Yeehaw

Note in a Bottle 4

By Joe Nasta | Seattle foodie poetPublished about a year ago • 4 min read

Mar 13, 2022

Lake City Studio

Yeehaw,

I’ve been sending secret messages. They’re meant to tell a story: I have been feeling a certain way for a long time but resisted. My subconscious wouldn’t let me stop talking and I was left with poems I had no control over — they said what I was afraid of saying. In my new work, I want to recognize what I truly want to communicate and more carefully express it.

Of course, a message derives huge parts of its meaning from the intended recipient. I’m playing with the idea of talking to somebody I don’t know very well: What can we ever know about another person? How can we ever tell someone that we admire, care for, and value them in a way they can understand? How can we let go of our visions of the stranger and work towards genuine understanding? I think a lot about the poem “Altruism” by Molly Peacock. It reminds me that we can never truly know each other, but we can still feel love.

Frank O’Hara’s personism theory is a joke, right? I’ve been reading and rereading. If he’s being serious (“… you don’t say, “Hey, you can’t hurt me this way, I care!” you just let all the different bodies fall where they may, and they always do may after a few months,” he wrote) I think that bitch is just afraid. Sometimes it’s exactly what I want to say and I think it’s worth speaking out loud: I care! I feel pain. And yes, I do flatter myself into calling this “yearning.” It’s fucking terrifying.

Wherever Frank’s theory would supposedly “[evoke] overtones of love without destroying love’s life-giving vulgarity, and [sustain] the poet’s feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person,” I want a poem to bleed. I want to feel with the person I’m writing to. I don’t want to bury my head in the idea of them so I can write a perfect poem, a silly string of words! Poems are meaningful, powerful, and symbolic — but I want to know someone rather than idealize them and write about it, even if the continual inspiration of them destroys the poems I made out of them. I want the reality of who they are to ruin my stupid poem; I want our ideas of each other to shockingly change every time that we meet. The poem becomes a flower with thorns, an uncomfortably honest gift. Call it “personalism,” haha. Maybe the poems are bad but I wrote them for you :P

I was really intrigued when Elæ mentioned how music impacts our physical bodies in their recent Field Notes entry “Grief and the Other Body; Pastures of the Soft.” The sounds we hear can trigger our body memory. In some of these pieces, I used the Top Hits of 2011 playlist on Spotify to engage with emotional experiences I had at that time, relying on my body to access memory. I trusted my body to churn those feelings of nostalgia, longing, fear, and possibility when I didn’t have the brain capacity to fully consider them consciously.

I started buying myself flowers because I wanted to put one in my mouth for an Instagram reel, so I got the cheapest ones I could find on the way to work and refused to put them in water. I wanted the flowers to die. When I got home (it was the full moon) I collaged with photos of the Kennedys, did an intense tarot reading, thought about someone I hadn’t allowed myself to think about in a long time, and put the flowers in water. I told myself that if the flowers didn’t die after being left dry for so long it wasn’t a delusion. The flowers didn’t die. Every couple of weeks they need replenishing. There are currently half-dead sunflowers and fresh pink roses in my apartment, just to be safe.