Resolve weakening

So, I haven't been writing as much as I'd like to be. Ah well. I'm still trying to get in a little bit here and there - and 30 poems in as many days was a pretty gigantic goal in the first place. I am still making it in with 3-4 solid writing days a week, which is more than I was doing before this. Maybe I'll just extend the timeline out beyond April.

Part of the problem, I think, is that big things are happening and while I sort of want to write from that place of bewilderment that I'm in right now, I don't think it's right. I remember my creative writing teacher in 2001, immediately after the terrorist attacks, saying, I will NOT look at any poems about September 11. It is too early, he said - don't write for the drama in the drama - poems are about introspection and reflection and no one has reflected enough to digest what has happened here.

At the same time, there is something to be said for rawness, for the visceral edge that comes through when the subject is the excruciating now.

But again. What's going on is not so much moment to moment excruciating (not an acute symptom) but rather a drawn out, low lying buzz of emotion. That's hard to catch and sharpen and hone into something worthy of a poem. It's more of a stress, an anxiety, a greyness. Not necessarily bad, of course, because I feel I'm stepping in the right direction, I really believe that, but it's complex and rather undefineable, the emotional state I find myself living. If it were more immediate, more poignant, then maybe I would feel more comfortable writing it. It's hard to articulate something so ... shifting and variable?

Enough rambling. A little light poem to hopefully refresh a bit. It's an old one.

Saturday

And I'm still in bed,
awash in the words of each thin, backlit page.
The sun slides in slats through the blinds,
across the spread of my legs, my fingers
my hair and my face.

If I could trace it,
through time and intensity—

if I could still its erasure, keep each moment--

If it left its stain here,
laying its smooth, lazy, paint,
I would be lit and wet and glowing with swaths
of white-whittled light,
tempered only by the brush of quick clouds.

Something's in the water

Here's a rough second draft of a poem that began with a mimic of Naomi Shihab Nye's "What People Do" (great poem, incidentally). The one bad thing about this exercise is, if you use amazing poetry/poets as a base, everything kind of pales in comparison. But, without further scraping and excusing:

Outside/Inside

Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday the days press together,
strange bundled passengers at a bus stop.
I am in the streets, one of those days’ evenings haven fallen upon me,

(How did I arrive here?
I ask myself this each day)

and I pick up the paper,
its damp wings and words fluttering outside the door.
I take it to my lover
who sits two stories up, impassive
in the bottom of the warm well of our bedroom.

(Today my face is glass.
I walk the streets reflecting all I can with it
as the rain pats the ground)

He is there waiting for the night to fall, the day to become the next.
I give him the paper. He puts it in the litterbox.
Its wings wilt under the spread of sand.



I would tell my lover
Today I understand.
I am a bird and you are a stone.

Instead I stand here next to him
handing dishes to be dried,
watching him wipe each one carelessly
with a damp towel,
the one which smells of the tissues in my mother’s pocket,
of cloudcover in March.

(My face is glass)

Day 2

So, unless I write a small one, it's going to be hard to put really unpolished, unfinished poems up here, I've realized. But that's ok. I can try to build some time in for editing and rewriting when I get a few more poems to play with, ones that I feel have a little life in them.

For now, a poem I worked hard on in college. It's not really indicative of my usual style of poetry - it's harder, less optimistic, less transparent. Actually, this one is almost as difficult to post as an unpolished, as it brings back a lot of uncomfortable, unhappy memories - and, in my infinite worrying, I find it hard to share because I'm afraid it will make the reader uncomfortable, as well. But I guess I should be glad if it does. That means it must be working on some small level.

A Daily Calculation of Value

For 2,000

oh that number
carves me quick, swift from the outside in,
snitching with sleet-cold shears
snapping and slitting with sharp silver shears
until it steps back and whistles
at the wonders it’s done
whistles and wonders at the wonders it’s done
but I still need a nick with the edge of a nail,
now and then.

oh that number
makes me brittle, hard inside ready to be broken
riding on a breath of brokenness
edging into the eye sockets of brokenness
so my anger can splinter out into shrapnel
fired not cleanly into passersby
fired in fact messily into passersby
until their bodies scream silently with outrage,
like mine.

oh that number
snatches me into its clutch like a seducer
calavera in Spanish, brother word to sister skull.
ay dios, con un calavera en la calavera (oh god, with this seducer in my skull)
there is no pleasure, no quick breath of bliss
only all day my mind full of twisted rusted nails
only all day my mind full of nails
bitten down to the quick
red and raw.

oh number
what more will you snick off with your shears
what more will you have me kill with my brokenness
what more will you have me bite bitter into nothingness
I am numbed to your seductions and just let you
take me
and have me
and starve me
and rape me.

April 1!

So, it's not my poem. I'll say that upfront, no fooling around with April 1 hijinks. But I did write today. I feel rusty and out of practice but I always do after a hiatus. So instead of sharing my humble little scribbles, and in the interest of actually starting off this month with the presence of a poem, here's one that I've always loved.

Jazz, by Angela Ball

I'd like to know everything
A jazz artist knows, starting with the song
"Goodbye Pork Pie Hat."

Like to make some songs myself:
"Goodbye Rickshaw,"
"Goodbye Lemondrop."
"Goodbye Rendezvous."

Or maybe even blues:

If you fall in love with me I'll make you pancakes
All morning. If you fall in love with me
I'll make you pancakes all night.
If you don't like pancakes
We'll go to the creperie. If you don't like pancakes
We'll go to the creperie
If you don't like to eat, handsome boy,
Don't you hang around with me.

On second thought, I'd rather find
The fanciest music I can, and hear all of it.

I'd rather love somebody
And say his name to myself every day
Until I fall apart.