Dust and the Brown Rug

I used to clean your rooms.  I filled trash bags full of discarded shoe boxes and organized papers. I read cards and letters sent to you and marveled at your lives apart from mine. It was a way of being close in your absence. Cleaning eased the isolation and anxiety living in the bottom of a floodplain with nowhere to go. It required hours. I liked to imagine cities safe for children, where anyone could walk without fear of abduction. Now I imagine things I never saw you do. I wonder if you remember looking for displaced things. I wonder if you remember returning to order.

A Song I Writ for My Sisters

A poem for dani

Joshs friend kyle wrote this for me and I really like it. So I wanted to post it.

You said you never sleep
awake for days and days at once
as if the world lived by a design
not suitable for you

A world that spins in the wrong direction
and gravity that is too intense
and beauty that is too hard to find
it’s only suitable for few
You told me of a man
who threw your heart into the wind
and turned out to be a boy
not suitable for you

He loved you once, the story goes
but after moving in he learned
love was not on the list of links
he felt between the both of you

You told me of your words
the words you put into ink
describing a life of time
not suitable for you
describing a frame of mind
not suitable for you

I asked you to share them, these words of yours
These explanations of deceit
these statements of awareness
these windows into your You

I could not follow every meaning
but I did not mention this
for I wanted to hear every word
you felt suitable for you

That night I showed you my poetic loves
showed them in our drunken state
you cried at the beauty of words
you expressed to me your elate
it was suitable for you

Not six months prior
I would have considered
such an emotional response
to be contrived and dramatic

But in the kitchen of that evening
when you cried at my love
I felt only admiration
that you could express yourself
so clearly

I hope one day the world can
experience that talent
that has been bestowed upon you
that talent of sincere expression
that is suitable for you

Silence

Laughter

and

Music

Know your faults and keep your wits

Horace's Ars Poetica should be required reading for all would-be writers. I particularly like the last section:

AP:438-476 Know your faults and keep your wits

If you ever read Quintilius anything, he’d say:

‘Oh do change this, and this.’ If, after two or three

Vain attempts, you could do no better, he’d order

Deletion: ‘return the ill-made verse to the anvil’.

If you chose to defend your fault rather than change it,

He’d spend not another word or useless effort

To stop you loving you, and yours, unrivalled, alone.

An honest, sensible man will condemn lifeless verse,

Fault the harsh, smear the inelegant with a black

Stroke of the pen, cut out pretentious adornment,

Force you to elucidate where it’s not clear enough,

Denounce the ambiguous phrase, mark amendments,

Be an Aristarchus: not say: ‘Why should I offend

A friend for a trifle?’ Such trifles lead to serious

Trouble, once he’s been laughed at, or badly received.

The sensible fear to touch, they flee, a crazy poet,

As when the evil itch, or jaundice, plagues someone,

Or fanatical delusions, or plain lunacy,

Diana’s curse: children rashly follow and tease him.

He, inspired, goes wandering off, spouting his verses,

And if like a fowler intent on blackbirds, he falls

Into a well, or a pit, however much he cries:

‘Help me, citizens!’ none will bother to pull him out.

If anyone did choose to help, and let down a rope,  

I’d say: ‘Who knows if he didn’t do that on purpose,

And doesn’t want to be saved?’ and I’ll tell the tale

Of the Sicilian poet’s death, how Empedocles

Keen to be an immortal god, coolly leapt into

Burning Etna. Grant poets the power and right to kill

Themselves: who saves one, against his will, murders him.

It’s not his first time, nor, if he’s rescued will he

Become human now, and stop craving fame in death.

It’s not too clear why he keeps on making verses.

Has he desecrated ancestral ashes, disturbed

A sad spot struck by lightning, sacrilegiously? Yes,

He’s mad: like a bear, that’s broken the bars of its cage

The pest puts all to flight, learned or not, with reciting:

Whom he takes tight hold of, he grips, and reads to death,

A leech that never looses the skin, till gorged with blood. 

Never give up

I would have never given up on you and I try to be smart about it. use all my knowledge. Past. present. future. Biology.  chemistry.  Words.  And none of it is enough to give me the explanations that I need to get past this.

I Made Friends with a Spanish Cat

I'm fighting millions of years of evolution
in my single bed, when the blood comes
and cuts my emotions open like a bag of
sand, swept up in the tide of being lonely
and eleven, I pet my black cat and left
my room for magical thinking. I went to
Monet's poppy painting, blooming and
bleeding with red flowers and friends-
All children ever do is laugh, they turn
every utterance into a joke, no one sees
they're crazy, for being locked inside a
classroom: seven hours straight
staring at symbols on pages, the dead
wisdom of sages, expected to perceive
the applicability to reality when they're
unmoored boats- knocking against each
other confused by modern -ships, relation.
I just want to sleep connected to
another person's flesh, and maybe
that's why I cried as child, predicting
a lifetime of solitary slumbers, lonely days,
pushing through ideas when there are
experiences missing, call it stockholm
syndrome, call it what you want when I
push another egg out and start again.

syndrome, call it what you want