My first house

It's one of the girl's birthdays, on Facebook my students arranged a hilarious broken-english thread arranging the details of yesterday's surprise party.  Hilarious because they get jokes not because of their misused pronouns and verb forms.  Getting jokes says a lot when you are learning a language.  It is cheesy I get it but that's my first focus, we speak heart in my class.  Lots of laughter so that even if the words don't translate the spirit does.

We are all homeless I am thinking when I walk through the door of class and see the hopeful looks of the two Japanese girls in the corner decorating Maiko's chair with gifts and streamers, they are relieved to see that I am not the birthday girl.  What is a home?  Is it the knowledge that, say, you have to be turning on to Fairfield by quarter of if you want to walk in to class five minutes before class starts?  Is it the way your bed feels on Friday mornings, pillows stuffed with the zion of sleep and still cushioning your awareness when you settle back in with your first cup of coffee and books and blank pages?  Is it the way the air, through the screen when the sun is almost down and you are drying your dishes, reminds you that there is life outside?  How it makes you grateful, reminds you to pay attention?

There was sad news from the East Coast that came after other sad news from the East Coast.  The kind of news that jolted my routine and knocked me off balance for a while, after already being a tiny bit off balance because my cousin was here for ten days.  I had to pause and be firm enough with myself, my sleep was a mess, my caffeine intake off the chain.  My diet for shit and no yoga.  But totally obsessed with writing and studying, so really the past two weeks have been a madness of the poetic kind.  Frenzy.  The Poetry finally came back to me the night before last.  So I am proud of myself.  The golden tail tried to slip away under the door.  I went after it.  Wriggly little bastard.  I mean seriously, I didn't let up.  My poem muscles must be so lean and strong now.  Poetry sounds like palm trees and feels like the sea.  Or big bright magical flowers that only live in California and must have sparkle names.  It feels like the bald light of the moon.  Like the way that light must put invisible magic on your skin.

We're floating through space Brooks reminded me, a long talk under the palm trees them witnessing me letting him be my witness through the sun roof of my car.  I sat under my purple mexican blanket because it was cold out and night but I needed the fresh salt air.  That's when I felt the untying, when he said that.  That's what made it all good...this is life is what he was saying.  Which was enough for me to say, ohhh yea and I get a choice in the matter, to make it holy.  To make it holy with my own special sunshine and rain.

We are all homeless and speaking a second language.  I make a home my own home.  I do it for us, using language, my first house.  Also I don't really know what I am doing.

There is beauty in the knowing that no one really does.