Magdalena O!

My friend Safia writes/composes/dreams up these incredible worlds of perception and sensation.

(i will not tell you)

They mutilate they torment each other
with silences with words
as if they had another
life to live

they do so
as if they had forgotten
that their bodies
are inclined to death
that the insides of (wo)men
easily break down

ruthless with each other
they are weaker
than plants and animals
they can be killed by a word
by a smile by a look

(Translated by Czeslaw Milosz)

I was talking to a friend about poetry a few days ago. Moreover, they were just listening while I went on and on. I don’t have many poetry-lovin friends.

9:22:33 PM Number 6 (Magdalena): Poetry is difficult to love. I love it. But I can understand why people don’t. It’s often looked down upon as a lesser art even though sometimes it is through poetry that the most intense truths can be articulated. That’s why most people are drawn to artists, cos they are drawn to people who can express themselves, imo, and articulate desires because everyone has desires, but often do not have the vocabulary to express or even understand them.

Then today, I started Erica Jong’s Seducing the Demon (I specifically linked this review because it’s only fitting to Jong to be both, lauded and laid into always) and she talks a lot about poetry, and considers herself a poet first. I think about poetry as the most potent fantasy you can have – the most amorous hands can seek you out in poems. I give myself to poetry, writing and reading it. I’ve grown to be more weary about losing control in all parts of my life. I took pride in relentlessly giving into my passions and my politics, and standing my ground loudly. I’ve become louder in some ways, and have turned meek on others. Jong talks of Lawrence, no doubt, one cannot talk of sexual pleasures and books without Lawrence.

“Sex is everywhere in the media, but ecstasy is absent. Many literary novelists shy away from sex because it’s become a pornographic cliché. But it doesn’t need to be. Lawrence was a master of ecstasy (Jong, 78).”

“Sex has the unparalled power to make us absurd to ourselves, It also has the power to make us understand transcendence. When it it ecstatic nothing is more powerful than sex. And nothing is more difficult to capture into words than transdence. It’s not only because sex is embarrasing to many people, but also because ectsasy implies loss of control. This is difficult to acknowledge. Nobody seems to talk about ecstasy these days. Sex is always talked about in terms of control (Jong, 76).”

“Ecstasy cannot exist without a complete loss of control (Jong, 77).”

That complete loss of control is what we’re constantly after, isn’t it? Yet, we shy away, unable to completely surrender. Surrender always ends up in hurt. How much risk is enough? too much? That ecstasy is missing from everything it seems. It’s all just sex. Being seduced and seducing simultaneously should be on sex’s pedestal. Sometimes I worry I sound so superfluous or teenage when I go on about my lust of love. Why is trying to unravel your demons characterized of youth, moreover of immaturity? I once threw myself on a street after a rainstorm, rolling around in dirt until I was completely covered to show my devotion, to give the person a tangible sign of what they meant to me when their doubts rose high because their own love for me was more than they were ready for. Was my act immature? or is it the articulation of it in words seem lame? Part of me never sees any act of love as lame, because I have the hopes that everything that comes out love is as true as it could get. If anything, the doubter would be lame, because they never doubted my love, but doubted their own capacity in handling their love, not mine.

I still have doubts though and reservations about poetry and the lust of love. I wonder if I am a lesser being because I am easily caught up in all of it, that it takes me along and I lose sight of other things. I’m not sure what these other things are though, or why they are more important than living out fantasies. Is it all get filed under ‘self-absorbed, self-involved narccisism’? I’ve never been good at being organized anyway.

I like to stay up late into the night and dream. Photo and design by me.

November 4, 2006 (a spoken word piece not fully done and inspired by an experience Safia told me about)

I’m sick of all those bitches that
befriend me because I’m dating a
producer.

I’m tired of those bitches talking to
me because my friends are DJ’s.

Don’t show up at my house because
he’s there,
when I know you only care
for him to acknowledge your existence

without any resistance,

because you worked so hard for that
name, so it can roll off his tongue
like he means it.

You want to do what?
PR? A & R? What is that?
PR so you can play red-hot
A&R so you can audition for that raree show

The acronyms mean nothing when
you’re sleeping with them.

How hard is it for us women to be
taken seriously?
So we have these bitches trying to
run things in ways that fuck it up
for us all.

Public Relations is relating to the
audience not his dick.
Public relations doesn’t reek of the
desperation – you put off and everyone
smells it. Please take a second to
note that the words here are dope &
your roast beef pussy can’t compare to
the love I got for mine, yeah I wouldn’t
sell it for a dime-
bag, so you always have weed around in
case the boys come through for
“a joint to finish off the night.”

You all know this.

Leaving comments on MySpace like
you shared something secret for the
public to read,
it’s whack, you know it – we all know
it.
But enlighten us please, how
you do it with such ease.
The game, the time, how you ever gonna
find yourself when you’re busy looking for
others.

How can you know yourself, when
you’re too busy trying to know everyone
else.
But no one knows you – because no
one cares. Try it real next lifetime, it works
better that way.

Cos when I die at least I knew I was
fly.

(Inspired by a dance hall lyric of all things & not done…)

November 4, 2006 2:41

I just want to be around you,
not inside you.

___ We wrap our legs in each other,
and it’s friendship,
our kisses are made
with fingertips running down
our mind ___

I touch your head to feel alive
based on assumption
we’re eating each other
with ____

yet, it don’t matter because
inside, in bed,
we feed off
the poetry that is love.

You heard it before yea?
I mean the love that holds
hands not dicks
the love that is equal
not based on power
I mean the love when I see you
happy with someone else
my heart ____
because we don’t need that -

our friendship suffers through relationships
so we don’t have to.

II.

This friendship is a mirror,
because I look at you, and
my eyes can actually see -
I look at you staring back
at me knowingly,

united we stand
and together we fall.

The lyrics change with us,
we remix love into a
man-woman friendship.
We remix assumptions of
sleeping together.

III.

We don’t need to quote literature
or love songs because moments
evolve of our synergy. We bleed
the poetry that which we write
for each other.

But can I really tell you something?
I’m dying to be inside you.
for you inside me.

Final-Recipient: qrn005;you

Action: failed

X-Original-Status: 2.7.7

Diagnostic-Code: smtp;277 Requested action not taken: heart unavailable