wisdom

I have two extra teeth on one side of my mouth, so maybe that's why today my car kept pulling to the left.

vacation

I have to admit I like hearing the bass undercurrent through the wall that separates my room from my brother's. And I like being in town at the right time so I can gasp along with all citizens when Sorge's restaurant burns to the ground. Can you believe it's gone? Better than that, even-- the new jumper cables, a reed knife to help pull out that promise, the cupcakes arranged in the shape of a Christmas tree. I do adjust.

apostasy

Try as I might, I can't sit still on a Sunday morning. I can keep my mouth shut and not sing along, but I cannot stop from tapping my foot in rhythm.

in the moon of wintertime

I have done my research, and it appears that I have thirty years left of singing on key.

We all should be getting sick of the inappropriate gravity I place on insignificant things, but what the hell, my sister knitted me glow-in-the-dark gloves.

I am astounded by the sincerity of the love I do feel when I am at home, when I am surrounded by all this gentleness and poetry and snow drifts. This is the rich part of life. And I made it through a tricky day without letting slip that I don't belong.

It was snowing when I woke up this morning. Merry Christmas.

home

My lips have been looking good lately. It's not vanity, it's good advertising.

question

Would you like me better if I was friendly and dumb?

oh well

I let the early rain under my skin and I should not have, because the sun came out before I'd finished mourning.

I resolve to take in more poetry these next weeks

And clean the nail polish from my hands

So I can concentrate on the reason I took off the three silver rings.

I have been moving like a snow plow, and you have been in my way.

outlaw

Am in a week of pronounced and unpremeditated self-destruction. I am ashamed to admit that it is not only your rules I choose to ignore, I no longer follow mine, either.

claws

I have an arsenal of things I could say that would slice through you, deflate you, give you plenty of material for emo poems and another chapter in your future memoirs. I could reduce you to tears and dust with just six words: 'I am not proud of you.'

coworker

I thought of you as careful, and you said you're crazy. After a second I believed you, and was relieved.

surrogacy

I'd imagined the rooms switched around. They were the right colors, the browns and yellows and dark rose, but I hadn't foreseen the air of formality, and I'd pictured them stretched the other way, like my mind had held up a mirror to reality. The piano was out of tune, yellowed but hallowed, the way I thought it would be, and I'd imagined, a year ago, that I'd sit down absently, mid-thought, and play from memory a Beethoven sonata. I was right, and I was wrong, because when I was actually in the room, in the moment, it was an invitation, and the music was already laid out above the keys. The same sonata--the one I'd thought of memorizing, just for this instance and didn't because I forgot how--was waiting for my fingers. And I played the piece, stumbling a little, but right into the lap of the listener, and forget what I'd imagined, this was better.
We exchanged Christmas gifts--a delicate dove ornament for a blue egg of Silly Putty--and we both thought we'd gotten the better end of the deal.

keeping score

Yesterday I played for a local Baptist church's Christmas service. My second in two weeks. And I did, then, get a taste of being the weakest link, as the other dozen or so orchestra members were what you might call 'real' musicians, with names and reputations I recognized. I held up my end of the notes, I did. But there was none of the wow in me either at the rehearsal (which left me pale and exhausted) and the actual performance yesterday (which left me breathless and empty). I liked rubbing shoulders with so many very very great local musicians, and the French horns especially just wrecked me—I was sitting right in front of them. And yes, the music, the arrangement, the quality of the conductor and the choir were all beyond reproach. And yes, I was handed a check for $175 for my services on my way out. But for whatever reason, even though I was playing pretty well (still worse than last weekend, I think), and even though we ended with the Hallelujah Chorus and it was heavenly, I got over the whole deal very quickly and am not and will not be haunted by the music we made and the me I was. I keep thinking, what is wrong with this picture, when a church can afford to pay an orchestra of 15 or so $175 a pop for a few hours of music? I mean, it was good music. But it was so fleeting. Couldn't you have donated that money to a food bank? I ask, as I pocket the check and sidle away. Well.

I'm pretty good

This is weird: I feel really good, and it doesn't fit, because twice today I ran out of toilet paper and the hospital helicopter has just landed again and our lunch at Taste of Thai was called off by tragedy and I have accomplished very little at work today and I have nothing planned for this weekend and my whims have leveled off. Maybe it's a caffeine rush from the day-old chalky coffee and the new home for the paper cutter and the little chocolate heart in the Advent calendar that's waiting for me at home.

inapropos

I like that my library owns several volumes of the Journal of Mundane Behavior.

filling

You know I'm fickle and I know I'm fickle, but it is always still a surprise when I go to bed in misery and wake up in hope.

laying traps

I won't say I'd make a good spy, because let's face it, my grasp of physics is not strong. And I couldn't pull off stalker, because my impression of stalker is that it requires attention span. I am more along the lines someone possessing strong research skills.

bits

"he played me the theme to the symphony in his head" would make quite a good start to a poem.

understood

"You know, Hobbes, some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't help." -Calvin

expiration date

I've gone sour and so has the milk at the bottom of my bowl. I was so good, so giddy-good for the whole of fall, but now I can't, now it's over, and the christmas is so little and I am not sure what I will do.

burning

My heart rate lately is more depending on the faces in my head, the imaginary edge of the concert hall, the music I can't quite hear.

jealous

well, why the hell would this matter?? it became a problem last year, when i wasn't there for the family, and now it's an ISSUE. it is a monkey on my back named 'i'm still not impressive! i'm still not sculpted and confident!'

poof

It's been a weird week, culminating in an exploding feather pillow and four missing socks.

pulchritude

I'm not The Best at anything, but I am very good at blowing up balloons and this.

muse

You know sometimes how music makes you thirsty?

hmm

I would like to keep improving your exits.

placebo

Today I forgot to drink the bottom half of my cup of coffee, and then when I came back to it there was a fly floating in it. I picked the fly out and drank it anyway. And I stood in line at the DMV for a very long time, but I kept occupied with my keychain Rubik's cube. Then, I took myself to the movies and bought popcorn and spilled it all over my purse. And later I fell asleep on a friend's couch and his cat woke me up when she settled onto my neck. When I came home I helped my sister and Sarah make pizza and we ate it all and watched a Bond movie and I crocheted and sipped beer and realized that the plantar wart on the bottom of my foot is becoming a problem.

sweet

The cake I made today didn't turn out. I think that's because we ran out of sugar.

tough

My legs will be stiff tomorrow morning, but it was fun to walk along a mountain ridge and pee in the woods.

update

Lately, idealism makes me cry and I've become a mother hen. I lecture. I suffer from phantom fleas, and I get along very well with my roommates.

fresh

I have a thing for doing laundry. I like it. I'd do yours if you asked me.

but what does that mean?

I keep dreaming about big basements. Huge, warehouse-like spaces under incongruously tiny houses. And the subbasements beneath those. Perhaps this means I secretly want to be a spelunker.

somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands

- ee cummings

Words, Wide Night

Somewhere on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.
The room is turning slowly away from the moon.

This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say
it is sad? In one of the tenses I am singing
an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.

La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine
the dark hills I would have to cross
to reach you. For I am in love with you and this

is what it is like or what it is like in words.

-Carol Ann Duffy

The reason I like
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Is that her name
Sounds like a basketball
Falling downstairs.

The reason I like
Walt Whitman
Is that his name
Sounds like
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Falling downstairs.


-David Mamet

bones

I'm off limits today. There's a rowdy game of Monopoly going on in our dining room and I'm sitting here in clean clothes, with a band-aid on my finger, having a meal of cheerios and beer and I am not to be disturbed.

unfit

I blew my first smoke rings tonight, and there was a big, hairy spider in my room, but I calmly trapped it and dumped it into the bushes outside.

THE LONELY MAN PLANS A PICNIC

He wears his invitations on his sleeve,
imagining the landscape
partly undressed, the sky entirely
nude. Remembers the orchard on the late show
where brandy sojourned in a basket:
poppies, plums, the blushing skin
of music. Clotted sweets, and swans half-
buried under tossed bread. Ah, lunchtime,
glands!

Festival morning dawns the color of brine.
By noon, the erected tent looms a maw.
He wanders drunk through arriving guests, prisoner
in a maze of acrobats, a man in an amethyst
panic. All his graces
reduced to a primal quiver, like
what happens to the larynx on the dance floor.
The sky goes licorice, thunder lunges
over the meadowflowers. Already, parasols
and organdy skirts cut crosslots home.

In the pavilion, the headwaiter waits
forever in tatters. A lattice of
melancholy guests, old maids with throats
psalmed shut, fossil tongues taking food
from strangers. A cruel waste of grapes,
he thinks, looking for an out. Lover's
Leap's been blasted for the freeway.

-Sarah Provost

notes

Two summers ago was not a good one. I went through a phase where I believed all the graffiti I saw. I remember once I found a poem about a sad little witch under an overpass. Well, today I saw some that said 'you're prettier than you think.'

it did not end well

i want to whine, i want to complain about car troubles and social ineptitude and loneliness and too much to drink, but that would take too long and i'd rather take a nap.

bitten

Sometimes when I come home and the cats are spooning on my bed, I'm jealous.

February

Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It's his
way of telling whether or not I'm dead.
If I'm not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
He'll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring war. It's all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. Some cat owners around here
should snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids were sensible, we'd do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.
But it's love that does us in. Over and over
Again, He shoots, he scores! and famine
crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing
eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits
thirty below, and the pollution pours
out of our chimneys to keep us warm.
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You're the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

-Margaret Atwood

revenge

You're up past your bedtime.
Is it because of the moon? Or is it because on the way home I ran instead of walked? Or the hour someone spent running their fingers through my hair (it doesn't happen often enough), the dark chocolate from the factory tour (who could fault me?), the newspaper clipping you slipped into my desk drawer?
I'm always dividing the world into threes.

The detox will probably take a while, and this makes sense.
My motivation--revenge--only makes sense when I'm looking backward.

His lips are full, but to play he must fold them in,
make a tight line of those wet curves. It is shocking
to see them sprout out again when he finishes playing a long
note, takes a breath. The sound he produces is never thin
enough,
cannot express I am a lost nymph in the woods without adding,
a voluptuous nymph at that. He has tried to take the wink
out of his playing, read the most obscure books on the subject,
even one filled with circus metaphors: Think tightrope; but
he is
always down in the sawdust, slapping a seal, pinching the
plump
curves of an acrobat. The audience loves or hates him,
there is no in-between. Those who pick at their programs
wish his solo were over, others cross their legs thinking he
would only
have to look at a bundle of green twine and it would burst
into flower.
Both flute and clarinet become breathless in their attempts to
outdo him.
The conductor who approached the podium resolving to
rein him in
abandons his brisk baton strokes, succumbs to swaying.
And the oboist, who has been whispering his sins into that
dark
wooden tube hoping for absolution, flinches as the house lights
come up, hearing want echoed back in each footstamp, each
clap.

-Matthea Harvey

ah ha

i need more jazz in my life.

confidence

I might pretend I don't feel well, even though I'm strong as ever, just so no one minds when I spend the evening in bed.

And you might stop by to visit anyway, not minding the blankets pulled up to my chin, and sit down on the floor next to me and talk for three hours about melancholy and the end of the world and elections.

When you say, 'I feel like I'm never going to be great!' I bite my tongue so I don't say, 'me neither, but I honestly don't mind,' because the last thing I want to do is bring me back into the picture.

It's one of those days when your best friend tells you, 'I've never seen you like this--you're being so vulnerable,' and you wonder what the hell is wrong with you to never have been been vulnerable before.

The New Me

I adored my home, so I burnt
it to the ground
and slept in ashes.
I worshiped the moon, so I embraced
cold earth.

My dog was irreplaceable,
so I dropped him in wilderness
and drove away,
watched him grow small in the mirror
watching me.

Traveling was my life,
so I abandoned my car in weeds,
sheared my wings,
slashed my feet,
moved forward on my belly.

I loved you above
all others. So I betrayed you,
left clues crumbled
for your pillow, waited
beneath our garden's unturned stones.


- Gaylord Brewer

A Color of the Sky

Windy today and I feel less than brilliant,
driving over the hills from work.
There are the dark parts on the road
when you pass through clumps of wood
and the bright spots where you have a view of the ocean,
but that doesn't make the road an allegory.

I should call Marie and apologize
for being so boring at dinner last night,
but can I really promise not to be that way again?
And anyway, I'd rather watch the trees, tossing
in what certainly looks like sexual arousal.

Otherwise it's spring, and everything looks frail;
the sky is baby blue, and the just-unfurling leaves
are full of infant chlorophyll,
the very tint of inexperience.

Last summer's song is making a comeback on the radio,
and on the highway overpass,
the only metaphysical vandal in America has written
MEMORY LOVES TIME
in big black spraypaint letters,

which makes us wonder if Time loves Memory back.

Last night I dreamed of X again.
She's like a stain on my subconscious sheets.
Years ago she penetrated me
but though I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed,
I never got her out,
but now I'm glad.

What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle.
What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel.
What I thought was an injustice
turned out to be a color of the sky.

Outside the youth center, between the liquor store
and the police station,
a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;

overflowing with blossomfoam,
like a sudsy mug of beer;
like a bride ripping off her clothes,

dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,

so Nature's wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
It's been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.


~Tony Hoagland

You never have to worry that my feet are cold. I'm barefoot in January because they're not.