these lines
they wander
in but
one direction
ours
-
-
"When I was born I became the visible corner of a folded map.
The map has more than one route. More than one destination. The map that is the unfolding self is not exactly leading anywhere. The arrow that says YOU ARE HERE is your first coordinate. There is a lot you can’t change when you are a kid. But you can pack for the journey…"Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal by Jeanette Winterson -
Infrastructure in Motion: Go Your Own Road by Erik Johansson
-
A Human Sleeps
By night we wander the same paths
Walk up/down creaking stairs
to get cupfuls of water/coffee/gin
from the tap/pot/bar
*Remember to swallow multi-colored pills*
Fling two socks across untidy floors
Turn the lights on/off
just to check that they’re working
(they are)
*Set an alarm for half-past/quarter-before eight am*
Jump/slide/fall/crash into a horizontal bed
with pillows not quite exactly right
Toss ourselves over
(again and again)
Say a prayer/or don’t
Count sheep until four-hundred/a thousand/more
(leap back to where they were before)
Close our eyes to pretend we’re sleeping
*convince ourselves that we actually are*
Bodies still for minutes/hours/lifetimes
in the semi-darkness
Somehow we all arrive
to that place where
time does not exist anymore
Difference lays asleep, simply dreaming amongst
all the details
-
Here’s to the death for the death isn’t me
it’s the green kite I lost in the sky
one thousand years ago
and all the vowels I never
made
the way my palms felt on
bare wood and my
heavy knees
telephone calls at a
payphone with a soiled
yellow directory, my
cold finger pressing over
the names
the hour in which I fled
from myself
a gingerbread cake
cooked too long
a minute backwards
a crossed out line
a circled “F”
And here’s to the death for the death is me
because I’ve finally realized
I am. alive.
-
Nature’s Finger Paints
There swirled the colors
of everything and nothing
red, green, gray, lilac, light blue
and all the shades not ever defined.
-
So she took her smallest pinky
and dipped it into a whorl of
darkness, of fir trees, of the deep sea
and it was emerald green.
-
A robin nestled among the stand of fir trees
his breast heaving with the steady pant
of flight, of passion, of life-blood;
of red. Her cheeks flushed in elation.
-
and her thumb found the drop of
happiness to add to the canvas,
warm sand and the flash of summer lightning
in a straight yellow curve.
-
She found a hue that was freckled with
the shades of the night and cirrus clouds
and goldfish and cold,wet stone
that she gave to us for skin.
-
Then it began to snow
erasing all the newfound colors
in a ray of gleaming white
Nature’s nightmare and dream.
-
do you ever feel like you’re living 1,000 lives? not in a schizophrenic way, but like all at once? like you’re just so alive that there’s no possible way you can only be one person?
-
READ BOOKS WITH ME (the overly ambitious summer reading list 2k12)
-Ghostwritten by David Mitchell
-If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
-The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
-The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
-Great House and Man Walks into a Room by Nicole Krauss
-The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
-Left-handed by Jonathan Galassi
-A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
-Our lady of the Ruins by Traci Brimhall
-The Cloud Corporation by Timothy Donnelly
-Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson
-The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories by Bruno Schulz
-A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
-The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk
-Beloved by Toni Morrison
-The Poisonwood Bible by Barabara Kingsolver
-A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit
-The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
-Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood
-Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
-The Foundation by Isaac Asimov
-The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
-Netherland by Joseph O’Neill
-The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
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favorite child? ahahah not at all
- mother: PS - the other great thing about that picture is how perfect your teeth look -ahhhhhh. Othodontist's dream.
- me: i am such an orthodontists dream, yay retainers no idea why alden doesn't wear his
- mother: Ah well - you two are polar opposites. He spent the weekend doing yardwork here (unasked). I would fall over in a dead swoon if I saw you out there doing yard improvements unbidden.
- me: but i wear my retainer
- mother: Yes---- it's the little things!
-
after they plant new grass
someone always runs
around the sod followed by
a roll of yellow caution tape,
then at dawn we walk past
and our hands yearn
to grasp that plastic danger or
perhaps it’s just something to hold
