Crazy Happy Busy-Crazy!!!
Last weekend I was at Rutgers for the 6th Annual African Asian Latina Lesbians United (AALLU) conference. Tiye did an amazing job of getting the ball going uphill. I saw old faces in young bodies and was pleased that they were the same warm spirits I had not seen for years. Jade and Avril and Kim and all the beautiful brown faces that have formed audiences over the years.
I also spent a quick hour with the Yo Sistahs from The LGBT center on Saturday.
I lazed in bed on Monday. Back to the grind on Tuesday. Tomorrow I spend the afternoon with the kids at Juliard. Quraysh Ali Lansana is their professor and a good friend of the I and I. Looking forward to that.
Next Monday I am at Delaware College in Pensylvania. Wednesday at NYU with Kamau Brathwaite's students. Busy week.
I am feeling good. Lots of positive stuff hapening. I am feeling anxious too. Mad decisions to be shuffled between the teeth of my poems. Mad crazy fears of succeeding. Of being successful- whatever that means. I miss home, but only in the moments when I am still. Not today. Yesterday. The day before. Perhaps tomorrow. But for now I am suffused in the color of worlds crashing by, of words whizzing into the sound of trumpets and violins and our own lives becoming part of history.
How I long for the pleasure of a good long restful sleep. I don't remember what it feels like to be rested.
People looking at me on the train. People not looking at each other on the train. Wonder what would happen if we had to speak to each other? If we had to look each other in the eye and actually listen for the answer when we asked, "So, how are u?"
Hours and hours later, I return to this entry.
Where was I?
Just now, I am exhausted. Feeling like I should really be writing something of worth. Something beautiful. Open-mouthed and beautiful like my mother. Like the way she likes making stories. Like the way I wish I could write. Like Toni Morrison. Like Kamau Brathwaite. Like what the hell am I going to read to a class taught by Kamau Brathwaite?
Like I need to know by next Wednesday.
Like, is there anything new to write. Like how do you make the choice between dinner and her legs wrapped around mumbled dreams of cows and winter. Like I love the word like. Like how unspecific it allows me to be. Like how when I have nothing to say I pad the sentence with likes and like and like nothing I have seen before, this generation uses the word like for everything.
Like how I envy them the freedom to speak without all the consonants, without half the vowels. None of the clusters of sounds poured into precise pronunciations.
I wish I was hip. Like Lenny Kravitz. Brave like Audre. Lorde. Have Mercy on us. Poor timid motherfuckers wanting top be hip more than we want to write. I know more about fans then I do about Iambic pentameters and such. Sonnets and so on.
It is later in the day. I should not begin one entry and finish it hours after I begin. The mood has changed.
Can you feel it?
I no happy no more. Just crazy these days. Just crazy about a girl whose hands are less frequent than my poems, now.
I be
breezing into eternity
no God breathing
hot air
into my ass
I be
inhaling myself.
Let Him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for his love is better than wine. Solomon. The greatest motherfucking love poet in the Bible.
Greater love, hath no man than this, than a man lay down his life for his friend. Jesus. The big JC of the New Testament. He was a pretty dope lyricist too.
I am still wearing my coat.
Still wishing you had insisted and come to spend the night in my desert-hot room. Our throats dry. The humidifier is never enough for the soft membranes 'neath our protests, our long conversations at night. I be wanting to see you shadow bleeding into the light.
Come here
stand in front of the light
stand still so I can see...
Paraphrasing Ani...
What if I never told you I loved you again. Would you still know it, the pressure of my hand on your insecurities sweet but uncertain? Would you know how much I crave you, if I never said another word...
Rambling now.
Gonna quit while there is still the urge to share these thoughts....
Kisses in all the languages of your hearts,
Staceyann
Posted by staceyann at February 27, 2003 04:35 PM
