Lately, I've been thinking about expatriation like some people contemplate suicide. Some thoughts by reminders or sentiments that create the longing. I lack a plan and am grounded by loved ones. But if there were no loved ones a plan would be easy to conceive…. Maybe a plan is already pieced, just not assembled.

I feel most alive when traveling. Other times it's like I'm waiting to travel again. I think I decided a couple of years ago to stay put for a while to progress a career, to fulfill this competing need to create something I could call a substantive accomplishment. But anything, when I get into it, is less than my imagination of it.

That is my fault.

I find adolescent infatuations instead.

Lately, I’m enamored with the music of Patrick Wolf. At this point, wherever I am, I’m not even creative enough to romanticize him; I just find the music incredibly sexy for its playfulness and passion—really, for its freedom. It’s a hard line to what I wish I could be, what I will unleash when there is time. But there will never be time, right? Not unless. I hold it open as a reminder of some disappearance to prevent. I listen to it constantly.

Lately I’ve been reading Catherine Wagner. When I first read Macular Hole, I was unimpressed. I thought, like many people do when they see some style like their own, that if she can publish that, why am I unpublished (the lack of effort notwithstanding)? So I read it again and again and found more there that did not disconfirm the question but that instead uncovered more questions. I heard someone complain that the verse was too self-referential to engage them. Older than we are, she wondered if it wasn’t a generational difference. And now I too wonder if it isn’t: For me, the style seems too easy. I wonder about the evolution of the confessional into the blithely dramatic isolate: conceited self-displays that demand attention but refuse connection. What is any daily self-published event but this? I was able to find an early published draft of one of the poems in Macular Hole, which was a boon. The portions she cut deliberately distanced the subject and context to this degree. Just seeing the intention was enough to win me. Her language is inventive and daring in a free syntax, saying what you or I would only think. It's so intensely personal that it doesn't let in the audience, but makes you watch. The feeling is being witness to a series of inside jokes. The question is, is it an intentional commentary on the way we've become accustomed to expressing ourselves or just a preference for that kind of expression—that is, going to what she knows?

This distance of the moment: How much more desperately can we justify using tools of isolation as the means of our connection to each other? I’d rather have it real, wouldn’t you? Rather actually be distant if I’m going to be isolated. I loathe this emotional exile. My mind gorges on details to the exclusion of experience. Even when I want to quiet it to try feeling, it no longer can release the racing with ease. I want forced simplicities; I want the lights to go out and the batteries to die. Truly, I want to go far enough away that my mind can’t be co-opted for someone else’s shallow purpose.