February 2009
1 post
A letter to my new business (aka me)
Dear new business,
I know you feel like you’re having a rough time these past couple months. Things seem really swell, and you’re up up up, until suddenly a needle appears, and bursts your little bubble, and crash! Back down to earth again.
Or lower.
Because after the impact—smack!—you realize that while things were feeling so wonderfully amazing and fresh and new, that was probably because you...
October 2007
1 post
intentional.
i am a compass needle pointing true north.
i am not alone,
but i do not fall into you before me,—
though our knees knit together
like zippers’ teeth—
preferring
delicious unknowing, ecstatic unbeing
preferring to forever
teeter
on the brink.
i am a compass needle pointing north.
trustier and truer than any star.
guide yourself by me, but know
i will not follow.
i have...
September 2007
1 post
spoken and then transcribed
Reading A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver, struck by her use of the word ‘prosody’ and her description of how meter and rhyme were an integral part of our forebears’ lives, and felt natural to them, even if they seem stilted to us. And while I had spent the last 15 minutes reciting to myself all the poems I know by heart, I read that line of hers and decided to write a poem by...
August 2007
5 posts
loose-leaf legal, 07-28-2007
Written on a sheet of yellow legal pad loose-leaf, sitting in the car at the Safeway by my new apartment. I had been thinking as I did my errands around the house and driving around and I just felt like the words were going to spill out of me, splash out into the world and evaporate (or drown me) if I didn’t get them out. (I didn’t end up going into Safeway, either. I went home after...
partay, 11-11-2003
When I wrote this for my old online journaly thing (www.spiffariffic.com), I was 20 years old… and still a wallflower in social settings beyond just the handful of people I knew well. Yes, believe it or not, I was a wallflower. And I made a conscious choice to change into the socially fearless person you know today.
I’ve always been described as friendly, gregarious, ebullient…...
“I have a hard time noticing that time passes, and I don’t know where the...”
– me, age 19 (self-description on my old online journal)
January 01, 2003
untitled, 08-11-2007
for me the wind blows gentle,
a fragile kiss from someone i know i’ll soon
be missing:
sad and lovely, honey and salt
and i’m not ready to let it go.
i smile through tears, cast shadows on
the asphalt;
i glow with sunlight and sparklers;
i soak in the shhh of distant oceans in
the rustle of
trees that nod and bow over the hum
of radiators and
the squeals of little...
on responsibility - 06-28-2007
Transcribed from journal on Sunday, Aug 5, 2007. (Mostly) written in journal on the plane to Austria, June 28, 2007. Everything after the sentence beginning “There is tremendous freedom…” was added on transcription. I’d like to write about this topic again in the future, from a more personal standpoint, but for now this is how it came out. I catch a glimpse of the...
July 2007
2 posts
hidden seams
how long
have i borrowed
your wit, your wisdom
your words?
i can’t tell where
your thoughts begin
and mine
bleed into them.
but does it matter?
i take you in
wholesale, piecemeal.
you become mine—
and i become me.
july 30, 2007
humidity
moist.
the most—singular—way
to describe
summer
in this state.
see sleepy roads—narrow,
bumpy—drip
with oak & maple trees; tulip
poplars, magnolias rustle
and lean in
close.
see sunlight splash through come-hither
leaves; puddle and pool
in the gutter,
sloshing.
and always—you can never
forget—to fail to
escape
the prick
of frustrated sweat.
it’s how you know...
June 2007
1 post
9th grade, 93%, "almost perfect"
An excerpt from a completely half-assed essay I wrote in 9th grade English class, a poetry explication for Robert Frost’s inimitable “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” I actually wrote the 5-page paper in only a couple of hours, and then went back and futzed it up for the “draft” we had to turn in. Despite the fact that it was billed as a 10 hour project, and I pulled it...
May 2007
10 posts
thank you, mr roosevelt
Sitting here at the Perk, trying to tease out a singular thought from all the stuff that’s been swirling in my head lately. The din is getting to me a little bit, making it a bit hard to think. Maybe I need to go someplace silent.
I’ve been thinking a lot about fear lately. Fear, pain, and imagination: the holy trifecta of paralysis. Fear of fear, fear of pain, and the absolutely...
a sense of scale, 11-30-2006
I don’t see the stars in New York. There are beautiful sunsets, and city lights, and headlights, but no stars. Just an inky orange-black miasma. Sky muck. And yet, I’ve grown to love it here.
I could wax clichéd about the hustle and bustle, the endless variety of things, the local color—but these are not the stuff of dreams, at least not my dreams. I am no country bumpkin. I didn’t even like...
birthday reflections
In the past, the schedule of the last two weeks would have crippled me. But instead of being crippled, I’ve handled it with grace. This is such a turnaround for me over the past few years.
Oh, there was stress. I was harried, and hurried, and sleep-deprived, over-caffeinated, and faced with coauthors who couldn’t pull their own weight, and situations which went from looking not so...
sidewalk chalk, pt 2
Addendum to sidewalk chalk…
We knew in our hearts that it was silly to act so serious, just like we knew when we were pretending to speak German that it was all a lie. But it was a lie we embraced and decided to forget. We knew in our hearts that everyone else knew about the lie, too—but by consensus, we kept quiet, and enjoyed the charade.
I think, now, that our unspoken agreement—and...
the cycle continues, 05-23-04
It’s funny how some aspects of childhood are universal. The cute, childish misunderstandings of the adult world; the strange and fickle alliances; the games kids play.
It’s even funnier how little things change once we become adults.
I’m put in mind of the game that everyone has played at the doctor’s office, or the supermarket, or the department store, or school. The...
sidewalk chalk
Watching a little boy draw a race track on the sidewalk with chalk, outside my office window: a box outlined with “start” in the middle in a stereotypically cute, childish scrawl… a line that goes out from the start box and midway changes from pink to white because his pink sidewalk chalk died.
It made me quite happy to see.
I remember when we were kids, how important it...
facets, faucets - 03-13-02
The sink in the kitchen struck me this evening.
Slowly you begin to feel at home, to know and embrace the floor, the wall of windows, the faults in the plaster, the beige walls, the sound of the air conditioners. They insinuate themselves as home, become a part of you. Then you stand at the sink to wash an apple or wet a paper towel and it hits you: that sink is foreign. That faucet is not...
love letters to the future and the past
I spend so much time in my head, thinking things that never manage to escape the confines of my inner monologue. It may not be that these thoughts, ephemeral as they are, have any intrinsic worth—or even that they can survive out here in the air.
But they’re my mental landscape, they’re where I live, they make up what is my life… and if I hope to remember my life, I should...
untitled poem, 01-04-04
we do not touch. we do not speak
except of pleasantries and mundanities,
nothing that
could be construed
in any way
to mean anything.
we play an elaborate game, he and i,
we pretend
never did we touch, never did
we kiss;
never did we avow our love.
but we did.
making old what is new
Have you ever noticed that a skillfully aged, antiqued, fatigued, burned in, or otherwise manipulated photo seems to have more emotional weight than an unretouched one?
Some photographers go to great lengths to accurately create the effect of shooting with a $15 toy camera with a plastic lens. Others buy low-quality, $100 specialty lenses mounted on a kind of spring, so they can create...