Ripping fifteen minutes off the space-time drudgery of school to, err, mutter and putter about my blog. Fifteen minutes, aye. Nice, quiet, meditative fifteen minutes, that.

But. FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU. I can't help it. Screaming, I mean. Scientifically and psychologically, it releases tension and the faggot demons shackled in the dungeons of my throat.

Homaygulay, I have yet to explode from another nervous breakdown. (Through the course of my seven years in college methinks I've had about four nervous breakdowns all followed by an AWOL or LOA but in any case I always kick my butt right back in to the system.XP How can I kick my own butt, I wonder.) It just isn't fair for an artist to be harassed by life and school and anal fixative professors. (Yes, I consider myself an artist, bugger off.) Just like Juan Antonio Gonzalo from that Woody Allen movie we watched yesterday in Philosophy class. (I have Philo this semester, and I just topped the midterm exams.XD Eeeekkkk. WTF. Me??)

Deep inside me really is an overachieving meritocratic perfectionist bitch gaining the rat race blasting everybody else ahead of me with me trusted shotgun to bounce my self-righteous ass to the top. If I don't I just throw my hands off and say, "Screw. School sucks. Grades don't matter squat in the real world anyway," that sort of denial phase. Because I think doing stuff (anything, including laundry and toilet cleaning) should always be pleasurable and not in the very least torturesome; and that toil and work will always be the results of time pressure and peer pressure and whatever atmospheric pressure there is out there.XD KAH, mais.XD Just like in the middle of firing my fifteen-paged paper tonight in this laptop when I know I won't ace it not when it's about the matriarch of Philippine Literature set in the socio-political, historical, cultural, and whatever trifling influences that mortal woman had--I am talking about the author of Dead Stars whose name I will not mention for the sake of anti-googleable purposes--hurmm, where was I? And it's not just that, but also to talk about all her works, both the warts and shining gems in them, and set them all in the context when they were published. I mean, who gives a shit?

Gaaaaaaaaaaad. How long does it have to take for me to learn that school, and UPD in particular, is not for lazy, artistic, indulgent people?XP

Holyfuckholyfuckholyfuck, time's up. Please, God, please, if you're real, do shake this archipelago with a nine-point-nine richter scale earthquake so my professor can just diiiiiiiieeeeeeeee. And I'd delay submitting my paper should a substitute come along.

I've never posted somebody else's work here until now. Let's just say, out of all the hundreds and thousands and millions of words I've read in school, there's only one poem that didn't suck.

Down There

by Sandra Cisneros

Your poem thinks it's bad.
Because it farts in the bath.
Cracks its knuckles in class.
Grabs its balls in public
and adjusts--one,
then the other--
back and forth like Slinky. No,
more like the motion
of a lava lamp.
You follow me?

Your poem thinks it
cool to pee in the pool.
Waits for the moment
someone's watching before
it sticks a finger up
its nose and licks
it. Your poem's weird.

The kind that swaggers in like Wayne
or struts its stuff like Rambo.
The kind that learned
to spit at 13 and still
is doing it.

It blames its bad habits
on the Catholic school.
Picked up words that
snapped like bra straps.
Learned words that ignite
of their own gas
like a butt hole flower.
Fell in love with words
that thudded like stones and sticks.
Or stung like fists.
Or stank like shit
gorillas throw at zoos.

Your poem never washes
its hands after using the can.
Stands around rolling
toilet paper into wet balls
it can toss up to the ceiling
just to watch them stick.
Yuk yuk.

Your poem is a used rubber
sticky on the floor
the next morning,

the black elephant
skin of the testicles,
hairy as kiwi fruit
and silly,

the shaving stubble
against the purity
of porcelain,

one black pubic
hair on the sexy
lip of toilet seat,

the swirl of spit
with a cream of celery
center,

a cigarette
stub sent hissing
to the piss pot,

half-finished
bottles of beer reeking
their yeast incense,

the miscellany of maleness:
nail clippers and keys,
tobacco and ashes,
pennies quarters nickels dimes and
dollars folded into complicated origami,
stub of ticket and pencil and cigarette, and
the crumb of the pockets

all scattered on the Irish
linen of the bedside table.

Oh my little booger,
it's true.

Because someone once
said Don't
do that!
you like to do it.

Baby, I'd like to mention
the Tampax you pulled with your teeth
once in a Playboy poem¹
and found it, darling, not so bloody.
Not so bloody at all, in fact.
Hardly blood cousin
except for an unfortunate
association of color
that makes you want to swoon.

Yes,
I want to talk at length about Men-
struation. Or my period.
Or the rag as you so lovingly put it.
All right then.

I'd like to mention my rag time.

Gelatinous. Steamy
and lovely to the light to look at
like a good glass of burgundy. Suddenly
I'm artist each month.
The star inside this like a ruby.
Fascinating bits of sticky
I-don't-know-what-stuff.
The afterbirth without the birth.
The gobs of a strawberry jam.
Membrane stretchy like
saliva in your hand.

It's important you feel its slickness,
understand the texture isn't bloody at all.
That you don't gush
between the legs. Rather,
it unravels itself like string
from some deep deep center--
like a Russian subatomic submarine,
or better, like a mad Karlov cackling
behind beakers and blooping spirals.
Still with me?

Oh I know, darling,
I'm indulging, but indulge
me if you please.
I find the subject charming.

In fact,
I'd like to dab my fingers
in my inkwell
and write a poem across the wall.
"A Poem of Womanhood"
Now wouldn't that be something?

Words writ in blood. But no,
not blood at all, I told you.
If blood is thicker than water, then
menstruation is thicker than brother-
hood. And the way

it metamorphosizes! Dazzles.
Changing daily
like starlight.
From the first
transparent drop of light
to the fifth day chocolate paste.

I haven't mentioned smell. Think
Persian rug.
But thicker. Think
cello.
But richer.
A sweet exotic snuff
from an ancient prehistoric center.
Dark, distinct,
and excellently
female.

¹ John Updike's "Cunts" in Playboy (January 1984), 163.

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