car trouble

a little ode to social anxiety. might need a little more fleshing out. any suggestions will probably bring harmony to the middle east and statehood to dc.

Tell her car trouble.
it's believable;
she won't take it the wrong way.

Tell her car trouble.
it's easy,
won't hurt her feelings.

Don't tell her
how you circled the place
where the party was,
planned to park and go in,
but then you thought about talking,
about people,
being talked to
and not being talked to,
the lack of faith
that you could even make words,
time them right,
or keep up,
and you kept on driving.

And it doesn't make sense.
'cause you love her,
love all of them,
but when you pulled up to the place
you weren't breathing.

Tell her car trouble.
Or
tell her about the other times--
all of them--
the happy hours at the bars
you said you couldn't find
while really you were traveling the city alone,
'cause it quelled hte pain in your stomach
when you contemplated
another evening of maintenance,
the performance of being
funny and loud and entertaining and just like them
'Cause maybe you can't
'Cause maybe you aren't.

Or go further back
to the high school parties
you claimed you couldn't get a ride to
so you didn't have to stand
in another basement corner
digging one foot into the other
'cause it's more comfortable
than standing with no one to talk to.

Or further still
to when you were an eight year with chest pains
at the thought of the school cafeteria.
Tell her how sometimes
that's still who you are.

Tell her all of this,
tell her the awkwardness you mask with cleverness,
tell her how you plan an excuse for escape
every half hour
tell her,
tell her,
tell her, "Yeah, it wouldn't even turn over,
problems with the starter.
I got a new one the next day--
my friend installed it."

Because it doesn't make sense.
And you don't know her well enough
for the truth
so tell her car trouble
and pray
that next time
you'll go
so you won't have to tell her
anything at all.

itinerary

Let's celebrate my giddy new status by exorcising some old relationship demons. I feel like this one lacks a little in the way of specifics. Any ideas of what to bulk up may be rewarded with omelets. Or not.


This morning an airport carousel will spin empty.
Today flights will move passengers to where they belong;
you will throw a bag into the overhead compartment,
tell yourself it fits there,
believe you can sustain a trip home
without it on your lap.
Tonight, I will walk the runway of another hotel parking lot
without the comfortable baggage
of missing you.

Once you were a monument that my travels,
I drove in and out of casual embraces,
used my finger to trace a route down your spine,
I navigated your back; your memory.
If you had named a distance,
promised forever was where I would land,
I'd have gone there.

But you are a silent captain
and I am a restless passenger,
I am just learning to ask for what I want,
and you are barely beginning to listen
,
flash a light telling me which way to go,
let an answer travel the expanse of a PA system,
announce whatever it is you've been whispering with inarticulate fingers
for too many years.

Because distance is a dangerous pilot,
and when you held me in your lap
to forge intimacy from months of nothing,
your hands rubbing against my sides
only serve the purpose of unzipping me;
every stupid hope I'd ever harbored
and word I didn't say
threatening to spill form the worn canvas bag where I've kept them.
And I can't keep them.

This morning everything I carry will come with me,
abandoning a carousel that only understands circles.
And today you will awake in your hotel bed alone,
stare deep into the eyes of a silence that won't comfort you,
a distance that offers no protection,
walk the lonely runway of a traveler with no plan,
pretend that what you're packing can fit neatly into anywhere
and face the fate 0f moving
without me.

Day Off

After a day of traveling to the taint of Northern Virginia, my sinuses are still trying to secede from my face.
More poems tomorrow.

Marektable Skills

This one almost became something about 3 years back. Agai, I like the concept, but the execution's a little off. It needs more theme and less story, so any ideas on what to trim would inspire borderline euphoria.

I have always wished that I could have marketable skills,
something measurable and productive,
something that people would enlist me for:
knitting sweaters, installing software, fixing a catylitic converter
but all of my talents are intangible,
writing is a beautiful thing,
but no one has ever had a poetry emergency.
And aside from some tutoring and an occasional term paper,
there is no market value for my kinds of words.
And I collect trivia,
but the three movies to win the "big four" Oscars,
the two American women to win the Nobel Prize for literature
and the one US president who never married
don't fix anything for anyone.

And none of these penchants instilled enough organization
for me to remember that 70 dollar speeding ticket,
or the responsibility to pay it
before the license suspension notification was issued.
And It Happened One Night, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Silence of the Lambs
didn't stop me from getting pulled over,
And Pearl S. Buck, Toni Morrison and James Buchanan
couldn't spare me
the handcuffs, shackles, cop car, jail cell, paddy wagon and commissioner's office that followed.

So for months I wanted marketable skills.
I wanted to be something other than a teacher,
passing on my incompetence to new generations
because what I do doesn't make anything.

But I didn't spend the following months developing marketable skills,
instead of learning to make clothes,
I was selecting them,
using my normally superfluous knowledge of fabrics and designs
to make a courtroom outfit that was equal parts
professional and penitent,
calling on obscure the color theory I had accrued over the years:
what shades mean honesty,
which hues hues connote innocence,
creating nothing more tangible
than speeches with which to vindicate myself,
maintaining nothing greater than my own organization,
trying to find proof of a check
that was sent just a little too late.

And when the day came to defend my ineptitudes
in a court of law,
I got to see just how far marketable skills had gotten my fellow defendants:
aisles of people clad in the best stained jeans
ready to plea their cases, unshaven and inarticulate,
mumbling with a minimum of respect to a man
who controlled their freedom.
And then I stepped in.
Donning a monochromatic grey flannel jacket--
and lighter is unprofessional, any darker is unseasonal--,
a tie: blue--the color of business,
and dress shoes--old ones, 'cause the new ones are missing in a box or a bag somewhere.
When I apologized to the public prosecutor for them,
she laughed.
Amid the stack
of papers for the 30 plus cases she would try that day
and burdened by by the unprepared individuals she'd already dealt with,
and my words she laughed.

And somehow, she could see what I was making.
With every reference I made to obscure penal codes
and episodes of LA Law,
she saw it more.
And with my words, the some words I had once cursed,
I made her a smitten little girl.
When I described my timing as less than fortuitous,
I made her that high schooler again,
way before the BAR exam,
studying vocabulary words in preparation for the SATs,
with one word I took her back to that moment in her recollection
when she realized that the "fort"
in fortune and fortuitous is the same as the "fort" in comfort.
And I made her love me.

I could see that with every utterance and gesticulation
I called to mind every boyfriend she remembered fondly--
the ones who didn't come out until long after they lost touch--
and when she said,
"Oh Honey, you won't get any jail time for this,
I couldn't lock up a teacher,
we need you out here.",
and when she added that she was dropping all of the charges
because at least I had tried to pay the ticket,
which is more than most people do,
I knew that in my flakiness I had made justification
of other people's carelessness,
faith out of their disregard,
and as that underpaid woman smiled and assured me that tis
would never appear on my record
I knew that for one moment,
for one person,
I had made justice.

something I don't remember writing

from new year's day of 2006.

I like waking up to the rain. Id' enjoy it more if I could convince myself that it wasn't symbolic all the time.
And if I could recognize that point--a few moments after waking, having walked around a bit and begun to reconsider consciousness--and consider seeking out that non-moving, slow-thinking state as a choice, the plan for the day, and not just the evening's necessity. If I could recognize these moments as a part of the morning no matter what time time it is, not darting the eyes immediately for the clock, trained to believe that life, from eye open to eye closed, is a series of things you have to do, I'd recognize them for what they are--a time when the job is to sit sprawled out on the bed, listening to no one particular sound, over a book just barely illuminated by one lamp across the room.
I could use those moments.

Credits

So I love the idea of this poem, and absolutely despise its current form. It was a thought I'd had for a long time, then forced myself to write during the slam in which I performed it. The pacing feels way off to me. Any ideas about where to trim stuff and what needs to be added would make me dance a little.

This Spring
I spent 3 hours
on no less than 15 Thursdays
seated at a table that barely fit
in the smallest classroom
of the humanities building
of the school I disappeared from three years ago.

At this table
I discussed the finer points
of post-colonial theory
with people who were born
when I was in middle school.
We didn't actually read any post-colonial literature,
we just discussed the theories based on it--
whether postcolonialism
is different than postcoloniality,
what difference it makes to put a hyphen in
post-colonial
or not put a hyphen in
postcolonial
with kids who get weekly allowances from their parents
so they can spend their free time getting high
instead of getting jobs.

I had a full semester of this
because someone where I work
thinks this will make me a better employee.

For twelve years
I have been engaged in the slow and incremental pursuit
of my Bachelor's degree;
today I frantically and unsuccessfully attempted
to teach myself to use an exacto blade
with glue covering my fingers,
already stained with the black smudges
of silhouette paper
because this semester
Mondays and Wednesdays
find my ass warming a swively studio chair
'cause, according to Goucher "bend over and be educated" College,
an art elective is the last piece I need
to make me ready to teach English.

For twelve years
I have been employed by schools--
as a substitute I was requested by middle schoolers
twice as frequently
as my teacher-certified biddy compatriots.
As a teaching assistant I correct the grammar
fo people working on their Masters,
so I wonder how much credit I should be giving
to this notion of credits.

My students don't care
about the source of the subversive elements
in Chinua Achebe's texts,
but they know that I love them.
So I should get a credit for every compassionate act.
My prospective profession doesn't hinge so much
on the art class ability
to attach paper to canvas with glue
so much as to discourage kids
from eating it.

So I think that every day that I do my job
I should be one step closer
to being paid decently for it.
Because real callings aren't achieved
through a series of randomly assigned classes,
they build themselves into our lives
based on our decisions and circumstances.

In a just world, college employees
would be yanked from their offices
and forced to follow us,
assigning redeemable credits
for every element of our lives.
So by now I would have
Associates degrees in fidgety excitement and making people cry,
a Bachelor's in inspiration
and a Ph.D. in poverty
from waiting for somebody to finally recognize
the things we truly
deserve credit for.

moonlight

An old one from a while back. I'm never comfortable writing anything about relationships, or writing anything that relies on words or images being repeated really frequently, so any advice on the salvagability of this one would be fantastic.

Sometimes it is moonlight,
a thousand unanswered prayers for the sun
yielding a giant rock in the night sky
trying to reflect the light.

Romanticize it.
let it represent what you're not seeing,
pretend it's what you wanted;
a consolation prize in the darkness.

Sometimes it is nothing,
just enough life
to illuminate
the place where you should be.

Dwell on it.
Circle the absence with a red marker
like a child's game
labeling what is wrong with this picture.

There is nothing wrong with this picture.
Departure is the natural companion to presence
and I am used to kissing the clouds you leave
when you exit.

This is fine.
It is just the story of my arms,
each one with only one night of your chest
to unlearn,

just a story of this house,
drenched in unlit sky,
seeping through blinds half closed
even at midnight,

blocking out moonlight
just like you do.
It is easy
when you keep yourself so far from it.

But I don't fault you.
I know what it's like to have big knuckles--
I have squeezed my fingers together
tight as I could
just to have the light pour through
the cracks in between them.

And I've watched you,
strobelighting the ground
with the beams
I have tried to send you.

There is a pulse inside moonbeams
shot from fingers attached to veins.
You will not the heartbeat in these shadows,
It will make them easier to walk out of.

In the beginning....

So Mr. Wilson has given me a special assignment for this whole 30 days project business.
During a conversation we had this evening, it was yet again reestablished how many poems that I have that have either almost been brought to fruition or were abandoned immediately after their debut, regardless of the potential they may have had. Y'all know I'm easily distracted, so it only takes something vaguely shiny for me to move on to something else. There also may be the matter of my lack of inclination toward actually typing up or responsibly maintaining most of my work (say what you will, Turpin and Wilson; I still hold that it encourages literary survival of the fittest).
Anyway, I say all this to say that the next thirty days will be all about exhuming old notebooks from the wreckage that is my life and digging for little poetic nuggets. Each day, hopefully starting tomorrow, I will reclaim, polish and post a new old poem--probably shit that only Gran has ever seen or heard. The more feedback you give me, the more likely it grow into a real boy. Or something.
Arright, going to bed. Poem sometime tomorrow.