I have never been successful with completing a “thirty day writing challenge,” (attempted before on this blog in 2021 and 2023), but even if left uncompleted, the challenges — and the several subpar poems they produce as I get back into writing, again — are successful enough in resetting things that I usually do end up writing again, and a lot (even if the challenge itself was technically aborted at day five or something). With that end in sight, here is another (possibly doomed to fail…) thirty day challenge.
1: “race against the clock”
far-away death rattle, catch the time in a bucket and a glimpse,
before, it leaves you — your flip phone, your death phone, will not save
you! — and yet, remembering time is a flower that can be ripped
open and the folds, the inward-going red folds, can be licked and twisted
at Will — now let’s move to Japan, now let’s take the little baby
for one year abroad.
Invented narcissism, invented false suffering: old ideas come back,
death rattle, of before-ness and better, and the grey sky as promise
and not as — suffering. Think too much and the poem falls
apart, I have said it before. I said to my husband I, like everyone else,
stricken by the enlightenment and I cannot take my face
apart or my skin, let’s indulge stupidly in at least 1). far-away
stupid dream and go live in the Backwater. I walk to the market
on the daily with the baby strapped to my chest. Inside each
dream is another dream: work aboard, or just live. David Foster
Wallace: or just my father, finally caring enough
to fuck me (over). I said twenty-five for me has been okay, better than
twenty-four, wasted year, year in a cage. another appointment and
the doctor says I don’t know what is wrong, patterns live on become pain when
it happens to you. I am always getting back into, making up for, lost time.
Search for lost time and it’s just realizing, in retrospect, your mimesis:
I was the snob all along! Let’s go to Japan and I’ll get the pre/post-covid
dreams of sunrise with all the electric wires, talk to me or lemonboy playing in
loud dim-room repeat, post-pop saying you are too referential, me saying dully:
I grew up outside the world and the internet spit me out. Let’s go to Japan
and take the baby and rip my face off — thinking nothing I did
nothing wrong I made no wrong choice. I kept in the dirt what you
couldn’t pull out of me by force; I wrote poems on the airplane and backpacking
in dream-colored lake, Hebrew colony at the bottom of the earth, I will
write poems in Japan and they will spin out, making a life of their own and
fucking me over, condemning me, what beautiful wet kind of rape
that I want, that I beg of you to give me!
the last pavilion 