A Tianyu-related break from Harry Potter squeeage
I have decided to start posting some of the poetry that I've been writing, and it will all be behind a cut if that's not your cuppa. I wrote a bunch for my class, and some of that I've refined and worked on since then. Anyway these are the Tianyu related ones that I have edited to something I feel rather finished with.
The first was a visual poem, more of an art piece. I was playing with texture of poetry and shape, what constituted poetry. And I also wanted to write about Tianyu's death, but I had a hard time doing so in ways that weren't overly emotional or sentimentally masturbatory (a classmate's comment about overly personal poetry, not mine, but I like the term.). The end result is behind the cut, both a scan of the original and a reproduction of it in typeset, since I'm still trying to transition it to a more "readable" form.
Original : http://s30.photobucket.com/albums/c341/turned_earth/?action=view¤t=wallpaper.jpg
Wallpaper
The police come to
county coroner? (detective knut) effects at monroeville police [personalsriflesammoblastingcaps?]
call next april -ballistics lab-to get gun back
your door, even when you're
corl funeral home (northern pike) [gives death cert. viewing 1 day wed funeral thurs am puts obit in paper (check names)]
watching a cop
restland cemetery churchhill cemetery 2 pm dan homewood cemetery (forbes avenue) [spot overlooks victory garden headstone discounts in may]
show and you can
freeze their doppelgangers
leslee airport wed @ 9:50 pm-jer can get
on the screen while
you answer the knock.
I said I wasn't
dr. duggin scrip called in [ambien take ½ pill] make first prenatal appt after first trimester funeral
afraid of
anything, and
apt-pack [furniturekitchenbooksbedroom-storage] [bookscdsdvdcomputers-to house]
for the most
part I wasn't
death certificate to [sallie maeciticorpcapitalonecitistreetMBNAnationalcity--take name off accts.]
lying.
car towed [mach's auto body (broadway avenue, pitcairn) $300 fee-cash only] CALL PROGRESSIVE
Every couple holding hands is a lighthouse
of what we couldn't do.
The second is one about the hurricane season we went through. It uh, well, yeah. Everything I've written actually foreshadows that thing, sadly.
Hurricane
On the night that God hammered on our door,
we caged the cats in their primitive selves under the table,
shingles smacked the windows like moths;
air/sky/water were all gray & lobbying for equal space.
On the one night that I lost at trivial pursuit,
fear made me parrot that we hadn't bugged out,
left & run & skipped not walked across state lines,
even though the afternoon had been petrified,
all of the birds had gone north
& leaves on their cradle stalks had sucked in
their breath, waiting.
Outside, Tianyu ducked & weaved & bobbed with the camera,
told it to cut through nature's red tape and give us an image,
but all it gave him was speckled night, swampy coffee grounds,
tea leaves shaped like disaster.
The last is one that I wrote about our trip up North in the winter of 2005.
A Slingshot Just Short of New Year's
How many words are there for snow? Did they ever really answer that?
Each syllable is unique when it lands on the windshield, and piles of unspoken phrases
accumulate on the tarpaper road.
Our path is soft
with snow and something oily &
slick that is made from air.
When did you lose the map? How does a person lose a map in a moving vehicle? It's pretty idiotic to just throw it out of a window.
Four rest stops
in a row have been closed, and now there is just the slow easy
rhythm of the wheels on asphalt seams, each
beat a prayer in the religion
of Mpg and Rpm.
Where are we? Slow down, I can't see you. I just feel better when I can see where you are.
There is no home to go to-
keys on a jailor's ring that open into soft beds and coffee-
we are pinned to the January road with no direction but forward.
We settled this on livejournal-everyone agrees that Elton John's saying "And there's no one there to raise them if you're dead," not "if you did." That doesn't even make sense.
Blue smoke spires from the mouths of the tunnels, thrumming throats of the mountains.
I'm just saying-why does Japan seem to believe that kids are the only ones who can save the world in giant robot suits?
In our separate cars we jabber across the intangible ropes of satellites,
rolling through topics and traffic;
trucks play hide and seek with hungry engines-
the roads hidden from paper wander off course and stop in shanty towns long passed,
exits already forgone.
I asked what state we were in the last time we stopped. You get to be an asshat this time.
Short skipping jumps into the next port,
seventeen virgin cups of coffee despoiled, and eight hours of air time sees us
across five states, pulling our life from one place to the next like
a rubber band anchored between two fingers.
Brake, brake. Please brake, dude.
Every house we pass
gives off lazy streams of smoke and sound,
earmarks of humanity,
dog-eared celestial pages.
I understand that only teenagers fit in the suits, I'm just saying that I wouldn't pick an emotionally damaged teenager to pilot my fifty billion dollar mecha robot in a populated city.
The evening waitress at the diner is a worn-out beauty queen,
paper tiara, smudged lipstick,
the veins on her hands pumping when she writes down orders.
I think Christopher Lambert has a better chance at becoming successful again if he attaches himself to another franchise, like Highlander or Mortal Kombat. He doesn't have very good script judgement.
We stare out of the windows
like Odysseus' men, dulled blades in our hands, waiting for something,
the sight of land.
Well he could be Revolver Ocelot in Metal Gear Solid. That reminds me-did we ever decide who could play the most races and ethnicities? Was it Ben Kingsley?
All the decorations on the walls are fat yellowing babies swathed in banners,
paper faces smeared with
pancake layers of dust and grease. We
are too tired to examine the silverware
more closely.
They changed the name of the Transformer from Meister to Jazz, like a black man couldn't voiceover anything that German. He needed some hip name to match his jive talking. "Massa says yo name is Jazz!"
This is what it must be like to be
trapped in an oubliette, then,
rounded and made of stone.
The only reason anyone watches that movie is so that they can stare at David Bowie's package.
One window to the outside world, the one you came in, shut, bolted-
No one knows your name but the person who made the journey with you,
(If you eat any more of those jelly packets, you're going to get sick..)
the one who threw you down there,
a face across a table,
a voice coming from a fancy piece of plastic hooked to your ear-
the walls are thick and lined with memory.
The Wrath of Khan was the best one. KHAAAAAAAN!
Any calls you make are echoed by the person on the other end of the line, but
the voice coming out of it is
probably your own.
It's okay to scream that in public because everyone knows what you mean.
The first was a visual poem, more of an art piece. I was playing with texture of poetry and shape, what constituted poetry. And I also wanted to write about Tianyu's death, but I had a hard time doing so in ways that weren't overly emotional or sentimentally masturbatory (a classmate's comment about overly personal poetry, not mine, but I like the term.). The end result is behind the cut, both a scan of the original and a reproduction of it in typeset, since I'm still trying to transition it to a more "readable" form.
Original : http://s30.photobucket.com/albums/c341/turned_earth/?action=view¤t=wallpaper.jpg
Wallpaper
The police come to
county coroner? (detective knut) effects at monroeville police [personalsriflesammoblastingcaps?]
call next april -ballistics lab-to get gun back
your door, even when you're
corl funeral home (northern pike) [gives death cert. viewing 1 day wed funeral thurs am puts obit in paper (check names)]
watching a cop
restland cemetery churchhill cemetery 2 pm dan homewood cemetery (forbes avenue) [spot overlooks victory garden headstone discounts in may]
show and you can
freeze their doppelgangers
leslee airport wed @ 9:50 pm-jer can get
on the screen while
you answer the knock.
I said I wasn't
dr. duggin scrip called in [ambien take ½ pill] make first prenatal appt after first trimester funeral
afraid of
anything, and
apt-pack [furniturekitchenbooksbedroom-storage] [bookscdsdvdcomputers-to house]
for the most
part I wasn't
death certificate to [sallie maeciticorpcapitalonecitistreetMBNAnationalcity--take name off accts.]
lying.
car towed [mach's auto body (broadway avenue, pitcairn) $300 fee-cash only] CALL PROGRESSIVE
Every couple holding hands is a lighthouse
of what we couldn't do.
The second is one about the hurricane season we went through. It uh, well, yeah. Everything I've written actually foreshadows that thing, sadly.
Hurricane
On the night that God hammered on our door,
we caged the cats in their primitive selves under the table,
shingles smacked the windows like moths;
air/sky/water were all gray & lobbying for equal space.
On the one night that I lost at trivial pursuit,
fear made me parrot that we hadn't bugged out,
left & run & skipped not walked across state lines,
even though the afternoon had been petrified,
all of the birds had gone north
& leaves on their cradle stalks had sucked in
their breath, waiting.
Outside, Tianyu ducked & weaved & bobbed with the camera,
told it to cut through nature's red tape and give us an image,
but all it gave him was speckled night, swampy coffee grounds,
tea leaves shaped like disaster.
The last is one that I wrote about our trip up North in the winter of 2005.
A Slingshot Just Short of New Year's
How many words are there for snow? Did they ever really answer that?
Each syllable is unique when it lands on the windshield, and piles of unspoken phrases
accumulate on the tarpaper road.
Our path is soft
with snow and something oily &
slick that is made from air.
When did you lose the map? How does a person lose a map in a moving vehicle? It's pretty idiotic to just throw it out of a window.
Four rest stops
in a row have been closed, and now there is just the slow easy
rhythm of the wheels on asphalt seams, each
beat a prayer in the religion
of Mpg and Rpm.
Where are we? Slow down, I can't see you. I just feel better when I can see where you are.
There is no home to go to-
keys on a jailor's ring that open into soft beds and coffee-
we are pinned to the January road with no direction but forward.
We settled this on livejournal-everyone agrees that Elton John's saying "And there's no one there to raise them if you're dead," not "if you did." That doesn't even make sense.
Blue smoke spires from the mouths of the tunnels, thrumming throats of the mountains.
I'm just saying-why does Japan seem to believe that kids are the only ones who can save the world in giant robot suits?
In our separate cars we jabber across the intangible ropes of satellites,
rolling through topics and traffic;
trucks play hide and seek with hungry engines-
the roads hidden from paper wander off course and stop in shanty towns long passed,
exits already forgone.
I asked what state we were in the last time we stopped. You get to be an asshat this time.
Short skipping jumps into the next port,
seventeen virgin cups of coffee despoiled, and eight hours of air time sees us
across five states, pulling our life from one place to the next like
a rubber band anchored between two fingers.
Brake, brake. Please brake, dude.
Every house we pass
gives off lazy streams of smoke and sound,
earmarks of humanity,
dog-eared celestial pages.
I understand that only teenagers fit in the suits, I'm just saying that I wouldn't pick an emotionally damaged teenager to pilot my fifty billion dollar mecha robot in a populated city.
The evening waitress at the diner is a worn-out beauty queen,
paper tiara, smudged lipstick,
the veins on her hands pumping when she writes down orders.
I think Christopher Lambert has a better chance at becoming successful again if he attaches himself to another franchise, like Highlander or Mortal Kombat. He doesn't have very good script judgement.
We stare out of the windows
like Odysseus' men, dulled blades in our hands, waiting for something,
the sight of land.
Well he could be Revolver Ocelot in Metal Gear Solid. That reminds me-did we ever decide who could play the most races and ethnicities? Was it Ben Kingsley?
All the decorations on the walls are fat yellowing babies swathed in banners,
paper faces smeared with
pancake layers of dust and grease. We
are too tired to examine the silverware
more closely.
They changed the name of the Transformer from Meister to Jazz, like a black man couldn't voiceover anything that German. He needed some hip name to match his jive talking. "Massa says yo name is Jazz!"
This is what it must be like to be
trapped in an oubliette, then,
rounded and made of stone.
The only reason anyone watches that movie is so that they can stare at David Bowie's package.
One window to the outside world, the one you came in, shut, bolted-
No one knows your name but the person who made the journey with you,
(If you eat any more of those jelly packets, you're going to get sick..)
the one who threw you down there,
a face across a table,
a voice coming from a fancy piece of plastic hooked to your ear-
the walls are thick and lined with memory.
The Wrath of Khan was the best one. KHAAAAAAAN!
Any calls you make are echoed by the person on the other end of the line, but
the voice coming out of it is
probably your own.
It's okay to scream that in public because everyone knows what you mean.