my scalp twitches below the skin
wiggling hairlines receding with the tide
the roll of a humpbacked beetle whose hardshell bursts my pores like angry blackheads
but who doesn’t mean to and apologizes profusely
“I’m cumbersome and something else,” he says
and the powdery moth with its dusted scales
flaking at the corner of my mouth
gloats of her delicacy

Then there is the termite that gnaws at my nose
whose sole concern seems to be my integrity
and his sisters, the carpenter ants who
like to build disastrous roller coasters
made from my synapses

and when the cars inevitably
fall
off
the
track jolt bed
andcollidekaleidoscopefireworks me out of
I am convinced that they do not know how to run a Six Flags.
And are better suited to lacquered swimsuit covers
of Entomology Today

what of the cricket and the cricketeer
throttling my eyeballs into black wicket lashes
who think life is a game
gamble gobbed omelette thoughts
scrambled, half-digested

I am bursting with bugs
crawling from my ears, inviting one another for supper
the ladybird and arachnid
dining on mismatched lyrics twirled on a fork
and the early worm who misses the bird
to attend a dreadful showing of Foucault writ small
complaining to the front row: academics don’t get it
petty bourgeoisie them all

They like to chatter stupid ideas that keep me up at night
“She likes him but she’s got the head of a coconut.”
“Agreed, thick but runny.”
“Try erasing the Bourdieu and replacing with Butler.”
“That don’t make sense, though.”
“You’ll never know until you try.”
“Until your committee reads it and thinks you’re stupid.”
“Best left to the bibliography, then.”
“Become one with the dirt and die already.”
“Super, but your supervisor is still waiting for your chapter.”
and nails like scalpels, autoclaved in my mouth
vomit fingers
slice my skin and
extract the maggots
one
by
one
to get a moment of sleep

peace
at last

But it is not so easy
The screams scatter into a million corners
and run up and down my veins
crawling and scratching and grasping and pulling
I squash the carapace between my fingers
to hear the pop of organs squeezing through crispy keratine
my head has gone silent
and skeletons litter my bed
I think no thoughts
but one
a chrysalis blooms by the moon

the young butterfly strokes my temple
with a crescent proboscis
“My darling,” I say.

Get bent
out of shape like an old rubber toy
you forgot to save at your parent’s garage sale
’cause you thought there was still something to save
in something so useless
but with so many memories rippling in its ripped biceps
you watched your childhood weep between the cracks in the sidewalk
for a bargain steal of a toonie
and you said it wouldn’t hurt
as some punk of eleven with a tongue out in defiance
laughs at hair “so totally retro”
takes your toy in his oversized hands
and pulls it as hard as he can

limbless corpse

and while you mourn the loss of your old plastic companion
’cause you didn’t know what else to do
I’ll kick you when you’re down
and snap your stretchy superman limbs
across the table
into the wall
and into the garbage

The first time you say my name
you comb my hair
with your words
my bird’s nest of black
and your gnarled mouth
kneading

And when my tresses scrape my chin, your lashes beat across my skin, the softest voice whispering in my hair as I brush it back behind my ear

In your clementine sweater, your hands peel
your scarf from your neck
your bag from your shoulders
your glasses from your head
if you could peel anything else off
the juice would run down your legs
instead of my hands
and what a waste
that would be

But I am no dog and I will not wait
for you to shower sweetness on me like
spit when you talk
I still weep your words
from the citrus saliva in my eye
and stubborn I am
when you say my name again,
one year has passed

My head was untangled in your leave
and my hair, a straightened spider’s web
ponytailed pretty
to catch your new gaze
wandering
down my spine
but you aren’t interested
in rough play
wrestling
out of my wagging tongue
unless you are the mead and vinegar
that attracts the bug

So standing ten feet apart in a cramped lecture hall
I climb to the emergency exit
so I don’t step on your toes
and hope if I am cruel, I am loved
but a self-exiled Rapunzel
I am anything
but myself

I crawl back to you.

And when my patience has run dry
you say my name and
I see a shadow in your voice, its riverbed
of rocks and buried feelings
in the absence of sound, a lingering touch
a collegial gesture from my non-dominant palm
to your right
fingers wrapped at the wrist
condensed moisture, perspiration
and I wonder whether that was it at all
in the paperwork that switches hands
and falls like snowflakes
on my flattened quills
defeated

Today is a good day to be spun like a record. I have found my grooves and the music is playing so sweetly from my spiraling ridges, down my fingers, and onto the keyboard. The last few days, I have been skipping tracks and looping sounds. I’ve been stuck in a rut. And while I have momentarily escaped the days made up of marred battlefields and trenches, I am dancing a broken waltz with my thesis, jittering and skittering on the razor’s edge of my page.

But no matter. Today, the chords are triumphant! The words tumble onto the page and finally, I feel insightful. I want to sing it to the sky, “I have figured out my third chapter argument–after all this time, I’m not stupid! I’ve just been procrastinating!”

If I’m honest, I would attribute this to the subliminal audios I have been listening to this morning. With such catchy titles as, “Overcome Creative Blockages, Writers Block, Find Solutions in Study Energy brain waves” and “Super Intelligence: 🍎 Memory Music, Improve Memory and Concentration, Binaural Beats Focus Music“, it’s hard to imagine them having an effect. Yet, here I am with a solid intro and argument after a week of nothingness. So, I guess, maybe they work. Who knows though, I’m not a doctor. Yet.

If I keep this up, they’ll give me a doctorate.

I met with my supervisor–it hit me like a backhanded slap that I need to work more. But how do I work more? I should spend less time writing a blog. Writing down my thoughts is therapeutic though. It gives me a sense of relief to put things down until I can’t anymore.

The deadline is approaching and submissions for dissertations is coming up. Here is my poem of the day:

A blank screen
snowy fields
fresh linen
feather down
threaded crevices with little sound
the muffled throes of gasping lungs
punctuated arteries
shattered ribs and things
I stifle a laugh
and the mask laughs too

Tearing out my hair
In ire over chapters scant
A line here or there

In the frustrating world of getting a thesis done, the window of productivity seems to close slightly more every day. One hour of work is worth ten hours of agony I suppose. But is there anything to gleam from staring at a blank screen that doesn’t write itself? Patience, yes. We could all stand to be a little more respectful of our mental states. Kindness, too. We don’t normally get things done in a day. We should be generous to ourselves. We should love ourselves on our most difficult days. We should love ourselves when we cannot anymore. We should love ourselves when we wake from our three am benders or fall asleep on our screens. We should speak softly our admiration for our skills, whisper our appreciations on tender ears. Most of all, we should not take things too personally–if we depersonalize, desocialize, deemphasize, and deride ourselves into something other then selves, maybe we can get work done.

But then again, I’m at the graduate bar and I drink to get away from this.

I dream a lot.

I often can’t stop myself from the persistenceness of thoughts. They come like waves upon the beach. I have dreamt of alternative pasts, prospective futures, the moments that fleet my fingers, and those seconds with weighted chains. I lose myself to the simulation of reality that renders me a flickering fire in a world of spectres, shadows on the wall.

Some may theorize that dreams serve as a way to process information at our most restful period. We stitch together data like scrapbook pages, taking a face from years ago, a song we heard before bed, lines from our favourite movies. Dreams can also be tales of agency or lack thereof. How often we hear of lucid dreaming and the ability to control our thoughts? What of the predicative images that harken to prophecies and visions of the future? We struggle for direction, whether we have freedom and will, even when we are inside our own heads. And we are often not alone either. We communicate with others. The voice of the dead can speak beyond spirit realms and they continue to resound even when we wake. But we also communicate with ourselves: the layered selves, translucent and pearlescent like the skin of an onion, blooming.

Today, I dreamt of my instructor, the one I am TAing for this semester. I have been thinking of him a lot. On the chance he (or anyone else I know) appears in my dream, I try to purge them. I cut their silhouettes from the screen and leave a hole in my wake; to know they were there but to expunge my emotion with them. But today was different. The dream became a vivid performance of cruel optimism (to borrow from Laura Berlant). I felt myself living a fantasy romance. I felt myself falling in love.

To fall in love with a virtual stranger is to fill an empty shell with yourself. He became what I wanted him to be. He invited me to his apartment and apologized for the mess–everything was meticulously placed but his winter boots, kicked off by the front door. He looked at me over the top of his glasses. Appraisingly. I’ve got a bottle of wine in my arms–no, it’s a six-pack of beer–and I put it on the table. He’s got a small bed, one pillow. Perhaps even in my dream, I am an anthropologist, combing through his imaginary things, trying to piece together who he is to me. He is his itchy sweaters and his unfretted brows. He is his booming lecturer voice and his deep, backhanded compliments. He is his restless hands, his tactile, reaching hands, and his invasive proddings. He is his dismissiveness and his pretentiousness. He is all of these things, the bad and the good, and I am propelled to him as I glide on the air.

And as we kiss, I feel nothing. No relief, no warmth, or ache. I act out the motions of making love with limbs like concrete and cable, suspended over the water, and when we are done, I crumble into myself and hug my legs to my chest. I am disgusted by my weakness. The temptation of fantasy was too great. I couldn’t stop myself. I had to have him. These are excuses. They try to cut the pain, the hollow chest that knows nothing like this could ever be outside of this room, his room, in the far reaches of my mind.

Sometimes, I confess these things to other students. I know it’s wrong, I say, but I can’t stop fetishizing him. And so they laugh, and they say, I know, I do the same thing with my supervisor. It’s the power structure–it makes it hot. We end up chiding each other for our choices, mocking and over analyzing our interactions over cups of coffee in tiny cafes, tucked just outside of any prying ears. And we bring up Plato and Socrates, who encourage these kinds of relationships between students and their teachers. We debate the sleaziness seen in Call Me By Your Name, and hope to god we don’t end up falling so hard that we end up like them. But in the end of the day, they say, It’s just a dream. The moment will pass.

But in my bed, I think it over, again and again. I visit his home and kiss his head. It is the last time. I wake at my alarm and meet him to discuss midterms.

This is not the best place to tell you about myself–wherever I am wedged in the deep web’s crevices, half here and in between. But I can’t help it. Isn’t that what blogs are all about? Blogging about cultivated moments, captivating audiences, eeking out of comfort and into glamourous anonymonity? In theory, maybe. The ghoul of Foucault calls out, “pride and power, the discourse surrounds us!” He’s more poetic than usual and waxing lyricisms assuages me to agree. I do this for you, dear reader, though you do not know it yet. I write here because I cannot do anything else. I am a graduate student, an anthropology student, and best yet, an anthropologii student–illiterate, uneducated, and unoriginal. Forget the faculties with their circlejerk Deleuzes and Latours. Here, we dive our hands into the air, skin surfboards on the wind. Our Icarus wings, our stretching fingers, will carry us afar if only we reach. We’ll break these chains of ivory so that our kin will know freedom from its spires. If you can trust a stranger, an anthropologii both familiar and strange, then take a proverbial leap of faith and fall down the rabbit hole. Falling is still flying.