Willow Trees

It would seem I have been on a nature kick. I have written no less than 3 poems in the past month of an arboreal nature. In my ENGL 397 class I was required to put together a chapbook in which I encase all three of these. This is the second chapbook I have made in the course of my studies but it will not be the last. Next semester, my last semester (oh my, the real world is looming in the near distance) I will be doing an independent study resulting in the creation of a chapbook. But I digress. Below are the arboreal innards of my chapbook

Carnivorous

I saw the Willow droop its leaves
into a cup of tea, frigid and prim
I heard the tea scream at the
intrusion and the tree chuckle
as its fingers soaked up
the constant comment, burnt
umber in color, citrus in taste and
abandoned by its holder:
cozy hands to cup its sides
warm lips to caress its rim
The Willow soaks the dew and I
pluck at its newly infused leaves
the crunch is more sweet
than bitter, more citrus than soil

If I had an Airplane

My knees ache I wonder if
I am getting old
like the last kamikaze leaves of fall
Are my roots brown, my head
green? I leap frog and dive bomb you
I get lost in the air and die
My last mission admittedly a failure
(I missed my target)
Leaves don't have knees and
I would rather be brown bodied suicide
arboreal foliage
than woman with chronic aches
and no airplane

Kamikaze Leaves

                                 Unwanted memories.
They are sad,  the last leaf alone on a tree                                           
brown at the base.
                                a kamikaze leaf that stood no chance and chose to leap,
            that last fragment of arboreal decoration gave its life for its mother
its mother would not return the favor.

               My memories have died

                                                                          they jumped to their death
                and they will rot
                                              until no one remembers to

                                                         mourn them.

The formatting of the final poem is a bit odd within blogger so to see the proper formatting visit the link (click the title).

Huzzah, a poem I say

I love The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, I really do. It is the only poem I was ever forced to read in high school that I enjoyed and half a decade later (oh my, has it been that long since junior year?) I am still in love. My favorite lines from the poem change from time to time, but one that always sticks out in my mind is "I have measured my life with coffee spoons" because it is so very true. Every morning, coffee.

This line has been a source of inspiration for years but I have never been able to really produce a work out of it that I enjoyed. I could not harness the creative potential. Honestly, I think I just didn't have the talent for it yet. Perhaps I do now for I have made another attempt and it has produced Error: Unknown User

I am quite fond of this poem. I was in fact still fond of it over 24 hours after writing it which is a masterful feat in its own as typically I am a doting mother until I realize my poetic offspring have blemishes and like a true Spartan, I toss them over a cliff ne'er to look again. This piece is up to muster so it gets to live. For now. Sometimes it takes me a week or so to lose my sentimental coddling of poetry.

HTML, my secret love

Back in my freshman year of college (which was not so long ago) I took an IT 103 class: generic html, make a website, learn some nonsense about bytes and get overly familiar with Microsoft 2007. Needless to say, it was boring and I hated it.

Flash forward to now, my senior year, and I am in an Electronic Literature class, which requires a website. So I revamped the one I made for IT 103 and discovered my secret, well buried love of HTML.

I've been writing for quite some time--poems, essays, flash, nonfiction, fiction, etc. I made a chapbook and will shortly be making another. This kind of creation is satisfying but familiar. HTML is exotic. I can type seemingly nonsensical code (after all, what is an "a href," really?) and then, after some mystical magical uploading, that code becomes a link, a picture, a table, a button, color, anything really. It is not hard and there are countless books on the subject. Mine was by Kamalajeet Sanghera--a name I know by memory because it is so wonderfully odd. it was tedious at the time and the work I was posting on the web was dull and semi-low brow for me. The topic did not interest me and thus HTML slipped through my hands.

That is different now. Now I know the subtleties of tables and borders set to zero. I know how to bypass the need for templates and create links to nowhere just to be a smart ass. My pictures are links to other pictures which may very well link to a poem. I have embedded video and fiddled with creative commons. I have photo manip'd (however badly) and saw my codings and tags transform from gobbledygook to glory on a screen. I do not know java and am by no means an HTML master (if anything, I am an apprentice--this is as nerdy as I will get, I assure you) but I have rediscovered the glory of learning and creativity--of design and html ingenuity. Throughout my college career (which is rapidly coming to a close) I have lost my wonder. Quite frankly, I am not even sure this mysterious "wonder" survived elementary school. But it has reignited and I am awed by my education. Should someone ask me the one thing I learned in college, the one thing I took away from my four years, it will be recapturing my imagination--even if I had to harness it in HTML.

I am an English major with a minor in history, in love with an art that has a tenuous connection to my field at best. But this is fine, I have the whole world of electronic literature unfurling before me--a new media (well newish anyway) gaining a foothold among those who matter (those mysterious "those" who determine your curricula for instance). Perhaps, my primitive HTML skills will not go to waste.

College, college everywhere

So for my final year of college I am finishing off my mandatory requirements with 1 class I do not like and 2 classes I do like. I also have random electives, but I don't really find any of those interesting.

Anyway, of the 2 I do like one of them is called "Electronic Literature" and I find it to be fascinating. The class text is written in Sanskrit and class time itself is so-so but the projects give me endless entertainment. I have rediscovered my lost love: html. I had forgotten how absurdly pleasing it is to write coding that looks utterly like gobbledygook and turns into colors and text and buttons etc etc. I created a website my freshman year of college for an IT course and have since added an ENGL 344 section. It will be hosting some of my old works as well as some originals. Check it out if you get the chance :)

Have a Mommy Issue? Well Here's a Daddy Tissue.

My mother and I, we have an interesting relationship to say the least. My brother and cousins and friends and insert other sources agree it is because she is jealous of me. I would not go so far as to say she loves me. I am not sure you can love the thing of which you are jealous. She has most definitely hated me from time to time. I have hated her more than that, but I will not go to far into detail. Suffice it to say her weight gain, general aging in appearance and lack of success in life are somehow mostly, if not entirely my fault. Or so she seems to believe.

She has of late taken to trying to repair our relationship. Which, really, just makes things awkward. I do not like her. I have not liked her since I was 5. We have very little in common. As I strolled through my gallery of literary pieces I have constructed I realized a good deal of them are about mothers and daughters and most if not all are negative. It would seem the creative juices that flow through my veins are tainted with my mother. Perhaps we are all tainted by our mothers when we come down the birthing canal. Perhaps they imprint some kind of symbol or design upon our blood cells that marks us.

Anyway. Of the mother stories/poems of woe and misery I have Maternal Caress, Mothers Don't Want Their Jills, 20 Weeks, Premature, The Faces Inside My Coffee Cup, Belly Fruit, and Jack and Jill

Now, granted, most of these are not about my actual mother. All the poems about fathers, however, are about my actual father. My relationship with him is far more complex. I can not boil it down into a simple feeling of dislike. It is rich and has layers. It is miserable and full of treachery but every now and then, the gleam of love shines through the grime of mistreatment and negligence. My father loves me, this I know. I have always known it. I can feel it pulsate from him and it makes me feel so awkward. I do not know if I love him or not. I know I do not dislike him most of the time. But can you love someone who is content to watch neglect and abuse without intervening? Can you love someone who was not present during your childhood for various reasons, none of them good enough and all of them pathetic excuses? I do not know. I know I feel tender toward him sometimes. I know I enjoy his company sometimes. I also know he embarrasses me. It is conflicted and therefore requires the truth. The brutal truth that strips the breath from your lungs and pulls the tears unwillingly from your eyes--that punches you in the gut like only the truth can.

My father has taken up poetry and nonfiction; I have never written a fictionalized version of him, for how can I? How can I fictionalize that which is so deep and multifaceted. No. I must stick to the truth and tell it as it is, not as I would like people to see it. My mother, in her simplest form, is a monster. A maternal monster, but a monster all the same. My father does not have a simplest form. I cannot boil him down or condense him into bouillon cubes. Here is what I have written on my father: Mary J and The Imperfect: Past Continuous.

I have a non-fiction piece that is long and brutal. It started as a tale of my family and morphed into something more about my father. It goes into my mother and my brother, but my father is the only multidimensional character. My mother is a monster, my brother is my psuedo-child (or rather, someone I try to save from his inevitable future) but my father is an unknown. I have never posted it and I don't know if I ever will. For now, this is enough.

We Are Zoo Creatures

My body is in fact defunct. My primordial clay was improperly handled and sent down the assembly line too soon. Perhaps in being born a month early (apparently I was tired of the womb and ready to kick the bucket as I wrapped my umbilical cord around my neck three times)I permanently scarred my chances of having a fully functioning body. All of my organs are fully formed but a few of them seem to malfunction quite a lot of the time--every few days or so.

Oh yes, my organs, how they do hate me.

I have since grown accustomed to not being able to eat without fear of painful intestinal/stomach episode. I have grown accustomed to my joints not lining up properly. I have grown accustomed to my twisted spine.

Or, more accurately, I have grown accustomed to chronic pain. It's odd to hear people six decades older than me complaining of the pains I have now. I fear old age. I fear I will be wheel chair bound. But mostly, I fear the unknown. Some of my ailments have names, like scoliosis. Others do not. For a brief, terrifying summer I believed I had cancer of breast and intestinal natures. Eventually, it was discovered the issue was not cancerous, but quite heretofore unknown. I was sent home, not necessarily living or dying or knowing which of those two labels was more accurate but in a limbo I continue to exist in.

Cancer is terrifying. Everyone has an expiration date but the glory of not knowing how soon or far off it may be is often underestimated. Cancer patients can morbidly watch death approach on a speeding train, BigRig, or whatever vehicle of their choice. Either way, they watch the end approach. I am lucky in that I cannot see mine.

However, when in limbo you have no such comforts of "I eat healthy, live healthy and am not cancerous and therefore will live to be old barring car accident or freak lightning storm". I have: It could be nothing. I could be the next new disease that causes slow, lingering death. It could make me live to be 150. I could die tomorrow.

Limbo is terrible. I now understand why the Pope got rid of it. I wish he could banish it from my body.

And on that happy note, I leave you with Summer Surgeries, a full and far more amusing account of the above ramblings

Once upon a time, or, let's talk about marriage.

I have always wanted to get married. There seems to be some strange correlation with Disney movie childhoods and an extreme desire to get married. I know what my dress will look like, what my daddy daughter dance song will be, who will be involved in the planning and who won't, etc, etc. I never seemed to contemplate the man much which resulted in supreme terror. And this flash fiction piece: Velcro.

For the linkaphobic:

Our father is clutching her, his wrinkled claw of a hand clasped about her forearm declaring this young woman as his own offspring. He's about to hand her off to a man he has deemed acceptable and she has deemed marriage material. If it were a real material rather than a metaphor it would be made out of Velcro. Once the husband-to-be is brushed up against, removing him is a noisy, gruesome affair--what was once a whole is ripped in two and so on. He says he loves her and isn't any of the things on her list of men who cannot be saved, dated or married. And that is all the matters according to our mother, our father, our cousins and all those rather irritating bridesmaid friends who overdid everyone's makeup including my own.

Her dress doesn't look quite right. I haven't been able to pinpoint what it is and while she claims it is the perfect dress we both know it is not. The one she really wanted was $2000 over her budget so I guess she is pretending this dress is really that dress. I know my sister.

Her husband-to-be, my brother-in-law-to-be, is perfectly bland in conversation, occupation and, so I imagine, in bed. I picture their honeymoon and his perfectly bland abs in numerous pictures at the beach. I picture his perfectly dull smile situated right next to hers. I picture them fighting and laughing. I picture her pregnant and him working eighty hours a week to afford the child. My sister does not picture these things.

She is walking down the aisle with a withering man, one foot in front of the other. Her neck is sweating because she let those bimbos convince her to wear her hair down in July instead of up. We all know she has beautiful hair, but one would think pragmatism would override a fifteen minute aesthetic that will be ruined by sweat. I'll put it up for her later. I will resist the urge to shave her head or yank out all the hairs one by one.

My sister does not love the man she is walking toward. I can see it in the white knuckles around the bouquet. She is going to be white knuckles for the rest of her life if she does not flee. She needs to drop the flowers, drop the pretense and run for the hills before I kill her with my eyes. Our father is lifting her veil. Our mother is crying. I and her ditsy bridesmaid friends are surrounding her. The priest is talking.

They are kissing. There are some rings. There is a limo.

We arrive to the reception and the rest of her life with a man she does not love but has wed because he is made of marriage material and our father likes him. He is bland enough for our family's conservative overtones. I hate that conservative overtone, but he meshes just fine. He seems to enjoy it but I can never tell. He is so boring his face is a mask of tranquility. And 5 o'clock shadow.

Our father is dancing with her now. They are swaying to some song she picked out that has no real meaning to her because she does not love the man she married nor anyone else--she wed because it is expected of her, not for any real want on her part. Her husband, my now brother-in-law, is behind me, waiting for his turn to dance with her. I can smell his unexceptional cologne. I can sense his heat waving off of him onto my bare shoulders as he passes me, stalking toward my sister.

I can see the Velcro waving like conquering heroes from his fingertips.



I have since given more contemplation to the kind of man I would like to marry and as such am highly relieved I am no longer dating the man I was dating for many, many years. It was hard and terrifying and I cried far more than I should have. Now? I am absurdly happy that I will not be strangled by velco but perhaps will have a chance at the "Once upon a time" and the "Happily ever after" that I grew up believing.

Or maybe I'll have a few cats and half empty bottles of cheap wine. Perhaps even the kind you buy in a box. We shall just have to wait and see ;)

Waxing Religion

Something that never ceases to amaze me about the various religious sects is their unfailing arrogance that they are right and everyone else is wrong. Perhaps that is what is most off putting about it to me. I believe in God and that is about as far as I get. But that is not enough for any holier than thou branch of Christianity I have talked with. It is all or nothing and I feel judged in their presence. But who are they to judge? I may not know the Bible by heart but I do know Mathews 7 "Judge not, that ye be not judged". My father can quote that passage. An irony really, seeing as he is the biggest atheist I know. Comes from his Catholic upbringing I guess.

Sometimes I wish Dad had just let Granddad raise me Catholic. It was Catholic or nothing doe Dad's side of the family but my father refused. I think it's much easier ot understand and have faith, etc etc when you are raised with it from day one. Instead I got bible stories for children as a toddler, years of nothing, bible study at a 7/8 year old, then years of nothing since granddad found out and oh my the bible study class wasn't Catholic based, and then finally I started church hoping with my friends. Pentecostal, non-denominational, Baptist, Catholic (for over a year, Mass every Saturday Youth Group every Sunday), etc. It has done nothing but confuse me and dismay me. Everybody seems to hate everybody else. They preach love and acceptance, but only for the familiar. The "other" is "wrong" and they are "right". The other is to be saved and if not savable to be shunned.

I do have a wonderful friend who is Christian and answers all my questions as best she can without judging and she agrees with a lot of the things I see and say about Christian churches these days. She says things are changing, a revolution, a movement away from condemning. Hopefully, someday soon I can walk into a church and not feel accusatory glares from the church goers.

Hopefully someday I can feel God's presence because I have never felt it, but it's not for lack of trying. I believe in Him, but sometimes I don't think He believes in me.

And on that happy note, I leave you with The Tang of an Unearned Trophy, a poem about the self absorbed generation I was born into who are so certain of their importance because of all the trophies and medals they were given. We are called the trophy generation for a reason. Once again, text is below for the linkaphobic.

When people die
of creamy rum ruminations
I look up at my unearned
regalia
staring at my
lazy young heart
which will beat
or
will break
and
shed flavors.
Ribbons of organs will fall into ruins of sky because
we are adults,
not scruffy, just buying diamonds and
insurance:
a jar of pennies,
an adolescent girl
bracing to crash against malignancy
or faith
But we're only trash;
Toxic bottles.
We bob to music
And pull others in--
to our constructed superiority.
We don't deserve but
that is trivial
in the face of rum ruminations, penny jar insurance and
death.
The flavors are magnificent.

Introductions

Perhaps, being incredibly strange, I should introduce myself how I want to be perceived by those few who pass through and may or may not return:

I absolutely hate uncompounded sentences (unless used for emphasis, of course). I require commas and semicolons, dashes and ellipses. I require improper grammar when poetic and ironic--and most especially when I am accused of being an overly pompous and correct English major. I require abuse of sentence lengths that seem to never end, yet give pause for breath--they keep you guessing; will it ever be over?

It is too soon to be certain.

I have been told, as I gave brief entertainment to above, that I am strange. Most strange in fact. And with that I give you this:

Women have been taught that, for us, the earth is flat, and that if we venture out, we will fall off the edge. ~Author Unknown

Which must needs be followed by:

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman. ~Virginia Woolf

Oh Virginia. There is no Santa Clause.

Moving on. I have been pondering on the subject of Virginia for various reasons and as such have written a poem. For those who are linkaphobic enjoy in-blog text.

One Day, Onward

And perhaps one day I too
will see the ocean from all sides
unfettered and un-atlas'd

But for now I will wallow
and wait
And begin my sentences with conjunctions
Just to irritate the English Elite
Who notice such things

Perhaps I too will escape
the confines of lined paper
And textbooks and pencils
Perhaps I will sojourn
and learn the value of grass and
sky and
rain that cleanses more than dirt—
more than the soul

Perhaps,
I will learn the feel
of postcards and the taste
of stamps
Perhaps,
I am who I am

Or I am who I will become
Perhaps I am not so defined
like the parchment I write upon
or the lines I write between
Perhaps I will always end with
prepositions

Maybe I am freer than I think
And my cage is my own making
My key my own will
To fly. To escape. To run.
With wind twined around
my fingers
And sky filling the void in
my chest

A bedroom with no walls
A house wherever I call home
Be it lined paper or untamed sea

I will find my heart there
Waiting, as always, for me


My friend, who has recently graduated, promptly attempted to force me into a road trip upon reading the above poem. Unfortunately, I am still tethered to a University and must remain in a non-road-trip-state for the next year or twenty (oh life, how non-conducive to travel you are).

Perhaps this is the beginning of something fantastic.