coffee orange sky blue

So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow and the glint of the paint in mid-afternoon showers.  I know this.  And still I smear the paint.  What a mess it turned out to be.  Why do we do this to one another?  So harsh, so brutally objective with the emotions of the other.  You push me to say the things I do not want to say, but want to say, but shouldn’t say, but must say because you demand them.  You bring out the brute in me.  I am not, by nature, a biting creature.  Yet here I am, snapping at you with regretful sighs and salt water in my head.  Why do we do this to one another? 

in the library

I wish I smoked sometimes, I feel that would impregnate my silences with some sort of meaning like I was brooding intentionally, not the reality which is I can’t remember or I don’t know.  Lovely.

You’re not from around here are you?  Automatically you think that.  It’s easy for me to go with.  That.  Why not?  No, I’m not from around here, but yes I am.  I grew up right around the corner, I went to school up the street, I wore a mu’umu’u in a parade and sang Hawaiian songs in a choir.  For the first time, I don’t feel blasé about someone not knowing that I’m from here.  For the first time I feel a little strange. 

I held a copy of the application for the Vermont studio of arts fellowship, a print out that I needed.  Due in a week.  A dream, come to term, or not, but will be forced out of me because some sort of omnipotent force has deemed it ready.  And in my other hand a book of poems by Ginsberg.  She knew him or knew of his work I should say, and so she felt it only necessary to inform me that she was a poet as well.  Lay her beside Ginsberg and she would say he’s taking her limelight.  One of those.  A confident artist.  They always seem suspect to me. 

Then we started talking poetry as I absent mindedly folded the application into the pages of Ginsberg.  Perhaps I was hoping he’d rub off on me.  We talked about poetry and about poets and about slams.  There was a degree of arrogance and yet I continued to swim in her pool sullied by self righteousness because it was pool with a poet nonetheless and they seem to be in short supply round me lately. 

I dreamt of connections, human connections, emotional connections.  I dreamt of you and you.  But not you.  I stroke my neck softly in the hopes that my hand will transform into someone elses, yours or yours.  Meet a real writer.  I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.  Someone who has been through it, someone who knows.  Knows?  The pain, the despair, the desire.  I know these things.  There is a projection I put out that I’m not happy with.  Are you from here?  Aren’t you young?  I’m feeling underestimated and misunderstood in my time.  signs that I will be a great artist someday.  Surely.  To look at the milk as less sour and to suck on the chunky bits because.  I waited for the writers and they were nowhere to be found. 

human noise

they are gone, the big black bumble bees.  i liked their hum, their base, it was comforting in the way sighing is comforting or fingering the rosary is comforting or listening to mother's heartbeat is comforting.  but there are human noises now.  and they are cacophonous.  there is a difference between human-made noise and the sounds of everything else natural.  the sounds of nature meld nicely with one another, the waves rumble and the bees buzz and the birds chirp.  there is no need to take over, no need to negate the other.  but human noise--the sound of a car door slamming, the alarm beep of a unlocking vehicle, the ting-ting of an aluminum can hitting the side of a metal trash barrel--takes over everything.  it's sharp and loud and demands precedence.  it's deafening.