then practice losing farther, losing faster

I lost my checkbook. I lost a pile of papers that contained the only copies of my favorite poems I’ve been lately writing and rewriting and writing again. I’m mid-intentional-process of losing my often draining over-aptitude for detail which has seemed to result in the unforeseen and unfortunate consequence of being incapable of remembering wherewhenwhy I let items leave my hands. I lost the ability to read in bed before going to sleep without waking up hours later with a book squishing my face and the lights shining.

But as I rode my bike home from another day spent losing my energy and enthusiasm for work, I found two children playing along the side of the neighborhood street.

“Hi!” the small boy’s arm stretched high over his head waving little fingers feverishly at me as if I was my own parade riding the street for his entertainment. The little girl’s big eyes shouted,  “She’s pretty!”

Somehow those two words—if any way they had sounded my direction in the past—contained some of what I had lost. An unexpected catch-you-offguard comment restores the ability to see.

With these new eyes I saw the ugliest house that I daily pass and cringe at the clues that people actually live there. It looks like the road stretching up toward the sky to form this building’s concrete crumbling walls. Solid, square, closed, old, windowless, a looming blue-clad prison that someone calls home.

Today, on it’s block porch, four new pots containing plants and flowers. Beauty engulfed  under everything opposite of it.

A hint of something found.

anti-matter-of-fact

In honor of the haze through which I’ve encountered today, I found a definition that best fits it from the website Definitions, where Jon Fried decided that he had better things to say about words than a dictionary. I agree. His run-on style is endearing.

Today’s word defined:

Sleep Deprived:

I need more sleep. I need more sleep. I am grouchy more and more of the time and cannot always concentrate on what is in front of me. I have less patience and take less pleasure in my routine in fact most days I take no pleasure in my routine although I love the moment I go to sleep I hate the clock reminding me that again I will not get enough sleep. I have things I like to do and things I need to do and things I am expected to do and things that I can’t not do, plus the dayjob, and now there my eyes were closed and I felt better then I was driving no not in a car I was driving myself and drifting in to other lanes and into oncoming cars and through lights and just by myself as I am with no sleep even around all the others I am by myself because there’s not enough sleep to be alive to them and no one is hurt as there is no collision but I don’t like it.

To further expand on my sleep deprivedness, here’s my extended definition:

Curled on the kitchen floor which is covered in dirty footprints and people banging pots and appliances around my head I could just pass out but the noise and the dirt and the fact that I have to be somewhere important in seventeen minutes. I’m waiting for the day to play although I forfeited it yesterday but it has to run its course while I sit unable to be really in it like going back in time to re-live a mistake but unable to do anything but again make the mistake the exact same way. And eyes clamped open like the terrible scene in a clockwork orange it feels like it looks like it feels.

soundless words

Saturday granted me a mandatory task: spend 5 hours in alone silence.

Saturday granted me the perfect placement for such a task: a strange, new spot on a lake surrounded by trees

I set out to explore silently 5 hours.

Wondering through a cracked-open gate, I moved into an opening where brightly colored shapes sprouted to towering from the ground: an empty carnival. Rides stood eerily still as laughing kids and bustling crowds who once filled the space floated down ghosts in the beginning rain.

I entered the ancient tilt-a-whirl ride, pulled up the metal bar and sat in the car untilting, unwhirling, but curving to protect me from the rain. And me, giddy and giggling at the stillness of a ride most people move through quickly as rain tapped my feet.

I ran barefoot across a nearby field of white dandelions and collapsed in the middle so my sight contained only knee-high dandelions and sky.

I wondered into the woods and found a clearing furnished with carpet, chairs, lamps, a toaster oven, an old merry-go-round horse named Mike. And on the outskirts, an ironing board.

I climbed on a fallen tree dangling over a stream and wrote about everything. About my memory of years ago discovering an impressive treehouse in the woods behind my sister’s house and about my comrade during that exploration which contrasted my current aloneness.

I stepped into the cold stream and splashed all the way along its current to where it found the wide open lake. I was crazy-laughing as I and my clothes grew increasingly drenched and the stream restored became pure lake.

I sat by the lake on a log and read poetry out loud to the waves hitting the carcass of an enormously decaying fish.

After the 5 hours of silence ended, I re-met eight people who had similarly spent the same time in silence. I discovered that other people had stumbled across the same scenery I had; one had traveled almost exactly the same path as me.

And then I knew.

That we’re never as alone as we think we are. That things happen always with the power to change everything if only we were aware. That life at its most right involves a balancing between climbing inward and stretching out.

That the bare-bones potential of any day is that there’s always something new to explore and contemplate and say and create.

poetry by obliteration

 

via altered books

 

The Idea:

Cut the bindings off of books found at a used book store. Find poems in the pages by the process of obliteration. Put pages in the mail and send them all around the world. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I like the idea of transforming anything into poetry. Especially if it involves recycling beautifully aged words.

clinging onto words

Front-page news in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette:
The price of stamps increased two cents due to the fact that post offices have been hooked up in too many unsuccessful blind dates and are now suffering rejection from everyone.

The editorials inside offer an altogether different but related story:
Printed journalism has been stabbed in the stomach and watches while its stomach acids flow out the wound and slowly devour its skin.

What we can conclude from this:
People have secretly consented to an implied boycott on tangible information sources. They are pandemically forfeiting the writing skills they learned in kindergarten for the typing skills they learned in middle school (possibly because this is the only memory worth hanging onto from middle school).

I’m a desperate romantic when it comes to words. I want familiar pages to wake up with me every morning and friendly packaged papers waiting faithfully for me next to the door when I come home. The internet keeps intruding on my affair with words and only offers a one-sided relationship in its place: it never waits for me and makes me do all the work.

I prefer words to come to me in containers that I can smudge with fingerprints. I have an overwhelming need to spill my milk on words, circle points of interest in them,  make origami out of them, carry them with me for a bus ride, rip out pieces of them to save or share, doodle on the spaces between them, use them as floor shields when I paint, roll them up and hit someone over the head with them, crumble them up if they make me angry, kiss them if they make me fall in love.
Or at least have all of these option available.

I suppose this lament stuffed inside a computer screen does little to help. The internet has that obnoxiously useful boyish charm that I can’t escape.

But letters and newspapers are irreplaceable. They constantly advocate for slower and more intentional movement through life. I support their cause.

overexposure

Yesterday at the gym, a man turned the tv so it screamed its moving colors toward my face and he climbed onto the machine next to me. “I’m a tv man,” he declared as he began moving his legs but kept his eyes glued to the screen.

I’m a music person, I thought as I set my headphones to ”drown it all out” mode and experimented with treadmill-running while closing my eyes. It didn’t work well.

I don’t care for being constantly bombarded with the top stories Wolf Blizter talks into the ground. As I over-heard Wolf and endless “experts” give their input on pirates, pandemics, killings, and the GOP (all the general newsworthy events made specific daily), it reminded me of a soap opera where they stretch out plots every day and nothing much changes.

I’ll admit that my possibly favorite part of morning is my venture onto the porch to search for where the newspaper landed. Then I have a brief love affair with its pages and a bowl of cereal.

I scan most of the stories in seconds because I know they have high potential to appear as topics of conversation later in the day. But the facts get too tedious. Where’s the imagery, the rhythm, the breath behind the words?

Maybe this is why I indulge in mandatory poetry breaks throughout each day. But it’s also why the editorials comprise the most worthwhile part of any newspaper.

I’ll take ideas over facts any day. And music. I can always take music.

the way she wrote

I went to a poetry and fiction reading at Chatham University on Tuesday to hear the products of the chapbooks created by students in the MFA creative writing program. While listening to people read their works, I quickly got lost in the nervousness of the unestablished writers which added an element so real to their poetry.

 

Listening to poetry is quite different from reading it. Differently just as good.

 

I hate to admit it, but at every reading I’m immediately biased by the voice and the character of the reader. If they speak with a hard-edged sound or fail to project the poetic clarity that I hear in my head when I scan their words, I might end up getting better acquainted with the space of wall in front of me than their poem.

 

I’m working to get past this.

 

I ran into a writer who graduated with me from college last year. Both of us were in the writing program and we had been in classes together that involved us reading and critiquing each other’s creative essays very carefully.

 

It’s off-throwing to encounter a familiar face in an unexpected setting, but as her face came into focus, I realized that I knew her mostly by the way she wrote. I envisioned some vague stories about time she spent in Europe, but mostly I envisioned her writing style. She wrote in clipped sentences and phrases with humorous quips that led up to neatly boxed ending.

 

I decided this is a nice way to know someone.

painted the day with palaces

and i. what dreams had i suspended
above our short order lives
when death showered you with bells.
        call her back for me
        bells. call back this memory
        still fresh with cactus pain.

-sonia sanchez
from “kwa mama zetu waliotuzaa”

I’m finding that I have distinct and specific attatchments to some certain images. Like the effects of sunlight captured well in a photograph. Or the image of a bell ringing  through the words of a poem. Or anything that looks or sounds like peace. And I only noticed these motifs because they stare at me through the picture and word images I save so I can return to them later.

I’ve jotted down my thoughts with little consistency and some organization for most of my life. I return to read the books I’ve filled with my words occasionally, and in them I discover motifs to my life that I never would have discovered had I not written them down. It’s a secret value of words that can only be found when pieces of life become a book or poem.

by his dreams not alone his deeds

so how do we judge a man

most of us love from our need to love not
because we find someone deserving

most of us forgive because we have trespassed not
because we are magnanimous

most of us comfort because we need comforting
our ancient rituals demand that we give
what we hope to receive

and how do we judge a man

-nikki giovanni/ “the women gather”

i floated in those words

I found it dwelling in the response I received when I needed someone to assure me that my poetry would be an acceptable gift to give someone:

“But what can you do with poetry? Maybe if you write it on something useful…”

There it was. The uninvestigated truth that poetry is too impractical, too tossed aside, too improperly separated from the practicality of life and even from other forms of art.

But poetry is so valuable within itself.

You can know poetry like you know your daily breakfast, the familiar taste of soggy cheerios as you read the morning paper while still shaking off the sensation of nesting inside darkness and sleep.

You can walk through poetry like a walk through the woods on a sunny day with endless questions breathing in the branches and strips of sun painting strokes across your skin that disappear as you move.

You can feel poetry like a child feels a summer afternoon, hearing inaudible delight in a lazy day without having yet discovered what work is, without finding any need for concern with overbearing details of life.

Poetry houses something. It’s something you might find elsewhere like in a circumstance that naturally offers accidental sweetness, or in a perfectly taken photo, or in a just-rightly created piece of art, or resounding from the voice of a favorite person, or within the frame of an ideal moment.

It resides in poetry to alert you that life and everything in it has the perfect potential to be right and unspoken silences might be said.

for a moment, all bells ring true.