Ash Friday

Foreword: So I made this a while ago for one of my lessons. I was modeling for my students this technique called “found poetry” where you essentially take something – anything, e.g. a news article, bumper stickers, a cereal box, whatever – and find a poem within it. You can black parts out so you leave behind a poem or you can pull words and phrases out of it and use them in a poem. So I had my kids do this and I showed them this poem that I made the night before as an example. It was “found” out of 3 short articles on the firebombing of Dresden (we were reading Slaughterhouse Five), but it ended up being about Black Friday, which… well… being soon/now seems appropriate to post up. And if you were curious, my three AP classes really enjoyed the found poetry exercise.

 

 

Vital signs: the beat of feet trudging rhythmically on.

We’re piled up in houses at the end of city blocks,

waiting to step through those big doors.

There’s the dull whine of public morale rising as time ticks down.

Air raid sirens wind up and glass automatic doors open hungrily.

It’s a fire sale! A downright incendiary sale!

In crowds we scream and gesticulate as the tide of people surge inward.

Bundled hands claw forward and booted feet march on -

“mere acts of terror and wanton destruction.”

We leave the aisles barren, the store uninhabitable.

The weak and feeble – charred corpses – trampled underfoot.

Happy Black Friday. For some, it’s more like Ash Wednesday.

 

 

Post Script: I really don’t like a few of the wordings, but hey, I made it in 20 minutes the night before the lesson. There’s a point where it’s good enough to get by. Happy Black Friday.

Something like Hickory

Foreword: One of the oldest pieces of written English literature is a poem titled “The Wanderer” – old as in from like Beowulf time frame, not Shakespeare time frame. The thing is that everyone, to some extent, has a little bit of wanderer in them. Whenever I drive through foreign lands for long periods of time, I get this strong wandering desire too. It comes in questions like what are the people who live here like and what would it be like to live the rest of my life here…? Anyway, here’s a story.

All you really need is a good backpack and a good, waterproof, jacket. I’m lucky enough to have these things and a car. A car takes you wherever you need to go – I do not mean this solely in terms of transportation. A car is your home and it’s everything to you. Without a car, your shoes are your home and it’s everything to you. If you’re serious about this, about exiling yourself, get a car; you can always find money and gas along the way. Very Thoreauian, very Walden.

I fell in love once. It was a very confusing time and a very confusing situation. She was returning from a business trip, as I was; we met on a red eye flight from Phoenix, AZ to Washington D.C. We were seated next to each other and conversed politely, waited patiently for drinks to be served so we could go to sleep. Drinks were served and we chatted a bit longer and complained about the stuffy airplane cabin and the weather in Arizona and how no one talks to strangers anymore. We drifted off to sleep; we’d wake up every now and again from a bit of turbulence and look at each other and smile – maybe a quiet chuckle here and there. Deep down I hoped her head would droop onto my shoulder with a thin smile on her face and one on mine – how long had I known this woman? She didn’t, of course, in fact she sat perfectly straight and slept like that, rigid and hands folded in her lap. Her name was Alyssa.

Arizona was a three hour layover and D.C. was my final destination – home. At the time I traveled a lot for work. I stayed in great hotels for free, had a stipend, and kept a lot of little bottles of shampoo, soap, mini-cereal boxes, chocolates, towels, bottled waters, cans of soda, bags of chips, and so on. Then I would stockpile it at home for whatever unforeseen apocalypse that was drawing near. I never was home much except to stockpile – it was more of a warehouse than a home. When the flight landed in D.C. at 6:26 AM, a half hour early from a tailwind, Alyssa and I waved goodbye, hugged, and walked down the concourse in the same direction. We paused, burst out laughing like age-old friends at an inside joke, and then casually strolled down the concourse on conveyor belts chatting away like nothing ever happened. We hailed taxis, exchanged some contact information, and parted ways.

We kept in touch and met up a few times for dinner, drinks, things like that. Then it was time to fly away – that’s the way things always work out. Months and years moved along and a lot happened; here are the bullets. I quit my job because I was tired of flying. I started working for myself and all I needed was my laptop. I stayed home for a few months and worked and I got antsy, I went to coffee houses and libraries and worked and I got antsy. I sold most of my stuff, took my SUV and loaded it with essentials, and just traveled and worked, staying in various cities and suburbs and whatnot for a few months at a time. Like I said before, I was lucky enough to have a car.

So here’s what happened next: Philadelphia, Hartford, New York City, Buffalo, Toronto, Cleveland, Champagne, Des Moines, Mitchell (home of the great Corn Palace), Ten Sleep, Spokane, Portland, Los Angeles, skipped over to Fort Worth, Baton Rouge, Atlanta. On the road, sometimes the road or the land itself smells funny. One entire town smelled like smoked hickory, a nice pleasant scent to drive through. Another highway just reeks of melting rubber for twenty miles. And then of course you get strips of road that smell like forests or trees or manure or the ocean. At some point, I headed back home. At some point you realize that those places you travel to aren’t as great as you imagined them; you just didn’t know what they were like until you got there. That in the end, what you were looking for was back at home with the years’ worth of amenities stored away in your closet.

Home, Washington D.C. and Northern Virginia, had its own distinctive scent. It’s something subtle and elusive underneath the smog and highways and random parks and malls. It’s a… it’s a kind of… No it’s just a distinct kind of smog I guess. But even that’s special in a way, right?

I’m not sure where Alyssa is now. We caught up over coffee whenever I was back home, but now that I’ve decided to stay here, I can’t find her – isn’t that always the way? I must be a day or a week or a month or a year late. Maybe I’ll run into her at the airport.

Post Script: As I was writing this… I thought it was super boring, but it was already written so… whatever. It’s probably cause I don’t know how to write anything romantic and there were no ancient lake monsters this time for me to play with (I forgot what it was called, but I think to date that was the only other romantic story I’ve ever written here). Man… such a boring story; half-way through I just stopped caring and wanted it to end. Oh well, jokes on you, reader!

Fetal

Foreword: I couldn’t sleep a few days ago. I was in between consciousness and sleep. I got up and took a marker and wrote on my whiteboard thus.

 

Are you here to hear me

and nod your encouragements?

Or are you here to diagnose me

as I lie here on your divan,

prostrate and fetal before you.

 

Postscript: I have no idea what this was supposed to mean or why I wrote it. I just wanted to write it down before I cleared my whiteboard for another project.

Dynamo

Foreword: This is… a kind of experimental poetic form that I just thought of playing with. It mixes English with programming language. So it’s pretty nerdy on two fronts, but if you understand basic programming, it should be… interesting? I don’t know. Also, it’s not any specific language, just very basic elements.

 

include night;

while(darkness >= light){

print or make light;

echo some sound;

if(sound reverberates){

“listen close” – “close, listen”;

break;

}

make some light; print some light; end the night;

}

if (too bright){

for(i; gradually fade away; ++i){

Dim(lights);

- – Sun(decrement);

print horizon;

+ + Moon(increment);

}

echo “beautiful.purple.red.”sky fire”;

Set(Sun);

Raise(Moon);

Break.

 

Postscript: it’s about night turning to day and the sun setting and stuff. Very basic, just trying to get a feel for this new form that… I’ve never seen anyone else do. Maybe if it works better, it’d be pretty cool… I dunno.

Pariah

Dream that this is happening:  We wake

up, overcome with melancholy as

if something interrupted some horrorscape of slumber.

Gasping, collapsing and suffocating the cold, humid

air. There is resistance to the labor of our breaths and

still there is dissonance in the tremors of my heart.

I’ll rub it off the page with nothing but

the oils of my fingertips – these fingertips – your fingertips? -

that I may smile and smile (villainously).

It’s an unforgivable sin that we tongueless mortals sing.

We? We sing? You do the singing, I shall sit here in silence.

- Yes… I wish I could sing too.

Instead I shall don the straitjacket – it’s chilly out, you know -

and I shall gag myself, armless as I am (the plan

is to grip the gag by the teeth; it’s grip or gripe out there).

The siren sings (that makes you one of them). So here’s the

question: did we tie me – jacket and all – strait to the mast?

Or did we forget?

 

 

Postscript: I’m so tired of this stupid semester.