journal 2

at night my feet freeze up like ice. the coldness comes from inside. My hands less so, when I move them close to my chest. there I wait for hours for the physics of tiny molecules vibrating from the almost artificial hiccuping of my heartbeat to conduct thermal energy through lungs then ribs then muscle then fat then skin to my fingertips where my internal blood circulation was not fast enough. Progress is slow. The chill in my feet ends exactly up at the ankle. A useless and arbitrary line was drawn between the tijuana of my heel and the california of my calves. I blame my heart for whatever reason it has for being slow and weak. Is it unmotivated?
Afraid? and what would a heart be afraid of?
I have a hard time knowing that these parts of my body are mine. Most at home is the feeling of being surrounded by water, not knowing where my fingers end and the ocean begins. Then I am the entirety of the earth, a movement in the wave, a small physical purpose who happens to be conscious, my whole body reduces to the cold and sloth of my slow and stupid heart.
As a result my blood pressure is undeniably low, and I have no temper. maybe I do not even love at all.

meijuun & the difference between raleigh and mie scattering

Meijuun falls into the thin spaces between the pages of a book when you look at it from the sides. Meijuun smiles at me when I see a electric socket's alarmed double-face.

journal 1

i just cleaned out my ears. it's definitely a pride thing to sigh in self-satisfaction and relief at the tremendous amount of earwax one's own body had produced in just a couple of days. Even more so is it a boost to the ego when one manages to coax it all out in one large sheet.

Do you believe me when I say writing is listening? as a writing major I don't even write everyday. It's as much a crime as a strawberry refusing to taste like a strawberry. And believe you me those strawberries have committed the ultimate crime of it's kind. It's fine to look green and unripe and taste like shit, but if you're shiny, big and red, you better taste like you promise.
I know it really isn't the fault of the strawberry. It got drugged up. It had bad parents. or both.
But as creatures of free will I am at fault for not growing up and ripening properly.

So I must set aside time everyday to write whatever the fuck comes to mind, even about the mundane parts of life. Because even so, there are kernels of meaning waiting to be made and understood about everyday.
Earwax becomes a metaphor for my refusal to listen to my own conscience.
Earwax doubles as another symbol for the relief of finally writing, and writing something amusing.
Earwax is also, thank goodness, out of my ear.
I can't wait to see what other refuse my body comes up with today.

off to class.

bite-wanting teeth

i am the bite-wanting teeth,
the ground-wanting soles of my feet, eating up
the concrete, the curves under my feet like a tongue.

i walk so fast the heat doesn't get me-- the sun-baked sidewalk flicks off my toes when i run- and i run, and when i run i cut into the wind like a blade cuts water-- the wind rolls behind me making invisible curls and eddies, licking at the rippling of my blouse, who can hardly keep up

i become a voice, escaping a mouth, traveling the speed of
sound i escape through a window and
i realize in this moment
the freedom and the fear of knowing
there can be no one to stop me but myself.

meijuun & the copper daisies, or inter-shameful transpacific discourse

No one caught them growing in the meadows. An epidemic of bright copper colored flowers came unsuspected into the suburbs, first spotting up onto the sides of freeways, then into the corners of yards, the grout lines in the concrete. There they were pulled out adamantly as weeds, but unlike the living, the dead ones were hideous. After only a couple of days these copper-penny daisies, as the hikers called them, rolled up into a ball to produce seeds. The pretty petals pulled in, and bulbous masses resembling testicles would emerge. These unsightly hairy balls germinated in weeks after falling to the ground, the stems brown and useless, baking in the sun.

Now the city is full of these. The empty lots filled with half beautiful luminescent penny daisies, with testicles in-between. Children often pick at the ugly seed pods, amazed at how large they are. Proud of their discovery, they hold them up to their parents who snatch the treasure away, disgusted, then scold their children almost with seemingly too much passion.

In any case, the local news did not ignore the penny daisy invasion, reporting on it as if it were an issue of national security. And true, no one knew exactly where it came from and who or what was the exact cause. I saw a half-hour discussion special starting from the botanist from the university, the chief park ranger, and a meteorologist all with their theories. The ranger believed it was a species of rodent that was exterminated from the local ecosystem whose primary diet were these unsightly testicle pods. The botanist believed it was a scientific mutation, and the meteorologist actually didn't say much at all. He mentioned the lack of rainfall, but it didn't seem to relate. At the end no one actually had a concrete answer anyway. Typical local news coverage. All speculation and no information.

Really, not much happened except that there was this conspiracy theory upheld by some people in the neighborhood. That the government or something did it. I don't know. In any case, what ended up happening was that much of the city wanted this unnatural occurrence out of sight. I mean, people just walked around with their own personal bottle of Weed-B-Gone.

But really, the flowers really weren't so terrible to behold in the valley, viewed from enough distance where the hairy balls were hidden/blurred among the multiple blossoms. Almost majestic, a whole acreage of them. Meijuun thought so anyway. When we saw them for the first time it was before the excessive overgrowth, anyway. Went for a walk into the hills, and she was so amazed she plucked a huge bouquet, brought them back home and they sat in the middle of our table, gleaming under our cheap dim lights. Even after the reaction against them she still wore them in her hair, so that they wouldn't turn into pods, and instead would die discarded as beautiful browning copper petals falling out of her long black hair at the end of the day. Sometimes in bed I would see one she missed, gleaming even in the blue night-glow.