A Poem! Well, Kinda....

So since this, my very own blog, is about (well, halvsies about) poetry, I figured it would be in good form to at least blog about something I have written. This kind of long little diddie is something I just spit-balled one night after a long and sincerely drunken conversation with a few buddies over our respective, hypothetical perfect girl(s). It was definitely a fun time but on the flip side of that, it was a pretty thought-provoking conversation. Thinking about your prospective perfect mate (especially being only 20 years old when doing it) makes you flip turn what you believe about yourself and project it outward. Do you look for more compatible qualities in your, in this case, girl? Or do you seek out qualities that are lacking or deficient in yourself? The way you see yourself defines the way you interact with other people, and though this may seem obvious, it gets much much more complicated when love and passion and lust become involved. Anyway, that conversation still sticks glue-like in my head. Here is what I posted on facebook and myspace after that conversation:

{Note: This is simply a page from my journal, which isn't so much a journal in the sense that it is true or in any way an accurate portrayal of me. In fact, it is best to think of it as purely fictional. In fact, it is best if we kept this between you and I.}

{Note: There is a fraction of people that will feel queasy upon reading about a person pondering being inside another person. These people should not continue. }

{Note: Anyone feeling queasy at all should probably not continue}

{Note: There are some among the continuing population that may come to believe that this little excerpt is about them. It, I am afraid to say, is not.}

{Note: But what if it was about you? How would that make you feel? Angry? Ecstatic? Perhaps flushed with a sense of pride over being the subject of such an honest, heart-felt online posting? Perhaps indignant over having the completeness of you reduced to a few petty lines by some hack-writing amateur? Those people who feel they may become wrought with emotion over this little posting should not continue.}

{Note: I feel as if the number of perambulatory notes has become disproportionate to the cursory interest of most casual readers. This group, with my apologies, is free to not continue.}

{Note: Shall we get on with it?}

--> --> --> -->

We are stalking each other through a Safeway.

I chance a quick look while she peruses the cheese cracker options on aisle three. The –its or the –nips?

She sneaks a peek back as I pretend to debate the laurels of Single and Double-stuff Oreos. The single is a classic staple, but, oh, the decadence of the double!

I first saw her by the avocados. I was naively weighing bananas.

I sneak another glance. She has chosen the –its. I knew I could trust her.

I decide to linger a moment more on her, if only so that I may engage in a more serious study.

Appendix A:

Title: What I Learned on Aisle Three
Author: [omitted for obvious reasons]
Date: [omitted because, really, do you care?]


She has brown eyes.

Her eyes are the corduroy buttons of my father's sweater.

They are burning cigars.

I believe this girl will be the one to hold me in dark rooms when we have had just the right volume of wine.

She will be linen waves, wrapping and sliding across my body.

Her hair is teased to an astonishing volume.

Her hair is dirty beaches.

Her hair is sandstone arches.

Her hair is pencil shavings on a classroom floor.

I believe this girl will be the books I have read.

Her spine will crack open and her organs will tumble across a wooden floor.

Her brain is a medical dictionary with haiku poems slipped between every page.

Her lungs are homilies.

Her nerves are subscription leaflets that flutter out, like snow, like ash.

Her liver is metabolizing the ignorant words scribed above junior high urinals.

I believe this will be the girl that finishes my crosswords. "Oh, that was six across? How ever do you know your soap stars of the sixties so well!?"

She will finish the coffee that remains in the pot.

She will exclaim "Fuck!" when she burns her pinky finger on a pot of Wanton Soup or when the NY Rangers get scored on (she likes hockey for an inexplicable reason. I don't fully understand her inner workings yet).

Being inside her will be the slow steam heat of a subway grate.

It will be a mother's breath.

It will be warming your hands while you wait for the bus on an icy day.

It will be the rhythm of tunnel traffic.

It will be the lull that you felt sitting at the bottom of that swimming pool at your second cousin's Bat Mitzvah.

It will be the weight of water.

She has a body that slips between drops of rain.

I will have conversations with her body. I will whisper into her stomach. I will tell the butterflies to do their buddy (me) a favor and stir a little more. She loves those butterflies.

She will stitch her own dresses together on the couch while I read D.E and look up occasionally to ask questions like, "If Einstein and Charlemagne arm-wrestled, who would you most want to win?" and "If Groucho Marx was your father, would you, as a small child, have asked him to shave off his moustache because it tickled when he kissed you?"

She has a laugh that buzzes her into any apartment building.

She has lips that free up my calendar.

-----

We have weaved out and back, out and back and are fast approaching the frozen food section.

It is at the toiletries, aisle nine, that I am witness to something spectacular. A miracle.

As she lifts the Supersaver 24-roll toilet paper off the top shelf, I notice the bird. Her shirt is lifted up off her waist for a moment and then, like London from the morning fog, there it is. A single song-bird. A Meadowlark? A Sparrow? A Nightingale?

She slyly wraps her gaze around me, and for the nineteenth time since our first encounter eight aisles ago, our eyes catch and sparks shower the Safeway. Our fellow shoppers pretend not to notice. Some people are so afraid of light and sound.

I swivel back to my paper towels. I try not to smile. I shift my head back to my cart, elated. A bird! On her skin! Living there! Flying free across the plateaus of her shoulder blades, over the hills of her breasts! A beautiful little bird! Her bird!

Appendix B

Title: Where My Head Went on Aisle Nine
Author: [omitted for, again, obvious reasons]
Date: [omitted because, still, do you really care?]



A Conversation:

Skin: I am here, I am willing. You can see this. I am laid bare. I am a canvas. I am alterable, yet unchangeable. I have the fundamentals down.
Tattoo Gun: Then, my love of loves, why are you here?
Skin: Because I am alone. I am cream. I am pure paper wrapped around beauty itself. I have felt the salt breezes and the sticky touch of teenage fingers. And yes, I have been burned before. I have had it all. All but a companion.
Tattoo Gun: What kind of companion are you looking for my dear? I have brought together all kinds.
Skin: I myself have legs and arms and lids and napes but I do not yet have wings.
Tattoo Gun: Ah, then a winged creature! A bat? A dragon? A wasp? A phoenix? A pixie?
Skin: These things are beautiful, but they are not deserving of my curves. They could never relate to my fragility.
Tattoo Gun: Ah, ha! It is the nightingale that you seek, my lady. Her song could pierce the hardest heart. She will deliver you through the dark. She will hold your morning song inside her through the long night until, at last, it blooms into a million cascading notes, pouring out across the dawning sky.
Skin: Yes, you have done it! You are a genius! Nightingale? Where are you? Are you here?
Song-bird: Chirp...
--> --> --> -->

Past aisle ten, the temperature begins to fall, the steady hum of freezers rises through the air, and I am acutely aware that I am no longer within the safety of the non-perishables.

She is moving more slowly now, grazing the frozen glass of every tall freezer window with her outstretched fingers. I am submerged in her. I am ensorcelled.

There is a palpable danger as we near the yogurt and the end of the store and I can sense an new urgency in our dance. A desperation of the eleventh hour.

And then it hits.

We are on aisle twelve and she is holding a box of Gorton's Fish Sticks when I am suddenly wondering if she likes older men.

I grip a waist-high freezer.

Self-doubt grips me back.

What if she already has a boyfriend?

What if she already has two boyfriends, three? What if she is dating a football team, a chess club or an entire men's choir?

What if she snores during naps and cries at national anthems and likes Fox News and smacks her lips when eating cereal and what if she thinks my jokes make me look like a child and what if she discovers I grind my teeth sometimes when I sleep and the sound drives her away, drives her straight into the arms of a racquetball player, or a law intern, or an ex-child star?

What if she is anything less than the girl in my imagination?

What if I become a long list of dropped-short expectations?

What if everything goes perfect and we still fall apart?

Appendix C:

An Entry From a Future Diary Marked for a Cathartic Burn:

Date: XX/XX/XXXX

Dear Diary,

There is a time limit on every living thing. There is an expiration date for all that is beautiful. There is a crashing point for the crest of every deep-sea wave. A final descent for every set of God-given wings.

There will come a moment when every exotic creature has been named and classified, when every enigmatic territory and passage has been mapped and charted, when every unknown process has been thoroughly discovered, observed, and transformed into a practical convenience. My microwave stands as a sad testament to this.

When everything becomes known, we cease to believe. When everything has been discovered, we fail to hold faith like a final breath. When everything is finally found, something essential is lost for good.

We are finished but I can still see her in my dreams. She is there, walking across the horizon like a tightrope artist, balancing herself between the fading day and the gathering night. On her lips sit words and as she opens them to speak the words spill out bright across the darkened sky like diamonds I could never afford. These diamonds are the stars and she is fading into a ghost beneath them. She is languishing into death beneath them. She is bleaching her bones white beneath them.

I wake powerless to change the past.

But my life goes on and on and on.

I want to make this poetic.

I want to write love poems on my arms for her and cut them all out, give them all away to big-breasted women in dive bars.

I want to send her envelopes with words like razor blades scattered inside.

I want to post up billboards in every major city describing the lewdness of her preferences in bed.

I want to change into the night wind and howl through her bedroom at night.

I want to scream through her dreams.

I want to wrap up hurt in smooth blue paper and tie it up with red ribbon heart-strings.

I want to forget what it feels like to be a music man and I want to forget what it feels like to write music notes just for you and what it feels like to have those notes dance inside my blood and what it feels like to rip them out of my body

and give them all back

I snap out of my head and come to realize three things:

a: I have been staring at the ice cream sandwiches for an inordinate amount of time.

b. Since adolescence I have always been locked up in my head like a hermit, with a pile of books and a map, dreaming of the light outside.

c. I have to take a chance, even if the end is calamitous. Why? Because her eyes are singing: Take a chance! Take a shot, you idiot! Take me to a movie!

d: She's Gone!

I quickly collect myself and rev my cart into overdrive. When I hit the checkouts, I move systematically:

Lane 11- Nothing

Lane 10- Nothing

Lane 9- Damn!

Lane 8- Nothing

Lane 7- Nothing

Lane 6- Shit!

Lane 5- Nothing

Lane 4: Nothing

Lane 3: !!!

There she is! Bouncing her gaze between the tabloids while an elderly woman fumbles with the mechanics of her checkbook.

I reach out my hand and gently touch her shoulder.

She begins to turn, and I face a certain death.