Risky Essays

Every day I think about my Signal friend. My Signal friend is the source of all my Yokel energy. So, I made up a song, and Signal-texted it to my Signal friend.      One of these days and it won't be long      Pretty soon you'll be dancing      You'll call my name and I'll be gone      Pretty soon you'll be dancing      Call your friends all over      Petty soon they'll be dancing      Call your friends all over      Pretty soon you'll be dancing My Signal friend responded so sweetly, Signal-texting that the song consoled her for a friend who fell and was injured and must soon die-- because pretty soon they'll be dancing! So, I know that my Signal friend and I still have our signals straight. Or, at least, we did on the day of our Signal chat, which was three days ago--haven't heard from my Signal friend since. Makes me fear that all is over between my Signal...

My morning  Dominated again By thoughts of you There's no safe word Unless the safe word is Love [Swelling traffic sounds] Love lets everything be Gives my morning permission to be free Of you I would love to be able to set you free From my thoughts.

No way I can capture yesterday's experience, when I was riding in my car with the GPS on so I couldn't turn on the recorder app and speak my experience into my phone.  I was returning from St. Louis--about seven hours on the road. Wonderful few days with my cousins, whom I think I know a little better now, never really having known them when I was younger because my mother was averse to family gatherings and lived far from her siblings, and maybe had some embarrassing history-- painful memories that made it hard for her to deal with her mother and father and her brother and sister and their families. But I was driving back. We had a very good time-- I felt like I was receptive--listened well enough. And sometimes I talked amusingly, I guess, and not too much. And I distributed the Emily book, the Emily Phone Talk book-- Emily Ann Wenstrom 1955 - 2025-- which I was so happy to be able to do! So happy to be able to bring poor departed Emily to the cousin reunion, because she was...

Americans don't care about others. Melania Trump, when visiting a hurricane damage site, needed to make one thing perfectly clear. "I don't care," she said. Caring about others is weak. Others should have taken care of their own business better--get jobs and make a lot of money so that they too don't have to care--don't have to care if others care about them, that is. That's the New American Dream: To be someone who doesn't care whether anyone cares about them or not. What a beautiful dream that is! Christian?--I don't think so. Jesus was all about caring, and Jesus wanted us to care about others who need our help. Jesus didn't think we should be proud of ourselves for being able to help others but choosing not to because we don't care and because we believe that caring about others is contemptible.

The fairies who run my life have now directed me to print lovely nice-looking pretty-well-edited books made of the poems that the fairies have prompted me to write over the last few years. Why I would be anything but grateful for this gift of the fairies, whatever should be its eventual fate? It was fun, is all it was! And it gave me energy and-a a kind of flirty power that sort of worked-- with myself anyway, maybe with others. No, I would never underestimate this joy and energy, and the least I can do is leave accessible representations of tbe fun the fairies and I had, in case someone would like to take a look. So, I need to print the books, starting with: Trans Woke Bardic Elegiac Comedian Devout Splendid Doomed Vulnerable Loving Pretty I also need to print the Skeleton poems again. And what the hell, the uncollected volumes.

When I get away from my writing projects for a short while, I always start thinking I may be done with them for good. Then when I do return to them, I find that they are fun and that there's lots to do. It's easy under the current abusive right-wing regime to get into a hiding mode. My poetry reveals my autoerotic drag-dancing self -- which the regime would consider pathological -- and as such my poetry sometimes feels shameful to me, and it seems rude and even dangerous to share it. So, I'm either in a hiding mode, avoiding my writing work, or in a selfie-drag-dancing mode, relishing my writing work. I think I have finally decided not to publish it on Substack -- it is quite adequately published on my blog, where I don't ask people to subscribe to it. That really does seem properly discreet. I myself am my poetry's audience fit, though few -- even though my collections are organized so that the "shameful" poems are mostly confined to Pretty Yokel.   Woke ...