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