28 December

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I would shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.
-Billy Collins, On Turning Ten

Incongruous I

Holidays, among other things, never fail to remind me why small towns depress me. It is the terrible abundance of tennis shoes, of muss-haired mothers, and of bark-- and the bark colored brick-- and the brick colored sky-- one horrid mound of nondescriptness, of brown. I do not like this nondescriptness because from it I was birthed and from it I flee. Uncle D sells pottery and is very wealthy; he wears cordouroy shirts that smell vaguely of clay dust and mint. Small towns remind me what I ought to have been, and, worse, what I could still mend and become: arriving my tight-waxed blue Nissan into an Edgarsburg or Adamsville, stopping and living and dying there, wearing Carhartt rubber boots and drawling about pottery sales. Small towns remind me of how instead I am flushed and rather fidgety in my white JCrew cardigan, dead broke, rather fragile and classically pretty, my main gig being how I am semifluent in French and Shakespearean English. Uncle D speaks in dollars, and in dirt. B, my cousin, eyes me as though I am a corn sample. On the back porch when the stars prick out white against the clearness he looks at me and says, "I mean, I'd offer you a joint, but, I mean, you know--"

14 december

whoa now.

Love Sonnet #3

I shall not curse the star on which the sky
Leans resolutely: no, nor shall I bow
To any other star of blue or white
With love-penned constellations on its brow.

Celestial point, you, Love of stone and glass
To which I, planets, stars revolve in spires:
Light without which the sky unpins; a Mass
In which the Priest is burned with holy fire.

I, You, cannot forever intercept
Each bolt from an ungracious silver sky:
I know. We place our tangled silhouettes
In tandem, Love in spite of Stain and Sight.

Press palm to palm, and I will hold you till
The lights extinguish from your own black hill.

Love Sonnet #2

Having birthed a child of substance, not of
Water; having loosened the interminable weight;
I must swallow Self to tend my infant fire.
Creation kneels its forehead to my fate.

No planetary love of moon and sun
Could carve from ash of Selves what we have carved:
Cleaved things now sautered, severedness made one;
Love sharpened by and sharpening the stars,

Contained in arms, and noses, and in knees
A beauty to whom, surely, is akin
The bee that swarms and kindly never stings:
Eternity in skin, and skin, and skin.

I fear that it shall feed and flourish, sire,
Till I hold nothing unfed by that fire.

Catharsis

In planetary weakness I've forsaken
My body to the whiteness of the moon:
Have blackened what, in willful adoration,
So struck its heel with love's ungracious tune.

And gaily, having birthed a child of water,
Having loosened it's interminable weight,
I crush the head of love, of erring fathers,
And sacrifice my body unto Fate.

8 December

relationships are straight up hard. all of them.

Für Mein Trommler

you are paper-thin lightning
a sweet liquid baritone

the fluid pinging of a harp.

you are the sweet-smelling juice dribbling
down children's chins from the pulp of a skinned

peach.

you are fragile, a marzipan Eros
whose warmth i cradle in the curve of my spine;

great Greek confection surveying
with affably lung-numbing eyes from
the backs of my eyelids.

you are edgeless, my lone
luckless hazel-eyes, edgeless

and i am the sea in which
space leans on space and collapses,
introuvable.

(fragile) and this is the fear:
to build not an edgeless eternity
but one faceless and underfed

star which bangs out its fizzling
on a moonless celing;
that we shall wake, as dreamers do,

to obscenities scrawled black
across the sun.

(love, and love! cry Eden's
exiled children: love;
j'avais mon coup de foudre et
the heavens collapse with a slow roar.)

your armor is clean and undented.

no, no, no, no
you can't handle me.

4 december

update:
a. God
b. college
c. girls suck
d. puppy love.

1 Dec.

God is in control; I am not in control. God is in control; I am not in control. By sacrificing my control and putting Him in charge of my life I experience a death of sorts, but certainly a justifiable death; I am a superemly ineffective ruler. God is in control; I am not in control. Help me, God, to keep my sight that way.