writing home
Dad,
In regards to [ the things I can not say ]
and I nearly cried in Union Square Park
where the little boy ripped my headphone
from my ear so I could listen more—
and the pigeons at my feet moved for no one,
these smudges of grey, these zeroes and ciphers
never needing to exist but doing so regardless,
just like us.
And I asked two pedestrians
for help with directions
on my tenth day in New York
and they were pleased
to provide the way.
I guess things can
unsuspectedly be okay,
even when we’re ripping up
the floorboards to mend
the rafters.
new canaan 2
your father wears a hat like me,
your sister lives her teenage dream,
i take a sandwich to the game room
i flip the channels like i am home.
the patio furniture sleeping in the yard
is thankful that we resurrected it from
the basement around lunchtime today and
it is spring so it can breathe something
clean and once far-away now present, now
completely surrounding.
these are the magnificent stones
of your foundation, shaped smoothly
and so obviously correct.
then the “look”.
and the four-poster you were made in
is not made for making it
but we’ve used the guest before
so we use the guest once more
and outside all of the bonus-list
of perks so non-los-angeles:
platoons of plumes and trees, the wake
of the star-lit swaying lake
whisper happy murmurs and
contain their silent fervor
and wink me through the window
saying simply “let us thank you
for bringing back the baked
and rocking california quakes
to knock the ancient sediments
of sleeping south connecticut.”
unchecked sap
if it were possible
to correct the course
of time, i’d make it so
i was born early enough
to die before eddie van halen
so that he may melt faces
during the celebration
of my death.
otherwise,
we commit everything else
to the books and let these
messy moments live where they lie
and we’ll keep my father’s balled fists
and let exist my mother’s infinite sadness,
so pleased and thankful for these cards
and the chance to play the game
in which our numbers fell from the shuffle
and landed adjacent in the deck-
and with any more luck,
eddie van halen will long
be dead before they
toss us in the graves
and begin to forget.
LOOKED LIKE LAUGHING: Alan is a dumb fucking name.
lookedlikelaughing.tumblr.comAllow me to examine my own work for a bit, as self-indulgent as that may seem, but after staying up all night working on some mindless work and most of my ask box being filled with writing questions and now not being able to sleep and enjoying a cool and calm California morning on my patio, I was reminded of this poem for the second time this week and had some thoughts I wanted to put down. [Fair warning, I’ve been up for quite some time now and this is very long with many run-ons and comma abuses ahead]
In the past year or so I came across a quote on tumblr by a writer I unfortunately can not remember—shit, maybe it was even a poem. The gist of it was that, although it happens in varying degrees when it comes to all types of writing, poetry is amazingly deft at rarely being written with a fully purposed message and how the truer meaning, to the writer, and hopefully sometimes the reader, is only discovered after it is written—sometimes crystalizing during the process, sometimes upon reading the first draft you don’t hate, sometimes even weeks, months, years later. That writer said it in a much more beautiful and succinct way but that’s the important thing I eagerly ripped from it. I had experienced it before but never was able to figure out why the experience was affecting or how to articulate it.
This is by far one of the top poems, according to the subjective writer, me, in what happens to be a very short list of my work that I like. Even some of my more “developed” and recent stuff I have come to hate, sometimes as soon as days after I’ve posted them and sometimes months later, late at night, sneakily going in and trying to erase their digital footprint and start forgetting they ever existed. I cringe like a motherfucker. Regardless, this is one of my favorites, arguably my best, and I began to wonder why that was. Or why my own work affected me in such a way that it almost seemed like it had been written by someone else, or a story I wasn’t a part of.
Now, I believe, it’s because it exhibited most closely the sentiment that phantom writer described. I wrote it after Memorial Day weekend in 2012 after experiencing a nearly year-long bout of numbing depression. Friends had come into town, I got to know a brilliant person through new eyes, had an amazing ever-present group of friends, and we all drank happily and went to our favorite bars and played games out our house and spent a truly wonderful day in Venice (Venice! Of all g-d places!). I was riding high on that weekend and my initial reaction to the poem was, “Christ, I’ve been so sad for so long, but look at these wonderful people, and man, how much do I love this city and it sure is good to be alive.” Which were all pretty obvious takeaways and those topics are no stranger to most of my poetry—Los Angeles, being alive, my friends who are in most ways more family than most of my family. Weeks later, I even saw a budding crush developing between those lines. After that it sat on its webpage and wasn’t visited often. When I read it at the Roaring Fits of Summer I was too nervous and drunk to be cognizant of what the words coming out of my mouth meant.
And now, just a bit under three weeks from the poem’s one year anniversary, I’ve taken another close look. This coming at a very scary and exciting bookend for me, as well, as almost to the day of the poem beingn written this year, I’ll be moving to New York City (I’ll discuss this another time). It still exhibits those original ideas and paints the same visual picture to me. But other, larger things, have grown from it.
I see that not only was I very sad but I was fucking damn near suicidal. I remember more clearly now how often that thought popped into my head the months leading to that spring. Never with intention but always just tonguing what that meant, the idea of it, in my mouth out of nowhere some days. And that poem now shows me how much of a transitionary season that was for me. I was becoming more optimistic and recognizing more and more, and so goddamn vividly, as if I had just been turned on for the first time, the simple, wonderful beauties of being alive. Which were constantly being found in small moments with friends and tiny, sharp images I’d come across walking through Los Feliz—certain graffiti, single mothers with polite children, a place that felt like home (a somewhat vague concept for me, carried from my military brat years). That weekend was the apex of that. I was hanging out, blissed out of my skull, without any worry and with amazing, talented and caring people in my very beloved city. And I was dirt fucking poor. I’m usually pretty skint but I was at an all-time low; I even made sure to have someone pay me back their share of a sangria pitcher. Humiliating shit that I extremely detest. And I was still out of work with no end in sight. But none of that depressing tangle weighed on me that week. Everything was enough.
Simultaneously, I was falling in love. Not all stories of “growth” need to, and rarely do, coincide with a love interest the way movies want us to believe. But hey, look at us sitting here having our cake and eating it, too. I didn’t know it was that big of a feeling at the time and when inklings of it did float up in me I brushed them off. That was so fast! What a foolish feeling! The seriousness of that feeling is preposterous! But the communication that proceeded that weekend stoked those small coals and six weeks later I told Futernick, on the patio I’m sitting on now, “this is silly but I think there are some major feelings growing here, bordering on, uh, like, love, dude.” How poetic!
So that was what got me stoked this morning, while returning to Alan is a dumb fucking name, and it made me feel like I urgently had to express that. It makes me so thankful for leaving behind artifacts, and enjoying even my cringe-worthy work for the documents they become, and looking back and tracing lines to that artifact to see ebullient kernels waiting to grow, unable to be seen that early on.
Sorry I just wrote so long about sucking my own dick but it’s not really the poem itself, or my supposed talents, that I’m crazy about, it’s what it meant to me, still means to me, and how it showed some growth from the past. Come at me with pitchforks.
Circadian Rhythm
by Alan Hanson
My mother left when I was ripe
and I couldn’t gestate
what kind of absence
that could breed; a subtraction
of moments like
when I once hugged her
so hard, flushed,
so scared, hush,
that the rhythm of her heart
felt more familiar
than anything ever
because I remembered, in her,
being grown
and being home.
I often fumed jealousy
watching robed graduates
gripping tight their mothers
knowing surely they felt
the beat of the womb
and that every time,
every drumming hug,
felt like the beginning
and how I could
never return.
Later, when she was replaced,
on a train across a deep gorge
in Colorado, my new one,
overcome with some simple emotion,
some acceptance of her new family,
brought my chest so close to hers
squeezed so tight my blinking life
that my glasses broke
smashed against her collarbones
as she wept fully
into the engine’s smoky drones.
It took me years to realize
that at the moment
she broke down
because she wasn’t
like I thought,
a stone,
but after years of searching
she had finally found
a home.
“I am Titan II. I am Saturn V. I am Vostok. I am V2. I am the loving daughter of Von Braun (von der grun, immer gelb tut mir leid, mein Liebling) ripping through steel plates and threaded notebooks and rich text files up and up to find myself climbing above the Earth rising with fury the spreading of my self-immolation And as the lights fade, Lebwohl mein Liebling!, the red and yellow disappears from the sky and cheek- (explosions that pry your lips apart) even soldiers and the Learned are still fascinated by fireworks.”
—Fight Song by Alan Hanson | The Worst
One of my more substantial efforts, which happens to not be about California, modern love, nor the coincidence of life, is up at Ned’s freshly launched online magazine, The Worst. Give it a read, I politely beg, and check out the rest of the site while you’re at it.
“All of this callous tween-trolling is a drag, and maybe that’s all there is to say about it. But there are leagues of pre-pubescent mental athletes out there who could own any one of us in a ‘sport’ that, it so happens, every single fucking one of us has technically trained for. For more than a decade, with grades. Can you imagine if every American was made to play basketball, intensively and with parents mean-mugging our report cards if our defensive rotations were slow, for twelve years?”
—The Classical: Respect The Lex
I ranted about the shitty reception of the Scripps National Spelling Bee for The Classical and probably mostly for Lindsey Weber.
Familial Request
by Alan Hanson
I have decided, Mother, to give you a gift. I have decided, Mother, Mother who now goes by Erin, to give you a version of me you can fold and carry. I have decided, Erin, whose birthday is now somewhere in a month stripped of dates, to make up for the cold, stone skin I wrapped myself in years ago when you turned ghost in Colorado. This is all I have to give.
How our recent past is seasonally punctuated: I drive miles upon miles into the hearts of a manufactured family I have cultivated in replacement of the standard structure. My nuclear loves are in my eyes like spikes and cross-continentally a system of strong vine has wrapped itself in new definitions of family. I live in a technicolor dream that screams and I am rooted in happiness. Yet three times a year you fumble a phone and delicately ask How are things and Do you miss me and Why does your sister never talk to me?
I have an arsenal of answers. For years I sharpened knives to deftly cut your core out of you. To hold it in my palm and present to you the image of your absence, of your falseness, of your fracture. But you, too, are a perfect and accidental existence. And I, healed, have no energy to war you again. I can only politic and nod. I can say Things are fine and Yes sometimes I do and I don’t know maybe you should call her. I could cut, Erin, oh Erin Lee, oh Daughter of Linda, how I could cut. But my engine has no more pistons for revenge.
I have decided, Stranger, to give you a gift. When your ivory and hungry fingers tapped keys through blues and whites to request that we are publicly listed as family I shook. It is a request I made for the latter half of my life answered by snow drifts in phone lines and bird-bone promises. But now, with my weapons collecting dust, I accept that this is the form in which you can bond back to me. And I will gift you the confirmation of your request. And you may flip through jpegs of me and my new family, my new family who is Cuban and Mexican and Irish and Italian, and my new girlfriend who is beautiful and a lighthouse, whom you may never meet, and my home in California, which was once your home, too, and you can keep these things. You may fill in the blanks you helped stretch. Blanks the size of a life. That is what you can have of me. Images and information through your router and your glassy eyes; until you learn to build a highway back to me.
disappearing act/sutcliffe catering song
by Alan Hanson
i see the cars
blurring down the
race track
and the stars
gliding sheepishly
into black blanket
without me.
and some days
satisfied
to ghostly hide
inside a fender
twin-reverb’s whine
and a church organ’s
tired cry.
unless rihanna
wants to go to
a pavement
concert.
