aahhh

Having a soft heart in a cruel world is courage, not weakness.

That’s what I look for in my work: when a writer can deftly describe the human experience in a way that you didn’t think could even be put into words. That doesn’t happen often, but it gives me something to play inside. Too much of the time our culture fears subtlety. They really want to make sure you get it. And when subtlety is lost, I get upset.

It kills me, the way the world is. Literally. I sat down to write about it, about how every 15 seconds a woman is battered in the United States about how a woman is raped every 1.3 minutes, about how 1 in 8 women develops breast cancer and what I wrote was I like you. This is a problem. The world already has too many of those. I already have too many of those. I sat down to write about how desire and hate killed Matthew Shepard and when I write desire I think of you I like you my pen sprouts snuggly kittens and spring flowers and I hate myself for it I like you so much I had to have therapy for it and I like you so much I fucked other people to get rid of it and the weekend you went to Disneyland I tried to grow mouse ears I tried to be your e-ticket I tried to grow up to be your full-service hotel except I won’t throw you out for using bad words like they do so if you say oh, fuck me oh, god oh, take me I’ll take you back to bed I like you so much this isn’t in my agenda; I like you so much but this should be a poem about breast cancer and I like you so much this should be a poem about genocide and I like you so much this should be a poem about ending capitalism smashing the state stating the obvious getting smashed to tell you I’ll fuck capitalism and patriarchy and totalitarianism to get next to you I will deep throat my politics I will get more therapy that I won’t need if you’re near me because therapy and politics are all about making the world a little more perfect when I close the door and it’s you and me the world is a little more perfect whenever you smile at me in a world that doesn’t offer many smiles the world is a little more perfect the world is perfect whenever I’m with you.

I want you to tell me about every person you’ve ever been in love with. Tell me why you loved them, then tell me why they loved you. Tell me about a day in your life you didn’t think you’d live through. Tell me what the word “home” means to you and tell me in a way that I’ll know your mother’s name just by the way you describe your bed room when you were 8. See, I wanna know the first time you felt the weight of hate and if that day still trembles beneath your bones. And if you were to build a snowman, would you rip two branches from a tree to build your snowman arms? Or would you leave the snowman armless for the sake of being harmless to the tree? And if you would, would you notice how that tree weeps for you because your snowman has no arms to hug you every time you kiss him on the cheek? Do you kiss your friends on the cheek? Do you sleep beside them when they’re sad, even if it makes your lover mad? Do you think that anger is a sincere emotion or just the timid motion of a fragile heart trying to beat away its pain? See, I wanna know what you think of your first name. And if you often lie awake at night and imagine your mother’s joy when she spoke it for the very first time. I want you tell me all the ways you’ve been unkind. Tell me all the ways you’ve been cruel. See, I wanna know more than what you do for a living. I wanna know how much of your life you spend just giving. And if you love yourself enough to also receive sometimes. I wanna know if you bleed sometimes through other people’s wounds.

Whales have been evolving for thirty million years. To our one million. A sperm whale’s brain is seven times the size of mine… The great size of his body has little to do with the great size of his brain, other than as a place to keep it. I have What If fantasies… What if the catalyst or the key to understanding creation lay somewhere in the immense mind of the whale? … Some species go for months without eating anything. Just completely idle.. So they have this incredible mental apparatus and no one has the least notion what they do with it. Lilly says that the most logical supposition, based on physiological and ecological evidence, is that they contemplate the universe… Suppose God came back from wherever it is he’s been and asked us smilingly if we’d figure it out yet. Suppose he wanted to know if it had finally occurred to us to ask the whale. And then he sort of looked around and he said, “By the way, where are the whales?”