note to self: things to make

-adorable tiny leather book necklace
-sweater boots
-clasp wallet

things to buy pine for:
http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=6857078

Life, you’ve killed off the faces of my childhood.
The old man who,
with shaky hands outstretched
reached over formica countertops
to place peppermint sticks
and butterscotch rounds
in my tiny hands,
was shot to death ten years ago.

I hope the money
set well in their pockets.
.45 stole a hundred dollars,
seventy years, a husband;
put a hole in the fruit-stand wall
and left a bullet wound in my toddling soul,
because a child cannot understand
why there are no more peppermints.

And a week ago life laid to rest
the man who made me consider
my last name.
who, every Saturday
with the thickest of accents
carried me across the atlantic
to the ruins of Augsburg,
the hills of Garmisch,
the streets of Munich,
with but a bite of Brochen.

Who, hands coated in flour,
would sculpt for strangers
intricate strudels,
from water and rye,
and delicately slip such treasures
into plain paper bags.

And I, ten years later
Cannot understand
Why there is no more bread.

I think this might suck...

burn, pale white paper.
women will write poetry from your ashes
and men bathe in the brevity of your smoke,
while the rain spends its day disappearing
into thirsty rivers,
and falling into heavy puddles.
a hundred thousand misplaced droplets
that cascade down the broken stone
and carry away the embers
shared between two lips.

graduation

makes me feel like this:

the inferno: la frittella dolce senza la gelatina

Once for an assignment, the teacher asked us to pen our idea of hell. General notions of sulfur and fire abounded, save my dear friend who described it simply as “jelly donuts: without the jelly.” While I realize that within the scope of her humor, she probably meant little by it, thinking back I cannot help but muse over the truth in such a trivial statement- a loose analogy to the fact that hell is, at base, the deceitfully empty promise of something which one would commonly expect. One sees the donut, and from its basic form deduces it is jelly filled, but upon the first hopeful bite, discovers he has been duped.
Often, described all too wrongly as brimstone and flames, true hell is a crisp something sound system that continuously plays Hillsong (all day…all day now…all day.) Hell is a large 3-D movie screen that shows nothing but Joel Osten sermons. Hell is a beautiful mahogany library stocked with nothing but Rick Warren books. That is, hell is the expectation of enlightening literature deflated by the reality of a moralistic 12 step program that will enable you to quit whichever vice is most ailing you (in truth, this vice probably isn’t bothering you at all, but as quietly declared by the prevailing ideology, damn well should.)
As such, hell is also summarily definable as the purest form of torture: pancakes, with no syrup.

poetry is a trick we play on ourselves.

but a lovely trick, nonetheless.

I wrote this exactly a year ago (again)

Overgrown emerald fescue
intertwined with golden patches of grass
cradle my bare feet,
while I sit on worn boards
as the wind and your fingers
tousle my hair.
And I cannot decide
which soothes me more.

Pale light from heaven
filters through the clouds
and kisses my shoulder,
where your lips rested
only hours earlier.
And I cannot decide
which warmed me more

tomorrow, tomorrow...

and if tomorrow, dawn
comes without a sunrise-
without reds
without dew
without hope;
if it comes with clouds
with fog
with frost
still the world will wake up
and stretch their hands
towards the saddened sky.

and if tomorrow, the sea
rages without end-
batters my little boat,
and breaks it's wooden ribs
on the rocks
and shreds the canvas sail
with wind,
I will mend it all by evening
and begin again in the morning.

and if tomorrow,
I wake up hollow-
the sea will rage, without end
and the sun will rise, without hope
and I will know
that you have gone.

march 1st, 2008

I wrote this a year and nine days ago...

He smelled like cigarettes. Not strongly, but faintly, almost like an air of cologne rather than a haze of smoke. I like him this way. Green button down shirts with the sleeves rolled halfway up, contacts instead of glasses, and strong, sure arms. The sky seemed like midnight at only half past eight, so we sat on rusty trailers and told bad jokes. His hands found my shoulders, or my sides, or whereever they liked, and rested or rubbed accordingly. None of this was sensual so much as all of it was sacred. The entire evening a "moment" as he called it, breathing in lungfuls of air and laying on his back.

"You even have a pretty heartbeat" he says, I ruffle his hair and rub my face in it. He wraps me up in both arms and lays his face on mine, gently, thoughtfully, and I feel the few rough patches on his cheek. I giggle, and he smiles. We're both quiet for a few breaths, and then he softly kisses my cheek.

"sometimes you just know 'this is a moment' and so you have to stop, and remember all the details, so that when you think of it again it's there, clearly."

I think I might be in love..

with this dress.

I wrote this about two years ago...



Sun- don’t set! I beg of you-
grant me still the light of day.
Sun- beam ‘cross the barren blue-
the shore still so far away.

Away- across the somber sea,
where no wave does raise its peak.
Away- from peace, from purity,
of which no man does speak.

Speak- of what? Of life? Of love?
I see none of that out here.
Speak- simply of the clouds above,
that christen me with drear.

Drear- that clouds away the light,
and rips its rays undone.
Drear- that beckons forth the night,
As my heart sinks like the sun.

there is something important in the way paper fades. In the way words pale into a soft navy and photographs blush yellow. In how the subjects in the pictures begin to blend into one another, subtly.
there is something important in the way our attempts to capture moments dim and dissipate when we lay them out in the sunlight; how something new and soft and beautiful emerges out of a seemingly solidified second.

future goals and aspirations: a list.

- learn to knit
- travel to spain, germany, and back to belgium
- have a functioning vegetable garden
- have a flower garden
- have a significant number of poems published
- live/teach in a foreign (preferably european) country
- take philosophy classes in college, and know what I'm talking about
- learn to crochet
- have people live in my house/apartment/cardboard box on the side of the murch, and cook for them
- write a self study of...myself.
- not have ugly bulletin boards. this is very important. very, very important.
- learn to speak either spanish or german. maybe both.
- learn to make jam/jelly
- write a play, and see it performed (even if just locally)
- have a substantial column in the newspaper
- make/sell jewelry

a new haiku, for you

i hate mock trials-
and so would you, I promise
it will destroy you.

I have never been
a soft, subtle line in your
poetry- have I?

here, amidst the cattails,
I am so enormously small
that my shadow has lost it's darkness;
that my soul has lost it's thinness.
A hundred days
is a rush of nothing,
that courses over the heavy rocks.
Webs glistening in fine silver chains,
adorned by tiny violets
that open for night,
and night alone.
your voice is but an echo,
that fades in the pine branches,
caught in the throats of nightingales
who sing it into something new and bright,
a prayer for the phosphorescent fireflies
that dance in whispered dawn.
searching the crystalline surface
I find wearied constellations,
that dissipate in nearing twilight
and leave my reflection and I
hidden between the stars and sky.

thoughts of this week:

-The philosophical ideals of Greek life were riddled with allusions to tension and the strangulating self doubt that plagued both nation and people. The theories of prominent men such as Socrates and the Sophists accurately display the dichotomy between ideologies that arose in Athens. The Sophists sold their "knowledge" to the masses, whereas Socrates denied he was even a teacher on the grounds that he allowed people to teach themselves.

Socrates was later charged with a crime akin to heresy. The chosen method of execution was for him to swallow a vial of hemlock as the sunset. Hemlock is as fleshy, neurotoxic herb often mistaken for parsnips or wild carrots, though upon further inspection, various elements of both vegetables are missing (you know, like the fact you don't die.) The intake of hemlock causes death because of lack of oxygen to the brain and heart. So, essentially, Socrates died as night fell, because the substances necessary for his existence were ripped from his veins. The Greeks have always been masters at utilizing literary devices. Why should irony be any different?


-Zarathustra*! the ideological revolutionary who created the conceptual struggle between aša (truth) and druj (lie) and which later affected emerging religions.



-Integrity does not help your numerical average. Conversely, your numerical average does NOT help your integrity.



-a fictional continuation of Faulkner's short story "Barn Burning"


But not! Oh- not withstanding, not expecting, not changing, not stopping – still burning- knot of heavy hemp in which my mind was tangled. The ancient night came to me in dull edged fragments. The voice of my mother (who would always be my mother, who would never see her son) the shots, the whippoorwills, the Bermuda blades slick with tiny diamonds, my voice that was not my voice calling out in the frantic darkness.

Holding the very edge of the picture between my fingers, I gild the portrait in bronze whiskey, and hold my sister’s face into the flame. There in the dust, with the symphony of summer playing in the background, I lit the entire world on fire.


-"someone should have told him that being a physicist, on a planet where the smartest animals hate being alive so much, means never having to say you're sorry."
-timequake, vonnegut




*also introduced the theory of free will, which was later bludgeoned to death by John Calvin because of the implementation of his idea of a "calling."


more later.

and I, a dreamer's bride,
am void of expression
as I smile, and listen
for the rustle of skirts
as though forever
could stand suspended in such sound.
and you-
you echo effortlessly
an evanescent hymn
in the overcast morning.
the bells ringing across the bricks
over the oaks,
and beyond the walls
as the ghost of laughter
haunts my lips
and in paling shades
of frost and fog,
night becomes day.

its snowed.

moments of time
when you rain colored eyes
collided with mine, and
reflected like taintless puddles
our intentions.

The vaguest of memories
emerge out of the still night,
the sky is all stars, and
the symphony of summer
has played its last note.

The street is so loud, but
the world is so quiet,
and one is with one’s self, alone,
amidst the torrents of voices,
the sea of faces.

But your hand is in mine-
and no one else can feel
what I feel in this fragile instant.
And in that second
of a hundred days,
my heart is warm, again.

written during a party on halloween night.

blogging, take two

I'm going to try this blog thing one more time.

(the avett brothers)
what I've been up to, lately.
I'm back at school now though, about to take my calculus exam, which means all fun/life will cease to exist for a week or so.