Leaving Sex Education & Other Spoils of Childhood

This is the year I am leaving sex education, and other spoils of childhood. Because, frankly, I am twenty-two, almost twenty-three years too old for my mother to insist that sex is bad. Bad for me, because no one wants to marry a used vagina.

I am taking my soap, dirty laundry, loud music and my laptop screen-time away from an older, more respectable generation. The unused mess of birth control pills can leave with its immoral, cancerous self; The fertile stink of overgrown teenager can blow away with its cloud of depressive self-doubt; The childish daughter can grow up, and come back when she is woman enough to represent her family.

The black sheep does not need sex education in the first place. She was born out of a black-hole. Literally, she is a black-hole kept warm by black fluff. She is the Boogie-Woman that everyone’s mother warns their children about. The perverse black-hole that eats nice boys who don’t know any better.

It is time for me to quit mother-tit-sucking and fend for myself. Time to stop leaching from all the sons around me. Create a universe to call my own; A home to fill groceries made of my brain sweat. Brain sweat, because it is not appropriate for a bright, talented girl of today to work traditional women’s roles; It is not time to wash dishes and have sex with a lover in return for survival.

Ex’s rise from dead journals

This is a young person’s post-breakup diary entry:

out [Jul. 15th, 2007|11:13 pm]
i don’t care for him much anymore. he is a running dirt string in front of the breeze through the door. i imagine him in that same house, in the same doorway: busy with his life: capoeira on the beach, his new best friends and his brazilian dream. At twenty-five, why would he stick around this retirement town. he has been on two continents, he has about five more to go. funny he is on his way to MY montreal, to MY brother, to MY third language. enough running across maps; as I drive through tunnels, i hold my breath and wish that the world given him all its secrets, so he would stop and remember me. maybe he has seen and felt my secrets, he’s afraid to look at the unmolded, rough sketch of me; young clay spun wildly a few rounds. he wants polish, shine and glaze. i am not a diamond.

the other boy, is convinced, singing, smitten
we both can’t help but move our bodies, stretch our legs out in rhythm walking, kneading granville street into laughable putty. he will start the funk funk mcing, i will dance and sing, weave inside-out the cracks and loops. if i was to grant him “permission” for me to fall in love, in bed: he would be the bone skeleton frame, i would be the soft, worn out, squeaky beat.
oh he was nervous, vanne taught me when he mumbles and talks forever and ever down the never-ending highway, he is nervous.
i know how it is, i scrunch my nose to my toes, bite down my jaw, flex my lips till they don’t water so much

i try not to think of him, though i roll up and down the street in front of his capoeira school peeking through the window; one of his fancy cars are there? now, i don’t even poke into his email anymore. because there is nothing there. my ex is just text.

Love and Bio-Diesel

my mother
my father

are building a room in their house
waiting for when I will fill it.

Our house will be a bio-diesel tank

I will be thrown out vegetable smoothie spilling outta my guts
out that pretty Bistro on Main St.
that pretty pretty Bistro, circulating in and out
pretty pretty girls.

I will smell of kitchen – deep-fryer thickened air
I’ve been marinating in. I am soupy waste oil.

I’ve been at the cold Exit door once before,
but this time, Mom & Daddy’s diesel truck is waiting for me
A tiny little tank for me
for me to grow up in.

when I am one crying cricket
solo, out in a cold, unfriendly field

Ditching Dollars: An Emerging Artist’s Journey to Honest Art

I’ve been thinking of you. You and your power to consume my art, once I expose it to you. You have the choice of licking it, exchanging money for it, chucking it. I’ve been hoarding my art for most of my life, I’ve refused to sell it to you for a long, long time. At the same time, my art has tried to please you, begged you to fall in love.

The art is young; it resolved to not poison its growth with thoughts of money. It’s goal is not to grow up as a mountain of cash.

Also, its direction should not be dictated by the art du jour, preferred subject of its audience, curators, critics, collectors for the goal of popularity. It should remain flexible when it comes to exploration, expansion of ideas, and general learning.

To Art:

• Yes, you can be a simple painting on canvas, your forte in the technique, despite the art world’s current fixation on concept, philosophy and process.
• You can be anything you want, just as long as you are true to yourself (as an extension, expression, and/or tool of expression of the artist or whatever it is).

and the journey of learning and art-making continues…