i am not that writer

ex boyfriend drops a funny little email with a photo of himself in elf-like pageboy costume to perform Don Carlo in Japan with a link to a spoken word poet called sarah kay. like many powerful wordsmith superwomen playing to multiracial young audiences in the demographic of the Rising Jedi Knights (cover of Time magazine, kawanahoo or whatever they call them in Hawaii, mongrel progressive yuphippies), she is herself of multi heritage and a breathless believer of her role in the liberal progressive battle for the something greater than. she writes that "hands are made for loving," and with aside coyness that, in this light, "hands are not political." Of course, she is trying to make the point that hands are political, in her understanding of love in the polis. She confesses to her unborn child, "from a scale of 1 to overly trusting I am naive," but she is not only a believer but believes in her believing -- which makes her believable and unbelievable.

i am in the untethered, water-less winnebago of finding my way to writerland, and just thought to myself to remember that i am not that writer. the kay cadence, a self-conscious post-90s reasserting of the trope of the spoken word artist, something to be made fun of at parties on last saturday night in artist lofts where kuan yin stands blessing unshielded bathtubs and fun boys are thieved by curly-haired blondes who look like sarah jessica parker. speaking with the gangly 7 foot tall man seated upon said bathtub and his oddly-paired, well-dressed girlfriend, somehow i get to blabbering about the kuan yin statue and old chinese mystical wushu movies where the transliterations breed absurdities like "I am Divine Virgin Divine Dragon Gang 9" and in said absurd movie the said Divine Virgin can only save the village/gang/treasure/something by copulating with the town idiot in the middle of a forest clearing in a giant cocoon swirled into being by the whip of her long sleeves. the catch phrases for the evening were "swoop, dragon, swoop" and "rapturous embrace in a cocoon". in the telling of this said story, we jointly mocked the kay cadence, not specifically hers, but the cadence of the spoken word artist of whom I may have once and always desired and will never be.

because who are one's audiences, who listen because you speak in their voice? somehow, i speak for the old men, the loser lover, the ones who can't help themselves, the divorcee putting a daughter through school for acting partly in order to piss off his ex-wife. those who spend their lives fighting their minds that take them to dirt-filled places; the haggard wanderer, homeless, death-obsessed, constantly overflowing with treacherous life. the leech, the leach, la que sabe the one who knows. those who do not hunt, but cannot help to smell spilled blood. sharks, dung beetles, carrion eaters.

she lives on pages but keeps her mouth shut. she keeps nameless people company when they don't have any, can't have any, hope for any while feigning casual intelligence while reading in public. with peripheral feelers, minions of skin dust scattering to attract to oneself, he -- reclined seductively against a public park statue, artfully sliced trousers to shorts, spends time with a writer like she. she next to a smushed banana, she worn down and thrown in a book bag, she in the brown donation bag, she the designated driver, she with the paper back. she, the working man's lunchtime sunshine mistress. she, who pilgrimages to have friends and lives in residence with god. she of the 52 minute battery remaining. she of the clackety clack of bones and keys. she, who speaks well to strangers, estranges her kin, and walks home alone.

i am which writer?