cracked

helloooooo..... I'm imagining myself yelling this into a cave, where all I hear in return are my own echoes . . . .


echoes . . .


. .

echoes .


unhuh. i've written personal statement after personal statement, but have barely finished a draft... and the one that i have finished is all but finished... it's a mess, i believe.

this may or may not be good shape to be in--considering God's ways.

can he ever make our paths straight!

can he ever make beauty from ashes!

can he ever and does he ever!

exclamation point.

i hope you are well, all of you. please pray for me--especially these next four days as i try to wrap things up over here with grad. school applications. first mention of it on here, i think... sometimes i like to keep things on the DL.

p.s. my students crack me up.

The Mistress of Chicken

also, i just found this really hilarious (even if only to me) account of a dream in my journal from November 3rd. for your own amusement (or not):

"I dreamed about a mistress or a matron at the King's palace. She was really quite poor and useless, but the King allowed her to sit and leech off his wealth. They called her the Mistress (or Matron, or Lady--I can't remember) of Chicken, because it seemed all she ate was chicken. She slept in a hammock that had been crocheted or made of macramé, so she looked like a cocoon in her sleep. After she stopped eating--for she did--she never seemed to move. And moths wrapped her body tight in gossamer film. Tight as a baby--until she just stopped (living)."

Weird, huh? And kind of creepy.

with a word

I'm not exactly sure of all I've been needing lately, but I know I've needed more and more to worship. And on a bus ride back from Hua Hin weeks ago, I wrote the beginnings of this poem--barely an offering, but it's what I have at the moment.


LIFE

my edges are rough-groomed fern

rightward leaning palm

trees and coconut brush;

my edges are the contoured shapes

of a beer-belly man, island mass

shifted well along timed tectonics;

my edges are my own—infinite

in complexity; mirth; solitude; perfected by

seeming imperfections;

haphazard placements;

anomalous blinking live-wire fire

flies grouped as fanfare splays

of honest, unabashed prints: my own

with a word, life

whether right or left

Thanks, readers, for being patient while I go these days without posting much.

P.S. how does everyone feel about the use of "my" in the poem? anyone think it should be "your"?

The revision--hope I cleared some of the mess up with this one. Further thoughts? (Sorry for the huge gaps here...)

SPICY MUSHROOM SOUP

That numb seeps again, even
at 33 Celsius.
Table swollen for dinner
guests: eating, merry, sturdy
folk. I sip coke and sit like
the 8 pills in my stomach:
hearing, sensing, musing. No
words. Smoke. Think of the charcoal
they made Jane choke down after

swallowing a whole bottle:
Tylenol, Winter ’02,
sweet 16. Had she done it
at numb, room temperature?
All this when Dan digests his
spice with 2 helping black, flat-
stone capsules. Maybe herbs. In,
he whispers, claims my disease
may ease with the right herbs. He’s

spotted progress in friends. We
breathe steam from Thai chili and
coconut broth: soaked lemon
-grass, gray mushrooms bob, while orange
oil congeals ‘round cilantro
sprigs. Now Dan’s really selling.
If it’s the spice and the pills
and the coke, I don’t know, but
I squint and smile till we both

start believing I’ve not heard
this before: old heresy
of herbs. Not that I don’t trust
it worked for that native dance
-girl he met; I rule myself
out, though. If I believed this,
I’d want to believe You, too.
Miracles may not be my
problem. The question of You

doing them is nothing. You
do. It’s just this where and when
that gets me—for what? Meds and
herbs may be fall-backs; still, I
won’t bank on herbs. Shots, pills: Yours,
too. I’m used to them now: can’t
tell where You fit, or if I’ve
just one choice. Questions sink to
my numbness. You fit. You do.

December's just a month away

Plane tickets for wedding finally in the works! May be spending a night at JFK Intn'l Airport in December between flights--but it's worth it. It's so worth it.

Excitement rising.

return of the clay

This poem (the first part of it, and a worse version of the second part) had been sitting in my stack of to-be-finished poems for the past 6 months or so. Thankfully, at God's urgings (the creative genius that he is), I returned to it... and will hopefully be able to include it among some in application samples. Constructive criticism, anyone? Whether you do or don't "get" anything, your feedback means a lot to me. Thanks.


CLAYHEARTMATION

I.
Their skins: orange with red-circle
cheeks, like construction paper
cutouts pinned to their skins; one in skirt, one
in jumper—blue-jean,
but clay-jean—; dark
clay blocks, slabs of leg,
rectangular flat-shins thighed without feet
(nothing blended, just
fuzzy if moved).

Two clay girls on green-grass hill, a clover-
leaves-and-dandelion pasture. Bucket made
of plastic clay, filled with clay; a sand-hole
digging, dug with wilting shovel:
one and sharing, each of them.
Moving, shifting. Cheek-circles, hot. Singeing
under circle-sun, hanging, dripping, sweating
clay-beads; water, baking angry,
selfish. No help, no share—move apart.

Jean-jumper, hers! Stealing one
with gripping claws. Baked-up nails, the fingernails
scratching on a jumper, not hers.
Tear, a shred of clay, a peeling layer comes and falls.
Cover gone, the chest—another slab—pounds,
beating, up and down inside
the out-girl. Dandelion hair, choose
one, choose none. Choose share, choose us.

II.
Then, safe, your fleshy father hand
beneath my neck, you sinking needle
through the flesh of my chest, sealing
blue up the cavity she left—and is it gone,
where’d my beating go? That spike or yelp!—
why, so wide awake? Without drug, I’m counting
the pierced and shallow
sag of my breath. Needle thin through
clay skin around a space
of collarbone, where a ribcage should
shield up the meat that used to be my old heart;
but I can’t sound an alarm—for the people
in your house, the quiet where
we are—silent as tears dripping
into my teeth and soggy paper cheeks.
What have I now: what you see and nod
to a pain needing
being. Sewn. All right—sew on, or
will this never heal?

III.
When it was three: clay
girl one, two, and you, you held
in the middle their miry hands.

But two: on her own in the dry dust, elbows
stretched at extra weight of heart—not hers. Burnt,
dried black, she drops it to flies.
Back turned now, sun still
raging, she’s secured her drooping
limbs with glue and wire left after
a pipe cleaner drought followed through.

You wait for her come-around.
Will she come again

apart or around?

-