Thursday, August 13, 2009

Working On It


So I'm writing a poem every day since I got here. Here are two that Brette said were alright.

August 9, 2009

What Is Still Literal

“…[T]his vast, dispersed network of interdependent data systems has lately come to be referred to by an appropriately atmospheric—and vaporous—metaphor: the cloud.” – The New York Times Magazine

“Divorced people who suffer depression and complain of cognitive dysfunction may be expressing the loss of their external memory systems.” – Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

The cloud doesn’t hold a character,
a bit or byte of memory, a digital image.

The cloud is an animal, a cetacean
that grieves and the sky

its own whale-road, full of forgiveness.
The cloud is a Ford Fairlane

with a long hood and fins.
The cloud is also a loon, loud

wings flapping against the water.
The cloud isn’t a metaphor

but a shape that doesn’t hold
like the loss of joint memory, a place

where we held externally our interiors.
The cloud is not a place

to store data or one to decide
who remembers what. It is a cloud.


August 10, 2009

The Tipping Point

Skitter is too cacophonous a word
to transmit the sound
of a mouse sliding down the plastic
trash bin’s side. S doesn’t
soften the k to reflect the futility
of four paws up and then back,
the hasty upshot and heavy
return to bottom. If gravity is
relative to size, then we can all know
how the mouse feels coming down.
We can all understand
the convergence of some dozen ants
that creep in, defying gravity,
to take out the mouse.

Friday, July 31, 2009

Fictional Account

It was then that she decided that she would throw herself into the task of writing jokes. She scanned the room looking for traces of humor in otherwise humorless faces. She began to wonder if she should see a movie instead. Maybe laughter begets humor. Her throat felt tender, as if she were getting sick, but she knew she wasn’t. What if the joke was on her?

She simultaneously wanted company but was hiding from it. Anonymity is its own kind of company. She knew one thing. It was convenient to blame things on other people even as she realized it was really her fault. Precisely because she felt she hadn’t needed them any longer, or that even their presence had become somehow irritating, they had realized they did not need her. Now that the illusion was dispensed with, she desired them more than ever.

Wasn’t that all just a round-about way of saying: you only desire what you can’t have? Knowing her inclination toward the sentimental, she decided: of course it was. She struck this from her notes and began again. It was then that she decided that she would throw herself into the task of writing jokes.

Thursday, July 30, 2009

So Instead


Yes, I have again taken to posting to this many-times-dead blog. Have done much here and yet I am still waiting for the productive season of separation from this hole. Time for lodging.

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

The Summer of the Bike


This is the summer of the bike. Let me clarify: the bike I never ride. Figuratively, the baby blue Ross Europa that stands precariously in the hallway of my building is a symbol. When I think of symbolism, I now think of reading my friend's AP students' essays about The Heart of Darkness and how they don't really understand symbolism. Symbolism is, in some ways, too easy. The bike, it seems, is a place for me to project my other should haves. Because it's there in my hallway. Every time I come into my building. Every time I go to smoke a cigarette in the back patio. I moved it a little the other day. Just because I felt like it must be in the way of my neighbor, the guy who watches out for the building and takes out the trash. I imagine if he had a problem with it, he'd say so. But the guilt I felt thinking about that is only a symptom of the guilt I feel for only riding my bike twice. It had cobwebs between the handlebars when I moved it.

Is it a coincidence that symptom and symbol sound so similar? I can't truly sum up the season with this bike. But as each day passes where I haven't done what I intended to do, it gets easier to identify the malaise with this bike or to allow the bike to stand for what the weeks could have been. It could have been the summer where Brooklyn was shrinking. On my bike, things could have gotten smaller. Yet things seem to have gotten bigger. Clouds have begun looming more heavily. Another rainy day without taking a ride.

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Friday, July 3, 2009

Thursday, July 2, 2009

Summer Reading















The list so far...

The Screwtape Letters
The Stranger
A Long Way Gone
Ishmael
The Alchemist
The Whole Five Feet
The Known World
Evil in Modern Thought
The Girl With The Pearl Earring