In case you are heading out to the skating rink and can't remember your favorite song to request.
whoever posted this on youtube says: "ayeee, lol, yall are funny. some of things this song reminds you of is crazy. everybody leave a comment a say what this song reminds you of, or what you were doing with your life when this song was..."
memories have been creeping in, seeping in lately, and with gusto and obviously the poems come too.
After thanksgiving
Remember the roses pruned to look like trees replaced by junipers--no less prickly?
No. This is not a question
although my memories often pose themselves as such,
their voices lifting upward at the end like a branch, inquisitive and question
able to throw us all into a reflection pool of quaking and quandry (query and qwerty).
The scene of it a well tended English garden...
Or! thanksgiving leftovers wrapped in a gentle tent of aluminun foil
O! those roses, arms akimbo
resting fleshy flower fists on their healing
hips protecting their thorny fingertips bossing gently--don't touch they say,
offering blossoms to noses not hands
And I grabbed anyway at that soft flesh,
shaking hands and came away clenching blood
red petals good for tossing to the winds of the transatlantic trade route.
A young chemist said to me today "the right mix of practicality and theatricality"
I blew my nose into the scarf
around my neck like an unkempt gypsy
asked do you dance and he said no but I could, then accidentally composed a poem, myself.
~~~~
I do not deal well with fear, really none of us do.
And my insides shrink and it is like looking into the sun.
Make no mistake: loneliness does kill. It has killed other people but it hasn't killed me.
It hasn't even killed the best parts of me and I have been living with it for a long time, much longer than anyone I thought I would. But I am afraid of it nonetheless. And I am sure it is some kind of default or if not de facto then at least a fault. I am afraid it will always find me, catch me off guard and I won't remember any of my skills or tricks for dealing with it.
I don't remember even though I know
how to write about it, sing along about it, use it, embrace it, wrestle it to the ground,
drive it to my mother's house and leave it at her front porch, where it belongs, where it came from...
and leave a note that says you taught this to me, brought this to me but it is not good for me so please keep it here and never send it back to me.
Or mail it to my father's mailbox with a letter enclosed that says I learned this
from the absence we both abhor and regret and it is no longer useful so just take it from me, put it in storage with my other childhood toys: the nightmares I clung to even when you worked so hard to fend them off with your snores as I slept against your chest, and the security blankets and cigarettes and road trips and death defying fights you never knew about.
Or perhaps I shouldn't write to my parents, I should just write loneliness and tell it off:
Dear loneliness you are not the only feeling. You are not even the biggest feeling, you are just the scariest and I refuse to keep you; you cannot stay here. Do your best but I will win this game.
Even as I write a cat stranger keeps me company, pretending to explore the frozen fallen leaves but really he is watching me. Then I scratch my knuckle on the cement stair chair beneath me when I shifted my weight so my butt will freeze evenly. it hurt but not that bad and then bled all over everything.
Yesterday was awful. Most of the days have been awful because the difficult conversations keep coming also.
Tom Lombardo, my sixth grade teacher gave me this advice: Look to the horizon.
Look up, he told me. Elevating your head sparks or triggers a response in your body and you will feel better. So its not just a Native American suggestion--it is scientific.
A tilt of the head means everything, changes everything.
~~~~
Love seems like a reason to hold off on the apocalypse, don't you think?
Just hold on one more day to one more lovely memory of an apocalypse like thing that didn't ruin us:
The Leonid meteor shower comes once a year, do you know about this? Apparently a comet left behind some of itself and every year we pass through the mess as we orbit the sun.
We went out one year to watch it over the tops of a Gravenstein apple orchard. We looked up over and past the horizon and waited for all those shooting stars. It wasn't the end of the world but it marks an explosion of meaning. It wasn't an answer to any of our questions but I still remember it fondly--as though maybe one day I will ask a question and the answer will come to me like that memory or in it perhaps. I'm not sure what we were meant to see that night. We hoped for stars to fall like rain (which would have been a terrifying thing and would have caused a hole in the very bubbling layers that protect this crazy blue-green orbiting rock we call home) because we had imagined such a thing was possible. Those were days when anything was possible (life and death by fireball!) and that fact too is woven into the skies of the memory... all that possibility we didn't know we imagined. Perhaps we were disappointed, but the memory is so comforting in spite of that because, I tell myself, we went.
We hoped for more than we saw and I am still hoping one day to see it: the Leonid or some other miracle like that in the middle of the night.
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