Calibration
The teacher said
Okay -
who can draw
a perfect circle?
and of course
all the smart-arses
rolled their eyes
and
strolled up
to the front
of the class
while
the clever kids squinted
deep in thought
and
watched them fail
one by one
trudging back
to their seats
and
once I’d seen
all the popular kids
lose, I began
to feel
the classroom
letting go
of my shoulders
and the chair
sliding out
from underneath
I took the chalk
and
watched the board
kiss the tip
and
once it landed
there was no stopping
I had to drive safely
eyes on the road
class gabble fell to silence
I daren’t let a breath
but rode on a white line
feeling the height
as I flung out
around corners
and came to the finish
a white nuclear nothing
as I blacked out inside
and the serpent jaws opened
to bite down
on its tail.
____________
Prompt by creepywriter
“I mean, think about it this way: The reason poetry comes so naturally is because it's about real people, and you more than anything. It's about the truth, as it is. Fiction is also about the truth, but it's about finding the truth in places you didn't think it was.”
—CreepyWriterAgain, Dispassionately {a dance}
I.
Split like blooming perennials,
an inflorescence of girls, clumped and tinted red- the night romanticized (like cancer).
II.
And life acts as a spider’s web, catching on our limbs, weaving transparently around us- unaware until we are entangled; only then are the tendrils manifested (but it’s too late).
III.
And I see it. A leaden body, but I’m 10 feet off the ground. The boys lining the walls- even the shadows can’t conceal their flagrant coal black eyes and inside- I’d light them all, but they remind me of the emptiness of desire.
IV.
Wilting, for it’s February (but in the South, everything is reversed). The girls flit with moth-like delicacy. In the midnight, hands and germs on diaphanous wings (in transparency).
The room fuses in the darkness without me, entwining; they don’t seem to know; they don’t seem to care;
I wonder why I am always so afraid.
You Are the Fly and This is the Wall: Or, Things Jen and Creepy Found to Talk about for 3 Hours at Starbucks -- A Non-Exhaustive List
I should probably work on my titles. That one seems a bit overlong. I realize you all probably don’t give a damn what we talked about, or who we talked about, or what we said about all of those things, but I’m pretending you do.
Last night, Creep shot me a message on Skype saying he was gonna be rolling through Tennessee today, and would I like to meet up for coffee or whatever. And I was like “fuck no, stay away from me, Creep!” No. That’s a lie. That’s not what I said at all. I said I thought that’d be cool. Yeah. So 9 texts and 4 phone calls later (he got lost twice), there we are. And we sat in silence for like 3 hours, nodded, and went our separate ways. That’s also a lie. We found a few things to talk about, things like:
- Tumblr
- The ridiculous number of people on Tumblr who I communicate with on a regular basis
- Writing
- You
- Zen and the Art of Successful Blogging (or, as I so eloquently put it, “it’s all about marketing and promotion and shit.”)
- Neil Gaiman
- Various true stories that would be considered unbelievable if written as novels. Most of which happened to me.
- Branches and collarbones
- People on tumblr who like to ship you with people with whom you’re JUST FRIENDS
- John Green
- Misinterpretation of authorial intent, and the weight authorial intent should have on a reader’s understanding of a piece of writing (agreed conclusion: minimal)
- Tumblr
- “Online” friends vs. “IRL” friends (Creep, I’m writing something about this, so paws off. Unless, you know, you want to write something about it too. In which case, cool, but I’ll probably hate it.)
- Hemingway
- The film Midnight in Paris (briefly, and in relation to the previous point and the parenthetical in the point before.)
- A Literation
- Tumblr
It should be noted that, true to form, I said “fuck” a lot. No worries, there were no small children about. The place was primarily populated with the primary population of my neighborhood: unshaven male hipsters in skinny jeans toting MacBooks. We talked about other things too, but softly, so even if you were a fly on the wall you’d not have heard us.
nights are painted
in swathes of liquor
since mummy unwound
apron strings
from Oedipal wrists,
the taste of freedom burns
as it goes down, bigger gulps
to feed the man
your father was and
never will be
find a girl
who smiles just nice,
hair like cornfields -
reminders of home -
show her how you love,
pressing bruises
purple with a purpose.
Today is the day you find out who creepywriter is.
You’ve waited, yearned, lusted for this moment, and today is the day. Your hand shakes as you knock on the door, and a voice from the other side asks, “Who is it?”
“It’s me,” you reply, and suddenly a small slot on the front of the door opens. It’s dark at first, but it’s still the moment of truth. You peer into the small space, hoping to get a glimpse of his glorious visage.
Your musings in my music.
A couple of weeks ago I was driving to work and a song came on that I really liked. As the music played, it began to make me think of one of the Tumblr writers in the TWC that I really enjoy.
So, I logged the connection. It was neat. Nothing more.
Then a few days later I hear another song and another Tumblr writer pops into my head. Cool, I think to myself. Neato, I add.
Another drive to work. Another connection.
But then it began to happen more and more often. And when it happened today, I decided that I needed to jot these down and share them.
And here’s the list I came up with:
jayarrarr
Days of the New.
More specifically their Yellow album. The acoustic sounds were so raw and untouched that it was hard to listen to sometimes. Not because it sounded bad, but because it sounded like it was hurting them to play it. Like perhaps they were being forced to make an amazing acoustic song under threat of someone torturing their cats. Jen’s writing has that raw, open-veined feel to it that makes me cringe sometimes. Because it’s so good. Because I can almost feel it.
roggyscanvas
Muse.
Muse doesn’t try to be deliberately sexy, but they have such a smooth electronic sound to them that you can’t help but think their music would be really sexy sex music. Roggy’s written so much sexy stuff in the past, even when he writes about a computer crashing you can’t help but to say, “Yeah…yeah, you KICK that computer…you kick that computer GOOD, Roggy…”
creepywriter
They Might be Giants.
They Might be Giants blew my mind when I first heard them. First of all, they’re taking conventional popular music and throat punching it to create their own distorted versions of good music. The end result is a list of songs about particles and birdhouses that melt my face. And now we have Creepy who writes a piece about poo on a finger and I fall in love with it. Sicko.
creativecloud
Pearl Jam.
Pearl Jam rocks. Their music never fails to make me think. Sometimes it’s uplifting and other times it’s downright depressing or scary. But that’s what I love about them. They seem to really write from the heart. They seem to actually write what matters to them. And that’s what Cole seems to do, too. His writing is very honest and it’s that honesty that draws me to it. It’s that sincerity that makes me want to read more.
proletarianpoet
Rage Against the Machine.
Rage Against the Machine scared me when I was younger. Not because their music was louder and slightly angrier than I was used to, but because the lyrics were more than just, “I’M MAD AND I LIKE IT!” They had direction. They had depth. These guys were angry and they were actually going to do something about it. Proletarianpoet can wax political with the best of them, but his work is more than just a rant. It has purpose. Plus I’m pretty sure he’s smarter than all of us and that scares me, too.
jackieb99
Cyndi Lauper.
Cyndi Lauper was one of the coolest ladies ever. And today she’s still one of the coolest ladies ever. She never seemed to care what people thought about her music back then and she still doesn’t. Plus, she has such an awesomely fun punkish musical style that she’s never let go of. Jackie, while she doesn’t post anything on here, also has a really fun style with her writing and it always makes me happy. Hint, hint, dear…
There are so many awesome writers that I wanted to include, but just didn’t because
1) I’m too lazy
2) I’m also very lazy.
However, I like this idea of connecting music I love to writing I love, so I’ll probably do more in the future. If you’re not on this list, please don’t think it means I don’t value your amazing writing because I do! I just haven’t driven through your archives long enough to make up my mind about the connection. But yes…it will happen. And I can’t wait for A Literation to open my eyes to so many more amazing writers.
And, no. This whole thing wasn’t a shameless plug for A Literation.
This is:
Follow A Literation now! You’ll be happier if you do!
yappers
loud, noisy, talkative people
who wonder out loud
and bitch in impressions
seem like children to me.
incessant, inefficient, questioning the air
like the sound of their own voice comforts them
talking about shit that no one cares about
children, incapable of self control
or the grace to not spill themselves
all over the fucking ground.
please
shut the fuck up.
Before the medication, the author wrote. People read, damning with faint criticism. It was beautiful, what he wrote, but had all the non-sense of a poem half the time, his words as verse, filled with gaping holes left for the reader to fall into.
The kind compared it to sex with strangers. The rest — most — simply turned away. It was both too small and demanded too much of them.
Time passed. Words came at the expense of all else. Lives fell apart. It did not matter. Words happened; next to that nothing mattered. Money fell away. Things were sold, lost, defenses weakened by cheap diets. Friends and family gathered, circled like kind vultures.
The author was taken to a place that was cruel to be kind. Electroshock had been replaced with pills, they explained, and it was another death of imagination. There would be no great story to come from this, no real moment to twist into fiction. Just exercises and pissing in cups. Eventually the pills stopped making his urine smell, soaked right into the bones.
A cured status was pronounced, like a wedding ceremony gone slightly south. The author was bundled out into the world amid quiet warnings to never come back: the cured could not fall away from their new state. It was an issue of funding. Kindness, you see, comes at a price.
The author returned home. It did not matter where: it was a place to write from. Words came, and were understood. Praises were sang, a book deal offered — out of pity? the author did not know. Months from the world had shifted the author out of gear. The writing was distant, removed.
Polished, some said. Better, others opined. But better than what? And why? They would not say.
Everyone understood what the author meant now when he wrote. Everyone got it. Even he did, much as he didn’t want to.
The ending was inevitable.
