Our Lady of Perpetual Exhaustion

I realize, of course, that I am incapable of saying "no." I have overfilled my metaphorical dinner plate yet again because I associate "mad busy" with "happy."

People keep coming up to me and telling me I look "beat" or "tired." This is code for "You look like shit. What's wrong with you?" My hair is stringy and I am having a weird resurgence of middle-aged acne and my eyes are all puffy. Allergies and exhaustion, mostly.

And still, I find the time to blog and generally mess around online. Ha.

I am doing lots of way cool stuff and I had an epiphany about book manuscript #2 (which has been simmering in the subconscious for too long) and I am banging away at it, writing new pieces and feeling stoked about all the weirdness floating around in my head but by next week I will probably hate these poems again.

I have not sent anything out in a while. I did have a poem picked up by a magazine last week that I'd forgotten about so this was a nice surprise. I might be ready to send things out by October or November. Too many ideas, not enough time. I have not updated my website since, like, 2008. So sad. I keep saying I will and then I just can't get to it. I have sketched out the new design in my journal, at least. Submissions are rolling in for blossombones and I must get reading before I am buried alive. See? Too much stuff. Still, I know people who do so much more and make it look dead easy. I hate them. No, not really.

The weather is finally changing and soon it will be dark, dark, dark. I love this. The leaves will change colors and drop and I will walk through the quiet neighborhoods once it gets cold enough and the people stay inside. I am already making chai for breakfast and thinking about soup and bread and things made with apples and pumpkins and wonderful spices. I want to light a fire in the fireplace and shut myself in and feel rested and peaceful and warm.

In the meantime, I am continually plagued by dreams of the dead.

***

I dream about murderers and vicious, bloodthirsty ghosts. Last night I dreamt I was in my childhood home surrounded by floating women in white dresses with anger issues. They were very stabby. (And by stabby, I mean they were wielding knives and sharp silvery scissors which they would gleefully plunge into one's abdomen if given half a chance.) I felt at such a disadvantage. How does one defeat the dead? After all, they cannot be killed, right? I captured one of these ghosts and forced her to reveal her weaknesses. She admitted to being incapable of moving through glass and said that if I pinned the names of her victims to her dress, she would dissolve. At some point there was a coconut tree, ripe with clusters of severed heads. I shook the tree and the heads plummeted down into the grass. I recognized some of the faces. The necks were oozing something gooey and yellow. Later I was at a literary conference where I was forced to share a hotel room with a pair of dead lovers. They were entwined in the white sheets, stiff with rigor, their mouths hanging open in tortured ovals. I told the concierge, "I cannot sleep here. These people are dead."


According to my dream dictionary I am: a.) feeling oppressed; b.) feeling pangs of guilty conscience ; c.) in need of professional help ; or d.) in the midst of a powerful transformation. Of course, it is possible that I watched too many horror movies this week, too.

I am also researching Elizabeth Bathory for a poem.

I expect the nightmares to continue.

***

Scary Workplace Vending Machine Item of the Week: Twin Pack of Microwavable Chili Dogs

Watching: Dario Argento, David Lynch

(Re)Reading: Swimming the Witch by Leilani Hall

Feeling: Rather like Deflated Bagpipes or Fireplace Bellows