Epic
28 Sep 2011 Leave a Comment
in Culture, Love Tags: love, nizar qabbani, poetry
Your love taught me to grieve
and I have been in need, for centuries
a woman to make me grieve
for a woman, to cry upon her arms
like a sparrow
for a woman to gather my pieces
like shards of broken crystal
Your love has taught me, my lady, the worst habits
it has taught me to read my coffee cups
thousands of times a night
to experiment with alchemy,
to visit fortune tellers
It has taught me to leave my house
to comb the sidewalks
and search your face in raindrops
and in car lights
and to peruse your clothes
in the clothes of unknowns
and to search for your image
even…..even…..
even in the posters of advertisements
your love has taught me
to wander around, for hours
searching for a gypsies hair
that all gypsies women will envy
searching for a face, for a voice
which is all the faces and all the voices…
Your love entered me…my lady
into the cities of sadness
and I before you, never entered
the cities of sadness
I did not know…
that tears are the person
that a person without sadness
is only a shadow of a person…
Your love taught me
to behave like a boy
to draw your face with chalk
upon the wall
upon the sails of fishermen’s boats
on the Church bells, on the crucifixes,
your love taught me, how love,
changes the map of time…
Your love taught me, that when I love
the earth stops revolving,
Your love taught me things
that were never accounted for
So I read children’s fairytales
I entered the castles of Jennies
and I dreamt that she would marry me
the Sultan’s daughter
those eyes..
clearer than the water of a lagoon
those lips…
more desirable than the flower of pomegranates
and I dreamt that I would kidnap her like a knight and I dreamt that I would give
her necklaces of pearl and coral
Your love taught me, my lady,
what is insanity
it taught me…how life may pass
without the Sultan’s daughter arriving
Your love taught me
How to love you in all things
in a bare winter tree,
in dry yellow leaves
in the rain, in a tempest,
in the smallest cafe, we drank in,
in the evenings…our black coffee
Your love taught me…to seek refuge
to seek refuge in hotels without names
in churches without names…
in cafes without names…
Your love taught me…how the night
swells the sadness of strangers
It taught me…how to see Beirut
as a woman…a tyrant of temptation
as a woman, wearing every evening
the most beautiful clothing she possesses
and sprinkling upon her breasts perfume
for the fisherman, and the princes
Your love taught me how to cry without crying
It taught me how sadness sleeps
Like a boy with his feet cut off
in the streets of the Rouche and the Hamra
Your love taught me to grieve
and I have been needing, for centuries
a woman to make me grieve
for a woman, to cry upon her arms
like a sparrow
for a woman to gather my pieces
like shards of broken crystal
Fog
20 Sep 2011 Leave a Comment
in Culture, Love Tags: bukowski, love, poetry
Love is a fog that burns away with the first sunlight of reality.
Young Man
18 Sep 2011 Leave a Comment
in Love Tags: love, men, the who, young man blues, younger man
Maybe I should pretend like it never happened, like I didn’t invite you over, and you didn’t kiss me. Unfortunately, I can’t stop thinking about it and you. You’re in such a great time of your life, I’m envious. You should be romping around in as many beds as you possibly can, feeling angry at the world, getting drunk, hurling expletives, feeling hopeful, meeting lots of Los Angeles’s beautiful women and fucking all of them, denouncing love, falling in love a million times, going broke, writing bad drunken poetry, taking great fucking photos, working on shitty movies, working shitty jobs, feeling hopeful that one great one will be around the corner, getting that great job, building your confidence so that you will jump in and produce a thing of your own. Man. If I could have a muse, my friend, you’d be it. All of the possibility and the frustration and the hopes and the dashed hopes and your wit and your adventure and your youth and your smile and the fact that ginger tea makes you giggle for some reason and your brooding and all that is wrapped up in your skin. When I kiss you, it’s not just fun for me anymore. It used to seem simple and uncomplicated. Now when I kiss you, all of the things that torment me and make me feel intoxicated with my loneliness start to undress themselves. My charm falls to the floor and all I am is this horribly vulnerable person.
I feel things very intensely. It’s not anything that anyone should be asked to handle. You didn’t come over in an attempt to handle any of it.
As much as I see in you that I find lovely and beautiful and sparkling… Damn it I want someone to see that in me. I want someone else to see everything I have winding round and round in my heart and head and find it wonderful and to let me know that they find it wonderful. I want a Clyde to my Bonnie. I really don’t know you that well at all and I might be just a very imaginative person, creating this romantic ideal of you, This Young Man. Not to say that you don’t have your own very real, very good qualities. We just don’t know each other that well and the idea I have of what you should be doing as a Young Man is so much better than perhaps what its really like being a young man.
Romp. Kiss. Play. Work. Work. Work. Write. Photograph. Those are the things I hope you are doing, and more you beautiful creature. I’ll write stories and feature you in them.
Gibran
14 Sep 2011 Leave a Comment
in Culture, Favorite Things, Love Tags: kahlil gibran, love, poetry
“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.” – Kahlil Gibran
Newlyweds
12 Sep 2011 Leave a Comment
in Love Tags: cartoon, love, love letter, marriage, npr, story corp, weddings
My friends just got married yesterday. I hope that their love lasts long into their old age and I hope that he makes her feel that she is loved every single day of the rest of their lives. Gives you hope, don’t it? It gives me hope.
Rumi
31 Aug 2011 Leave a Comment
in Culture, Love Tags: love, poetry, rumi
When someone mentions the gracefulness
of the nightsky, climb up on the roof
and dance and say,If anyone wonders how Jesus raised the dead,
don’t try to explain the miracle.
Kiss me on the lips.When someone asks what it means
to “die for love,” point
here.When lovers moan,
they’re telling our story.I am a sky where spirits live.
Stare into this deepening blue,
while the breeze says a secret.When someone asks what there is to do,
light the candle in his hand.How did Joseph’s scent come to Jacob?
Work
15 Aug 2011 Leave a Comment
in Favorite Things, Love Tags: friends, home decor, ikea, love
I purchased this desk from Ikea yesterday. The glass table top is embossed with the word “love” in different languages. I had a girl friend of mine help me put the heavy glass table top onto the wooden trestles I built myself.
My friend is the biggest badass I know. She drives a motorcycle. She’s a musician. She upholsters furniture. Her favorite thing to do is smash things with a sledgehammer. And her life is full of men that she cares little about, except how they perform in the bedroom. She stared at my new romance themed set up and she said, “You are SUCH a chick.”
She’s not wrong. I have a Love Desk. It’s not the only thing Love themed. One of my tattoos says “Amor vincit omnia, Nos cedamus amori.” Guess what it translates to. I’m currently listening to Maxwell singing about how he wants to be with this one girl forever and ever. Hell, everything that sort of flies out of my brain and onto this blog has a tendency to be about love.
Why not? There’s not enough of it in the world, in my humble opinion. Why can’t I cover every inch of my living and working space with a little bit of it?
As I was figuring out how I was going to make this very beautiful desk functional, while keeping as many things off it as possible, my friend watched me and said, “I’m very glad that you and I have such different tastes. I appreciate this desk and I appreciate your taste, but I would never get one like it. But I’m glad you have it and I’m glad it makes you happy.”
And it does!
Lotus
07 Aug 2011 Leave a Comment
in Los Angeles, Love, Places I Go Tags: buddhism, little tokyo, Los Angeles, love, metro
I met this woman on the train today. The whole exchange reminded me of the way a friend of mine described what it must be like to be me: “you must live in this imaginary world and it must be hard to reign you in sometimes.” I suppose she’s right.
I had an armful of groceries from Marukai market: a bag of rice, somen noodles, miso paste, some bright pink packages of candy for a friend’s birthday. I had decided to catch the train to the market in Little Tokyo from Los Feliz: it would be my Saturday adventure.
As I was walking down the steps to the trains at Union Station, I heard a heavy accent from one of the Metro workers. He was trying to explain to a flustered woman which train to go on, only she was becoming more flustered and confused. The more confused she got, the louder the man spoke. She asked him, “Which train to I get on? The one that comes on the left of the platform or the right?”
“You going to Hollywood? You get on either train! I don’t know which one, it switches! The purple and the red line comes here.”
“So which train? The left or the right?”
“They switch! They switch! Just make sure you get on the one going to Hollywood!”
Earlier in the day, I thought I’d make it part of my adventure to be as kind to as many people as possible. I do that sometimes. With hilarious results, occasionally. Disastrous results on other occasions. It’s all an experiment of mine. I spoke up and I told her that both the red and purple line trains come to either side of the platform, so you just need to look for the signs at the front of the train and make sure to get on the red line. The accented man was annoyed that I’d stepped in, he seemed to be taking some kind of pride in his “ability” to explain things.
The woman breathed a sigh of relief that a calm person was giving her instructions. She walked over and stood next to me, finding a safe place amidst the storm of the Los Angeles Metro. We got to chatting and she revealed that she was visiting Los Angeles to reunite with a sweetheart of hers from when she was twelve. “And after the divorce I just went through after 27 years of a bad marriage, and another painful relationship right after that, I just wasn’t sure I should come. I felt like I needed to heal my heart. But you know, here I am!”
“You only live once,” I concurred. “Go for it!”
She blushed, “He told me it was his birthday wish to see me again. I’m meeting him at Hollywood and Vine.”
We sat next to each other on the train and we chatted about her life and her excitement about seeing this man again. On one hand, I really hoped that it would work out for her, and that she would meet this guy, they would fall in love, and she would find happiness for the rest of her days. On the other hand, I thought, “If this was my mom, I would ask if she had googled him, is she sure he’s a good guy, how many ex-wives has he gone through, does he have any food allergies, all of that. I need to know these things.”
After she’d explained just how excited she was, I put out my hands as if making a very important point, and I said, “Have fun.”
Before I got off at my stop, she told me that one of the greatest things she’d discovered in her life was Buddhism. She gave me a card for a meeting, and it had a website on it. She said that once she discovered Nichiren Buddhism, she saw proof of good things happening to her and she was able to escape a deep depression in her twenties.
I’m a sad person. It doesn’t mean that I’m not kind or self-destructive. I’m just sad. Sometimes I wonder if religion will give me the relief I’m looking for. I hear it often does… maybe it’s worth exploring.
Virtual
03 Aug 2011 Leave a Comment
in Love Tags: love, online dating, single
Click Me
I’ve signed up for match.com.
Online dating feels like I’m allowing the dregs of society access to my person. I’ve only done this once before, and let me tell you, it sucked. A lot. A friend of mine compared his experience on match.com to shooting fish in a barrel. OK, sure, I get it. If you like bad fish, then yes, it’s a lot like taking a shotgun to a barrel of gimpy, three-eyed tilapia.
Signing up for an online dating site was like that moment in Thriller when a cloud passed over the moon and the zombies started rising up out of their coffins and chasing after Michael Jackson’s pretty girlfriend.
Signing up for an online dating site was like that moment in Finding Nemo when Nemo goes too far beyond the drop off and then turns around and realizes how far he’s gone, right before he’s swept up into a net of despair.
Signing up for an online dating site is like sifting through kitty litter and hoping to find gold.
Signing up for an online dating site is like saying to yourself, “Yeah, you know all that stuff that I hate about dating, the sifting, the trying to find someone who is as attracted to you as you are to them, the annoying realization that there’s something really wrong with either you or them, but regardless, your unique brand of crazy is just not meshing with his? You know all of that? It’s exactly the same on the internet only with weirder people and grainier, uglier, more mysterious photographs.”
Online dating is like the Loch Ness of Love.
HOW in the world is this successful?
And yet it is… I want to be willing to give it a chance. Maybe at the other end of it, there really is someone who is truly awesome and will think I’m truly awesome. I guess that’s why I’m back. The world is much smaller now. No reason to give up hope.
Los Angeles: A Love Story
11 Oct 2010 Leave a Comment
in Los Angeles Tags: city life, Los Angeles, love
Every love story starts when two unlikely people meet, often by chance. Typically, it goes like this: Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy self-flagellates, discovers meaning of life, boy gets girl back. Coitus ensues. Human race continues.
My love story starts with my city. It is the unattainable dream, this place, that makes it so desperately romantic in my eyes. Many people write about falling in love in New York. It’s easy to fall in love there when you’re young and everything is big and new and exciting. Your dreams are spelled out in the concrete, a message in chalk left by an artist for you to discover and take with you for the rest of your life. When I was sixteen, I stood on the sidewalk in SoHo and took a picture of the message written out just for me to find. It said, “LIVE YOUR DREAM.” New York is the icon of dream attainability. The Statue of Liberty lit the way for immigrants hoping for a new and better life, as if to say, “Here is the way! You will find what you are looking for beneath the light of this torch.”
Los Angeles is not such a beacon of hope. People seem to land here because they were hoping for something else. They were hoping for New York, but this is what they ended up with.
I found a way to love it. I love this place. I do. I love it for its grit, its grime, its hollow glamour and its eternal empty promises, a lover who always kisses you like he means it, but is already thinking about his next kiss with someone else, someone better. I love it because it is constantly reinventing itself as a potential bastion of culture and identity, but doesn’t seem to succeed with the authenticity it had hoped for. It is well meaning, but loves itself too much to pay much attention to the areas that need improvement.
Los Angeles is a character in my life’s novel, it is the Humphrey Bogart of cities. Sad, handsome, desperate to find love and validation, but only finds it when it has to let it go. Los Angeles is what it lacks, not what gives it integrity. Not a lot of people think about it as a contributor to culture, as much as it’s a suck on humanity, attracting fruits, crazies, gangsters and vulnerable, superficial women.
Los Angeles was my second choice, but I was woo’d by this intangible sadness that I tend to find attractive in men, also. The unattainable dream factor. Something always to chase. That means that I’m also the type of person that doesn’t really like commitment. I don’t value what is stable as much as I value what is exciting. Otherwise, I would leave, move to a small town where everyone likes me, get married to a providing sort of man that lacks a lot of passion, and sleep comfortably in my bed, without ever questioning a thing.
I love it here for the smoggy sunsets, the beautiful miserable, the hopeful broken. The oxymoronic nature of the city that loves ton save trees as much as it loves big, fast cars. I love the dichotomies and I love the weather.
Come for a visit. Stay a while. Get your nails done. Have brunch. You may see what I mean after all…
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