another night of my daunting dreams

It seems these days I can't go a night without having one of those troubling troubling dreams. Someone trying to kill me, someone telling me that everyone hates me. I'm lost, I'm running, I'm crying, I'm hitting. It seems so sad that in my "restful" state it is the sadness of my days, my doubts and stress that take over. I may be jumping to the ceiling with delight but am being watched with hateful eyes. I may be flying to a beautiful place but there is the scare that I may fall to my death at any moment. I don't believe that these are the dreams I had as a child. I remember the rarity of scares or running or crying. But dreams were of something I looked forward to. That I truly believed in my young spiritual life told me a story worth holding on to, worth looking into, the meaning, the use of the nightly sleeping experiences. And perhaps, that is the lesson into these dreams as well. I am doubting, I am saddened, I am worried and hurt and crying and feeling no love from any direction. And this is in my slumber!!! and this is in my daily life. And so, I will try to take away, and regain my spiritual attentiveness, that indeed my daily life and the way in which I'm living is negatively impacting my sleep and in my understanding of dreams, my spirit.

How To Be Alone

estoy aqui, estoy contenda

I am here and I am glad and the days have passed now with only two more to sink into my skin. After the moments that your yearn to remember in the future, I prepare to write. I gaze at the computer screen and hesitate, and then I walk outside to see the morning skies and practice my Spanish. To enjoy the day before it rains in the evening! as it does every evening. We take off our shoes and we count, and we say ready and then go to run on our bare tippy toes through the rivered streets. whaling, whaling! are we waking those who sleep? I watched the rain fall through the small open door as I watched Mozart's "Magic Flute" in a long theatre under what looks like an old part of an aqueduct. walking under the arch to find Bryce and Chucho under an umbrella. We go eat our corn I had prepared for! cheesey, mayonaise, boiled ear with chili pepper and lime. yumm yumm as all the specialties. spicy beer, spicy, spicy (which I would've enjoyed more if a drunken man wasn't yelling "Oaxaca city! you like, my queen?"
We walk to see posters littered the walls of graffiti. a paint splotted multicolored of eyes. Later to meet the artist at the Oaxacan Painters Museum. He explains the "process" of his creations as to connect the young people of the city, like us walking the streets with the exhibitions simultaneously walking in the neatly laid museum walls.
Today. warm chocolate with dipped fresh sugar bread. and to a graphic arts museum and for tacos and warm rice spice milk. To listen to jazz perhaps and tomorrow a fresh, organic market and much dancing dancing to catch up on before my departure.
we hope we can reach the airport as election for city governor has initiated street blockades by protesters. we will know if I make it home on the 3rd of July, 2010. Like 2006, there is much to protest, and many people who join.
still enjoying the vibrancy and newness and difference. To attempt a recoiling of it all in the keepings for later stories.

Una mas, una mas

My third night in Oaxaca I woke, thrashing, run run run to the bathroom to throw away the curtain door. sickness. "the disease period, getting to know the bed". It lasted the entire evening and aches in my body the entire next day I slept with the 10/10 day outside my reach. I bounced back. and then Bryce fell victim. nausea and bathroom living. Chucho and I broke out to Cafe Central, I tried mexcal. not to my liking. and danced our faces and smiles. We found our place on the stage where we dramatically twisted and contorted our matching bodies. No one here will ever see me again. I will dance my most heart. Revealing of the push inside that we ignore. one free dance. and Chucho replayed he and Bryce's meeting in the open courtyard.
He speaks in English and I speak in Spanish and we teach one another. I write my new words in a tiny book Jean made me and I read over every day.
In the morning we had great stories for Bryce and we packed our bodies with mindful of health for the trip to Monte Alban. Zapotec ruins outside the city, sandy brown and bright green grass. we hiked up the ceremonial centers, the view above to praise the gods that gave them the nourishment and beauty of the land surrounding. to eat homemade delicious cooking from Chucho's mother, Anita that evening and every evening after. I am still in awe of what is common here, the colors, the barred windows, enormous doors. soccer/futbol in the streets, children selling candies, the shining sun on the sandy earth floors, the edges and balconies and curiously cut walls, flirtatious smiles, and small closet doorways of stores to buy. and Bryce and I have our share of sleepovers that our parents denied us as children, I sing early in the morning and we talk of dreams the night before and mexico treats me well.

Oaxaca, Mexico, Dia dos

After a long long journey of confusion and sleepiness and carrying and walking and sitting for hours upon hours. I arrived. with sun shining. and clean green grass. and Chucho drove up in his tiny automobile. waving loudly out the window. I had grand smiles. We breezed through arms and legs and fingers and heads and I brushed up on my Spanish and we laughed at his Missouri accent speaking Spanish through a long ago acquaintance.
Two hotcakes made with love from his mother and a tour of his art collection which is beyond words, brilliant, we drove to find Bryce, one of my oldest friends, as he concluded his teaching lesson. bright pallets of golds and reds buildings holding one another, embracing, row by row, bumping tires, we pound the claw knob and the large door swings!
A hat falls down, jumping and jumping we are dreaming. in Oaxaca, the gringos tell me this is the most beautiful city in the world, the Mexicans live the beautiful world. We eat tasty treats nearby Santa Domingo and the central square of the city.. why didn't I study BEFORE my departure? I lean on Bryce, US American face, Mexican boca. he is my translator. I will catch on. I will catch on.
I rest for hours and we meet Chucho for dinner in an open space, ceilings close atop when rain showers. Immaculate plates of plantains and mole sauce and sweet sounds and pretty faces. The election has stirred strikes for teachers and the city has tarps as sky, human spiderwebs of strings, and bryce says they breathe with the winds and passing time. people line the streets with their sleepings, blankets, pillows, friends in parking like cars.
Today we will visit museums and markets and dance with Bryce and write down my new Spanish words. A dream I am in. I won't wake for 9 more days!

The Artificial Binary Creates the Masculine Encore, written December 6, 2005, University of Vermont

The Artificial Binary Creates the Masculine Encore
The human body is used as a medium to inscribe identity on individuals in relation to one another. The “artificial binary” system, used in most modern social discourse, regulates individuals’ inscription as either man or woman (Foucault). According to Simone de Beavoir, “one is not born a woman, but, rather becomes one” under the cultural construction of describing their body as “not man” or the “negative”/ “invert” of man. The controversy over the construction of this discourse, as Judith Butler in “Gender Trouble” explains, is the polarity created between free will and determinism. The determination of one’s identity is found consequentially by societal norms, expectations and strict guidelines without regards towards individual attributes. Therefore, the dualistic ideology transcribes one as either the superior “male” or encore “female”. This determination is done with negligence towards possible conflicting characteristics (sexual ambiguities) of the individual.
Butler, through her research, analyzes the female body’s position as “marked” by masculine discourse. In contrast, the masculine body, as defined by the masculine discourse, is “unmarked” and therefore the female “sex” is merely the “masculine sex’s encore”. Even within the 18th century’s creation of the “two-sex model”, evolving from the “one-sex model”, the hegemonic ideology empowers the masculine, male. The social fact that the First Lady of the United States role is the (male) President’s encore, Mrs. Claus was created as Santa Claus’s encore, and Mrs. John Smith is Mr. John Smith’s encore illustrates woman’s symbolic positions in society’s public and private sphere. Merely a continuation or extension of the “greater”, “superior” and more powerful male figure, the female was first defined in the one-sex model as “incomplete”. Therefore, as Jane Adams would explain, individuals become symbolic characters through the social discourse in the shaping of their identity rather than any characteristics innate in them.
The human body viewed as anatomically binary is a cultural construction that has been scientifically legitimized through biology to support false societal pretenses of sexual dimorphism. Thus, biology’s false determination and dualistic approach appears to disregard sexually ambiguous/hermaphroditic people who contribute about 2% of the total population (Blackless and Fausto-Sterling). And to support the heterosexual binary matrix created within biology, sexual dimorphic ideals have been woven into socio-political discourse as well. With using this false binary system, biology extends this ideology to explain “nature” in such ways that are contrary to natural phenomenon. The notion of “man” and “woman” as the only “sexes” found in all living organisms and furthermore the only “genders” is essentially human’s self-constructed “nature”.
Coinciding with a constructed binary system; culture versus nature, man versus woman, feminine versus masculine, and the performative gender structure that is expected, the social production is tightly limited. Butler begins, “The law that prohibits, is the law that invites” in regards to the heterosexual matrix and forced gender binary. Furthermore, her theory conflicts with feminist ideology because of its challenge towards any binary discourse. Feminism theorists could be questioned for their cultural preconceptions which, inevitably, use the binary system of sex and gender edifice.
Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s cultural feminist critique of society observes women as a superior being who is innately peaceful. Her feminist activism and writing acknowledged the hegemonic binary system as problematic but structural. However, her acceptance of the “matrix of intelligibility and heterosexism” sought not to collapse the two-sex model, but rather to manipulate it as if it was pliable. In “Women and Economics”, Gillman illustrates the female’s position as the male’s encore. In contrast to Butler, her use of phrases such as “one sex to the other” and her animal references maintain the binary sex system’s sexual dimorphism ideology as a universal understanding. As Butler would explain, Gillman’s theories are “built from the law and therefore are part of the law” (Butler 75). The construct of “woman” as noun (used by feminism theorists) ratifies the binary system, according to Butler, and furthermore allows the female’s position as the “encore” to remain
The masculine hegemonic, heterosexual matrix supports the “matrix of intelligibility”. If “identity” is an affect of discursive practices, then the question of the relationship between sex, gender, and desire is inevitable (Butler 18). According to Witting, “sex would dissipate through the disruption and displacement of heterosexual hegemony” (Butler 19). The binary “sex” system, as Michele Foucault illustrates, produces regulatory practices that generate identities “through the matrix of norms”. This grammar of sex/gender and the language of social norms “conceals the fact that being a sex and gender is fundamentally impossible” (Butler 19).
Gender as the illusion of identity creates boundaries within the social realm and on an individual level that are maintained politically and socially are signified through identification placed on “the body” (Butler 30). Created by the masculine hegemony of power, the relationship of “the body” in all social systems legitimizes hierarchal inequality and stereotypical differences. The “body” has been manipulated to support a universal understanding of sexual dimorphism that doesn’t exist. Contradictions to the rule are easily dismissed to sustain hierarchy and inequality within the production: the man as the main show and the woman as his encore.

because vagabonds sonterlong long

Back to my writing for me and for you and for no one. My time was taken for so long. 20 years exactly, minus one I have been spending my days at school, for learning, for "education". of certain things. Always I ache for the days of my own educating.
myself on the brances that curve their way into my window and decorate themselves with green outlined precision. I want to know what they call themselves.
on the home that I can find in an empty field with purple petals at my feet. I want to find myself there.
on the song of the breeze that will wash my face while I roll down an unfamiliar fated street.
on the colors and words that can come from ones hands and present themself on one's paper. dancing literation.
to my feet moving, and writing, invisibly as I walk on the sidewalk that I pass to leave behind me in gleeful expression.
and with blooming pinks and greens and purples and yellows and budding beauty. there now is this time to sit and walk and peacefully partner with my surroundings.
transitory trajectories muddle my clear water of revival!
as in sleeping hours the only pacification I see to be clear....
swim with the current that picks you up and takes you off.
dear ivy. this is for you and what you taught me today.

The positive pelican push

moments of aloneness, some filled with opportunistic moment.
a van full of strangers returning home from trips around the world. a couple, newly engaged, returning from Disney World, glowing with settled, filled, visions of a home, fenced in, a dog, a new baby, a family to view their life as completed. myself, alone returning from a weekend with half my family. newly divided. feeling divided.
and a man sitting across an aisle of division. his smile big, his eyes pleased and genuine. the driver says, Mr. Thomas, we are please to have you with us. he says he tried to be a nobody, but he accepts her attention and appreciates her friendliness. I find I am sitting now, without an isle any longer, closed from conversation, a local celebrity, a news reporter for Detroit. he speaks about his love for his life, his job and the couple beams behind me. I beam for all their happinesss, everyone's. and he tells me to watch him on the television, I look him up on the internet. I find he is more than a happy, gifted and privileged news reporter. he is a struggling man. I learn about his story. Born an African American, now a disease, turning him white, slowly. Once an attractive man only noticeable for his smile and confidence, now noticeable for his atypical skin and fame. Watch, be inspired as I was, and learn of the privilege most of us have. solid skin color, solid to our existence.

http://www.myfoxdetroit.com/dpp/about_us/personalities/Lee_Thomas_Bio

vagabonding blogging

so without a voice, as it is lost to overuse or anger or a tightened throat from unbearable stress to the body
and without an extension of this natural life into the life of others so far, or maybe just across town, as the obsession with plugging and charging and attaching electronics to your pant pockets is forgotten
and without the companion that calls you to check in every day, or to give you a hug every morning, or make you tuna fish for lunch
and without a home where others know your face on a passing by of the street, and smile into your solitude feeding your for hours
and without knowing your own face, or your own hands, or your own loveliness.

to exist in this world, substantiated by these expectations, of what a day is filled with. In the vagabonding there are strangers who tell you who they think you are, and there are alone moments were memories seep in from a past life, a song comes on, and you are in your first apartment, lying on the floor, with someone you know loves you, for a moment.

I listened

I listened to a man speaking on the radio about forgetting who he was. Standing in a train station in an unrecognizable city, not knowing how he got there or where he intended to go, looking at other strange faces. All he understood was that he didn't understand. Searching for a mirror a reflective. Piece of his identity. He spoke about looking down at his hands wondering how many years of his life he had lived, seeking some remnants of what that life was to him, he sifted through his pockets. When and where did he put these pants on, how many days had he been living this empty way. The extreme notion of losing one's identity, by losing consciousness of our actions, missing the signs of our moment to moment existence. And perhaps the fog this man spoke of could possibly replace our conscious mind, the identity we hold so dear as it is ours and ours alone. Or perhaps it already has. The forgetting of yesternight's dream, the distant memory of dancing with a friend on that one night that felt so special at the time, that pivitol conversation that seperated you and another, and the flight of excitement that ran through your body when you chased the purple butterfly in your 5 year old heart. It is the smells and songs and touch of our present days, if we are mindful enough that can take us back to this joy. Not so much in the memory, but the feeling, as without our identity, without our history, we are feeling and feeling alone.

A new Post of an old Writing

I told you that in my throat I felt a thickness
In my throat, our lives
sharp roof tops and honeysuckled honey and cream and sugar of salt and whiskey that they drink
They drink separately miles apart
They live with imaginary friends
Ships sailing opposing grounds without the breeze of this evening
No more music of them or music of their colors of red and snowfalling white and lanolium floor coating
Of kisses on the hand
And punches to the jaw I sewed back in my nursed vicariously fanstasized mind
Because we can’t swallow
Sourness disinigrates our teeth and we don’t call those people that wait for our voices they pretend they
Recognize
Because the numbers are stuck in the condensation and the heaviness of these days and hours in the fog and dark fog that they put you in
And I’m getting older too
And now I should understand and they should too and
What the dictator of passing time allows is only this
Grudge
Grudging teeth of grit and ore and wafered bread and half touched wine
Driving north to a place of escape with como estas bonita senorita
And capes and watered streets of enlightened empty encounters
To complimate the radiant side of finding people who you must replace with imaginary friendships when they are gone.
Finding a place of placement in every place you go you go to find these new
Families
We find we make we consolidate and protect and neglect and reject
In embracement of the souls between, the space between we find heavenly and sweet heavenly space to swallow.
We can swallow around the lumps and folds of fear of losing of regretting

Burlington, VT 2006