I am in love with poetry. I had studied her before, but never seen lips so red with the fervent ardor of youth, and yet eyes so heavy with the dank cares of the night and the honey lays of the lark. Her face was transfigured, for before it had appeared to me as if hidden behind a veil, like the moon behind the clouds, but when it struck forth and in the clear air and in a cold breeze blew to tingle and shiver the skin...

Blotched with nightmares. The muse is sick. There are terrors creeping and crawling under the air; the heart is beating in each half-stop of an arrest for rhythm. Words clutch precariously for sound and meaning like suffocating life with only an absence of breathing, only a thump in the fields that roll endless green like an endless checkered field of consequence, and the stiff-moving, fast beating, careless gliding and (oh so glimmering in their jagged reflection of moonlight) tipping crescent heads and long, phallic stabbing...

Still it's the grapes. Still it's cheese, and all good food. Breaks and the clutch of juice that lolls to prick sour the tongue and then dribble down the chin and roll down the long neck to coalesce in the absent ardor of the chest and then dry, evaporated into the heights, the little rolling juice-pink clouds of sky.

Oh these liberties of prose! I am the poet of the night. The poet of the few large stars! Such treasures of the ages, I take them all, I spread my fingers through them; I scrunch them between my fingers; I trace them like sands; I feel their moist and cool between my fingers. I look at them, glistening...

Each world is an ardor. The depth goes down to the very chill, frozen tundra of meaning. And then it is the waves rising and pounding down the sea. To all future generations, it is the call of the baying horn that brings such a music the ear can never forget it (and it shudders in all the canals and leaves a permanent impression that carves and cleaves the eardrum, shaping it into ever greater fallacies of play) and I am walking on the water, blowing the trumpet of the covenant, and all the eager hearers crowded on the shore are suffering in feasts of great clutches of bread that is soft and so nourishing to the senses, the calm of the mind...

I will lie an idle book in someone's hand, when the moonlight glistens and gently in the leaves the palm fronds of the wind are jingling like blue-bells amid the grass in the summer when the grain ripens to oats falling and stirring in the air. The quiet lapping of the waves will speak eternity while lips mouth my verses silently, and I will enter into the very body of a love breaking with new vibrations of being. This is the immaculate conception! Eternal birth: eternal verse.

I have organized my days now according to a syllabus, while I search for work and engage in various other of my activities. I have finished the Divine Comedy, finally, after a year and a half of somewhat lukewarm attention -- in the last two days of my reading, I completed more per day than I had in weeks or months of the work. I am also reading a book of poetry called Western Wind and, while I like the poems included in the anthology and occasionally find the book illuminating, I find the author is far too hasty to insert into what he believes are the "components" of poetry his judgements of what separates good poetry from bad. All the more frustrating is that the author includes examples of bad poetry -- I would prefer to be exposed to good poems for demonstrations of the elements rather than given an example of a bad poem and expected to confirm, silently, the author's own opinion of the inferior quality of the verse. In addition to these, I have been reading the Bible. I went to the library and checked out the New Revised Standard Edition in the Oxford Annotated Bible and also the Oxford Bible Commentary; they are good, unbiased, secular commentaries, but they hardly make reading the Bible an exciting experience. If I want mysticism, I suppose I shall have to turn to the Kabbalah.

There is an essay writing contest on war, whether or not it is justified. I may or may not enter, but if I do, I plan to cite (one is required to cite a primary source) Helen in Egypt by H.D., which, infuriatingly, isn't carried by the local library NOR any of the tributary libraries that severally feed into it; so I am forced to seek it out in either the Denver Public Library (wherein I would have diverse works checked out on diverse cards, which could easily lead to overdue penalties) or online / at the Tattered Cover (which thankfully does have it). About the book: it is wonderful. It is an account stiched together from the fragments of an epic of Stesichorus of Helen in Egypt (appropriately). But the poetic posturing, the symbolism, and the echos of the Trojan War, the manner in which she has manipulated the story, such clever language, and the wonderful use of arguments parallel to the each of the choral odes making up the work, all of this creates a unique experience for the reader; a rewarding reading for anyone interested in history or the classics and the manner in which our era interacts with the past.

Socially, I've slipped off of the horizon. I'm approaching event horizon, being sucked ceaselessly back into the academic world. But I don't mind. I'd been limiting much social interaction to the pursuit of a boyfriend -- an aim that only depresses me, that causes more pain and discomfort than pleasure. Still, I have been going out occasionally. Yesterday, I went to the library (suppressed smile) WITH A FRIEND. So that is some small token of sociability. And then I've been hanging out with Brit and Chris a lot. Just this weekend I went to a party. Had a Rum and Coke. Had a boy (:-P). It was good.

Ah well. At least I'm reading a lot. I feel very glad for that. Very scholarly. I like that world. Bury myself in it. My poetry will provide the contrast; I flesh myself in words.

Oh, speaking of poetry -- read Kenneth Fearing. He's good. He's very, very good.

I am sitting in the basement of my friend Val's house. Val, say something:

Something.

Well, that's all that you can expect. She is stealing my tea. Mwahahahaha. She is a tea napper. Exeunt upstairs. So writes our goodly friend, Shakespeare, having just seen (I) Hedgewig and the Angry Inch I must say I am disappointed and I disagree. However, all things being thus in an unequivocal thusness striving towards the supernal flame united in all ulterior claims of a static motion, the fire reborn will quench itself in only eternal thirst. Thus has the oracle spoken. All is united in one, a presence sheathed in mystery of love. By the stars divine, goodnight.

To those of you who think I can't do it: I can! I can make friends and I can meet people and I can leave this fucking house and make something of my life. I am not a socially inept, stuckup, arrogant brat. I am worth something. You think I'm miserable because I'm worth nothing, but it's not true. I'm going to make something of myself.

And now, a message from our sponsor...

I can't believe last night. I completely let myself be carried away by my emotions; I was a slave to my passions -- I couldn't sleep, I howled, I cried, I clawed like some ravenous wild beast. Who am I? Why do I let myself do things like that? I need to find a more positive way of responding to negative emotions and events, or they will consume me.

I suppose I'm being dramatic, but I'll post the events of the day just to share with a wide-based audience. Now I wonder if anybody is dissuaded from visiting this site because of La Vita Nuova? Perhaps people think the site is in Spanish or Italian? Or perhaps abstract literary references just aren't a turn-on.

Tonight, I fear I hurt someone I liked. I guess I can't go into too many close details, but I'll say that personal information was divulged, information that must be dealt with, information that must be discussed, sorted out, analyzed, compartmentalized, felt, shared -- and I copped out. I didn't mean to, I didn't want to, but I did, using my sister's project as a sub-conscious excuse to get out of there. It must have been subconscious, because looking back I don't know why I was so insistent on helping my sister -- I didn't end up doing it at all because I was so upset I couldn't concentrate. I guess I felt my parents' disapproval, I guess that I wanted more privacy, I guess I wanted a space in which to deal.

Sometimes I fear the hopes of any love are smashed to bits. Someone I finally felt I was connecting with, and I ruined everything. And then I've obsessed since then. Tried to call several times, apologized via email, a whole disgusting and dramatic saga. I'm reading this book called "Drama Queen" and I fear I am one. This whole damn saga. I don't want people to hate me, and I don't want people to think I hate them, or that I hold them in low regard, or that I don't have time for them. I love everybody, maybe, but I have a hard time expressing it?

I don't feel like I have a right to my opinions or feelings anymore. I don't trust them. When I get jealous, I'm being petty, when I get upset, I'm being either overanalytical or overdramatic. When I call a friend because I'm so obsessed that I just can't do anything except sit and mope with this awful feeling in the pit of my stomach, I feel as if I'm just burdening other people with my problems. I feel as if I were writing this now (I might not be entitled to use the subjunctive there) just to get attention, just to get sympathy. Parading my woes. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

I read those lines to myself, wrote them on the door, when I broke up with Ben. Or when I first heard that he was with someone else. I guess now I really am broadcasting personal information. It's more drama I suppose. I felt so awful then. I get so attached to people. What I need is time to process; time to think about my loneliness. JD says I don't understand my loneliness.

And I am so lonely. So terribly lonely. I have so many friends, if I ever sit down to think about it -- real people who actually care about me. My teachers, people from school, my professors, people from home, my family certainly, and Val: after I found out and after I got into a fight with my parents about helping my sister (I'm so very sorry, I just couldn't concentrate, and yet I sleep 'til 12 every morning and don't find a job, lazy bum that I am, and no I am not entitled to this self pity -- so the alternative is love, I guess...I'm beginning to feel the beginnings of a warm glow spreading just from the bottom of my abdomen upwards, the sanctified chantings of an inner peace are spreading, or at least some outer facade of calm) I then went to her house and we watched Six Feet Under and The Critic and made jokes and talked. But I guess that was the problem. I was trying to avoid my problems. I should have faced them, as maybe I'm doing now. Then I could've begun the process of healing instead of trying to call him another three times and desperately clinging onto people for reassurance. I need to make a commitment to myself when I feel upset to write about it. It's therapy. The only difference is that the chair is empty facing across from me, just the blank stare of a computer screen. About as sympathetic as a bad therapist though, it will do as substitution.

Today I was convinced that I love the whole world. But I can't listen to people when they talk to me. I get so involved in the meta-discourse, if you will, that I forget the real world. I think about what people are saying and ride off into a world of hasty conclusions and intellectualism; I miss the moment, I don't see the world and environment around me. My mind is busy scanning and processing things at a thousand miles a minute and I just can't listen, I can't be interested -- perhaps I want to escape from intimacy. Perhaps intimacy is choking me; I can't handle it, other people -- they're too much for me sometimes. Perhaps why I'm not more friendly.

When I get really depressed, coming out of it I get incredible highs. The euphoria encompasses everything -- music, words, art, landscape, and people are redeemed and cloaked in a new beauty (nous sommes revetus dans une nouvelle corpse amoreuse ou quelque chose comme ca) -- and I feel the sheer narcissism of loving a phrase. Phrases become aphrodisiacs, become overpowering symbols of a great and supreme happiness that I cannot reach. Today, entering the mall, I was thinking about mortality transcending itself to become eternity and I was in love. I wanted to embrace the world. Une ivresse belle m'engage. I love the little world that I've made for myself, and I'm afraid to go outside.

But I do feel terribly lonely as a result. I want a boyfriend. I want somebody to love me. Because in the end I won't do it. I don't feel entitled to want a boyfriend. I don't feel as if I deserve a boyfriend, because I'm so whiny and snivelling, I suppose. I don't deserve that either of course. I don't merit self pity. And yet the paradox of that is if you don't merit to pity yourself, then you do merit to love yourself. If you're so low that you can't hate yourself, you must love yourself.

Mental images and thoughts I've always considered to be more powerful than medications. An idea can set the heart racing, can penetrate the pores of the mind, and can forge a broken man anew. The metaphor of grand temperance in the forging of Aragorn's sword -- good new, resplendent, and shining, a glowing light in the dark of Mordor. I don't know why I thougtht of that, but I did. Thoughts are a gleaming sword in the mist and darkness. The lady of the lake.

You see, my world is self contained. But I apologize with love. To my friend -- I hope you are -- if you are reading this, yes I am sorry. Not for being myself, but because you think I am not treating you as you deserve. Because I should be, and if I am not, I am sorry, and let me try, give me the chance and I will.

To the rest of you, the best and most peaceful of nights. I will learn to listen to the secret murmurings of the entire world.