Saturday, March 13, 2010
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
WE PEGGED YOU AS A PROTESTOR
When he was a young boy his parents deprived him of television and sugary snacks and all of the good things America has to offer, and for that, he was grateful. His parents were hippies, in the true sense of the word, they had spent their 20's fighting for what they believed in, which is more than he could say for himself. Now they lived in the country and raised chickens and grew pot in the basement of a house they had built themselves. I mean, he did his best to protest the way thing were, but the modern world had too many distractions, and not enough unity. His parents never showed their disappointment but he could tell they were less than impressed with their son's achievements (or lack there of). It's not that he didn't buy into the whole idea of starting a movement, he did, probably more than his parents ever did but it was hard to pick the right fight. In the '60's they had it all set for them. There was a war and a draft, the fight to choose was obvious. The fight had a name. These days things were just to fucking obscure. There were too many fights of equal importance and everyone chose their own personal “favorite” which didn't allow for as much unity as there was in the '60's. He had a girlfriend and she was fully invested in the environmental movement. His parents would probably love her, but they had never met her and he was going to keep it that way. He was afraid his parents would convince her that he wasn't doing enough with his life and that she should move onto someone more politically active. (And he really loved her, so that just wouldn't work for him.) He wrote angry poems and stories in secret, his own private protest against the modern world. Not everyone was born a fighter, he thought. Some of us were made just to float around and try to find the good things. His parents would never understand that, they considered protesting a part of one's civic duty. So he did his best to find his fight, but all he ever came up with was pages and pages of words. Perhaps, if he gathered enough of these pages, he could do something dramatic with them, like light them on fire. Maybe outside his parents house. See? He could protest with the best of 'em.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
EL CAFE
(the closest i have ever come to doing it justice.)
I wake up every morning
to the muffled sounds
of NPR, and the clatter
of cooking pots
my mother, in the kitchen
starting out a day
that will inevitably
end in varicose veins
and another 15 loaves of bread.
My father, making coffee
tests our patience
letting the kettle scream
until my brother and i
run out of our rooms, disgruntled
to shut the burner off.
My brother, six years my elder
trapped in his room
by his own inventions,
music slipping out
from under his door,
something that he has taken to calling work
and I have taken to calling,
a pretty excuse.
Thus, the day proceeds
and we try our best
to find sounds
to fill it with.
At night, i creep down the stairs
drawn in by the soft hum
of folk music.
I watch the reflections
dance off the guitar
in rhythm, as though
they know some secret
i am too human to understand.
I lean my head on my mothers shoulder
and right before
I fall asleep I think
if these
walls
could talk
[they wouldn't talk
they'd sing,
like a gospel choir
on Christmas morning,
like they've never loved
anything as much as they love
this place]
[they wouldn't talk
they'd yell,
they'd speak in tongues,
they would shake
themselves to pieces
from the mysterious beauty
of the things that happen here.
they'd bleed magic,
the sounds of all the voices
that have filled this room
at once
like an orchestra,
but better]
I wake up long enough to tip-toe
my way up the creaky stairs,
to my bed-room
where I collapse
onto the sheets
and fall asleep to the sounds
of muffled folk music
mixed with laughter
and wait for Jean Feraca
to gently wake me
in the morning.
This must be the place.
I wake up every morning
to the muffled sounds
of NPR, and the clatter
of cooking pots
my mother, in the kitchen
starting out a day
that will inevitably
end in varicose veins
and another 15 loaves of bread.
My father, making coffee
tests our patience
letting the kettle scream
until my brother and i
run out of our rooms, disgruntled
to shut the burner off.
My brother, six years my elder
trapped in his room
by his own inventions,
music slipping out
from under his door,
something that he has taken to calling work
and I have taken to calling,
a pretty excuse.
Thus, the day proceeds
and we try our best
to find sounds
to fill it with.
At night, i creep down the stairs
drawn in by the soft hum
of folk music.
I watch the reflections
dance off the guitar
in rhythm, as though
they know some secret
i am too human to understand.
I lean my head on my mothers shoulder
and right before
I fall asleep I think
if these
walls
could talk
[they wouldn't talk
they'd sing,
like a gospel choir
on Christmas morning,
like they've never loved
anything as much as they love
this place]
[they wouldn't talk
they'd yell,
they'd speak in tongues,
they would shake
themselves to pieces
from the mysterious beauty
of the things that happen here.
they'd bleed magic,
the sounds of all the voices
that have filled this room
at once
like an orchestra,
but better]
I wake up long enough to tip-toe
my way up the creaky stairs,
to my bed-room
where I collapse
onto the sheets
and fall asleep to the sounds
of muffled folk music
mixed with laughter
and wait for Jean Feraca
to gently wake me
in the morning.
This must be the place.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
ODE TO ORGANIC WHOLE MILK
skim milk is simply not my cup of tea
and two percent won't do the trick
but I love whole milk made organically
though most my friends say it makes them sick
to watch me drink straight from the carton
I tell them that I don't give a lick
so when the weekend is just startin
and everyone is buying beer
I go out to buy my milk carton
while many find this to be queer
I would have to disagree
that piss beer you drink comes no where near
organic whole milk of such high quality
and even thought it's full of fat
I drink it quite religiously
oh sorry, i'd love to stop and chat
but I drink whole milk, are you down with that?
not my best. but it was written in terza rima form, and i seem to struggle when writing in form. my new goal is to write a poem every week, and i will be putting them up here, but i warn you that they are all in their roughest stages, most likely. On weeks when i am not particularly busy, i am going to try to attempt writing in different forms.
and two percent won't do the trick
but I love whole milk made organically
though most my friends say it makes them sick
to watch me drink straight from the carton
I tell them that I don't give a lick
so when the weekend is just startin
and everyone is buying beer
I go out to buy my milk carton
while many find this to be queer
I would have to disagree
that piss beer you drink comes no where near
organic whole milk of such high quality
and even thought it's full of fat
I drink it quite religiously
oh sorry, i'd love to stop and chat
but I drink whole milk, are you down with that?
not my best. but it was written in terza rima form, and i seem to struggle when writing in form. my new goal is to write a poem every week, and i will be putting them up here, but i warn you that they are all in their roughest stages, most likely. On weeks when i am not particularly busy, i am going to try to attempt writing in different forms.
Friday, September 18, 2009
triumph of hash browns
i've spent months
trying to digest
your empty words.
(carbonation is rough
on the sensitive stomach).
my new plan
is to indulge
in large amounts of breakfast food
and forget about you
all together.
i'm just trying to figure out
when the thought of hash browns
became more appealing
than the thought of you.
trying to digest
your empty words.
(carbonation is rough
on the sensitive stomach).
my new plan
is to indulge
in large amounts of breakfast food
and forget about you
all together.
i'm just trying to figure out
when the thought of hash browns
became more appealing
than the thought of you.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
toothbrush revisited
I threw out
Your toothbrush
It was orange
And said “aquafresh”
but it’d served it’s purpose
and you’re supposed to get
a new one
every year.
Your toothbrush
It was orange
And said “aquafresh”
but it’d served it’s purpose
and you’re supposed to get
a new one
every year.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
an explanation for the tree on my arm
The best thing we can do is move forward from the pain. It’s only logical. But logic has never made sense to me, and I suspect the same is true for my family of bears. We sit and marinate in it, as though perhaps if we wait long enough, it will all make sense, and it won’t hurt at all anymore. Moving forward means leaving things behind, and I’m a pack-rat of the heart.
The other day, I was trying to rationalize a rash decision, like I am always trying to do, and which everyone always knows I am doing. I told my mother “I like trees. They seem so patient. Like they can’t go anywhere. And their okay with that.” There is something comforting about the permanence in trees. They stick around unless they are cut down or uprooted and even then they make a silent scene, something so awful it could make a person cry, or wretch, or whatever they are inclined to do when they’re upset. I am no tree now. But that’s what I want to be when I grow up. The chances of me growing up in this life time, they’re not so good. But when I die, and all that death wisdom soaks into my bones, all I want to do is be buried, and decomposed in to dirt and be mixed in with leaves, and worms, and other little things that live underground and to somehow, through all of that become a tree. I take comfort in the fact, and this is the only comfort I have for the thought of death, that when I die, I will be returned to the Earth whence I come from, be part of something bigger, and more beautiful, and more purposeful and functional than myself.
I spend a lot of time thinking about ways to get attention, though I don’t think I realize that is what I am doing most of the time. I am doing my best to look for a new goal or perhaps not look for a goal at all but figure out what I like for the sake of liking it, not for the sake of impressing someone.
Did you know that people can stop loving you? You can say the perfectly wrong thing, just once, and it is over. “sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me” what a crock of shit. I did that once, ya know. Maybe more than once. But only once that I know of. Said the wrong thing, spent months trying to swallow it back up, the ‘cause of a half year of stomach aches. Mistakes are tough on the digestive system. In return, they erased me. So I had to erase them. So it didn’t hurt so much. But we can not swallow or erase things. Just like your stomach gets full and the paper gets thin, people get tired. If you get broken once, can you ever get pieced together properly again?
I am beginning to believe there is no such thing as “moving on” in the sense I always assumed people meant. It is more like learning to be at peace, for a majority of the time, with the things that have happened or the things that have not happened or the things that will never happen at all. So you better find the love of your life fast, because the older you get, the more you have to carry, and it gets harder to know a person through and through, and it gets harder to explain yourself, because you have all these things, these memories, these, these things branded into your heart and your bones, and how do you sort through them properly to explain yourself? I am scared that I will be this way forever. It is not really a bad way to be, I suppose. But I can tell that it will get lonely. Lonely like being swallowed by the sea. Sometimes, it just doesn’t matter how hard you try. I am wondering if redemption is even a possibility ever. You can’t take back things, even if you didn’t mean them in the first place.
It seems like I’m stuck on this one thing, but it is not just one thing, but many things, perhaps all of the things. We all have our own personal terrors, and whether one person’s is worse than the others is really not the point, because our terrors seem big to us, because they are what we know, and they ARE important, even if they aren’t in the scheme of all the terrors ever heard of.
The trees are a comfort. I can hear them trying to sell me something, just by their existence. They’re whispering some sort of secrets with their leaves, and it is the only thing that convinces me that someway, it will be ok, even if I can’t understand how now. So I’m sticking with the trees.
The other day, I was trying to rationalize a rash decision, like I am always trying to do, and which everyone always knows I am doing. I told my mother “I like trees. They seem so patient. Like they can’t go anywhere. And their okay with that.” There is something comforting about the permanence in trees. They stick around unless they are cut down or uprooted and even then they make a silent scene, something so awful it could make a person cry, or wretch, or whatever they are inclined to do when they’re upset. I am no tree now. But that’s what I want to be when I grow up. The chances of me growing up in this life time, they’re not so good. But when I die, and all that death wisdom soaks into my bones, all I want to do is be buried, and decomposed in to dirt and be mixed in with leaves, and worms, and other little things that live underground and to somehow, through all of that become a tree. I take comfort in the fact, and this is the only comfort I have for the thought of death, that when I die, I will be returned to the Earth whence I come from, be part of something bigger, and more beautiful, and more purposeful and functional than myself.
I spend a lot of time thinking about ways to get attention, though I don’t think I realize that is what I am doing most of the time. I am doing my best to look for a new goal or perhaps not look for a goal at all but figure out what I like for the sake of liking it, not for the sake of impressing someone.
Did you know that people can stop loving you? You can say the perfectly wrong thing, just once, and it is over. “sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me” what a crock of shit. I did that once, ya know. Maybe more than once. But only once that I know of. Said the wrong thing, spent months trying to swallow it back up, the ‘cause of a half year of stomach aches. Mistakes are tough on the digestive system. In return, they erased me. So I had to erase them. So it didn’t hurt so much. But we can not swallow or erase things. Just like your stomach gets full and the paper gets thin, people get tired. If you get broken once, can you ever get pieced together properly again?
I am beginning to believe there is no such thing as “moving on” in the sense I always assumed people meant. It is more like learning to be at peace, for a majority of the time, with the things that have happened or the things that have not happened or the things that will never happen at all. So you better find the love of your life fast, because the older you get, the more you have to carry, and it gets harder to know a person through and through, and it gets harder to explain yourself, because you have all these things, these memories, these, these things branded into your heart and your bones, and how do you sort through them properly to explain yourself? I am scared that I will be this way forever. It is not really a bad way to be, I suppose. But I can tell that it will get lonely. Lonely like being swallowed by the sea. Sometimes, it just doesn’t matter how hard you try. I am wondering if redemption is even a possibility ever. You can’t take back things, even if you didn’t mean them in the first place.
It seems like I’m stuck on this one thing, but it is not just one thing, but many things, perhaps all of the things. We all have our own personal terrors, and whether one person’s is worse than the others is really not the point, because our terrors seem big to us, because they are what we know, and they ARE important, even if they aren’t in the scheme of all the terrors ever heard of.
The trees are a comfort. I can hear them trying to sell me something, just by their existence. They’re whispering some sort of secrets with their leaves, and it is the only thing that convinces me that someway, it will be ok, even if I can’t understand how now. So I’m sticking with the trees.
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