July 2011
1 post
May 2011
1 post
April 2011
13 posts
“Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how...”
– William Faulkner (via anastasiabooks)
5 tags
“Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an...”
– “Little Gidding” : Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot.
2 tags
Oh Canada...
Today I listened to Michal Ignatieff’s “Rise Up!” speech and cried. This can only mean one of three things: 1) I believe very strongly in the Liberal Party of Canada 2) I am confident that the Canadian people will remove the contempted Conservative Party from power on May 2nd. 3) I am utterly horrified that Canadians are either too misinformed, too ignorant or too apathetic...
You as a child (February 7th, 2011).
There are certain points in the year when your heart stops. These times are quiet, And as a flicker behind your lashes, I can see the broken parts of something tiny and delicate—a shell, or the snapped links of a silver necklace. These time, instead of speaking, you are silent but allow me to witness, not entirely without the fear of voyeurism, the specter of you as a child, bent...
July 2009
1 post
November 2008
3 posts
“For those who proclaim
they’ve grown weary of children,
there are no flowers”
– Basho
At Hassletons.
(I am reclaiming the words I wrote about you, because they were and still are mine.)
I have dreamed your face watching people pass in the street, half-listening to conversations spill from other tables, on God, on Korea—and I have found you in the words and metered footsteps. I have drunk your clean scent in cups of coffee, both flavored and black from Ethiopia, still seated, or on the walk...
Hayden, Barely Friends.
Just because it went down that way, and we’re barely friends, when I saw you last week at the dance I should have took you by surprise, and told you how beautiful the sky looked with you in front of it that night. I should have lied. I should have took you by the hand and told you that I was no man those weeks that you walked on my land. in all my reasons there were none, ...
October 2008
2 posts
Halloween costume list.
-blue tank top
-black shorts
-piece of blue fabric to put over my face (maybe a long piece of blue fabric to make into the top and also the mask?)
-paper fans
-black electrical tape for gloves and arm bands
-black tights and boots
“I mind how we lay in June, such a transparent summer morning;
You settled your...”
– Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself.”
September 2008
5 posts
“We hear, that we may speak.”
– Emerson, “the American Scholar.”
There are twenty-seven steps to your bedroom, and for each step I have an alternating calm and panic. You’ve left the light on, and from the front door, I can see you silhouetted in your desk chair, highlighting school books. I want to say how good you look in two-dimension.
The trees are making quiet rustling sounds in the wind, and suddenly I have all the time in the world. With your book-hand...
“I’m with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a...”
– Allen Ginsberg, Howl
When at sixteen you
“stopped fucking faces”
you learned instead to fuck
the cold air from the open window
the sound of taxis
the cat curled, cleaning its stomach on the red arm chair
the politics text books on
the records stacked alphabetically under a dirty porcelain bowl
your wrinkled lace slip
on the floor in the corner
the picture of his girlfriend with a smile on her...
“I believe humans are beautiful, and society has corrupted us. Not the other way...”
August 2008
26 posts
“Give me my money back,
give me my money back, you bitch.”
– “Song for the dumped”, Ben Folds
I know I write love poems
that are not real
because in my soul
there is still an echo
of things I counted on my fingers
but was afraid to mention
that I found gathered in the folds of
your lower lip
when you smiled.
I pretend to myself
I have really experienced these things.
“For fear you will be alone
you do so many things
that aren’t you at all”
– Richard Brautigan, “For Fear you will be Alone”
“You taught me victory is sweet even deep in the cheap seats.”
– Conor Oberst, “Cape Canaveral”
Note to self: Download Calexico when the computer comes back.
“Not everyone you love is going to leave you, Tibby.”
– Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2
“It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we...”
– John Steinbeck, East of Eden.
I
Your fingers are the pure white of snowflakes, caught in the lashes of God.
Untitled
All her life, she worries she has sat in the same empty front seats. Parked facing the street, new flakes of snow have melded with the drops on the windshield. On one hand, there is the long walk home. On the other, the easy ascension of a familiar staircase, the strong desire to know her self in the eyes of another. The choice is planed with nuances that colour a decision bad, or better, ...
Bride
It is not necessary to know love to be loved I will hide each flake of skin beneath your sheets, call to you at night, recognize the sound of your breathing against the far wall. I will ask you where to stop your hands, but gradually forget protesting reasons, and I will be a doll: I will be any doll you want from me.
Eulogy
even the forest grows melancholy this close to winter there are coffee grinds in the sink, inside the house, and they are not wet from the faucet but from a chill in the kitchen that slowly obstructs the flow of warm air born in the basement of a parent’s home where only dead cells remain, caught in the cracks in the paint
Praying
God, lately I’ve been thinking about you and your son. I put Alice to bed, each tiny limb on fire, and wondered if you brought cold cloths for your boy’s head before you put him to bed in the earth? Lately she asks questions more and more to the point. I say, “Mama’s busy with the lord now, honey” and she hangs her head, but lets me change the subject. Between four...
Malleus Maleficarum
I do not know how to live in fear. I have learned to cross streets out of a desire to be elsewhere, not from a pure resentment a pure disdain for the other. I have adopted the cheekbones of German ancestors and I am neither shy nor apologetic nor do I wear their redness on my sleeve, nor do I deny the past (is past.) I have chosen quite consciously to wear my hair long, straight and in the...
Where Your Hand has Been
I have drawn you in stick figures cut into the condensation on the glass panes of my window every night since you left the city. And every night they get smaller and farther away. The details I remember translate not into straight lines but into gashes where I miss you more concretely than I do when you are not before me in the water on the window.
Untitled
there is a dance between the heart and the tongue—an expansion and retraction each time I recognize the pattern of movement, the fluid twist and bend that politely reflect a seasonal change in your eyes and there is no lack of will, no aching loss of words but a fear that keeps me knelt by the door, in trembling awe of the light dispersed in the cross from winter to your bed room
Hyacinth
Each time I catch a glimmer in the snow I am reminded of your morning eyes. Each agonizing moment between the shudder and expansion of lungs in the cold, each binary lunge of a child to the ground from the height of a swing, each flight of birds landed, each crack of thunder in the spring is a home where I spent my youth. is a memory of your hands on ivory keys, on fresh linen.
...And the Cardinal Hits the Window
When the phone rings, there is the simultaneous echo of her footsteps on the roof, and one separate, tentative breath. It’s alright, she says. I’ve been wanting air for a while now. There are sparrows on the phone lines, picking at the connections that exist between two people. It’s alright, she says. I don’t feel the cold like I did inside. There’s just sky in the air. It’s alright. Filigree...
Genesis
There’s been water on the windowsill since last spring and I still can’t make it from one side of the room to the other. The space between the chinks of wood in the floor has made a forest out of dust balls of dead skin. I believe in neither Love nor God. I believe in neither God nor Country. Capital letters are removing all the sentiment from the books that I love. I am fourteen at the foot...
April, the Airport
Somewhere on the continent there is a hole in the atmosphere and your breath is frosting the air. Here in my room something is missing from the decoration, from the emotion littering the floor. What is left is an extrapolation of the thoughts of us together simultaneously that don’t exist apart from my recollection, and a gaping separation that can’t tell whether it wants to start or stop. Trees...
You Are a Godsend, and I am Not Afraid
“She cried when she told us about Jesus.”
At dawn we crossed the bridge to escape a lull in the traffic, the silent police cars, and the sigh of the sleeping air. We left our bottles on a picnic table and stood in the basketball court. With an image of setting stars in my eyes, I crossed the park to the children’s swings and spent the first fifteen minutes of daylight...
Stay Home
There are words to explain the stretch of space between us,
but beyond the sound of feet scraping the floor,
I can’t hear them when I’ve crossed the room. I hear reality burst against my eardrums
when the door closes and if I turned around, I wouldn’t see the outline of your back. I can hear you pack three days from now,
in a room I’ve never walked across, let alone...
"10" - 2005.
You told me there are times you can’t take your eyes out of the corners in your room. I said I used to write to clear my mind, but I’ve been thinking, and maybe we haven’t spent enough time apart in the last month. ‘Cause there’ve been days I don’t move, and we haven’t talked about our eating habits in ages. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just tired of you, and you’re retaliating. I’ve been taking these...
"09: Space is not a journey, but a way to measure...
When I first found out you breathed the same air as I did, it wasn’t so much a privilege as a surprise. I couldn’t figure out how you got so good at being, while I was still trying to feel resolved. Maybe your lungs have filters similar to my heart. Or maybe you’ve been saving up oxygen over the last few years, while I’ve been trying to grow my hair. Maybe our priorities are based a little...