Poem by DiDi Delgado

Dwellings
Which is code for the place my mind goes when you choose not to answer the phone.

I never thought I’d have to plead or beg for your support, when the floor and walls of my vagina’s estate, housed you, kept your manhood comfortably sheathed, when the world around and outside you was chilly, cold and too cool… you were learning my home came with a built in self-regulating heating system, a whirlpool sauna and heated pool.

The estate’s resident ice queen sculpture gave you the luxury of not dreading sliding on the preventative gloves you hated the feeling of. You have been the only house guest who is exempt from the evening mandatory code of common space dress. Isotoners required at the dinner table dear.

I’m no Freud, Nietzche or Camus, but the existential existence of your existentialism is slightly askew. Off kilter, agape, keloided scar tissue has formed over your brain or your heart, or both. Every year you choose not to have the elective surgery to remove that thickly roped tissue, mistakenly believing that all scars from battles you’ve barely even won, mean something, are aesthetically pleasing, that the next house you visit will agree with your ripped wall papering, fucked up landscaping and unforgivably drab unending rows of vinyl siding.

I feel bad for you, that you’ve accepted these gnarled installations labeled as acceptable forms of decoration. The cups in the kitchen cabinets, mismatched ever since you brought in all your shit, of which I will convince myself that it’s doable and liveable and write it off as musings of misunderstandings. I can’t help but throw in my own cliché decadence in the form of murmured digs, when I wonder is ignorance really bliss, because you obviously don’t know a lack of class has been passed down to you as an inheritance from your father.

I don’t even fucking like you the way I write you.

I was just hoping that you’d continue to at least pretend to be placebo in my experiment on what it might feel like to hear someone say that they liked you for you. You. With your outdated and antiquated interior.

I found myself calling your flaws “character” and your unleveled flooring, “cute” even when I stumbled upon it and busted my lip, chipped the inside corner of my left front tooth, which I now run my tongue over absentmindedly when I’m nervous.

Two lost souls content with disfigurement in our dwelling.

Answer your damn phone.

DiDi Delgado – 1. Girl wonder. 2. Fat & Phat. 3. In the midst of a quarter life crisis. 4. Is also an anomaly – Conceited yet humble; I’m still searching for my niche in the world, life and in your heart. 5. Creator of DiDi-isms and DiDi-ness (according to my friends). Follow her blog Love and Labels.

Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn. He is a sculptor, painter, book dealer, photographer and teacher. His work has been seen in numerous group shows both in USA and Europe and he has had 9 one man shows including several retrospectives of his sculpture. His work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum Of American Art, New York University, The Guggenheim Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum and The Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Since 2007 His paintings, drawings, photographs and collages have been published in over 160 on line and print magazines. He has received three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two Pollock-Krasner grants, the Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grant and, in 2010, he received a grant from Artists’ Fellowship Inc. He currently teaches art to retired public school teachers at The United Federation of Teachers program in Brooklyn.