Nicked from a friend’s status update on Facebook – but apparently it’s a famous quote.

“When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You just know that your name is safe in their mouth.” Billy – Age 4

I’m doubtful that “Billy, age 4″ ever existed (Bravo, clever marketeers.) but still, this is the freshest, least contrived description of love I have heard in a while.  I really dig the idea of a sacred part of you finding refuge inside someone else.

once. what does it matter
when or who, i knew
of love.
i fixed my body
under his and went
to sleep in love
all trace of me
was wiped away

This is an extract from Sonia Sanchez’s Ballad.  It’s been swirling around in my brain for a while.  I think I might be nearing girl time because the last few days, this bit, my favorite part of the entire poem, has also made me feel incredibly…disconnected.

All trace of me was wiped away.

I adore So-San.  No-one can make words massage you the way she can.

All trace of me.  Wiped away.

I do love me a strong cup of existential anguish first thing on a Sunday morning.   It’s how I feel about Shanghai now.  As I get ready for the last of my deserting friends to leave in nine days I feel like I’m having a cloak of reluctant anonymity thrust upon me.  Like I’m entering the world of anti-Cheers. Like there’ll only be people who know Contextual Me left

On the upside, Contextual Me is cool.  Depending on the context in which you know me her.

Work Me: She’s awesome.  She dresses super-businessy these days and gets stuff done.  Hire her.  I’d totally be friends with her.  You know, if I wasn’t already her.
Weekend Me: Her, I could take or leave.  All my stupidest decisions seem to be made on a Friday or Saturday.  And not just during the evenings either.  It seems that judgment lapses are not purely a nighttime thing.
Church Me:  She has not made an appearance all year.  This is bad.   But she will be around a lot during the coming weeks.

All trace of me.  Wiped away.

Gah!  Can you tell my birthday is just round the corner.  Can ya?

I don’t usually blog on weekends but the last few weeks have felt like having a gargantuan sumo wrestler squatted on my chest. I haven’t been able to breathe. Or sleep. On the plus side, all that nervous energy has gone into research and pitching and writing and editing. But being “on” for 18 uninterrupted days takes its toll and some pretty self-flagellatory poetry has been written.

This week has been difficult to wrap my head around. Someone killed themselves in the building opposite mine on Wednesday. That’s all I’m going to say about it but it was one of those things that when it happens, makes you morbidly introspective. It seduces you into contemplating making bold impulsive leaps into the unknown because you figure The Known isn’t up to much, how bad can the alternative be? Then you stall. Just before take-off. Because at least you know this devil. And that’s what really counts, isn’t it?

But this morning, the thing that I really needed to happen, happened. The person we had been rooming with left. It was very sudden and very, very cathartic. We made a mistake. No, I did. And there was no way of undoing that mistake. Nothing to do but endure every long, tension-riddled day and count them down, one by one, until the merciful release of a contract expiration came. But this morning, Person X woke me up to tell me they we leaving and that they would be back in a month to clean the room and get the rest of their things.

Thank you, God. The negative energy was killing me. The resentful silences. The malignant aura all around the place. The motley clan of strangers sneaking in and out of the apartment at odd hours of the night. The introduction of inappropriate substances into our living space. But I never really blamed Person X for this; I blamed myself. I found them. I moved them in. Finders keepers.

But it’s over now. The chest-squatter has dissolved into little more than a fading bad taste in my mouth. Tonight, I’ll wash it away with sweet martinis. And start afresh tomorrow. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

I went to writing group again last night. One of the things we did was write about a protagonist and his/her foil as two sides of the same coin. Earlier in the evening we’d written some poetry and, for probably my first time ever, I read out one of my poems to a bunch of virtual strangers. It’s not people reading my stuff that wigs me out. It’s me reading it aloud in my own voice that I find so scary. I felt incredibly exposed. Like there was a giant magnifying glass zooming in on all my imperfections. Like all the flaws I work so hard to disguise were ringing out in each word I uttered. It freaked me out a little bit. But am glad I did it.

Here’s my villain/heroine thing. One’s a dealer, one’s junkie. Their backstories are anybody’s guess.

Villain

Sweet-kissing Chrysanthemum. Chrissy for short. She had a way about her. A ravenous, unspoken thing that devoured the men she toyed with. Sometimes, the women too. If she was fluid, then her morals were vapor. Barely there. She didn’t need them. Morals were the brakes. The red light to her fast existence. She was all go, baby. Sweet-kissing Chrysanthemum. The girl with a pill for every ache. Just tell her where it hurts. She might make it better. She might fix you. Or she might just be fill you up with her poison because you want it. And because she can.

Heroine
It kept on growing. This gaping cavern inside her which she’d been struggling to fill. Struggling for years, it felt like. Lord, when would this uphill be over? It was so steep and she so tired that everything ached. From the frazzled tips of her raggedy hair to the hardening scabs on her battered feet. She needed a release. Or a boost. Something to numb the pain. To launch her high over this landscape of desolation and despair. She needed Chrissy. Just for tonight. Something to make the sweet sweet again. To wash out the bitter from her mouth. Tomorrow she’d started start. The repair work would begin. But today she just needed her head and a one way ticket to anywherebuthere.

Have you ever tried something out for the first time and –

No, wait. Have you ever tried someone out for the first time and thought: Ooh, you’re just not my cup of tea?

I don’t mean that in the romantic sense. I mean, you meet people in a variety of ways: new job, mutual friends, online, in a bar, at a special interest group – whatever. You meet them and you are a little bit intrigued. You wonder what’s beneath the surface. How many angles they have. How quick they are to get fired up about an issue. What issues they get fired up about. What talent they have that they share with the world. What secrets they are desperate to keep hidden. When the last time they cried was. Why. You wonder: if they got hit by a truck tomorrow, would I remember them? If it were you on the end of the truck, would they remember you?

Everyone wonders these things, don’t they? And then you get to know them a little bit, and you find out that they are boring. What’s beneath surface? Nothing. No angles. They are totally apathetic. They don’t care about anything, with the predictable exception of money. And the only thing truly remarkable about them is the complete absence of a sense of self-awareness. You stop wondering about the last time they cried or the cause of the tears and that truck that might hit them? You’re no longer sure that would really be as tragic as the initial thought suggested.

Am I the only person this happens to?

Full disclosure: Shanghai is a very difficult city to thrive in. My head no longer works the way it used to. I blame the melamine. I can get by. I can stay busy. I can build my portfolio. I can let my portfolio building buy me pretty red shoes. But that’s the cut-and-paste way of living. I’m talking about thriving. About being a superstar. About laughing because I genuinely find it funny, not because it’s the expected response. About sticking with a conversation because I’m completely enthralled by it, not because I can’t think of a solid exit line. About tasting wine because I want to delight my palate, not because it’s the quickest way to get to Anywherebuthere.

There’s something missing. Something’s off. I’ve thought about it a lot and I’ve had to consider the idea that maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m the one whose expectations are too high. Maybe I am the one who’s completely one-dimensional and boring. Maybe Shanghai is the same as London and Salzburg and Harare and Bratislava and it’s me who’s just lost my mojo. I remember those other cities. I laughed and danced and created and oozed vitality. I remember those days. I remember those people. Sonia Sanchez, who does the most incredible things with minimal words, says:

once. what does it matter

when or who, I knew

of love.

I fixed my body

under his and went

to sleep in love

all trace of me

was wiped away

All trace of me was wiped away. Sometimes I listen to myself talking the Shanghai Talk. I watch myself walking the Shanghai Walk. And I feel like that. All trace of me. Wiped away.

Back in high school, in the mid-nineties, the white girls were very into the British boy band, Take That. The black girls into US Rapper Tupac Shakur. The contrast between the two sets of teens, in pretty much every sense, could not have been starker. On 13 February 1996, Take That announced that they were disbanding. White girls: distraught. Black girls: tickled pink. How we laughed at their OTT despair, their cacophonous wailing, their futile attempts to dial UK-based help lines, their insistence on wearing mournful all-white instead of regulation bottle green. “Drama Queens”, we called them. It was pretty satisfying.

Exactly 7 months later, on September 13, Tupac Shakur died from gunshot wounds. Hello, Shoe? Other foot, please. I remember pleading with my mom to let me stay home from school for a few days. So bloodshot were my eyes and acute my distress.

But this blog entry is not about teenage melodrama, racial division or how spiteful young girls can be. I’m listening to Tupac Shakur right now while working on a project. And I feel the same way now that I did 13 years ago. (Minus the hysterical hero-worship.) He might be rapping about hustling, Hennessy and ho’s, but I get it. Somehow, despite the utter dichotomy of our life experiences, I get it.

See, the problem with putting someone into box that says “Gangsta Rapper” is that it you have to add labels like “misogynist”, “ex-felon” and “gratuitously vulgar reprobate”. And once you do that, you don’t see anything else or hear anything else in the music. Yet, just as easily Tupac, could’ve been “social commentator”, “poet”, “powerful orator”. He was the man who said:

We wouldn’t ask a rose that grew from the concrete why it had damaged petals. We would celebrate its tenacity, we would all love its will to reach the sun. Well, we are the roses, this is the concrete and these are my damaged petals. Don’t ask me why, thank God, and ask me how.

The incongruity of that, the hardened, gun-toting rapper comparing himself to a delicate flower, is startling. Who doesn’t love an underdog? A misunderstood struggler. A fragile blossom trying to sprout up from among the overbearing weeds. Who doesn’t love that?

Of course he did say some pretty horrific stuff about people with sickle cell disease and threaten to gun down a whole boatload of people but….but…If you strip away the vulgarity, the f**k you’s and the die b**ch, die’s and just listen: He makes a lot of sense. A lot of angry, vulnerable, insightful, surviving, indomitable sense.

I miss music like that. I miss lyrical authenticity like that. Where’s the gut-wrenching vulnerability in music now? Where did true artistry go? Oh, wait, here it is.

Someone once said to me about poetry: Everybody writes it, nobody reads it. I can just picture him saying it now. He probably eats pasta with his hands. The Neanderthal.

I love the accessible type of poems: simple and unpretentious and sad. I do prefer my poetry sad. But there’s always room for some feisty Maya Angelou or zany Wendy Cope. But the sad ones are truly the good’uns.

I love this poem. It is by Michelle Linn Hall. I wish I could find more stuff by her. I hope am not breaking any copyright laws but I think it should be ok because, again, it’s not my poem, it’s Michelle Linn Hall’s. And so very pretty.

Piety

By Michelle Linn Hall

I stare at the cactus in back of the
greenhouse that cowers in hiding,
forgiving the Maker for lack of companions
in voiceless devotion;
he wonders if water were always so friendly
but simply too shy to sneak under the armor
to whistle good morning. But then I am
elsewhere, and in sudden musing,
I catch myself thinking if only I’d married
that surgeon I met on the trolley in Frisco,
the tall man with stubble, I’d likely be
swimming bare-bodied at midnight, lazy,
pink petal in peach-colored porch lights.
But the water runs onto my foot from the
table and empties the pitcher;
the cactus was waiting, so patient; so often
in silence he prayed that I sometimes feel
guilty for leaving.