strange days

I stay awake and check my spaces,
calculate the time in other places
Online at two, just to say hi;
And then, within ten minutes, goodbye
Reassess new relationships
Rate and order online friendships
Sit in silence under sunsets and dream
Take my sister out for ice-cream
Drive in peak traffic with a potpourri
of sixteen-year-olds in the car with me;
Sprawl in dingy corners of strange spots
watch relatives down tequila shots.

Play lonesome music and sing along
(if any of you ever needs a song -
music to cry to, come to me quick!
my collection's wistful, eclectic)
Moan at all the crushing misery
of not being as good as I wish to be
Things that cause me acute distress
which will not let me be unless
I manage to fix my poor design
But in the end I have to resign
myself to failure and agree
that this architecture's not for me.

So then I come to blogger again
when I'm in pain, and then again when
everything just gets too overwhelming
and the only way to fix it is the writing
Voilà, and therapy newfound that
seems to work rather better than cat.

gratitude

Do you read poetry, he asked me; and I,
I shook my head no and watched the dark eyes
lose all interest and look elsewhere
Saw the faint contempt and the little sneer
And I went to a fair, a book-fair, a place where
they sold books from anywhen and everywhere
and I bought there a Whitman in memory of a movie
and there I bought nine little anthologies
Elliot Shelley Keats Poe Dickinson
Hardy Wilde Emerson Tennyson
Dover Thrift Editions, emphasis on thrift
And I went home and I read Nevermore and thought
I think I prefer the short stories to verse
And I put the little volumes by the untouched Whitman
and I forgot them as I forgot the boy

And I read my fiction and loved it and unaware
I loved all the poetry that came my way
Nonsense and sense verse in Lear, Carroll, Blyton,
Kipling, Dickens, good old R.L. Stevenson
All the quotes people quoted and put in my head
in spite of myself, and I still never saw
And instead I wrote free verse steeped in loneliness
And fancied myself a poetess



I will read you poetry, he promised, and quoted
things that set my mind tripping along
unexpected paths and forgotten alleys
voyages of invention and discovery
I would quote poetry, I thought
Till now, I saw no poetry in poetry, no romance
And still I do not see beyond someone's personal story
But I would quote it, just the better
To express myself

Came home one afternoon, sprawled on the floor
Sat herself down with the Anthology;
Complete, Unabridged, Annotated, tooled in leather
of one Mister William Shakespeare
The sonnets! she cooed, and read aloud
The ones that were her favourites.
I would know poetry, I thought
Understand the art not to quote it
but to know if I love it or hate it

Do you like poetry, he asked me, for I,
I love it, and know it and quote it, do you?
No, I said, for I cannot tell
The bad poetry from the good, but I would
I would love poetry, I thought
Read it to know what I'm missing, so tried
I picked up the Eliot and read Prufrock and cried
At the yellow fog and the Michelangelo
And wondered why I'd never read poetry before

penis envy

I wish I were a boy, she sighed
Flagrantly, emphatically so
With balls to scratch, the balls to do it
That pompous male ego

To walk around topless in the heat
Without seeming too extreme
Oh, to be able to pee standing up
Has always been a dream

With no restrictions on where I go
Or how late I stay out at night
The confidence to think that I'm all that
Exploit that superior might

To grunt and snort and hack and spit
To keep all emotion at bay
To have best friends one happens to hug
Then accuses of being gay

Oh, easy camaraderie I envy
That all men seem to share
Even as they sit silent in the sun
Doing little more than stare
at every passing girl, and that
is another thing I'll enjoy
Being the one who's handing out
Those glances that irk and annoy

The sense of humour that you'll find
In boys the whole world over
That tendency to be scatalogical
To be proud of it, moreover

Oh, to be a boy, she sighed
Just for a little while
And to be hailed as "one of the guys"
Wallow in their mad lifestyle

and one for archy

Now, it seems a provable point
That one who truly wishes to
Could concoct rather passable poetry
(use a rhyme generator; or two)

I wonder why it is, then
that no matter how hard I try
every attempt at meaningful verse
seems to go quite promptly awry

There was once a time, I remember
when I considered it uncommon neat
to be able to choose two words
groovy last syllables repeat!

I wrote poems on sunsets and rainbows
and on mean girls; and every time,
when I got to the end of the alternate
sentences, poof! there was the rhyme

Then came teen angst; fear of pretension
dread of hypocrisy (though, if truth be told,
teen angst; teen acne; burning desire for truth,
only came along when I was twenty years old)

See, I’d never been fond of reading poetry
Found it threw my mind into disarray
Found I paid more attention to the patterns
than on what it was attempting to say

Was truly unfortunate, that of late
I have fallen unwitting prey
To the lure of vers libre à la Whitman
Face it, free verse rather made my day

So perhaps the fact is that it’s easier to be
Either flippant, fun, structured; or earnest and free
For I find all too often, for a feeling strong enough
The attempt at rhyme robs the thought of clarity

I guess that’s what separates the masters from the rest
The ability to weave all aspects into one
And though I won’t ever go the whole hog, at least
I can say I tried both little ways, and have done


*thanks to these three people.
for inspirations and such :)

P.S. The next one promises to scan better.

only in my world

don't we love above all others, the people who manage to read our signals the way we want them read?

if it makes you feel better

Tell yourself whatever you need to that will drive away your pain. Trivialise every emotion, belittle every involvement, second guess every action. Invent for yourself all the little lies you can; call the grapes sour; predict disaster. Use past tense verbs and words like useless, never, anyway. Foresee failure, turn the future inside out; see in it all the misery you would care to. Make the past a rosy, perfect memory; put it on a shelf before it’s opened; before the splinter shatter smash. Anticipate, precipitate, weave worst-case scenarios. See the worst in the might-have-been; and see the escape in your heartbreak.
Is the day prettier now?