this is a ¨how not to¨ post

i´m in bistrita, doing this and that (not much) (mostly despairing over where i will live next week, cause god knows at this point). so of course i go to my former room and start looking through all my old papers from time imemorial. and i find ...
...old notebooks i don´t even open, files with my teaching stuff, collections of Cosmo magazines, and a bunch of things i brought back in 2008 from Vancouver. really? really!
- an empty folded bag of vinegar chips
- free postcards taken from cafes or wherever
- printings of workshop manuscripts from 1st year classmates (mostly poems)
- and some attempt at poems of my own, as of late spring 2008, i would imagine. not a proper poem, but i´ll post this one here - as a timely reminder (strangely i have much better memories in retrospect re: Vancouver, maybe they´re from my second year?) of how-not-to-feel-in-a-beautiful-foreign-place.

also, because i know about being lonely. it will happen, but for god´s sake: it´s part of the goddamn price.


this is

more than seafoam and seabreeze for many;
along the way from False Creek to Main,
towers glinting in glorious sunsets, silvery
 rainsheets against the mountains. this is home
 to flowering condo buildings, Carrall Street syringes,
 Point Grey alleys and for me to make sense of
it would take years and years

i´m running out of. this is beautiful
in some ways i see, but in some it´s been locked
to me, and this is vain to question before i can name
all the blossoms that scent my way, or even go
through one day and not stumble on
the basic tasks signifying this: be
longing.

i am not here to fit in or disrupt, but goddamn it       
 i am here. caged in a hilly land, i swore
if i ever escaped to the ocean, i´d walk to the beach
every morning and dip my feet in, a new life ritual.
and now it´s this slate i see in passing from 20 blocks
away, with no further thought except a loss
as to what to wish for next.