(One)

What is desire? I have none I burnt my back 

I am waiting for a certain activity… don’t know what it is

spiritual teacher drop by drop down your throat

Stairs I climb reluctantly 

Hesitantly 

Some adverb of the future

You know you can never really decide

A trip to Japantown with your mom

She wants to get close but you both did too much

And now you are skin talking to skin

I think I’ll take your picture! I think I’ll ask you a question!!!

There must be so many ideas

Sad in bed dying 

How long is your lease what if we lived together and you hated me

Finding a lover making a map we would have a huge whiteboard 

I always want friends a little…. Too much claw!

The party in the backyard not the neighbor’s not mine

A cloud rapidly dissolves, reforms

Having fun

Concert going tendencies…. And can you blame her

Thinking she is fame itself

A water bottle handed to somebody’s face/directly

I have no portfolio she shouts

There is no way to learn about investing 

The world scares me, you do not!

(Two)

You do not believe in my symbols they wrinkle

A girl needs poetry and nobody else believes

Nobody likes your dinner nobody makes that salad

It’s a gross one it’s wet that’s how I like it

I am reading a lot of books at once and that is also my life

I let myself go stale baby

Look at all these buckets they are mine!

This is how I used to do it and now no explanation not even tears

Just really tired of myself

In a way, I do not want to make it mean 

I am of course concerned if I go back it won’t be the same

(Three)

How do you make the switch? Subtly, sweetly

You peel it off and you begin to replace it

Do you know how much dirt I got under my fingernails planting life?

Life was very dirty, just like how life is dirty when it’s in a person

A newborn baby is very dirty and we are compelled to wash it, but in that we lose the lesson

You need to look at your beautiful clean and pure baby—with the freshest skin possible—and see that it is covered by the dirt and blood and guts of your insides

It is necessary for the beautiful little baby to be covered in goo, and it is necessary for you to shit as you give birth, and it is necessary to feel all that pain. We go the wrong way, not allowing for true discovery.

my mother was an aristocrat and my father did something, though i did not know what and never asked. he seemed not to be passionate about his work, and when he came home he greatly enjoyed dinner. he was a paranoid man, and after shy encounters with other people he would come home and tell my mother about the ways he thought they were conspiring against him or secretly insulting him. he would spend many conversations constructing his story, until he found a way to compose a joke about them, and then it would be over until a few days later when it happened again with someone new. i think he did not know that i understood all of this because he did not imagine that i listened to him, but i did, with the upmost attention.

when i was a teenage girl, we decided to take a vacation to the clouds. this had newly become possible, and it was a modern undertaking for my parents, for whom even camping was too strange and exotic. i think my mother wanted to feel alive and new, and she had convinced my father, who likely secretly harbored the same desire and needed little coaxing. after she called and confirmed that there were many suitable restaurants in the cloud, he took out his credit card, and the vacation was confirmed with a six-digit-code that both of them wrote down in their diaries.

when we arrived they gave us three champagne bottles full of juice, and my parents’ juice also contained a bit of liquor, which they laughed and joked about. we had survived the tensions and explosions of packing and traveling, and the juice perfectly symbolized the culmination of all the effort. 

the clouds were beautiful, but we found early on that you saw all you needed to see in the first hour, and for the rest of the time, you were just there. it was more alike to camping than camping itself. this was for imaginative people who could expand and delve into the simple picture in front of them. this was for empty canvas people. my parents did not want an empty canvas. they wanted to see things—a lot of things—quickly. for our first dinner we all had the same meat dish, and everybody was underwhelmed. they realized then that all the glamour and hope of the vacation had to be placed upon the meals, and from this realization their fighting began. 

it was over small and big things. the key to our room. the light switch. the tv remote in the room. the amount of wind in the clouds. my future. my past. their last wedding anniversary. their first date. the time she accidentally cooked bugs into chicken fillets because she didn’t see them in the breadcrumbs (she brought it up). her mother, and his mother and sister and brother. 

we were at a four pm lunch (we had started eating two meals because the restaurants in the clouds were more expensive than my parents had realized) and another fight lived between them. i had ordered orzo and was trying to think of the last one they had it when something unprecedented happened. my father took out his cell phone and started reading. ‘it is so annoying to console yasmin.’ he looked at us with eyes that were somewhere between child and animal. he did not know what he was doing. he was excited and provocative and had just thought of this idea. i was hurt by the message he had read, and i was upset by him reading it, but looking at my mother’s face, i knew that what awaited him with her was going to ruin him, so i still wanted to protect him. my mother, too, i was embarrassed for. she was exposed for her pettiness with her child by the person who was supposed to be in a contract of trust in maintaining the sacred illusion of parental authority with her. much had been destroyed, and we had three more days in the clouds.