12 July 2009
Today there was a wall of clouds around Lansing. It was obviously a plague against the Michigan State government, or Michigan State University.
06 July 2009
pour L'artiste
I lost myself again. This time in Midland, to the tune of one missed exit and six erroneous turns: one wrong, two Us, and three missed. I was late, which was all right, the evening ripe for summer cruising, for autoflirting with the girls in the beat-up LeBaron, for going 65 in a 70 zone. Let the scenery go by like the afternoon.
The reading was in the small cafeteria of a church embedded at the far edge of a densely wooded neighborhood. The sanctuary had high windows through which one could see the tops of the pipe organ; its roof slanted back, and down to the Sunday School and office wing, which itself had two-toned window coverings. The Lord's House, circa 1970s ranch-style.
I swung the van into the parking lot, tiptoed into the cafeteria while the first reader finished a short story. A visual survey of the audience yielded two dozen hearing aids, sixteen orthopedic shoes, and liver spots galore. It appeared I was the youngest listener, by at least 25 years. Median of 51. Outer limit of 73.
In the corner, on a shin-high table surrounded by tiny chairs, a wooden train and block set caught my eye. I told myself that if the poets got too boring, too high brow or meta-, I'd sit my ass down in a tiny chair and play with the trains like the child I felt like, writing my own poetic lines across figure 8s and switch tracks, pulling in and out of the stations like grasping a haiku.
If a poem was funny, the group would collectively chuckle at its close. If it was solemn, they'd hum like a congregational amen: "Hmm!" Makes you think. At the end of the reading, there was only one question for the poets, from an elderly gentleman in the front row: "What about titles?" The way he said it, the way the rest of them chuckled, made it feel like it had to be asked, if not by him, then by the woman with the oxygen tank beside him. Poetry readings require questions about titles, as a rule.
I got the feeling that these people had all been here, exactly here, before, listening to the same poems, eating the same windmill ginger cookies, and I had accidentally stumbled upon this world, which exists for nothing but its homogeneous and autonomous self--and which, by the looks of things, is on its way toward extinction.
I had slipped in like a ghost; I slipped out like a sinner from the back aisle, skipping refreshments and idle chit-chat.
In the parking lot, in a red sedan beside my car, a frazzled woman sounded like she was crying on the phone, "I'm here, but nobody else is."
She closed her door so I couldn't hear.
The reading was in the small cafeteria of a church embedded at the far edge of a densely wooded neighborhood. The sanctuary had high windows through which one could see the tops of the pipe organ; its roof slanted back, and down to the Sunday School and office wing, which itself had two-toned window coverings. The Lord's House, circa 1970s ranch-style.
I swung the van into the parking lot, tiptoed into the cafeteria while the first reader finished a short story. A visual survey of the audience yielded two dozen hearing aids, sixteen orthopedic shoes, and liver spots galore. It appeared I was the youngest listener, by at least 25 years. Median of 51. Outer limit of 73.
In the corner, on a shin-high table surrounded by tiny chairs, a wooden train and block set caught my eye. I told myself that if the poets got too boring, too high brow or meta-, I'd sit my ass down in a tiny chair and play with the trains like the child I felt like, writing my own poetic lines across figure 8s and switch tracks, pulling in and out of the stations like grasping a haiku.
If a poem was funny, the group would collectively chuckle at its close. If it was solemn, they'd hum like a congregational amen: "Hmm!" Makes you think. At the end of the reading, there was only one question for the poets, from an elderly gentleman in the front row: "What about titles?" The way he said it, the way the rest of them chuckled, made it feel like it had to be asked, if not by him, then by the woman with the oxygen tank beside him. Poetry readings require questions about titles, as a rule.
I got the feeling that these people had all been here, exactly here, before, listening to the same poems, eating the same windmill ginger cookies, and I had accidentally stumbled upon this world, which exists for nothing but its homogeneous and autonomous self--and which, by the looks of things, is on its way toward extinction.
I had slipped in like a ghost; I slipped out like a sinner from the back aisle, skipping refreshments and idle chit-chat.
In the parking lot, in a red sedan beside my car, a frazzled woman sounded like she was crying on the phone, "I'm here, but nobody else is."
She closed her door so I couldn't hear.
02 July 2009
01 July 2009
I realized that I hate meeting friends for lunch. How's life, here's a sandwich. We should go for a picnic, if we're hungry, at least, or try to have as many different ethnic foods as possible within an hour. Next time meet me at a shooting range. Not that any of us love guns, but because it would be something, a memory, that we share. And I'd like to share that bang bang with you.
30 June 2009
I realize I haven't been writing on the Back of the box as diligently as I have--as I should. Call it the delinquency of summer. Or whatever. I been busy.
And taking a ton of naps.
If working retail is teaching me anything, it's that at heart I am an introvert. Not whole-heartedly, mind you: I charge off the energies of close friends' laughter just the same as everyone else. However. After 5-9 hours of asking, "Can I help you find anything?" and making small talk with senile men with body odors that could make a skunk drop dead, all I want to do is lock the door, turn up the music and sink into whatever there is to sink into. Retreat is the word.
(And that's on a good day. A bad day would include defending why the store is out of a particular item to an outrageously self-entitled a-word, tallying at the end of the evening how many customers habitually wake up on the wrong side of the bed. Those days I wish I were a heavier drinker.)
I've been downright mean some nights, in my pursuit of loneliness.
Some days I get home and genuinely want to write. But I'm so drained that there's no flow, despite the full basin.
Other days I just don't want to think at all. I know we've all been there. That's what TV is for.
I have other excuses besides introversion for not writing as much: Over the past 2 months (in actuality, it's been the last five years, but most densely in the last 2 months; even more in the last week or two), I've been gathering materials and assembling my forge. I've been planning this for so long: Way back after I graduated from high school, I bought myself an anvil. And it sat. For years. And years. And years. When we moved it didn't even move with us right at first, just sat in the old garage, in the same place it found when UPS first delivered it. But last Fall my parent's church was giving away a bathroom hand drier, so I took it and immediately modified it into a blower (a bellows for you romantics out there). Then it sat in my room. For months. And months. And months. People tripping over it and everything.
But in the last few months I've got my stuff together. I got some wood and built an anvil stand. I built a tripod for the fire pot. I cut the former legs off the firepot, cut a hole for the air pipe and lined the pot with cement. Using coffee cans, I made some reducer fittings so the air hose can fit on the blower and the air pipe. I got some charcoal and a hammer.
Yesterday I fired it up. And dang it's nice, if I do say so myself.
As an idea man, I am mostly impulsive thoughts and excited talk. In the past this has upset/unnerved some folks, myself included, as I'd get up one day talking about my big plans, getting everyone around me excited until the next day when I'd come up with something new to occupy my thoughts.
But every once in a while a thought comes 'round to fruition, having withstood the test of my shifting impulses, and it feels good. It feels real good.
I should accomplish things more often.
And taking a ton of naps.
If working retail is teaching me anything, it's that at heart I am an introvert. Not whole-heartedly, mind you: I charge off the energies of close friends' laughter just the same as everyone else. However. After 5-9 hours of asking, "Can I help you find anything?" and making small talk with senile men with body odors that could make a skunk drop dead, all I want to do is lock the door, turn up the music and sink into whatever there is to sink into. Retreat is the word.
(And that's on a good day. A bad day would include defending why the store is out of a particular item to an outrageously self-entitled a-word, tallying at the end of the evening how many customers habitually wake up on the wrong side of the bed. Those days I wish I were a heavier drinker.)
I've been downright mean some nights, in my pursuit of loneliness.
Some days I get home and genuinely want to write. But I'm so drained that there's no flow, despite the full basin.
Other days I just don't want to think at all. I know we've all been there. That's what TV is for.
I have other excuses besides introversion for not writing as much: Over the past 2 months (in actuality, it's been the last five years, but most densely in the last 2 months; even more in the last week or two), I've been gathering materials and assembling my forge. I've been planning this for so long: Way back after I graduated from high school, I bought myself an anvil. And it sat. For years. And years. And years. When we moved it didn't even move with us right at first, just sat in the old garage, in the same place it found when UPS first delivered it. But last Fall my parent's church was giving away a bathroom hand drier, so I took it and immediately modified it into a blower (a bellows for you romantics out there). Then it sat in my room. For months. And months. And months. People tripping over it and everything.
But in the last few months I've got my stuff together. I got some wood and built an anvil stand. I built a tripod for the fire pot. I cut the former legs off the firepot, cut a hole for the air pipe and lined the pot with cement. Using coffee cans, I made some reducer fittings so the air hose can fit on the blower and the air pipe. I got some charcoal and a hammer.
Yesterday I fired it up. And dang it's nice, if I do say so myself.
As an idea man, I am mostly impulsive thoughts and excited talk. In the past this has upset/unnerved some folks, myself included, as I'd get up one day talking about my big plans, getting everyone around me excited until the next day when I'd come up with something new to occupy my thoughts.
But every once in a while a thought comes 'round to fruition, having withstood the test of my shifting impulses, and it feels good. It feels real good.
I should accomplish things more often.
19 June 2009
You probably know by now that one of my favorite poems is Robert Bly's "Two Ways to Write Poems":
"I am who I am." I wonder what one has to pay
To say that. I couldn't do it. For years
I thought, "You are who you are." But maybe
You weren't. Maybe you were someone else.
Sam's friend, who loved poetry, played football
In school even though he didn't want to.
He got hit. Later he said to me, "I write poems.
I am who I am...but my neck hurts.
How many times I have begun a poem
Before I knew what the main sounds
Would be. We find out. Toward the end
The poem is just beginning to be who it is.
That's all right, but there's another way as well.
One picks the rhyme words, and so the main
Sounds, before one begins. I wonder what
Yeats had to pay in order to do that.
Maybe it's the fact that I first read the poem shortly after graduating high school, or maybe it's because I keep coming back to it at various junctures along my way, but the poem is so clearly about shaping our lives. Which is ironic, for Bly to write, because he's all Monomythic about his Universal Mother and Iron John and all that. The plot of his life is pretty much set, his characters cast and modeled after nursery rhymes. I wonder what he pays in order to do that. I mean, write a poem like that and mean it.
I'm over here trying to avoid seeing my life as a movie or television show. Fact is I'm not stuck on an island, though I'm always trying to figure out how to get away and stay. How many times I have tried to explain how I feel in terms of Rebel Without a Cause. It's easy to do, social consciousness and all that.
And yet, these are just stories, ripped from today's headlines like all the rest, like all the poems I write. So here I am, trying to not compare my life to a story while at the same time trying to tell the stories of my life.
I've never felt so self-destructive.
I need to do something.
"I am who I am." I wonder what one has to pay
To say that. I couldn't do it. For years
I thought, "You are who you are." But maybe
You weren't. Maybe you were someone else.
Sam's friend, who loved poetry, played football
In school even though he didn't want to.
He got hit. Later he said to me, "I write poems.
I am who I am...but my neck hurts.
How many times I have begun a poem
Before I knew what the main sounds
Would be. We find out. Toward the end
The poem is just beginning to be who it is.
That's all right, but there's another way as well.
One picks the rhyme words, and so the main
Sounds, before one begins. I wonder what
Yeats had to pay in order to do that.
Maybe it's the fact that I first read the poem shortly after graduating high school, or maybe it's because I keep coming back to it at various junctures along my way, but the poem is so clearly about shaping our lives. Which is ironic, for Bly to write, because he's all Monomythic about his Universal Mother and Iron John and all that. The plot of his life is pretty much set, his characters cast and modeled after nursery rhymes. I wonder what he pays in order to do that. I mean, write a poem like that and mean it.
I'm over here trying to avoid seeing my life as a movie or television show. Fact is I'm not stuck on an island, though I'm always trying to figure out how to get away and stay. How many times I have tried to explain how I feel in terms of Rebel Without a Cause. It's easy to do, social consciousness and all that.
And yet, these are just stories, ripped from today's headlines like all the rest, like all the poems I write. So here I am, trying to not compare my life to a story while at the same time trying to tell the stories of my life.
I've never felt so self-destructive.
I need to do something.
It's storming. Not here. But somewhere, I'm sure, an airplane is having to divert its path, or fly under, or over, or whatever airplanes do in inclement weather.
Last night, early this morning, I woke to a roll of dry thunder five miles long. It stretched on and on like mourning an illness.
I wish it would rain. I wish the sky would crack with a flash, like the splitting of a water balloon, rain down, cool off, relax.
Last night, early this morning, I woke to a roll of dry thunder five miles long. It stretched on and on like mourning an illness.
I wish it would rain. I wish the sky would crack with a flash, like the splitting of a water balloon, rain down, cool off, relax.
18 June 2009
Each day he grabbed his wallet and keys off his dresser and slipped them into his pockets--right rear and right front, respectively. He put a Bic pen in his breast pocket, and counted out three quarters, two dimes, one nickel and four pennies, so he'd always have exact change, no matter the amount, and filled the pocket opposite his keys, to balance out the jingle.
15 June 2009
Today I am covered in dirt. I pull it out from behind my ears, under my fingernails; it's tangled in my hair, stained on my feet. I blow my nose and my snot is thick and black.
And I am tired. Every movement requires a stretch. My brain is scattered.
But I feel good about spending the day in the sunshine. Spend a day gaining blisters and sunburns and the simplest things become extravagant: cold water. Hot food. Chairs and a breeze in the shade. Sleep.
I will dream of rakes and shovels. Goodnight.
And I am tired. Every movement requires a stretch. My brain is scattered.
But I feel good about spending the day in the sunshine. Spend a day gaining blisters and sunburns and the simplest things become extravagant: cold water. Hot food. Chairs and a breeze in the shade. Sleep.
I will dream of rakes and shovels. Goodnight.
10 June 2009
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