Just to say

<> I'm still working on things, but haven't gotten around to uploading them yet. Fear not.

The Loneliness

I awoke the next morning at 7:43 AM, much earlier than my habits in college had groomed me to awaken. For the week prior to this day, I had grown accustomed to hearing a shuffling from the master bedroom towards the bathroom and then the running of water from the large shower head. At this point, I rolled over - it was my grandmother, doing her morning routine before preparing coffee and staring wistfully out the large glass windows to the desolation of the barren winter snowscape that lay silently outside her warm home. The ice was too treacherous for any fishermen to dare venturing out onto it, no matter how good the fishing was likely to be, and the snow was too crisp and powderless, its moisture sapped by months on the frozen ground and exposed to the open winds, to be of any use to snowmobilers, who would be on the trails. I caught a glimpse of her on the first morning, when I had been started awake by her movements, foreign as they were to my ears. It nearly killed me with sorrow.
On this morning, I had awakened at this customary time and was alerted by the distinct lack of sound emanating from anywhere in the house but my deeply-breathing lungs. I shot from bed and flung the door wide, frantically looking into my grandmother's room to make sure that she was alive - and remembered, standing in the doorframe in my underwear, that she was not there because she was probably on a plane from Traverse City to Detroit and then somewhere in Italy. I do not know if this revelation was any better than if I had discovered her lying stupefied in her bed, so sour did it turn my spirits.
The sun was barely risen but I was at full noon. I could not be here alone all the time. I had friends, people I had known from college and before who could easily visit me, now that we were all in the lull between college and "real world" jobs and families. How appropriate was it to ask them over, though? Really, it was now my house, thus I could do what I pleased with it. At the same time, though, I felt a great tightening in my stomach, a worry that she would come home unannounced to find me with many friends and be upset. This was uncharacteristic of her, and I dismissed the thought, knowing it to be a nonsensical fear.

Penguins

The return trip to the lake house was devoid of thought or emotion; it was just another run to me, another twenty-four minutes of rhythmic and robotic motion that I embarked upon in a vain effort to maintain some ill-forged body image I had culled from society. On my off days, runs felt like this, like exercises in futility and mere playing at a real run. My body was certainly performing all of its necessary duties, moving my legs quickly enough and flexing or relaxing muscles at the correct intervals to maintain my pace, but my heart, my mind, was not in the thing. A runner who is out of his body is a beautiful sight because his body flows effortlessly while his mind floats above him like a cloud or a balloon tied to a child's wrist. I was buried deeply into myself, feeling every inch of flesh and sinew straining to get me back to the house.
I arrived and, soaked and shivering, unlocked the door. Under the protected awning that hung above the back porch, I kicked off my wet shoes and socks, peeled my shirt from my back, and entered in, locking the door behind me. My first instinct was, of course, to alert my grandmother to my presence. The smell of eggs and toast did not greet me this morning and neither did she. I realized quickly in this expansive house that I was alone and that she was not coming back for some time. I could feel a knot in my shoulders where tension had nestled itself angrily into the hollow between my shoulder blades, and my legs were hanging sailors' ropes for knotting practice. The shower beckoned, it being the warmest thing I could expect in a house that was so cold and empty.
I felt no less hollow in that shower than I had on the return trip from the exact midpoint of today's route. The heat and pressure from the nozzle did remove the knots from my muscles, slowly uncoiling them as my grandfather would uncoil the anchor lines on his - my, I suppose - boat when I was a small child, explaining the nuances of seamanship to me while I dangled my feet off of the dock and watched the silvery minnows dart about beneath my shadow. It left me drowsy and hungry.
I had read in Hemingway that hunger was a good discipline and that you learn from it. I was learning quickly that I did not like being hungry but also that it was an inevitable part of living alone. I had plenty of food in the pantry - my grandmother had made sure of that, and she had never eaten much to begin with - but I was loathe to see it evaporate before me simply because I was sad and needed comfort. If I needed to be comforted, I had a fireplace and a notebook that could do the same things with less self-disgust later. At the least, whatever nonsense I scribbled in the notebook could be jettisoned later via weekly garbage pickup. After I had toweled off, leaving my hair to hang in my eyes today, I donned a bathrobe and started a cup of coffee and some oatmeal. My day was more than half over, and I was eating breakfast. I decided to forgo the oatmeal in favor of more coffee and the acute clarity that being hungry and sleepless infers upon its participants.
Outside, the rain fell in sheets and washed across the long arm of the lake. The sand was becoming pocked and pitted from the impact of the heavy drops on its once-pristine surface, still unmarred by the plodding footsteps of summertime tourists, but now looking somewhat like the cratered face of the moon. Lushness was creeping into the lawn like a cat slinks after a vole. The house had been expertly placed so as to keep the windows relatively clear of rain; a few streams trickled down the corners where edges of the house met, but for the most part my view to the frontage was unhindered by moisture on the glass. I smelled coffee and poured myself a strong cup of it and sat at the table before the window. The lake was there.
I knew that I could have picked up the latest novel I was reading - it was something by a lady I had never heard of - or perhaps started writing poor prose or affected poetry in the notebook or maybe have made myself that oatmeal after all, but the rain was too enchanting for these endeavors. I worried that I would miss a moment of its terrific display and would regret that all day. I had missed much of my grandmother and was not sure I could stand to miss much more going on around me. I needed to become observant.
Under a small pocket of pines I had planted with my family twenty years ago was an equally small clutch of sparrows huddling together to stay dry and warm. I wanted to go outside and cover the tree with a tarp, drop seed on the ground, but it was not my place to interfere. They would make it somehow. They appeared to be a new family, not because they betrayed it in their demeanor but because I did not recognize them and I was well acquainted with the wildlife that flocked to the lake house and its welcoming yard. They seemed to be getting the hang of this place and had carved out a niche of their own, so I blessed them and assumed the laissez-faire affectation I was expected to.
The coffee had cooled significantly enough that I drank half of it and felt it warming my stomach and rejuvenating my limbs and heart and keeping my head still for a moment. That was what I needed: a still and clear head. She was going to do fine in Italy, and she would most likely enjoy being there more than she could ever love being here.
The rest of the day I watched the rain and the birds until the sky cleared and they hopped about, chirping and pulling worms joyfully from the ground. The bounty of the feast was their reward for outlasting a gully-washer. I felt proud and watched the news. I forgot to eat, but then, so did Hemingway, I suppose, and I was a much smaller man than he and could thus do better on less than he. This night, I slept warmly and soundly and dreamt of nothing but those flowery and empty dreams that ultimately mean nothing though you assume they surely must, so profound was the imagery and so hard was the rest. Alas, they meant nothing: I dreamt of penguins on a cupcake, spinning around me and smiling while singing "God Save the Queen" and pirouetting like beautiful little ballerinas, their tuxedos flapping lightly in their self-made breeze. The cupcakes were honeyed pumpkin and pecan, and I felt warm and gooey and lazy as though nothing could extricate me from the batter in which I was now imprisoned, even the corkscrewing hind feet of those elegant little penguins.

HOLY SHIT NEW POST

Here are all 2460 words of my in-progress. More to come. This one's for you, Al.

THE BLUE NOTEBOOK

I lived in the lake house that my grandmother had left for me, solely me, after she died on the anniversary of her heart escaping our atmosphere. My grandfather died five days short of seventy-six, and my grandmother lived five years to the day after that, knitting in the recliner in which her husband had spent three years dying. In the months following his death, she remained the epitome of strength that she had been during the treatments. Her worried children, my aunt, uncle, and mother, had visited her profusely to be reassured that she was surviving in the wake of granddad’s death. She, like the lily-of-the-valleys that she loved so dearly, was thriving. I knew better of the pain that haunted her heart.
My grandfather was always a vibrant man. He had served in the United States Army during the Korean War, functioning as an infantryman and flame-thrower operator for a single four-year tour of duty. He had been awarded nothing more than the basic enlistment medals and remuneration. After the war, at age twenty-two, he was offered a position with the Detroit Tigers, playing catcher for their minor-league farm team. By this time, he had met my grandmother and had asked for her hand in marriage; his first daughter was on the way. Though still a well-paying job, professional sports in his time were not nearly as lucrative as they are now, so he declined the offer for what he saw as a much more stable living: working for General Motors in the Power Houses. The pension he picked up from more than twenty years of service for GM would enable him to fund a family of five with little hardship; a supplemental pension from Michigan State University, gained by working there for several years, helped him to retire comfortably at age 65.
The relationship that he had with my grandmother was a golden one. She was the traditional housewife, leaving her modestly-paying job as a soda jerk behind when she was just nineteen to start a family with my grandfather-to-be, a man whom her father disapproved of greatly. They loved legendarily, and she raised her three children fairly and lovingly even while he worked more than fifty hours a week to support them comfortably. When he did not work, they threw parties and soaked up life in the way that a family that works hard would: hard, vivaciously, and often. Before I knew her, the drink she most often chose was Southern Comfort; he liked Black Rose on the rocks. She was a typical Southern Belle, with no siblings, and a strong lineage. After the children left home to start families of their own, my grandparents enjoyed lives that only stoked the fires of their romance for one another, taking trips to Aruba, Gulf Shores, and Papua New Guinea, among others. Theirs was a love stronger than those tragic lovers, Tristan and Isolde, or Romeo and Juliet; it was also less ill-fated.
For twenty-six years, they had lived together alone. There were, of course, intervals of greater population in the house, particularly during the summer and on holidays, but for the most part she lived every day speaking to him and he speaking to her. They had friends, no doubt, and spent enough time away from one another to remain sane, but their separation was never greater than the span of a quarter of a day. When my grandfather died, my grandmother’s entire paradigm shifted; she was irrevocably alone. I cannot say that I truly understand the depth of her loneliness, ineffable as it is, but I could see the depth of her sorrow. Others saw in her longing gaze a desire to move on and continue. I saw a desire to return and die with him.
What my parents and extended family mistook for looking to the future I recognized as classical grieving. Following the death of a lover, the remaining spouse often fights for change, struggles for air in the stifling remnants of their now-dead marriage. They redecorate the living room, change the kitchen, tear up carpeting and lay down wood flooring, or move to Italy to escape the monotony and the winters that punctuated his worst moments of illness. My grandmother sold the vehicle that had transported her and my grandfather back and forth between house and hospital five times a week, every week, for three years. It was a 2006 Chevrolet Trailblazer, in metal-flaked charcoal, with dark grey seats. The vehicle she bought was nothing drastically different, but instead a new iteration of the same thing: a 2009 Trailblazer, this time in merlot. She had not changed severely, it seemed. She still saw old friends, played cards with them on long winter nights, sipping Riunite-and-7-Up, on the rocks, as they fought back the acknowledgment of their mortalities. She still crocheted me afghans and hats and scarves, still made peanut-butter fudge for my mother’s work-sponsored Christmas parties, still baked my father molasses cookies with a little snippet of whiskey, and still made sure not to cook eggs for my uncle when he lived with her for a few weeks to finish a construction job near the house. She entertained my love, Allie, by re-teaching her the art of crocheting, ate sparsely, like a sparrow, and watched Regis and Kelly every morning, even if she had seen it before. Not much was altered.
Then, she took off for Italy. It was the week after my graduation, where she had come with her 35-millimeter camera with genuine Kodak film to capture that moment for posterity. I choked up when I walked to the podium to receive my diploma because I saw her next to an empty seat, his ticket taped to the seat. It reminded me that he would never give my wife the necklace she had been aching for and that I could not afford, simply because he “had nothing else to spend it on,” would never hold my cooing child in his arms and suggest burlesque names, would never teach my daughter to throw a pitch properly or show my son the art of ice-fishing. I moved home after school to be closer to her, at least for those few months in the summer when I was not absorbed in my education.
A week I had been sleeping in the back bedroom, waking up to cool mornings, going to the park to run, and coming back to a house warmed by fresh biscuits and coffee. We talked for hours each day – it seemed as if she had been keeping her words pent up inside, with no one around to talk to – and she always reminded me how nice it was to finally have someone around the house. She showed me the upkeep of the place, where to dump the lawn trimmings, where the ladders were for each operation that was too tall for my short frame, how she liked the flowers arranged outside. I had no indication that she would buy a one-way ticket to Tuscany the Saturday after I moved in with her. I woke that morning to already-made breakfast, a full one, with eggs, bacon, buttered toast, apple butter, and hot coffee. She knew I did not eat until after I ran.
“I’m moving to Italy,” she told me soberly. I saw that she had already packed everything she needed.
“But why? Where will you go?”
“The Donnas have a house there, which they sold me for next to nothing. Don’t worry, I’ve paid everything off here. You can stay as long as you like. I just need to see things before my time. You understand, right?”
I nodded slowly. I understood. I had needed to take the time off at school before I could come back to the house, and it had taken me a solid six months to come home to the house where I had spent so much of my life. Sometimes, it takes a drastic change.
“Please be careful, Grandma. Call now and then, but just enjoy yourself.” I had tears in my eyes.
“You sound like me four years ago.”
Our embrace was long and tearful. When we disentangled ourselves from one another, she held me at arms’ length and smiled grimly. “I will keep in touch, honey. Take care of yourself, now?”
I nodded. Words escaped me.
Within the hour, she was gone. The Donnas had arrived to pick her up and bring her to the airport in Traverse City, roughly a ninety-minute drive, so she could leave me with a vehicle if I needed it. She left behind the brand-new Trailblazer, on which she had only put two hundred miles, and had single-handedly ensured that I would have a place to live without fearing for my finances. I put the food she had prepared into the refrigerator, knowing my appetite was slain, and sat disbelieving on the couch. A chill breeze came through the open windows; outside, the oft-calm lake was rolling with whitecaps, the surf crashing angrily on the sandy shore, pulverizing the remnants of dead fish and abandoned snail-shells. I pulled my worn cardigan closer about me, feeling my grandmother’s fingertips in the innumerable places where she had touched the wool whilst crocheting it for me. My shivers would not cease, and my tears would not fall.

CHAPTER 2

The clock struck eleven before I awoke the next morning, still strewn uncomfortably along the length of my grandmother’s couch. I supposed it was now my couch. A burning hunger bit into my thoughts, reminding me that I had neglected to eat for a day now. Sitting up, I gazed outside and noted the warmth that was beginning to seep into the lowest points of the day. I needed to go run to relieve the sorrow in my heart.
The back bedroom where I had been sleeping was much as I had left it, disarrayed and looking much like a freshman dormitory room. I ignored the mussed covers and deposed pillows in my single-minded desire for running. My shirt, long-sleeved, grey cotton, well-worn, had accompanied me on many medal-winning runs in my college days; the shorts, too short, were likewise accustomed to my body. The two fit together better than I could imagine, the lower hem of the shirt sitting perfectly atop the elastic waistband of my shorts. I dressed quickly and pulled on my trail shoes and tied them quickly. The house was closing in on me.
When I stepped outside, the sunny day that had greeted me from the couch had dissolved into a dark, brooding, overcast afternoon. Clouds swelled and roiled above me, waiting to have the rain wrung viciously from them that they might soak me and wash me clean of my sorrow. I locked the door and put the key into my shorts’ key pocket and started to run.
No birds uttered a single cry even as I started down the road and disturbed their wistful rest. All that was heard was my breathing, still calm and even, and the rhythmic crunching of compressing gravel and soil beneath my shoes. The waves had silenced and the wind was dead, and the clouds were that bubbling color of a television tuned to dead air. I felt comfortable along the road, began to feel my legs warming from the exertion, felt sweat on my back beginning to pearl. It was becoming more humid, and the clouds sagged, pregnant with precious rain. My muscles twitched eagerly, awaiting the electric discharge of the growing storm above me.
A mile passed in this manner, and the hormonal electrification was beginning to exhaust me. I turned off the road and onto the driveway that led back into the woods at the North Higgins Lake State Park. The trails there wove through old and new growth in a four-mile loop that would sufficiently tire me; it was littered with hills and deserted this time of year. Just as I entered the trails, brushed with pine needles and soft earth, I felt my body begin to fade; the exhaustion that follows fight-or-flight was beginning to cut into my stamina. I faltered slightly, my cadence falling noticeably off of it rhythm, and the storm took its opening. The downpour began and caught me in its grasp.
Rain pounded down on me, stinging me through the thin cotton of my shirt, nipping at my shoulders and fingers, exposed at the end of the sleeve. My cheeks burned as the clouds dumped their spears upon me; my hair was quickly soaked and drooped into my eyes. Each breath sucked in the flavors of the forest, alive and outspread to absorb as much of the nourishing rain as it possibly could, and the taste burned my lungs even while it swirled sweetly on my tongue, nesting there and reviving memory. Water weighs eight-hundred times more than air, and I felt every thousand-pound drop crashing down on me, threatening to fracture me like an egg and spill me across the forest floor. Each opening in the canopy poured the deluge down upon my head, and after three miles, my tough exterior finally broke.
I cannot be certain if every drop of salty moisture running down my face began in the sky and absorbed salt from the sweat in my hair or if it began inside of me and was laden with sadness. I stopped, switching the stopwatch on my wrist off, and stood wearily in the middle of a puddle in the middle of a trail. It hurt. I burned. I seethed. Steam rose from me. I was alive and dying. Everything awoke and screamed at me. Squirrels in the trees, birds in the underbrush, leaves in the wind barked at me. Throbbing muscles in my legs gasped with me. My heartbeat pumped ticking me away to death. My clock counted down as though I stood in lieu of time. Lightning cracked.
There I was, in the middle of the puddle in the middle of the trail, weeping like a lost child, crouching on his haunches in the rain. I stood slowly. I looked up, out into the woods. The trees were thin and tall. The grass was too. I was small and stocky, engulfed by their enormity. All that filled my ears was the soft steaming of my breath and the constant dribbled of rain on wet leaves. I had three more miles before I could be home. It was time to let go and run to it.

Poll

Saturday, August 8: DAILY REPORT KWEVEL 21WM 67.145
SIX-TWENTY CHECK IN
SEVEN-FORTY CHECK OUT
card gobbled up, punched, stored for the night
keeper to tally and balance while KWEVEL
sleeps a fitful five hours.
Sunday, August 9: DAILY REPORT KWEVEL 21WM 67.145
SIX-TWENTY CHECK IN
THREE-ZEROZERO CHECK OUT
something is amiss this day and the keeper
checks against the balance to ensure for the sake
of productivity and discipline that KWEVEL
21WM has his shit in order. Doesn't.
Terminate.

94% of respondents would enjoy waking up
to a body like this but 21WM sighs
heavily then laces up
and starts to check out a balance
greater than he deposits.
The bank of the body - where overdrafts build credit.

What the Years Do to a Man

His slouching shoulders bear
a chip so large that even all the love
in your heart (a quantity alike to the levels
of saline solution in the pacific seas)
combined with all the patience in his could
never quite fill it up right, like patching
up potholes with sand - every time you drive
over that sensitive stretch of road, the damage
digs an inch deeper and spreads spiderweb cracks
across the healthy pavement. You're riding along
nice and easy, on a sweet Sunday cruise down
some freshly-asphalted avenue when you come
jarring up to the edge of the roadwork and slam
your head into the roof on the dropoff without
even a sign to warn you. And you know that no matter
how many times MDOT comes out with a fresh load
of blacktop to resurface what's been
irreversibly worn, there will always be
that snag in the continuity of serenity
where some jackass floored it out of spite
and out of revenge.

Before the Sunne Risinge

What thinkers failed to see
when they said she's all states
and all princes, he,
that naught else be,
is that the "she" we see
in elegantly composed love poetry
is quite the wrong lady
for, dear poets, you shall see
that the woman who all states be
is the realm in which you'll find me.
I may be all princes, aye,
but without her loving hand
and roving eye
I'd be nothing more than a guy
with tracts and tracts of swamp.
For, what's a prince with no land?
What's a marriage with no hand?
What's a woman with no man?
A queen, Elizabeth, for one,
Alexandra is the other in the span
of histories and mysteries
who surpasses your system of princes
and states. She all lands is,
and I, all tenants be.

Insomnia

There's been a cheap plastic nozzle
gripped firmly by your chawing
nervous teeth, made unquiet
by too much insomnia and
Colombian roast (which is best,
after all) while your breath
condenses on the cherrywood
that you clutch in your hand like you're
some kind of academic. This pipe
is filled with a crack you can't
stop can't catch can't
buy on the streets. Give me a light
and see if I burn the night
sky fuckin' high, like a
deconstructionist rocket in flight
while I play Boggle with myself
and grin 'cos I just fuckin' won.
In just under 2.5 I'll be
on the streets, under
those lamplights, and some speedy
Gonzalez is gonna blow smoke
in my face and say hey
little man
ain't you out kinda late?

April 28th - For Sartre

After the Age of Reason

Defiance made his smile
deeper and creased his sweat-speckled brow
like a spoon
dipped into a murky,
long forgotten soup.
And yet, something
insidious, creeping,
entirely involved in its own affairs,
badgered him incessantly,
gnawed belligerently, demanding attention.
It questioned the mindless
refrain of no’s
and bade him be free of that slavery
he knew so fondly, defiance.

April 27th - Every Evening in the City,

vague reminders cry aloud over cold marsala beef.
Every evening in the city, we survive, waiting
day to day, scraping by with fears in hand.
A voice collapses as the night shakes free
and we grew tired, raging.
If we somehow, sometime find a way,
between the entrees and the decaf coffee,
to break this mold and seize this day,
still will we fall into the
same old song and dance.
We're standing in the foyer
reminiscing about the day before,
watching the cheap champagne go flat.
This is the sting of slowing down.
This is the scorn of nine to five.
This is the scent of dreams deferred.

April 26th - Welcoming Spring

I used to know the way to walk
down these long forgotten roads:
I knew the ways back home, but then
the snow consumed them all,
made the world white and cold
one long, lifeless, blindingly bright blanket
where no shadows survive -
not even those I held inside.
the memory bled from my mind
like a waterfall of crimson silk
sluicing decisively along virginal backs
left in ribbons from the willow switch.
now, standing tall, craning to view
over a particularly rolling hill
the serpentine thoroughfare I thought I knew
when I was young and brave.
I'll pry the boards away from that
dilapidated, crumbling house
that held all my follies, secure for ages,
covered in the snow;
the memories tumble forth
and collapse at my feet;
the snows, retreating, slink away.
the shadows crawl back in,
stretching their shoulders, cracking joints,
reminding me the season only
covers, never kills.

April 25th - The Love Song of K. Wesley Eveleth

If I believed my answer
were being given to someone
who could ever return to the world,
this flame would be still.
But since no one has ever returned
alive from this depth,
if what I hear is true,
I will answer you
without fear of infamy.

You and I
Shall walk along empty streets,
And I shall let you in
On my secret,
But this will be my
Last revelation.
TS Eliot was a sinister man: He wrote
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
with my torment in mind.
He knew that in those fledgling years of
Stumbling poetic discovery,
I would see nothing
But a tired, balding, thinning man,
Walking along the beach
Ivory trousers rolled,
Muttering about some abstraction,
Ragged claws, or peaches, or somesuch thing.

All this talk of Michelangelo,
Lazarus, coffee spoons,
Foggish cats in soot-stained alleys!
My foolish, empty head
(Downed with auburn hair!)
Could not comprehend the ever-present question,
Rolling with the universe into a ball
That leads unto my secrets.

But he knew it would settle and assault
Renew and overhaul
Approach me in my dreams, holding out its
Overwhelming Question on a silver platter.
It could be no great matter.

But it strikes me in my core,
Sprawls me on a sticking pin:
What am I?
By what yardstick shall my life be measured? Coffee spoons? Works of art?
Have I really made a start on
Anything I wanted in my dreams?
The gravity of all he wrote nearly
Broke my heart and
Crushed my lungs.
I wept and fasted,
Wept and prayed,
And saw far before me that Eternal Footman,
Wearing his long grin and that same snicker.

The women will come and they will yearn,
Thinking of Mr. Thomas Stearns.

Though I am only twenty-one
I feel as though my days are done;
And Despair, ye mighty!
For we all must die.
But much of life remains for me,
Much of time,
Time to murder and create the poet
That I long to someday be.
My life
I hope
will be counted by all my creations,
And the mermaids will sing to me,
And I will unravel that Overwhelming Question,
Tame it with a dismissive hand
And linger in the sea.

April 24th - Surge

There is an
Acute sense
Of sorrow
In watching the ice
Evacuate lethargic waters
As Spring approaches.
As it thaws, it
Cracks, shifts, and groans,
And the sadness
Seeps into my bones
(Like the cold).
All that's left
On the pregnant,
Rushing river
Is a skiff of abandoned ice, a lingering
Scent of winter,
And a trace
Of what once was.

April 23rd - No Texting in Class

Back in the day
Calliope, Clio, and Melpomene
(Καλλιόπη, Κλειώ, Μελπομένη)
The Muses, sang A Capella
directly to me
I decoded
I transcribed Creation (Θεογονία) as
they saw fit
But in my age
this age of technology and chaos,
strange attractors and erupting tweets
they phone it in
On slipshod cellular phones, or worse
email and txt (τεχνολογία). Half the time
I figure my three
of nine are dead, or worse
buried under noise (χάος)
Sometimes I wing it, sometimes
I'm silent
Always I invoke them, always
(Πείτε μου, o αγοράς, o κόρη του Ζεθς)
I know I'm the
Only one calling

April 22nd - Fair Nike

Your stench could overwhelm a stubborn crow
Who never feared the woes of stink.
Musty, rancid, rank, and fetid,
none of these do justice to your general decrepitude.
The duct-tape, fused into your man-made skin,
has wrinkled, wears the stain of time just like your face,
and somewhat hides your funk --
but not enough to help your case.

When I lift you up to throw you out,
I meditate on all we’ve shared --
mostly against my will, most likely due to your vicious reek --
My flesh and blood, sweat, tears, the mud
of victories from bygone years,
thirteen hundred miles of aching legs,
searing lungs, seething coaches,
spikes in calves and bloody noses.
Dances with the grassy knolls,
or pavement strewn with trodden holes.
Miles on miles in rain and snow,
cars honking while some drunken student
yells Go Forrest Go --
And Lord Almighty do you smell!

You broke me once again, fair Nike --
armless, headless, wingéd, she --
so you shall stay inside that unwilling closet,
turning it miasmic with your gamy breath.
Do not get the wrong idea about all this:
I do not love you. I don’t! Think it all you want.
I only feel the faintest remorse when I look down
and see clean, functional white kicks.

April 21st - To Running

I love the way she plays with my
sanity like it’s dried up
play-dough. I love that she
demands my time and in response
gives me diminishing returns. I love

her way of making sure that I know
that she loves me most
when I miss a date, because
it means she gets to ride my
back like a rabid cat gone apeshit. I love

how she rewards my loyalty and love
by punishing me more than usual, because
I know her attention is sublime and that it’s love
that powers the extra effort given
to make me feel that much worse. I love

that she yanks me out of bed at five
in the morning every morning and lovingly
slaps me in the face, then cutely says
‘We’re going out, get dressed, you’re much
too slow, and we need to go.” I love

that no one else can understand why she and I
keep this marriage alive, except for Tony,
her second husband, and of course all those
people she has flings with when it gets warm or is
new year’s resolution time. I love

how when she’s not a stone cold bitch, she
breathes life into me intravenously, keeps
me strong and holds me up when grief
is all I know.

April 20th - Rolling Boil

She and I fought for weeks: a real barn burn, so to speak. It boiled in our love like a pot of soup left on the stove for days to cook slow. We would hash it out for a bit, prod slights back and forth, test the seas of our slow burn, but once in a while, we would take a break for a day or two. The storms in our hearts rose like dough, up and out, down the sides of the pan, to the hot-stoked fire, then burst in the heat of our brawl. Like a good book, we set it out back, far from our thoughts, to grow and steep and get some steam on its way to the front, strong and a ripe for war. It built while we let it sit and stew, found brawn in long-lost fights of yore, in things we thought we killed and stuck deep down in the dirt, dead to the world and lost to us, then blew like a fuse on a frost-soaked dawn when the heat, the lights, the fans, the bath, all in the house sucks the juice dry.

The rage burst like a slighted soufflé, a pastry overflowing with magpies, a fragile balloon, sniped from afar by something spoken that refreshed everything previously simmering somewhere subconscious.

Explosions abounded throughout the rupture of renewed discontent, leeching from memories that possessed little to nothing related to anger a fuel that during any other epoch should empty distrust from our over zealous quarrel, but currently nurtured an already-roaring disaster of conflagration. Nothing could stultify our inferno, fueled by enough mistakes and misspeaks that neither involved was capable of dowsing aforementioned, passionate rages.

And then, one grey morn in the days just past May, she set down in front of me a pile of flap jacks and a tall glass of juice, with a mate she had laid out for her. I looked at her eyes and saw no flames there, no fight, no hate, just a deep haze of blue.

We ate in the weak, lambent light of the morning, finished, then spoke:

Thanks for the grub, hon. I am as right as rain, I said.
Thanks for the fight, babe. I am as good as gone, she said.

April 19th - The Night Eveleth Lost Religion

After Zimmer

The night was dark and thick
Like licorice
And I felt sick.
We’d made love, but here I was
Awake, alone, looking out the window, resting on the sill,
Thinking God would fly a-raging over some strange hill,
Clenching in his fist a righteous wrath.
I was pale, like the moon,
And traced a path
Through the ochre-tinted gloom.

Every promise was unfulfilled:
I loved her no more,
And yet no less;
I felt no remorse,
Yet was not blessed;
And God was nowhere to be found,
Neither burning up the sky
Nor tearing up the ground,
And I just wondered why.

And nothing came, and nothing came,
And to this day I wait for flames,
Or crevasses to spread their maws beneath my feet,
Engulfing me, to burn the sin out of my meat;
But I know he knows I know better than to think
He would come down to flog me and my ex-,
That he, busy with the rest, would make a stink
About a little fun we had by having sex.

April 18th - Food Saga Pt. II - Nuts to You

To You, On the Anniversary I have with Her.

You would offer yourself up to me
like a ripe & roasted pistachio;
spreading your lips open wide
to offer me some of that
sweet & salty & tangy meat.
I would devour that shit for
breakfast, lunch, dinner or brunch,
an afternoon snack or something
to be washed down with a pilsner.
We fucked like rabbits,
just about every day, twice or thrice
a day, had stock in trojans & it was
always the same:
I was never filled, never satisfied,
always left thirsty and hungry,
eating from between those lips,
because those pistachio meats
never did fill me up quite right.

The girl I have now,
she’s green & tough to crack,
but clean & keeps me sane,
rubs my back & feeds me well.
Her tiny shell spreads to reveal
a meat-and-potatoes kind of love
that’s like Campbell’s Chunky Soup;
she’s a meal fit for LT or
a king, & like such a feast
she takes work to love & appreciate.
But when that work is done, Sweet Lou
do I salivate & extricate & fornicate.
And though it takes effort, I work up
and appetite, and she’s always open
for a meal, & there’s just one more thing:
Loving her fills me up;
I feel sated at the end of the night.

April 17th - Chicago Morning

Blue is the color of this city
Where the wind whips ‘round the skyscrapers
And plants kisses on your face
Like a none-too-gentle slap,
I might add.
It’s the sound of souls left screaming out for sustenance
Dripping weakly from the
Oil-stained neck of a
Life-stained Man’s guitar,
gently weeping.
It’s the taste of the beer drunk here
Best when it’s served up cold,
Sitting lazily in the dark on
some tepid summer night,
like the moon it was named after,
Blue’s the way your eyes look and
The way I feel when I’m around you.
Everything’s been blue so long
That I’ve lost touch
And all I see is orange.

April 16th - Gu

He knows a little bit about
hitting the wall. He's a machine
that choked its fuel down to
the very last glycogenated drop

and sputters wearily into
the fueling station - ding ding -
gripping a twenty in his mitts
and singsonging with his very last gasp

"Sweet Lou, Sweet Lou,
I need a kiss from you,
Baby I've gone too far
and honey I need some sugar."

He grabs a cup of water
and dips his tongue in Gu,
a honey-pot of sweet sensation
and tangy satisfaction,

endless in the darkened well
at the local filling station.
At first his stomach starts to flip
but it settles once it realizes

just how sweet and sour the stuff
he's gulping down his throat
is at this very moment. It's the texture
of robitussin cough suppressant

but the flavor of some exotic fruit,
and it fills his cup to overflowing,
giving him the energy to finish the race
instead of rolling over and falling asleep on the course.

April 15th - The Infected

The virus is insidious
like a hollow smile tainted by a twitching eye
that defeats the politeness and warns
that soon after, your ears will be burning because
someone will be talking about you.
It is indiscriminate
like cancer, meteors, sleep,
and income taxes, and it has
the equivalent lethality of all three
combined and glued together with
the breath of the reaper.
It multiplies and takes over,
a nematode in an ant, clinging
to a blade of grass, or a mist,
clutching the ground,
surrounding it,
and absorbing all the headlights
that drive unwittingly in.
This virus takes the reins
in our simple, broken brains
and makes us pass it on like it's
a biological imperative.
It's incurable. It's infectious.
Each person experiences their own
personal brand of symptoms, and though
some are common amongst the infected,
most all are unique in some manner;
the virus always kills its victims,
and everyone becomes a victim sometime,
but it likes to change its game
and find new and interesting ways
to lay waste to the living.
This disease was given to me by my
mother and my father at the moment
of conception, when 23 and 23
made 46, and that jelly in her belly
became a solidifying form
that shivered into heartbeats
and grew its little fingers
and grew its little toes.

April 14th - Melting Pots

I am an American
by birth: a human, pried
from a ceramic mould that was filled
from the melting-pot of heterogeneous cultures.
I am a mosaic
of traditions, an amalgamation
of peoples and cultures, distilled
down into one whole, homogenized
sentient creature. People tell me
I should celebrate my heritage
but then they slap me in the face
with it whenever they feel
threatened. At home,
I speak my native tongue:
Dia dhuit, mahair, ahair,
conas atá tú?
Dé tha thu ah deanamh?
Mahair hits me, weeping. She has the nerve
to tell me that
wennaeyr ae sey muh wards enna aulden
heilan tonna, noboody kinnaer
kennit, leass daen haida blode, naow, onna'll
never be respected. I had better
learn to cover up that accent --
it's un-American, I guess,
tae knoow wehl ann sweht wenna sei
my words in clear enunciation and when
tae speek thi weigh. My parents
hate it. Neither are from
the old country, and they feel shame
that their son's tongue turned out to be
a quartered blue field
instead of stars and stripes forever. You'd think
my tongue was red and yellow and that
I wielded it like a weapon
with my hammer and sickle
and universal health care. It seems
Mo chroi ta se marbh
in this country that exalts
the impeccably mixed grey of complete assimilation
and spits out perfectly-formed underdogs
who fight for the American dream
just like Rudy, or Radio, or some other
feel-good story of the century. No other
Scot was e'er 'fraid t'speak his mine, and tho
we've been unnerdoogs fer soom taime,
no one seems to root for us.

April 13th - Happy Birthday

In all the years that have ever been,
of all the births that day thirteen
of the fourth month has ever seen,
from Thomas Jefferson, or Guy Fawkes,
to Seamus Heaney and Reverend Al Green,
from Samuel Beckett, or Georg Lukács,
to Kasparov and any in between,
none will be so glorified,
nor honorable nor true,
no year will be as sanctified
as nineteen-hundred-thirty-three,
the year which gave forth you.

And it is true that there were celebrations
across the oceans, throughout nations
on this early April day,
But all those monumental 'ccasions
were merely cheerful resignations
to the splendor that some say
Erupted forth as much elation
to the self-same situation
which you gathered there to celebrate.

Things have come, and things have gone:
In '64, America smiled as Poitier won
Best Actor; Much earlier on,
in the times of canonizing saints,
Spain and Portugal, anon, anon,
in 5-8-5, saw Hermenegild placed upon
the chopping block. They say he won
the Visigoths from Arianistic taints.
And Tiger, Tiger, burning bronze
In the fields of the Masters won
back in 1997 - I was there, among
the family next to you, and no complaints
of turning 64 this time around.

Some say this number has a magic,
which has ever been oft weaved.
Others who know of things more tragic
Know that we are left bereaved.
Today you might have turned seventy-six,
which, in its parts, six and seven,
thirteen makes; alas, no math can fix
that much divides you and I - Heaven
for you, Earth for me, air and angels between.
It stands for the independence of our nation,
the number of letters in those nineteen
words that make the first revelation
of the Qur'an; to ancient Hebrew men
it was how many heleq a rega make.
Yesterday was the Resurrection,
April 12 (76 multiples of that stake
their claim in the Bible), but of those
men who were revived, as Jesus chose,
you stayed dead. Yesterday, no good men rose.

I was ten when Tiger won the Masters.
You were ten when Thomas had 200 years.
I like to think that you, just 76,
and him, with his two-hundred sixty-six,
are palling around up there,
enjoying the few, sitting in chairs,
a pipe and a pint between you two,
chatting of lives so full that you knew
the lives you left behind would be
as empty as my heart, shattered, be.

April 12th - Easter Sunday

Town is deserted today, a twisted
reflection of its former self. The
streets are empty, soulless, and I
am free to go where I please
whether by road or sidewalk. This
freedom is what thrills me,
though I can have nowhere to go
but simply "around." Everything
is closed for whatever illogical
reason we close things today
of all days. I guess everyone
but me is gathered, waiting quietly
outside this cave with a huge
boulder in front of it, asking
breathlessly "why is the boulder
still there? It should have moved
if he hath risen!" And I just smile
from my perch, gazing down on them
as they wave their arms and praise him,
who has not risen, for rising anyway,
just sometime or place where they
could not see it. That's faith:
believing the unbelievable even
when glaring evidence says otherwise -
but we have another term for this
as well. It's called stupidity.

April 11th - The Way to a Man's Heart

Today Meghan wanted me
to try this lasagna pie that looked
pretty tasty. She said to me
while we made it in the kitchen that
"You have to make sure the meat sauce
goes all the way into the pasta
or it makes a crater when it bakes,"
and I know that somewhere in her voice
is an off timbre that tells me
she is strangely satisfied
by stuffing meat into ribbed hole,
like a rigatoni, or something else
which satisfies me. She says while
it relaxes on the counter that it is
so gratifying to have that meat in there
nice and deep and snug, then to drizzle
the white cheese (it's Parmesan)
all over the top, like frosting
on a cake. I stifle a laugh. When
we dig into that lasagna pie,
I have to choke down the double-entendre
beneath the delicious meal, but
she moans in some strange way,
rolling her eyes, then gazing up,
and says "This is heavenly."
I agree: it's fantastic, a long,
deep, moist rigatoni, brimming with meat,
plastered in white cheese.

April 10th - In the Jungle

The last twenty years I have been
in this dense jungle of my mind,
a brave explorer, on the scene
to trim the trees and treasures find.

I seek not either fame nor glory,
but only recognition here,
in this forest where my story
unfolds, blanketed with my fear.

For twenty years I walked a trail,
lingering branches chopped and hacked,
demons faced without a wail,
I bested all that has attacked.

But, in turning 'round to travel back,
I heard a rustle with the breeze.
I realized at the branches I should not have hacked,
but at the roots of those deadly trees.

In that final day I emerge, awake
but broken, quiet, and afraid.
I felt the ground beneath me quake
and knew too well just what I'd slain.

April 9th - Living the Dream

For David Foster Wallace

When was the last time
You did absolutely nothing?

Not laying around, with so much to do,
yet procrastinating,
but honestly, truly, balls-to-the-wall
doing a whole truckload of nothing?

Like, there was just nothing to do,
so you relegated your brain
to sit back and chill, and in that
salty, sticky substance in which you floated

sent out postcards to your pals
that said "if I weren't doing nothing
I'd probably wish you were here?"
It's this kind of nothing. This one.

Not the one that flips your TV
to every baseball game that's stuck
in the sixth, one team smashing the other
while that other lays down and dies;

Not the one that makes you sit
with a pencil clenched in your teeth
staring at the lined paper on your lap
begging your brain to function;

And certainly not the one
that actually sends out those postcards,
or even the one that wishes it did,
because that's more than nothing.

No, I mean the one that just drifts,
like air, like smoke, like you,
just slacks off all systems that don't
autopilot. That is living the dream.

April 8th - Rest in Peace

For Wes Frank

We would have kissed our last goodbye

twenty minutes before the fight

that battle-scarred a fledgling love

and dragged down thunder from the sky;

The devil would have sent a card by post,

admitting he was wrong for acting like a child,

putting his pride away for once, to God,

to say he misses his place in the heavenly host;

And wars would be fought with words instead

of guns, and prisoners would be the brunt

of bad slam-poetry readings. The only casualties

would be the meats sixty-thousand writers would be fed,

If the world were fair, and good.

Men would only need to lie

to their wives to cover up

the surprise birthday planning,

Watching joy go infiltrate her eye;

Everyone would have a job,

and none would have a qualm;

Taxes and benefits would be just

so as to disperse the angry mob;

You would rise this Easter Sunday

like the son of man, from the tomb,

or like the phoenix, burning bright,

from the ashes that were made,

If the world were fair, and good.

April 7th - Loving You is Like

- riding south out of town
on a rusty ten-speed
with the wind in my face
no matter which way I turn

- trying to catch the last bus
before midnight rolls around,
reaching the door only to find
that I left all my change on the bar

- catching that round of influenza
that mimicked food poisoning
and throwing up half my guts
the week of final exams

- running full-speed after a Frisbee
in your ultimate game of the same name,
disc moments from your fingertips,
and crashing into a sycamore

- drowning underwater in a dream
that you know is a dream but feels
too fake to be true to life
and too real to be an outright lie

- the potent venom which was designed
with my particular cellular structure
in mind, which makes me feel both
special and dead at the very same time.

- my favorite thing in the world
because I never know which way
is up, or which door leads
out, or which key opens you.

April 6th - Stolen Bases

When watching pop-flies from second base,
Legs coiled for the second outfield makes the play,
I make eye contact, scan his face,
As if to say: let’s go punk, make my day.

He knows from my look what I intend,
Loads his hips and shoulders, like a gun,
Then fires the ball like a bullet to fend
off my frantic, bonus-base run.

But my coach is bright; he has a reason
for putting me in line as fifth at-bat:
I rack up twenty or more runs in a season
from bonus bases; coach knows that.

He puts me in deliberately
before three sluggers who swing it big.
With so much distance ‘twixt the ball and me,
I’ll grit my teeth, and smile, and dig.

I attack the diamond on every pop-fly,
and my stolen-base average is stellar;
Sure, I make pitchers’ ERAs climb sky-high,
but my RBI total is dead in the cellar.

Once I’m on base it’s a battle of strengths:
The outfielders’ ranges versus my speed.
Enemy coaches have gone to great lengths
To find the remedy they all seem to need.

I’ve faced catchers, lefties, plate-blockers too,
Daring right-fielders, hoping for fame,
Lanky centers trying to stop me at two;
Yet none have thrown me off my game.

Today was like any other of those days.
I rushed on home and the crowd was mum;
I slid hard as the catcher rushed to the plate,
I lay there, dusty, dirt in my gums.

The ump rushed over, mask off for his sight,
and waited for the dust to settle back in,
Then spread his arms wide like a bird in flight
To signal SAFE. All I could do then was grin.

April 5th: The Dread White Whale

Braeburn was idle when I first awoke,
Sitting, awaiting those seven keystrokes
that would allow me access into the system
where I could check all the new updates,
in cased I had missed them.

I first checked the weather. To my grim dismay,
I saw a flat 34 and still snowy on my display.
With a mutter and grimace, I went to the news
updates: thousands on thousands before me,
and I'd not even yet laced up my shoes.

So I swiftly connected to the iGoogle site,
peering ahead at the forecast for night,
while the Youtube widget did load and demand
that I see this penguin get whacked in the head;
so many things beyond my command.

My inbox was there, right on the screen,
Filled with new messages I'd never seen.
A few were all business, though some were for fun,
but most were just junk mail that slipped through the sieve,
so I wrote in iCalendar of my upcoming run.

Then a black pop-up bid for attention,
Tweetdeck, it was, working hard for its pension
of devoted CPU workload. It had to inform
That Twitter and Facebook had updates,
and I let in my throat a heavy sigh form.

Twitter and Facebook, more than likely the same,
Only slightly different in appearance and name.
Each offered the same little pop-up of information
which tell me in 140 characters or less
of the tedium everyone feels at their station.

Honestly, how can it be that in a world so infused
with keeping tabs on our friends, we refuse
to interact more directly than this? Are we
truly so disinterested that we watch for these Tweets
Only to say "it's intriguing, but not happening to me"?

Whatever happened to talking by phone?
Waiting to talk until we got home?
Why are our hearts so frozen with ice
when we have all the means to communicate
in every single digital device?

And why does this white whale cause distress?
If Twitter is down, isn't that all for the best?
Instead of wailing and cursing this internet place,
why not just put down the Twitter, Facebook, and cell phone,
and go to a friend's house to talk face-to-face?

April 4th: Food Saga Pt. I - Caution! This Love May Be Hot!

Our love has dwindled, like a cup
Of rich, delicious coffee:
What we have, what love remains,
Is in a mug that’s nearly empty.

Our love right now is that last gulp
Of cold, Columbian brew,
Growing stagnant, bitter, and old,
Reminding me of you.

Don’t get the wrong idea, though,
As that penultimate
Sip was refreshing and glorious,
And extremely sweet:

Saturated with the remnants
Of some sugar and some cream
Added when the cup was new,
Fresh and hot and full of energy,

It made me think that this last drink
Could maybe be delish,
But I knew from past experience
That such a thought was foolish.

I don’t want to finish this off,
Drink the damned thing down,
For I know that its foul tang will mark my tongue
And fight to stick around.

Yet, I don’t want to get up and dump
Remainders down the drain,
But I know while it sits there,
The chalk white mug will stain.

The coffee left in that damn mug
Will taint it with the flavor,
And when I pour my next hot cup
It’s a mixture that I’ll savor.

At some point I will arise
And rinse the cold batch out,
But as I stand to wash it clean,
I’m struck with fresh hot doubt.

Either way, I’m ending it --
It’s going to be done --
But should I let it bite my tongue?
Or lament it when it’s gone?

Or is this really the point at all?
After I stand to wash it clear,
Whatever comfort lingered with this swallow
Will surely disappear.

April 3rd: Fishing

Consider this, poets
of the world at large:
a man, seated, reclining
in a chair he has built with his own
tools, his own heart and soul
and the callused hands that are
byproduct of his weary vocation;
he stares through a plate-glass window,
out over the grass and the sand, to the lake
that spreads out over an entire world,
separate from this one of air,
like a thin film of glass, the deep
azure and emerald and bright cerulean
mingling into admixture,
stark orange skies stapled to the horizon
at a juncture of the background paper,
green from the woods; smoke rolls
across the beach, fogging
over the water, from a fire
to get rid of those wet pine boughs
because if they rot out that roof again
I just don’t know if we can ever repair it
to where it was before, yeah?
the sun is sitting low in a cloud,
dampened, subdued, and he
feels for Helios from his chair.
The rain is coming. We’d best
put on our parkas before the
fish start biting, because, you know,
they’re already wet, and they don’t mind
what you’re doing; they bite
when they’re good and ready, now.
Looking out over the stern, rain
dripping over the edge of my
beak-like hood, I can feel but not see
his lonely, aged eyes, boring sorrow
into my heart. The thunder starts its low rumble.
We reel in quickly, tossing one last
perch back into the water, he’s a lucky one
today, son. I say
Dad, something’s wrong.
Jeff yanks the cord and the two-stroke
bursts awake, rumbling with the thunder
and the reclining man’s rattling breath.
Grandma’s in the bathroom so she can’t hear
when he drifts off. We could hang on to him,
but instead we toss him back because
he’s the lucky one today.

April 2nd: Running Downhill

I love the way in which snow,
falling gently to the earth, will sometimes
uplift on a warm draft of air, if only
for a moment before continuing down
to the ground; but I hate when she,
normally so demanding and
controlling, cannot make up her mind,
and she, like that same snowfall,
drifts up, then down, oscillating between
decisions which revisions will reverse. I think
it is because the snow, poor thing,
is damned to fall. It cannot reverse
its direction the way a human
may, but is always locked in,
heat-seeking the ground or
the skin we left bare or perhaps
your uncapped hair (you should
really wear that woolen hat
your grandmother knitted for you, she
spent all week getting it right, and
Lord knows you’ll catch your
death of cold. I can see that your
ears are freezing).
She is making the most of
her life, I suppose, moving
laterally between two points
in space, each equally attractive,
each with its own reality to follow -
but in so doing, she wastes the
precious time which we are given,
hanging in that moment, biting
her lip and looking to us
for answers. Unlike the snow, our
indecision, turning fearfully to look
back at the choices we’ve made,
hovering in the sky before we
land with a bone-shattering smack
on the cold concrete - indecision
cannot save us some time
or spare us some momentum as
we plummet to that inevitable
end that pelts the soil with
our bodies, layering us up
like hours of cold snow. Time keeps
pushing us down, even if
we’re looking sideways.

April 1st: Have You Ever?

Have you ever
bonked in the shower?
I do not mean
“bonked” in the way in which
a marathon runner, plying his craft
would mean it, but instead ask
if you have ever
rooted, or
frigged in the shower?
Let me tell you:
It has to be
glooooorrr-eeeeee-yus;
fantaSTIQUE;
magNIFico! Just think:
The way bodies mingle
like two swirling halves of a
yin-yang circle, always
distinct and whole but
still connected in that gray spot
that makes an airtight seal
between those squirming bodies?
OH, EXcellent!
Or how you feel a distinct
dichotomy, a paradox
in the pounding cleanliness
and the pounding filthiness
as one cascades down on your tangled hair
and the other cascades down your tangled legs?
exQUISite!
Both soiled and clean,
like a batch of soapy lutefisk,
singular and plural,
like moose,
refreshed and exhausted,
like that same marathoner,
spent and content,
like scrumping in the shower.

Seven Days a Signer

Last night, I attended a luxurious, free show for renowned teacher and slam poet, Taylor Mali. He entertained, informed, spoke to, and challenged us in the audience, and one of his legacies - if not his love of teaching - has been branded on me. April is Poetry Month, and for 30 days, 30 poems shall be wrought.

They will cover any variety of topics, in any variety of forms, lengths, meters, rhythms, and levels of coherence; they will be written with a careful eye and an open mind; and they will be posted both here and at Facebook. Enjoy.

Note that the seven which we shall see soon will be posthumously published by their dates.

Steps Forward

As reported across the nation and readable in this Yahoo! News post, the state of Iowa has recently passed legislation which will allow the free marriage between couples, regardless of sex.
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This comes as somewhat of a surprise to me. Any who know me well know that I fully support the gay rights movement - I view it as a 21st-century equivalent of the civil rights movement to end racial segregation and the movement to end gender discrimination - but nonetheless, Iowa's decision to allow same-sex marriages is a bit off-kilter. The reason is, of course, not because the issue is inappropriate; it's just that Iowa is about the last state I would expect to lead the charge in gay rights. Iowa has been, to my limited knowledge at least, a perennially Conservative state. To make such a liberal move is astounding and touching. I can only hope that the reasoning for the legislation change is a noble one and not a pseudo-event designed to bring publicity to an ailing state. To the best of my knowledge, Iowa is doing fairly well for itself (Michigan having firmly rooted itself in the Red Lantern position, for those of you in the know about the Iditarod), so unless someone is up for re-election in the coming months, I can only see this as a step forward in the fight for human liberties.

Now all we need to do is convince some choice hard-nosed Republicans that Socialism is not a bad thing at this juncture.

-RKS

Full Ramblomation: Operation "M Speak"

I'm currently in the office (Sloan 118), slogging through five-point-five hours of required office time. It's not such a bad thing, really - the combination of the monitor in this room, which is quite nearly the size of Jupiter, and the executive-like feel of saying to peers and parents that I'm currently "in my office hours" makes me feel like some kind of big-wig - but it is certainly eating into time which I could be using for . . . I dunno, something, I'm sure. Really I am doing just what I would be doing during any other stretch of time spent in my room, procrastinating. The only difference here is that I'm somewhat professional and have appointments, don-cha-know.
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Now, the real meat of this posting is coming from a current despair I've been wrestling with like a greased-up Mickey Rourke (disturbing imagery, ho!): the difficulties of maintaining interpersonal relationships (especially those of a romantic nature) while attending graduate school and while searching for a professional degree and subsequent teaching position.

As some of you may be aware (though most may not be), I am currently firmly planted in the realm of 'Taken,' or 'In a Relationship,' by Facebook standards. Alex and I have been dating for a smallish bit of time, but it has been quality nonetheless - no qualms on this end, at least, and I like to think the satisfaction is mutual. Put simply, she's pretty much the bee's knees, so to speak.

Where the apprehension arrives, then, is in a cosmically-influenced hindrance to our otherwise best-laid plans: she's a fair bit younger than me and will be graduating in 2012; I am on a track for May '10. In an over-arching sense, this is supremely minor. In a minutiae sense, however, this is abysmal. I will be applying for graduate schools in roughly two months, trying my hand at several places that are rather far removed from the roots I've planted here in humble Mount Pleasant: esteemed epicenters of literary scholarship like Cambridge, Oxford, Cornell, Brown, NYU, and several others, I'm sure. Thinking in the best terms possible, I will be accepted someplace - maybe not one of those, but someplace nonetheless. This creates a long-distance relationship which will be at best cumbersome and draining and at worst volatile and defunct. I do not see the latter happening, but I roll abysmally on my Scrying checks, as I am no Wizard.

Now, this is a minimal setback on the grand scheme of shit that could happen. If all goes well - that is, we stick together through the portion of our lives which will separate us greatly - then the issue moves to one which is somewhat more dire. I am pursuing a professional degree in English with intentions of teaching at the collegiate level - a pretty barren job market with its own pitfalls, but I'll dodge those bear traps as they come - while she plans on teaching at the middle school and high school level. Our dreams would entail becoming a sort of tandem duo akin to a straight left and a right hook. She would drag them into the field of English with some cursory looks at early American literature, maybe a bit of modernism, then I'd go for the jugular with surveys, theory courses, and the occasional study in an author. It would be fantastic.

It's also fantastical. The odds of me getting a job in this market are bad enough as it is; the odds of her getting a job are equally poor. Combine the two into a single probability statement and you get something roughly equivalent to the odds of pencil gaining sentience, realizing its own relatively low worth and its own expendability, writing a bestseller in which it relates its life as a product to be consumed, used up, and thrown away when it no longer performs its function.

shit, I need to write that story now on this god-like monitor.

RKS out

-a tale told by an idiot

More Insomniatic Meat

This is insomnia at its finest: the kind in which the insomnia creeps throughout the body's structures, moving between mind and flesh in an intricate dance which never leaves either in the same state of wakefulness. They are as oil and water, never truly meshing in the same degree, always whole of themselves, one suspended in the other, waiting to separate when enough time and stillness allows.
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It started as an exquisite restlessness in my body, particularly my legs and my aching knee. From there, it shifted to my stomach, where it began to toy with my digestion and shape a malevolent tightness in my chest cavity which has yet to dislodge itself. My mind was, at this point in the cycle, quite exhausted and prepared for a restful night. Such a blessing was not in the cards. Just as my body finally settled into comfort and began to feel weightless, my stupid mind snapped into awareness and forced me to stare into the backs of my eyelids. I pulled my eyes open, gazed out the window, listened to Joe snore beneath my bed. His mouth is like a seaside cavern, yawning and amplifying the incessant winds of the equally restless ocean. Perhaps tonight he merely echoed my own fitful churning, as a cavern would.
Alex lay next to me, warm, silent, motionless. She was fidgety earlier in the night, and it set me on edge for no apparent reason. My knee is aching dully now, reminding me of that exact moment when I got frustrated: how stupid it was, how foolish I am. It mocks me through analgesics, through icings, through massage, stretch, and ibuprofen. It is rheumatoid when my emotions flare up like a storm crossing the plains on a hot summer afternoon, aching, foretelling the fleeting dissatisfaction and anger I am sure to feel sometime that day. When my own anvils roll in, thick with rancor, it laughs, biting deeply into my nerves, aching like a joint that needs to be relocated but never will.
I sat up in bed after a quarter of an hour, knowing I would find no solace in my mind. The gears were cranking along, waiting for their part of the cycle to finish, for my body to find its second wind so the mind could shut down, leaving me awake in the most hollow way. When I arose to a seated position, I felt her warm hand caress my back, noted how fondly her fingertips traced a path along my spine, reassuring me in her own particular way. I was amazed at how knotted my dorsal muscles were, holding the weight of consciousness upon them.
When I got up to apply Icy Hot to my knee, get a drink, collect myself for a second round of trying to sleep, I could feel disappointment lying in the growing space between us. I feel horrible. I feel like a broken piece of machinery which, knowing it is now expendable, turns its back on its owner, thinking itself useless, only to see a single tear, filled with an entire race's worth of sorrow, fall to the ground. I will return.
My knee aches more profoundly now. It harmonizes with my disgust, amplifies it, like a cave by the sea.
I am driving all of these sounds, like the mercurial ocean, but I am so caught up in the sound of my own surf that I cannot discern a meek cry from the roaring noise of my own stormy consciousness.
My knee is at its limit: it surely can hurt no more, throbbing in a self-sustaining chorus of echoing pain in a time similar to my body's dilapidated circadian rhythm.
It is time for my return. I shall calm these waters if it takes me a night and a day, or forty, or thousands. I shall discern, and sleep, and dream.

RKS

Weekend from Mt. Pleasant

I had the busiest Friday known to man last week, for a guy who has no Friday classes this semester. Suffice to say, it was laden with down times where I thought, 'Gosh, I could probably go run. . . ' then decided not to do so. My spare moments were always less than an hour in total, with the one exception where I was able to slink off to the SAC and run a quick 3 mile workout before going ice skating. It's still not my absolute favorite thing. I fell a few times and it was quite painful and humiliating.
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Saturday, however, was where the real action was, so to speak. I ran a 15 miler from around 11:30 until around 1:45, or 2 hours in actual running time (time spent standing about, waiting for traffic subtracted). Total time: 1:58:57. I was very excited about that little tidbit. I was not expecting to run the distance that quickly - truth be told, the run was meant for a slow run, not a speedy one - but the conditions were right and my body was ready for a fast-paced long run instead of an easy one. This bodes well for me, though, as it means that I'm probably going to be on track for a 3:40 or better marathon - which would be an outstanding achievement, if I do say so myself.

Saturday night, however, deflated whatever awesome dreams I may have entertained about being some kind of sweet distance runner/feeling well today/being at a respectably fit weight for the run. I went out drinking with the roommates and everyone, sabotaged whatever diet I've been calling this, and ultimately ended up with a massive headache and some kind of screwed up hunger system. I'm back on the late-night hunger binge, which must change once more back into an early morning hunger pang.

Sunday was unproductive until just this last 20 minutes. That's life.

I do not believe I'm going to continue running marathons much after I finish this one. It will be awesome to complete one, sure, but I get insanely bored running the training runs leading up to the marathon itself. My mental resilience is pretty good - I can deal with the long runs, obviously, but it's not as much fun as the more 'middle' distance runs I'm partaking in, such as the 6 to 10 milers - but I'm pretty sure I'm reaching a limit. Maybe it's because I run alone, but even running with a buddy doesn't mitigate the realization that I am taking upwards of three to four hours out of my day for the sole purpose of running. That strikes me as crazy. Maybe I'm too used to 5k distance training, i.e. no more than 8 miles at any given time.

Beh. Time for something else, possibly more productive than this. I'm sure I had another point to make with this, but I can't remember it. Onward to finishing homework.

Oh yes.
Huzzah for the last week before a long, much-needed break!

RKS

The Selling Out

This Friday is going to be more full than if I did schedule classes for the day. What the hell?
I have a meeting with David at 10 AM to discuss details concerning the senior research project IRB proposal and etc., followed by a meeting from 2 to 4 PM concerning a book we've been given to read (which I've yet to crack open) for McNair, culminating in ice skating sometime after 7 PM.
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It's not that the day is absolutely stuffed with things to do - really, this is no more than any other Friday, when I think about it - but all the things are coming at intervals which prevent me from doing the one thing I've been doing all semester: the long run. This week's run will take 2+ hours, so the only time span in there where I may have enough time to run+shower+eat is after the meeting with David but before the McNair meeting, but only if David's meeting lasts less than two hours. If I'm out of there by 11:30, I'll have the time to do the run and perhaps shower, eating an apple on the way or something. Otherwise, there's no point in even getting ready because I'll just be sweaty and disgusting. I might have time after the McNair meeting (which is looking like the prime time as of now), so I think it might get scheduled somewhere in there.

As for the title of this post, I'm polishing poems and stuff to start submitting. I'm not sure how it is going to go, but am hoping or aiming for pleasant. Problem: where to get started. No idea. Couldn't have one.

Class now. More post later? who knows.

-RKS

They Call it the Real Folk Blues

I've been watching Cowboy Bebop episodes with Allie via AllUC in an attempt to get her excited about one of my favorite television shows of all time. Anime is not usually my style, but some shows transcend the mostly sour genre we know as 'popular anime:' shows like Naruto, Bleach, Dragon Ball Z, Blue Dragon, Beyblade, and many others. There are a few gems in the anime world - very few in my opinion - which can hold my attention and keep it well.
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Most of these animes are ones which have plots I could see evolving into a modern or postmodern kind of way: the antihero, the villain who is by no means evil, just has an agenda, the intriguing plot twist. Stuff like Bebop makes me feel more faith in humanity's ability to come up with skillfully written plots and use new characters. I particularly like Bebop because of the mystery ingrained so deeply into every episode with regards to the characters' pasts: viewers are thrust into the action knowing very little about these so-called 'protagonists,' but know right away that these are the guys we're supposed to root for, flaws and poor judgments aside.

I went on another long-ish run tonight, an experience which was quite phenomenal. I ran without my watch for the first time in about a month, mostly because I cannot remember the last place it landed, but also somewhat because I decided to run today based solely on feel. I kept a pretty steady pace throughout: I would call it my marathon pace, were I a betting man. I sure felt like I could go another twenty miles after finishing six, but of course this would be subject to some re-evaluation once I reached, say, mile eighteen.

Running by feel, sans-watch, is pretty liberating when your life is dominated by the terms 'tempo,' '5k/10k/half/marathon pace,' 'easy,' 'interval,' and 'comfortably hard.' For some reason, I always put a timer on myself when it comes to these runs. I never really enjoy the beauty of a long, slow run; I always go about the same pace throughout. It's a weird situation: I run tempo runs at a 8:00/mile pace; I run all my other runs at this pace. My body just feels this is the pace to go. I need to vary these times, making my tempo runs significantly quick and my long runs significantly slower. My marathon pace is right around 8:20. Having a relaxing, long run at 9:00/mile pace is not going to destroy that, especially if my tempo runs become 7:20/mile pace.

-RKS

New Style Movement

Hello, folks, just a quick pre-homework posting to distract everyone.
I spent a bit of time going through the archives (luckily to this
point quite small) and decided upon a nifty little trick to make the
pages work a little more smoothly, i.e. to quash my ranting down to a
mere three or four paragraphs at most. You'll see the +/- (or, from
now on, +More/-Less) links on the longer posts. Clicking these links
will expand or collapse the post in the same window. Hope it makes
your browsing easier. Off to write 4-6 about Melancholy Play now.

Oh, you can go ahead and test it, if you so desire.

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Congratulations!
-RKS

'Ain't'

The Dictionary feature on my Macbook, based on the New Oxford American Dictionary, 2nd Edition, defines 'ain't' as (non-italicized brackets represent my own input, italicized represent those of the NOAD):

informal: contraction of
-am not; are not; is not [thus, a construction of 'to not be']: 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it'
[ORIGIN: Originally representing London dialect]
-has not; have not [thus, a construction of 'to not have']: 'they ain't got nothing to say'
[ORIGIN: from dialect 'hain't'.]
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The question this brings up in my mind is, of course, how in the world do we get the bastardized 'ain't' from am not (I'm not, or amn't?), are not (ooh! aren't!), and is not (isn't)? Worse yet, how do we arrive at a negative syntax construction from a negative contraction (hain't)? I can see how 'hain't' evolved into 'ain't' from the Brit dialect, fond of dropping H's ("'is 'ouse is 'appy coz 'is woif 'as 'it the roade") but how a contraction of 'has not' or 'have not' (usually followed by 'anything,' as in 'they havn't anything to say,' or 'they hain't anything to say') baffles me.
Or, rather, it used to, but I think I've the solution.

Look at the vast majority of speech in the US dialects of English. We're fond of the redundant colloquial construction 'have got' but use it improperly. Take the sentence 'I've got to shop,' for example. The extended form of the sentence is 'I have got to shop.' 'Got' in normal usage refers to the preterite form of 'to have,' i.e. 'I got the flu.' Thus, the proper form of 'to have + to get' is in the past participle, i.e. 'I have gotten (i've gotten) sick before.'
The main reason for using it in the present-tense construction of 'I have + infinitive' is because 'have' lacks a full stop consonant like t. Speakers can put more emphasis on their plight with that hard stop: 'I've got to get this assignment done' can be more emphatically and powerfully delivered than 'I have to get this assignment done.' It also aspirates less, so the chances of blowing your audience away with your Phelps like lungs (toke, suckah!) is minimized. Making the 'have got' construction is as easy as adding a one-word negative after the got: 'I've got no time,' 'I've got nothing to do.' It easily follows the positive contraction's rules for changing to negative, though no more so than the previously-stated-to-be-correct have + infinitive.

Since 'hain't' is a dialectical shift of 'hasn't' or 'haven't' and a modernizing shift from archaic 'ha'en't,' it's easy to see why this changes. However, 'hain't' is a negative contraction - the adding of 'got + negative' makes a double negative, when the word following 'hain't,' as with all negative contractions, must be positive: 'I hain't anything to do today,' rather than 'I hain't nothing to do today.'

Suffice to say, 'have got' (and its brethren) and 'ain't' (as a bastard child of other contractions) are on my shit list. [...]

There's a Reason Facebook was Made for Procrastination

Does anyone else feel like the 'objective' message which pops up in the Facebook status box - 'What are you doing right now?' - fails miserably at being objective and passes itself off as accusatory? I cannot help but put exorbitant amounts of emphasis on parts which make it sound to my ears like a wronged lover: 'what are you doing right now?'

I'm not doing my homework, you bloodsucker, and it's all thanks to you and your globalized popular culture!
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Mount Pleasant was, for once, quite pleasant over these past few weeks, save Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Thursday and Friday were bitter cold: I awoke Saturday to no snow - none - and fell asleep to a foot. Twelve inches of snowfall! How the hell am I supposed to run in that? Very carefully, I suppose.

Well, luckily my running days are moving indoors. Unluckily, all my runs require certainly larger amounts of mileage, so indoors is going to be a slog of laps. Loathesome, effing laps.

Core work makes me feel strong and fit. Then I sit down and eat. It's a fun dance.

Looked at a bit of a different training program for the marathon - I like this one better. It's from Runner's World, a link to which you can find on the sidebar to your right. I would recommend it highly.

Last week, our HON 321A - American Independent Cinema class watched Francois Truffaut's Les Quatres Cents Coups, i.e. The 400 Blows (1959). It has firmly planted itself onto my list of 20 favorite films. Hey, I might as well list them.

1. Monty Python and the Holy Grail
2. 300
3. Garden State
4. Reign Over Me
5. Love Actually
6. The Notebook
7. The Princess Bride
8. Robin Hood: Men in Tights
9. Love Me if You Dare
10. Into the Wild
11. Rudy
12. Radio
13. A Lot Like Love
14. We Were Soldiers
15. The 400 Blows
16. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
17. Requiem for a Dream
18. American Beauty
19. American Psycho
20. The Dark Knight

As you can probably tell, most of my posts lack focus. We of the postmodern mindset call it pastiche.

See you bright and early tomorrow for summer class registration antics, some early-morning running, stretching/core work and some form of breakfast, data entry and analysis, then class.

I just realized that, regardless of whatever my better judgment may be, my days are becoming increasingly front-loaded. I do not like this. I like sleeping in. I also like ending sayings in prepositions. Take that, English.

Oh, you know I'm sorry, baby. Don't be like that.
-RKS

Musings on Writing

I've published* one measly book of poetry thus far in my life; completed four research endeavors (two in Psychology as of now, two in English as of now); am working on three more research endeavors (two in psychology, one in English), as well as another volume of poetry and perchance a book of short stories; and am currently quite happy with everything as written in life.

Where is this going, you folks ask. Well I will tell you. I will.
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Publishers. It's a vague kind of word, not in the sense that a person does not know what a publisher is or what one does, but rather that one seeking publishing does not concisely know just how to contact them or break into the realm of publishing. Of course, there are the giants of publishing: Penguin, Norton, etc., but what of smaller presses which do not mind new works by fledgling authors? That's the sort of influence I'm working on. I want to find my place in an editor's heart, be granted some kind of tenure with a publisher, and have contracts to write something for some kind of monetary reward. Yes, that would be lovely.

Maybe I'll pair some poetry with my short stories and start shopping it around to publishers to garner some interest. I'd really like to be published. That's a feat in and of itself.

-RKS out.

The Long Run: Musing

Going on another 13 miler today, so musings are sure to follow sometime this afternoon.

Not an Old Post, Thankfully

I just watched a video on runner's world that was pretty intriguing, featuring correspondent Jeremy Mosher running the famous NYC Run Up competition.

The race has been run since 1977 and put on by the NY Roadrunners running group. Current records are 9:30 for men and 11:23 for women. In it, runners race both the clock and other competitors to reach the observation deck as quickly as possible - 86 flights from ground level.

Here's the vid: Jeremy Mosher v. Empire State Building
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His reaction was normal. He starts the hill fresh and happy ('this is easier than Freshman Spanish'), then dies about 25% up ('me no gusto,' which is incorrect Spanish, btw). He finished in a respectable 16:45, just about 6 minutes behind the winner.

Now, I've run hills. Northern Michigan cross-country will do that to a person. However, even with all my training and fitness as of now, I'm not sure I could do the challenge in even that kind of time. Mount Pleasant is notoriously flat ('where the hell is the mountain?'), and my hills have been limited to a small rise and maybe some stairs - but not 86 flights of them.

So, woke up this morning thinking of running, decided to let my rest day be a rest day in light of the 19 degree, snowy, windy day that lay before me. 11 mph? no thanks.

Joe's a bit off-key today.

I do believe I'm getting sick. Not sick as in diseased, or plagued, or whatever you want to call it, but sick as in somewhat insane. There was a time (not too long ago, I might add) in which I would've called two slices of cold pizza the ultimate breakfast, bar none. This morning I woke up, headed for the dining hall, and had oatmeal with almonds and a banana mixed in and a plate of eggs. Granted, these were some disgusting eggs and soupy oatmeal (I like mine drier than most), but it was, for some reason, the best breakfast I've eaten in a long time.

Paczki day!
-RKS