busy late night nothings, now with extra random poetry

Ah, Love, you smell of petroleum
and overwork
with grease on your fingernails,
paint in your hair
there is a pained look in your eye
from no appreciation
you speak to me of the lilacs
and appleblossoms we ought to have
the banquets we should be serving
afterwards rubbing each other for hours
with tenderness and genuine
olive oil
someday. Meanwhile here is your cracked plate
with spaghetti. Wash your hands &
touch me, praise
my cooking. I shall praise your calluses,
we shall dance in the kitchen of our imagination.

Right, i should totally be in bed instead of up posting Judy Grahn poems on Val's laptop. After months of paying through the nose for the rationed privilege of checking my email while surrounded by 50 14 year old boys playing some sort of computer version of Operation Iraqi Freedom ("Merde! Ah, putain!!'), a renegade cloud of illegal but free wifi has drifted into our flat. So I'm taking advantage of it. I should be in bed, I gotta get up early tomorrow because I agreed to go to some random villiage nearby at 7 in the morning.
Yeah, anyway, I'm almost done here in Verdun. On April 22 I plan to be on a train to Paris. So things are in that totally wierd state when you're about to make a major change but it hasn't happened yet and everything's continuing as per usual, like just before you graduate. Limbo. Tension. Liminal space. I hate periods like this. Everything becomes heightened, given extra significance it wouldn't have otherwise. The last movie I see at the cinema. Actually paying attention to my surroundings on my morning jogs by the river, trying to fix them in my memory. Saying hello to an acquainence, Tony the barman/local pot dealer, the boulanger who sells me my bread, someone who's always been in the background of your day. There's like a wierd poignancy to it that annoys me to no end. Because, yes, there are things I will miss about Verdun, like how the bus drivers always nod hello to the garbage collectors as they drive by, or the ever-changing sky that makes me think of Vermeer's View of Delft. But let's not make it worse or more melodramatic than it has to be, okay? Let's just get it over with. I'm ready to go. I've got some teacher version of Senioritis, I just can't be bothered; I'm not a teacher, I realized that my first week on the job, but it's been a good experience, and now it's time to move on. How can I do lesson planning when I've got my Grand Tour in front of me? Paris, then London, England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, Berlin. And my last night in Europe will of course be in Paris. I'm not sure I'm gonna make it, my brain can't handle that much, you know, happiness and shit. 'Bizarre Death of American Backpacker! Coroner Reports Abnormally High Levels of Endorphins in the Bloodstream! Too Much of a Good Thing? See page A3' I mean, the last time I was in London I was 17 and "straight", on a whirlwind 9 day trip with nuns. Not that it wasn't fun (notable especially for my first sight of drag queens, walking past the Tower of London in the middle of the day). But. Just you wait this time, London. You won't know what hit you. I'm going to be so broke when I get home.
Home. That's the thing. I want to go home and I don't want to go home. I miss family, friends, electrical sockets that aren't round, pick up trucks, my own car, my books, milk that comes in gallons, barbeques and corny classic rock, cutoff jeans and farmer's tans, Mexican beer. I can't wait to get my life started back home, make dyke friends, date, learn Aikido, get a pet iguana, join Code Pink and cause some trouble, get my hands dirty again. But I'm afraid, too, of getting stuck in Missouri, getting stuck in some shitty job in some shitty town wishing I'd gotten that PhD in Lit like everyone told me to, realizing that this time here was the best time of my life and it's all downhill from now on. Because it has been the best time of my life, and I'm a different person than when I left, more confident, more assertive, more secure. More adventurous. I'm more like the person I always wanted to be. And what if it doesn't last? What if I come home with all 7 of Nina Bouraoui's novels and lose my ability to read French? What if I regress? I'm afraid, too, of sticking out even more than I did when I left. Cause here I often feel like an ignorant hick (middle-class midwest and middle-class East coast and middle-class Western Europe can be very, very different things), but back home I'm going to be Too Intellectual, Too Educated, Too, believe it or not, Sophisticated.
What if, part of me wonders, finding a place to be, of my own, means having to sacrifice some part of myself? Because back home I'm too bookish and too gay, and here I'm too provincial.
Life would be alot simpler if I liked boys and makeup; but I seem to insist on being someone who goes fishing (mm, deep fried catfish) and reads Colette in the original.
Okay, I really need to get some sleep. God I'm going to hate myself in the morning.