whew.
The past months have played out in some crazy form.
I am moving along. Saying things and doing things I have never experienced before.
28 feels great. I am very very happy to say goodbye to the midtwenties BS.
I feel solid and far less confused.

January has been surprising, and wonderful and difficult.
I was very saddened to hear of Steve Sauve's passing. I realized the other day that I haven't actually talked to anyone about it. Please know that I have been thinking of all of you in Ottawa, and who knew him, deeply and lovingly, and often for the past weeks. Steve was a true piece of joyous light, and I cannot even imagine the ways in which his passing has affected your lives.

( Other things about january )

YAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG.

I went to a play about Bruce Erickson last night. It was a musical put on by Theatre in The Raw.  I am not a particularly big fan of musicals, but something about this was exceptional. Bruce Erickson fought tirelessly for the residents of the downtown eastside in the late 70’s and early 80’s. He started DERA (www.dera.bc.ca/), and pushed the city to reopen the Carnegie library. A heritage building which is now a thriving community center in the neighbourhood with a cafeteria, library, computer center, meeting rooms, and place for people to spend time together, safely, away from the street. His wife, Libby Davies (our van east MP), has fought tirelessly as well. She has registered homeless voters, and maintained the velocity of a movement for social change in the eastside.
 Some people have lived in 12 by 12 rooms in decrepit hotels for over 20 years, some even longer. The play reminded me of this and of so many things I had forgotten about the history of the neighbourhood. 
It is hard for me to think about the downtown eastside sometimes. Since I left the work down there, it has left a bit of an open sore on my whole self. Things have definitely moved forward from that point of reopening the Carnegie in 1976, but I don’t know where we are now now. People are still openly injecting drugs in the street, and living in substandard housing. Although I go through waves of feelings and thoughts about the place, for the most part it makes me incredibly angry. My eyes seethe red like my dad's when he is upset. Most days I don’t know whether to cry, or start throwing firebombs. I know neither of those things will accomplish a solution. So most often I walk around with my heart clenched and lips pursed…waiting. waiting for people to take back what is rightfully theirs
How far can we push people into the proverbial mud? I think we might as well stone people to death. It seems that letting them waste is essentially the same thing to me.
 ( About Hope... )

It is incredible how sometimes you think you know what you want. That you have some sort of map in your head that tells you where you are, where you are going, and where you are meant to be and then you realize the map has been upside down and you have been trying to speak too fast in a language you merely enjoy the sound of, but don't actually understand.
So you return to where you started.
I have many of these places. they take different forms. Some are in the form of lists. My favourite, is one I started compiling years ago after I broke up with a long term boyfriend. It was the first of many lists, including, but not limited to: "things I hate," "things to be more serious about," and "things I would do once, but never again."
The actual list, which may or may not exist in the archives of Kathryn (that is, unless they didn't make it through this recent purge), is a list of things I will or won't accept in people I date. It's like a list of red flags. Like boys who think they are shaman, and people who don't know how to cook, and people who don't like music, and people who want to be in the wilderness, and people who question everything, and people who don't have mother's that call me things like "different."
I wish I could see this list so I could know what to add (as i am still sure there is nothing to take away).
The more years i put in, the more I understand that this thing that is me is an ever evolving soft tissue morphology that, through a series of strange mutated adaptations, continually brings me back to the same skeletal remains. It looks wholesome and wonderful. It is a pure, brilliant, essential, overstated, star bright, glittering mass to be uncovered, and every time I return here to open the glass case I lock it in, I am overwhelmed and empowered by the basic fact that it still shines, even when I haven't shaken the dust off of it for years. I am sorry it has become so distant to me. I am sorry that I have fought off truths about myself to be more accepted in the world by things and people and places.

I am going to sleep with it tonight.
Pull it close into my body. Kiss it all over.
I will name it.
presence, pleasure, persephone. sometimes we don't know where we are going. Sometimes we find ourselves right where we are, and it is ecstatic, perpetual joy.

I will hold this essence. i will tell it i am sorry for abandoning it for potential.
I will sing it to sleep.
.tis a gift to be simple, tis a gift to be free, tis a gift to come down where we ought to be, and when we find ourselves in the place just right, twill be in the valley of love and delight.

I had paralyzing dreams last night. someone tried to stab me with a pen knife after i caught them stealing things from my bedroom. Apparently the world was going to shit, all the public services were on strike, and a whole bunch of sleazy people showed up at my house and then decided they were going to burn it down. The people were intensely drunk, and really mean. I woke up in my bed, and couldn't move. It took me a long time to regain a sense of safety so i could go back to sleep. So I layed in bed and listened to the rain, and a few passing cars, and looked at my grey street light lit room with fuzzy eyes. Then i had another nightmare, which i can't remember, and repeated the experience...
 
 Could've been all the food I ate at our thanksgiving party. Could've been that i drank too much wine, or the house was too hot because we left the heat on, or it could've been that I made everyone sing johnny appleseed before dinner, and the atheists in the room who had never been to summer camp and do not know the pleasures of singing grace in a round put a curse on me. probably not. Nightmares are strange things. We process so much through our subconcious world.

( Read more... )

Someone at a party last night said he had me all figured out. he told me that because I am a poet, I am always watching on the outside, and am not completely engaged in the world I am in.
The things strangers say to me are usually true. But, i don't know that i can call myself a poet right now.
how long can you not write for to still be considered a writer? it is true, that I withdrawal. but it stays in my head and doesn't go anywhere.

in my life, about me, there are only two things I know for certain:
1. everything is uncertain
2. French Canadians get me pregnant.

Not to say that the latter is happening now. It is just a fact of my life i have had to come to terms with. twice. I suppose that it too is subject to change. but I don't want to risk it.
Most days i think I can do things that no one else i know can.
I only wear mascara as a deterrent for tears.
most days I cry about something.
when i was an adolescent, this seemed appropriate.
at 27, it seems I am going through a new stage called adultlessons.
When things are simplified too much,
I fuck shit up to make it interesting.
this is not new.
Probably, I should've been a mathematician since it seems I am predisposed to
making problems and then solving them.

I am tired of this. this is exhausting.
I am tired of being so difficult.

lately I do alot of things because they are prescribed by others.
because, as much as i love it,
i am fearful of the uncertainty, and no longer trust myself to make appropriate decisions.

I am far too in love with far too many people.
this is also not new, but grows massive uncertainty.
because i can no longer follow my heart, as i thought I could when i was
a dreadlocked 18 year old holding crystals in my pocket, and a notebook
to keep my secrets in.

I know some stuff about some stuff.
One of my greatest fears is that I will never do anything with
the things I know.
because i suffer from severe depression at least a few times a year,
and I seek to constantly reinvent myself to get away from it.
uncertain indeed.

This has to affect the people in my life far more than I know.
but really,
this is to say...
I have stopped writing.
I suppose there is a third thing I know...
when i stop writing,
everything becomes far more difficult than it should be,
I cannot complete my tasks, I fuck shit up to make things less boring,
and far more exterior.
I cannot do the things I said I would,
I get angry at promises I did not have to make but made anyway,
I wear mascara everyday.

this isn't meant to be a poem.
I just needed to say some things,
and i didn't know where else to do it.

I know, I know....
I thought I'd say hi.
Things are ever evolving, and suspiciously wonderful right now.
Finally detached myself and am now free to roam.
I'll have more to write soon, just thought I'd clear the dust from the journal.

In the meantime, I just wanted to tell you all that I let a 15 year old boy read one of Christian Drake's poems in a
workshop last week. I missed my chance to scan it over really well before he picked an arbitrary place to start from.. but
he didn't miss his chance to say
"Fuck me like rug burn"
really loud.

I'll let that settle with you and will have a real update soon.

Hi!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
e

I've been quiet for far too long.
I mean, I've been quiet online which allows me some sort of active potential in my immediate life that I didn't have before.
I didn't realize how much time I had in my hands until I stopped with all the compulsive nonsense of facebook/myspace/livejournal/msn/3 email addresses et al.
I feel weightless not feeling chained to the desktop.
In other news:

I didn't make it to the WOW finals last night. I went swimming. but congratulations to all my lady poet friends who rocked it. I am sure you put out your best. and congratulations to Radar. I am proud.
There have been a few things said out there about my sudden disinvolvement in all things slam. I would like to address a couple of them, as they do not stand very true and I feel that my lack of prescence has shattered my voice in my reasoning for walking.
perhaps I have walked further than I intended. but the comment that I am "so done with this scene" is one that comes from someone thinking I wander around and dump things as I please.
In a way it's true. But not in the way of the glorified ego that I somehow do not need that "scene" (ie:people, friendships, handjobs) and have moved on.
I have moved forward to get an education.
Anyone who has asked knows that I needed to make some seriously progressive changes in my life (after a major breakdown, 3 years in the DTES, and 3 years of drinking at poetry slams). And so I have. For a lot of people, they breakdown and discover their artistic selves. My dad wrote a lot of poetry after my parents split etc..) for me, I broke down and rediscovered my brain...
I feel like going to school is one of the first things I have ever done just for myself. sometimes I want to run up and down the hallways yelling "I can think! I can think about all kinds of shit!"

I miss seeing people I like in one place. The slam is a convienient guarantee that this will happen.
I don't miss the drama and the drinking and the public life and, the competition. I don't need or want fame. I want to write and it is the labour of being part of those things that takes up all my time and cuts my writing time to nil. I miss sitting in a room of people reading poems back and forth for joy.
So I've been working on stories, and reading genetics, and dreaming the fossil record, and learning ancient myth and being hyper critical about things that one should be hyper critical about (ie: the dissappearance of the great apes), and remembering that I care for a lot of things on wholly altruistic terms... not because I want to have something to say about it in a cute dress while elevated above a room of the strange and not so strange.

Some people think I am far more inflated than I am. I know that most of those people dream of fame.
All this rambling is just to say that I'm happy. I've been learning things, and sitting around sharing words for the sake of sharing them.
Thanks to those of you who asked. You are true friends. with no purpose for my life but my own.
I miss you.
call me, let's have coffee outside the box I once thought of as a sphere.

yes, I read the christian science monitor...
nevermind... just look at this:
http://www.csmonitor.com/slideshows/2007/angola_rodeo/

G: how's school going?
Me: Pretty good.
G: Well, I know it's been a hard transition for you
m: Well, I think I'll have two A's and a B+
G: Did you get any D's?
m: no
G: well, what about C's?
m: Gramma, I just told you. I have two A's and a B+
G: Well, I know it's been a hard time for you
m: What are you talking about? I'm doing really well, apparently it's hard to get A's in your first semester
G: Well, you've just been away from school for so long so I know it's hard.

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WTF