Am I really this old? And powercouples

Everywhere I turn, there is an adorable power couple, basking in their self-reflected glory of their corporate ladder success.

It could be self-inflicted: this is what I get for going out with my boarding school boys,who have beautifully blossomed into perfect realestate entreprenuers, investment bankers, financial consultants, etc... complete with looks, charm and the bucks to back it all up. Did I mention their slew of gorgeous girls? Poor things, they won't know what hit them. Don't get me wrong, I *love* my friends.. i just wouldn't ever date them. As one of them said in response to my complaining about the impending psychology grad-school costs that will plague me for at least the next 8 years, "Don't worry Jess, we'll take care of you" Because that right there, that is exactly what I'm worried about.

Sure it should be every girl's dream to find a rich husband to wait on her and give her sparkly, shiny things. And although I am not opposed to (laboratory grown) sparkly shiny things, I am absolutely terrified of becoming domesticated. Like one of those perfectly groomed lap-dogs with a sparkly-shiny nametag on her collar, smelling like roses with little boots and matching rain jacket. I mean, if I'm going to be a dog, let me be a big sloppy dog, right? Well the same thing goes for rich wives. I mean, I think I'm a little less Paris Hilton-y, rich body obsessed housewife who gets her kicks by doing coke and drinking heavily when the hubby is out of town, and a little more Audrey Hepburn in "Breakfast At Tiffany's", uptown girl who acts like a complete lunatic and yet is somehow completely self-sufficient.

Powercouples are on the TV (you've got Brad and Angelina, Kate and Tom), they're in the bars with their matching razor phones, driving around in their SUVs with matching license plates like love notes. They're my friends, they look so happy and organized and cleancut and I know my parents would love for me to find someone to straighten me out like that, to take me to the *best* restaurants and live in the *best* cities and travel to the *best* countries all over the world. But man, that just seems so overwhelming right now.

Sometimes I just can't believe how old I am. Because, really, my time for messing around and being creative feels like it's running out. It's not running out, not really. It's just I had this idea that college would be this time where I finally found *my* people. You know, find people that come home every day just excited out of their minds about something that happened, some idea they had during class, or dying to play me some piece of music they wrote, or show me the story they stayed up all night last night writing, not for class, but just to fucking write. Where has the excitement of youth gone? And why do I feel as though, on this strange road which in so many ways caused me to skip adolescence and go right into mature pre-adulthood, has made me lose the juvinile irrationality and spontenaity that I crave?

Maybe that's why I cringe when I see my friends attatched to their blackberries, unable to turn off a cell phone for more than 10 minutes, and why I love some of my other friends who don't have cell phones or computers and are constantly moving to brooklyn or philadelphia or panama city or paris or santa fe and are impossible to get ahold of because of it. We are just animals, preoccupied with the toys our masters give us. Perhaps we have lost a bit of the passion along the way.

Thanks power-couples, but no thanks. You can have your Zunes, your high-tech blackberries, your matching mercedes. I'll stick with the musicians and artists of the world, a run-down studio in philadelphia, scrambling at the end of every month to make rent and a bike to transport us from our late shift at a bar, instead of a car because gas prices are just ridiculous and who really needs to drive in a city this size. We've got the best chinese take-out place on speed dial already anyway.

internal illumination

-But I want to be illuminated from the inside out.
said 6 year old me.
-Eat your spinach
said my great-grandmother who was the most illuminated woman I had ever met, who prayed an entire rosary every night till she died. She smelled of lilacs.

(Then I learned about death, which is also illuminated. Death is a bird constantly spying on its victim. When we turn to see it, it flees. It is a raven sitting above a door, a vulture circling its prey. I don't know about you but my death is a daft robin with a crooked beak after years of constantly slamming its face into my bedroom window. It also has a sense of humor, just like life.)

The only other woman I ever met who was illuminated like her was a priestess who also smelled of lilacs. I saw her through my best friends eyes, sitting in an auditorium 500 miles away, bursting into tears as the woman held me, held everyone in the room so tight that I couldn't tell where I ended and she began. And I smelled of lilacs for a week afterwards, and from then on I knew that it was possible to see the world through others eyes because the only difference between them and me was a name.

And so I want to see the world through its mothers eyes, to rejoice in every small victory, marvel at every sunrise and sunset, proudly smell the blossoms of spring and happily welcome the snow of winter. I want to cry at every defeat, to kiss all the scars, to swoop in and rescue it from the brink of disaster, to brush its hair out of its face and wipe away its tears, to make it all better.

I want to be illuminated from the inside out so i may feel like it was all worthwhile. Every pain, every morning of wishing for an eternity of dreams instead of reality, every breath and step an individual miracle. We are constantly on the brink of disaster and yet somehow we still continue, blissfully oblivious to the proximity of our own demise.

I want to be able to look into your eyes and say with the upmost conviction and all the love a woman can possibly bestow upon another, that you are a miracle too. You are, perhaps the best miracle of all.

the big-bad... brunette?

I guess my aversion to blondes started a few years ago, when my boyfriend at the time suggested I bleach my hair. I'm gonna throw this out there for those who don't know what i look like: I'm Italian-American. There was no chance adding bleach to my dark hair would end up pretty. I refused (of course) and he kept insisting blondes were hotter. (we've been broken up for quite some time now.. obvious differences...)

But let me back up. I think this goes back farther than that. Maybe back to when I was in high-school. I went to a typical east-coast boarding school, that had only recently turned into a co-ed institution and was overrun with the nations best, brightest, and -need i say it?- richest, mostly hailing from the Mainline in Pennsylvania. The boys were your typical old-school-I'm-going-to-take-over-daddy's-business-so-college-is-just-networking types. Oh and the girls, the girls were gorgeous. Hell, everyone was gorgeous, my friends and I used to joke that our school looked like an animated J-crew catalog. But the blondes, man, was it just me, or did they have Connecticut-elite-housewives stamped on their forheads. And little rebellious brunette me, I just couldn't bandwagon it (did i mention i had a goth phase? second thought- lets not go there).

More recently,and to make matters much funnier, the girl I wrote that last post about is (was) a blonde.. obviously. She apparently doesn't like me, just because I'm me(which, by the way, I'm fine with. One less nasty blonde to worry about). After senselessly arguing with me via facebook messaging, she then scolded me because thanks to a 12 dollar bottle she is now a brunette. I can't blame blondes who want to be brunettes: hey hon, it's ok. we can't all be perfect.

Maybe it's because every time a boyfriend has cheated on me, or left me for someone else, it's been a blonde girl. Maybe it's because I just don't like that "sexier-than-thou" attitude. Metro fashionista blondes are the worst. The super bleached, big sunglasses, I-wish-I-was-Paris-Hilton strut, complete with ugly dog, high heels and microscopic skirt. Man, I hate those girls.Wherever and whenever it started, whatever triggered it, I just don't like blondes. Sorry.

I should note, it's not all blondes that I dislike. Just ones that like to make a point of their blonde-ness. I feel about them the same way conservatives feel about "minority groups": I'll tolerate it, but just don't shove it in my face and don't expect "special treatment". I'm not gonna respect you just because you've got a genetically recessive trait.

I should also note, for the sarcasim-immune: this is (mostly) a joke.

Who's afraid

of the big bad blonde?

Not me.

Wait

Before you leave
Remember
(I never want to see you again!)
I would've been that girl for you
(I say with silent eyes)
if you had only asked me to
but you didn't
(who's silence is my fault?)
I watch from my window
as you walk away for now
(I never want to see you again.)
leaving me listening to the
muffled sound of falling snow.

Meditations

Meditation 4

I would do anything to be somewhere else right now
Anywhere but here
Standing on stage in your spotlight
and even though I have a microphone
I feel like I’ve got to shout to get you to listen to me
Spitting pretty words in
Iamic time and
Pentameter rhyme
And couplets like crime
Isn’t good enough for you
So I push through


Meditation 3

Hoy es siempre todovía
-Antonio Machado

Our lives are the stories we tell ourselves
Imaginary, drawn like the lines
Between the stars-
To be a revolutionary is to change the life
Of one single person
Because the universe is a room full of friends
And eternity is nothing more
Than this very moment


Meditation 2

I crawl up inside
The works of my lifetime
And peer through the vacant lines
Through sketches of charcoal lettering
Onto miles of paper snow
With hands pure and smooth
I rub clean the scars of time
Slowly I erase
All trace of me

Not writing my thesis

the other guineahen
died of a broken heart and we came to New York.
I used to sit at a table,drawing wings
with a pencil that kept breaking and i kept

remembering how your mind looked when it slept
for several years,to wake up asking why.
So then you turned into a photograph

of someone trying not to laugh
at someone trying not to cry

-E.E. Cummings

This might just be one of my all time favorite poems.

excerpts from a prayer

( , said the shotgun to the head- Saul Williams)

INTRODUCTION:
Have you ever been kissed by God? Passionately (tongue, lipts etc.)? Or are you one who simply condemns God to the realm of the invisible? When do you feel most comfortable? When do you feel most loved? Perhaps it is in the warm embrace of your loveror in the assuring touch of your mother. Perhaps, like me, you have likened this person to God in your life, and realized that God was loving you through them. Or maybe you don't believe in god. Cool. Here's a simpler question: Have you ever lost yourself in a kiss? I mean pure psychedlelic inebriation. Not just lustful petting but transcendental metamorphosis when you became aware that the greatness of this being was breathing into you. Licking the sides and corners of your mouth, like sealing a thousand fleshy envelopes filled with the same essence of your passionate being and then opened by the same mouth and delivered back to you, over and over again-- the first kiss of the rest of your life. A kiss that confirms that the universe is aligned, that the world's greatest resource is love, and maybe even that God is a woman. With or without a belief in God, all kisses are metaphors decipherable by allocations of time, circumstance, and understanding....

Citizens,
Children of the night
bearers of the day torch:
scorched and burned.
BURN NOT
the dam is broken
the curse is fled
once muddied and still,
the river runs RED
"ALL
those ships that never sailed
the ones with their seacocks open
that were scuttled into their stalls
TODAY
i bring them back
HUGE AND INTRANSITORY
and let them sail
FOREVER!"*

if ever there were currents
undercurrent

the wind
could not serve as
truth's currency

Currently
moon marked and sun sparked
unmarked bills (will) i AM
certain
i speak a NEW LANGUAGE
as is ALWAYS
THE FIRST SIGN
of a
NEW AGE

i had begun to believe my blackened toenails
were on the path to decay when in truth,
they had begun the graudal process of
CRYSTALLIZATION
i am he who walks on wind scorched feet with toenails of
AMETHYST AND ROSE QUARTZ
my path noq crystal clear
i AM come to tell you
SHE IS HERE

it is not written
NO pen MAN ship
was ever CARGOED
with her character
Note: books are carefully folded forests
void of autumn
bound from the SUN

Likewise, she made her residence
on the outskirts of a shadowing history
on the darkside of the moon
where the searchlight of the sun
COULD NOT SPOT HER
nor rot her
the sead of forbidden fruit
EVERY TREE
has a hidden root

YET SHE HAS
COME TO LIGHT
THE SWELLING PATCHOWRK
OF VIBRANT DREANMS
yes, there is a science
to the aroma
of sleeping women
(and to think of the girlfriend i was tempted to break up with because she slept too much)

i know now, the NURTURED her there:
they slept in packs
dreamt in cycles
NURSED HER IN SHIFTS
and became her
ON ROTATION

unnamed her
everytime she was named
so that she would not be known to anyone
(even unto her self)

undressed her
everytime she was dressed
so she would not be recognzied
as anyone other than herself


.... my friends
love is an artform
slightly removed from its element
one may ask
well what does that mean?
i respond
i've made it up
but it shall be
from now on

from now on
citites will be built
on one side
of the street

so that soothsayers
will have wilderness to wander
and lovers
space enough
to contemplate
a kiss

she kissed
as if she, alone,
could forge
the signature
of the sun

... to be
or not to...

to see
or not to...

she had eyes like two turntables
mix(h)her
in between
my dreams an reality
blend in ancient themes
the bass is of isis
(basis)
cross-faded to ankh
the beat drops
like a cliff
over-looking
my heart

6000 feet above sea level

3300 bodies
disassembled

the headbone's connected
to the cock pit

knee jerk
ass backwards

dancing slaves
in a mosh pit

punk rock
of gibraltar
roll out
nothing's new

mo blood dyes
the mo hawk
only this time
it's you

and you
never loved her
for what she
possessed

you powdered
her face
and came
on her
head-dress

oil sliked feathers, putrid stenched water-bed
"mother nature's a whore," said the shotgun to the head.

...Behold, a story untold
I HAVE SEEN THE MOON
IN A SUN DRESS
the ocean
beneath her
rippling in laughter
at the sight
of a lone man
who learned to walk on water
for a glimpse
of his truth
in her crater