Running

[I like the metaphor in the bottom stanzas. Maybe I'll actually do something with that...]

Seriously?
Seriously?
You know,
I think you exist to disappoint me.
And you do it so well--you make me even turn my annoyance inward
because of how, in the end, I really do give a shit.
I don't think I would care if there were
nothing
else for me to care about, if I had something to occupy my seconds
other than weeks of blurred uncertainty and ticking clocks and glossy advertisements.

I am ready to race,
but I've been stuck behind gates like a penned-up racehorse
just staring at the track
when I want to show everyone watching--
show myself--
that I can be faster than any of them.

Imagine the moment before the gunshot
stretched out
into a day, a week, a month,
almost a year, now, with nothing but
the silence of the waiting thinning the atmosphere.

But, in the air, in the wind that's stirring around my pacing feet,
lifting though the stagnation, beginning a change,
I can feel that this is the run of a lifetime--
in the slam of that bullet I can feel that
this will be something good.

Press '1' for English.

[Sweat the big stuff, guys. Sweat the big stuff. This goes with my SAu post "Press 4 for hypocrisy."]

"Press 1 for English.
 Press 2 if you were annoyed by that request.
 Press 3 if you feel like They should have to press the button.
 Press 4 if you think that Someone should do Something about this.
 Press 5 if pressing 1 is unAmerican.
 Press 6 if that prompt threatens your way of life.
 Press 7 if you were angry enough to complain to someone else about it.
 Press 8 if you haven't wondered if bigotry, school shootings, illiteracy, pollution, and corruption weren't better things to complain about.
 Press 9 for hypocrisy."

A burnt offering.

[FYI, the song I reference is "The Poison" by Alkaline Trio. Of course.]

I keep quoting that song
like it's the answer to all life's questions.
  (Where are my keys? Has the milk gone bad? Why am I still here?)
"Nothing has changed
but now I fight with words."
I do. Sometimes I wrestle with them
and try to pin them down lifeless in the dust,
and sometimes I try to catch them but
they flit away like pixies
laughing at me all the while.
They trick me,
lying down on the ground for me to
trample over them--the dead ones, the ones that
aren't mine, and just when I think I understand
and try to take them for myself
they swim away like that fish:
the one that got away.
I can see it now;
the smoke rising up
from my life, in the future,
burning up in a holocaust to these words,
these stubborn and intangible and beautiful damn words
that I don't think will ever trust me.

Lullaby

[random freewrite. I wanted to try and capture a mood, so I was thinking back to going to sleep in Malden.]

I remember laying in my bed, and how it never got pitch dark.
The big picture window looked out to the pavement,
where the streetlights would color the slats on the blinds
yellow twilight gold.
It always was twilight after sunset,
with a sky the color of dried up rose petals, washed in brown and orange
and the smoke of the smog masquerading as clouds between the stars
that punctured though the electric curtain,
three or four if I was lucky.
The massive pine tree was outside the other window,
dancing like an old man shuffling to a dusty waltz
while squirrels the size of crows the size of pigeons jumped back and forth
like they were playing jumprope in between the needles--
and the wind would keep blowing,
sometimes from the east like three kings carrying gifts of trash, car exhaust,
and air dipped in the salty Atlantic.
A car would go by my house like a blanket
and I would fall asleep watching the pine tree sway.

Leonid

We went over villanelles in poetry (which I absolutely love; look them up on wikipedia) and I wrote one about watching the Leonid meteor shower that happened a while back. The first version is an actual villanelle, and the second is where I rewrote it in free verse.

Leonid (A)

Dragged like cigarette ashes through
the constellations, a comet flies--
the light-pricked heavens painted blue.

I set my alarm clock for three
AM to wake and watch (or at least try)
the light-pricked heavens painted blue.

The soft cool nighttime did not flee
as the comets did; all but one died,
dragged like cigarette ashes through.

The chill, still air spelled peace to me
when I saw it drawing slowly by
the light-pricked heavens painted blue.

It first slid in behind a tree--
a gold-red ember in the sky--
dragged like cigarette ashes through.

An hour later I could still see
the comet, printed on my eyes,
dragged like cigarette ashes through
the light-pricked heavens painted blue.


Leonid (B)

I got up at 4 AM, setting my alarm clock to
nudge me from my bed, and
I put on socks and a sweatshirt--deliberately,
half dreaming and half wide awake.
Things seemed surreal in that dark morning
before the light, and as I slid open the glass
one spark shot through the inky blue night
between the pinprick constellations.
Then another. And I stood and watched,
with no concept of time or cold or impatience,
I stood and watched a gold-red ember fall screaming into
our atmosphere. To us,
it slid in slowly
and dragged itself above the treeline
like the lit end of a cigarette,
glowing past the houses and trees and roads.
In the 4 AM dark, I stood and watched.

L

New Year's Revolution.

[The following is a less cynical companion to my SAu post of the same title. I am, after all, a closet optimist.]

finallyfinallyfinally
Change.
what I've always run from, what I've always blamed.
but now, suddenly!
the closed door seems like an open one
into a room full of light and sound and truth--
and isn't that what I've been looking for all along?
But now.
Change.
I can feel it coming and it feels
beautiful.

L