisite. He finished painting my wall. Utah Blue. I made him do it in his boxers and i took pictures while his back was turned. Wonder if I'll show them to mom.

And now I'm here waiting for fucking Jessica. Hurry up Jessica! Are you coming on horseback?

On Thursday afternoon I was having dinner with my friend Rog and guess who calls? GM!

Backstory: GM is a bobybuilder/personal trainer/kickboxer that I dated for a short time before he moved away to England and got married. Basically, the day after I broke up with Rene back in April, GM and I hooked up and we enjoyed each other for a short scintillating time. I couldn't bear to cheat on Rene but GM was far more interesting at the time and far more dangerous so I had to see what it was all about and I'm glad that I did; even though I hurt Rene. Why GM was dangerous: that man and I could talk for hours and hours and that's my fastest highway to Loveville. Me and Rene's sexual chemistry is the equivalent of me and GM's intellectual chemistry. Rene doesn't stimulate intellectually and GM doesn't really stimulate me sexually. He's not bad but not good either. A sweet kisser though.

Anyways, I was weak for GM. I could see myself falling for him and I don't say that shit often. This guy was a mind fuck. Conceptually brilliant. But, he was engaged. And now, here he was on the phone, in my ear, saying my name and right away I knew that voice. He's from my country, so he sounds like the men of my island and I gasped. We couldn't talk long because I was at lunch with Rog, but in a nutshell, I asked GM how married life is treating him and he said that there's not one benefit to doing what he did--uprooting his life to move across the world to marry this woman. My face was a sinking ship. Not one benefit.

I asked him, "please, at least tell me the lovin' is good."

He repeated, "not one."

I felt sad to hear that, but not surprised. I knew he was flying across the world to lay in bed wth misery. I could see it in his eyes; he had the eyes of an animal that knew it was going to be put in a cage. I'm not saying that's a metaphor for marraige, but I'm saying it was a metaphor for his sitaution. I'm just sorry that he hasn't even been married six months and he's already climbing the walls.

He's coming here for Thanksgiving. We made plans to see each other, perhaps dinner, perhaps a movie, perhaps great conversation, perhaps my place, perhaps perhaps. Perhaps danger. Things are so good with Rene and I don't want to mess it up. I'm determined not to mess it up. I'm determined not to let GM into that space again. GM made his choice. He has to live with it. Not me. I won't let my weakness for him mess things up. Realistically though, I think that when I see him again I will realize just how terribly I've missed him. I think things between us will be as they always have been, full of electricity and exploration. I think he will try to kiss me and I think I will let him. And that's as far as things will go.

Daylight Sonata

It's a peaceful morning here in Brooklyn. If you've ever looked
into the vivid blue eyes of a Himalayan cat, then may be able
to understand the vividness of today's sky.

I'm listening to Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata." Relentlessly.
There are certain sounds that my ears fall in love with for a time
and I indulge my ears the way I indulge everything else: esp.
my tastebuds, esp. my sexual appetite.

Have you ever put a song on repeat for hours? It's time's
best magic trick, the simplest, most ingenious mind fuck:
every five minutes or so becomes a mirror of itself.
Time only passes for the duration of the song, and then it loops
back in on itself like a rottweiler chasing it's own phantom tail.
When I listen to a song I love, over, over, time doens't pass.
That tiny smile that always blooms out of my favorite moment
of the song, that milisecond where i prolong a blink
(i do that only for unbearably beautiful things),
these tiny gestures reincarnate themselves again, again.

And then the phone rings. Then my time is up. I have to go to
work. I have to jump in the shower. My stomach is growling
like an angry dog tied to a pole. But I emerge knowning
that I needed to hear that sound for as long as I did. It may
have been two lifetimes. It may have been 10 minutes.
But, I needed to hear it the way I sometimes need
to feel my lovers arm sling unconsciously around my sleeping
waist in the morning, in the viscious night. It's that illusion
that something, someone on this planet was made so many
years ago, just for you, just for this moment of sweet collision.

I didnt' wake up this morning needing to feel my lover's
arm, but I did wake up needing to hear Beethoven's
"Moonlight Sonata." I don't know much Italian, but I do
know that sonata means little song. I only know that
because that's where the word sonnet comes from.
Who ever said a masters degree in poetry is useless?

I woke up this morning needing to hear it. Beethoven.
What I love about music: how it's crafted around silence.
Without the skillful use of silence, music would make no sense.
Stars would make no sense without the black in between
them. Stars would make no sense without eachother.
It's the same thing with architecture: how it's crafted
around pure space. Without that recognition of space,
you'll have nothing useful.

That's how poetry and art in general is a commentary
on the vast silences of our lives: inner and external.
It burrows like a mole into the uninhabitable spaces within
us where words have no business being: the swamps, the skies
the fires, and all that unfathomable water.

That's what makes art such an intrinsically arrogant thing.
This is why we have no choice but to love it. Stretch it.
It strives to speak not only the unspoken, but the unspeakable.
Like my lover's unconscious arm, like "Moonlight Sonata" composed
hundreds of years ago entirely for me, this morning--is art
this world's greatest illusion? Are we all Houdinis--master
illusionists? What if we're greater than Houdini--illusionists
even to ourselves? Houdini knew he was creating illusion---do we?
Can art truly encompass even one synapse in our brains,
one breath of our inner lives?

Enough. I've written a poem lately, one I've been writing for years
it seems. But I can't even remember the poem I've written before
that and I can't imagine what I'll write after this one. I'm not saying
it's a tour-de-force but it just took so much out of me. When did i stop
being a bending branch? When since could one poem break me so
easily?

I just need to know why it is that my writing is coming along
so slowly lately. Yes, I'm busy but busy has and never will be an excuse.
I've always found time to write; i've never had a problem sliding
a hot something to the back burner to write a poem because there are
few things more important than a poem that's ready.

So much is happening in the world yet so slowly the words come,
more ooze than gush, more moan than orgasm,
as my friend Kevin would say, more corset than garter belt.

I guess i made a decision: that if i'm coming to the page lightly,
then I may as well not come at all. I want my words
to go places in me and come back with clues. If something
has no clue then why make it immortal?

"Moonlight Sonata" has just started again and it's time for me to
wrench myself away from it and from this day encased in the picture
frame of my window. Time to walk away from this music and walk
into this day, to make it larger than it already is. As I walk
to the train, then to work, I know I will look up into the vivid sky
and think that maybe all of this is what lies beyond the Himalayan's
blue gaze, maybe this is what lives inside that cat, an entire city,
these buildings, these yellow cars armed with receipt paper, and me,
big haired woman with the ghost of a flu, walking down a street
in East Harlem.

Censor-shit...or is it sense-your-shit?

Yesterday, Halloween was the anniversary of my Grandmother's death. Enid. She died on Halloween, 1989. This was my first emotional kiss with death. Ever since then, Halloween has been a very vulnerable day for me. As usual, I went to work, I hung out with my middle schoolers in my after school program. We had a little Halloween Party, I gave out their gift bags and gave them plenty of cake. They brought me such a quiet joy--they will never know. Man, just watching the light on their faces when I heaped big chunks of cake onto their flimsy plates was healing enough for me. I love serving my kids.

On the way home from work yesterday, it started coming down. I felt like a DJ was in my throat, scratching away. My limbs: weak branches holding up my body. My head: heavy bowling ball with eye sockets for holes. By the time I got home, I had a full blown cold. I think it may even be the flu. My body aches and creaks like a rocking chair.

I called out of work today. I don't know the last time i called out of work due to illness. This has given me much needed time to write about something that's been on my mind, something that occured last week.

I teach a spoken word class at a college in Brooklyn. The majority of my students (99% of them) are seniors in high school. The director of the African American Studetns department at the College came last week to observe my class and give my students an evaluation of my teaching.

I felt a little nervous about that because I'm not used to people looking over my shoulder, but I'm confident about my teaching. The only thing is, I'm a very liberal teacher; i give my students a lot of room to express themselvses. I've been called "edgy." I'm not conservative by any means. I definately can't be especially with teaching urban youth.

So, point blank, if someone is going to observe my class, I'm not going to mold my classroom dynamic into something I think they want to see. This person is walking into the space that I've created, my four-walled universe. So on Thursday, she came. And she saw.

She saw me put a halfway finished bottle of Bacardi gold in the middle of the floor, among a few other objects and ask my students to a write a poem from the perspective of one those objects. Of course, many of them chose the Bacardi. It also just so happened that my students' poems were a little more sultry than usual during our weekly open mic session and I guess I didn't help things by playing some NAS on the boombox.

After class, she asked me if we could meet for a little while. Oh shit, I thought. I knew this was trouble. We met for over an hour, during which she expressed that she wasn't happy with the sexually explicit content of some of my students' poems and that this is a university setting and those poems are not appropriate for the University classroom. She also raised an eye brow at me playing the NAS song in which he cursed and used the "n-word" and she asked me why I didn't put such atrocities into context during the discussion of his work.

I replied, "well, there's many ways to skin a cat." She raised an eyebrow.

I was completely honest with her. I told her that I don't restrict my students from any subject matter and from any language use. I told her that I've given them the freedom to use profanity in their poems, so if she's going to blame anyone for their use of language, then blame me, because they asked in the beginning of the semester and I said "okay." I told her that I run a censorship-free classroom, that in order to create a safe space where people feel comfortable expressing themselves, I made a conscious decision not to give them any restrictions, regardless of my own aesthetic.

Personally, I don't like erotic pieces. Never have, probably never will. Sex poems are just not my cup of Earl Gray. But if my students write it, then they write it. I'm not going to impose my aeshetic on them in that way. I mean let's face it: teaching in general is an imposition of many sorts. For instance, the moment I encourage them to use images in their work, I'm imposing my aesthetic, because not everyone thinks the use of the image in poetry is the key to good poetry. Language poets come to mind here. Some people craft their poems around sound, not image. So, yes, encouraging them to use imagery is an imposition of sorts from a craft standpoint. That's unavoidable. But, I definately try not to impose what they can and can't write about.

Needless to say, she and I did not agree at all on a few things. She's of a different generation and from a different school of thought . I find her conservative and I'm the opposite: that's the bottom line. I told her that next week I will tell my students how she felt about some of their poems. I don't think I'm going to tell them to stop writing with profanity or sexual content; I'm going to express to them how she felt and I'm going to give them the choice.

On a good note, she was full of compliments about my teaching style, the safe, comfortable atmosphere of my classroom, the lesson, and the writing exercise that I gave them on personification. She said that out of all the spoken word classes she's observed in the past three years, that was by far the best one she's seen. So on a good note, it wasn't all altercation and clashing of horns.

Though I think I held my ground, I felt a little shaken during our talk because seldom encounter this situation. I've been spoiled by my own luck: i'm not used to having bosses who act like bosses. I'm not used to people looking over my shoulder and telling me how to run my classroom, my program, my shit. I know I've been fortunate thus far and that more of this is probably to come in my crystal ball future. During our meeting, I started to second-guess myself and my whole pedagogy. I started thinking, "Maybe i am taking the wrong approach. Maybe I do need to tone my shit down. Maybe I am a trouble maker."

And then she made the mistake of letting me read their evaluations-- incredibly re-affirming. My students' evaluations of me were stellar. My students love me and their work as a whole has improved drastically in our seven/eight weeks together, which is all I fucking care about to be entirely honest. I came to that realization as i was reading their comments. All this administration shit can kiss my ass. What matters to me and what has always mattered to me is the teaching itself. I'm not going to spend any extra energy trying to impress my higher-ups or trying to make them feel comfortable with my big-haired presence in their badly-lit, badly-ventilated classrooms. I have a duty to encourage my students to write their hearts, their lives, to represent their generation accurately and adequately. It may mean cursing and it may mean some breaking of beds but take me or leave me. All this other beaurocratic shit about pleasing the funders is for the crows. I've never been that "safe" teacher and I'm not going to start now. The most important thing to me are my students, the rolling up of the sleeves that is the teaching experience, the *work* itself. And fuck all the rest.