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