The Randomest of Random Poetry

The diss is finished, submitted, accepted. Which means now, perhaps, there will be time for other writing.

Jon Tuttle asked me to read a poem or two for the Snow Island Review reading on Tuesday the 30th, and I didn't really think about it before saying "Yes." Not that I'm regretting it, but that with this and the Pee Dee Fiction and Poetry Festival earlier this month, I have come to realize just how much I've failed at writing in the last two years.

I've decided to read either two short poems from the Disability Workshop, or two shorter, older, poems that I had polished long before the dense, academic prose took over my brain. In trying to locate these (some of them on this blog), I found some other, really strange, pieces I wrote last year, my first year in Lafayette, and my last year in Boston. So I thought I'd post those here, in an attempt at recovering what was lost. Note that these have not been revised, and at times falter in syntax.

Friday Last

too lofty a word to speak here--love--and yet i do, aware that the "v" goes on to long, that i'll have to lick my lips quite soon. the rain falls listlessly unlike that first time i thought about the concrete ledge of the stadium, when it poured so hard no one knew i was crying until i tried to speak. too close to the rain, to the sidelines, to his breath fogging in time with mine, i fall back to my place on the third tier of seats without hearing a reply. florida, i say to the floodlights that cast our shadows together into one, can be reached by car in twenty hours. the ledge is too far to climb at this hour anyway.


On moving back to the midwest
if this is a sign of retribution, of atonement, nearing me then i’ll look away or look into the sun to blind me. this cloth is scratchy on the shoulder that’s not sweating yet this shoe is digging hard into my heel. the robe around me is just enough—my god, it’s may, and there’s my breath—just enough of a coat and it’s black. this robe cost too much, too much to cut my hair and box my clothes and drive drive drive west, even though the ocean calls me. the strap has blistered me again, flesh welting in accusation, making my cheeks twitch, i’ll give it away now if i blink or smile or raise an eyebrow, this carefully twirled hair will pull the cornerstone out and i want it to. there’s the pole i fell upon, there’s the one that fell on me in the early morning scent of steam and sweet cookies. there’s the track we circled around then around again and never quite met in the middle, the rubber soles and the rubber ground bounding us away from each other.


Solo
The ones my fingers know they've always known
and at this stage, can no longer afford to hazard guesses
this touch was my only intuition once
Pairs of people wander around me in my pretty dress
they come, they always come, to spoil the child
with "babe" and "hon" and "sweetie"
a slippage in the slick sweat on metal
intentional falter, intentional trip over sidewalk cracks
his words are praiseful, bouncing against the raindrops .


The trees come at me--this can't be--but the light is moving and I know I can see North and South at once. The wind slaps like waves, chunks of wind patting my eyelashes down to shut out the marching forests. Blunt wind, sharp sun--they say you can bathe in it, but it's all spikes and rays--speeding the leaves up into my face. It gives us a chance to sing loudly into the roar about the conditions of possibility--meaning, really, hope. To think about definition as the definition of the shadow on the moon. To hum a melody about what we contain, how we curtain it away like a shower, like a dirty room, so that the open space won't swallow everything, so we don't lose our shapes and release the churning infinity within. The strain of forever nips at the bounds we set, the missing fences around sensation.
The setting sun lances with intention this time, opens the pain, pokes holes in the boundaries of my flesh and I bleed freely, without cause, this time. The hole it makes expands, jagged, and infinity seeps out, flooding away words, lines, fences, until all is All and All is one. The trees are marching to staunch the flow and even the simplest question--are you alright?--is a feat of creation, but not impossible.


A vision of the messianic

I see you in the finite,
Which is, of course, wrong.
I see you as a condition of my caught breath,
As a phantasm of a deeper structure.

I ask for simpler words
(Perhaps angry words?):
Something to keep a beat to when the beat slows down,
And to walk to in the new night.

I want to measure a chill in the air.
I see you as a condition of cradles and graves,
Without which I am hungry.
It fed off of the delta valley.

Every other line is empty
Of devotion and vocation to cloister.
Not me, not in context, not in the northeast,
A condition of angrier words.


Being a liberal in war

Oh how easy it is to die in war,
The fletch of the arrow, the hilt of the sword
To see your own blood and want to see more
To bow to the sky, to scream from the core

Oh how lucky to die before
The panic sets in, they even the score
They burn all the bodies, loot all the stores--
How lucky to die as they blast through the doors

Oh how simple it is to protest
To scrawl on a poster and scream with the rest
About blood, about oil, about the oppressed
To fast and to mourn that we’re overly blessed




Happy

We are one big family
While all the stupid people writhe in agony
With sauntering steps kept to pace
The brush and bend of pulse and pages.
The party blesses one another;
In cold address each does stumble,
Hiding in their fetal poses
As one would cradle rose bouquets,
Cherishing sores from thorn arrays.

The undesirable among us
Chip each edge of memory from us
With emotion sweet as sugared donuts.
We must choose to abuse the past like this
It does not come naturally
It does not leave quietly
It will not be happy till we loose our fits
And miss these bleak displays.

Habitus

Settled in to the hard edge of a chair--it cuts and makes its shape known against my body, and this awareness of sitting skitters at the edge of thought--I'm listening to songs that are substituting for prayer. I'm fairly sure Fiske is misreading the social action of fandom, and I'm fairly sure Burke says it all better in a single phrase: Literature is equipment for living. And I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with what I'm supposed to be reading for--oh, I'm poaching, baby--but the lines of the chair and the shining tabs of fanfic lining the task bar and the sounds of hope and peace and love penetrate the film of pain just enough to shatter my discipline.

This dissertation is being written amid burning and stabbing and weakness and twitching, words in the spaces between pain, theses extracted painstakingly, chaff from wheat, diamond from rock, tumor from breast. And even when I laser focus, pull my mind and soul from the body long enough for clarity of thought, it's there, in the meat; back down in the physical my legs move without consent, my brain registers startling scents, my ears baulk against the pressure of some deep throb of sound: A passing car. It's solid, inside me, a force that my soul shrinks from until I'm nothing but a singularity. How can it not appear in the writing, this pain? It manifests itself in every sentence, tainting my masterpiece with that which I abhor; the thing I hate infiltrating my love, I cannot escape it; we are forever entwined. When I speak of hope, it's never about my own.

"Final" draft of disability poems

When I took The Rhetoric of Access Class in the Summer of 2006, Dr Salvo kept asking me why I could theorize all sorts of things, but couldn't theorize my own disability. Or even seem to conceptualize it in any meaningful way. While I had come to terms with the necessity of the label "disabled" for university purposes, I didn't like to use it except as shorthand for my situation--which, as a Burkeian, I should have realized the implications of this naming, but, then again, I wasn't theorizing it. I struggled to define for myself whether the disability was part of me, or if there was some other core identity outside the illness. As though the illness were a deviation from my True Self.

"You don't let it define you," Lou said today, as I struggled to finish the prose poem. And this is and was and probably always will be the problem. It does define me, but not in totality; it is me, I am it. It colors my language, my bodily movements, my lived experience. It gives me, in Burke's words, an orientation or perspective that prescribes strategies for living. But people, particularly normals, don't want to think about this, because admitting the sickness is (in) you is to admit your proximity to death. We run far, far away from death, if only to return to it in the death drive. Being disabled means being mortal. And that makes people uncomfortable.

Well too damn bad, people. As Mrs Curie told me when I struggled with Weber's Clarinet Concerto, "Make beautiful mistakes"--or, in another orientation, make the mistakes beautiful. Here's me trying to make the mistake of my body beautiful. (Oh, and Jeff, if you're reading this? Thanks, and sorry about the Muppet comparison. And to AHS band members: Yes, I'm aware I was never "cricked." But there was that one time with Kamp's pants, and you know we came close then...)

Twelve Steps Away From Disabled

He wants me to walk like a penguin; I want him to speak to me like an adult. My feet turn ninety degrees without my permission and I waddle triumphantly across the office. No, he says, not looking at my mother. I meant, turn them the other way. My toes face each other and twitch hello.

In the middle of a step, time stops with a high whine, bright and still like a frozen sunbeam. My boot slides in the snow banks; the New Hampshire sludge has a contract out on me. The rest of the class keeps on walking. Thanks, teacher, for leaving me be--I‘ll catch up eventually.

If I don't run now, I might be able to walk later: this is energy conservation in its finest. The gym teacher is unimpressed by my planning skills. He thinks I mean later in the day. I mean later, when I'm middle-aged and sporting a wheelchair. I've got a lot of contingencies to consider. I'm already eight.

My fingers fly up and down the keys, faster than anyone, and my mother looks relieved. Somehow my body knows this, easier than walking, than using a knife and fork, and I wonder if this is what it's like to walk without thinking left, right, lift, push. The concentration of a step is harder than Mozart's clarinet concerto in A.

And hit. Three feet behind again, panting and red faced; my foot is nowhere near the white line--it’s betrayed me again. The bass drum pounds on, and they threaten to throw me in the creek. The doctor’s note stays in my back pocket. I’ll take the plunge instead.

Trudging uphill. The cold feel of frozen meat that is my thigh trips me, breaking the article already written in my head. I can't ask the question I want to (Do you agree with the Senate's decision?) with the noise of pain coating the scene. I go for the easy schmooze instead, and Mom recommends I rethink journalism school. We call the new round of college applications "Plan B."

The word is washing machine, but I'm going with "the thing that gets things clean," which earns me laughter and friends. I smooth over the gaps by speeding in circles around missing words, so it's okay, and no one notices until I try to order pizza and ask for balloons instead. Much giggling ensues. Instant friends for life.

I didn't mean to hit her, but she was sitting too close, and the arm decided it needed to inhabit some other space, so I'm telling myself it's not my fault. When the leg kicks me back from my desk and into the wall three days later, Jeff’s mentoring skills kick in, and he eases my blush with jokes about the spontaneous overflow of emotions. I tell him I hate the Romantics, anyway. I score points for intertextuality.

Jeff’s a mad Muppet-like man, bobbing in his seat, Mennonite compassion oozing from the books on his shelf. You’ve got more options, he tells me. You’d like grad school, because it’s clear Plan B is a bust, and I don’t want to travel too far into the alphabet. I refuse to ask What if I run out of words? What if I get lost? because Jeff has too much faith in me, and I’d hate to ruin his day.

They put me on the top floor, of course, high above the city that breathes for me most days. Fire drills aside, the minuscule elevator carries me faithfully down to the pavement I can pound, inhaling Boston, infusing it in my skin. The stairs stare me down, and I glare right back; I am not lost, for once, in the streets that wind dizzyingly in marshes and fens.

To the prim professor, I say, “The creation of audience identification is necessarily voluntary: But what if they don’t want to feel disabled with me?” The words haven’t gone anywhere, as long as the buildings twinkle at night, and standing in the doorway between here and there seems to suit me.

I'm sitting in the driveway, trying to remember which one is the brake pedal again, and how to get home. Twenty years of failing to be the right kind of penguin has been like the slide of twilight into night. Or like a frog being boiled slowly in water. “Becoming,” I say to the unfamiliar street signs, “is different from being,” tasting Heidegger on my lips. As long as I’m still driving, I haven’t yet arrived.

Sirloin Or why you shouldn't hug me

Please unloose my flesh
To let fly free that which
Aches against my borders.
Like frost on a window
Binds sticky and prickles,
So do your fingers scratch
Against the edge of my skin.

It begins in the spine,
Tracks down and settles
Matching gut for gut,
Meeting stab with stab,
Etching rutted lines
Through pulsing muscle,
Clean Ginsu marks,
But not to stretch,
Not to butterfly open:
It’s not your intent to butcher
Me with embracing arms.

And a bonus poem that I didn't have the balls to read at something called "Disability Awareness Month." "Raising Awareness" is an idea I often rant against, and this poem is to be read sarcastically: Imagine a whiny 13 year old girl's voice, and you've got it just about right. (Yes, this and Sirloin are reposts, but with revisions)

Raising Awareness
Are you there, passion?
Are you yet asleep?
Has hope awoken you on cue
at the end of the end,
where you can sip the most fuel
thrust forward at the tip of the fuse?
Or have you slipped beyond now
infusing the realm of dreams
where you are more easily grasped
where you are not denied a chance
to light the plot to enlighten the world
And make them all impassioned for the cause?

They’ve waited, passion,
those banner-makers and slogan-writers
They who walk for cures with posters held high
They’ve waited on you and upon you
waited for your arrival at the darkest night
triumphant in trumpet blares at blastissimo,
For you to burn the untouched souls
And inflame them with compassion.
But you snuck in quiet to the back room
and tied them up in our own pink ribbons
till they are furiously still at the keyboard
passionately aware, the standard of awareness raised.

Are you still here, passion,
Now that the worst has floated downriver?
It seems they can't remember
how this is supposed to end--
is it a tragedy or comedy?
A romantic gesture?
A single rose on the fifteenth of February?

Vines (A meditation on consubstantiation)

In working with the "Writing the Disability" group, I've been contemplating what Burke has to say about disease. It's not positive, of course. In Burke world, disease is dis-ease, and is what we are always/already acting against; we are "rotten with perfection" or at least the motive to perfect, and that means constantly expunging the disease around us. But what happens when the diseased is a person, not an idea or situation? What does that do to Burke's motive of identification: He says we all want that communion with each other, but do we really? Do you want to share substance with the ill and dying? That would mean admitting that you, too, are ill and dying, and we Americans don't do that well.

So, thinking about Burke and disease and about his brief comments on consuming ("you are what you eat" being his example of how changes in substance can occur) and thinking about the latest episode of Supernatural, in which Famine perfects the desire to consume which leads to death (insert Lacan here), I came up with this. This Whatever.

Vines
To be consumed,
to share in substance
to stand on the same ground
to emerge from the same soil like spider plant offspring
Springing off away from each other
soaking in the same rain
under shadows, one withers
the other bears fruit amid glittering rays: This is brotherhood.
It falters against the wind
it leans against its brethren
it steals all the nitrogen
just to stay till spring
just till May, not greedy enough to hope for summer.
To be ensconced
to huddle together for warmth and shelter
to bear down to the root
to find the common branch
and kill it: This is brotherhood, too.
Free from earthy tethers
from the lines of fathers and mothers
from the what was consumed together
the fruit bearer bears itself away
takes no part in the disease
of yellowing leaves and barren pods.


And, now I've managed to depress myself. Lovely.

Functionalism (WIP)

[That which washes the other in a holy palmer's kiss]
scratches and twists
[structures which twitch and make things tap].
they used to run up and down
keys blinding [they who listen and clap]
sliding up [the spaced line that gaps a chord]
with joy bursting from the tip.

Sirloin cut

the glare of hope
begins in the spine
tracks down and settles
matching gut for gut

meeting stab with stab
tearing rutted lines
through pulsing muscle
butcher knife sharp

Carry On Wayward Son

Muscle memory is a bitch.

In general, the second I hear classic rock on the radio, my fingers change the station. It's not that I don't like classic rock, but that my only exposure to it happened for those four terrible, wonderful, terrifyingly full years of high school. So, yes, I get a little nostalgic when I hear "Back in Black" or "Cat Scratch Fever" or "We're An American Band." But nothing, and I mean Nothing makes me react the way I do to "America" from West Side Story or that little ditty by Kansas (see title).

Luckily, the local station doesn't have much use for old show tunes. But for the last three weeks, I've heard the damn song every Thursday morning as I drive to school.

It wouldn't be that bad, if Supernatural didn't also use it as a theme song. Or if the roommate didn't take a certain glee to my wide eyes and panicked breathing. But lately, it's like everywhere I turn, there's those strong downbeats, and my wrists flex without my permission on the steering wheel.

Hence, muscle memory's bitchiness.

This one time, at band camp

It's in the blood. It's the source of shivers (of slivers).
Pulse turned to pulp by the blender beat of drums.
This three minute death and rebirth burns at the crescendos.
Canvass burns at first, but for this we pray:
Love, split lips and numb fingers,
Clear, crisp skies and a hidden flask,
The seamless motion of the stars as our own.
It is born in full from the first,
No rising to life, but complete it bursts
Whole and unwrapped
For bloody mouths and splintered palms to embrace.

Random Writings

exstasis

What air fills these lungs,
they that will sing and sing
and deny
the beauty of spaces and faces
in favor of seeking lightening-wrought hearts
steeled by flame to hope!
The upbeat of the canvass cuts through the veil
and enflames the waiting spirit within--what blue skies
and cobbled streets humming in harmony
drain us of, of trying to be!

Once our skin was breaking from containing the desire
but now we stretch our wings to hold room in unbidden embrace.


December 23

Some commands cannot be followed: Remember!
Scuffed terra cotta ground with sand, aside;
Cheeks flushed against the sun, aside;
aside from the sound of hushed steps
and the prick of hollow watching eyes,
these things band too loosely and are denied.

Even though breaths can be counted and heart beats tamed,
even though absolute stillness of the body attained,
and blood slows to stagnant deep in veins
and pain disperses in heat across white skin
Even though the door is opened, nothing comes in
Remember: some commands cannot be followed.

September
From the first of September, the center starts to break
and once the nucleus has shattered, the cell walls bow out
from the first cold crackle, the ceiling sags down
under the weight of salt water, the dirt path is unmade


inGrained

Patent faith soaked to the feet
the fear of god, of water
of drowning in the stares,
falling on the stairs of the baptistry,
where we as children played,
dry and content to be unwashed.

But when guilt pours down and paints our skin--
the faults of a thousand aching sins--
then must we speak,
into the mic, into the air,
over the sobbing piano chords
that accompany such confessionals.

The Arc of Truth

Watching Stargate with the commentary tracks on has led me to consider the nature of plotting narrative over a long serial text. The idea of an "arc" is of particular interest--why such mathematical a term? Should stories really be "plottable"? What would a graph of a series actually look like? What about the financial, production-controlled aspects of a serial narrative?
Given the right information, could a television writer use the desires and narrative conventions of fandom to better control an audience? Do we really want fans writing our canon stories (yes, I'm still angry at Russell T Davies. But Martin Gero, this is for you, too).

Pendulum

This isn't the story he wants to tell
he makes her fall, cloying sweetness gone,
he makes her fly, volition lost in plumbing depths
that plumb three years later, carrying her closer to Xeno's mark

He shapes the world with steep arcs
smooth sines dipping below to break the zero line
he threw her down to this cupped pit to ride the curve
to cushion the rough universe plotted hastily against blue grid squares.

Drabble

Or, Amy Tries to Cope with Torchwood: Children of Earth

He doesn’t try to fix it, for once. He stands there and lets time wash over him and space move around him. And still he is not still, but hurtling around the sun as the rest of us flip our daily coins: to be or not to be? And the odds are always the same, anyway, half and half, maybe a little less, if you’ve got a nickel with the thick raised head of what’s-his-name. He lets the coins drop without tossing his own or tripping over all the spare change rolling around. All the day you’ll have good luck.

RUSSELL!

Rewiring

brain chemistry reboot

Are you there, passion?
Are you yet asleep?
Has hope awoken you on cue
at the end of the end,
where you can sip the most fuel
thrust forward at the tip of the fuse?
Or have you slipped beyond us now
infusing the realm of dreams
where you are more easily grasped
where you are not denied a chance
to light the plot, burn it forward?

We've waited, passion
Waited on you and upon you
waited for your arrival at the darkest night
triumphant in trumpet blares at blastissimo.
But you snuck in quiet to the back room
and tied us up with black and yellow and green,
a mighty pen against a mightier sword
till we are furiously still at the keyboard
passionately aware, the standard of awareness raised.

Are you still here, passion,
Now that the worst has floated downriver?
It seems we can't remember
how this is supposed to end--
is it a tragedy or comedy?
A romantic gesture?
A single rose on the fifteenth of February?

Precision Surgery Required

My blog is so not boring, Lou.

Precision Surgery Required

It was supposed to be over bandaid quick
This was the simple plan without illusions
But minds left alone can change
Minds left to cracked alley wanderings
Might make another turn,
Delay the path to home just to see
Where the faded beat down grass leads

And hope left alone can wait for the appointed day
Burning low on the back burner, ready to ignite
Alcohol flames that flash ere one can say it lightens
The story said we’d burn together
Cautionary tales will convict us
before allegations are named

Left hope festered down to a gram
Always waiting in the darkness
For the dawn of sun to rise
To play a role in careless dreams
To turn bleak reminders of all those turns,
Of what you said while palming embers
What is it that hope hopes for?

Now all the things you said would never die
Had already withered by your last breath
How can we go home to this,
Tree lined streets blown to splinters
In the middle of a drunken night?
What can there be to praise in such dust?

What have we done, but torn and shredded
Forgotten and breezed away,
Only flitting in and out in dreams?
Rip the plaster away quick like a bee sting
And run; this was the plan
But I lingered and wandered too close to home
One void summer, the blank before the period.

Two months? Really?

According to Blogger, the last time I published a post was November 7th, 2008. Two months is a long time between posts, but I did accomplish some stuff in December. Like passing the prelim.

I was playing on Icanhascheezburger.com last week, and ran across their sister site, Once Upon A Win, which features all the cool stuff from when we (whoever "we" is; there seem to be some assumptions about audience being made) were kids. Now, I never really liked VH1's I love the 80s (or 90s, or whatever), but this site makes me actually remember stuff, which is interesting in and of itself. It also reminds me that I am getting old.

Aside from fears that I may cease to be, the site provides links to some of that cool stuff. One such link sent me to a few MadLibs-esque sites that allow you to play that wonderful word game all day, no pens required. While some of it turned out quite silly, my reproduction of Hamlet's soliloquy had some good moments, which I have edited together here.

Oh, and a note about engrishfunny.com: Some of those "errors" are really quite lovely, such as "from time to time, the usual moment seems terribly beautiful."

Soliloquy
When we have washed off this mortal thief,
when we have found that dread of something after restlessness,
then we will know those ills we have
and prattle on to others that we know not of.

Thus conscience does make writers of us all
And thus the flattened hue of resolution
Is plated over with the passive wrench of thought.
And we are ordered, missives all:
To carry out the first stage of
(a lawsuit, for example): filed charges against your lover.
To march or quilt in a line.
To put items in a crate.
To make application; to elate.
To open one's name to a sterling contest
of will, of hope, of daily rendered love.

On this historic occasion...

Like all good former journalists, scholars of rhetoric(s), and news junkies in general, I stayed up to listen to Obama's acceptance speech in Grant Park, Chi-town. And then I listened to the pundits do their last punditing of the season, which turned into some really poorly done "analysis" of the speech. Leave the rhetoric to the rhetoricians, please.

On this historic occasion, (yes, I voted), one can feel the historicness. Whatever that means. Perhaps it means we can feel the mark of a new trace beginning. A new set of cultural assumptions, shared values, and mass experience (experience of the masses, experienced en mass, massively) ready to launch new language, new critical distance to be attained, a different progress narrative to be made hegemonic.

Hope, says Obama, but I remain cynical, because some part of my indoctrinated brain holds echoes of fundamentalist teachings. In days to come, some will name Obama as the anti-Christ, will point to the signs and wonders that prove we're headed for the end of days. And while I have critically distanced myself in some ways from that particular reading of Revelation, old ideologies are strongly embedded in my thought processes, my language, my view of history. While I have turned those views around--made negative copies of them and embroiled them so deeply in theoretical language that only those who know me can see the original under the postmodern brush strokes--they still remain, even if they are only now a starting point for further meditation.

Thus, I provide On This Historic Occasion, some Stuff I Wrote last week, having no explicit connection to an Uncovering. Explicit.

First Place

Plated into place, this nomination of ours lays flush against the wood,
as though the name will fix in place for as long as aluminum brackets hold.
But we live in four dimensions (And now they tell us eleven!),
so the thinner lines that mark the dates will rub out first, from all these boxes,
from being packed in newspaper, unwrapped, propped again against a different white wall;
from all these state line crossings the edges will not hold.



...and God only knows what this is--maybe a piece of fanfic? Or my own apocalyptic writing?

The night was warm, well, warm for this far north, when he woke with a start. The scientists would say later that it would have been impossible for him to hear it, to see it, or to feel it in any way with the five senses, but he always went with his gut, not his eyes or facts anyway. The last of the fire was winding down, and he could think only of death, despite his previous state of dreaming of tall buildings, bright lights, and skin. He woke his fellow traveler with a panicked poke to the ribs--"What the fuck was that?"

Evergreen

if you had run
I would have run
and when you slowed to a walk
I would have cast nets and made camp
right there, wherever was far enough
you were waiting on me to say Yes
and if I had said yes
you would have started running
my silence disappoints you
but it does not mean I wish to stay
only that I've forgotten how to go
how to say Yes against the echo of No
how to jump from the tower and and not die

desire

the stark stillness she has sought refuses to resolve, to become fixed in reality

it has passed over her dreams like some restless spirit, or a thought about leaving the stove on

but no means no in any language, even with that beat she allows to pass before speaking

Event horizon

WIP--Found poem

Something might have happened in the snow
it might have come unglued, unhinged,
or slowly rusted underneath the snow.

There might have been an opening I missed
a pockmark, a drip mingling with the snow
in the winter sun there's so much to be missed

Somewhere in the settling of the spring
came rushing water, fog and perfect mist
drowning leaves of grass in what had been a spring

Gentle rivers raze the fields unhinged
washing over seeds and rust and a thousand sins of spring
But here we watch the foundations come unhinged
Something must have happened in the snow

And, a little emo from Amylea

Kate's playing the new RadioHead CD, and the songs are making me a bit lethargic, nostalgic, acerbic, and other -ics. And I've been thinking about how much I hate December and Christmas and family-ness for obvious reasons, and this emerged. Needs some work...too much in the confessional mode, and that's so 1980s. So, not for publication or anything, but I wanted to save it here.

five years ago
curled up on my mothers couch in a week long sigh of relief
time pouring out of me
unafraid and steady, sure wheels settled firmly in the driveway
I breathed in the world with out a mask, hope coating my skin
The creak of the floorboards as she padded back and forth
her cough punching through the cold air
the soapy noises from the kitchen
lulled me into satisfied sleep

ten days without my sisters as ten too many
their absence the only disturbance to my slumber
all night lights dancing blue across my too-firm bed
the bed I only visited, never really laid in
the sheets she dug out of the closet
the kitchen table I still thought of as his not ours
--the soft edges of nowhere cocooned me
and I needed not a home
stately mansions and even-sided shelves
roots and leaves mixed in a compost mash

what first snapped my shoulders into rigid lines?
where is the hope of the city at night?
of patterns broken, sunlight always fading,
music always playing in the musty subway air?
Do not ask me to prepare for this
as eternal weights and concreted place
a permanent address suspended in the middle of nowhere
I've washed the hope from beneath my nails
and refused to let peace enter this door
and I will not rest till rest is restored.

Christmas 2003

I'd nearly dreamed of heaven
when the flood began to rise
There's something there of a howling
in the deadening of the skies
It's the song that says just what I hear
That comes as a surprise
The sickened bells of Christmas
toll coldly as snow flies

Notes from Summer 07

Despite what this blog seems to indicate, I DID nearly make it all the way through the Burke corpus this summer. My notes were taken by hand (insert gasps of surprise, shock, and/or awe here)! However, the notebook is getting more and more battered by Kit (and, I suspect, Bastet), and I've had it since Gerald's Contemp Rhet class, so it's probably time to do the right thing and just recycle it. First, of course, I'll save my notes here, and on that ephemeral "server" thing at Purdue. Just in case.

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First, some random poetry....

No date, no title. No Idea.

It's my job to rip out the bricks and reveal the ones hidden in comfort behind. This is Virginia, untouched white walls, that I scream at to unloose. They stare when I reappear and I apologize for my absence. Which way, I ask, which way away from the dust? Which way across the too small ocean, where I died by saying, "I live!" too often in Latin?

---

The man with slightly toned thighs sitting in front of me has a wishbone shaped scar running up his arm, over the carpal arteries. Like someone tried to peel them out of him. He can no longer retract his vow, but he does not feel quite at home in resenting that.

---

(After reading Burke on "Perspective by Incongruity" and "Piety")
The gargoyles followed me from high school--that first imitation-marble statue that sat still on my vanity does not have a memorable face. It was not grotesque or strange enough, its eyes too small to be of any real transcendence. She gave it to me (In French now: Elle m'a donne) in praise of skills I did not want (Je ne les ai voules pas) to exploit, not in that oak-ridden town (La ville que m'a tuee), the stately marble and brick sinking slowly into the swamp. I left the gargoyle to watch over my mirror instead: only he could make it mean again, apart from the sea foam tiles swimming in my visions.

---

(After seeing Joyce Carole Oates read at Purdue)

It's the kitchen, he realizes sometime after dawn, the kitchen floor he's ended up on this time. It's a fact, he said, a quote, he said, that Betrayal is Damning. The spider plant is hardy--thank god, he thinks, palming the knife from the counter. It wasn't sharp enough anyway, so it lands in the dishwasher, rounded point up.

---

Why is it good to leave yourself sop much? TO go so far from your own brain, to be carved out from your own soul? Is it too deep in there, like an old mattress you've sunk your own silhouette in?

---

Random phrases in margins to be incorporated (embodied?) at another time
We must agree with a shiver that One did things for dead men.

The uncrowded filth of an ugly God
grounds us to the flowerless fields

The weave we use for fishing of men is perhaps too tight, too scratchy, too barbed.

The East holds in tension
the hand at the forehead
the groin,
right foot raised to toe.

One eye twitching
as he says
"Runs his eye along it"
not in variable foot
my foot squished into a
fat black shoe.

Transfigured by the broken clock
minutes as degrees of persuasion

So, it's another crit class and again
I'm staring down something Victorian,
and decidedly homosexual. Dorian Gray
is poking his sensual head at me,
cooing, "Remember!"