homemade poem spam
I rewrote my story and have almost finished it. It wasn't originally supposed to be the sequel to Pluralism, but after much debate I've decided that it is. It's about the same length as Pluralism. I don't think it's quite the same as the first version, maybe not as good, but it's okay in its own right. We'll see.
I was going to finish it tonight but I wrote this instead.
I went out in the fog tonight
Because my mother told me to.
"It's beautiful," she said. "Go see."
I went. And when I came back in I told her
"Yeah, it sure is"
And went back to my room.
Later, after I found my coat and shoes in the dark,
I picked up a flashlight on my way out.
I didn't use it. I live in this house; this house lives in me. I know my way around.
The fog was not thick
Impenetrable
Dense
All those hard words we use to describe something that is hardly there
Just a breath, white
Like my breath the morning after I stayed up all night
And yelled to the frozen world from the steps of my dorm that it was going to be an A paper
Because I said so.
The world slept on then, just as it did now,
Undisturbed by a breath of white.
I couldn't pick the moon out among the streetlights,
Dozens of little moons suspended in the white,
Maybe more fluorescent than the real one, but the right size, anyway.
The poles that supported them were gone.
I couldn't see to the end of my own block in either direction.
When I took my glasses off, it was like
I'd always been meant to be blind
Because nothing had ever been there to see.
Depression is like this, maybe,
Comfortably numb, like the song.
It's an old analogy, still the best; a gray world of nothing. My mother told me.
She would know.
But my mother told me the fog was beautiful
And I believed her.
Maybe her intimacy with gray worlds of nothing makes them all beautiful to her
Because they're killing her kindly
Begging her from my arm for every slow dance
And leaving the fast ones up to me
To quick-step while there's still time.
But I don't think that's why this fog is beautiful. To either of us.
This white isn't gray
It isn't cold
There is no sound
No touch of wind
As soft as a hand caressing, in passing,
No creature comforts except the greatest of them all:
Undemanding presence.
A listening silence,
And a cocoon that presses memory close around the shoulders like an old coat,
An old friend.
We watched The Fog the other night, Mom and I.
The remake.
It was okay, better than we'd anticipated,
Worse than we'd hoped,
Like life.
And like so many of the things we try to say
To each other, and the people we live with,
The people we know in passing --
Like when we hand over an awkward Christmas present to a good acquaintance we aren't really sure qualifies for gift-giving status
Hoping that gracious gratitude is still the general rule
Because we tell ourselves that there aren't enough small kindnesses in life
And besides,
We can't return it.
Like life.
It doesn't matter if you break it --
You already bought it
A long time ago
And the warranty is always running out.
But it's true that there aren't enough small kindnesses in life
And gracious gratitude, unless there was a memo I didn't get, is still the general rule
And if merciless capitalism can't make us give to our fellow man
What will?
I like the fog because it doesn't send me automatic emails for online petitions
Appealing to my guilt over the deaths of children I've never met,
the slaughter of wild horses I've never watched running on a mountainside,
the injustice of laws I never voted for or against, because until five months ago
I was too young to vote, or have sex, or smoke,
And it only feels like another month before that that I couldn't drive
Or go to high school
Or ask friends over for sleepovers
Or wander off by myself in a store
Or read a book with chapters
Or cross the street without my mother holding my hand
Or breathe air
Or exist in self-awareness like the sentient being I am
But sentience doesn't make godhood
And though the guilt is irrational, it's there
Deep under the skin
And those emails are cruel in their exploitation of that fact
Even if they are right.
If the capitalism works where the guilt only hurts,
Let it go, let it go, let it go.
Part of me wanted to sing into the fog to hear my voice swallowed up.
Maybe then I wouldn't have to have a voice anymore
And without my glasses I wouldn't have to have sight.
Deaf and dumb and blind in the womb of the fog.
But the threat of being pushed out is still there, as with childbirth
because fog doesn't last
And it's easier just to leave
To go inside and sit next to the heater and write poetry
About the condensing of water molecules in the air on a winter night
Being a metaphor for life
Than it is to be woken up to the world
By having your womb taken away.
So here's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.
You wake up off your usual schedule to make the day feel different from the other thirty days in December
And you sit in a circle and call everyone by name
To show them that you remember
And that you care
And that what you give them doesn't matter, because it's the thought that counts
Just like your mother told you
When you were too young to understand why the toy didn't matter too, just a little.
Christmas is about
Answering a couple of those emails with the two seconds it takes to type a signature
That might save some child or wild horse's life,
And maybe trying for a second to care about the child or the horse
Instead of just feeling uselessly guilty.
Christmas is about
Giving the awkward gift without hesitation
Because it's Christmas
And people don't care about anything except the fact
That you remembered their name
And at least one thing they like.
And Christmas is about going out in the fog
And letting it listen to you breathe
Just because your mother told you
That it was beautiful.
And that's that. Take the tone as you will, because I honestly can't decide how I feel about this poem.
-rave
I was going to finish it tonight but I wrote this instead.
I went out in the fog tonight
Because my mother told me to.
"It's beautiful," she said. "Go see."
I went. And when I came back in I told her
"Yeah, it sure is"
And went back to my room.
Later, after I found my coat and shoes in the dark,
I picked up a flashlight on my way out.
I didn't use it. I live in this house; this house lives in me. I know my way around.
The fog was not thick
Impenetrable
Dense
All those hard words we use to describe something that is hardly there
Just a breath, white
Like my breath the morning after I stayed up all night
And yelled to the frozen world from the steps of my dorm that it was going to be an A paper
Because I said so.
The world slept on then, just as it did now,
Undisturbed by a breath of white.
I couldn't pick the moon out among the streetlights,
Dozens of little moons suspended in the white,
Maybe more fluorescent than the real one, but the right size, anyway.
The poles that supported them were gone.
I couldn't see to the end of my own block in either direction.
When I took my glasses off, it was like
I'd always been meant to be blind
Because nothing had ever been there to see.
Depression is like this, maybe,
Comfortably numb, like the song.
It's an old analogy, still the best; a gray world of nothing. My mother told me.
She would know.
But my mother told me the fog was beautiful
And I believed her.
Maybe her intimacy with gray worlds of nothing makes them all beautiful to her
Because they're killing her kindly
Begging her from my arm for every slow dance
And leaving the fast ones up to me
To quick-step while there's still time.
But I don't think that's why this fog is beautiful. To either of us.
This white isn't gray
It isn't cold
There is no sound
No touch of wind
As soft as a hand caressing, in passing,
No creature comforts except the greatest of them all:
Undemanding presence.
A listening silence,
And a cocoon that presses memory close around the shoulders like an old coat,
An old friend.
We watched The Fog the other night, Mom and I.
The remake.
It was okay, better than we'd anticipated,
Worse than we'd hoped,
Like life.
And like so many of the things we try to say
To each other, and the people we live with,
The people we know in passing --
Like when we hand over an awkward Christmas present to a good acquaintance we aren't really sure qualifies for gift-giving status
Hoping that gracious gratitude is still the general rule
Because we tell ourselves that there aren't enough small kindnesses in life
And besides,
We can't return it.
Like life.
It doesn't matter if you break it --
You already bought it
A long time ago
And the warranty is always running out.
But it's true that there aren't enough small kindnesses in life
And gracious gratitude, unless there was a memo I didn't get, is still the general rule
And if merciless capitalism can't make us give to our fellow man
What will?
I like the fog because it doesn't send me automatic emails for online petitions
Appealing to my guilt over the deaths of children I've never met,
the slaughter of wild horses I've never watched running on a mountainside,
the injustice of laws I never voted for or against, because until five months ago
I was too young to vote, or have sex, or smoke,
And it only feels like another month before that that I couldn't drive
Or go to high school
Or ask friends over for sleepovers
Or wander off by myself in a store
Or read a book with chapters
Or cross the street without my mother holding my hand
Or breathe air
Or exist in self-awareness like the sentient being I am
But sentience doesn't make godhood
And though the guilt is irrational, it's there
Deep under the skin
And those emails are cruel in their exploitation of that fact
Even if they are right.
If the capitalism works where the guilt only hurts,
Let it go, let it go, let it go.
Part of me wanted to sing into the fog to hear my voice swallowed up.
Maybe then I wouldn't have to have a voice anymore
And without my glasses I wouldn't have to have sight.
Deaf and dumb and blind in the womb of the fog.
But the threat of being pushed out is still there, as with childbirth
because fog doesn't last
And it's easier just to leave
To go inside and sit next to the heater and write poetry
About the condensing of water molecules in the air on a winter night
Being a metaphor for life
Than it is to be woken up to the world
By having your womb taken away.
So here's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.
You wake up off your usual schedule to make the day feel different from the other thirty days in December
And you sit in a circle and call everyone by name
To show them that you remember
And that you care
And that what you give them doesn't matter, because it's the thought that counts
Just like your mother told you
When you were too young to understand why the toy didn't matter too, just a little.
Christmas is about
Answering a couple of those emails with the two seconds it takes to type a signature
That might save some child or wild horse's life,
And maybe trying for a second to care about the child or the horse
Instead of just feeling uselessly guilty.
Christmas is about
Giving the awkward gift without hesitation
Because it's Christmas
And people don't care about anything except the fact
That you remembered their name
And at least one thing they like.
And Christmas is about going out in the fog
And letting it listen to you breathe
Just because your mother told you
That it was beautiful.
And that's that. Take the tone as you will, because I honestly can't decide how I feel about this poem.
-rave