When I Find the One that Likes Me Too

Instead of hours, on and on,
over pints, or through the park
about my Past,
I’ll take you to SkateLand, where we will couple’s skate,
skirting the fallen, popular tweens, one standing, the other,
a half-circle Sit-N-Spin on the seat of jeans

We will go to the Air and Space Museum
to pulverize astronaut ice cream like florist-foam, brown
and pink. There, a shy girl-nerd studies the suspended
Cold War jet, the IMAX marquee, various capsules,
diesel Blue Birds idling in line,
vehemently ignored,
by nerdy, high-school boys

We’ll go to a symphony at a conservative religious university
and hold hands. No longer library staff, I will
not police the stacks for stolen kisses.
We’ll instead pretend to look up Ezra Pound and,
between the shelves, I’ll take your lapels,
a mix of permission-asking and desire,
and kiss you, there, myself

Sit on the couch,
at dark 5-o’-clock while I write
and the dim light shows up ghosts. You
won’t see them, but you’ll believe, for me,
and I won’t be afraid, with you.
And that’s all you’ll need to know.

What I’ve been reading. What I’ve been hearing.

Salt, by Jeremy Page
This man is a master of, I’m going to have to say, “motif.”
It’s one of those stories about generations clashing, the woes they pass down via genetics or weird-parenting, set in an English seaside-marsh starting in World War I. The matriarch can (possibly) read the future in the clouds.
So, clouds loom throughout. They’re full, literally, of symbol, foreshadowing, hark-backwards-ing, whimsy, myth, family myths, beauty, theme, etc. etc. The idea is gorgeous. So are his details (characters, setting). The clouds, though, fogged the story’s progression for me near the end. Maybe he wanted the story to dissipate?


Pictures of the Gone World, Lawrence Ferlinghetti
I do not have the words to describe this poetry. Actually, I have way too many words.


Paste Magazine
What? A magazine? Yes. I was appreciating the magazine very much this month. I’m in the middle, reading the dozenth review on a tiny indie band (that I will probably never ever encounter in any way) when I realized, inductively, that this little band is part of a bigger discussion about Art. Check this blurb on Janis Ian (I’m in the Oct. issue), “I’ve never heard a record more bitter and forlorn than Between the Lines. It’s nuts how brutally upset she seems, and brilliant how well she translates it to music.” Janis Ian, but also art + life, for me.
Then, art + life + sin + grace in “Listening to My Life: Saints, Sinners and the Honky-Tonk Gospel,” by Andy Whitman. (Pondering the faith, addictions, incarcerations, music of Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, etc.) “There’s nothing neat and tidy about it. It’s an unholy mess. It’s music and it’s life, bound inextricably together, and the glory and the wonder of is in the tension. It’s some of the best music America has ever produced.” And all the hipsters said, "Duh."


Over the Rhine
I must first confess a dark love for novelty rock, hooks, neo-Appalachia’s ballads of dead babies, The Cure’s angst, punk “rage,” Stephen Merritt’s gorgeous, mellifluous melodrama, Dragonforce’s fight against dragon oppression.
But I sat before bluesy, indie, Over the Rhine, last week, and felt my face heat, no lie, like I’d just eaten taco salad sluiced with Texas Pete. An amazing feat when I’m moved by happy music.


9Tail Fox, Jon Courtenay Grimwood
And, finally, I read a man’s book this week.
Calibers, car engines and the inner-workings of the San Francisco PD.
And ... celestial foxes, and Chinatown, and street people, and people who wake up from comas after 20 years, and how Russian hit-men get offed, themselves. Loved it. (He even jabs at people who believe Evanescence is “real goth.”)
The dust-jacket blurbs: “the only real heavyweight ... in orientalist post-cyberpunk fiction.” Beware, squeamish, it’s guy-fiction (with all it’s expected accouterments) but also great fiction.

Monday

It's cool and rainy, but at least I'm writing.

Hey! Uh-Oh! Let's go!

I retract the blog, a few posts ago, concerning improv. Because that is just not the spirit. (And this is not the spirit, either, but after this I will stop apologizing and explaining for good. I really will.)
These hippie guys in the coffee house the other night were telling me all about their band, asked my name, etc. I went back to our kitchen hippie and said, "Why would hippie guys flirt with me?" He said, "Well, you seem like a nice, laid-back hippie girl." Really? "Well, I never really thought of myself as a hippie."
He said, "Well, what do you want to be? A punk?" with the hippiest tone of tolerance and acceptance.
Maybe! Aside from the tendency to punch things and to pierce with pins, there's something pleasantly up-front about punk.
"This is what I am. And if you don't like it (expletive)." How refreshing!
I'm just going to have a good time. And if anyone doesn't like it, they know what they can do.

yellow steps at morning

I'm back on the porch.
It's October-cool, but a yellow jacket scribbles near the lip of my coffee cup.
A grey squirrell ripples like a goosebump on the surface of my street. Everything's a gentle yellow and quiet (except for Modern English in my earphones). The school buses have already tunneled under the tree limbs to school, and the walking moms are back inside for another cup of coffee.
And I am blogging so I don't have to start any more ambitious projects. So I need to stop blogging.