Give them words.
Friday's post coming Wednesday because Friday has not ended yet, and is projected to carry on until Tuesday evening, at which point: chaos, collapse, catching up on the internet.
Instead:
When you see this meme, post a poem on your LJ.
The archived first installation of this.
Self-Improvement
Tony Hoagland
Just before she flew off like a swan
to her wealthy parents' summer home,
Bruce's college girlfriend asked him
to improve his expertise at oral sex,
and offered him some technical advice:
Use nothing but his tonguetip
to flick the light switch in his room
on and off a hundred times a day
until he grew fluent at the nuances
of force and latitude.
Imagine him at practice every evening,
more inspired than he ever was at algebra,
beads of sweat sprouting on his brow,
thinking, thirty-seven, thirty-eight,
seeing, in the tunnel vision of his mind's eye,
the quadratic equation of her climax
yield to the logic
of his simple math.
Maybe he unscrewed
the bulb from his apartment ceiling
so that passersby would not believe
a giant firefly was pulsing
its electric abdomen in 13 B.
Maybe, as he stood
two inches from the wall,
in darkness, fogging the old plaster
with his breath, he visualized the future
as a mansion standing on the shore
that he was rowing to
with his tongue's exhausted oar.
Of course, the girlfriend dumped him:
met someone, apres-ski, who,
using nothing but his nose
could identify the vintage of a Cabernet.
Sometimes we are asked
to get good at something we have
no talent for,
or we excel at something we will never
have the opportunity to prove.
Often we ask ourselves
to make absolute sense
out of what just happens,
and in this way, what we are practicing
is suffering,
which everybody practices,
but strangely few of us
grow graceful in.
The climaxes of suffering are complex,
costly, beautiful, but secret.
Bruce never played the light switch again.
So the avenues we walk down,
full of bodies wearing faces,
are full of hidden talent:
enough to make pianos moan,
sidewalks split,
streetlights deliriously flicker.
---
Christian's Calling
Nicole Blackman
Christian is just learning to speak.
He unravels over the phone like a sweater.
He's loyal to the wrong friend
he's in love with the wrong girl
he's destroyed by the rest of the world.
Christian keeps a box under his bed.
He whispers in his sleep.
He always carries his passport with him
in case he has to suddenly disappear.
It's taken him a year to trust me.
Sometimes when he thinks
no one's looking
he touches the scars on his throat
where she nearly clawed him to death.
I parked outside her house today,
he says. I didn't go in. I didn't
want her to see me. I didn't know
what I wanted, but this hurts,
he says. It hurts out loud. I can
hold it in my hands and it's so
heavy, he cries, it's just so heavy.
Christian boils down his days to
coffee, errands, bills, regrets,
daydreams, drinks, crying fits,
phone calls, nightmares.
One day he falls
onto a strange new blanket of skin.
He tells me later that things are better.
Don't worry about me, he says,
I'm getting it somewhere else now.
In two days he's brittle again,
a china boy who chips away at his skin
just to see how little it takes to leave a mark.
Was it like this before? he asks.
Will it be like this forever?
I can't choke out a yes.
Long distance is too far away
to risk a suicide.
On his way to a date with some
interim girl, he gets a message on
his pager. She cancels his chance,
ending his night before it's begun.
He calls me from a payphone,
halfway across the world, and says
I'm all messed up with no place to
go.
(The lions pick their teeth
clean with your bones.
Christian, your only crime
is that you fell in love with a lion.)
I hear the catch in his voice and
he breaks down, tearing apart like silk.
I just don't want to go home.
I just don't want to go home alone,
he whispers, as if the oxygen
costs too much. If only I
could reach across the country
to the dark parking lot
where's he's falling apart a piece
at a time.
(The lions smell your blood
and breathe in your dust.
If they destroy you, Christian
it's because they must.)
And the little god
with the broken head
and the broken heart
sighs and beats the time.
I have come to Los Angeles to die,
he moans.
I have come to Los Angeles to die.
Instead:
When you see this meme, post a poem on your LJ.
The archived first installation of this.
Self-Improvement
Tony Hoagland
Just before she flew off like a swan
to her wealthy parents' summer home,
Bruce's college girlfriend asked him
to improve his expertise at oral sex,
and offered him some technical advice:
Use nothing but his tonguetip
to flick the light switch in his room
on and off a hundred times a day
until he grew fluent at the nuances
of force and latitude.
Imagine him at practice every evening,
more inspired than he ever was at algebra,
beads of sweat sprouting on his brow,
thinking, thirty-seven, thirty-eight,
seeing, in the tunnel vision of his mind's eye,
the quadratic equation of her climax
yield to the logic
of his simple math.
Maybe he unscrewed
the bulb from his apartment ceiling
so that passersby would not believe
a giant firefly was pulsing
its electric abdomen in 13 B.
Maybe, as he stood
two inches from the wall,
in darkness, fogging the old plaster
with his breath, he visualized the future
as a mansion standing on the shore
that he was rowing to
with his tongue's exhausted oar.
Of course, the girlfriend dumped him:
met someone, apres-ski, who,
using nothing but his nose
could identify the vintage of a Cabernet.
Sometimes we are asked
to get good at something we have
no talent for,
or we excel at something we will never
have the opportunity to prove.
Often we ask ourselves
to make absolute sense
out of what just happens,
and in this way, what we are practicing
is suffering,
which everybody practices,
but strangely few of us
grow graceful in.
The climaxes of suffering are complex,
costly, beautiful, but secret.
Bruce never played the light switch again.
So the avenues we walk down,
full of bodies wearing faces,
are full of hidden talent:
enough to make pianos moan,
sidewalks split,
streetlights deliriously flicker.
---
Christian's Calling
Nicole Blackman
Christian is just learning to speak.
He unravels over the phone like a sweater.
He's loyal to the wrong friend
he's in love with the wrong girl
he's destroyed by the rest of the world.
Christian keeps a box under his bed.
He whispers in his sleep.
He always carries his passport with him
in case he has to suddenly disappear.
It's taken him a year to trust me.
Sometimes when he thinks
no one's looking
he touches the scars on his throat
where she nearly clawed him to death.
I parked outside her house today,
he says. I didn't go in. I didn't
want her to see me. I didn't know
what I wanted, but this hurts,
he says. It hurts out loud. I can
hold it in my hands and it's so
heavy, he cries, it's just so heavy.
Christian boils down his days to
coffee, errands, bills, regrets,
daydreams, drinks, crying fits,
phone calls, nightmares.
One day he falls
onto a strange new blanket of skin.
He tells me later that things are better.
Don't worry about me, he says,
I'm getting it somewhere else now.
In two days he's brittle again,
a china boy who chips away at his skin
just to see how little it takes to leave a mark.
Was it like this before? he asks.
Will it be like this forever?
I can't choke out a yes.
Long distance is too far away
to risk a suicide.
On his way to a date with some
interim girl, he gets a message on
his pager. She cancels his chance,
ending his night before it's begun.
He calls me from a payphone,
halfway across the world, and says
I'm all messed up with no place to
go.
(The lions pick their teeth
clean with your bones.
Christian, your only crime
is that you fell in love with a lion.)
I hear the catch in his voice and
he breaks down, tearing apart like silk.
I just don't want to go home.
I just don't want to go home alone,
he whispers, as if the oxygen
costs too much. If only I
could reach across the country
to the dark parking lot
where's he's falling apart a piece
at a time.
(The lions smell your blood
and breathe in your dust.
If they destroy you, Christian
it's because they must.)
And the little god
with the broken head
and the broken heart
sighs and beats the time.
I have come to Los Angeles to die,
he moans.
I have come to Los Angeles to die.