On the Road

Stuck
Jack Kerouac
So wanted to be Allen
Allen Allen Allen
Allen and Proud
Allen and Naomi
Allen and Buroughs
Allen and Jack

Spitting poems out of the good side of my mouth

In the back pocket of awkward, skinny boys (and fat girls)

Wrong in New York, Carolina, Oklahoma, Kansas
It's a long way to run

Oh come back Many, mute and lame
Come back Sycamore
Come back Orange Grove
Come back hill

Save me from the smell of corn
Corn for breakfast morning
Noon and night

Save me from myself come to be

I will be your school girl, jewish priness, wife, engineer

Save me from this stalk sky road
Save me from computer languages
Lay me down in green pastures

Dear John

I have disappeared
If you happen to see me
Riding around town
Kindly remind me I am gone
And that I no longer need to be seen
The girls never liked me anyhow
And are probably happier not to have me around
Since I never really existed, at any rate
It is time they stopped
Playing games and seeing ghosts
And married nice boys like their fathers
And had sons like their brothers
And wore dresses like thier mothers

Here we are, again

Looking across the table
through mirrors, between mirrors
One behind the other behind

In this life there are three dogs
In this life there is a tree swaying
In this life there is traffic pounding
In this life there is water falling
In this life I am drowning

I am swimming

I can see the back of your head
(I forgot to brush my hair)

In this life I am five years old
And she is 102
And we are 24, or are we
In this life I am as old as time
As the glaciers that shared the hills
That have always been here

In this life I am as still as the horizon
As restless as the car window
As alone as the man in the moon

How long ago?

You said to me once
Daring me
You said
I was too good
To leave you
You told me once
I loved you too much
To leave you
So I left
To prove to myself
To you
We are not the same person
And I was right
Today I saw you
From across a mass of tiny faces
Do you think me forever lost in the crowd?
You were glorious
and older
and slower
and missing
something
You were right
We were too good
And now we
Are dimmer
Without each other
As proof

An Apology

I hope this letter finds you well. I have not heard news of you in quite some time. It is so hard to keep up with people from home. As you may well know. Even my sister who lives in the city now is infinitely more attached to our past than I am. She sends me knews of people we once knew, people she has seen by chance or heard of from others. It feels as though I never really knew any of them. As though they were whispers in a dream. I think sheer proximity to the place of our shared youth grants her longevity of memory, for she visits home from time to time and her contact to the past seems have been strengthened by the act of following old familiar streets.

At times I feel like a patient who has suddenly awaken from a long slumber to find that she has only a flickering recollection of life before some tragic accident. It is like a smell you can't quite place. The images have all faded, except for a few, and I feel utterly disconnected from, well, history.

I write this to you for you are a lasting image from my youth. An image that, prehaps in my childish arrogance I assumed was lack-luster and forgetable against some bright and shining future which fate held out before me.

Many years ago I read a wonderful short story by Ursela Leguin. It was right after I had experienced the second great failure of my life. The first was a girl. The latter was, as I am sure you knew it would be, a game. This is what she wrote:

"He knew how fragile the string was that held hope -- The sword above our heaeds."

Now, so many years later that line reminds me of you, or perhaps it is the memory of you that summons up the image of Damocle's sword. I would like to apologize to you for being so blind to the doom looming above our youthful heads.

I apologize also if I am being coy. I thought, somehow, you would understand. It is the only way I can express myself. Besides, you were always much smarter than me, which I am sure you have always known. I was just ambitious, and alittle talented, and not at all worthy of the greatness I aspired to.

In my minds eye now you are grown and educated. You have a family or a calling. Meaning and fufillment. It is for this reason I feel ashamed at being so remiss. For having not forgiven my 12-year-old best friend sooner. I was not really ever upset with you for your mistakes, but only for loving me because I felt I could never love you back. And now, having been quite unrequited, you will always have my heart, as I am late in love like wisdom.

Small Birds Sing the Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock

I wish the rest of my life were one long rainy fall day, upstate, some place where the leaves are turning and the apples are ripe, someplace where there is pumpkin soup brewing and a chilling breeze wafting the smell of children playing in hay with candy-apple breath.

I wish I were standing in the kichen of my first studio apartment eating herkimer cheese and cooking a huge bowl of black bean soup in a fuzzy sweater with a world of knowledge opening before me like a barn door. That is where I first read Chaucer and now when the spring comes and the birds begin to sing I can only think:

Here bygynneth the Book of the Tales of Caunterbury.

Sometimes I feel as though I have been sleep walking for some 600 years. Then nature pricks me in my heart. I have measured out my life in rain drops, in clouds passing, in blades of grass.

I have been waiting for the chance to relive some day once existed so that I could share it with someone else. I have been dreaming of a day when I could read A Few Lines Composed Above Tinturn Abby and not feel a horrible sense of loss of kinship. Some fine morning as it were. When I would wake up and live forever in the lamb light. King again of the apple orchard.

Today, today I am going out to clean the pasture spring. You come too.

Self Referential

It is interesting that I feel compelled to continue posting things to this blog that no one will ever read. I mean let's face it who really cares? I am not the person everyone had hoped I would be. All people see when they look at me is their own disappointment. I am homonculus. Subhuman. Inhumane. A edgy reminder that our children always fail us. I just can't stop talking to myself in public.

Hypatia

I enjoy irony and happenstance. I miss my friends who have graduated and moved away. I more and more long for the hills and rain, the colors and smells of Upstate New York, where I was born. My home town has hit the skidz. I woke up the other morning and realized that I am stuck in someone else's white-bread world and I need to get out. My favorite things in life are playing soccer and spending time with my dogs (recently ceded to my ex) or my friends (recently departed for the coast). So basically, I have become a work-aholic. I go into work at night and don't ever report the hours because I can't stand watching anymore tv and my family is too far away to really talk to. Besides I would rather just sit quietly in their presence. Sometimes I really think I was smarter 10 years ago. MY brain is shrinking. My old friends all speak 3 languages and have interesting, dynamic lives with interesting, dynamic jobs and interesting, dynamic and new friends. I can't buy into their world-views. I know that I love things other people find mundane. I am not very good at dancing with strangers. I listen to music for subtle nuances in diction. I like the way children speak. It inspires me. I have resolutions 1) never to leave my dog and 2) never to work in a cubicle. I am currently in violation of all of my resolutions. I am in search of some miracle ice cream. Please contact me if you have had any.

Radiant Red Matrix

I got a new car. I drove all around. I felt for the first time in a long time that I could just go somewhere. But where to go?

Some things you think of when you're bored . . .

I wonder what it would look like if I threw the camera up in the air and took a picture with the remote . . .
(more illuminating thoughts)