This post makes my skin crawl.

I hate the word "moist."  I hate the way the mouth forms when it's spoken.  It reminds me of those skeevy men who lean out of their trucks, honk and blow kisses as they drive past and make me want to yell, "I'm walking here!"  "Moist" is blood and stickiness.  It is also cottonmouth.  Someone who moistens his lips is unsure of himself and therefore unattractive.  He probably has chapped lips.

These are all irrational things, like when I think of the word "Amsterdam" I think of the color orange.  But there are two instances when I can deal with "moist."  One is in the description of a cake, because I love cake more than I hate "moist."  The other is in poetry, because as much as I loathe the word, it evokes a strong reaction in me.  That is what I want out of poems, and that is the most I can handle with "moist."  This poem by Sharon Olds is the perfect example:

35/10

Brushing out our daughter’s brown
silken hair before the mirror
I see the grey gleaming on my head,
the silver-haired servant behind her. Why is it
just as we begin to go
they begin to arrive, the fold in my neck
clarifying as the fine bones of her
hips sharpen? As my skin shows
its dry pitting, she opens like a moist
precise flower on the tip of a cactus;
as my last chances to bear a child
are falling through my body, the duds among them,
her full purse of eggs, round and
firm as hard-boiled yolks, is about
to snap its clasp. I brush her tangled
fragrant hair at bedtime. It’s an old
story—the oldest we have on our planet—
the story of replacement.

I'm Donne! Donne, I tell you!

One of the things they make you read when you are an English major at a liberal arts college is Roland Barthes.  Barthes' most famous work is probably "The Death of the Author." In this essay he questions whether the reader of a text can ever ultimately know or understand the author's mind and true intention at the time of writing it, and therefore whether we need to know the author's intention in order to understand the text.  It's a little bit of a brain tickler, but basically the question is, do you think it's necessary for a reader to know who wrote a piece of writing?  Does knowing who wrote it add any extra meaning to the text? 

Maybe I'm a nerd (okay, definitely), but I've always been intrigued by this question.  Especially since nowadays we seem to be able to find out anything online and everybody has a blog (guilty).  Of course we want people to know when we write something!  We want credit and praise for it.  We want to make a point.  It seems like the only people who don't claim ownership for their work in this day and age are afraid of the repercussions from it. 

So, is it so horrible to think that Shakespeare didn't really write all those plays?  Would you feel betrayed to find out that the author of Romeo and Juliet was really some schmuck who dictated the whole thing to his assistant, who then gave it a rewrite?  Would it change the meaning or the genius of it?  I'll let you decide:


At the round earth's imagined corners, blow
Your trumpets, Angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go,
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance, hath slain, and you whose eyes,
Shall behold God, and never taste death's woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space,
For, if above all these, my sins abound,
'Tis late to ask abundance of thy grace,
When we are there; here on this lowly ground,
Teach me how to repent; for that's as good
As if thou hadst seal'd my pardon, with thy blood.

Well . . . that was John Donne.  Do you feel cheated?

Why I shouldn't have fish as pets.

I have been having some weird dreams lately.  Maybe weird isn't even the right word . . . just really real dreams.  To the point where I remember reading emails that I can very clearly see in my head but I never received in real life.  It's kind of like that scene in Romy and Michele's High School Reunion where Michele takes a nap in the limo and dreams that she knows the formula for Post-its glue.  It's disturbing to wake up and realize you don't really know the formula.

I also have two recurring dreams.  One is about a tornado and the other is about pet fish.  The tornado dream I've come to believe signifies change, but the fish dream is messed up.  In the fish dream, I'm usually out with some friends and we go into a pet store.  I look at all the animals and then I decide to buy some awesome tropical fish.  At that moment I suddenly realize that I have had an aquarium of fish at home all this time and I haven't fed them for THREE YEARS.  I rush home, terrified of what I'm going to find-- the horrible gaping carcasses of fish staring at me with betrayal.  I get to the room with the aquarium and I'm afraid to turn on the light.  I dump a bunch of food into the tank as if that will make up for everything and then this enormous Piranha-type mutated fish leaps out of the murky water and snaps at me.  I barely get my arm away in time.  Now what does that mean?

In honor of dreams, I wrote about another familiar phenomenon:

Falling in Sleep

It disturbs us.
A nightmare we can't quite recall,
where a hint of evil lingers:
an apple that's too polished,
a clown whose grin is too wide,
an argument too easily won.

It happens when we think it won't.
in the No Man's Land of our minds,
and just as we're settling into our canoes
it's over the ledge,
hearts expanding, filling
each limb with rushing air,
until the bungee cord around our waists
takes back some slack and we bounce,
midair,
blood bubbling in our ears,
legs twitching as we wonder,
why didn't my heart burst?

Not Afraid . . . to admit how much I love Eminem

I know, it's not like the album is new or anything, but whenever one of his songs comes on the radio, I can't help but admire the man.  He truly has a gift for writing, besides being a great performer.  When he first came out I think I was a little ashamed to say I admired him (for tendencies toward misogyny, homophobia, etc), but even then I was blown away by the way he twisted words, rhyming them internally, externally, slant-ways, you name it.  From 2000's "The Way I Am":

And since birth I've been cursed with this curse to just curse
And just blurt this berserk and bizarre sh-t that works
And it sells and it helps in itself to relieve
All this tension dispensin' these sentences
Gettin' this stress that's been eatin' me recently off of this chest
And I rest again peacefully . . .
But at least have the decency in you
To leave me alone, when you freaks see me out
In the streets when I'm eatin' or feedin' my daughter
To not come and speak to me . . .
I don't know you and no,
I don't owe you a mo-therf--k-in' thing
I'm not Mr. N'Sync, I'm not what your friends think
I'm not Mr. Friendly, I can be a prick
If you tempt me my tank is on empty . . .
No patience is in me and if you offend me
I'm liftin' you 10 feet . . . in the air
I don't care who is there and who saw me destroy you
Go call you a lawyer, file you a lawsuit
I'll smile in the courtroom and buy you a wardrobe
I'm tired of arguin' . . .
I don't mean to be mean but that's all I can be is just me

Now if you listen to him when he's featured on another artist's song--Drake's "Forever," for example--his verse blows everyone else out of the water.  I don't know if he's just angrier than Kanye or Lil Wayne, but his rhymes have so much power behind them, you can't help but really feel them.  Look at the difference between "The Way I Am" and these lyrics from "Not Afraid" and you can tell how he's changed and matured more with the imagery--it's not as literal:

It was my decision to get clean, I did it for me
Admittedly I probably did it subliminally for you
So I could come back a brand new me, you helped see me through
And don’t even realize what you did, 'cause believe me you
I been through the ringer, but they can do little to the middle finger
I think I got a tear in my eye, I feel like the king of
My world, haters can make like bees with no stingers and drop dead
No more beef flingers, no more drama from now on, I promise
To focus solely on handling my responsibilities as a father
So I solemnly swear to always treat this roof like my daughters and raise it
You couldn’t lift a single shingle on it
Cause the way I feel, I’m strong enough to go to the club
Or the corner pub and lift the whole liquor counter up
Cause I’m raising the bar, I shoot for the moon
But I’m too busy gazing at stars, I feel amazing . . .

Of course this is not the first time someone has used rap as an example of poetry, but I love seeing it evolve.  I have a special admiration for rappers because they actually get up there, having memorized numerous rhymes, and perform. 

 

Tomorrow's topic: Nicki Manaj (kidding . . . or am I?)

I cannot go to school today . . .

When I was in grade school, we had a closed-circuit TV morning program that was broadcast from the library.  Somehow, I don't even remember why, I got the chance to read a poem during the program.  I was all excited because they let me pick any poem I wanted (and I got to be late to class).  I was going to share my poetry-reading skills with the world!  The other kids would watch and marvel at my knowledge of the written art.  They would point and say, "Hey, that's Lisa.  I never knew she could read poetry so well!" And after it was over, I would return to class, and my classmates would swarm me and ask for my autograph.

So which poem to choose?  It was a no-brainer.  I reached for old faithful, my copy of Where the Sidewalk Ends.  I made the perfect selection, I just knew it.  It really spoke to my audience and the issues important to them today: 

Sick

"I cannot go to school today,"
Said little Peggy Ann McKay.
"I have the measles and the mumps,
A gash, a rash and purple bumps.
My mouth is wet, my throat is dry,
I'm going blind in my right eye.
My tonsils are as big as rocks,
I've counted sixteen chicken pox
And there's one more--that's seventeen,
And don't you think my face looks green?
My leg is cut--my eyes are blue--
It might be instamatic flu.
I cough and sneeze and gasp and choke,
I'm sure that my left leg is broke--
My hip hurts when I move my chin,
My belly button's caving in,
My back is wrenched, my ankle's sprained,
My 'pendix pains each time it rains.
My nose is cold, my toes are numb.
I have a sliver in my thumb.
My neck is stiff, my voice is weak,
I hardly whisper when I speak.
My tongue is filling up my mouth,
I think my hair is falling out.
My elbow's bent, my spine ain't straight,
My temperature is one-o-eight.
My brain is shrunk, I cannot hear,
There is a hole inside my ear.
I have a hangnail, and my heart is--what?
What's that? What's that you say?
You say today is . . . Saturday?
G'bye, I'm going out to play!" 

Well, my big moment was close at hand. I was sitting at a table off camera next to the "news desk." The girls who were reading the morning announcements said, "And now it's time for your weekly poem. Today's selection will be read by Lisa Di Trolio. What poem do you have for us today, Lisa?"

The camera creaked over to me.  It felt like a thousand eyes aimed directly at my head.  Sudden stage fright hit.  I went into survival mode.  The only way to get out of this was quickly and efficiently.  So I read the whole thing like this:

"SickbyShelSilversteinIcannotgotoschooltodaysaidlittlePeggyAnnMcKayIhavethemeaslesandthemumpsagasharashandpurplebumps . . .

Later I slinked back to class, hoping and praying that everyone had chosen that moment to go to the bathroom. 

Even later, for some reason they asked me to appear back on the morning show.  Maybe I was the only kid who read poems in that school?  It was a chance to redeem myself.  I took a few notes from the director and A.D. (i.e. a teacher who was volunteering and my mother who was the room mother that day).  I like to think that I redeemed myself, but honestly my mind has blocked it out. 

Mom, can you shed some light on this?

Bad poetry, or What I will do for money

I saw an ad on Craigslist for a card company that was looking for fresh poems for greeting and holiday cards.  There was a whole submission process involved.  It did seem to pay pretty well, so I went to their website to check out what kinds of poems made it onto their cards.  You can probably imagine the sappy verses about love feeling like the sun on your face, cream-colored ponies and crisp apple strudel.  But they said they wanted something new and different from what they had.  I wasn't sure how to proceed. 

Do I give them my best work?  Really put forth an effort?  I know you're supposed to try your best at everything you do, but I wasn't sure I wanted to give up ownership of something I was proud of.  As a friend of mine who did some ghost writing put it, "I wrote the scene and then I thought, wow, that's pretty good.  That may be the best scene I've ever written.  I don't want this guy to put his name on my best scene.  So I scaled it down a bit.  And then I scaled it down again."  Or something like that.  I didn't write it down when he was talking to me.

So that's what I decided to do.  I took some ideas that could turn into pretty decent poems, and I turned the volume waaaaaaay down.

Example (on love):
If you were a season,
you'd be the first day of summer.
If you were a city,
you'd be Paris in the spring.
If you were a holiday,
you'd be Christmas morning.
If you were a dream,
You'd be the one that came true.

I was pretty embarrassed by that, so I tempered it with this one (for encouragement):

Hero's Low

This is the part of the movie
when the hero can't see a way out.
His back is against the wall,
surrounded on all sides.
This is the point where he thinks
maybe I won't win the fight.
What if I give up, surrender?
Will it really be so bad?
But maybe the hero doesn't realize
all the people back home still believe in him.
They know he has a purpose.
All he has to do is steel himself,
and come out, guns blazing.
The cavalry is just over the ridge.

I didn't mind that one so much.  Then I tried a Christmas poem:


I imagine coming home this Christmas,
turning down the block
and passing houses, brightly lit.
It is night.  The street is silent,
the shopping over, the presents nestled
beneath the pine.
A wind stirs, prompting my excitement.
It swirls between the chimneys,
knocking snow to the white, pillowed ground.
I hum a carol as I walk up the pathway.
The smell of Christmas dinner in the air.
I move to ring the bell--
a delighted cry rings out.
Peering through the window,
there you all are,
gathered round the table,
piled high with the day's festivities.
I see your expressions of joy
and I long to hug you.
Though I cannot be there this year,
you are here with me,
in my mind and in my heart.

Yeah.  Can we just pretend that we never talked about this?

The Dog

I want a dog. 

I had a labrador once, growing up.  Everyone thinks their dogs are the best, and I am no exception.  Look at this face and tell it that you do not think it's the best:

We called her Bella.  She liked spaghetti.  She was trained to not go past the point where the kitchen tile turned into the family room carpet.  She excelled at digging and barking and generally being a dog.  She lived to a ripe age of 13. 

Since then I haven't owned any pets, except briefly a cat.  She showed up outside our apartment door one day, mewing and looking pitiful.  We took her to get a bath and then to the vet.  If we were going to keep her, she would have to be an indoor cat.  Her name became Bacon:

Sadly, this arrangement couldn't last as it became clear that two of us were far too allergic.  Bacon was adopted by Russians.  Her name changed to Behkon, I like to think she sits on a pillow and eats caviar all day.

So, by process of elimination I am a dog person (I also eliminated fish, but that is a different story).  I hope to adopt a dog whenever I decide to become a real adult with a stable job and a yard.  In the meantime, I came across this poem written by Billy Collins, or rather by his deceased dog:

The Revenant

I am the dog you put to sleep,
as you like to call the needle of oblivion,
come back to tell you this simple thing:
I never liked you--not one bit.

When I licked your face,
I thought of biting off your nose.
When I watched you toweling yourself dry,
I wanted to leap and unman you with a snap.

I resented the way you moved,
your lack of animal grace,
the way you would sit in a chair to eat,
a napkin on your lap, knife in your hand.

I would have run away,
but I was too weak, a trick you taught me
while I was learning to sit and heel,
and--greatest of insults--shake hands without a hand.

I admit the sight of the leash
would excite me
but only because it meant I was about
to smell things you had never touched.

You do not want to believe this,
but I have no reason to lie.
I hated the car, the rubber toys,
disliked your friends and, worse, your relatives.

The jingling of my tags drove me mad.
You always scratched me in the wrong place.
All I ever wanted from you
was food and fresh water in my metal bowls.

While you slept, I watched you breathe
as the moon rose in the sky.
It took all of my strength
not to raise my head and howl.

Now I am free of the collar,
the yellow raincoat, monogrammed sweater,
the absurdity of your lawn,
and that is all you need to know about this place

except what you already supposed
and are glad it did not happen sooner--
that everyone here can read and write,
the dogs in poetry, the cats and all the others in prose.
 

No animals were harmed in the making of this poem.

There is a car outside my window that needs to be dealt with.  Whenever it gets turned on, it makes a horrible ear-piercing screech.  The sound doesn't end.  It goes on for ten minutes.  What is the driver doing?  Is he checking to see if the sound will go away?  It's not going away, sir!  I keep sitting here at my desk/dining room table waiting for the car to drive off and leave me and everyone in a five-block radius in peace.

It has been three weeks since I first heard the sound.  At first I thought maybe it was someone visiting our across-the-street neighbors, the ever popular alleged drug dealers.  Those lovable thugs, they get so many visitors.  I'm sure every neighborhood has its own variety.  Ours take themselves literally in every sense of the word.  They are content to blast music but not just any music.  If it's Sunday morning, they will blast Easy Like Sunday Morning.  On repeat.

Anyway, it wasn't them.  I know this because last week I ran to the window after a particularly long session of acoustic bombardment.  I was intent on discovering which car it was and . . . after that I'm not sure what my next step would have been.  My downstairs neighbor once confronted a woman a few houses down who was laying on her horn for a good 15 minutes.  This was because she was too lazy to get out of the car and ring the doorbell for her friend/boyfriend/kid/whatever.  They got into a pretty good fight that nearly came to blows but luckily didn't since my friend is a dude.  The moral of the story is, think twice before you pick a fight in da hood.  So I ran to the window just in time to see the offending vehicle pull away from the curb.  Aha! I thought.  I've got your number.

The next time that car started up, I was ready.  I feel it's necessary to give you some sense of what it sounded like:

Imagine a bird, perhaps a canary.
Singing its sweet little song,
it gets to the trilling of a particularly
complex arpeggio when
an evil child plucks the bird
right out of the cage, mid-note.
The child holds the bird
in such a way that it can only tweet
the same note
in terror
over and over and over again until
the sadistic youth
swaps the birdcage for an electric fan.
The bird is dropped in its new prison,
the fan turned on so that now
the bird is shrieking
two variations of the same note
back and forth, back and forth
while the fan blades batter
its poor little organ.
The evil child then extracts
a cricket
from the depths of his pocket.
The poor thing clearly
has been through the ringer,
but it's not over yet
because now
the devil child
feverishly rubs together the cricket's wings,
chirping faster, faster
as if making fire.*
The bird and the cricket,
trilling and chirping,
shrieking and burning.
That is what this car sounds like.

My roommate happened to be around when the car screamed to life.  "Why doesn't he get that flippin' car fixed?"  "I know," I said.  "Let's see if he drives away."  Five minutes . . . six minutes . . . seven minutes . . . "ARGGGGGGHHHHHH I WILL CALL TRIPLE A MYSELF IF IT WILL TOW YOUR ASS OUT OF HERE!"

We ran to the window.  There it was, rattling, heaving.  The hood was up.  The driver stood before it, trying to solve the puzzle.  He tinkered.  He got back into the car.  He shut it off.

"Huh," I said to my roommate.  "I guess he's aware of the problem."


*I do not condone the torture of animals.  Do NOT try this at home.

Assonation in our nation's capital.

I received an email from my dad this morning that read, "Can I be assonated?"  My first thought was, "assassinated?"  Is there a threat?  Is it real? Don't you have to be a public figure?  Maybe I should scroll down further. 

Then I gathered that my dad was sending me a tip for a blog entry based on the crazy incident he witnessed (though it did NOT involve assassination).  He works in D.C., and apparently a taxi cab crashed into the U.S. tax court right in front of him.  It just dove straight into the side of the building-- an enormous federal building, which is encased in granite.  Luckily no one was hurt, not even the driver.  Of course, this being near Capitol Hill, every fire engine, police car, and ambulance in the mid-Atlantic region clogged the street. 

Now, you might assume as I did that this would be news.  I searched high and low, hoping to find at the very least a picture.  No such luck.  Instead I wrote a news headline in the form of a haiku to pay tribute to the cab's flight of freedom (or protest against taxation):

Taxi cab no match
for granite face of justice:
tax court collects win.

Then I started to wonder if a lot of news headlines are secretly haiku and I just never noticed before.  (I was also a bit slow to admit defeat to spell check regarding the plural of haiku being haiku.)  This launched me on a search across the web to see if I could find any haiku headlines.  Sadly, I saw only one that fit the bill.  From the LA Times:

Obama rejects
criticism that he's been
too hard on Wall Street.

So then I got carried away (this is becoming a theme), this time to turn today's headlines into a form of Japanese poetry: 

Yom Kippur party
leads to random drug test fail:
Lohan back to jail?

Prop 19 splits state,
prompts law officer debate
for November vote.

Photo puts firemen
into hot water over
nude chili party.

Okay, I think I now understand why no reputable news sources incorporate haiku into their headlines. 

The Waste Land

I mentioned the other day that my neighborhood sometimes resembles the Gaza Strip.

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

 

But then if I stand on my roof and turn slightly to the left, I see this:

 

And if I turn even further and tilt my head up I see this 

I was thinking about perspectives.  When I'm up on the roof, you can usually tell how I'm feeling about things/life at that moment by which direction I'm facing.

The urban palm tree view makes me feel inconsequential when I look out there and think about how many people are in this city.  Then I realize that I can't see any of them from where I stand so I imagine it's a post-apocalyptic neighborhood.  No matter how bad a problem I might be facing at the moment, there could always be zombies or flesh eating viruses that wipe us out.  Things are looking up! 

If I have writer's block, I like to sit on the top of the steps that lead to the roof and face the Hollywood sign.  I try to get past the horrible conventionalism of it and focus on the idea behind the sign.  Then I immediately flash to Pretty Woman where the guy in the street is yelling, "Everybody who comes to Hollywood's got a dream.  What's your dream?" Then I wish that I could write Pretty Woman.

If it's just a really gorgeous day out like most days in LA, I might take a beach chair up and face the sun.  I will open the latest issue of Bon Appetit magazine and I will plot ways to cook an enormous green tomato. 

Today, well, you're getting a limerick so guess which direction I'm facing.

Ode to the Spider I Killed Last Night

You're the second one I've seen so far.
As big as the freakin' Death Star.
Though your game was well-played,
you were foiled with Raid.
Yet I still wonder where all your friends are.

You're apologizing to me?

Back in college I wrote a poem that included a line I thought was pretty great: "a stitch that itches the womb."  The poem itself wasn't anything special.  It was about humanity, which is basically the broadest topic you could pick to write about, and I only decided to do it because I saw a magazine in the supermarket that had a photo essay on fetuses.  I had to have an assignment to turn in the next day.  Boom.  Fetus poem.  I secretly loved that one line, though.

I was a little nervous when I had to read the poem out in class because I knew my theme was flimsy to say the least.  There's always that moment after you read something out loud where the whole room is silent, taking it in, and you wonder which way the audience is going to tip.  But it was that line, only that line, that saved me.  I got a lot of praise for it, with my professor specifically picking it out.  "A really nice use of internal rhyme," she said, "I love the way it plays on the tongue."

The trouble is, after I turned the poem in, I suddenly wondered, did I write that?  Was that my original line?  Could I really come up with something so neat?  Did I subconsciously plagiarize it? I was reading a lot of Plath and Sexton at the time.  It did sound distinctly Plath to me . . .

I didn't want to know.  If I wasn't capable of that level of grown-up writing, and if even my own brain was overcompensating, then I'd rather just leave well enough alone.  I avoided the Google search box.  I ignored the book Ariel sitting on my shelf.  There was one poem I suspected I borrowed from in that collection, and I didn't want to go near it.  So it went on for nine years until the day I recently lost my job.

Feeling sucker-punched and directionless, I was questioning my purpose once again.  It was a familiar place to be.  I decided that I'd had enough.  I had to know: did I write that damn line?  To the Google search box!  I typed in the quote.  Something came up.

What's this?  An apology?  Google actually apologized for not being able to come up with an exact match.  I could scarcely dare to believe it.  There was only one other way to be sure.  To the bookshelf!

I went into my bedroom and dusted old Ariel off the shelf.  Even so many years later I still knew exactly which page to go to.  From a poem called Lady Lazarus:  "And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls."

That's it?  That's it???  Granted, that's a beautiful line, but I didn't plagiarize!  The stitch that itches was mine.  My line.  I wrote it.  Now, I feel safe to say, here is the poem:

Anyone Could Join the Circus

The first month we look like worms,
eyes in a sac, a stitch that itches the womb.
We are bulbs of flesh, photographed
for Time magazine's latest fetus spread.
This is how millions
discovered just how close we'd come
to being left in a shape nowhere near human,
had the covers been suddenly yanked
off our cozy amniotic waterbeds.

At three months we have the snouts of pigs.
At eight we could be the progeny of a pachyderm.
What is to keep us from popping out
with a small, wrinkled trunk in those last
two months?  Maybe those who are allergic
to peanuts have been the humans all along . . .

Would my mother have loved a child
more elephant than not?

Roid-mato

Look at the size of this tomato!

I got it yesterday at the CSA (there's your assonance).  Whatever farm that supplies them is supposedly organic, but this is a juicehead gorilla tomato if I've ever seen one. To give you some perspective of scale, here it is beside your normal Trader Joe's variety:

I actually think it's closer in size to this watermelon:

This called for a line-up reminiscent of the scale of planets in our solar system:

And then I got carried away:

I included Pluto as a planet even though I know it's been downgraded because the strawberry was so cute next to the tomato.  And isn't the plum Earth pretty?  Hey, look at all that consonance.  Consonance and assonance in one post?  That's a lot for a Friday.  Therefore, no rhyming for you.  Much like the planets revolve around the sun, many things in my life revolve around food and bugs, and with this ham-fisted segue, I leave you with this old poem I wrote:

A Morning Miracle

I happened to see Jesus one day in a line of ants.
Around my bathroom sink
they walked the curved
and narrow, careful
to avoid the temptation
of going for a swim for a bit
of sticky toothpaste.
It wouldn't fit God's will to get
out of order for pure greed,
and gluttony is a deadly sin.
So they plodded across
the great white virginal countertop,
I suspect on their way to turn a cracker crumb
into loaves of bread for thousands.

Best case scenario

In the middle of the afternoon yesterday, somewhere in the labyrinth of crumbling concrete parking areas and Gaza Strip stand-ins outside, I heard someone shout with genuine enthusiasm, "Yippee!"  I couldn't hear whatever else followed, but it made me realize that I don't think I've ever heard someone use the word "yippee" in its intended context.  A lot of the time people use it wryly, but rarely do they use it to express "wild excitement or delight" as defined in the dictionary.  I can think of a lot of words I would go to first if I won the lottery before I would get to "yippee."  It got me wondering what this person was so excited about.  I couldn't tell if it was a child or a maybe a teenager.  What would make them so happy?  As I left the house to run errands, I thought about it.  For some reason I was channeling Shel Silverstein:

The ice cream truck broke down- yippee!
The ice cream truck broke, it sputtered and choked,
Now it's free choco tacos and free frozen cokes,
Hurry, you'll get first pick out of the smoke.
It's all melting and the man canceled the fee.
Yippee!
Yippee!

In other news, I have just discovered a recipe for choco tacos.  Oh dear. 

Damn Thirsty

You know how you used to know something really well?  You knew it like the back of your hand, then you grew up and you forgot about it.  But suddenly something jostles that trunk where it's stored in the cobwebbiest corner of your mind, like under a tarp, and it pops open and you go, "Hey, I used to know that!  Wow!" There must be a scientific name for this phenomenon.  I even remember it occurring at the tender age of five when it consistently blew my mind to realize that bugs lived in the ground.  Now I feel that way when I read about buffalo (i.e., "Buffalo? Aren't they extinct? Is that the same thing as a bison? Oh, they still exist? Phew, glad to hear it!"). 

Anyway, a friend of mine sent me something I feel like I read before.  It's vaguely familiar, and all the time I'm reading it I'm kicking myself for ever forgetting it.  It's about a fish:

First
The fish needs to say,
‘Something ain’t right about this
Camel ride-

And I’m
Feeling so damn
Thirsty.’

I didn't write this poem.  Hafez did.  But I am the fish.  I know my friend feels like she is the fish.  Maybe you are, too.  And maybe you just woke up and you looked around and thought hmm something's . . . fishy.  (Sorry, it wrote itself.)  How did I get on this camel?  Fish aren't supposed to go on camels!  Who booked this ticket? 

And also, why are some of the best poems about fish? (see: Elizabeth Bishop)

Grandma and the isotopes

You know when you're searching for something in your email?  You type in a word like "flapjacks" in the search box because you just know you have a flapjack recipe that your cousin sent to you three years ago.  You always meant to use it.  Surely you didn't delete it.  There are 7497 MB of storage space in this mailbox.  You keep everything.  Where is it?  Then you find yourself scouring message threads from years past (that may or may not have contained the word "flapjack") about which you had completely forgotten?  Sometimes you stop to read and reminisce or think about your situation at that point in your life.

Well, this happened to me when I searched the word "pie" (most of my searches are food-related), and I came across a series of emails between me and my sister, Tara.   This correspondence occurred over a period of time when she was living in Italy and I was staying with my grandmother for a summer in between semesters.   Tara was feeling full of woe, mostly due to the constant striking of the Italian transportation labor unions, which made her commute to work hellish to say the least.  Every day I was receiving an email with yet another tale of woe to the point where I ended up writing,

"No offense when I tell you that having a 'tale of woe' to look forward to in your emails is not the most scintillating thing.  Could you maybe change it up every once in a while and re-title these anecdotes more positively, like Tales of Once in a Lifetime Opportunities, or Tales of Doing Something Amazing?  That'd be swell and way more uplifting."

In return, I promised her a limerick.  Who doesn't like a limerick?  They are fun, they are familiar, they are rhyme-y.  They all consist of the same format and rhythm.  For many, they are a creative way to tell a dirty joke.  (We've all heard about that poor girl from Nantucket.)  But for my sister, I decided to try a daily dose of limericks based on the ridiculousness of my life living with Grandma.  Take, for instance, the isotopes.  I had forgotten all about them until I found this gem in the same series of emails:

"Today G'ma had her stress test.  I dropped her off at the doctor this morning and she told me to come back and pick her up when she was done.  Boy was she cranky this morning, having had no coffee for 3 days and no food since 6 am.  Well, when I picked her up she said, 'Now I have to drink lots of water because Tom told me that I'm full of isotopes.'  Tom was the technician at the doctor's office.  G'ma loves Tom because he was very nice to her and calmed her down.  She said she asked Tom how long she was going to be full of isotopes and he said, 'That is a very good question.'  And then he guessed that it would be about three weeks.  Now G'ma uses this excuse for everything.  Example:  'Lisa, I'm going to lie down because of the isotopes.'"

Well, upon reading this I didn't even remember what an isotope was, but this is what I wrote to Tara:

Do you know what an isotope is?
They're the cool thing to say in the biz
of handling old ladies
who drive big mercedes
to the doc for a stress test pop quiz.     

There it is.  Your daily dose of poetry.  It didn't hurt, did it?