i'll offer this as explanation (i can't take credit) -- emma (the 4 year old) wanted to be mean to me on the playground, telling me i can't use her pen to draw with. what came out of her mouth next i only wish i had the chops for.

she let me write it down because she said i could put it in a book and call it emma. i wish i could also put in a book the expression on her father's face when he walked in and she put her mouth on his crotch and said "yummy penis."

from the mouth of babes. :-)

draw with your skunk pet
draw with your bumblebee
dance with your eyeballs
and your noses.
your blood with crack open
your heart will itch.
it's a sun. it's a flower.

Nefertiti's Bust Gets a Body.

[NYTimes reports the Hungarian contribution to this summer's Venice Biennale consists of a bronze sculpture of a female body intended to unite briefly with the 3,300-year-old limestone head of Queen Nefertiti at the Berlin museum]

well, doesn't every bust need a body? or vice versa. :-) although i think maybe if a head has been happily a head for 3300 years sans anything to stand on, sure, why not keep it that way?

i need a nap.

when a girl dreams in a thunderstorm, this is what happens:

a poet has me in a bathroom. he tells me oh we should make love. i don't want to make love with him, but feel as though i should be nice because he is my superior so i politely decline. he removes his clothes, lays down on the white tile floor, begins rolling around. he has huge boils on his back. as he rolls back and forth he starts yelling, "hit them! hit them!" i think he's in pain so i reach out to hit one and it bounces back at my hand. "floppy one" he says, and i run out of the bathroom, disgusted and terrified.

i leave the house only to realize i'm being chased, that i have in some way been defiled and must be punished. i run through castles and down streets. finally three men with cigars catch me and take me through a roman arch, into the middle of a field. they tie me to a wooden post, keep calling me the madonna. a crowd gathers. i can see from above and on the other side of the arch that these men take off my arms and legs with axes. then my head. fastforward a year later, there is a festival, i am still in the field tied to the post. they stitch my arms, legs, and head back on. i return to being inside my body, i can again see through the other side of the arch, through my eyes. they have some kind of celebration, that i've died, that i'm resurrected. then they relive my dismemberment again. this will happen over and over ad infinitum. i will never not be tied to that post, never not be constantly with or without my body.

from now on i'm not sleeping in thunderstorms. it's too much. i mean, how can you walk around normal when you know dreams like this visit? may come again?

i don't have so much time to go into this but i would just like to say that this time last year i was reading the goldbug variations and there was this long long passage about dna and i thought to myself wow what a beautiful thing human life is and how magnificent that we all are born and grow up and walk around with personalities and red/blonde/brown/black hair. forever and ever human beings have constructed these stories to explain who/what/why human beings, and in the end the truth of it is so much more beautiful than the fiction.

this time this year i've had a similar realization, hopefully one more lasting (i was only reminded of that thought because of my new thought and am sad that it didn't stick with as much glue as it deserved) about our big world and why we run around asking it to have a magic it may not have when it's such a magnificent thing. when "the thing in itself," as they say, is so amazing.

not that i'm not a fan of magic. i still keep a jar of faerie dust next to my bed, just in case. i still empty the jar out, set it next to me, and tell it, now jar, now you keep a dragon, now you keep a small boy on a swing kicking higher, now you have a star all bottled up in you, and i believe it, i love the jar and the dragon and the boy and the star. but then maybe now, at least i hope, i will stop asking a star to empty out, to kick higher, to grow wings