How 'bout some REM?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2vyYHFO7jg

How's that Beck song go?

It's early stuff...lot more hip-hop
than later Beck..

"I'm a loser baby, so why don't kill me"

Hum, hum hum Hum hum hum,
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me...

Damn it gets so boring to be depressed.

*

B's heart cath went well. Needs some additional meds. Not good
news, not bad news. The stents are ok.

I've been going over and over my termination from work
day after day, as if that is going to change anything. I just
can't f'ing believe I lost my job. After the initial shock, I felt
some relief. Now I am back to despair.

Then I go from that to thinking about Dad.
Then I think about the time I didn't cut the damned
grilled cheese into triangles
or I went into a frenzy when a plate got broken
or when I threw my sister's music box against the wall
and busted it into a milllion little pieces
or the times I called my brother all sorts of unforgiveable names...
or just anything, anything and I just go off.
I just go off on a boo-hoo tangent. About what a loser
I am or how I seem to screw everything
up one way or the other. How everything is my fault.

Even global warming.

Hey, I at least recycle!

Another rainy morning...


no sun since
last Thursday (I think). Basement flooding
but not as much as it has in the past.
I think I'll just stay in bed and read today.
Last weekend, when I was in Lexington, I bought
Mary Oliver's New And Selected Poems, Volume One,
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Memories of My Melancholy Whores,
and Alice Sebold's Lucky. Have read some of the Oliver
and am enjoying the work. Other than that, I haven't
picked a book up in the last week. Unusual for me.

Spent yesterday afternoon at Ashley's. She invited
several people over for a chili luncheon. Lupper
as she calls it. It's still difficult for me to be at gatherings,
but I made it and enjoyed myself for the most part.

Tomorrow B. has a heart cath. Not her first, but the first
was an emergency and she didn't have time to think about
many things. Her attitude worries me. I'm not so sure
she wants to make it through whatever has to be done
and I don't know how to convince her that she does.
When people tell you they're tired and so done with things
and you say I understand because I feel that way some
days too, you have to realize not everyone says it as
loosely as you may on any given day. I do feel it some
days, and I am not so sure I am saying it all that loosely,
but I am not ready to go. I'd like to think that I will want to

rage, rage against the dying of the light

I hope she'll find reasons to want to do the same.

*

Ashley's taking the GRE today and asked me ride
along. I could have stayed in Evansville at Barnes and Noble
while she was there, but I am just going to stay in today.

*

Lauren lost one her coworkers to cancer last week.
42 years old. Such a loss. It hit Lauren hard. I know she
went to the hospital to see her about a week before
she died, but her friend was out of it for the most part.
At 25, I was still a stay-at-home mom. I had
not lost anyone close to me when I was that age. This year,
Lauren's lost her grandfather and a coworker she cared
for a great deal.

*********************************

I keep sending out resumes and filling in applications
but nothing has come up yet. I got a call back
from the court system about a Court Designated Worker
position I applied for, but the position originates out of the
Lexington area. I can't do that. I can travel from my region
but I can't relocate to Lexington, so I'll have to keep checking
the website for a regional CDW position.

I have to try to get these cobwebs out of my head. Time for a cup of coffee.

*


Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas

A Night With Rosemount

It was beer first, didn't matter
what kind. That was long after Strawberry
Fields and high school, long before ad-
diction became a possibility.

I wasn't afraid then, Bud Light
or Coors in my hand, that one day
children, friends, lovers, and others
too numerous to mention would leave

me. I remember them, curled
inward on their sofas, or lying face-down
on the bathroom floor, tiles imprinted
on lovely cheekbones, their mosaics

decorating the still-firm tissues of youth.
But in my dreams, they don't need
me any longer. I have become
what they feared they would become.

Last night, when I was sleeping, one
of the dears found reason to say what bores
old drunks can be, how taxing and tedious
their comings and goings. I woke knowing

my exit from her life was in many ways
quiet as a snow-filled morning, rush hour
madness come to a complete halt. I knew
then there was no turning back. So, tonight,

Rosemount and I had communion, and I
praised a January with the front door
wide open, and I asked forgiveness
for those with no excuse not to come.

The Language of the Brag

I have wanted excellence in the knife-throw,
I have wanted to use my exceptionally strong and accurate arms
and my straight posture and quick electric muscles
to achieve something at the center of a crowd,
the blade piercing the bark deep,
the haft slowly and heavily vibrating like the cock.

I have wanted some epic use for my excellent body,
some heroism, some American achievement
beyond the ordinary for my extraordinary self,
magnetic and tensile, I have stood by the sandlot
and watched the boys play.

I have wanted courage, I have thought about fire
and the crossing of waterfalls, I have dragged around

my belly big with cowardice and safety,
my stool black with iron pills,
my huge breasts oozing mucus,
my legs swelling, my hands swelling,
my face swelling and darkening, my hair
falling out, my inner sex
stabbed again and again with terrible pain like a knife.
I have lain down.

I have lain down and sweated and shaken
and passed blood and feces and water and
slowly alone in the center of a circle I have
passed the new person out
and they have lifted the new person free of the act
and wiped the new person free of that
language of blood like praise all over the body.

I have done what you wanted to do, Walt Whitman,
Allen Ginsberg, I have done this thing,
I and the other women this exceptional
act with the exceptional heroic body,
this giving birth, this glistening verb,
and I am putting my proud American boast
right here with the others.

Sharon Olds


***********************************************


Happy 16th to my youngest today! I managed
to mortify him already (bought a cake shaped like
a guitar).

He said, "Mom, are you ok? Ummmm, I could see
you getting me something like that 4 or 5 years ago,
but, ummm, well, are you ok?"

Clearly I am not ok. I should have baked him
a chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting
and decorated it myself.

I have no explanation for the cake (it's actually
made out of cupcakes).

All I could say was, "Well, you do like music and sometimes
you play your guitar and I just didn't know what you
wanted and I thought it would be kinda funny
and you guys would get a kick out of it and, well,
you're right. It is kind of weird, isn't it? For me to get
that and not know how weird it would be and all, and, well,
I'm sorry."

It's all ok. We're ok. Funky brain here.

Learning the Language

We grow into who
we are. Step by tiny step
into a future laid out
before us like the language
we would grow to speak
and learn to unlearn
and then relearn,
despite our rants
and our raves,
in spite of ourselves.

No. The first raw taste
that sits on the tongue
like beets. Too red, too
root-filled to ignore.
No again. This time
the unsavory bits of chopped
spinach, a green we swallow
in reluctance. We have not yet
learned the loveliness of
green and No, nor the unbridled
joy of sating ourselves
with tuberous things. Things that grow
underground in the dark, wet
places we are yet to know.

And then, one day, a normal
day in most every aspect
of the word normal, all of our oral
expectations are met, and it’s
a resounding yes! as mother
pokes the spoon in. An unspoken,
understood yes! that fills the room.
Yes, I will eat that. And this. And more
than you will ever guess in your long life,
Mother. Eat, masticate, at times
regurgitate. Mess myself up in ways
you never expected, you who followed
the step-by-step.

I have grown into an occasional
bite, shunned an entire meal.
I have learned to love the observed.
A bottle of merlot, a fifth of tequila,
a shot of gin and tonic. These
are the substantial elements
of my existence.

Step by step, I fight my way
through briars no one else sees.
I drop from a pine fifty-feet tall
and come out unscathed. I watch
the slender bend of my ankle
get chewed up in the spokes
of a wheel lost in time.
But man have I grown!
The likes of growth so seldom
seen in all of the animal kingdom.
A regular anomaly of sorts,
my body an organism, my brain
a refugee. My use of language
once again relegated to a simple
Yes, a fitful No.

A comment regarding my poems:

I do think they suffer (suffer is too strong a word) from the fact that the writer seems to need to write them more than the reader to read them. In most successful poems, the equation is reversed. I think you'll write better poems about the experience in a few years.

This comment comes from someone whose writing
and opinions I respect a greal deal. I wish I could
reverse the equation, but wishing won't make that happen.
I'm disappointed that the work comes off as needing
to be written, but I think he's right.

And, I'm a little confused. Don't most writers feel
that what they write needs to be written?

I don't feel discouraged by his words, but I wonder if anything
will ever come of anything I write. Some of us are meant to
be readers of poetry and to just love the experience of it.
We don't all have to write it, but at one point in time, I thought
I may have something close to the ability to write not just a decent
poem, but perhaps even a publishable one.

I've had only 2 published--one online and one in a print journal.
Not to bash online poetry, but I still aspire for print pubs.
Alas, I may never see my name in Poetry or the New Yorker!

Which makes me think of the book Running With Scissors.
The author's mother was certain she was going to be the next
Anne Sexton, so she actually gave legal guardianship of her son
to her psychiatrist so she could focus on her poetry, or so says
Augusten Burroughs in the book, but VF printed an article
recently stating that the family he talks
about in the book questions the liberties he took
in his memoir.

***************************************

For now, I can only content myself with writing things
I need to write, and, as my friend says, maybe in a few
years I'll write better poems. Not just about the experience
of losing my dad, but I hope about all experiences I feel compelled
to write about.

This from Jane Kenyon:


Not Writing

A wasp rises to its papery
nest under the eaves
where it daubs

at the gray shape,
but seems unable
to enter its own house.