thoughts

I remember feeling at ease earlier today. Maybe it was because I started grading papers or drank a beer or sat on the internet too long, but now it all seems gone. The ideas I had about my life, emotions, emotions and faces of those around me, anxiety, sleep, poetry, all somewhere else maybe stretching into someone else's mind. The collective experience. I do like to think about that one. I remember feeling overwhelmed by all the books at the Strand bookstore. What did it mean for me? I saw a book by Carolyn Forche I would have liked to own, a book about the history of marajuana, a book with electrical impersinations of birds, a book by Charles Darwin about how human and animal facial expressions relate to one another. And I will die without reading 1/10th of the books in that one store. A lot of people think about that. Maybe even a lot of people feel overwhelmed by that. I finally made sense of some poems I have to talk about and bought a nice knife that was on sale and a garlic press that was not. i thought about space, not the big dark kind, but the kind we make in our room and how we need familiar things in order to feel familiar to ourselves. I had a chair that every cat I ever knew loved to sit in. I sold that chair to someone at a garage sale and I wonder if they have a cat that loves to sit in the chair too.

Today I felt less anxious and more okay of where I am. I ended up drinking coffee, and felt a little anxious, but then back to observant and local to myself. I watched the light open and close on a woman's white shoes on the subway. Like how lightening can change a room. I read a poem about that, too.