Blank Sticky Notes

How do you ever write without making absolutely everything about yourself?

I think we are all sick and tired of being tired and worried. Heads so thoroughly embedded in reality, with not a sliver of the false or fanciful to hide behind, It’s like a barrelling sun eating away at our skin. Is it too hot? No, it’s just... acidic. Slow burn.

I worry that I’ve let time slip past me, draw and stretch too steep a gap for me to ever fill. There is a distant me, in another life. With different struggles, led, drawn, tugged through the water by her own sense of gravity and her own weighted, aching wreckage. Less cold? Maybe. Less distant? Less of a something, of many something’s, then what ‘more’ have I gained? I’m trying to work with these fickle, clumsy blocks of identity. None of which connect with one another, none of which meet in the correct orientation or shape.

I have become defined by my lack of wants. By my deference to things that are “universal” goals. You expect me to want and somehow I am made inanimate by your reflections. So I should. So, most would. So maybe I am greedy or selfish or unyielding and stubborn and ungenerous to those who know no better. But so? So, they should. So, most would. Know better, that is.

There is a strange, small kind of solace in not being the decision maker in the things that happen to you. You can chalk it up to the erratic tendencies of life, to other people and their decisions. Irreconcilable differences with reality. You can step back and farther back until you are more like passive object than person. Things happen to you, things occur surrounding you but have no bearing on you. You cannot recognize your settings, you can hardly recognize the small bubble of space you occupy yourself, anyways.

Something I need to try to learn again is how to be accustomed to silence, or empty time. There’s this relentless need for sound and background noise that is always following me, this impulse to be busy--only ever doing multiple things at once, that it’s hard for me to ever feel comfortable doing nothing. I never really adjusted back from when my days were twelve hour stretches of work/study/commute.

//

When you lose something, what do you feel, if anything? Why is loss sometimes a delayed sensation. Sometimes it is so fresh and overflowing, you are drenched in loss one moment, only to have trouble recounting its fingerprint later.

I lose immediately, in that I grieve instantaneously, but regret and anguish doesn’t follow me around. Sometimes it edges in from the sidelines, sometimes I sit with it and sink. But we become transient to one another. Untied.

//

miniscule. taut. pulse. bludgeoning. burgeoning. all excuse. all disease. I rip this wrist. I pull rogue bones from my teeth. if you do not start now, you never will. I am crackling, a ravenous fire ready to consume until I am not myself / ready to consume myself. Make this melody make sense, make this sense put me back together / back into a self.

I want boiling rationality.

Physical (saddle-stitched, handbound) copies of my micro-chapbooks for Ghost City Press’ 2016 and 2017 Summer Micro-chapbook series are available. Print copies of Dream-like Houses includes a bonus unpublished poem and comes in a plain and patterned inner cover version.

To purchase, send $ to paypal.me/joycechongg with your address, email for confirmation, and which books you’d like.

Dream-like Houses - $7

Inventory - $7

Dream-like Houses (patterened) - $8

DLH + Inventory - $12

DLH (patterned) + Inventory - $13

International orders are an additional $1.50.

If you can’t afford physical copies, they are also available as digital versions for free/pay-what-you-want here:

Inventory - https://gumroad.com/l/chong

Dream-like Houses - https://gumroad.com/l/chong2017

A limited number of orders will come with a bonus little handmade corner bookmark. 

Thinking of being stuck in remote towns like desert islands. Thinking of how a bit of distance can make you feel like you’re in another world. My mind is hungry to lead itself astray, to wander off the edge of a cliff somewhere.