20things: Talking points

1. I don't think it's exaggerating to say that in January I began to emerge from a six-year fugue state called wage slavery + chronic illness.

2. I looked around for my comrades but they had scattered or fallen away.

3. In the meantime I'm trying to carry out everything I meant to do in those six years. To pick up conversations where I dropped them. [not drowning, but waning]

4. Please write me back. 

5. And considering not killing this tomato plant.

6. It's really hard to kill a tomato plant.

7. Keep in touch. Take care.

8. I used to have a thick garden. I would wander among the containers, watering, pruning, testing. It felt like immersion, like not-thinking. When was that?

9. Last summer I let two small basil plants die. Every day I made the choice to neglect them, until their stalks shrank and crawled along the porch floor. Pent anger was starting to leak out of me like when you view a house, on fire, from the street, but the fire is still furtive. Was that a flamelet creeping up the siding? Does anyone else smell smoke? Did you hear an alarm?

10. [Casually]: Did you get my email?

11. Sometimes you can't anticipate a full system crash. And sometimes you can just feel it coming... a spirit haunting the circuitry. You take steps, make preparations.

12. She made an observation about my heart chakra but I wasn't paying attention.

13. The writing is going great. {{{{take large sip of cocktail}}}} I have so much material I don't know what to do with myself. {laugh now}

14. Sometimes I fantasize: I push my hand down into the dirt, scrape away the superstructure until I find the root ball... and then just pull hard and fast until the whole thing comes up in my palm. And then throw it as hard as I can onto the concrete.

15. You're canceling the next workshop? 

16. Nothing will stop the thoughts from revving behind my eyes, between my ears. Nothing that I'm willing to mention here, anyway.

17. Did you get my friend request? I don't mean to seem needy. No, delete that. Don't send.

18. My latest bruise is dissipating in the form of an eye, an arched eyebrow. I swear I can see a hint of cheekbone. These things don't show up the same in pictures.

19. Hello. Hey. Hiya. Halloo. Howl. The speaker in this poem says what?

20. pls wrt