Friday, September 28, 2012

March 21 - Untitled, Theater Class

Running my finger tips along your spine is like running my hand across the Appalachian Mountains on the globe on your desk.  It has been locked in place since you found it in your basement, always prominently displaying America.  Your parents myst have been nationalists, they have made it forever spring here.  I can imagine hearing the bloom of trees forever about to flower.  It is the sound of rustling sheets.  I want to draw a map with my finger tips, turning you into a facsimile of the globe.  Adding states borders and rivers and forests.  Mountains and valleys.  But you laugh when I start naming the peaks, and you turn over.  Making it winter on our own little American map.

March 20 - Coffee Shop Flirt

Before she found herself racing to take her shirt off as he watched, excited even by the glimpse of her waist, she bought him coffee.

A magazine had told her that it was "a simple, effective way to flirt" and she'd seen it done in movies and he was cute and both of them really needed to get laid so she made her move.

"And whatever he's having." That's how she'd closed her order.  It nearly sent the barista into confused apoplexy.  In addition to a summer Sweet Tea, she got a mocha latte.  She hates mocha.  But it gave them something to talk about as she handed him his second of the morning.

So she races now not out of eagerness - she does not know nor particularly like this man - but out of necessity.  She will stop if he doesn't start soon...

March 19 - Untitled

I wish I did not know you.
I would not imagine us
curled together - ribs lining up
like a zipper - and warm.

I wish I did not know your house:
warm, inviting - it smells like home
on TV, of food and love, and
like the cast has not yet heard cut.
Our director yells cut an awful lot in my house.
My parents stop acting
and we go back
to hating each other.  When people
cannot see.

No one has ever yelled cut on us.
But still I wish I did not know you.
For then I would not know these things.
And I would not miss our talks.

March 18 - Nice Girls Do

She sits in class and glances.  Smoothing an awkwardly too long skirt over her knees, crossing one leg over another, she tries to look desireable.  She cannot.

She sits in class and glances.  Remembering the lessons her mother taught her. Don't run, only thieves and children run.  Ladies wear their skirts longer, no man wants what he can see walking to first period. And others.  And she realizes that her mother was wrong.  If they can't see it, they cannot know it's there.

She sits in class and glances.  She is a nice girl.  She does not get the boy.  She sits alone.

March 17 - Untitled, Math Class

Across the hallway is a blazer casually thrown across a chair, suggesting the idea that the owner is perpetually about to return and claim her seat.
It is a woman's blazer. Highly designed.
          Impractical, unopenable pockets.

I can see them.

She has not yet returned.

Friday, September 21, 2012

March 16 - Watching


Watching the woman you love go out on a date is painful.
Watching her go out with a guy is even worse.
            It suggests a hopelessness so total and so complete that it over comes you.

But watching her date fall apart, that is a new kind of hell.
Because this is envy fulfilled.  What made you jealous has been swiftly and surely taken away.
And you must support her, because she is your friend and she assures you it wasn’t a date anyway

March 15 - Thursday, September 13


A chill ran through my body that day.

I once heard a poet talk about our death days.  Those days on which we will one day die.  Shakespeare died on his birthday, which – in addition to ruining the party – makes for some easy headstone math.  We never celebrate these days, but perhaps they are the best days.  The world celebrates for us by throwing us a bone.  Our favorite songs line up on the radio, or it’s the perfect temperature.  Something like that.

So perhaps this was not my death day.

Perhaps, as an old Samuel once told me, a goose walked over my grave.  It sent a chill through my body that would not leave.  It sunk into my bones and made them lead.  I shivered and jittered my way through a thoroughly average day.  That goose must have stayed put.  The chill stayed so long in my body that I thought I would never be warm again.