can experimental poetry provide a release/new pathway for those who have been "sentenced"

Write To Connect will do two workshops on the body poetics of moving past the "sentence" at Rose Manor. This is a residential treatment program for women who have elected to live here as an alternative to prison and losing custody of their kids. I imagine, being "sentenced" in the legal sense, is like diagnosis in the medical or bureaucratic sense. As when, last week, Social Security required me to go to a doctor to redetermine my "the extent of my deformity": so they could determine whether I could get health care or not. How it stings and stays with you, but the process os word toward an option.

How sentences are binding in terms of a system's great churning, consequence and getting low to get help/options. But sentences can be exploded, reworked, healed, revised through poetry...I am meditating on that now in preparation for meeting these women on their journeys.

Seminole heights, if it has sidewalks, is where I would like to live

Seminole heights sans the heights, with a lot of Spanish moss and low-lying sponginess, as if the limestone was just inches below the dirt. here we are at a park in Seminole Heights. Dad saying where are the drum? No drums at the Friday night concert, but an unplugged version of Indigo Girls Galileo and then, Walking in Memphis. A moment of feeling very at home. These songs never sounded so the same, so good.

(Dad's shoes. At some point, in the 90's, his band had a Converse endorsement or sponsorship or some such thing  and he had the high tops that were pre- Target knock offs. But his drum kit, i think, had to have the Converse logo spray painted on it.)

The park concert is actually, at the Lowry Park Zoo. Where there was once a semi-circular concrete stairway painted to look like a rainbow. Not a 1980's rainbow, but a 1970's rainbow. 

Dad or Mom, or some other strong relative would carry me up the rainbow and into the park where hippos lived behind chain link fences. My UV blindness caused me to trip over a chunk of tar dried on the sidewalk near the ferris Wheel and had a hematoma, but I think I still saw the dusty, poop smeared elephant.

Now, my little brother walks up in a tight grey wifebeater and skinny jeans. He gives me his coveted smart phone with the flashlight feature turned on so that I can be safe in the ptich black, mosquito infested port-a-potty. Night blindness and public toilets. Implores me not to drop it in, but sounds otherwise brave and chivalrous. It is likley he has gotten the part in the high school kids' adapation of Little Shop of Horrors. He says his friend's mom asked him why I would move back here from San Francisco. There is no way I can create a good enough arc in as few sentences  as would be appropriate, to be shouted through a port-a-potty door to a 14-year-old I adore.

sapos flattened

Causeway, algae.

My first day of college, by the briny Sarasota bay, I met a girl named Martha who spent most of her time in an old oak, during the ice cream social. When she came down, she looked at me and said, I do see a toad in you--the freckles on your face. She disappeared a few weeks later and I always think of her.

Red Solo cup, Rick's on the River, the ubiquitous Born to Be Wild Cover, the old toothless guy at the bar who asked me and Reese which college football team we were for.

Giant pond snail, now hollowed out by ants.

Jovan does not believe the retention pond in Mom's back yard contains gators. But they do migrate. Come and go. Like the way otters appeared, in the deep middle, crossing, and then gone in the brush, gone.  And sometimes you see the flat, prehistoric-looking soft-shelled turtle and sometimes you only hear the snake bird, whose caw is even more like a crank than the yard geese. Maybe the sound radiates down, and scares the fish up into his avian-serpent's beak.

Is it shameful that I do not know the names for common things, in the landscape that is so climatized (though not necessarily traversable) to my body? Or does that make sense? Inger Christensen tells me, in Grass, that words insist on "procession", whereas Florida, and the arthritic body, insists on fluid stillness.  I google "palm tree pollen frond" and find an article that tells me, due to climate change, Antarctica was once covered in palm trees. It is still cold here for May. Disturbingly so. It gets down to 60 at night.

Sapos ahumados, is what goes through my mind when we see the little American toad in the cul de sac gutter beside Mom's driveway, last week. I poke him with my toe. He feels dry, rigid. It's playing dead, the way my pet toad, also an American (because having a bufo in the house was dangerous), played dead on my bedroom carpet, at 4am, when I was in high school. This was pre- rat and yellow-bellied-slider. He got loose because I had to take my hand off of him to spoon out the mealworm pupae we stored in the refrigerator. If not kept cold, these pupae would turn into big-ass buzzing beetles, in minutes, I believed. So, I always hastened to get them back in the fridge. In my hurry, the Wet Sprocket got away and started doing a wild hop toward my erotic Celtic novels. I trapped him between my calloused crooked feet. Pre hip replacement, there was absolutely no bending over. (Once, there was that other time, at the Days Inn that my college had converted to dorms, behind the overgrown RV lot. The buzzing sulfur light. Puerto Rican night at the adjoining Ramada pulsing over the crumbled concrete wall. Crouching, my stripper friend and fellow postmodern lit student, helping me to catch and hold toads.) Toad in the gutter from last week got truly desiccated just a day or two later, lost some dimensions to a tire.

I am wanting this blog to be something else. To return to writing about somatic poetry, disability culture, something. But there is mostly jus tthis porch, for now.  

The porch I wanted, to begin again to figure anything out, or just to feel.   Jason [Phydras] writes, on http://tract-trace.blogspot.com that prose allows for time, for the sentence to become poetic as it "wanders far afield" and also, takes on a quality of "suddenness".  I have descended to a part of the country where I most come from, that is nearly below sea level, that defines disability as only developmental. (Ok, maybe that is wrong--but there is a lack of specificity in "professional" or service provider speak, a way in which other types of disability don't get seen...or it has to do with naming only what can be funded...I don't understand it yet and I am not sure I want to.)

Swimming, horizontally, is difficult with a rigid neck. I lack the presence of mind to practice with a snorkel. Feel conspicuous among the children at their YMCA swim lessons *the pool on this shaded porch is not swimmable, due to the strangely cold May. Luckily there is the hated one at the Y.). It occurs to me that when/if--with a baby in there, I will be a tiny, walking swimming hole. How I want gills, and to sit quietly, inside myself, on this porch. But to become non-verbal and push off too, into my own air, beyond the screen.

Sunny Taylor on the disabled body, the occupied bed, capitalist value, erotic work thoughts

Crunched down in the big, sunny, soft, tropical, albeit medical model landscape of Florida, trying to find the right niche (to carve is labor so tedious and complex it almost defeats the purpose of trying to dig into a mellow, allowing small pocket/niche for a simple life), I can only revel in Sunny Taylor's article that Michelle Puckett sent to me. Go here and read it: 

http://monthlyreview.org/2004/03/01/the-right-not-to-work-power-and-disability

But here are some big chunks I adore:

"Disability, in contrast, is the political and social repression of impaired people. This is accomplished by making them economically and socially isolated. Disabled people have limited housing options, are socially and culturally ostracized, and have very few career opportunities. The disabled community argues that these disadvantages are thus not due to impairment by its nature, but due to a cultural aversion to impairment, a lack of productive opportunity in the current economy for disabled people, and the multi-billion dollar industry that houses and “cares” for the disabled population that has developed as a consequence of this economic disenfranchisement. This argument is known as the social model of disability.5Disablement is a political state and not a personal one and thus needs to be addressed as a civil rights issue."

"Marx and later theorists have shown how capitalist development has privileged certain biological forms of embodiment (for example white able-bodied males). Because of this, it is important when trying to understand the impact of space on bodies (for instance inaccessible buildings and transportation), to consider who is forming (and has formed) spaces and who inhabits them. The extreme inaccessibility and alienation felt by impaired people may not be a natural consequence of their own personal embodiments in the twenty-first century, but instead a complex system of historical, cultural, and geographical discrimination that has evolved inside and alongside capitalism and that we now simply regard (and too frequently dismiss) as disability. Crippled and elderly people have an especially precarious relationship to the machine that is production and consumption. People work hard, they age, their efficiency inevitably lessens and, unless they are fortunate enough to have some savings stashed away, they are too often put in nursing homes where their new value will be as “beds.” As Marta Russell has astutely pointed out, the institutionalization of disabled people “evolved from the cold realization that people with disabilities could be commodified…People with disabilities are ‘worth’ more to the Gross Domestic Product when occupying a bed in an institution than when they’re living in their own homes."

"What I mean by the right not to work is perhaps as much a shift in ideology or consciousness as it is a material shift. It is about our relation not only to labor but the significance of performing that labor, and to the idea that only through the performance of wage labor does the human being actually accrue value themselves. It is about cultivating a skeptical attitude regarding the significance of work, which should not be taken at face value as a sign of equality and enfranchisement, but should be analyzed more critically. Even in situations where enforcement of the ADA and government subsidies to corporations lead to the employment of the disabled, who tends to benefit, employers or employees?"

And the image that goes with the article, a self-portrait of Sunny (who is a painter):

Just what does she think she is doing, affixing her naked self to a scholarly, political article on the body, disability and capitalist worth? Being a fucking genius, I say.

In a sort of related vein, am artistic statement by me about some of the erotic performance work I did in CA, work that used my body just as it it was/is  (in a slightly different person of my own disabled self) may be on it's way to appearing in the Oxford Journal of Dance and Well Being. I made a lot of money doing the performance work (though the risks outweighed the gain). However, the value of the essay in which I may appear, with other disabled performance artists on the fringe--that is priceless.  Now to remember that and re-channel that energy into my current job search.

Phil and Eugenio

With Phil and Jovani at the Columbia restaurant in Ybor. In a smaller, darker, more Moorish-looking room off the main dining area, a private party is watching flamingo dancers. As in Cuban flamenco. Gypsy Kings echo through the tiled corridors. 

After Phil and Claudia's wedding in 2007, I flew back to San Francisco with memories of the Ft. Lauderdale lounge where the event was held, a desire to return to that little art deco tide pool of a room over and over again. And so, I painted my SF walls tiffany blue and avocado green. 

Now, P and C live in Miami, with Penelope, age 14 months. I bemoan the fact that we did not move there, but maybe, someday. Some arts orgs that I have interviewed for here, in Tampa, look at me flatly and say, "Why didn't you go to Miami from SF?" (If you are reading this, arts Tampa people, and you sniff at the idea, be my friend--write to me!)

We dine on mussels and chorizo, paella and roast pork. My great-grandfather, Eugenio Morales, was a cook at the Columbia in the 40's. Phil says that the joke, in Miami, about Cuban coffee, has become: it is American beans, run through an Italian press and served by a Venezuelan waitress. I think about the waitress in Fiesta Plaza, at Montauro's, serving us ziti. She might've been Sicilian, but then she started calling my brother Papi and we knew she was Puerto Rican.

And somehow, Junot Diaz's stories about peeps from the DR, in the 90's, in New Jersey apartment complexes, help me think more clearly about local socio-culturla history. Despite the fact that I have only ever known one person from the DR. Altagracia, who I met in Sevilla, Span and traveled to an ice cream shop with on Siesta Key, in Sarasota, FL.

Dairy Queen and lobster claw

Being back in Florida puts me in the mood for boy bands. Well, that is inaccurate. It is just Justin Timberlake. I understand things about him I never did before.

It is probably the sheer fabulousness of the light touching my skin every day--despite lack of disability culture infrastructure, joblessness and a knee that's chosen now to go out

Meme is having her renaissance. Here she is, cruising the porch like a calico land shark. In her dotage, she now has more to do than ever before. Hunting lizards and looking all alert and sinuous. I sing to her, "I am bringing Meme back, those other kitties don't know how to act."

She does loops around me while I lie on my belly on the pool deck--the pavers giving me belly chaff and my skin stitched together now by biting midges (minute aquatic flies). I approach action, eloquent interior action in a way that I have not in many years. Just writing several tiny lyrics in my notebook on an afternoon. Inger Christensen's Letter in April helps me with this.

Also, the instinct to achieve a white-gold base coat, so that my skin is really assimilated and has achieved balance with the sun. So that the fry-able parts are protected under a light outer tan. This is not so easy. I am pale with a true olive potential, but it only gets activated in my forearms and cheeks. There is my "lobster claw" right arm, as Jovan calls it. The arm that began to return to Rimbaud-in-the-desert nature as soon as we started our road trip toward FL 2 months ago. And there is my Dairy Queen. A red splotch on my lower back in the shape of the DQ sign. It is browning now, but the inflamed route to that tone was not the desired path. In the end, I may always resemble my cat in FL. Calico--with patches of pink-white, yellow-white, red, light brown, and red-brown. Maybe at best, my skin will take on a kind of creme broulee coloring.

Some other things: drugstore white wine or sweet tea and Tennessee whiskey; that Mom and I are the only Tampa-born natives in a room full of New York/New Jersey people at the Creative Loafing magazine's birthday event; men's shoe store in Arena Plaza--boat shoes and loafers from Miami on a spectrum between Papa Suave and Papi Chulo; that the Franks soles got busted out on the brick streets in Ybor at the festival some weeks ago and his feet yawned like old and leathery alligators--not a good scene for a man who likes to dress; something something a peli-can/his beak can hold more than his belly can.

esos Wesos

Excerpt from email to Melanie Westerberg:


Yeah, the old name for it really was Cayo Hueso (Shakira has a beautiful line about her huesos--from when she was still more Alanis than Brittney), but the funny thing is, Latinos in FL, like my family, THINK, that this in the espnagles for Key West because, some people will say Weso instead of West or Oeste, as in the proper Spanish. Kind of like the way my abuela and my abuelo get shortened to Weli and Welo. But actually, that is not a good example...But, hilariously enough, when you googl Cayo Weso--the Wikipedia for Key West pops up at the top.

Process of excavating foundational vernacular--to push off from the silty bottom of how the talk gets talked and what about, where I come from. so as to make new pomes in a home speech, what M. Sikkena calls (Dusie, Issue 13), "radical vernacular".

A doliath grouper, which I hope, now at this size, is a protected species. I think also, when they grow to the bulk, they taste like rubber tire anyway

here is hair, Flavor Blasted, at the beach

There is small, round toddler at the Sunset Chateau. Belonging to one of the winter people, the Canadian renters, I guess, because no one here gets in the Gulf until June. She looks like a delectable little sausage in her neon purple bathing suit--her hungry little butt has devoured it's bottom end. Atop her head, a messy "waterfall" of hair pouring from an elastic font.

Ty John rescues her kite and boasts about it long afterward. He also shows her a giant iridescent angel-wing oyster shell he found. Here he is, resisting the me and my photos, with superhero goggles on.

Here is his mom, my Reesa, trying to get him started on a sand castle so he will lay off the Flavor Blasted Goldfish. When he goes, I grab the Goldfish bag and start in myself. Reesa's hair makes an angel wing in the wind.

Jovan is trying to grow his hair out, Brazilian soccer-player style, so he can pull it back into a man-bun. He grew up in San Francisco, so he goes into the Gulf on this cloudy April day and calls it refreshing.

Here is a "pony tail palm". An anemic, tiny version of this one used to live on my windowsill in San Francisco. The calico and shark known as my Meme enjoys eating its leaves and puking it on the pavers, after she has hunted lizards mid-morning.

flordacana notes: being fed honey-spread by an old Cuban woman in the health food store

In one of the strip malls--actually no--there are still strip malls in West Tampa, in the old Latino part of town where my family used to live. But in my mother's Lake Ellen neighborhood, the strip malls are puffed up, rounded, they are shopping centres. With the t-r-e just like that. Facades for jovial chain  marketplaces and rows of SUVs outside of them.

In one such centre, at the health food store today, I met this older Cuban woman who looked like Sean Penn in this movie about the aging, somewhat hermaphroditic seeming, rockstar:

Maybe  she still lives in West Tampa, behind Macarena Plaza or Fiesta Plaza--the strip malls--or maybe she is not really Cubna but El Salvadorian or from Venezuela. I've been gone long enough that I am having a hard time with distinguishing the accents.

She was  a sample-giver. The person in the food shop who prepares little tasties for you to consider. She was selling a salty, cinnamony crushed almond, honey spread. She artfully used a tiny spoon to  spread it on a thin chip, on an apple, she spread it on a piece of red cabbage sprinkled with coconut and onions. And she leaned over and popped all these things directly into my mouth. It was because she noticed my hands shake, as they do when I have to try to turn my wrist to take small items from someone one else. She said, here let me and then, the bites were going into my mouth.

There you go, baby! Delicious!


Here you go, mama! Isn't that good!


From any other type of person, I might not have been able to open to this. From my own grandmother, no. But a strange, theatrical, aging Cuban woman in a black lace dress (though it is 90 out already), yes. You can be baby and mama with women like her and there is a charge and  a care that has nothing to do with being patronized and everything to do with the crushed, sweet, thick substance of that culture. Of meeting each other with gusto in that moment.  Somehow, when she fed me these treats, and everyone in the grocery store saw her put them in my mouth like it was the most common thing, to hand feed strangers, she made me feel nurtured and powerful at the same time. Some magic she has. I wanted to follow her home, to know everything about her. I felt that if I went with her, I would immediately start to have a Pedro Almodovar life.

sub/urban-tropcial-parking lot-sunset and the beginning of letting myself really be here

Art in downtown Saint Petersburg gallery.

Annual Italian festival in Ybor City. Chino and Gloria tell their stories.

 Everyone kept telling Mom her dress made her look like she had just come from church. I thought it went with the gondola vibe.

Food trucks--chicken fried chicken with red peppers and grouper sliders--at the riverwalk downtown.

In flordacana-land, one values car ports, a place to dock and shelter the cars from the vast, thick sea of heat and light. Jovan gets his car port painting chores down before we go to the softball field.

It occurs to me that I should take ethnographic notes before I stop noticing. Now, having been here a month, start  taking notes before I am again, really solute and solvent with the weather and the color. It is unlikely that I really will write a novel about the flordacana phenomenon or anything for that matter, because if i can help it, it will all be social practice and somatic poetry. So, a blog, as Bhanu might say, can be for failed novelists. My favorite kind. Why withhold with the idea of saving. At least not with word currency.

Flordacana notes.

Fl. squirrels stay way up high in the skinniest palms. They make a gnashing, almost birdlike sound as they are scarfing the palm dates. Not humanly delectable dates as in the goat-cheese-and-  variety, but more akin to giant acorns.

There is a FL southern accent. I heard it at the Joint Alliance meeting (of disability service providers). It was easier to hear it and name it, apart from all the talking that goes on among the many people in and out of mom's house. "'em" instead of "them", " 'cept' ", and "ain't"--though the ain't sayers can and do often autocorrect themselves to "isn't" if they are trying to make a rigorous point or find themselves in a formal situation. Louie the cab guy flipped back and forth from ain't and isn't several times, depending on who was challenging him at the committee, on issues of Medicaid vouchers and the lack of cabs for seniors and elderly.

As for my family's vernacular--well, there are endless notes to be taken about that, but for now, the penal shooting-of-the shit.  As in, a mild tone in which they say, "so-and so oughtta be shot". A lot people "oughtta be shot" according to my grandparents, including Lindsay Lohan, the guy who did the stupid job designing the kitchen, the maintenance guy at the beach condo who uses the tiniest paintbrush to paint the biggest surface.