desiderium

i want to read
the trees until the leaves fall,
pages of a book half-read.
i want to suckle all the sugar
from the sky-
every inch of the earth
in my fists-
to sing to the sky,
"PORTANTES!"

a brief introduction to the most important thing

The first thing you should know about Christianity is that until you really get to know God, until you are completely tangled up in Him, he does not feel very glorious or relevant. He feels very old and very stale. He looks like a faucet that used to be germane and glossy, but now is dull and cloudy with grease, rusty and covered in scratches.

This is one of those revelations that smacked me in the face after several years of pretending to have fallen in love with a savior who I knew about as well as I know Ghandi or Bill Clinton. I cannot love a God who is old and fat and greasy, a 5000 year old has-been. Why should I embrace in a God what I reject in a human? How can you love a God you don't even like?

Until you experience God- not Christianity, but God- you cannot love Him. Until he wraps the proverbial threads of his affection around you, until you begin to grasp "how long and deep and wide is the love of Christ", you will hear sermon after sermon that echoes emptily; you will sing praise song after praise song and feel nothing.

This is why some people have trouble wanting to do "what is right". Who wants to give up the safe comforts of sin in order to please a God that we don't even like? Sin is fun. If it were dull and stagnant, no one would want to sin. It is deeply ingrained into our nature.

Love changes people. The only thing that can deaden the desire to sin is love.

love is

love is a many splintered thing.
it raises white and battered wings
to carve its name on every stone:
the signature of one well-flown.

it seeps accross the ochre plains-
each iris mountain touched by rain-
it soaks each town of little fame-
each lupine tribe without a name-

it sutures and it tears apart
the lining of each human heart-

for the jews in their eden

anger not unlike the throb of an artery
eats its way up and down the knots of my
spine.
eleven million tombstones sing
something haunting
in a language that i do not speak quite yet.
disconsolate, i demand of the skies,
"why did you have to stop living?"

CFY survival music

don't listen to crap!
piquet through the remainder of October with
harmonious-dischords approved music. : )
enjoy!

Be Ok : ingrid michaelson

Ottoman : vampire weekend

Gotta Have You : the weepies

You Are What You Love : jenny lewis & the watson twins

1234 : feist

Apres Moi : regina spektor

Such Great Heights : the postal service

O Valencia : the decemberists

Portions for Foxes : rilo kiley

New Soul : Yael Naim

fall

I cannot bring myself to use the word "autumn". I just don't like it. It reminds me of tired brown grass and apple cider, which i also don't like. It's that staple "autumn" beverage that brings to mind rosy-cheeked children sipping warm beverages on one of those rusty hay-rides that really only leave you grumpy and itchy and with a nose full of dust.

I don't like "autumn", but i do love fall. I love the cool tint of the air, like the sky has been dipped in wax. I love the way the leaves sing love songs over the tips of the braches before crumpling complacently into themselves and drifting to the ground. I love the cool way the floor meets my feet in the morning, the way the shower melts onto my forehead with its steady little drips. Yes, although autumn is stagnant, like bad jazz, fall is glorious.

november

Last year i missed fall completely. Just as the leaves began to be singed with traces of purple and orange the tidal wave of Musical Season swallowed me up, pulling me underground into its ebb and its flow. I didn't see sunlight for days. I was like a mole, running frantically through tunnels and tunnels and never befriending the day. By the time I emerged, the leaves had turned from green to burnt black crusts of things crinkled on the pavement, shriveling into themselves like stale, forgotten words.

This year i will stare fall in the face and dare it to try sneaking past me. This year i will also not fall in love with a ladykiller. (They are so ripe and juicy, but when you bite into them there are always seeds.) Musical Season is the time of year when everybody falls in love with each other. Our lungs are filled with so much sweat and hairspray that we become, without fail, madly amorous and mildly delusional. This year i will fall in love with a tall, wholesome blonde.

By the end of that special circle of purgatory which is Dress Rehearsal Week you will have strong feelings for every member of the cast. You will either adore them or abhor them. This is because you will spend every waking (and sometimes sleeping) moment of your life with them for three full weeks. You will know their dietary habits, the flavor of their laundary detergent, and whether or not they drive I-27 like it is the Indianapolis 500. You will know the tenor of their snoring and how ungodly they look in a leotard. You will cry in their shoulders and sleep in their laps.

Then the final drum slaps the final beat of the accompaniment, and the stage trembles with the timbre of seventy-five wails of joy. And in those seconds you feel as though your heart is going to burst, every inch of your body salted and marinated by the sleek sweetness of other's sweat. This is one of those moments that you should tell your grandchildren about, something inside you whispers. But no matter how hard you slurp you can't really drink it in.

But by then the trees are bare, discarding the last from their branches like old letters. By then the sky has drawn up into itself and sighs coldly, and all we can do is glance shyly at one another accross the tired dark grass through sleep-revived eyes and remember. This year i will remember them. I will search them accross the damp grey lawn and lie my head in their laps, the cold deciduous leaves melting sweetly on my skin like cough drops... like memories.

just another love poem

mistaken love is no calmly aging river.
that love is knotted and ugly and stark.
it is the dam where all that mud and grit and
fish crap has coagulated into a hard wall,
choking and clogging the water.

it is like a starving man who dreams about food and
wakes up feeling very raw and very empty.
it's like that, only it's every inch of you that aches.

that love is not the tulle of carbonation
that seeps through bones like so much Perrier.
No,

it is a dream that cannot be dismantled.

it is unrequited barrenness,
for all they say of love is true:
but mostly it is stagnant,
it is feeling very still and very alone.

here's to the belief that childhood should not be a period of endentured servitude

lets trade this en garde for touché or shalom
for some things we can not understand,
as you've never lived as a 16-year-old girl
nor i an embittered old man.

winter

carefully wrapping up december
like a package of old cinnamon,
storing it on a shelf to ferment,
january peeks through the doorframe
and taps at the wrapping
to see what's inside.

you are such a beautiful contradiction that, suddenly, i am able to sing Embraceable You with a fervor

you are unadulterated latin
rain untouched by acid.

a pond which has not yet become stagnant

bobbing his nods under lilypads
and baby ducks.

you are the new summer's strawberries,
ripe and untasted

the soft down of blonde that i watch from the
wings.

the hand that i have not thrown from my heart
belongs to one who cannot see it

philosophy of poetry

poetry is deliberate suffocation of the intangible. it is taking the world, piece by piece, and squeezing it until something beautiful comes out. it is clasping the good and the pain and the facets of existance, with vigor, and turning it over to look at it from the other side.

sometimes it is like a virus, industrious, eating its way out of you. always ravenous at the most inopportune times. sometimes one is deriving the quotient of

october is august's allargando
allegro? molto ritardando?
(no, it isn't, it is decrescendo)

or, perhaps, one is on the verge of discovering the fundamental basis on which


and there it is, hungry, whining and pawing at the door.

one day i sat down with the SAT dictionary that my mother had brought home from the dentist's office and i read and i read and i read through all those beautiful cavernous five syllable words and their various conjugations. and in plum-colored sharpie on the back of an index card i wrote what is probably the most unintelligable poem to be drafted by mankind, and i read it over and over again, the words melting melodiously in my mouth like some fantastic form of intraoral ballet. that's when i fell in love.

poetry is catharsis, and poetry is an exploration of all that is, a set of camera lenses through which one can view the world in green, in purple, in yellow, in Czech or Italian or in Hebrew, in teacher and banker and pharmacist. it is the marraige of language and philosophy, a relationship that is in turn joyful and enraged and burdened and stagnant. poetry is, perhaps, ourselves turned inside out; the documentation of every word we're too afraid to say. the authors' stamp at the bottom, my name, shedding my protection from the world. from you. a blatant signature, sprawled and deliberate in plum-colored sharpie.

october

i think that october
is august's decrescendo

the air tense with winter's vibrato

we all, in a fever,
crumple in our shells with our
feet straight up,
struggling insects on cold
linoleum

bargaining with the sky
for a few more weeks of life

this year
we did not "fall"
but plopped
straight on our bottoms.