Monday is for poetry

At least for the rest of this semester.

Today is a better day for perspective and poetry than I've had in a while. I know exactly why, though I don't have time to explore it just at the moment. Class starts soon, and I don't want to spend my whole evening in the computer lab.

Looking at Permeable (which may soon be retitled; right now I'm thinking Needle, since ambiguous noun/verbs are so much fun), I'm still dissatisfied but I can see why and have some idea what to do about it. The pacing at the start of the third stanza is all wrong; it needs more time to build to the frenetic rush of overwhelming, incomprehensible syllables. Not sure how to do that just yet, but I've got some ideas and I'm working on it.

Stanza 4 is powerful as a single line, but almost too cliched to stand alone, so I brought back a bit I'd cut from 3 and hopefully smoothed that transition a bit:

______
They’re only words, after all.
Exhaustion, indecision, insomnia;
the writers’ disease.

So I carve deep into their pathogen
until only pathos remains,
______

And I need something more there, another transition before I'm ready for cats and poetry. I know the gist of it; I need a source of perspective, something to motivate the sudden shift in tone. What's changed? More to the point, why has it changed? Did I learn something, find some peace, just give up? I think it's a little of all of that, and something more as well, something that maybe I don't understand yet and won't be able to write until I do. I think fear has something to do with it, and also maybe authority.

I just love that word. Authority. It needs its own poem. It's a hinge-point in my half-finished villanelle History Of Now. "...and then learned to say we. // It's you with my authority..." I can't remember the rest of that stanza (which means it's probably not worth keeping in its current state), but the basic idea is exploring the sentence "We are." Perhaps it would be worth breaking it out of its meter and seeing how far it could go.

Another little snatch of verse, started yesterday and will likely have some pals to travel with by the end of the week:

______
Promised myself something new,
certain stumbling blocks left behind.
Soft skin against my palms is still
soft skin, and there's nothing new about
my ink-stained hands. Stumbling
to my knees again, salty taste of spring.
Shallow, maybe, but there's so many
uses for skin.
______

Too much repetition right now, and not elegant enough to be a theme, but it feels like it has plenty of room to grow.

(updated version, for Laura)

Permeable

When I was five my mother called
old women to lift my shirt and say
german measles,
though the doctor only said measles
with a needle in my arm.

There were so many:
Penicillin in my hip and a dead leg
for three days, no bananas for fifteen years,
no cats and a bottle of benadryl in every room
with a k on top, and so saying
pediatrician
was easier than saying hero.

They saved me
from pneumonia, strep throat, asthma, chronic
sinusitis; pneumonia again, blood in my lungs, tuberculosis
tests (like everything else, so many needles in my arm);
ear infection, throat infection, lung infection: idiopathic;
pneumonia again, and every other winter a week in bed,
doctors' orders, pill bottles lined up and I speak
pseudoephedrine, diphenhydramine, acetaminophen, sertraline,
until the words come easily; depersonalization, anxiety,
suicidal ideation, comorbid major depression.

They’re only words, after all.

But when I carve deep into their pathogen
only pathos remains.
It tells me to gather up bananas,
cats and poetry,
laugh at the pollen on my grave.


(What do you think? I'm worried that in cutting so much I might have lost what little narrative thread I started with, but I'm not sure I liked what I started with all that much. In truth I'm too grumpy and guarded for poetry today, but I had to have something for class tonight.)

Winter for One

Crass commercial hearts tell me
I've got fourteen days to find love,
just a couple more weeks
or it's another year I spent alone.

I'm trying to tune it out
listen to my self, listen to the rain
and remember that March
is for the fishes who swim upstream, down.
But sunshowers seem miles away

and this cold, dripping rain
trip-trap trapping,
your talk, talk talking
is falling on deaf ears.

I wriggle harder, but it only cuts my mouth:
February's got its hooks in me.

needles

pathos -> pathogen

when i was five my mother called
old women to lift my shirt and say
german measles
though the doctor only said measles
with a needle in my arm
there were so many:
tetanus locks your jaw after
being pierced by rusty metal
and is prevented by
being pierced by shiny steel

penicillin in my hip and a dead leg
for three days, no bananas for fifteen years
no cats and a bottle of benadryl in every room
with a k on top, and so saying
pediatrician
was easier than saying hero

they saved me
from pneumonia, strep throat, blood in my lungs, asthma, chronic
sinusitis, pneumonia again, we thought it was consumption
tuberculosis tests by broken pathogen
like everything else
a needle in my arm
ear infection, throat infection, lung infection: idiopathic
pneumonia again, and every other winter a week in bed
doctors' orders, pill bottles lined up and I speak
pseudoephedrine, diphenhydramine, loratidine, acetaminophen,
depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, insomnia
the writers' disease
Enough.

If I have to choose, I'll take
rusty metal
and gather up bananas
cats and poetry,
laugh at the pollen on my grave.

Miracle Metaphor

Okay, I've been stumbling around this same thing from several different directions for more than a month, but I have more I want to write out and commit to (virtual) memory. My gender poem as it stands now:
__________

Virgo

her hands are cold and sore

this is a weak metaphor
but she doesn't have much use for beauty
small hands, soft and round
make small miracles, milk with honey
turn back, water that had been wine
they aren't mine, but will be

temperance
is always drawn a woman

but daddy, i'm missing you
couldn't give me your time
couldn't give me a y, but i
don't know what to do
in a woman's skin

but miss you
and wish for a man
___________

Okay, so who and what is this? Virgo is the virgin, but she's also the eternal mother. Her Sumerian name was something to do with some fertility goddess or another, and that makes sense with her being all about practicality and caretaking and abundance, but after the Romans got ahold of her she somehow turned back into a virgin. Stupid Romans. When you make your symbols contradict basic biology they can't and won't stand the test of time. Really, who takes Zeus seriously anymore? The occasional inversion I can handle, and paradox is great, but a god who's petty and insecure as the worst man I've ever met is no kind of god. (Maybe Zeus can be my symbol for Ben? Abstraction helps me deal and work my way back to a place of contentment and compassion, so this needs further consideration.) But the Romans screwed Hestia over something fierce. She was flame and security and a safe place to rest, a nice union of what I usually perceive as earth and fire, but they wrapped her up in shame for female sexuality, and now she's missing her flame. Her hands have gotten cold. I resented the hell out of my mom for what I perceived as her promiscuity and the way it destroyed my nice, safe family, but if I'm honest with myself I know that's not the whole story. She was Mother to me, but she was just a woman to her, and she was clumsily stumbling toward happiness like all the rest of us. Unfortunately for all of us, she had two young children she kept tripping over along the way.

So, Virgo. My mom is a virgo, incidentally, and as far as I recall I don't have a single planet in my whole chart that's in virgo or any other earth sign for that matter. But it's just a metaphor, not divination, so that part can actually be kinda useful. Those particular hands will never be mine; I've got two of my own and I need to learn to use them. (And, really, you should see them fly across this keyboard right now. Let it never be said that in all my dreaminess I haven't learned to do at least a couple things with dexterity and grace.) But we learn by modeling, and I've tried to be my mother since I was an infant because that's just what children do.

It was a revelation to begin to see temperance as one of my potential strengths instead of a stumbling block and a weakness. As an adolescent I had a tendency to overindulge in just about anything I didn't set up as totally taboo, but I was an adolescent. That's what adolescence is about. The fact that I have a tendency to drink just a bit more often than I should, but only a bit and very rarely more in one sitting than is wise, is a testament to the fact that I am growing up, if a bit more slowly than I had expected of myself. I'm learning to do things in moderation, to balance head and heart, to keep one foot on the ground and one in the moving stream, remember to carry around a pitcher of water so I can nourish myself in lean times. Oh, I never posted that desert piece here. It's not so good, but it relates to the water bearer/water and emotions as nourishment theme.
______________

desert blues

wasting through dry desert days
aching for somethin green
coyote lurking, showin his ribs,
fear and hunger makin him mean,
and the sand in his eyes
sun on his neck
dust in the air

haven't heard the rain all year

the desert is makin me lean, makin me lean
got me missin things i aint even seen
waves on the shore, wet sand in my toes
green trees and forest, lord only knows
how this desert is makin me lean

yucca's got roots go a mile deep
'cause it knows the sand keeps shifting
and time can break any hard dry stone
does me no good, i keep on drifting
with this sand in my eyes
sun on my neck
dust in my hair

haven't heard the rain all year

and the desert is makin me lean, makin me lean
got me missin things i aint even seen
waves on the shore, wet sand in my toes
green trees and forest, lord only knows
how this desert is makin me lean
______________

Silly and sentimental, but not a bad first draft expression of this idea. I think it might do me good to work through the nourishment aspect of each of the elements. I've noticed today I've been cooking and eating, writing and reading my own words, and I feel very pleasantly full in a couple different ways. (For anyone who didn't catch that one: words, intellect, and communication get filed under air.)

Back to Virgo: Temperance is an excellent symbol of self-actualized, balanced femininity, and it would be helpful for me to learn to play nicely with her. David helped with that, good little water-bearer he is, always wrapping his emotions up in something seemingly cognitive and unrelated, but soothing all the same. That suits Jacob pretty well too, now that I think about it, though his wrappers tend to be a bit more visual or tactile and less talky. *smirk* Capricorn, fish that insists on pretending it's a mountain goat. It's a restrictive lens, but it sure is working at the moment.

But we move away from temperance pretty quickly, because even thought it's complex and multifaceted, I haven't managed to internalize much of it yet. We still haven't gotten to first or even second person, because to do that I've always had to invoke something masculine. And what's everyone's favorite masculine archetype? Daddy's home! Do we squeal and rush into his arms or hide in our rooms because he doles out the real punishments? Oh, you know better than to fall for that false dichotomy; it's both at once, of course, but on top of that he's not actually here. He didn't give me his y chromosome, or an explanation for his absence, or even enough closeness to ever really feel comfortable calling anyone Daddy, just Father (much to his consternation) and, much later, Dad. And what is female without male? You can't have a continuum with just a single point, and I like dichotomies, like moving back and forth across a spectrum and reveling in the rainbow between.

Why, hello there Iris. You'd make a pretty good Temperance yourself, with those wings and the water pitcher, and who needs to know it's Styx water and not something a little softer. Talked to your sisters lately? Poor harpies got a bad rap, getting all mixed up with the sirens, although they haven't been treated all that fairly themselves. Fierce women aren't well liked, whether their fierceness is couched in flame or wind. But we like them well enough when they're all pretty and colorful. You keep on keepin on, Iris, but I gotta admit I still resent you just a hair. What happens when you grow up and those colors fade?

small miracles

I've got to get this down before I forget: in my gender poem (arguably untitled so far), I had considered "small hands, soft and round // make small miracles, milk and honey" to be the weakest image and in need of tinkering. I've consider home and hearth, which are alliterative and monosyllabic but otherwise out of keeping with the general sound. I chatted with Laura tonight about how milk and honey are ambiguous as symbols of domesticity, but they invoke "female" from a frame semantics perspective fairly effectively, milk with the whole mammary thing and bees being rather matriarchal. I was pondering this on the drive home, then thinking about how Blake chooses his closed-case words very carefully, arguably more for their phonetic than semantic properties, and it hit me:

small hands, soft and round
make small miracles, milk with honey

so I get the assonance of the /I/ and invoke a personal frame that likely won't read for 99% of my audience, but is perfectly in keeping with that stanza. My mom used to make us "spiced milk" on special occasions (read: when she was affable and in the mood to be affectionate). Basically she would add some spices to milk, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and the like, heat it to a nice warm-drink temperature and stir in a spoonful of honey. I'm still of the opinion that this is one of the most delicious, soothing drinks in the history of the world and totally trumps even a good chai latte. And yet I almost never make it for myself.

It's not mine, but it will be.

**Edited @2:45 to add what seems like genius right now, but might be total crap by light of day: Hestia! It's the perfect title. I mean, sure, it's my mom and it's temperance and it's me learning to cook and clean for me instead of all the men in my life, but, really, it's totally the goddess of home and hearth! Oooo, or maybe even Vesta, from after she's been further corrupted by the Romans and less immediately understood to be all about keeping folks warm.

Today has poem pieces

To make sure no one worries too much, I think I should preface this with a disclaimer: this isn't my usual confessional voice, though it sounds an awful lot like it. I've been thinking a lot on gender roles lately, and this is more the product of my musings in general than any specific personal perspective. So, read and enjoy, but don't concern yourself too much with what exactly this means for me. I'm not too sure myself just yet.

her hands are cold and sore

this is a weak metaphor
but she doesn't have much use for beauty
small hands, soft and round
make small miracles, milk and honey
turn back, water that had been wine
they aren't mine, but will be

temperance
is always drawn a woman

but daddy, i'm missing you
couldn't give me your time
couldn't give me a y, but i
don't know what to do
in a woman's skin

but miss you
and wish for a man


**edited to reflect midday tinkering

In which my temper gets me in trouble, again.

Bad, bad, bad day yesterday, followed by the worst night I've had in a long time, and then my first ever hangover this morning. I'm mixed up and hurt and angry, completely unsure if I've been taken advantage of, or if I'm being an inconsiderate asshole myself. It's probably both, and I have no idea what to do about it.

I'm trying to recenter myself by any means I can, because I know I make crappy decisions when I feel like this. Watching the snow is helping. It's hilariously out of keeping with the weather, but I've been trying to clean up a poem I started a couple weeks ago. It's out of step with the snow, maybe, but crushingly appropriate to my mood.


Dandelion in December

You're too pale, you know,
spindly and awkward on a bent stalk.
Trying too hard, that's what,
like you're trying too hard.
The grass is so young.
Youth out of season
is bright smooth green,
not your pale sad yellow,

but there's nothing else blooming
for miles.

Collapsing rooms

The way I deal with extreme emotional unrest is to compartmentalize. I suppose this is still a fairly new coping mechanism for me; it’s hard to say for sure, because I wasn’t entirely conscious of it at first, but I think I started a couple years ago. When I feel something that’s simply too much to take, I put it out of my mind during the day, when I’m out with people or when anything needs to get done. And then, when my responsibilities are taken care of and I’m alone, I let myself wallow in whatever anxiety or hurt I’ve been putting out of mind, give myself free reign to cry and sulk and generally be a big, blubbery mess. Overall, it seems to be a pretty good strategy. These past couple years I’ve been able to keep up with my practical responsibilities without totally cutting myself off from my emotions when things get rough. It seems to have broken my previous cycle of oscillating between irrational, purely emotional decision-making and total emotional shutdown and denial. Which is good, because neither of those ever worked that well, and this new system seems to have worked for a while. Except right now, it isn’t.

I’m not entirely sure what’s going on with me. After more than four years of therapy largely focused on being aware of and honest with myself, that’s a strange and unpleasant thing to realize. I’ve had trouble putting my anger and hurt away for a while now, and worse, a lot of the time I can’t seem to fully feel anything when I’m alone and it’s safe to feel. Or, maybe, I’m afraid to feel any of it? I’m not sure. Which is in and of itself scary and anxiety-provoking. I’d gotten very used to being clear on what I was feeling and what I wanted, even if I couldn’t always do anything about either of them. I’m incredibly anxious right now, almost fearful, but I can’t say what about. It’s almost like there’s too much that I don’t want to feel, and I’m afraid of it on this peripheral, pre-conscious level, so I don’t quite feel the full impact of it but instead there’s this incredible stress of keeping it at bay.

And those times when I do feel it are really, really bad. Maybe it’s the build up of setting it aside for too long, but that hasn’t been an entirely conscious choice here lately. I’m being far too abstract for this to be clear. An example: right now, I’m sitting in a cafe full of quiet, studious people enjoying a peaceful afternoon. And I feel, on the whole, pretty good. I’m chatting intermittently with a friend on Facebook, and when he asks how I am, I surprise myself with how much sincerely positive stuff there is to say about my life right now. But a moment later, I look across the room and think about how many times David and I sat on that couch over there, sharing chamomile tea, and then I have to clamp down on that thought, and I can feel something huge and awful just on the periphery of my awareness.

And all of that sounds like good, effective compartmentalizing, but I’m not consciously choosing any of it, and I’m afraid to face that big, awful chunk of unprocessed emotion even when I’m in a good situation for it. It’s snuck up on me a couple times, and I haven’t coped well. This isn’t the usual melancholy that’s embarrassing and undignified but ultimately just part of life, the sort of thing I secretly get a kick out of. It’s… overwhelming and terrifying. I want to sort through it and analyze it here, but I can’t even begin because I haven’t faced up to enough of it to know what’s there. It’s way too much for me right now, and I don’t know yet how I’m going to deal with it.

On a completely unrelated note: I promised an updated version of that last poem, and though I’m still not quite satisfied with it, it’s much closer to done.


An Inquiry into the Basic Nature of Fluids –
Water Flowing Apart

I wanted to know if water
scooped from a stream
knows what it’s lost or
does it just feel
smaller
diminished, not divided
is it content to fill a space
or does it remember the flow

you won’t speak of it
these rivers beneath our skin
yours are gears and keys and bits of wire,
so very clever,
but they will never flow

like water that is poured
a measure in your glass, in mine,
and I will always wonder
do they know each other
sitting side by side

you have brought me more
poured out until
water, which can’t remember
how it came to be,
knows it is
full
to the brim

but still you insist
a watchmaker’s wasted hauling water

the drops between us,
sips and spills,
must be the loneliest of all

Hey, look, I still have a blog!

...And a year and a half later, I decide to come back to it.

I got a comment notification email a couple days ago from someone I've never met, and I have absolutely no idea how she found me, but it was encouraging and uplifting and just the nudge I needed to un-abandon my blog. (Thanks, Toyah. I was confused but very touched, and I'm glad this all is worth something to someone other than me.) I'd already been thinking lately about the sort of things I usually write here, my motivations for self-examination and sharing, and wondering whether or not to come back and post some more.

I hesitated to come back, because, well, blogs are kinda silly, "for people who like to hear themselves type" as David once put it. But I've got all these thoughts, and writing them all out can only help me sort through them and maybe figure out the things I've been missing, so why not? I'm not going to start anything too big tonight, seeing as it's already pretty late, but I've got (eek!) a poem that I've been staring at for a couple hours now, and I thought I'd share. It's really just a rough draft, but I couldn't say right now if anything more will come of it any time soon. This all just sort of fell out of my head as is, and I've got a strong suspicion I won't like it much in the morning and will feel the need to pick it to pieces, but for the moment, I have no idea what to do to improve it. So:

An Inquiry into the Basic Nature of Fluids –
Water Flowing Apart

I wanted to know if water
scooped from a stream
knows what it’s lost
or does it just feel
smaller
diminished, not divided
content to fill a space
no memory of the flow

when the pitcher is poured
and you and I each hold a glass
do they know each other
sitting side by side

you could have taught me or
together we might have learned
but you’re so certain
a watchmaker’s wasted hauling water

water measured in sips and spills
must be the loneliest of all

Success!

My metered poetry project seems to be paying off, and more quickly than I'd expected. I had some lines knocking aorund in my head in the shower last night that just wouldn't go away until I wrote them down. Looking at them today, they're actually not half bad. The part that thrills me, though, is how it wasn't just easy to write something - it was imperative. It's been several years since I really felt that way, that these ideas were inside me and wouldn't be still until I had put them on paper. I've been telling myself for years that it was just a dry spell, and the longer it went on the less I believed that.

I've stitched them together a bit, and though this is by no means a completed work, I'm so excited by this that I can't help but share with anyone who will listen (which includes you, captive virtual audience).


address

I am
Head and heart tied tail-to-tail
swimming circles in brackish water
Quickly lost to apprehension
missing the words to bring you closer
Siren in a desert land
and desperate for a sailor

(In this piece, I play both damsel
and dragon – stop me
if you’ve heard this one.)


I am
Heart and head tied tail-to-tail
fighting for direction,
sinking fast
Easy prey for a knowing smile
and hawk-bright eyes with sober intent
Holding on with both hands tight
to pleasures I know weren’t meant to last.

(I woke without an ounce of guilt,
only the weight of his hand on my breast.)

You may want to avert your eyes

Remember what I said a few months back about irregular line breaks? Yeah. This is your advance warning.

I went far too long without writng anything, and now the task of coming up with words worth saying seems incredibly daunting. So I set myself a project: metered poetry. A series of 13 rhondels, specifically, hoping that such a clearly defined structure would help me work through the troubling lack of inspiration. Anyhow, it's proving to be slow, agonizing work, and I'm trying to find ways to encourage and goad myself. So, here's the first of the set, and the only I've actually completed so far.

Shame

So why do you keep telling me
How small, how helpless I’ve become?
My plans and hopes, all come undone
With all the things I’d tried to be.
A graceless fall to bended knee
And so much more before I’m done.
So why do you keep telling me
How small, how hopeless I’ve become?

The precious past where I’d come from,
A loadstone weight for dragging me.
So trapped inside I didn’t see
My weapons lost, your battles won,
How small, how helpless I’ve become.