i am
scared
lonely
like a shard of glass
falling upwards
into a footperhaps this is only recompense
for dreaming of the phlegmatic world
i wish was my own
Lovely poetry from a 15-year-old in Florida. The first stanza holds one of the most arresting images I have read in a while, and one I won’t forget it in a hurry.
Woman, make me a sandwich!
A sketchy image from the graphic novel in the works, Gutter Angel. Unfortunately, a recent project for a group at school has convinced me that comic artists just don’t scan in pencils, because IT IS A PAIN IN THE BUTT. So I’ll be inking all my old panels completely before going digital with them. On the other hand, I’ve found viable ways to clean my art up without editing every problematic pixel out by hand.
To your left is Lance, probably not picking up the phone on purpose. To your right is Girl, our pathetic protagonist, living out that adjective nicely. The home furnishings in the story are all supposed have a 50s vibe, the architecture hails from the 70s, the technology is supposed to be reminiscent of the 80s, and the main characters dress like kids from the 90s. In other words, disjointedness is fun!
Also, due to the nature of this sketch, Lance’s right hand has gone mysteriously missing. This is vaguely problematic.
Never marry a poet.
We are empty-handed
fisherpeople, crying out words
into space like hooks,
unable to see or taste
what we have caught.
It’s not romantic!
It’s a reflection in a pond,
it can’t be touched—
your hand goes through
and wavers, wobbles, warps.
The surface breaks
and then re-forms again. smiles.
you are inside it now
cut off from yourself
and translated—
Or poems, what are they? gorgeous
shiny fish, we’ll put you in a lovely tank of arms
and watch you go round and round
each time startled by your brilliance.
We’ll lick you with our words, aware
you, too, have that poem inside
deep where we cannot know it,
the bitter medicine of self.
It does not matter
how many languages you know
or we know.
Words are tinsel
on our plastic-wrap skins.
We label
like a caress, or our caress
labels, we confuse the two,
we are robotic and luminescent.
And marriage! a couple boxes
on a shelf inside a refrigerator,
how it looked so fresh—
almost new-caught and gleaming—
in the store.
No, never marry a poet.
Better—never marry
at all, and avoid
the issue altogether.
Be weightless in the rolling dark.
Know the corners
of the room that you are in.
Never pretend that people
are something you can touch.
This is the anthem
of all our understanding:
you are beautiful
and there is nothing
I can do
Just a little thing.
~
They are not the only thing about myself that I enjoy, but they are the one always visible. Next to others’ hands they are impossibly small and delicate, easy enough to take, cool enough to warm. A girl’s hands. But on their own, when I see them holding my balance to a pole on the train or resting in potential motion at the edge of the table, they appear to me angular and deft. Instruments of muscle and ligament. Hands from a da Vinci sketchbook. A person’s hands.
Right now I am wondering, how do atheists handle it? Is this what is so terrible about complete rationality—not having a God to thank?
Another rough draft: long bus rides and no sleep are clearly essential to poetry. Let it be known here that the bus ride was from DC to Boston, but stopped at Baltimore along the way; the word came out and thus it stays. Later generations will find this an essentially interesting part of my poetic process, to be sure.
written 3/6/12 ~
in the darkness the going-home
is a long one, Baltimore to Boston.
the formless blur of night thick beyond the windows
every sodium light is a dream globe
from a childhood half-alseep
and dreaming still.
I daze forward, unasleep,
so that outside the windows
it is the long ride home from school or church
head pillowed against parent’s car seat
with home an eerie glow and crickets
in the distant future
the darkness hills beyond us
without my second eyes this unfamiliar highway again
is Mockingbird Canyon forever etched
like a shadow in my peripheral vision
every curve the arc of going 50 mph on a 40 mph bump
is El Sobrante Road flickering of yellow reflectors
and broken picket fences, orange and palm trees clotting low
on the hilltops, nothing
in the rearview mirrors. telephone poles
flying armful at us out of the bends like sudden ghosts.
is a bus a form of autonomy or is it another piece of parenting?
a tired driver temporary parent to us all.
I can look at time directly, but
the dark takes memory’s contours when my eye wanders.
one direction or another.
time-space compression is what they call
our increased ability to move from one place to another.
nine hours
I look out the window seeing the familiar shapes
of a thirty-minute drive. I have roads
for veins now, I have hands for clocks
or clocks for my animal deep brain.
any moment now, it seems, I will stumble
out of this cramped carpeted seat
into the arms of dawn at Logan airport
lit by the hot permeating orange and green of gases or else
where my parents, stepping over dogs and beetles,
pushed me soft in the door. the smell of cats and bed.
out of the corners of my eyes home
a place only reached with someone else behind the wheel.
