Mendon gig of SPEAK on the road…

Brilliant.

Great crowd, great reading, too much fun.

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Column will be late tomorrow because I’m rewriting a section.

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Rest easy, y’all.

Do you know how much I appreciate your feedback?

SPIN

The braids around her head
make me spin whenever
I look at her picture.

She lies on the white road.
She could be asleep. (I know
she isn’t asleep.) I spin

whenever I look
at the picture. She lies on the
white road, not sleeping,

eyes closed and dusted white.
The braids around her head rest
snaky in the dust, where she could be

any young girl anywhere
who doesn’t sleep in the road unless
it’s unavoidable, because

that’s where the mine
bullet bomb RPG caught
her. She lies in her braids there,

and I’m spinning around her picture —
a fragment, a white fragment in
dusty tears, the long streaks on my cheeks

vapor trails on my skin. The jets above me
drop nothing on their way into Logan.
The roads here are black and wet.

We have no dust here, no white dust here.
I pull my own hair out of its braid
and spin slowly down onto the couch to read

more news. She lies on the front page
of the local daily and the picture
is black and white and she is not sleeping,

though I know I am.

Gronked from ocvictor. All very Discordian.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

“The three siblings had agreed to get the same tattoo, but he was the only one to choose to have it burned into his face.”

From “Shopping For Identity: The Marketing of Ethnicity”
by Marilyn Halter.

Dawn Gabriel (mom_star) was great at the Hut tonight…on a night which I thought was over all pretty staid and frankly, a bit lackluster. Only a handful of poems struck me as remotely interesting.

News about the 3×5 bout structure at the NPS this year makes me VERY glad I’m done. Can’t imagine how this will play out; shocked that they didn’t wait a year to implement it, what with everyone’s slams being structured to pick a four person team and almost all the slam season done. But, hey…who cares, right? The more teams, the merrier. Of course, we’ll see if that holds true as rumors seem to be predicting more than a few teams will be not going to St. Louis.

The fact that the quality of the poetry has been declining for years is all beside the point, I guess.

Which leads me to another point: as of midnight, my PSI membership expired, and for the first time in years, I’m not renewing it.

Kiss today goodbye…

OK…a larger revision, focusing the poem more sharply, I hope.

DIALOGUE

I tell her, the time between

late winter and early spring
really takes a toll on my
optimism about sweat equity: you survive
the dark months expecting you’ll find relief
in the growing light, and then
nothing changes.

that’s the problem with you, she says. all I
ever hope for is that I’ll
still be breathing
when the wind turns
lukewarm. I respond that

days like this
hurt worse than february’s worst
knife. just as the crocus
starts to crack the frost and pierce through,
you give up on hope and admit to a longing for bloodshed,
drunken fights in dive bars or a sudden burst of deadly lust
that carries you into a strange bed through a broken
window and from there into oblivion; every bad impulse
to self-immolation breaks out in you as if you were
a ruptured pod.

you think it’s wrong to feel that way,
she says. but it’s not wrong to
describe a heart as broken
if it is broken, or a fallen hope as
fallen even if it has yet to hit the
ground.

what you don’t get to do, she says,
is marinate
in the description until
you’re tender.

I don’t fully understand but I think we are
not so far apart. all this bloodlust in me
is just a way of acting the same thing she is saying.

I want to reach for her
and explain this but
there are shadows among my fingers
that leave me cold. there are bones
hidden in my flesh that I’ve never noticed.
I’m afraid the sun
won’t ever break through to warm them.
I’m afraid that
if I try to touch her,
one of us may shatter.