Poem for Monday on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008

Carry

by Billy Collins



I want to carry you
and for you to carry me
the way voices are said to carry over water.


Just this morning on the shore,
I could hear two people talking quietly
in a rowboat on the far side of the lake.


They were talking about fishing,
then one changed the subject,
and, I swear, they began talking about you.







Burke's Book Store
936 South Cooper
Memphis, TN 38104
(901) 278-7484
www.burkesbooks.com

and sometimes, it lets me breathe

and then there are glorious nights, full of trees and wind and birds and the sound of your breathing and tires whirring on dry pavement.

every moment is an epiphany. over and over the universe is throwing object lessons at me and i try to be grateful and humble and brave. try and fail, mostly. still, i learn as much as i can hold.

every now and then, though, it does let me catch my breath. nights with easy words and laughter and none of the worrying and projecting. even the pain backs off a little. things just happen and i can just sit back and watch myself breathe my way through it.

the lake is vast and i lay next to it feeling my heart thumping almost out of my chest, the city glow scorching the clouds, the water dark and black and heavingly alive. mars was bright. so was my face. i felt like my smile was projecting batsignals onto the clouds. huge scudding shadows the shape of my heart.

i have to believe it keeps getting better.

big pharma is in your face, all the time.

drive slow

My life has slowed to a crawl. I sign the lease on a new apartment tomorrow, closer to the water, to an independent natural food store,, a yoga studio, and to friends. I scan craigslist for jobs I could be physically capable of performing, I read, I bike out to acupuncture once a week, to therapy, and to watch Lost with my best friend here. I drink tea, I try to remember to stretch and shower every day, and I wait for things to get better.

I am rereading Thich Nhat Hanh's biography of the Buddha,Old Path, White Clouds. It's been almost a decade since Zach, may he find peace, first pressed it on me. I can't believe how long ago it seems. I remember being blown away and being fairly gung-ho about Buddhism for several years, although I balked at the precepts prohibiting intoxicants and casual sex. I've been very very lazy in my practice for far too long now, and the suffering has definitely caught up with me.

It has become quite clear to me which path I must follow now, and in many ways, it has been made easier. My social life is no longer based around intoxicants, and I'm no longer interested in sex as a way of escaping/punishing my body. I'm quite lucky, I guess, to have had these desires stripped away, even if it was not my choice.

I am trying to view my pain as a tool to help me prune my life. I can't imagine that plants enjoy being pruned, but when they grow straight and tall, how joyful they are.

Poem for Monday, May 12, 2008

Names







by Lyn Lifshin







Lately I become

whatever you call

me, the way some

Indians do. First

I couldn’t say

your because

it belonged to

someone who’d

turned me into

who I wasn’t.

When you called

me love near the

rag shop on Caroline,

I tried to remember

the spell Iroquois

put on names to

make them stay.














Burke's Book Store
936 South Cooper
Memphis, TN 38104
(901) 278-7484
www.burkesbooks.com

I am tired. I am true of heart! You are tired. You are true of heart!

the pain is my constant companion. sometimes it withdraws a little and I am able to go socialize with the neurotypicals, but for every hour spent in the garage at the lyndale rats' messing with bikes, there are seven hours spent in bed listening to the pain gnaw away at my body, tiny fire ants crazing my bones to dust. worrying about the future and waiting for sleep, and oblivion.

I have reached the point where I no longer remember what it was like before the pain.

I try to tell myself that there is something I must learn from all this, that I am coal being crushed to diamond. Were I to believe in Powers that Be I would be praying for grace and guidance and for whatever wisdom there is to be gleaned from the unrelenting boredom and loneliness to manifest itself in my heart. this is an exercise in trust, and in patience, and in acceptance.

I want to believe that I am not missing out on anything living in the slow lane, hobbling along with my heavy heavy load, I want to believe that I am shedding karma and learning to be true of heart. I want to believe that my suffering will inspire love and compassion in those around me. I want to believe that one day I will be self-sufficient again, that I will be rewarded for these long dark teatimes of the soul, that there is in fact an end to pain.

I can no longer ask for mercy. it has clearly been denied. for now, at least. all I can ask is for patience, and faith. and hope.

may all beings be at peace and free from suffering. and may I one day be one of them.

reading back through old livejournals from 2003, I feel a sort of tender condescension toward my younger self. I cared so much more about what people thought of me, and I hadn't really formed a concept of a future in which I would be alone and ok with it. I was so raw and ripped open still from ending an engagement that I just wanted to have that hole in my chest filled with sand. or removed entirely.

years later, I have grown used to perpetual brokenheartedness. I try to channel my love and pain into a feeling of compassion toward all I encounter, rather than try to pin it on one person as if their wanting me back could be the one thing finally capable of healing me.

my cat sits in the window looking down at the street, flicking his tail at the flies. I wish I could clear my mind enough to live on his level, free from jealousy or hurt or unrequited romantic passion. He seems to spend most of his time in silent contemplation. I suppose I must be earning good karma by supporting him while he lives in comfortable happiness.

I try to tell myself that surely there is something good and bright and shiny in my future but it seems so murky right now.

evertyhing was beautiful, and nothing hurt

my fellow Tennessean, Melissa, has finally put her portfolio up.

scenes of the lovely desolation that is time passed. or time past.



my own life seems to have reached a crisis of hecticity. hecticness. hectickery. hectitude.

i feel like i am in a log rolling contest in crocodile infested waters.
with whiplash.

Poem for Monday, May 5, 2008

For the Dead







by Adrienne Rich







I dreamed I called you on the telephone

to say: Be kinder to yourself

but you were sick and would not answer



The waste of my love goes this way

trying to save you from yourself



I have always wondered about the leftover

energy, water rushing down a hill

long after the rains have stopped



or the fire you want to go to bed from

but cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-down

the red coals more extreme, more curious

in their flashing and dying

than you wish they were

sitting there long after midnight














Burke's Book Store
936 South Cooper
Memphis, TN 38104
(901) 278-7484
www.burkesbooks.com

xkcd always cheers me up

jalouse

Now that I've made it through the winter and actually have a small posse of friends, accepting my body's limitations takes up more and more of my emotional CPU. Any exertion tends to have me limping within hours and I tend to lose mobility after sundown. I can always ride my bike, but other than than I'm pretty lame. literally.

I miss my body. I look back at past summers and marvel at how much I took for granted. I'd started to have a lot of pain then, but I wasn't nearly as crippled as I am now. I miss being able to stay up late, I miss being able to drink without having my bones transmuted to hot lead the next day, I miss dancing. especially I miss dancing.

it's hard to dance with mermaid feet.

The other thing that preoccupies me lately is dealing with memory loss. yesterday I started reading the sequel to a book I had read a few years ago, and skimming through the synopsis at the beginning I was appalled by how little I remembered. this makes me doubt my ability to do well in grad school. there will be so much to memorize. I used to take so many supplements to slow my brain's deterioration, and they seemed to help, but living on less than 800 a month kind of rules that out.

So I muddle on, taking charity when it's offered, trying to be a good person and fight this bitterness in my heart. but there's a deep and bone-chilling fear that is starting to seep in to everything I do, or think, or dream. I am not going to get better. and realistically, every year I am going to get a little bit worse.

Poem for Monday, April 28th, 2008

Poem in the Night Month

by Beth Ann Fennelly

Now that they've X-rayed

the mummified female crocodile

in the Egypt room in the British Museum,

they've found a baby crocodile, mummified,

inserted far back in her throat.

Just so, little one,

we drift toward the next world.

Our days are numbered.

Strangers will catch your head,

will thumb your eyes back to zero,

will say Welcome to the world, not

the afterworld.

Burke's Book Store
936 South Cooper
Memphis, TN 38104
(901) 278-7484
www.burkesbooks.com

caught up with friends on the way downtown, Adrian from Armitage Bikes, Alex from West Town, a Scalawag on a sweet chopper, and the most awesome green tallbike. the variety is delightful. just as many beatup old schwinns as pistas. seemed like at least half onespeeds now, though. flat city. who needs derailleurs.



rode most of the way with Tracy. it started to pour as we turned off Diversey onto Logan,
and so we rested a while under the right side of the Kennedy/Western/Logan overpass. hundreds of us. cheering and whistling at motorists who slowed to gawk.



we took over western for about a quarter of a mile in the lovely pelting rain, and i rode hard to catch up with tall bike tyler, hooting at cars in my totally seethru tshirt. hilariousness. we screamed our praises to thor.

at the very end, there was a small party with a keg and a mess of falafel and we all stood around and shivered for a while.

on the way west on bloomington there is a charming mural of picasso's "guernica."



happy friday. (cos sometimes it is.)

Poem for Monday, April 21, 2008

Indiana Avenue, 1949

by Etheridge Knight

Neons flash red and green.

April rains on still street, Man

Nods, Red lights blink, blink.

Mirror of keen blades

Slender as guitar strings; Wes

Montgomery jazz.

Burke's Book Store
936 South Cooper
Memphis, TN 38104
(901) 278-7484
www.burkesbooks.com

oh, the pathos

unrecognizable to myself

daddy, you bastard

my bff and I are convinced that we are too strong (intense, intelligent, experienced, intimidating, powerful) and that is why our romantic interests never seem to be requited.

there are no superheroines with happy endings, not really. mortal men can't handle them and superheros have inferiority complexes.

the village healer always ended up burnt or drowned.

I know I have years of sickness left to deal with before I can really even begin to believe there's someone. for as long as I can remember, I've only seemed to aim my heart at the unattainable. not that I have any choice in the matter, not consciously. I've been in therapy long enough to have figured out why I act this way.

getting sent off to second chance when I was a kid fucked me up so much more than I can put into words. there was a complete- and utterness to that rejection that left me permanently ducked and covered, so terrified of not just doing something wrong, but being something wrong. no matter how much someone loves me, I can't just be still and bask in it. I have to pick at it, worry about it til I make myself sick or insane.


there's nothing like being made to tell your mom you lost your virginity because you were a drug addict. unless it's actually losing it when you are 13 cos you are so bitter and angry at love that you don't ever, ever want to believe in it, to let it have power over you. expect maybe being forced to lie about being a drug addict, being made to believe that I was weak, worthless, selfish, mentally ill, being locked up, forcibly drugged, made to pretend I loved Jesus, sing foolish songs and flap my arms, being told to deal with my anger by ripping up phone books because my anger was invalid and not worth responding to, being abandoned, having my parents refuse to believe me, having the people who made me take the word of someone who wanted their 25000 dollars over mine. not allowed to speak for months.

diary read and thrown away, clothes, books, toys, music all thrown away and replaced with generic, safe normalcy.

hours, days spent trying to figure out a way to poison or injure myself sufficiently to be able to go to the hospital and somehow talk my way out of going back. running away, getting taken to juvenile court after spending the night under an overpass. being dragged back humiliated the next day, parents actually believing I wanted to use drugs that badly, instead of that their magic program was so unbearable I'd rather be a ward of the state than go back.

when i read kafka's trial for the first time I shook and rattled like a cicada shell in a stiff breeze. josef k had nothing on me.

fourteen months in all, and fourteen years later not a week goes by without a nightmare of being back there as an adult.

and it still taints everything I do, everything I feel.

and I don't know what else to do besides stay busy between therapy sessions.

emo

wish i could sleep in your arms