Symphony

How did I NOT KNOW that Sarah Brightman released a new album 10 months ago?  Stupid, stupid, stupid!  Just found "Fleur du Mal" on YouTube, and I was like, wait a minute . . . a Sarah song I don't know?

Hope.

I am usually a pretty passive person, but I realized that passivity left me baffled and astonished almost four years ago.

Do you really know the people you associate with? It's not courteous to discuss, but it needs to be discussed. Now more than ever. Disclaim yourself and go for broke. I wrote a now open letter to my family. Perhaps one similar can serve you well in the upcoming weeks:

Hi friends. It was about this time four years ago, after the fact, that I discovered I didn't really know my family as well as I thought I did.

Getting "into it" is unnecessary, and at best, verbose and raunchy, but I wanted to subtlely yet firmly convey how I felt about the upcoming election.

I don't know if I can go so far as to ask if you "regret" your decisions, but it has been a rough road. Just please, consider long and hard what this country means to you and how we desperately need change. Really look deep . . . beyond appearances, beyond religious affiliation, beyond the pomp, and ask who will really lead us toward the potential we had all along. Too many people are dying. Just one death was too much. The answer to lives lost is not more lives lost.

Registered affiliation aside, please just consider.

Fondly,
D.

By Fire

When I pass an abandoned, half-wrecked building,

on a waste-lot, in winter, the smell of the cold

rot decides me - I am not going

to rot. I will not lie down in the ground

with the cauliflower and the eggshell mushroom,

and grow a fungus out of my stomach

steady as a foetus, my face sluicing off of me,

my Calvinist lips blooming little

broccolis, my hair growing,

my nails growing into curls of horn, so there is

always movement in my grave. If the worm

were God, let it lope, slowly, through my flesh, if its

loping were music. But I was near, when ferment

moved, in its swerving tunnels, through my father,

nightly, I have had it with that,

I am going to burn, I am going to pour my

body out as fire, as fierce

pain not felt I am leaving. The hair

will fizzle around my roasting scalp, with a

head of garlic in my pocket I am going out.

And I know what happens in the fire closet,

when the elbow tendons shrink in the heat, and I

want it to happen - I want, dead, to

pull up my hands in fists, I want

to go out as a pugilist.

~Sharon Olds, "Blood, Tin, Straw"

{"Bonfire" by Howlitzer, Deviantart}

I Go Back to October 2008

So I don't think I've ever used this journal as a forum for my more legitimate creative exploits, but I wanted to reflect on going to a reading and book signing of Sharon Olds. She's one of my favourite poets, and in 2006 I staged several of her poems for my senior project.

I did share with her, however, that I only got a "D" on it. A reflection, perhaps, of my work, but not hers.

Details aside, because it's way past my work night bedtime, I wanted to write a poem back since she wrote so many that have moved me. Copyright me, et cetera, et cetera.

"I Go Back to October 2008"


You looked nothing like the headshot I knew
The angles of your face sharply pronounced and enunciated;
A brunette at most in grey scale.
Perhaps it's the you at what you feel is your best - or more likely,
The first picture stumbled upon and distributed.

“She must be older by now,” I thought aloud to my
reluctant escort. “Her parents were married in 1937.”
What an odd detail to know of a complete stranger.

Even with a picture in the back of my mind,
I did not expect the you at the podium.
Feelings don't have faces.
These words, although fleshed in my own
creative fancy, now had a voice, a shell, a host.

You are still in grey scale,
But have none of your former sharpness.
Your cheekbones soft, complacent where once
They were gaunt with your long kept silence.

The release has seen you well.

SWF LF BFF

{And if you aren't down with the abbreviations, it's "Single White Female Looking for Best Friend Forever". This has been a public service announcement.}

For some time I have felt a particular void in my life. It is that of a best friend. I've only ever really had one in my semi-adult to adult life, and that would be Brandi, my love from high school. Being apart is a definite strain; I wouldn't say she isn't my best friend anymore, but she is my best friend from a different time, and really, a different me. I had a sister, (see "Impermanence") but she is long gone, it would seem.

(As a side note related to this theme, Bethany Facebook "friend-ed" me last week, of all things. If you go back to "Impermanence", she is someone I thought I never would hear from again. It's a little hokey and impersonal, Facebook, that is, but I'll take it. I obviously from my writing adore(d) this woman and will take what I can get.)

BUT. In a long winded-y fashion . . .

I have long felt a void. A void that I so wish would be filled with a best friend. That one gal you can call at all hours of the night (and vice versa), that will drop everything to hang (and vv), that you can relate to to a "T". I haven't had that since . . . 2004. And . . . it shows. I'm a crotchety hermit who feasts on the little social interaction I do have, and now that my schedule is changing I won't even see the few people I treasure as often as I would like. SO. Here goes my personal ad:

SWF LF BFF

24 yr old curly haired 5'4'' average if not

squishy W LF BFF 2 hang w/ & heart

unconditionally. Been burnt in past but still

hopeful 4 future. Loves jokes

& unforgetable mayhem. Please contact
poster soon before hermitude sets in. Serious apps
only. Don't go breakin my heart.

{And here I am, being awkward even in a two-minute sketch. I can't even hug my legs properly because I realized I couldn't after I had already drawn my pantaloons. Flailing arms, ho!}

Tobias!

Look at him in his basket! I get excited whenever he uses it; it's a nice place for him to lounge when Ed and I are hogging/"using" the bed. Squeee! (Lighting's a little off cause it's beddy time, but lookit'im! Sappy moment: I was just telling him as he snuggled up to me how much I love and appreciate him being in my life. I nearly got teary-eyed. He really is such a goddarn joy.