same poem, revised, again, and again...

The Archaeologist wakes up just as high tide has receded and all retrievable history is left on the beach.

I.

Underslept:

The dehydrated shore beneath his feet,

He calculates

The volume of raindrops,

As imagined by the

galaxies of speckles

Left on a dusty windowpane,

The water he believes

Was reincarnated as raindrops.

Feet cut by shards of shell,

He sits there on the shore

waiting for glass

To reverse to sand.

II.

Overslept:

The error

became the most

prominent feature of the day,

Land art falling into place

after a great earthquake.

I woke up facing the city

In cubicles of rain-gray October,

The city-grid in conversation

with pedestrian traffic.

To the man who invented the Traffic Light,

I am thinking of you

When the pause is too long,

passers-by are empty in the eyes

And I am in a hurry.

III.

In early silver morning,

Wet hair freezes and the

Morning is more urgent.

If when stuck in traffic,

You imagine the light patterns of the city

As a symphony,

You will not feel anxious.

IV.

An hour dimly glows surrounding arrival.

It is awkward to be calling this flashlight

A a candle, but

I need to imagine better lighting

For recalling things that no one else remembers.

V.

With all the difference of

Placing a decimal point,

Every summer I watched

The beach erosion.

I tell the archaeologist and he tells of a great myth

In which all time is taken out to sea.

His eyes on the desert

beneath our feet.

The policies of healing are obsolete

When time is measured in teaspoons

And time is all oceans

And all oceans are adding and subtracting.

The archaeologist tells me

and I tell of a great myth

In which all water is returned by way of eyes.

VI.

In December, wet hair freezes and the morning is more urgent.

I can hardly exhale conversation in the freezing rain.

We walk a street with potholes like pores.

Concrete of museum construction

Color-balanced with the sky.

You turn to me and remark,

Look what is left of the season

And how it is the same

As what came to begin.

Draft #10 and a lot more work to go...

The lazy archaeologist wakes up just as high tide has receded and all retrievable history is left on the beach.

Unsleeping, Under-slept, Oversleeping:

The error became the most prominent feature of the day,

land art falling into place after a great earthquake.

Neglecting the importance of a good pillow

I woke up, neck hurting all the way down my back.

Shower long enough to imagine the inverse of winter,

Wait for the elevator, watch the second hand on the clock,

The red second hand, watch the clock hands frame a quadrant.

Corneas focused on elevator glow. Glow extinguishes,

Descend.

The morning begins at the intersection.

Half awake, legs moving faster than thoughts in thick air.

I am only visible because the wind hits against me.

Pedestrian traffic multiplied in storefront reflections

Is dangerous to social anxiety.

To the man who invented the traffic light,

I am thinking of you when the pause is too long,

All passers-by are empty in the eyes

and I am hurrying to stand at the edge of

The universe as a factor tree, and narrow towards

The generic details of cherry tomatoes

Grown in a side-yard gardens,

In conversation with tiny floral print fabric

meant for summer dresses made by Midwest grandmothers,

on sale, Next to the fake daffodils.

and it’s the square root, not the square root of the ignored problem

of wet hair in freezing rain, in the early silver morning.

the shore is paved with fragments of shells, somewhere else,

far from the choreographed city grid.

If when stuck in traffic,

you imagine the light patterns of the city

as a symphony

you will not feel anxious.

Thoughts will move at the same pace as body.

Clouds moving behind the

Branched calligraphy of chlorophyll deficiency,

I move at the same pace.

An hour dimly glows surrounding arrival.

8:30 is as good as the remains of any

other hour as any for anything, for analysis,

for parallel lines and ninety-degree angles,

This is a door. I imagine. I deduct.

The door is gone and

What we are looking

At is just the frame, against a wall

In the appropriate context,

Framing wall scuffs and indentations,
To be read like hieroglyphs,

Accidental, unintentional hieroglyphs

But no one says a word;

Cell phones on silent.

All attention directed towards

The city in cubicles of rain-gray October

And quiet. The way cities should never be.

It is awkward, so awkward to be

Calling this flashlight a candle

But I need to imagine better lighting

For recalling things that no one else remembers.

*

I am just observing,

He calculates the volume of raindrops,

As imagined by the galaxies of speckles

Left on dusty windowpanes.

The shore under his feet,

the water he believes

was reincarnated as raindrops.

I had woken up facing a cathedral,

Whatever that means, in terms of serial dreams,

In terms of doorframes

and window glass suspended by roots of

dead language growing from the crust of the earth.

He sits there on the shore also waiting for the windows to reverse

Themselves back to sand. His feet are cut by shards of shell and

Broken window glass.

In December, wet hair freezes and the morning is more urgent.

I can hardly exhale conversation in the freezing rain.

As children, my cousins and I cut earthworms and watched

The section containing the central nerve bundle

Slink away, and we turn away,

Ignorant of the earthworm section’s

impending death due to stress or blood-loss.

I tell the excavator and he tells of a great myth,

In which all of the water returned by way of the eyes.

Picking at the scab was an anxiety to feel new again.

The policies of healing are obsolete when time is measured in teaspoons,

And time is all of the oceans.

I tell the excavator and he tells of a great myth

In which all of time was returned by the way of eyes.

But I need to hear it from someone else.

*

It is nearly March.

On the corner,

By coincidence,

I find you there.

I can hardly exhale conversation in the freezing rain.

I can hardly exhume thoughts.

You exhale conversation,

Freezing rain falls like eloquent gemstones hitting your words.

We walk a street with Potholes like pores,

Concrete of museum construction is color balanced with the sky.

You, a best known stranger,

Turn to me and remark,

“look at what is left of the season and how

it is the same as what came to begin.”

Collage Poem

I wrote this last night as prompted by my Poet Critic class. It is a collage of the titles of songs on my iTunes and an outline of my History of Ideas class last semester. It was fun to do.

History of Ideas Chronological Outline

The notion of eternal form
Trespassing in the stereo field,
Immaterial and abstract
To sleeping in the human sense.
The kindness of strangers vs. earthly love,
Arranged in general statements
Born on the cusp of valid conclusions.
Spheres of universe aether
On opposite day
Grow cataracts, and Rome falls.

Send in the clouds
Of scholastic synthesis.
Dark matter, you are my face
In the relationship between
Divinity and the human individual,
Not a robot, but a ghost or
Cosmology armchairs
Of the High Middle Ages.

Avenues of alchemy
Lately leave
Long division
Laws of falling bodies.
Moons of Jupiter and
Phases of Venus
Don’t see the sorrow.

Matter and impact
Cannot be disproved by scripture
Back to the crust of the earth
In terms of particles.
When I get to the border,
Uncertainties moving inward,
The green green grass,
I was a stranger.
Rejecting Cartesian notions of innate ideas.

One cannot impose religious ideas on others,
I remember me.
Active in the universe
The wild kindness of
Rejecting skin.
Yours truly,
The commuter.

Recent Thoughts on Poetry

13th floor lounge

Notes For the Cartographer

Another work in progress...

Notes for the Cartographer:

The landscape divides between
Withered yellow and green with
Watercolor washes of afternoon rain above
Fields of blond cows and one of poppies.

Beyond the reachable distance of Radio Nostalgie,
Up on a cliff painted in layers,
St. Cirq sits there like a fairytale.

Down a steep angle is a house
You could build your life around
Just knowing that it is there,

Like a place that only lived on leap day,
But you want to stay all year.

*
There are trees and flowers,
I can’t tell you what kind,
When I was a child
No one ever taught me the names.

Bumble bees on blue things and
Something turning its leaves up in the thick air before rain.

There is this tree in the yard obstructing all of the photos,
It disappears with everything in the

Fog I wake up to,
Like a white screen pulled down for a projector,
Whispering beyond the church next-door
To the Patron Saint of Air Molecules.

Je me leve sans une alarme.


*
Like echoes of dismantled castles,
Henri’s house is haunted, maybe.
By La Révolution or British tourists,
or Dream analysis sessions, But haunted,
In a way that no other place I’ve been to
Is old enough to be

*

Baby doll and Science et Vie side-by-side
At the Brocante in Limogne.
For 1 Euro I buy someone else’s postcard
As if it had been sent to me
Some thirty-years before I was born,
Poetry books, past-life-souvenirs,
LETTRE A UN OTAGE, Saint-Exupery, 1944.

A Gypsy man with wooden puppets
Plays Lara's Theme from Dr. Zhivago on a saw,
As if he had noticed me there and
Aware of the open-ended nature of the past
Had phoned The Bureau of Follow-Up Stories
About the memory of my Grandfather’s favorite song,

Me being there, part of a sequel.

*
It is someone’s wedding day in Conques.
Guests arrive looking like the
Jewel encrusted reliquary of Ste. Foy.

With enough superstition to repent for
All Februaries without full moons
I drop a one-cent wish beneath a reflection of clouds,
Like a little girl emptying pennies
Into a shopping mall fountain, wishing for love.

*
The sun sets in a way
Like stained glass that keeps color sacred,

On the steps of the tourism office,
Opposite of an iron crucifix
Hydro and I share a bottle of
Vin rouge from a good year like 2007,

I have nothing to complain about,
On y va.

*



They call it la plage, as if a beach were defined
As any place where the land slopes into water.

Stepping and slipping on river stones,
In my underwear,
In the cold out-of-season Lot River,
I watch the one lane bridge above.
The water clear enough to see
Down to my feet.

Out to line dry,
The wind beats St. Cirq into my clothes.


*

Walls discolored like old novels, spiders descend from ceiling beams.
I’m Sleeping with my feet at the headboard
so I can see the stars out the window,

The window where I took pictures of fog and thunderstorm clouds
And other atmospheric commonalities of everywhere.

That last storm warped the wooden widow frame and it won’t shut.

*
Driving the steep curve of a backroad,
It is almost like St. Cirq, I say.

The way a texture of a place remains.
The way places almost look the same in the dark.

Something I've been working on

I'm going to consider this a first draft of something

The lazy archaeologist wakes up just as high tide has receded and all retrievable history is left on the beach.

1.
That is a door.
The door is gone and
What we are looking
At is just the frame,
But no one says a word;
Cell phones on silent.
All attention directed towards
The city as a wall outside my window,
Quiet. the way cities should never be

It is awkward, so awkward to be
Calling this flashlight a candle
But I need to imagine better lighting
For recalling things that no one else remembers.

2.
The riverbank under your feet:
the water believes in it (the river bank),
and we too, are waking up today facing a cathedral,
I am facing East, whatever that means.

3.
Pedestrian traffic multiplied in storefront reflections
Is a danger to drivers.

To the Man who invented the traffic light,
I am thinking of you when the pause is too long
and the passenger seat is empty in the eyes and
I am in a hurry.

4.
In the generic details of cherry tomatoes
Grown in a side-yard gardens,
Everything that is Southern Ohio is served with dinner.

Tiny floral print fabric meant for summer dresses
Made by Midwest grandmothers is on sale
Next to the fake daffodils.



5.

Neglecting the importance of a good pillow
I wake up, neck hurting all the way down my back.

In December my wet hair freezes and the morning is more urgent.
I can hardly exhale conversation in the freezing rain.

Picking at the scab was an anxiety to feel new again.
The policies of healing are obsolete when time is measured in teaspoons,
And time is all of the oceans.

As children, my cousins and I cut earthworms and watched
The section containing the central nerve bundle
Slink away, and we turn away,
Ignorant of the earthworm section’s
impending death due to stress or blood-loss.

6.
The error became the most prominent feature of the day.
Eloquent gemstones, Official blue ink ,
land art falling into place after a great earthquake.

You, the understudy for the moon,
have modified the calendar year to fit your sleep pattern.

No matter how many mountains fall into the ocean
you wouldn’t miss the next episode of your dream,
a comic book about wars you’ve never met.

7.
Potholes like pores,
I like the names of towns in counties
You only hear about in severe weather reports.

The dead heat of Northern Kentucky’s South
With Cincinnati smog wears
Sunsets over shopping mall construction
Frozen by the economy.

Early Work

9-21-94 (Age 6) " the hors is in the wagon it dusit/ fit in the red wagon help o help"



oct 7 1994 (Age 6) "the blak cat sol u wic/ the fish wus sed"



Date Unknown 1995-1996, (Age 7)

"It was the first big snow fall of winter. The snow looked like cotton balls. We heard the sound of snowballs being smooshed. It smelled like smoke from the fire. The snow felt wet. The snow tasted like no flavor popsicles."

Something Old

This is a poem I wrote a while back and removed from my blog, but eh, I always sort of liked the poem...

Williamsburg, Ohio

I wonder if your town existed
before you gave me directions.

This place, where you refuse
to be white-trash tattooed to the
Skin of the concrete steps
Outside of the bar
Where your mother broke her leg.

Driving by I only assume that
The paint under the paint peels and
Windows would look
Friendlier with shutters,
Yards grow tomato plants and
Oxidized children.

I drive in tip-toes around the curves,
Every right turn empties into
Narrow roads of black conveyor belts
That drain into the muck of the palette
Left after the painting.

On my way home from
Taking you home
An owl stopped in front of my car.

Always I remember that foreboding owl,
Its citrine eyes glowing like the owl lamp
In my grandparents’ 1970s basement,
As I inched the car closer and it wouldn’t move.

I never felt right about leaving you there.

Pantoums

In France we wrote pantoums, a form similar to the villanelle. These are two quick pantoums from the trip.

I.

The sun only burns tired faces
Inside appliances hum,
I don’t have anything to complain about,
On-y-va.

On the walk they hum
Unbalanced on cobblestone
On-y-va,
Blistered feet.

Sculpting the cobblestone,
The whole town a palimpsest
Under blistered feet
On the morning walk,

The sun only burning tired faces,
Faces as palimpsests
On the morning walk
I don’t have anything to complain about.



II.

You would think I had never seen clouds before
And sent whispers around the domed ceiling of the chapel
To the Patron Saint of Air Molecules,
A sunset in a way like stained glass that keeps color sacred,

Sending whispers around the domed ceiling of the chapel
Questioning the magic of wavelengths
A sunset in a way like stained glass that keeps color sacred
Beyond dismantled castles

Questioning the science of wavelengths
Camera failing
Beyond dismantled castles
Dismantled echoes

You would think I had never seen clouds before
Camera failing,
Dismantled echoes
To the Patron Saint of Air Molecules

France

Some photos from France, artwork and writing to follow.

Final Projects

I have made it through another year of school. I suppose I am a senior now! It has been a good year. Last Monday was my 21st Birthday and although it was on a Monday, during Finals Week, I managed to have a lovely time thanks to my wonderful friends. I am really thankful for the friends I have made in Chicago. I am privileged to have fallen in with such great people! As of now the plan is to stay in Chicago for a while after I graduate next year, at least while I figure out what I want to do about grad school. I'm not ready to leave my life in Chicago. I do however leave Chicago for the summer tomorrow. I never like leaving, but I can't complain because I leave for France in 10 days!!!



It has also been a great year for the Creative Writing Guild. The Guild is something that I really care about so it has been great to have had a successful year. We put out four publications, publishing 29 writers! I think it is important to have a sense of a writing community and also to provide students both Writing Program and not with a place to be published. I am proud to be the leader behind all of it. It is all rather fulfilling.


I have a lot of new poems that I am working on. I'm really excited about the work that will be generated from my trip to France!


This is my final project from Stitch, and the Artist's Statement:




A Minor Detail

6 AM is framed by my 6th floor window.
It is raining and the tallest buildings
Don’t even exist,

Streets emptied of
Umbrella confetti
Are sleeping as
Best as streets can.

I write you a hand-written letter
If only to show that I form
My cursive v’s incorrectly.


No matter how skillfully the poet crafts a poem, the poet cannot control exactly how the reader will interpret it. Quite possibly the most fascinating element of poetry is the opportunity for the reader to relate a poem in his or her own way, putting themselves into the poem and projecting meaning relevant to their own life. However, the poem always contains the poet’s intention and the added underthought of the process of writing the poem. There is an added meaning that only the poet can see in the poem. By creating an image for my poem “A Minor Detail” I am taking my control over the poem a step further. I am exerting my role not only as a poet but declaring that I am the speaker of the poem and the character within the poem.

I am illustrating the moment in which the poem was written, which is also the moment within the poem. In doing so I am providing the reader with the intended image of the poem. I have found embroidery to be a process that adds meditation to a poem in contrast with the fluidity of writing. A range of painting, appliqué and embroidery is used to capture the layers of texture visible at 6AM when the city is fogged over and sepia-ed by the street lamps and rain. As a poem “A Minor Detail” is open for interpretation. As a piece of visual art, it is open for interpretation. The poem accomplishes things the image alone cannot and the image accomplishes things the poem alone cannot. In presenting both text and image together, the moment behind the poem is clearly illustrated.

Twenty-Two

Today I tried to open my mailbox using the combination for my high school locker. I've been working furiously on my final project for my Comics class, which was due today, thus it is complete! It is called Twenty-Two and is the sequel to my comic A Prayer to St. Anthony and Sylvia Plath. It is 25 pages, So I'm not posting the whole thing, but I'm posting a few of my illustrations, these aren't the complete pages which have more text, but the original images. Now, four papers to write! Four isn't really that bad though. I'm working on a bunch of new poems, so hopefully I will finish those once I get everything else out of the way...

Lake Webster

Unbeknownst to you, a blizzard has occurred.

The play of candle on glass is water
And the gleam
On marble is ice
and over it is a
blue bridge rusted red.

Eight floors into a horizontal snow,
I have dreamt myself outside.
Your strategy is to follow footprints back
But snow has covered them and we are lost and wandering,
against wind flickered shadows
Of monochrome winter.

Scraping the landscape is a glacier
with dirt in its fingernails,
Leaving the streets of high contrast winter sludged.
All of the gray sage-greens the lake.
We are mostly and completely shadows,

The sky above us is just one big cloud and you say
that if the world were flipped
everything would just look the same, other than
the upside down street lamps,

The world is so papier-mâchéd with snow
that the paths your eyes make are
visibly beautiful geometry against the white.

The decrescendo was a hill,
The kind you only read about in dream dictionaries.

Ruth Lilly: Poetry's Best Friend

The Great Comet of 1997

Glittering
Psychic infomercials
At 3AM
Are a disorbed thing of the 90s,
Reduced to background noise
In the far reaches of space.

Without the historical context
Of Nike shoe death cults,
We stand in Aunt Barbara’s driveway waiting,

Hale-Bopp
Invents a sense of mortality,

While upper-middle-class
Catholic dynasties sleep,
Recalling past lives as
German and Irish immigrants.

Somewhere else no one waits,
As it passes over
Structures so worthless no one even bothered
To tear them down.

Nights Always End With Waltzes

Tissue Paper flowers in
9th grade ceramic vases
Never wilt, only wrinkle.
The summer always ends
With a church festival on a Thursday.
The football team will always win
The Homecoming game.

The Book Man*,
Our small-town legend
Looks like an antique
Against tree-lined spring,
He lives hundreds of
Speculated lives.

The top ten baby names of 1993,
Under yellowing cafeteria light
Discuss the possibilities
Of having children with blue eyes
As determined by Mendel’s law.

But mostly I get homesick for trees
And other things that change and
Grow while I am gone.


*The Book Man-A man who walks along Dixie Highway in Fort Mitchell, KY, while reading.

A Minor Detail

6 AM is framed by my 6th floor window.
It is raining and the tallest buildings
Don’t even exist,

Streets emptied of
Umbrella confetti
Are sleeping as
Best as streets can.

I write you a hand-written letter
If only to show that I form
My cursive v’s incorrectly.

The Passing of Time

In Memory of Esme Kenney

This is not the usual content of this blog, but I had to take a moment to reflect on the death of Esme Keeney.

I did not know Esme, I maybe met her once but I'm not sure. Her mother Lisa was a teaching artist on the Sew Taft project during my last summer with ArtWorks.

Esme Kenney, 13, went out for a jog on Saturday and didn't come home. Early Sunday morning her body was found in a wooded area off the road where she disappeared. She was a 7th grader at SCPA (The School for the Creative and Performing Arts in Cincinnati). It is horrible to hear of the loss of such a wonderful and talented child. Such a cruel crime. A man has been arrested and charged with her death. Today he plead not guilty.

Being that I am in Chicago and Cincinnati news is less accessible, I heard the news Sunday afternoon by way of Facebook. An outpouring of shock, grief and anger was immediately circulated by way of the internet. I spent a lot yesterday reading news articles and comments being made on them and posts on Facebook groups. I was frequently Googling for the latest updates on the case. It was most heartbreaking reading posts by thirteen and fourteen-year-old kids and trying to imagine how they would begin to process something like this. Having grown up in Cincinnati I know names like Erica Baker, but Esme hits a little closer.

I came across Esme's Blog

I keep reading updates and watching news videos about this crime, and it keeps on getting more and more utterly disgusting. A man who has already been convicted as a murderer and a sex offender should not be walking the streets.

Stanza from an Unresolved Poem

In the premature summer
A gypsy carnival
Pollinates the air with
Funnel cake powdered sugar
And vanishes into
Light slurs on
Wet Pavement

Revisionist History

A Transcendental paragraph
Of many adjectives
About the pattern of light through trees.

To skip a step,
An acorn has grown
To be a telephone pole.

Time passes as shown by
The acid wear on
Kindergarten construction paper.

With all the difference of
Placing a decimal point,

Every summer I watched
The beach erosion.

The Turning Point

A project due tomorrow for my Writing/Drawing Comics Class.
3 versions of telling the story of May 30, 2008, a night which I recognize as one of my major turning points in rebounding from the lowest point of my lovely mood disorder.

Silent and Across the Table

At some time of better convenience
I will tell you,
With my short-fiction way of
Inventing Rothko paintings into doorways,
About things swept so deeply into corners
That they are no longer true.

Least likely, I will tell you of
Picking wild violets on a steep hillside,
Neither in the city nor country
But a dimension that
No longer interests me.

Past certain hours on weeknights,
Cities like Cincinnati are as much ghost towns
As the twigs and tributaries that branch outward.

That I once played pinball in a hotel
In Pennsylvania is important,
For the same reason
Three points make a better line.

I do not yet know the metaphor
Of building a bridge between
An artificial park and a museum of art, but,
In a court of law, an expert witness need only know
More than the average person,

You look as though every scrape of vacant ground
Occupies your thoughts,
In interrupting this soliloquy of yours,

The beginning and the end
Of the conversation
Would look the same,
One folded onto the other with perfect symmetry.
Silently, from across the table.

To My Phantom Limb

Handling every day like an audition,
Oh little g god it is dizzying.

Infinite space is ever-so impossible to lasso,
To press so tightly against my chest that I feel
Three sacraments closer to heaven,

Containing it all in the dangerous language
Between black-iced roads and urgency.

Like a silent h to begin a word,
Will you notice I have not left?

The sky chameleon to the steel and stone city,
Dust collecting on figurines
In the curio cabinet.

There is a coagulated interest in antiquities,
Mostly I love you always
As Fabergé egg

Poetry and Comics?

At the age of five I decided that I wanted to be an author/illustrator when I grew-up. I've held on to that idea. I will most definitely one day write a children's book. Recently I've been getting into the idea of comics and the graphic novel, and with curiosity about how poetry can be integrated. The concept of illustrating poetry is an old one, it just isn't seen very often today, or maybe I'm not looking in the right places. Anyway, this is something I just did for my Comics class, using a stanza I am particularly fond of from a poem I never resolved. I didn't want to ruin my painting, so I just photoshopped the text temporarily, until after my crit.

The Pause, draft 4

Brushed aluminum sky threatens snow
The grey-green shards of land below
A welcoming home,

Don’t burn bridges, the suburbs are always saying.

There is a wind,
and husbands scurry to relight candles in
Paper luminary bags.

Real estate agents of celebrity status,
Deborah with her
Pictures on buses and benches.

Stuck in traffic behind buses, behind Deborah,
Always more than half-empty buses.

At a certain time of night everything
Begins to look like a ladder,
Every set of parallel lines
You pray is a way out,

I am acquainted.

***
A layer of ice is a friction
On the surface of the river,
Clouds skid-mark the sky.

Eyes dizzy Midwest snowstorm
Blistered feet from
All of the imagined talking,
All of the zero displacement
In the walking.

An intercepted conversation,
The loops and whorls of fingerprints,
wood grain pressed into a firm handshake.

Strands of syllables.
Further devolved, readable
But without sound or understanding
Drip an amber sap to preserve, to
Fossilize

Alone, relaxed from hands rigor-mortified,
My fingers have arched
around the back of my neck
kneading the skin,
My face sunken into the down comforter
And my feet hanging off of the edge of the bed,
Quiet enough.
The sound of the heat coming from the vent,
The tired between my eyes.
Only thinking about angles.
Less lonely, thinking about tesselations.
Maps, constellations and GPS,
A geographer who sits at a desk
With only navigatory inklings
And inanimate curiosity.

Letting the tea seep
In dim lit cold.

I’ve been told that it is not healthy to ask, What if?

***

A tall blue crane
Cuts across the large blue sky
And parallel,
An unfurled scarf,
The blue lake just is.
The window,
Just breathes there.
And the building is unnoticeably built.

Pick them away,
The pillings off of the sweater
The dead bugs in the swimming pool.
Perennial plants, Egyptian Ankhs,
Numbers, a funny thing a calendar is.

I have seen buildings torn down
With the entire facade preserved.
That humans would do the same is no surprise.

Comics!

Some comic strips from the Comics class I am taking this semester. Nothing too spectacular to see at the moment but this class has great potential, once we get past the beginning exercises and I get to jump into what I really want to be working on...and that would be more serious personal comics.

I haven't posted in a while

I've been writing, just not resolving...

The Pause-Draft Number 3!

Brushed aluminum sky threatens snow
The grey-green shards of land below
A welcoming home,

Don’t burn bridges, the suburbs are always saying.

There is a wind,
and husbands scurry to relight candles in
Paper luminary bags.

Real estate agents of celebrity status,
Deborah with her
Pictures on buses and benches.

Stuck in traffic behind buses, behind Deborah,
Always more than half-empty buses.
I am acquainted.

***

A layer of ice is a friction
On the surface of the river,
Clouds skid-mark the sky.

Eyes dizzy Midwest snowstorm
Blistered feet from
All of the imagined talking,
All of the zero displacement
In the walking.

An intercepted conversation,
The loops and whorls of fingerprints,
wood grain pressed into a firm handshake.

Strands of syllables.
Further devolved, readable
But without sound or understanding
Drip an amber sap to preserve, to
Fossilize

Alone, relaxed from hands rigor-mortified,
My fingers have arched
around the back of my neck
kneading the skin,
My face sunken into the down comforter
And my feet hanging off of the edge of the bed,
Quiet enough.
The sound of the heat coming from the vent,
The tired between my eyes.
Only thinking about angles.
Less lonely, thinking about tesselations.
Maps, constellations and GPS,
A geographer who sits at a desk
With only navigatory inklings
And inanimate curiosity.

I like the architecture of his face,
That is what I am thinking about in a
Crowded elevator on a Wednesday,
I take the crowded train out of my way
To be alone.
Univited,
I by you and you by me.

Letting the tea seep
In dim lit cold.

I’ve been told that it is not healthy to ask, What if?


***

A tall blue crane
Cuts across the large blue sky
And parallel,
An unfurled scarf,
The blue lake just is.
The window,
Just breathes there.
And the building is unnoticeably built.

Pick them away,
The pillings off of the sweater
The dead bugs in the swimming pool.
Perennial plants, Egyptian Ankhs,
Numbers, a funny thing a calendar is

Esmerelda

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jenicrone/sets/72157610647568693/

I can't promise the text is grammatically correct, but I really enjoyed making this book as part of a collaborative project this past semester!

Esmerelda est née dans Ames, Iowa, le 14 juillet 1917.
Elle est descendue du ciel comme l'air
d'un prélude de Debussy
Elle rayonne le clair de lune.
Une vache, elle s'appelle Maribelle, regardé
Esmerelda est un nom trop grand pour s'épanouir en Iowa
Toutes les filles ont appelé Esmerelda oublient où elles sont nées
Toutes les filles ont appelé Esmerelda quitteront Iowa.
C’est notre rêve.
Regarde notre Esmerelda.
Elle n'est pas une etoile! Elle est le clair de lune.

Abstract Geography

The calendar hung as crescent moons directly below my eyes.
The empty gaze, the empty 5 AM nights, awake long enough
To feel the uncomfortable of quiet. Yellow tinged
Dim rooms in transition to day,
This is how the past begins again.

I look pale. I am paranoid that I look pale
This is insanity, this is not right
This is a field of ten thousand pinwheels and a discordant symphony, and the slow drip of a single raindrop on a window, On a car window.
Simultaneously.
I am sitting in my car screaming to someone else’s God
Because that is where we are taught to look for bookends.
The too much space and the too many thoughts
And two years later, still always the hours
To remember my grandfather’s hands aged thin to
The texture of wet rose petals
Stretched thinly over veins.
Skin has a way of aging and accentuating
The science of being alive. The cold science of being alive
Or overwhelmingly, the most-alive, threatening science of being alive,
And the milky cataracts over his
Eyes closed
And his body died a day later,
The only other person I’ve known who was finished living.
It was called the Bright Darkness.

That early September Sunday,
The sound of church bells
Sitting on the screened-in porch
Wondering if there must be apparitions
To feel ghosts,
He is not here anymore
And the sky is cloudless,
He is not there, nothing is. And
Vines suffocate the tree outside and
In echoes he exists everywhere, but not here.
Like freckles, residual of summer, he exists.

Camel hair coats hang empty in the front hall closet,
Wrapped in the smell of cedar,
Everyone afraid to walk past the empty space in the family room,
An abstract geography where he coexists with not existing anymore.
And now I know what death looks like,
In gazes,
Like so clumsily the February when I hypothesized.

One night I slept there, in the chair that is in the corner where he died,
He was not there.
Anything embroidered to the landscape meaningless,
Only the geometry of the plane is permanent,

3 AM I call my mother because I remember that her hair
Is the same texture that her father’s was.
And she asks if I am okay, the tone in her voice
Is the concern that I may try to kill myself again,
Because I am awake, and alive and remembering;
But I do not and always exist there. Here
In my abstract geography of coexisting
With last February.

Misplaced Time

a Sestina

Pulling closer to the Time Line
Clinging to the edge of my cuticles,
Where did I live before I was an Anachronism?
The Cold always has a distinct connotation
And the lifespan of fog on mirrors.
Quietly, I asked for the equation of the Displaced.

In early morning February, Everything displaced,
All Red Line trains rerouted to the Brown Line
All surfaces acting as unintended mirrors
With only the thin layer of cuticles
To distract a friction in the connotation
Of a month, anxiously an Anachronism

How lonely to be cast as the Anachronism;
Longing for the Displacement to be displaced,
Equated with implications of a Connotation.
Time and Space can never be each other, there is a Line:
A cell wall, particles if anything, cuticles.
My History had never looked into your Mirrors.

I know an Architect of Mirrors,
Building the future into an Anachronism
And un-building it all to cut at the cuticles.
From his hands, let all chronology be displaced,
It is the only way to delineate the Line,
To write the annotation to the connotation

Addressed and mailed to the Connotation,
The copy-pasted chronology in the mirrors
An aerial view condensed into one line.
Every secret of time is an Anachronism,
To keep thoughts safe they must be displaced
Only protected by copyright and cuticles.

The dehydrated sit watching the re-growth of their cuticles,
The feeling of watching paint dry in the desert’s connotation.
No one displaced knows someone else displaced
It comes down to mirages and mirrors.
The Past did not invent your Anachronism
But we have no way to know that Line.

I woke up too much displaced, scratching at my cuticles.
Anxiously dotting the Line to inflect the connotation.
Wiped the fog from the mirrors and saw an Anachronism.

A Wednesday

The woman working behind the counter at a gas station outside Indianapolis
Used to be a country singer twenty years ago,
Living on a carousel of fringed jean jackets, cigarette smoke and tacky,
From bar to bar in Texas and Oklahoma
Until it all became a secondary dream.
“ You are Never Lost, only Misdirected.” She said to me, on a day
During winter’s leftovers in April, two days before the Pope died,
Strangers I paid five minutes enough attention to
To remember forever.

Slices of blue through the blinds say, don’t get out of bed.
Lie there and appreciate that color of cloudless Chicago September,
This window will only be part of this part of my life.
When I was five I had a brief fascination with
Building teepees using branches knocked down in storms and
A neutral-colored blanket from the basement couch,
But there was something lonely about the vision quest.

I was walking through parts of Chicago that look like Cincinnati
On a day in October that will one day be the square root of something,
Nothing about it reminded me of how I can’t write exactly
How silver and sheer the morning was in a photograph I took in Florida.
Rain melts the lights on State Street into a glossy varnish on a Tuesday,
I never catch the exact moment the Chicago Theater sign goes dark.

I have beautiful hands, I will admit to that,
With them I build each day like it is falling apart in sequence.
Everyone just keeps standing there like Greek columns,
It is a Wednesday in an elevator and All conscious beings are immortal.
Already I’ve woken up with the intent of taking a nap.
No one makes a monument
To the days unrecognizable as the ones that thread the rest together.

A poem I wrote a while ago and never did anything with

An Obituary

Soft-serve boredom is melting
me sticky,
where moths are called butterflies
and I mistake airplanes for stars,
my cheek pressed against
the cold of the window
that has been following me
everywhere lately,
I’m longing to watch the lava
flow of 5 o’clock traffic

A man died at the age of 101,
I could floss my teeth with
His one sentence obituary in
The KY Post.
My mother doesn’t like it when I
Use the word “dye” in reference
To hair color because it is a
Homophone of “die”:
The act in which one returns
Home and flosses the life out from
Between teeth.

My Sentimental Iowa

Nothing. Crowded with nothing
But room for imaginary coordinates,
Boundaries that hold
The ten-hour drive from Iowa,

Land completely dehydrated of shape,
Nothing to see but two-point perspective
And a heightened sense of ranges of yellows and greens,

Too much open land
Just asking for me to name it. Just
Daring me to make it the setting of something important.

My mother, viscose rayon or some other
Artificial silk,
Opens her mouth
And all I hear
Is the dial tone.
Often she asks me to
Look at the shadow of
Her hand and read her palm.

I don’t remember our argument,
It was Iowa to Home and
The pointless Point A to B,

The bored stretches of land
Asking to be shelves.

Untitled

May was a meditation on how
Twenty years is nothing enough to judge life.

In the premature summer
A gypsy carnival
Pollinates the air with
Funnel cake powdered sugar
And vanishes into light slurs
On wet pavement. And so too
Did our summer. All of the Augusts
I never meant to get too attached to.

He said,
“No loss of innocence is greater than any other.”
Half the palindrome in you, half the palindrome in me
Is the closure, and we are places
I attempt to reinvent.

This is a playground where I need new tangible memories,
Don’t mind the unfair collection of mine
That I keep here.
Here at the setting of an old poem,
Will you be my closure?

Palimpsest

The red is chipping off my nails
Into careful ink blot tests.
And in this lighting my hands look
Like an aerial view of the Midwest.
It is a lovely midnight to drive
To the edge of the months that bruised,
Away from the late-night’s LCD glow.
Mishmashes of pretty kite weather
And unfolded origami complexities,
I have loved them into landscapes
Of the delicate breath book-ended by
Ambiguous double-life hours.

A fiber-optic sky I’m awake under
Collects evaporations of exponential decay,
To be recycled back into origami
And unfolded back into state routes and
Radio static transitions.

Thank you for being a cataract
Hanging in every doorway
The way unmet plans loom over a day,
The hand-made paper thinned by pleats,
My fear of what will happen
When old calendar transparencies
Begin to align and are projected
Over recycled days.

The Hollow Feeling Was the Real Sort of Sleepwalking

Thunderstorm-incarnated catharsis, as she scalds herself in the shower,
The mechanical erosion of a human.

Simultaneously she is still sitting in her car,
raining and picking the
I will not give up on you (ambiguous you)
I will give up on you (ambiguous you)
I WILL NOT GIVE UP ON YOU!!! (you you)
Petals off of the situation.
But the wind is picking up,
A boy stands in a tree shaking the branches,
Petals freckle the ground and it is
overwhelming.

She paces the room to bury the excavation,
The pigmentation of the feeling
Walking her to the nowhere of concentric circles,

She post-dates checks to feel more removed,
Adopts a third person persona,

The last petal confirms the
Hollow feeling.

The End of Symbiosis

Tonsillitis-inflamed silence,
Snow-heavy branches threatened
By every exhale,
Thoughts calcified and consequently confettied
Under untied shoes,
Shoelaces tripping over feet today,
Blizzards dripping to echoes
Of the phone call made from the
Last existing pay phone.

My codependency spectrum
Accentuates the ultraviolet clinical catalysts typecasted as conflict.
An arthritic feeling sweaters the cavity that is
Rotting to a hollow disillusion
Graphed and climbing up the y axis.

Graffitied in vacuous tunnels of self-help brainwash,
The defiance that rusts me all the way down the fire escape,
Presses my cheek against the window of you
Walking barefoot at the scene of a broken light bulb,
Wanting to ask you to thread tree roots through me or
Simply to coexist.

An Insomniac's Dream About Hope

It takes a lot of ink to sound like calligraphy,
Enough to pave the road to here and there and
Asymmetrically, reluctantly back. Following

A caramel moon canoeing in-and-out of clouds.
On twenty-seven more occasions I will swear I have never
Seen the moon that color.
The constellation Hercules push-pinned to the sky,
Safer than every airplane ever mistaken for something
Constantly fixed. Everything only constantly fixed to
Anything that ever got lost in the crease of a letter.

Every insecure without-teeth smile,
Every Lenten fish sandwich bought
To appease false security.
Dissymmetry personified:
In the lack of finding a fixed
Point to orbit around,
In the blame of
Interchangeable person-places,
Incongruence in the alignment
Of the reason that came before
The Reason.

Fate is an inversed factor tree,
Narrowing the margin for error
With every risk closer to purpose.

Draft 1 A Prayer to St. Anthony and Sylvia Plath

A Prayer to St. Anthony of Padua and Sylvia Plath

Confusion over how
Ornithologists and Pilots are two different species
is worth pondering, but
The thought does not return
A continent to Elizabeth Bishop.

The middle of the day was
A broken dinner plate.
Saturday slipped from
My hands, of accumulating layers of
Chicago-winter and turpentine.

Decribe water without words, without the wet, cold, hot, rain, liquid, etc. words.
Umbrellas used to be made out of words, your words.
Watch the negative space that seems to grow bigger around the red suitcases,
The red amplified,
The liquid charcoal sipped through a straw
Sinking to the bottom to absorb it all.

On the Brown Line, bricks and metal,
Transparent skin and melting snow,
The sum of the velocity of the train
And the propulsion of my thoughts,
Windows are never
Safe to use as mirrors.

What if on the smallest sub-atomic level we were
Only made of sound? And
Death is only recognizable by missing someone’s voice,
Watch the negative space grow until everything heard inversed to invisible.

No one makes a t-shirt that says,
“I spent 4 days in the psych ward and all I got was hospital socks.”
The man in the corner, in the yellow shirt, with his pants unbuttoned
Is named Cecil, and he is schizophrenic.

Try counting ten, nine, eight, backwards
Next time you lose yourself. Say a prayer
To St. Anthony.