Think About It.

Emotional idioms are idiomatic for a reason-- namely, their proven universality-- and anyone who claims himself to be above the idioms of human feeling is a liar and a cheat.

28 February

College.

Everything, everything becomes you, or in your absence becomes your negative: aluminum soda-can lid, you are not what you ought to be. Carmex, warm and rubber-scented, you fall short. Where are you now, precisely, and what negatives of Me pass by your lips?

27 February

I have never really had to work, really ferociously work, at anything, much less for anything. But I shall learn to work for you, at persistence and fidelity. In several months there will be a vast numbing expanse of states-- Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, the portentous splendor of each lost in its status of between-ness--for there are several hours between Lookout Mountain and Birmingham that shall separate your forehead from mine.

hm.

Neitzche says, "God is dead"-- Lewis staunchly claims the opposite, that man's great project has been his own abolition. These two must run in tandem; one must be true: either we are dead or God is dead, for inherant in the composition of both God and man is the state of supreme reign (alone). It is a familiar concept, particularly in Christian circles, that only one power may reign supreme in the life of a man. What is it, then? Which is the living and which the dead diety?

The Christian answer is fairly simple: even against our reason, we must consider God to be more living than ourselves. In this light, man is most certainly dead: we are told that without God, man is an irretrievable corpse. Even with God, we are ourselves not living: the Bible teaches that it is Christ who lives in us.

21 February

There is such an enormous gap between literature and actual people.... one can delve into the world with the most fantastic intentions after reading, say, The Awakening, or Atonement; the world, however, shows itself to be much less high-minded and intellectual: teenagers do not discuss life and philosophy from the cool hard stone of Victorian windowsills, but from Facebook chat windows prattle about boyfriends and frat parties. It is so, it is so.

another in-process poem, structured

stanza
(something profound; for it is so maddenlingly difficult to procure any sort of original thought processes about love; love itself being so terribly idiomatic)

------> stanza: allusions? nothing mythological. Biblical? literary. fallback=plath

stanza: end in couplet?

(what is so terribly ironic, matt foreman, is that the last "poem, structured" was for you in the sense that you wanted to see how the process was structured: how alarmingly we have developed, that this is for you in the sense that I love you, I do.)

------->

A thousand barren earths beseech, "love
Neither quite so quickly nor so well."

01 February (thought conglomeration)

It is cold here, and I am trying to be Billy Collins.

There is a fistful of snow on the porch railing,
As if some celestial being had softly shaken
Slightness from its scalp.

Outside there is neither Moon nor Yew Tree;
There is sunlight on the snow, light of the bright sort
Underneath the skin of one in love.

(All these, things I said I'd never write about,
Line up in accusation, as if against a wall,
Like ghosts of animals I've cooked but never eaten.)