Moon Memo: Traveling Alone in the Dark
Good morning. It's still dark here in Portland. It feels like we're in the time of year where it is always dark. Raining hard, and dark early in the early afternoon, and dark late until I'm already at work. In the words of those great poets Metallica, "Darkness, imprisoning me, all that I see, absolute horror."
I just finished a BIG project. LGBTQIA+ training revision just went out. Big win. Feeling good about it, but mostly just happy to see it out there. Finishing everything on the checklist for work. All the new revisions. All the annoying tasks. Spending the rest of the month figuring out next year.
Work
I tell a story in orientation, which to me is a folk tale. It's half true, but true enough. A disenfranchised youth leaves her small town to go to college. She says she has summer classes, but is really running away from home. Settles into a warehouse in Northwest Portland, in an area full of empty warehouse spaces (soon to be bulldozed and turned into expensive apartments for rich people). She is naive and confused. She's out of the closet, but going back in because the christian college is almost free. She doesn't know she's a girl yet, wouldn't for 20 years or so.
One night, when she gets up from the shitty stinking sofa that she's sleeping on, near where her friend (lover?) from high school is sleeping off some kind of white powder, she steps on a nail or needle or something sharp on the way to the bathroom. The next day she is sweating and shivering. Her friend drags her to a little free clinic on the corner of 13h and Salmon. They give her medicine, bandage her up. Probably save her life. Who knows what would have happened if she had ignored it.
She goes on to the christian college. The marriage. The divorce. The coming out. The end of teaching. And now she's leading this training.
That's the folk tale I tell. That is half true. Mostly true. A little true.
Technology and writing tools
The perfect Apps are the ones that you are using, that are easy, that make things go smoothly, and gets shit done.
She says, as she looks at yet another To Do app, another writing app, another notebook, another fucking keyboard.
The problem is that the Muse shows up differently when I use different tools. For example: Poems right now are showing up REALLY easily on the phone. Almost all the poems I've written this year went directly on the phone, without the intervention of paper. Prose, on the other hand, kind of demands a full sized keyboard, so I've been writing a lot of it on the laptop or iPad with a keyboard case. The little raspberry pi word processor lies dormant and waiting for days I need to be away from the internet while writing. My notebooks hum in their door, waiting for me when screens fail. Different tools for different writing.
Coffee
I am not much of a snob when it comes to coffee. Jade will attest that I'm regularly drinking the shit coffee from McDonald's if I'm driving. Driving coffee should not be good coffee. Driving coffee only has two jobs: keep you awake, and keep you warm.
I will splurge if I'm at a coffee shop, though. I'm currently addicted to cappuccinos. I'm picky. If a place has a bad cappuccino, it means that their music is going to suck, that the server is going to be rude, that someone will talk loudly on their cellphone the whole time I am trying to work on a poem. A cappuccino is a contract for comfort.
Right now I'm at work, in the dark office, drinking store brand coffee squeezed out of a kuerig. It's bitter and disgusting. But it's a focus. And it's helping me out.
Reading and Writing
Excellent poems lately. Very happy with them. Just having a very good stretch of writing. Current prompt work is reading Louise Gluck poems and writing based on them.
Gluck struggled with anorexia for most of her life. When she was in her 20s she almost died. She says that poetry saved her, because it gave her something to focus on outside of her body. I get that feeling so much. Poetry is my drug of choice now. It's my obsession put in the right place.
A couple of poems:
Poetry
This ephemeral working of light on screens can be poetry. The small kindness of needles and foil left clean for waiting veins can be
poetry if the heart is split open by the drug of compassion. Whole books of nothing can search for poetry if you see the struggle
of waking in the dark, grinding coffee into your throat, attacking your fear of needles stopping the heartbeat with pleasure or
escape, any kind of escape. Pain isn't poetry unless it's the sacred kind, and all pain drips with the sacred. The junky leaves offerings
of candles and prayer at afternoon mass before scoring. That is poetry, isn't it? That is worth every night of worry for her, isn't it?
Maenad
All that is wild comes to the surface. Long nails sharpened by sex work and beauty smolder with cigarettes,
bottle blond hair baked by chemicals and desire. She is trauma and fury, she is a wine drunk destroyer of men
crying in the arms of crossdressers. We both know rejection by fathers, wonder what it takes by god to be
worth more than a body, pretty face, anonymous fuck in airport hotels. She breathes in smoke, blood lips
leaving a ring on paper. Some things are sacred in their debauchery. She is sacred in the way she listens after.
This is Fine
Online we trip towards the middle brother, turn flame wars into all the work we'll do to change the world. We think we're better
than the braindead megaphones keeping all the fires up around votes for the lesser, never for the optimist. Do the work
that sounds uplifting but turns us towards list completers. Conservative estimates list dead children as worthy sacrifices to gods
that curve towards control. Love and art can be turned to the machines now, along with who can live and who can die. Risk
the death urge that carries us all. Stroke a face or thigh while you can. Maybe war will be the answer, friends. This is fine.
Outro
I promise I won't be spamming your inbox as much as I have been. New tools, and I'm making sure that they work.
Love you all to bits. Someday, maybe, we'll be in the same room together, drinking cola and watching movies. A girl can dream.
Love and stuff,
Misha Lynn Moon