home, house, remember

Home again, home again, jiggity-jig.

Someone asked me a few days ago if this place where I am right now (Missouri) feels like home. I made the mistake of saying, "Yeah, well... the house is home, but not the city." She corrected me and said, "I would think that the people are the home and the house is just a place." That's true, too. In the Hallmark card kind of way, the idea that "home is where the heart is" translates into "home is where there are living and breathing people who love you." I think too, however, that the atmosphere of "home" can depend--even if slightly--on the setting. Not just the people, but the place.

Of course, I could be entirely wrong here. Maybe I'm slipping into the mindset of a 21st century American (capitalist) who believes comfort to be a right. I don't want to be this person. I think I must have been wrong before... but, I'm still stuck with my original notion that this house, where I will remain for the next two months and where my parents live, feels like home. The little material possessions that accompanied me through my growings-up -- such as the paper-mache butterfly that I shaped and painted in the second grade, the cow-skin drums that we've had since leaving Kenya and that we've used as coffee-tables throughout, the black upright piano I learned to play on -- these things carry memories, just as people carry memories.

A professor of mine from this semester suggested that, for humans, one of our greatest fears is that we will reach a point in life when no one else remembers what we remember. What seems meaningful to us will, eventually, find no place in the memories and minds of those surrounding us. Now, I don't know to what extent I believe this as reality; but, it certainly sounds like a reasonable fear for many people. With regard to the objects, such as those that I named above, these items seem full of data -- memories, records of their creation, use, and location --; yet, who, but the living being that enabled those memories and instances into being, will retell and remember those things.

Believers have got it a little easier, I think. Two reasons: we can recognize that this life lasts only a short time and that our stuff won't go with us into eternity with Jesus; and also, though everyone around us may forget who we were and what we did or what accompanied us through various situations, Jesus-God-the Holy Spirit all remember and were there beside us. He probably remembers better than we do... and doesn't compare who we become with who we were -- not like the world does, anyway. Hmmm...

sigh. dinner time?

Hey--
Thanks so much for your prayers, friends. I actually just finished my last exam for the season... big sigh of relief. Give me an hour or so and my vision will also return to normal (right now, it will focus only on things close-up... too much concentrated staring, I guess).

If you want to check out the winners and honorable mentions for the 2006 Current poetry and fiction contest, here's the web-address:

http://ecurrent.com

Check it out. I've got one in the poetry honorable mentions... but, you may have already read it before (if you're a long-time reader here). Also, there's one about someone who had diabetes (the 1st place poem).

Anyway, I've gotta go get some more poetry into shape for another competition... woohoo!

Prayer... please? Impossible amount of work...

sestina please

I've discovered that I, too, can have political ideas...

On that note, here's a first-draft sestina that I wrote:

TOWN HALL MEETING (Not Quite Black Jack)

My dear community members: please consider the family
tonight, as you look in your mirrors.
Don’t let it shock you, if your veins
look bluer than any you’ve ever witnessed,
or if you think someone has inscribed you with lines
from your knee-caps, up and across your shoulder blades.

Far worse might you otherwise appear–in the event of... a roller blade
accident, for example. They afflict thousands of families
each year. So, please, cease blaming your misshapenness on our simple lines.
You who complain that even your mirrors
shun you, know this. I spoke with witness after scarred witness
who, upon trying to bleed out their lines, incurred an even darker tone to their veins.

Therefore, those here who resort to comparing the lengths, colors and bulges of veins,
whose rumors about how many blades
it would take to slice through your thickest and avoid the city witnesses,
you contaminate our sense of what the true family
stands for. I’ve already spoken with your mirrors,
who after tonight will resume their responsibility of keeping you in line.

In light of my previous statement, all in-line
skates will be cast into the tributary veins
of our river as soon as the merchants meet with their mirrors
to discuss an efficient removal of all blades
from skates. We will recognize this event as the Day of the Reunification of the Family.
Everyone is urged to attend as a witness.

I suggest also, that you witness
to those neighbors of yours, who have tried erasing the lines
in front of their houses in order to justify both their negligence of the family
and their compulsive fascination with letting their veins
run dry. We may, eventually, have to take blades
to their mirrors.

Understand: our innocent mirrors
will undergo a swift, but deliberate mutilation–at the witness
of their owners–unless you prevent those neighbor blade-
hoarders from scrubbing–or even cutting–away at their lines.
The potentiality of a mirror massacre should explain our preventative actions: your veins,
after tonight, ought remind you of the importance of the family.

As you go, please remember to leave your blades
in the bins outside and to take quick note of the color of your veins
before you go home to find a changed reflection in your mirrors.

i shan't have frustrated them

I daresay, things will get better. I wrote a poem about ghosts last night and contemplated turning it in to my class for workshop, but decided that they might think I was a very superstitious person or something... and, you know, ghosts and souls and hearts and cries... those are all things that people try to avoid writing / talking about in the university setting nowadays.

My veins look bluer today than I think they ever have. I shocked myself looking in the mirror moments ago when I thought someone had markered blue lines all over me... I think it may have something to do with my recent diabetic emergencies. Gee, for a blog entitled "Diabetic Accessories," I certainly don't write about diabetes much. Or if I do, I'm not aware.

Supposedly, my poetry is honest. "It seems very honest," a classmate wrote on the last poem we talked about. I can't say that I believe him exactly on this last one he read, however. Most people felt intimidated by the poem to the point where they decided it couldn't be critiqued adequately by them: they felt unread as far as crazy poems like that one were concerned.

Hmmph. I feel unread. So, can that be accurately considered honest? I don't think so. Of course, the true test would be to search inside my *heart (there we go again with the heart-thing) and look at what my motives were for giving them that poem. I think they may not have been "honest" motives... unless you consider the poet writing the poem in a state of confusion and giving that mass of structured confusion to a bunch of readers in hopes of confusing them. I guess the real word is frustration. Not so much confusion as frustration. And I don't think I really did want to frustrate or confuse them, as much as I wanted to challenge their perception of poetry. I may have done that, I may not have... but I didn't want to intimidate them. It was a fun poem, I thought... This post, I feel, is rather self-indulgent. I'm sorry... perhaps I shan't post it. Shan't I? (What an archaic sounding word. Honest.)

I think I felt like Emily Dickinson there for a second...

BUT GHOSTS! DEFY

Anyone, anyone--I, too, will sing about ghosts
as they sing about ghosts.
She taught me to run into studies exclaiming their song:
"Theologians don't know nothing about my soul."
She taught me to forge into the black ahead; to take lightly those words
a friend may have said--though they have felt like gold
and proverb. She said, they will dissolve.
She first introduced me to bleating guitars,
whose piercing cry like a sheep's
sounds our hearts' internal long. These cries, too,
dissolve. She taught me to whisper of ghosts in all things.

In all things, ghosts. All feelings may dissolve,
but ghosts! defy.


I want to forget that a paper awaits my final touch (hours of final touches are waited for)... and I also need to write a poem for class. My poem-database is abundant, yet I want something new that seems my own. The pressure to produce quality work overwhelms my sense of what quality work exactly is. Everything seems sub-par now (just as that ridiculous paper is sub-par)...

a sad lack of information

Yes, I just wrote some words about a poem by Laura Kasischke for a paper... The poem, "Childhood Friend," was addressed (surprisingly) to a deceased "Childhood Friend," yet very little of the poem dealt with the friend directly. This great lack of information actually made the poem even more saddening; for the speaker of the poem starts by asking:

Is this what you asked for, my friend, these words, is this
what you meant when you said--?

Gulp. What did she say? Why don't we know? How could the speaker ask this question and publish it without ever finishing the question or telling us its answer? The speaker's loss--her probable regret--now becomes the reader's loss and unfulfilled desire to know that which cannot be known: the question, the answer, and the "Childhood Friend" who is left out of much of the poem. This is a downright difficult thing to think about. Can that be what you'd call regret?

I thought I had little to say about that poem.

of pentecostal clouds - a sonnet

Hey... I was supposed to write a sonnet about ONE primary image for an exercise. And today is Pentecost!

Happy Pentecost Everyone! Here's the first draft of my poem...


OF CLOUDS ( On Pentecost)

Joan loves the weather-channel cloud forecasts.
Thick cumulonimbus clouds puff gray storms,
Will take light white when baby sky contrasts,
Lack definition to assume gross forms.

Gray clouds make breaks: topple-overs and leaks.
Of Ghosts in clouds, of Spirit clouds she sings.
Joan wraps herself inside white fleece; her cheeks
Flush pink. Clouds–pretty for the promised ring.

Clouds: often ag`ed men with smokey eyes,
Alert lions with taut bellies beside
The fearless sparrow, which through thunder flies.
In di`amonds, these shifting shapes collide.

They’ll smell of sweetened grass before the storm.
She’ll share of how her clouds with flames conform.

forlorn and washed out

Supposedly, I look "a little forlorn." At least, I appeared that way when a friend of mine caught sight of me the other day. I think I must also look a little washed out--the pale clothes I've been wearing almost match my pigment. And yesterday, after the food-begging drunk said, "Your skin is fine... Mmm, if I could just have some of that..." about my friend's Indian beauty, he looked at me, shook his head and said, "And, I just don't know about your skin. Yours is just... I just... I don't know." He didn't want to be rude.

But, really, that's not what I started out to say. I started to say that I think I was lost for a little while--my writing self. I hadn't been writing in my real journal--or, as I called it yesterday, my true journal; which is to say, I hadn't been writing to communicate with the one who really cares about all of the jittery thoughts and mistakes that I write down when I try to sort through things. I may have been writing to please, to try to melt my style into words that my peers and my teacher would "get"... into something that made sense. There's an expectation to make sense in writing, and sometimes... I fear it... because I don't expect that I'll ever really attain it. And that, I suppose, is another place where I need to rely on God. Faith, baby.

"You met me at a very strange time in my life."

-Tyler Durden says this to Marla Singer in "Fight Club" at one point (the end, the end). I put the whole movie on play this afternoon in order to remember WORD-FOR-WORD what this line said... I knew I could have skipped to the end, but I put it on and carried out my activities in the foreground. The reason? Well, when my friend told me that I had seemed "forlorn," I wanted to write him back to say that he had met me at a very strange time in my life. This wouldn't have been true. Probably because I wouldn't consider now to be a particularly strange time, and also because I met this person much longer ago than now. Tense might be the problem here. Instead, I told him--in these vague terms--that there could have been a number of reasons, depending on which day he saw me... and that I've been frustrated with myself much this semester.

Such was the truth, and maybe I really had lost myself (reminds me of another "Fight Club" line... remember when Lou is pounding Tyler's face in the basement of his bar???--"Okay, okay, I got it. ...****! I lost it!"). Maybe I had forgotten that Jesus is all I really need--the only one whose opinion really matters. I think I had forgotten this; I think I am remembering this.

Aside from that, someone I know doesn't believe in editing. This kind of idea freaks me out.