Gonna start making some of my poems into videos too from here on out, for that sweet, theoretical YouTube cred! Inaugurating this trend is my latest piece, “Boats,” which I’ve decided to unofficially subtitle “A Weirdly Motivational Poem.” Enjoy!
New Poem: “Boats”
It’ll make sense in a second, I promise.
It occurred to me at one point that people seem to use old-fashioned boats and ships as life metaphors a lot when trying to be hyper-motivational or melodramatic. Whereas I once might’ve been onboard (heh) with that thinking, both extremes of self-expression have become tiresome as I’ve matured into my own personal sense of measured world perspective.
The first line sprung into my head, and because of how both aggressive and goofy it sounded, I decided to flesh out the rest with a similarly blended tone of earnestness and absurdity. It was a hard line to walk without sounding like the very thing I was trying to riff on, so I hope you can still take my advice when I say…
—
Boats
Fuck boats.
They’re unsubtle, overdone
as a metaphor.
Always held up for their
nobility, all while Caucasian sails
flap in the salty swirls of some zephyr
masquerading as inspiration,
aimless winds as navigation, feigning at a reliable route past
oblivious contemporaries. Such starry-eyed idealism
drawn from a mode of transportation more likely
to make you (sea)sick and stranded than
marked for greatness.
Barnacle-slick, ships just sit
in port, bobbing on a prayer and desperation,
waiting for the right crew to give its aching hull meaning.
No,
be a spaceship.
cloak yourself in steel and ignite
with the apocalyptic fire of determination and pure logic.
Incineration as motivation, every move calculated
and yet cosmically ambitious, a routine
you could set your solar system to as you glow
through an orrery of accomplishments.
Every planet passed is a milestone reached, every nebula blessed
with your glide, something you can look back on and say
“been there, charted that.”
The continents are well and spoken for,
but your own universe
awaits to be seen anew.
Be a submarine—
Flip the script and dive
beneath those waves you’d so shallowly just skim, otherwise.
Pile on the pressure and laugh, compacted,
glad to stare darkness in the face
instead of be blinded by naïve light.
Reach out with methodical claws and feel
between the cold, the crushed, the mistakes
God sweeps under a rug of blood and dust.
There is ambition in descension, the confidence of being able
to face the worst of the world and arise, however hesitantly,
to a sun all others take for granted.
Be a fleet
of fighter jets, greater than the sum of your parts
as you dart, multimillion-dollar throwing stars, off
the glint of midmorning fog and into the obstacle
which keeps you from freedom. Could be a dictator,
could be a deadline or one more Dorito.
Discipline is too much to prop up alone,
because the mind and soul hold court at every instant
and a coup is always one what-if and maybe-later away.
Have your own back. Be your own wingman.
Attack distraction and ask it to thank you.
Christ, be a unicycle.
Deceptively static, idiosyncratic
in you how appear calm and collected
yet ever eager to impress. Entertainment
by mere existence, in all the right ways
and means. Lean forward, move
by impulse alone, and store your momentum
with ease upon arrival.
Success can be humble yet colorful, and there’s nothing more important
than balance.
Just don’t be a boat.
Slow, laden with cargo long since loaded, sagging
ashen casks stacked for reasons forgotten and customers unknown.
Creaking, weakened with the memories of those who rode before
as you slog through the surf, scurvy tickling your teeth
and compass needle spinning like a blender’s blades.
Whatever vehicle you please—you just need
to be strong, not soluble.
Precise, not placid.
Opportunity comes to those who make it sweat
at the sight of engines, angles, angry gears
hyperventilating into an industrial blur, not leisurely dreams
of a vessel lit by candlelight and complaints.
It’s always a new day’s dawn somewhere,
and you don’t want to be caught
floating in the middle of everywhere.
—
Poem of the Week: “Cornell Scraps”
Apologies for the lack of a poem last week! I had finals… and given the topic and scope of this piece, I decided it needed to wait a touch longer anyway.
–
Ever since high school, I’ve habitually taken notes. On what? Well… everything. Potential story ideas. Interesting quotes, overheard or imagined. Goofy puns or jokes. Rap lyrics. Concepts for inventions, videogames, and experimental art exhibits. 90% of the time, I have no idea what if any writing I’ll use them in. But, given the fleeting fallibility of memory, I’d always rather jot/type something down and never use it than forget it and be hard up for imagery or snappy dialogue later!
When I moved to Ithaca in 2013 for law school, I started a separate dedicated document just called “Life Scraps.” Later, I renamed it “Cornell Scraps.” Now, with graduation mere days away, I decided to really reflect on these random moments and musings for the first time. In so doing, I saw the potential for a substantial poem. And so, out of what I realized had become forty-odd pages of grievances, late-night confessionals, and idiosyncratic one-offs, I selected and abridged or expanded the most striking lines to produce this.
It’s long, disjointed, and may not make much sense, even by the end. But, for better or worse, that was the last three years!
Three years of Ithaca being gorge-ous.
Cornell Scraps
I.
Outside my dorm window,
something chitters—cicada or sprinkler.
A bird call like a quick firework’s chirp.
An odor—either paint or rotten apples.
The common room, humid, smells of spirits, aflitter with tiny flies—
but at least they got the best Die Hards.
Cutlery comes and goes from the communal kitchen, like artifacts
passing through some high-tuition Bermuda Triangle.
At the dean’s home, a broken basketball backboard
heralds our class’s arrival at the drive.
Crickets congregate about white windowed reception tents,
drooping like jeans over hand-me-down dress shoes.
I’d moved in with optimistic discontent but,
walking ‘cross the gorge some evening next,
I felt a great emptiness within, as if
my life were a blurry eye, a voice gone hoarse mid-song,
as clouds closed over tentative night like a flowerbud.
And on weekdays, sudden bouts of belonging
fell swift to chronically displaced dissatisfaction.
I can’t stand Greek Row, but maybe I just lament not having a veranda
and roof to climb onto.
Mixer time. At the club,
the floor glows crime-scene UV;
it’s an arms race of debauchery,
and our livers are the battleground.
The nightly grind, never to mind by sunrise.
And that’s just the first week.
Fall’s descent brings sticky heat.
Thunder stutters, God
dragging a desk across concrete clouds.
Rain wreaks streaks, plasters the parking lots.
Inside sounds nice, but at a cramped laptop
my hopes are notes on a napkin, crumpled in anticipation
until the words blur to abstraction and all I have are withered strips
with no addressee.
Now, not saying class bored me, but I once wondered in one
what guy piled all that bread in a truck for the “We Can’t Stop” video.
Because my soundtrack is Skrillex and Joe Hisaishi,
for a romance with Holly Golightly meets the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,
dressed to the nine-point-fives by Hot Topic and Watson-Kennedy.
So I start to love going to sleep, because that’s the only time
I don’t dream. Rest unassured,
this head is not a pleasant place to be:
strung out on caffeine, blind ambition, and unrequited love,
my brain needs icing down.
I want to live life at the speed of verse—because of course
I would never kill myself. Not when this world still has synthpop,
Emma Watson, POG juice, butterflies,
and the tone it makes when you strike a tuning fork.
But with bedhead that’s passed “restless cop”
and “wacky high school sidekick” straight to “Goku,”
the rock-fountain trickle of my Brita refilling is a bit Sisyphean.
Life’s path feels like a backward shirt: it fits, but something’s off.
Winter waxes,
broken pie-crust tire treads in the snow,
and icicles dangle like fangs from parked cars.
Chinese takeout splays across the sidewalk like collapsed partygoers,
disgorging frozen neon pips.
Green signs glare down the halls: “QUIET: EXAMS IN PROGRESS.”
Still, I get to know a gal at the post office
through the letters I send and tees I test.
Granted, it didn’t last—like a bad twist ending,
she was out before a month.
But don’t worry, hon. Some day you will be in New York
and everything will be awesome.
Nevertheless, anger breaks in waves—a planned impulse
—and from the crest I see the smooth sailing of adolescence
giving way to rougher waters of adulthood.
Predator or prey, adaption matters, and this ecosystem is more concerned
with cardigans, judicial interns, and Friday night shots
than Spider-Man, postmodernism, and riffing on Xbox One.
And if the girls don’t have their nose up in the air, it’s down in a book.
Resistant, I might’ve cried my vice is beauty, but
after a brief reflection that turned into a soul-search,
contemplating complimenting the strikeouts with Your free time is a lucky guy,
I put passion on a pedestal so high I couldn’t even see it.
Like standing with my back to a chasm, I know
some comfort awaits, biding time in a peripheral vision,
but if I don’t turn and look then it can’t entrance me.
But now that backwards shirt is just outgrown,
because setting my own standards isn’t productive—
it’s a tarred-feather coat of doubtful guilt.
An apologist’s résumé: I may have a 3.49 GPA,
but I clean out the sink after I drain the pasta.
Planning exodus from the land of milk and honey
to the land of wine and awkward small talk.
Sometimes I say things just so they’ll die from exposure to air.
With every new social circle drawn, I promise
I won’t be the neurotic guy again,
but finals week makes liars of us all.
Body of a jock, brain of a geek, soul of a goth,
schedule of a preppie, dreams of a hippie—I got this.
In NYC, there’s a leaky halal truck towed ‘round the corner,
plastered with an ad for the Heathers musical,
and washed-out, outdated tabloids stock the sides of sidewalk kiosks.
Of my Manhattan Madame I’ve said enough, except that
I don’t mind putting things on the back burner
as long as they weren’t smoking hot.
Sharing sleep and little else, I think of stupid things
to untremble my muscles.
I think of running out of bed
and lying against the wall of the ground-floor grocery store in my boxers.
I think of punching a brick wall.
I think of riding a bike into a fence, rolling over, and playing dead.
It’s like attraction is a garage door opener: enough distance,
and the signal just stops working.
So I can’t wait to go back;
there’s nothing left for me here but one-way sexual tension and dog barks.
II.
A leaf drags down the street, as if pulled by invisible string from a car ahead.
Flow but no focus:
I still haven’t seen The Muppets Movie, I think
from the back of a reproductive rights panel.
Got a formal text tonight—better put on my dress grammar.
But first, I have to drain complacency like a wound.
All my flights of fancy are in a holding pattern, or grounded outright.
At least, I’ve lost the ability to tell
how much intimacy between my peers is tongue-in-cheek.
I tell myself I won’t live as a dependent clause,
but irony is gonna play hell on archaeologists.
I worry the Internet turns the world into a circle of paranoid, passive potheads
dreaming in dark rooms.
We are hot dog culture: gross and ground-up, but easy to digest.
I’ve got this game I play where I try to see
how many people on Facebook won’t talk to me.
It’s up in the dozens, and I feel like
earlier in life was the film, and now’s just weathering credits
‘til the reel runs out.
Going back to sleeping alone is like reverting to DVD from Blu-Ray.
My heart is an open offer
but my grudges have half-lives, and
there’s nothing less interesting than beautiful people complaining.
So it’s fun wondering what I’ll look back on as so simple about this,
especially when true love is like a UFO: you don’t hear about it as much
now that everyone’s got smartphones.
If only I, Inception-like, could just spontaneously be talking to someone.
Until then, I identify as Straight But Not Applying It.
All of my takes are double-takes;
I think I’m developing smirk lines
from parties (or, “going friend-fishing”).
I’d say I felt like an empty seat, but people sit by those.
Snow floats in whips and whirls, confetti in a quiet blender.
A girl argues with a guy on a porch overlooking a shore of Solo cups—
well-lit, dramatic,
a Disneyland dark-ride of campus life.
Me, moving on is Indy trying to swipe the idol: I gotta really think it over,
and if the replacement’s not the same weight, then bring on the emotional boulder.
So no, Buzzfeed, don’t tell me what my new favorite video is.
Don’t tell me who to hate.
Don’t tell me to nod politely at X times Y celebrity was more interesting than me.
This godlike technology is for education, entertainment—not building new wings
in my inferiority complex.
No, I want love like TV seasons.
Maybe it’s The Simpsons: on for decades, haters be damned.
Maybe it’s Firefly: a brilliant idea snuffed out in its prime.
Let’s make it a competition to see who can miss the other the most.
And hey, who do you think buys all those nightmares their daydream dresses?
At the least, someone in this subway, statistically, has to have nudes online.
Topside, sirens blurp like the Lord flicking water
beneath the trapezes of power lines.
I could admit I’m not confident, and you won’t mind
out loud—but the thought will still seep in, like a leaky pipe under an abandoned flat,
and I’m recycling-bound like To Current Resident.
If talk is cheap, then revenge fantasies are seashells and bottle caps,
so while I can’t act, I’m quite comfortable shouting in crowded rooms.
Trying to find the right song to unfriend old crushes to
while I move through Zeno’s Breakup:
Music for revoking any fucks previously given,
in tune with the phases of the mood.
Earbud cord peeks between my jeans and shirt like a spiritual insulin kit.
Balance doesn’t always mean staying in the middle;
it depends how heavy each side is.
Electric beats thumping out of a juice bar,
people staring at supercomputers,
glass skyscrapers soaring into the clouds…
Ever finally feel you’re living in the future?
Only this era, we’re building the meteor and bringing it down ourselves.
Everyone in my News Feed is closing deals, posing with koalas,
or bungee golfing in Antarctica, and I’m just taking a stroll, thinking
about how weird it is that Scooby-Doo had a laugh track.
My patience is the Earth’s crust: it’s thick, but crack it
and there’s nothing but ten thousand miles of fire.
I want to be a monitor, not a processor, never mind that
I once tried to avoid eye contact with a cardboard cutout.
Fluent in fantasy, my brain is a perpetual motion machine
that runs like The Hobbit: fast and distracting, but only ‘cause it’s closer to reality.
And yet my unfinished business as a ghost would probably just be watching
all the videos I bookmarked in undergrad and forgot about.
III.
The blood moon eclipse.
An aged penny if good,
a molding peach if bad.
Not even the cosmos gets me decisive.
I decided to make all the things I say worth saying
slowly, but I’m still making my goal a worst-case scenario.
Something went wrong, somewhere, in the past,
but it wasn’t just me.
Part me, part world, part my reaction to both.
Like short sheets trying to fit a frayed mattress:
pushing, pulling, coming off
at one corner for want of fitting another, never realizing
until I felt for its opposite and found it bare.
Or waking up to tatters beneath me, thinking it so secure the night before.
The rain was light yet thick, like falling mist,
suffusing streetlights with amber halos.
Another bar tab not bothered with.
They’re not even interesting assholes, they’re just boring assholes.
I lied when I said I’d rather die than do the same job forever,
I think. It just felt good to sound determined by choice for once,
because I need to make things—with my hands,
not my mouth and wallet.
And whether it’s an international bestseller
or the popsicle stick castle that went to shit in fourth grade,
it exists.
Substance.
Fighting back against entropy.
So what can you create today
that wasn’t there yesterday,
and that you’ll be proud of tomorrow?
Savoring the world is priceless like a funeral.
Good memory, bad memory—it’s still just a memory.
Not made but replayed,
and in three years,
I’ve repeated enough for a lifetime.
–
Poem of the Week: Telling Phone
I won’t waste space talking about how significant smartphones are in daily life now, for better or worse. However, with that prevalence, I’ve come to notice certain common signals and phrases they convey can signify much more. Amusing or compelling? You make the call (or text).
Telling Phone
Smartphones are the only removable organ
that isn’t vestigial.
We used to read.
We used to dream.
We used to think.
What happened?
Now we just stare
and type.
That’s how these poems go,
I suppose.
But technophobia tires.
In this new externalized mind, I find
the best reminders don’t give notifications.
Delete all future events.
Personal or professional—a cover closes.
The promise of occupation, docked;
a silent hand stretching into eternity, light-blue to-dos snuffed
like candles a continent away.
What we end today sends soft shockwaves to the future.
Ask to join networks.
A pale Post-It note to be known.
The numbers are right in your palm,
so text, message, address.
Put a tie on and try on your best hello,
portfolio in tow—no matter the passion.
Associate is an active verb.
Reset Statistics.
A penciled-in schedule of piano ballads,
clickbait binges, and narrowly missed conversations
can add up.
At the first toll, Pavlov’s dogged intent
to stay bent for fear of breaking
into normalcy or nihilism.
But stare down a mirror
and remaster the past,
and how much time you can still unwind will surprise you.
Recently Deleted.
Snapshots stockpiled to prove a point
since filed, away.
Desperate headshots, thought better of.
Some moments are paint splattered,
glass shattered: never undone.
But others linger: Bruises,
proving a date’s denouement,
a radical phase’s erasure.
A handheld closet, cleaned out,
still leaves boxes
to soften the edge of our breakthroughs.
Update Contacts.
Fetch New Data.
Every so often,
a closed door locks.
Identity’s lineup takes one step to the right
and we proceed: a childhood song forgotten;
certain birthdays unobserved.
Headspace echoes, but not for long.
Friend Requests accepted.
Photo Album uploaded.
Never stop learning, yearning,
and turning: a slow, mental metronome,
with work and worlds opposed.
Do Not Disturb.
Low Power Mode.
Everyone deserves a decompression session.
Shutter, blinds-like, the light of obligation
for a spell and a song.
Half-speed for a hoarse heart
and a brain like a PC in overdrive.
And when those windows chunk-chunk open again,
the breeze feels like progress.
Not every day can punch forward,
but some can always kick back.
Hide Traffic.
Use True North.
Focus.
I know it’s hard to find
a wall for your awards
when so many corners scream for attention.
The Nietzchean beauty of webcam celebrity,
of viral stars soon to supernova,
of girls with green hair and raccoon eyeshadow—
stare into the amiss long enough,
and a million-to-one shot comes off
as the best bet.
The prospect of apocalypse
from either side of the ozone;
tending to the ending but still paying rent on time.
A symphonic centrifuge
of changing tunes
that pushes away as it straddles you in place.
But you have the tools, if you want to
look for them.
Zoning out or in, paint that target
Day-Glo and go hunting.
If life is binary, divided
into an eternity of switches,
stay green.
The pressure’s necessary,
but it takes a thumbs-up
to power on.
–
Poem of the Week: Summertimes
Summer is getting close! That it’s a beautiful season (at least at my latitude) is a given; that it can be a state of mind is a cliché. Still, I combined both sentiments under the same confessional-meets-inspirational attitude I’ve approached the form with lately and produced what follows.
Sunset across the Central Park Reservoir, 6/6/2015
Summertimes
If seasons are sentiments,
summer is nostalgia,
even when the memories aren’t ours.
Halloween heralds a dry spell,
the last vestige of sugared debauchery
and test-pattern provocation
before winterwear and wool hats
shelter spontaneity.
Not to dismiss Christmas,
but the chances we treasure were taken
outdoors.
Yet this side of the solstice,
it’s too hot to be insincere
in body or mind.
By morning, the smog’s a balm,
calmly salving skyscrapers
and alleyways in sleepy haze.
And, adulthood aside,
the city’s so pretty at night:
A leviathan Lite-Brite patchwork
that, tracing the seams by sidewalk or subway,
all but pushes you to take center manhole
and twirl mid-intersection,
taking in a panorama of possibilities,
unburdened by overcoats.
Karaoke. Barcades. Broadway. Stargazing.
Sweat sticks, prickles the scalp,
but anything’s ignorable when you’ve got one thing
to look forward to.
But one year, waking in single digits to blinding curtains,
packing week on week with tours and to-dos like a tight suitcase,
changing the bassline of every newfound tune into car horns,
verses to cursing,
the beat to forty thousand footsteps
never headed my direction,
I pined for
a pine forest
and cabin in foggy solitude.
The film-pitch future
a dozen Tumblrs promised us Millennials:
A little loft; bereft of box spring,
a mattress buttressed by boughs of Christmas lights
and a standing fan.
Hardback classics scatter ‘cross the shelves and hardwood
in improbable stacks.
A skylight, so glow-in-the-dark stars
can compete with the real ones.
And a throwback van, foldout couch its cargo,
to park and ponder in crystal-cool Vancouver,
the doors as wide as our minds.
We could swim
(of course there’s a lake adjacent),
shadows casting sky
on the water, swaying ‘round our ears like a flipped pillow
that relaxes the intermittent chitter of insects unseen
into a cool throb.
Like childhood just went on vacation
and came back with perfect clarity.
And, in abstract,
companionship.
A clammy collage of models and male entitlement.
I said I’d settle for a metalhead belle
with a key for a necklace, a nervous system
of mandalic tattoos, Chucks shoes,
a wardrobe full of flannel and beanies,
a septum piercing, hair down to her gauges,
and a look of withering eroticism that says
I have been around the block, boy,
and you are nothing special,
but if I offered to eat a whole pack of Air Heads and then make out,
she’d reply your favorite flavor first.
A closet quarter-life crisis.
Development not arrested but under surveillance,
we tell ourselves it could happen.
#LifeGoal. #RelationshipGoal. #Dream.
Pepperoni pizza and Netflix.
Soft-focus photography as a five-year plan,
if only we can finally get on that penny-farthing of conversation.
Can we go forward to the time when…
Ironic it’s the ambient heat and happiness
that out our ennui.
I writhed under deadlines,
dull stares, and thoughts of forever
at crowded post-semester pregames that left my skin singed
and tank tinged with scents of cannabis and flip-cup flecks.
Partying as pantomime.
When someone asked why I wasn’t more upbeat, I replied
I’m just a different kind of person.
Yet, waiting for the wind, I realized
caution can be thrown without it.
Looking back
over the fence, to that growing grass, I decided
I wasn’t buried but planted.
And now, sunglasses on, shorts at the ready,
three months can mean something
more than either amusement or acting it.
Some summers may be legendary,
others mundane,
but there’s no shade to take in desperation.
In flying to the future,
some baggage must stay at the gate.
So with the regrets, frets, and what-ifs left to bleach—
all things not considered—
I guess, if I could keep one memory
for when the sun is high and the sky is Kool-Aid blue,
It’d be the fire pits.
Campouts, as a kid.
The smells: the blackly savory taste
of a BBQ lit anew, the bellicose tang
of fallen fireworks across my grandparents’ lawn.
The give and pull of comfort,
brother and I racing around the flame to flee the breeze.
Family on mossy, knobby logs, monitoring impaled marshmallows
that’ll either alchemize to gold
or go up in the embers like the Terminator.
The greasy security of copious sunblock still intact:
Head, shoulders, shins and nose.
Two yellow jackets trying my patience in tides.
Smoke and bare knees.
Quiet. Close.
No worries except the Mario level I’m stuck on
and if I ate too many hot dogs.
A composite,
probably.
Selective reflection, a doctored Polaroid
in the corner of my mental mirror.
But one unhindered by trying
to right a wrong, race a clock,
or chase a secondhand fantasy.
And that’s warm enough for me.
–
Poem of the Week: “Home Less”
I went back home to Washington State for Spring Break, and… it didn’t feel like it used to. I’m still not sure if that’s a good or bad thing, but I thought I should “write it out.”
Home Less
People speak of haunted houses,
but never the reverse.
We mistake it at first, home,
for the cabinets, countertops, and plastic toys.
That’s, after all, as far as our goals go,
as far as nimble legs can carry us:
to the playground,
TV room,
town bar.
Postcards, plaques, and photographs
hold fast the roof we sleep beneath—
hoarded mortar to the bricks.
All the world’s a game, and
you must be this tall to exit.
But over years,
under fees, degrees, double-digit birthday cakes,
expectations asphyxiate—comparisons oppress.
The mind moves but loops, running
not a marathon but a track:
Even if you notice a new patch of grass,
it’s still a circle.
And one day, returning turns nothing at all.
Through the front door,
and the past piles on, quarterback-like:
Memories of memories, of thoughtless acts
and thoughts never acted on.
The gravel avenue, the green, greener grass
remain unchanged,
yet the mailbox peels, the Jeep rusts,
and the dusty halls shine quieter.
Mirthful or mournful,
you can’t go back.
Every room is an interrogation room,
wrecked by recollections, recursion of diversions.
The bed’s a confessional,
coaxing midnight doubts and dreams
from uncanny comfort.
Bookshelves elevate what once mattered:
Piggy banks, cracked glasses, collector’s editions uncashed.
Half-sketches, bookmarks bisecting paperbacks,
beg questions:
When does a to-do become a once-was?
When does an ambition become an anecdote?
Branch out enough, and the limb will snap
at the base.
So it scares me, like a trust fall in transit,
that with so much behind, I don’t know where I’m headed.
Not depressed but compressed, lifted up
and weighed down at once
by the prospect of prospects.
Sure, stability is a privilege,
with a cap on laments.
Still, it’s unrelenting, this discontent
when the contents of my mind
mirror the zip code of my former universe.
A false sense of insecurity must come from somewhere.
When the beginning of your world starts feeling like its end,
the lucid dream becomes sleep paralysis—
a vacation becomes tourism through history.
There’s no cure for maturity,
but there is a placebo.
Just know
home is not a place
but a space, a radius
orbiting wherever we go—
satellites of plans, passions, and aspirations.
Home is not a building
filled with odds and ends and quiet blind spots.
It is building:
A life, a wife, a gig, something big,
or at least bigger than you were
the day before.
And until I lay those bricks—
wrap those drafts, earn that office,
let a ring follow a call for once—
there’s no place to rest.
But I’m fine being home less.
–
Poem of the Week: “See, I Can Do It Too”
This poem sat on my computer in various scraps for years. It started out bitter and detached but became inspirational… I think.
Maybe it’s still scraps. But I feel like it works.
See, I Can Do It Too
Beauty is a cold war
of cold creams and old dreams.
We’re in an arms race of allurement,
knee-deep in Vaseline and expectations,
dangling a lit match and whispering
you get indifferent first.
So no self-effacing, a selfie facing
those well-strung masks.
We can adopt Comedy, poise paralytic:
every post a pick-me-up,
every Snap a sell,
thumbs covering
the drunken nights and irreverent fetishes
so no one can confuse our appearance with our images.
Or, Tragic, revel in dishevelment,
photos filtered but cigarettes not,
for sadness the brand: Preaching peak minimum,
swaddled in ripped jeans, flannel,
and hashtag security blankets
knit in pocket supercomputers.
But either way,
fame is cheap.
Inflation does that.
It takes lots of work
to be concertedly ignored, or stir guilt
when glossed over.
Caked in Adobe clay, some wait
for the reblog of a lifetime,
the intentional accident,
the headshot launched, Voyager-like,
that’ll unlock their day job,
riding a stream of unconsciousness.
And the hope grows but flickers:
batting at shadows, Plato’s Allegory
of the gravely misjudged chances.
Freak flags lower to half mast.
But if the internet’s a big sweets machine,
I’d rather be a cake than a cog.
When it comes to popularity, I’m ashamed
to say I’m shameless—Better hell in the Top 40
than heaven with Pitchfork.
So I follow
models, vloggers, icons, artists,
and tell myself I’m a conscientious objectifier:
ready to Like unto others
as they Heart unto me.
But at the end of the day,
you’re still only ones and zeroes in my screens,
if not for minds then behinds,
set to amuse on the pot or the bus,
or when my desktop’s froze up,
en route to real life.
Pitch a show, rock a suit, tell a joke—
it’s all been done before,
there’s just quicker memes and more greenscreens now.
And it goes to show how
love is contagious,
not airborne.
The admiration to spur a fan page rampage;
to call a dox or charity drive with equal ease;
to lob a line or look into a crowd and have catchphrases
echo back at you like grenades full of validation.
And every comments section squabble, an exercise
in mutually assured instruction:
Pity or competition.
Learn your place or take his.
I’ve stared at UFOs less spellbound
than those accounts.
Beauty? Fame? Love?
What’s it take,
what strand to grasp
to untie this Gordian knot
or simply cut and run?
I could be you if I wanted to—
the sloth’s refrain.
But the truth remains:
Bodies can be airbrushed,
voices autotuned,
words ghostwritten,
fashion provided,
and pasts smoothed over.
You’re known?
Good for you.
Address to the electric ether
or a mirror, depending
on my motivation.
Because I tell myself
it’s all about who you know.
Which means it’s all about who
you have the luck to be born of
or, just maybe,
the courage to call.
–
Notes&Sketches 