Paint tomorrow blue

Ginsberg // Julia Vinograd

No blame. Anyone who wrote Howl and Kaddish
earned the right to make any possible mistake
for the rest of his life.
I just wish I hadn’t made this mistake with him.
It was during the Vietnam war
and he was giving a great protest reading
in Washington Square Park
and nobody wanted to leave.
So Ginsberg got the idea, “I’m going to shout
“the war is over” as loud as I can,” he said
“and all of you run over the city
in different directions
yelling the war is over, shout it in offices,
shops, everywhere and when enough people
believe the war is over
why, not even the politicians
will be able to keep it going.”
I thought it was a great idea at the time
a truly poetic idea.
So when Ginsberg yelled I ran down the street
and leaned in the doorway
of the sort of respectable down on its luck cafeteria
where librarians and minor clerks have lunch
and I yelled “the war is over.”
And a little old lady looked up
from her cottage cheese and fruit salad.
She was so ordinary she would have been invisible
except for the terrible light
filling her face as she whispered
“My son. My son is coming home.”
I got myself out of there and was sick in some bushes.
That was the first time I believed there was a war.

Silver white winters that melt into spring

I am thankful for all sorts of things this year, again, and it is worth mentioning them at least to myself.

I am thankful for friends and family, even when they are exhausting, or frustrating or far away. I am thankful for an empty apartment to my self this weekend, for getting shit done, for bad television to get me through it all. For the air when it's cold and crisp and fall and just finished raining. For travel, the option of travel, the ability to travel, the constant desire to find new.

For sleep, for comfortable beds, for walking in the snow, for puppies and fire's and friends who cook and drink with me and make me laugh. For bad movies good music and the opportunity to go home for the holidays. For still having somewhere to go home to for the holidays.

There are plenty of things to be thankful for, a certain level of exhaustion reached by the end of everyday, approximately six months til I walk away with a degree and no ideas what to do with it. Or, approximately six months until I have no commitments and can do whatever I like...

"There's another new world at the top of the world for whoever can break through the ice"

Fall is here. Cold and fresh and lovely. It's still sunny, which makes fall even better. And tomorrow I am going on a quest to get fleece lined leggings, which makes me oddly ecstatic, which is fun. And elections make me nervous, in a way that I want to curl up and close my eyes and hope that when I wake up in the morning that everything will be okay.
And this weekend is New York City, and it's been years. And next weekend is Montreal, and I've never even been to Canada. And then pre-thanksgiving thanksgiving, possibly with Todd, which would make me happier than is possible.
And I am suddenly panicking about my MA paper, but unable to do anything about it. Or maybe just not settled into enough to do it. But tomorrow, I need to spend all of my day that isn't spent getting fleece lined leggings or at the gym working on papers. And then New York, and Montreal :)

It's almost Halloween

Poem written at 29 thousand feet
Adam Clay

When you laugh your knees
shake and I can feel like

a joke unfolding
then crashing into

itself, a wave of noise
but silent from the inside

view. I wish you
had been there with us

watching the mountains
and drinking beer in

October. Lucky for us,
the mountains won’t

go anywhere, but we will
or we did, and we’ll go

back to the mountains
and drink beer on the hood

of Brandon’s car again
and I will shoot an arrow

straight up into the sky,
tear a hole in it,

and wait for the arrow
to make the type of sound

an arrow shot
into the sky should.

All those glances that we stole, sometimes if you want them then you've got to

Well then, they ask again, what does the air feel like? And we have to think about this. Air feels like air, we say, and the fishes laugh mirthlessly. Think! They say. Think, they say, now gentler. And we think and we guess that it feels like hair, thousands of hairs, swaying ever so slightly in breezes microscopic. The fishes laugh again. Do better, think harder, they say. It feels like language, we say, and they are impressed.
-Dave Eggers

It's been one of those falls, already. People getting sick, dying , losing jobs, pets, friends. I was so high strung last week I couldn't eat, couldn't sleep. So high strung I couldn't stop moving, went running, got drunk, and finally slept again. I feel better now, but don't know how to fix things for the people I would like to make everything right for.

It was my sisters birthday last week, and this time last year I was in Disney in the crazy heat and fighting with my family because they are nothing if not difficult. But for now, for this weekend at least, I will appreciate the good parts of fall. The cool weather and the sun and the people at festivals. Hiking til I can't breath and learning to bike again, on my new bike which is slightly too big but I believe a good replacement for the bike that worcester ate.

I think I'll go to Boston, Think I'll start a new life

I love where I live. It's been a while since I could say that, since Minneapolis at least, but old Minneapolis, before I realized that it was suddenly too small for me. Before I went to a bar and was about to hit on a boy before I realized I had brought him home the year before. Before I knew everyone, or everyone I knew knew everyone else. Before Minneapolis was not enough for me. But it was always a step up from Worcester. And now Boston, which I love, because I can walk everywhere. I can spend hours on foot pacing from one end of the city to the other, and love every minute of it. And it will get cold, and I'll be able to walk around in boots and winter coats and see my breath and it will still be good.

And so we start again, every year it seems now. And I rearrange, and figure out what will fit, what needs to be let go, what I can't leave behind. And I go out drinking with old friends, dance in rain boots, make a complete ass of myself, and laugh myself home. And I had a night reminiscent of nights with Lex on Friday, a mixture of drinking and laughing and bar hopping and staying up far too late and doing stupid and irresponsible things. And I enjoyed every minute of it, so we will see.

And also, writing recommendations for yourself is painful and unnecessary.

And, a poem, cause why not.

Subterranean | Eric Gamalinda
Let me be the first to say
that I know the name for everything
and if I don't I'll make them up:
dukha, naufragio, talinhaga.
Just like the young
whose hearts give no shame,
I love the excesses of beauty,
there is never enough sunlight
in the world I will live in,
never enough room for love.

I fear none of us will last long enough
to prove what I've always suspected,
that the sky is a membrane
in an angel's skull,
trees talk to each other at night,
ice is water in a state of silence,
the embryo listens to everything we say.

I am afraid for the child skipping rope
on the corner of my street,
the girl on the train with flowers in her hair,
the man whose memory is entirely
in Spanish. I am more afraid of losing consciousness
when I go to sleep, or that in my sleep
I will grow old and forget how desire
once drove me mad with wakefulness.

Just like the perfect seasons
they will die
and I will die
and you will die also;
no one knows who will go first,
and this is the source
of all my grief.

I miss bike riding

The Rider / Naomi Shihab Nye


A boy told me
if he roller-skated fast enough
his loneliness couldn’t catch up to him,

the best reason I ever heard
for trying to be a champion.

What I wonder tonight
pedaling hard down King William Street
is if it translates to bicycles.

A victory! To leave your loneliness
panting behind you on some street corner
while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,
pink petals that have never felt loneliness,
no matter how slowly they fell.

Poetry

Occupation
by Rachel Sherwood

The man who told me about war
said, it’s the only thing
that keeps us busy.
I thought of your fingers
on my back
counting the vertebrae
one by one.

The only thing?

nothin' new is sweeter than with you

The summer has been crazy, and I haven't written enough. I went from school to Minneapolis (briefly) to Spain (Camino, Barcelona, Madrid) to Kenya (Garissa, Nairobi) to Minneapolis. And soon i'll be moving back to Boston again. Nothing but crazy, but mostly, my mom got a new puppy and I want to put up a picture. this is Charlie, he's amazing.

heartbroken

And I am exhausted with the stress of it, with the feeling of alienation, with the decisions left to be made. I don't know what to do, I am heartbroken ahead of time, I cry at odd moments, alone, at home. I cannot force myself to accept the morality of it, even if it may be a necessary evil, even if there is no one to take him, to keep him, even if his life would be worse if I abandon him. It is still heartbreaking for me, and I am trying, I am trying to keep my pieces together, to find him a new home, to find the support I need, to be excited that I am leaving the country, moving to Boston, to be excited that my future is so up in the air. But still, part of me thinks of the commitment made, the seven years, and I am exhausted with the stress of it.

But I feel a constant need to think about it, to talk about it, as if when I make myself feel just horrible enough it will make up for the fact that I can't keep him. As if when I know, honestly, that I've tried as hard as I can, it will make it easier to put him down.

I am broken with the exhaustion, with the not knowing, with the amount that this adds up to a failure on my part, that there is nothing more that I can do, but that I'm still not doing enough.

poetry

Atmosphere and Door | Anne Heide
Allow me to suffer. Allow me to build my house of burned brick and
then. Allow me a pasture of Here.

Allow me the Grace once called question. Because if it is ever the
answer I’d want, I’d never.
Allow me Good News.

Hipsters? Post-post-post modern? Oh, adbusters...

https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/88/the_coming_barbarism.html

If the stars were mine, I'd give them all to you

I realize that somehow, this is turning into an odd collection of poetry and not so much recollections of any kind. I am home again, after spending a month in Minneapolis for the break. After spending time with people I miss like heart stopping. And I know that I don't ever want to live there again. It is a hard knowledge to come to, in some ways also heart stopping. Because how do I manage friendships if I will never live in the same city. How do I maintain friendships if I will never see them with regularity again. These are not arguments that I need to be having with myself. I am content with my friends in Worcester, I like them a lot. I am content with my friends in minneapolis, and I will maintain what I can.

But really, the reason I'm posting anything at all:
Aristotle by Billy Collins


This is the beginning.
Almost anything can happen.
This is where you find
the creation of light, a fish wriggling onto land,
the first word of Paradise Lost on an empty page.
Think of an egg, the letter A,
a woman ironing on a bare stage
as the heavy curtain rises.
This is the very beginning.
The first-person narrator introduces himself,
tells us about his lineage.
The mezzo-soprano stands in the wings.
Here the climbers are studying a map
or pulling on their long woolen socks.
This is early on, years before the Ark, dawn.
The profile of an animal is being smeared
on the wall of a cave,
and you have not yet learned to crawl.
This is the opening, the gambit,
a pawn moving forward an inch.
This is your first night with her,
your first night without her.
This is the first part
where the wheels begin to turn,
where the elevator begins its ascent,
before the doors lurch apart.

This is the middle.
Things have had time to get complicated,
messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore.
Cities have sprouted up along the rivers
teeming with people at cross-purposes—
a million schemes, a million wild looks.
Disappointment unshoulders his knapsack
here and pitches his ragged tent.
This is the sticky part where the plot congeals,
where the action suddenly reverses
or swerves off in an outrageous direction.
Here the narrator devotes a long paragraph
to why Miriam does not want Edward's child.
Someone hides a letter under a pillow.
Here the aria rises to a pitch,
a song of betrayal, salted with revenge.
And the climbing party is stuck on a ledge
halfway up the mountain.
This is the bridge, the painful modulation.
This is the thick of things.
So much is crowded into the middle—
the guitars of Spain, piles of ripe avocados,
Russian uniforms, noisy parties,
lakeside kisses, arguments heard through a wall—
too much to name, too much to think about.

And this is the end,
the car running out of road,
the river losing its name in an ocean,
the long nose of the photographed horse
touching the white electronic line.
This is the colophon, the last elephant in the parade,
the empty wheelchair,
and pigeons floating down in the evening.
Here the stage is littered with bodies,
the narrator leads the characters to their cells,
and the climbers are in their graves.
It is me hitting the period
and you closing the book.
It is Sylvia Plath in the kitchen
and St. Clement with an anchor around his neck.
This is the final bit
thinning away to nothing.
This is the end, according to Aristotle,
what we have all been waiting for,
what everything comes down to,
the destination we cannot help imagining,
a streak of light in the sky,
a hat on a peg, and outside the cabin, falling leaves.