Today's Sermon is Brought to You by César Vallejo

Let the millionaire walk naked, stark naked!

Disgrace for whoever builds his death bed with treasures!
A world for whoever greets;
an armchair for whoever sows in the sky;
sobbing for whoever finishes what he makes, keeping the beginnings;
let the spur-wearer walk;
no duration for the wall on which another wall is not growing;
give to the wretched all his wretchedness,
bread, to whoever laughs;
let the triumphs lose, the doctors die;
put milk in blood;
add a candle to the sun,
eight hundred to twenty;
let eternity pass under the bridges!

Scorn whoever gets dressed,
crown feet with hands, fit them in their size;
let my personality sit next to me!

To weep having fit in that womb,
blessed is he who observes air in the air,
many years of nail for the hammer stroke;
strip the naked,
make the cape put on pants,
let copper gleam at the expense of its plates,
majesty for whoever falls from the clay into the universe,
let the mouths weep, the looks moan,
prevent steel from enduring,
thread for the portable horizons,
twelve cities for the stone path,
a sphere for whoever plays with his shadow;
a day made of one hour for the husband and wife;
a mother for the plow in praise of soil,
seal liquids with two seals,
let the mouthful call roll,
let the quail be,
let the race of the poplar and the tree be;
let the sea, contrary to the circle, defeat his son
and weeping, gray hair;
leave the asps alone, gentle sirs,
furrow your flame with seven logs,
live,
raise the height,
lower the deepage deeper,
let the wave accompany its momentum walking,
the crypt's truce succeed!

May we die;
wash your skeleton daily;
pay no attention to me,
a lame bird for the despot and his soul;
a dreadful stain, for whoever goes it alone;
sparrows for the astronomer, for the sparrow an aviator!

Give off rain, give off sun,
keep an eye on Jupiter, on the thief of your gold idols,
copy your writing in three notebooks,
learn from the married when they speak, and
from the solitary, when they're silent;
give the sweethearts something to eat,
the devil in your hands something to drink,
fight for justice with your nape,
make yourselves equal,
let the oak be fulfilled,
the leopard between two oaks be fulfilled,
let us be,
let us be here,
feel how water navigates the oceans,
take nourishment,
let the error be conceived, since I'm weeping,
accept it, while goats and their young climb the crags;
make God break the habit of being a man,
grow up…!

They're calling me. I'll be back.

~19 November 1937

I Was Trying To Describe Being a Parent Once and I Wrote This

It's like dog-sitting. Only you can't put them in a cage and they outlive you.

Things That I'm Afraid Of

1. Dogs (strange)

2. Ghosts

3. Electrocution (of self: frequent)

4. Being followed up a stairwell
4a. Being followed down a stairwell

5. The closed eyes of someone asleep in a dark room

6. Ticks in my underwear/eyes

7. Ectopic pregnancy (self)

8. Geese/large ducks/possibly peacocks

9. Paranoid schizophrenia (self only)

10. Things that hover

11. Death (loved ones only)

12. Fainting in line at the bank

13. Random stabbing (street)

14. Opossums (face and teeth)

15. Encountering ex-husband with new partner (his/mine)

16. Frenzy (generalized/specific)

17. Vomiting in public (self only: rare)

18. The Exorcist (movie and book)

19. Bar fight w/ woman (rare)

20. Obesity (self only)

21. Hydroplaning

22. Rat in the toilet (while peeing: rare)

How I Want Every Moment to Feel

Once in Brooklyn as I was leaving the apartment building of a man I didn't love very much a small older man in a snappy long coat walked out onto the sidewalk with me. It was December and cold but not freezing and the air was high, kind of ionized and gusty and it took both of our breaths away.

He smiled at me and sort of roared. "This" he said buttoning his gorgeous coat, "is a day for tigers".

Crazy Listicle, 3 Items

Things I do to combat the crazy* when the crazy comes on**:

1. Chain-smoke cigarettes.

2. Lie on the floor with Lucy.

3. Drive around chain-smoking.

*For those of you unfamilar with clinical depression the crazy is (in my case anyway) a gut-kicking sense of loneliness, unbearable floating grief and a painful, monster anxiety that something really really really important has been left undone.

**Typically provoked by overly cloudy days, overly sunny days, winter, autumn, days of mediocre weather, PMS, too much crappy news before my first coffee, not enough coffee, too much coffee, not smoking, smoking too much, skipped exercise and/or being alone for more than 90 minutes. Also weed.

Crazy Love

I have this trouble with loving people. It's not hard, not hard at all, for me to love people. It's easy. SUPER easy. Easy like Sunday morning. Easy like saying 'yes'. Easy like breathing. I love like breathing: it's there, and I do.

Because I'm a lazy bastard overly fond of touching and holding and kissing and that feeling you get in the belly when you're looking a friend in the eye and they're telling you something painful, something really old and painful that's given them this scar tissue that they usually pick at when they're alone but you're there with them and they feel safe and they decide to open up, to open to you and they tell you this thing, this sad old thing that hurts them and they look you in the eye as they're hurting and you try to say out your eyes at them "Go 'head, it's safe right here, I got ya" and maybe hold their hand if they're touchers, or give them a little patpat on their hard shoulder if they're not, because I'm okay with that, because that feels like closeness to me, because all of it's okay whatever happens I'm down with it if it feels like closeness, like intimacy, I fall directly into love with most everyone I spend more than seventeen minutes with and that's the trouble.

I'm a lover, not so much a thinker. Love first, think later. Maybe. If I think at all. It's questionable, this propensity for going all soft for friends and manfriends and people on the street with a terrible limp or parts that clearly hurt, or so crazy that if I get too close I'll be drawn right into their world and hear the voices they hear and see the things they see and I might never be able to come back, that world is so real to them and I'm a sucker for crazy because it vibrates at a real familar frequency for me.

I question it in myself because it feels like bullshit a lot of the time. Who loves like that? What sorts of cultural messages about being a woman, or being a mother, or being fucking nice, have made me this softy, this sap? I can't possibly be circumspect enough, wise enough, benevolent enough, to have some kind of gentle compassion for all beings. I am selfish and needy and greedy for closeness and interaction and seeing the parts that hurt in people and there's nothing remotely wise or detached about it. I want to love people so hard that I crawl up next to their skin and know them, really right there, and this is probably the least sane thing about me.

I'm working on it.