Ah, beautiful warm day...hot coffee...an email from my sweetie...five more memoirs to read. Life is good.

My 83-year-old student is producing wonderful poetry at a great clip. I said to her, "Joan, you're on a roll!" She shrugged and replied, "If not now, when?"

Yesterday, a second grader wrote "W hugs the whole world," which I think would make a great title for the book I want to write about teaching poetry in the schools--either before or after the book I want to write about sex and chocolate and children.

I heard a wrenching interview last night on NPR about kids forced to work in the cacao trade for pennies, as well as children sold into sexual slavery. Maybe it hit me harder because my own love life is blossoming after long dormancy. Why do we take the sweetest things in life and ruin them? What possesses us?

Just fielded a call from my synagogue; they want to talk to me about the Terumah project, i.e. they want to hit me up for money to purchase the building. But I'm already giving and giving time and energy and money to Interplay. I love my synagogue and I want to support it. But I want to go to Africa more. I'm spread too thin among spiritual communities, and each of them are important for different reasons. This is why I could never be polyamorous. It's complicated enough being me working in all these different schools and attending to all these different projects. In fact I wrote a poem about it last night in class:

Non-Monogamy

The thought of it makes my spit dry up,
my armpits itch.
I want my wine undiluted,
my morning whole as an egg.
I want you beside me, skin warm,
wiry arms wrapped around my waist,
holding on for dear life.
Or one room over, splashing in the shower.
Or downstairs, making coffee
so strong you could stand a fork up in it.