Category: poetic

Categories
book poetic

Poem of the day

Because some days, you need a poem.

Down by the Salley Gardens – WB Yeats

Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;
She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.

In a field by the river my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.

Categories
personal poetic school

Passing time as I wait for time to pass.

Some afternoons just drag on, as if to spite a person. I don’t feel like I write well anymore, and it bugs me a little bit. On the other hand, i realize that I don’t really practice very often, so I should just shut my damn yapper and get some serious pen-time going on if I want to feel better about myself. I wrote well once, I think. My oeuvre is well liked among certain literary circles.

I freaked out a bit this past Monday about school and Montreal. I read at first that getting my student permit would take 6-12 months from application, and I panicked. Finally I found the fine print that stated that as an international student from the United States there was actually NO wait time involved, and that I could just get my student permit at my point of entry. What I do have to do is get my CAQ (quack backwards: reminds me of a bad joke. What do you call a duck that flies upside down? A quack-up!), which is something like Certification d’acceptance des etudes a Quebec, or something. The CAQ takes 4-6 weeks, which is certainly manageable, but it also requires proof of funds, not only to pay for the entire first year, but to assure them of being able to pay the second and subsequent years as well (should there be any). So, I got stressed out again, until I heard from the financial aid office at McGill that I should have already received or will at least receive soon a letter of award for the sum of $18,500 in loans. While I’d obviously prefer not to take out that much in loans, at the least it will assure my CAQ eligability while I wait for less soulsucking sources of funding to avail themselves upon my wallet. I should hear about ALA scholarships soon, though not about the big, supercool fellowship until mid-July.

I’m giving serious, very serious and honest-to-goodness no-holds-barred thought to selling my car and flying to Montreal. I would not own a car. It would be the first period of my not owning a car since before I turned 16. Over ten years. It’s a frightening and liberating concept. Montreal does have a good transportation system, and if I live close enough to campus, which is the goal, I think that I’d much prefer to walk everywhere anyway. Among other things, it will be cheaper, and the way things are looking I will most certainly be your quintessential dirt-broke grad student who needs every penny. Obviously I’ll lose a little outward mobility, i.e. it’ll be tough to visit folks like Tim who would be a relatively short drive away otherwise. I did think that maybe I would buy a motorcycle for weekend excursions, but I can come to that when I come to that.

In an effort to feel like more of a writer, today I decided I would create new idioms for the english language. Here is my first attempt. If you like it, please spread it around and say things like, “Wow, that Ahniwa fellow sure is a heck of a guy, did you hear this thing he made up?” and so on.

The idiom expresses an attempt made by someone to do the impossible, to bend a person or thing, which is impressively stubborn, around to your point of view. Furthermore, it implies a negative consequence for even making the attempt, such that by even trying to argue the point you are turning the person or object against you.

The expression itself is: trying to milk a lemon; or, milking lemons. And variations thereof.

Example: Sergei tried to impress upon Anna the efficacy of the Bush regime. The more he pushed, the angrier Anna got, until finally she threw him down a well. Years later, his friend Ajax came by to say, “That’s what you get for trying to milk a lemon.” Sergei had at that time, one might surmise, already been eaten by rats, and could not appreciate his friend’s advice.

Tee hee. Morbid, I suppose. My apologies. Please, go now, and have great weekends, and above all, don’t milk any lemons around any wells. Those rats are already overfed. Thank you.

Categories
poetic

Prose of the Day

Preamble To The Instructions On How To Wind a Watch

Think of this: when they present you with a watch, they are gifting you with
a tiny flowering hell, a wreath of roses, a dungeon of air. They aren’t
simply wishing the watch on you, and many more, and we hope it will last
you, it’s a good grand, Swiss, seventeen rubies; they aren’t just giving
you this minute stonecutter which will bind you by the wrist and walk along
with you. They are giving you – they don’t know it, it’s terrible that they
don’t know it – they are gifting you with a new fragile and precarious piece
of yourself, something that’s yours but not a part of your body, that you
have to strap to your body like your belt, like a tiny, furious bit of
something hanging onto your wrist. They gift you with the job of having to
wind it every day, an obligation to wind it, so that it goes on being a
watch, they gift you with the obsession of looking into jewelry-shop windows
to check the exact time, check the radio announcer, check the telephone
service. They give you the gift of fear, someone will steal it from you,
it’ll fall on the street and get broken. They give you the gift of your
trademark and the assurance that it’s a trademark better than others, they
gift you with the impulse to compare your watch with other watches. They
aren’t giving you a watch, you are the gift, they are giving you yourself
for the watch’s birthday.

Instructions On How to Wind a Watch

Death stands there in the background, but don’t be afraid. Hold the watch
down with one hand, take the stem in two fingers, and rotate it smoothly.
Now, another installment of time opens, trees spread their leaves, boats
run races, like a fan time continues filling with itself, and from that
burgeon of air, the breezes of earth, the shadow of a woman, the sweet smell
of bread.

What did you expect, what more did you want? Quickly, strap it to your
wrist, let it tick away in freedom, imitate it greedily. Fear will rust
all the rubies, everything that could happen to it and was forgotten is
about to corrode the watch’s veins, cranking the cold blood with its tiny
rubies. And death is there in the background, we must run to arrive
beforehand and understand it’s already unimportant.

From "The Instruction Manual" by Julio Cortazar
(and thanks to Sister Amos for sending it to me)
Categories
humor poetic

Word of the Day

Crotchfruit
n.  A derogatory term for children coined by staunch advocates of child-free public spaces. Breeders (aka parents) have now embraced the epithet and call the anti-crotchfruit zealots the real crybabies.

– from Wired magazine’s Jargon Watch

(with apologies to my friends who have crotchfruit of their own … or on the way)

Categories
humor poetic

Poem of the Day

I Left My Head
by Lilian Moore

I left my head
somewhere
today.
Put it down for
just
a minute.
Under the
table?
On a chair?
Wish I were
able
to say
where.
Everything I need
is
in it!

Categories
poetic

The Age Demanded

by Ernest Hemingway

The age demanded that we sing
And cut away our tongue.

The age demanded that we flow
And hammered in the bung.

The age demanded that we dance
And jammed us into iron pants.

And in the end the age was handed
The sort of shit that it demanded.

Categories
humor internet poetic

Distracted

I was going to write a brief post mentioning poetryfoundation.org, which is a massive poetry website from the Poetry Foundation in Chicago that includes handy searching tools, but then I got distracted by all the other neat stuff on Design Observer, as well as by a crazy guy doing guerilla-style video-posts, and of course by bee-keeping (and the related Eddie Izzard skits that clutter my mind).

It’s Saturday. It’s sunny. I’m inside, at work, and easy distractable. Go figure.

But there you are, poetry. Now, onward to more distractions!

Categories
internet poetic

Occasional Loveliness

Tamea doesn’t update her blog very often. Not nearly often enough, really. But when she does, her posts are always very worthwhile.

Categories
internet poetic

Interesting article on blogging.

For anyone interested in blogging, here is an excellent article from the Financial Times.

Which brings us to the spectre haunting the blogosphere – tedium. If the pornography of opinion doesn’t leave you longing for an eroticism of fact, the vast wasteland of verbiage produced by the relentless nature of blogging is the single greatest impediment to its seriousness as a medium.

Categories
music personal poetic

“Well, he’s no Clark Gable.”

Two men whisper on the back roads,
shoulders hunched;
their collars are up around their necks
and their dogs drawn in on a short leash.
In the frigid dawn their breath
draws clouds against the gray horizon.

Their eyes scan the trees,
above the hills,
and they are wary.
Their dogs are restless
and completely silent.

—-

Did you ever hear that Postal Service song? How did it go? Right.

I want so badly to believe that “there is truth, that love is real”
And I want life in every word to the extent that it’s absurd
I know you’re wise beyond your years, but do you ever get the fear
That your perfect verse is just a lie you tell yourself to help you get by?

When I think of “the fear”, I think of this and I think of “fear and loathing in las vegas”, not the title but a line from the movie, damned if I can remember it.

When I think of the fear. No, when I get the fear, like I can feel creeping up sometimes still, like today, my eyes feel too far back in my head. My pant legs feel too short and my shoes ridiculous. All these things that I want to do, but none of them energize me. The thought of these actions inexplicibly turns from exciting to draining, and I’d just like to lay down and sleep for a long, long time.

I make poor decisions when I get the fear. I quit dancing. I stay in more often than not. I start to judge the world, and worse, myself, with a scale that nothing can stand up to.

Indécise – Coralie Clément

Peut-être oui, peut-être non
Ca m’est égal de toute façon
À gauche, à droite, ça, je n’sais pas
De haut en bas, oui, pourquoi pas
Un jour où l’autre, on verra bien.
Toujours remettre au lendemain
Ce que je peux faire ce matin
Je ne sais pas me prendre en main…

Sometimes I know where the fear comes from, and why it comes, and what it wants. Sometimes it’s so simple.

Today, the fear is a fucking ninja. It’s sneaky and black and pointy, but I’ve seen its traces. Fuck you, the fear. Come back some other day.

Today. Today I don’t want you.

Categories
dance love personal poetic

The weekend could be summarized in one haiku.

Even two days later,
my bed still smells like beauty.
My couch smells like me.

Aside from the fact that I shouldn’t be “getting with” anyone right now, what all with leaving the city, state, and country in about five months, there are certain people that I REALLY should not be getting with, for other very valid reasons.

Of course, those are exactly the people that I am insanely attracted to. Grrrrr. 

So Friday night my friend Amy and I drove down to Portland to go to the Portland Lindy Exchange. First off, the Crystal Ballroom is mad cool. The floor is air-cushioned, which offers the effect something like that of dancing on a very firm trampoline. On the faster songs it was fun sometimes to stand back and watch the floor ripple. Aside from the visual effect, it was a dream to dance on, considering how much give the floor offers, and thus takes off your joints. I danced with people from New England, Chicago, and a flurry of other places. Had I known that there was an after-dance (from midnight to 6am) I might have geared up the energy to go, but as it was I was tired, and we left Portland around midnight:thirty.

Amy and I wandered around Olympia pretty much all day on Saturday, which was really nice. We had breakfast at Darby’s and later went to Chopsticks for Bubble Tea and green tea icecream. Seperately, good. Together, entirely too much sweet. It seemed like EVERYWHERE we went, every store and shop and restaurant was playing swing music. It was the soundtrack for our day, and all I wanted to do was dance. It’s hard to get a shy girl to dance with you in an antique store, though, where things might be broken.

Saturday evening I dropped Amy off at her house on the way to Seattle, and arrived at a party around 10:30 in the p.m. for some jiggy conversational action. The girl throwing the party is a friend of my sister’s, and used to be my babysitter. She’s a Cornish grad, so she knows all sorts of interesting artists and dancers and such types, which made for a fun crowd. Her downstairs neighbors are a band, so they came up and played, and there were a few dance performances at points that were fun to watch. We left after a couple hours and I crashed at my sister’s place.

Sunday we went to breakfast at Mae’s and then went ice skating. It’s the second time in my life I’ve ever been ice skating, and though it was hella fun, I think I prefer roller-skating, honestly. Plus, I had to pay constant attention to not run over little kids. Which is true when rollerskating as well, but seems more dangerous when you have sharp metal objects attached to your locomotive shanks. I guess, for the kid, it would be the difference between a crushing death or a slashing/stabby death. Hmmmmm…

Later, we went and watched “Night Watch” at the Neptune Theater in the U. District. I liked it a lot, and I’m interested now to see how the rest of the trilogy plays out. It’s nice to see good films coming out of Russia, and it was fun to listen to Russian. As a Russian film MADE to be seen by an American audience, they got to plan the subtitles out ahead of time (rather than just tack them on as an afterthought), and therefore had some really neat subtitle effects that I’ve never seen used before. Some characters practically gathered their energy and shouted the subtitle at the other character, in a very illustrative fashion (giant subtitle lashing across the screen), while some dripped, and some glowed, and while most were white, some were red or orange. In a word, it was neat to see subtitles included as an actual part of the artistic process.

I got home around midnight on Sunday, and went straight to work Monday morning. My bed smells like dangerous dreams, and I’m constantly torn between throwing myself into them or holding them at arm’s length. It’s all completely ridiculous.

Just like anything worthwhile.

.

Categories
love poetic webcomics

Questionably Content

Everything changed today.
You’d think I was overreacting,
that the sky had fallen,
or that I’d kissed a chicken.

The sea isn’t boiling,
not yet, but even so,

everything changed today.

Tomorrow,
it will likely change again.

Categories
love personal poetic

When haiku have kids.

I don’t know what the plural of “haiku” is, but I refuse to say “haikus”. I imagine, like geese, it could be “heeku”, or perhaps “haaku” or “hiiku” (but absolutely not “hooku”, which is obviously the plural for “hookah”). However, I’m going to go with the “moose” methodology instead, which remains “moose”, and which stands as a testiment, when combined with “goose” and its plural, that the English language really doesn’t put forth a whole lot of effort towards being consistent. And that’s exactly why I love it.

In any case, here are two haiku that I wrote. Afterwards, I decided I didn’t like them in haiku form (it was actually their choice and not mine), so from their loins sprung (that’s a really ghastly image) the poem underneath. Actually, haiku are hermaphroditic, but will rarely spawn anything but more haiku when left on their own. When two haiku spawn together, you’ll often get a poem. Haiku orgies often result in odes, ballads, sonnets in iambic pentameter, and children’s songs. Don’t look at me. It’s the natural order! Without further ado …

one

it’s not too late yet;
i want conversation past midnight and
to fulfill your smile’s promise.

two

you smile like moonlight.
fingers brush fingers.
your cheek is smudged with stardust.

it’s not too late yet

it’s not too late yet;
minds wrapped around distant angles,
long exposures drawn out and
sometimes so long that I become aware
of nothing but your presence beside me.

it’s not too late yet;
stepping back into the night’s
artificial flicker.
stars make wishes on our cities.
we hazard fingertips brushing,
too hot to be a holy palmer’s kiss.

it’s not too late yet;
as you smile like moonlight,
your cheek is smudged with stardust
and there’s so much time left to go.

it’s not too late yet;
i want conversation past midnight,
and to fulfill your smile’s promise.

Categories
humor personal poetic

One, please.

an anti v-day haiku.

lip-locked lovers at the movie;
while you made kissy face,
I ate all your popcorn.

Categories
personal poetic

Alone and listening

The first thing
these days
after I get home:
a cup of tea
(mint please).

I set the cup near the plants
to watch the steam caress their leaves.
I think they find it erotic.

I watch the sky redden,
then darken
against the sloping horizon,
and the city becomes
a sea of flickering lights
dancing outside my window.

By now I’ve moved on from tea;
something with a kick,
and while Miles takes five
I close my eyes and lean back.

Sometimes,
alone and listening,
staring out into the black
and the ground littered with stars;
sometimes every night is perfect.

Categories
book libraries poetic

When the rains came

When the rains came
the books were unprepared,
languishing in their regulated air,
they knew no more of wet
than a babe of fire
or an animal of greed.

The drops started slow,
cold dark moisture creeping
along the undersides of pipes,
melting through crevices,
plummeting in the manner of spring leaves,
patient for their fate.

When they reached the wall they balked,

hesitated.

The drops behind piled down upon them,
forced them to push through,
not hungry,
but desperate to obey gravity,
however slowly they would go.

Now, finding paper,
old trees,
the water soaked,
spread,
saturated those folds of wood and ink
and tried to remember
the call that nature gave
to water and to wood.

The water soaked,
and remembering by instinct,
told the books, “drink. grow.”

At first it was an onslaught
to paper that had never known
worse than cries of censorship,
which does not warp the page
nor smear the ink. Gradually,
listening,
they drank.
Page by page,
thoughts hazy as the ink ran,
as the pages twisted,
they tried to remember being trees.

Eventually the water stopped,
human error made right by human hand.
Some books were saved.
Some had gone mad, the lust to grow
turned their spines to sap
and their pagination
to rings of age beyond their memory.

Later, tossed out amidst debris,
the books, mad with life,
found sediment,
water,
sky.

And from each page,
a tiny sprig took hold,
following down into the earth,
the driving voice of gravity and life.

Categories
personal poetic

reflection squared

the image in the mirror isn’t you,
though it looks like you and acts like you,
it’s face, too, seems such an odd shape,
it’s smile too forced, it’s eyelids too low,
and you’re reminded so much of yourself.

but when, in the desperation of night’s cold,
you throw yourself into its arms,
it shatters, cuts you, destroys your fragile countenance.

now there are a hundred,
none of them you.
regardless,
you start an army,

a throng of reflections looking to each other for answers.

Categories
poetic

Linguatastically yours, bava.

I was poking around at thesaurus.com because, once again, I couldn’t remember a word (which I never did find, damn it), and thought this was interesting.

Their entry for liberal:

Main Entry: liberal
Part of Speech: adjective 1
Definition: progressive
Synonyms: advanced, avant-garde, big, broad, broad-minded, catholic, detached, disinterested, dispassionate, enlightened, flexible, free, general, high-minded, humanistic, humanitarian, impartial, indulgent, inexact, interested, latitudinarian, left, lenient, libertarian, loose, magnanimous, not close, not literal, not strict, permissive, pink, radical, rational, reasonable, receiving, receptive, reformist, tolerant, unbiased, unbigoted, unconventional, understanding, unorthodox, unprejudiced
Antonyms: conservative
Source: Roget’s New Millennium™ Thesaurus, First Edition (v 1.1.1)
Copyright © 2006 by Lexico Publishing Group, LLC. All rights reserved.

And for conservative:

Main Entry: conservative
Part of Speech: adjective
Definition: moderate
Synonyms: bourgeois, cautious, constant, controlled, conventional, die-hard, fearful, firm, fogyish, fuddy-duddy, guarded, hard hat, hidebound, holding to, illiberal, inflexible, middle-of-the-road, not extreme, obstinate, old guard, old-line, orthodox, quiet, red-neck, right, right-wing, sober, stable, steady, timid, traditional, traditionalistic, unchangeable, unchanging, uncreative, undaring, unimaginative, unprogressive, white bread
Antonyms: incautious, left-wing, liberal, progressive, radical, revolutionary
Source: Roget’s New Millennium™ Thesaurus, First Edition (v 1.1.1)
Copyright © 2006 by Lexico Publishing Group, LLC. All rights reserved.

It may just be me, but it seems like “conservative” is painted more negatively than “liberal”, and in a thesaurus, of all places. Who knew Roget was such a revolutionary?

Categories
montreal personal poetic

Montreal

Beware of what comes out of Montreal, especially during winter.
It is a force corrosive to all human institutions. It will
bring everything down. It will defeat itself. It will establish
the wilderness in which the Brightness will manifest again.

– from ‘Montreal’, by Leonard Cohen

The news is official,
though still too early to pack my bags.
I’m ready now for that trek, again;
ready again to consolidate my life into
a two-door on wheels and to drive like flying.

In August I will take my leave from this rain,
from these domes and evergreens,
lakes and quiet inlets.
August, a day away at best and yet
still too far to taste.

And long past August, when the hard winter falls,
we’ll corrode together,
Montreal and I,
and eat away at the institutions,
at the heartbreaks and the lonely solitudes
and we’ll emerge and be stars upon the earth.

And every step will be a search for new constellations.

Categories
personal poetic

Write like you used to.

Today my finger’s are antsy,
waiting for the right meaning
to find its way into my head;
for the right word or sentiment,
for everything to make sense again.

Reading back over July of ’04,
carpe diem, you know …
and all that;
makes me wonder what it felt like,
to be me then,
and the effort it takes to remember

it was me

is frightening.

Reminiscences are futile, finally,
chicken scratch on a chalkboard
long since washed away,
written over,
overridden with current turmoil,
and the zen certainty that
everything is happening simultaneously.

I never asked for Washington.
I was born here, lived here,
moved away and came back and it has my heart
and I can’t understand, regardless,
a similar connection to a different place.

Home is where your car is licensed.

My eye, lately, takes to rambling
like my fingers are now,
and it has no opinion on consequences;
leaves them for the rest of me,
takes its fill,
moves on. Philanderer.

Wandering the stacks at closing,
i put my hand out,
let my fingers run over the spines
as i used to do often when i was shelving.
I’ll close my eyes and
feel the whispers of those worlds
rasping against my skin.

Sometimes my breath will catch,
there alone,
and I am reminded.

I can hardly stand the beauty of this world.