Category: FB legacy

fine.

if everything is fine,
why am I biting
all my nails
to the quick?

if everything is fine,
why are all your latest
songs so very
passive-aggressive?

nothing feels fine
right now. there’s a disturbance
in the Force. I’m sure
it’s my fault somehow.
great. another Gordian knot
and me without my magic
sword.

confessions

I may have lied
last night. you
were the miller in that
second poem too, the one who
earned his rest by creating.

I don’t know why
I lied. something in me
was very wary, very afraid
to admit it. maybe because
I keep getting burned
whenever I reveal
my heart. so to protect myself
from fire, I buried that secret knowledge
six fathoms under. well, the skeletons
are floating up now!

also in that poem, I seem to have
devalued the lady’s writing poems
because to me it doesn’t
usually feel like work, and also because
I’m the one doing it.
you work at yours, I see it.
anything I do
doesn’t count as work
in my mind. unless I’m
making big bucks and/or
digging ditches. it’s probably a
daddy issue. gee, what a surprise.

and remember your favorite
devices: poetic license, literary
detachment and writing in
characters? the lady is both
me and not-me, not all of me
anyway. she’s a voice in
my head telling me I’m
worthless. she doesn’t know
shit.

the whole analogy
falls apart anyway,
the center cannot hold
because her writing poems
invalidates the entire metaphor.
if she had a mortar and pestle
and secretly ground her own flour
to bake illicit cakes, that would
be in keeping, but it would also
be ridiculous.

plus I didn’t think of it
til now. should I edit?
does the world really need
The Mill 2.0?

that time I tried to buy merch from Jeffrey Lewis

the first time I heard Jeffrey Lewis play,
I was quite impressed.
my little brother
had told me about Jeffrey,
I think he sent me a link to
the video for “Williamsburg
Will Oldham Horror”, and Jeffrey
was playing at Sidewalk and my
brother told me to go. I remember
he played that song “Anxiety Attack”
and it struck me as being very
honest and not a little bit
brave, because he wasn’t trying to
whitewash anxiety or in any way make it
seem like anything other than
what it is, which is shitty.

after the gig I spoke to Jeffrey
I think, and then I went home
and went on his website
and bought two t-shirts,
one for me and one for
my brother, who’s such a big
fan. Jeffrey wrote to me
and said that he had noticed
that I lived in New York and
so did he, so if I wanted to,
I could come find him at the
Sidewalk Open Mic that night and pick up
my shirts in person and he would
refund me the twelve dollars
I had already paid
for shipping. his email went
to my spam folder and I
didn’t see it til
the next day. I wrote back
and tried to be cute and ended up
sounding pretentious and
invited him to Catweazle, or
he said I could stop by
his apartment but I was too shy.
we played email tag
for a month and then he finally
mailed them to me and
when they arrived,
one of them was the wrong size
and I was too embarrassed
to say anything
after so much hassle –
until now.

every time I see him at the mic
I look away and hope to god
he doesn’t recognize me.
at one point my then-boyfriend tried to book him
for our show at Sidewalk
and there was a lot of emailing back and forth
but it didn’t end up happening.
so that’s my pitiful story
of how I tried to buy merch from
Jeffrey Lewis and embarrassed
myself in the process. I still like
your music though. in fact I am writing this poem
at one of your shows. sorry dude
that I’m so weird.

Taz

you don’t understand. when I said
I loved your t-shirt
with the cartoon of Taz on the front,
what I loved about it was seeing it
on you. it was your wearing of it
that made it adorable. in and of
itself, it’s just an elderly, faded, silly
piece of cloth.

that is why,
while I appreciate your gesture
in leaving it in the closet
when you moved out
your stuff, I must sadly
give it back. I will never
wear it, because I can’t see
the ridiculous graphic
on myself, and seeing it hanging dead
in the closet just makes
me remember a time
when I smiled to see you
with pure affection, like a child
that is someone else’s
problem.

so please, take back your Taz.
he deserves to be
happy too.

the poet’s eye

for a long time I stopped
thinking of myself as a poet,
calling myself a writer,
or trying to look at the world
through a poet’s eye. many years
went by in silence, blindness
and deliberate unknowing.

but lately
I have revived
my old writing bones,
resurrected my dead poet’s
eye, and now I see things
that before I wouldn’t have
noticed: the restaurant
called Caravan of Dreams;
how the purple blooms
of the pansies planted
outside a building in my neighborhood
look like tiny screaming faces;
the record cover reading,
“Can’t We Just Start Over”
or something like that. I didn’t
write this poem quickly enough
so already I’ve forgotten
the exact wording.

let that be
a lesson to me. practice
seeing like a poet, rehearse
being a writer
until it comes as naturally
as breathing, lest the strange
and beautiful sights and sounds
you’re surrounded by
pass you by.

the fly

I’d rather be
the fly in your ointment
than be a person of little to no
consequence. I’d rather be
difficult, challenging, weird, even ugly
and alive, than a perfect, lifeless
China doll, empty inside, reflecting only
what you want to hear.

I’ll be the one
to shake up your comfortable
brain and turn it into
a snowglobe. I’ll turn your
assumptions upside down,
rummage through your
mind pockets for ideas,
shake the thoughts
out of you.

I’ll fight to the death
backing an argument I’m not even
one hundred percent
convinced of myself,
because I’d rather disagree with you
and learn something in the process
than agree boringly
with anyone else.

competition

it’s a contest
that is open for anyone,
but no one else I know
is doing it. nobody is keeping score,
it is you competing
against yourself, and
by the way? you’re winning.
seeing you doing so much
makes me want to try
harder, to do more, to pull out
all the stops, to drive myself
to new heights, and coincidentally
to beat you.

this is just one of the
many ways
you make me want
to be better. to think more
of how I can help others,
and less about myself,
to look for ways to be more
creative, to get up and
go outside
once in a while
before night time,
to use my body and my mind
to express a certain
range of motion, to stretch
and strive and challenge myself
to live, damn it, instead of
accepting my slow death,
the one that I can feel coming
from a long way away
like a tsunami, that makes me want
to lie down in its path
and say sayonara
right now. but
I guess I have plenty of time
to sleep when I’m dead,
and to die when that crushing wave
gets quite a bit closer. to quote
Dorothy Parker, “might as well
live.”

expeditions

I would go to the Himalayas
and tramp through the snow
with a sherpa carrying my luggage
on his head, searching for the footprints
of the mysterious and elusive yeti
that is your love. I would hike
through the densely wooded
forests of the Pacific Northwest,
braving the killer mosquitos,
looking for the coarse hair tufts
of the big hairy Sasquatch
that is as obscure and cryptic
as your feelings. I would look
in the mountains of Borneo,
chasing the mystical half-ape,
half-orangutan that is as mythical
and fabricated as your
heart. I would do all of this gladly,
without a qualm, rather than dare
to ask you a single personal thing
to your face.