The Game of Thrones is ruining me

I just had one of those moments where I become supremely and incandescently happy because I feel as though I just stumbled upon something stupendous. I was pondering the luck of an acquaintance who will be studying in England on full scholarship, and then I realized: at some point she will die and become a rotting piece of flesh that once resembled a human being. In fact, we all will. Regardless of what we do with the time we are given, eventually it always runs out and we become worm salad.

I know what you're thinking: Wow, you must be a spiteful, vindictive person to feel joy at the thought of your friend's eventual death and decay. And to you I say this: After all the awful things we do to ourselves to set ourselves apart from the rest of the world, after all the striving and planning and machinations, the triumph and humiliation of life, it is comforting to know that regardless of all that, we are all equal in the end.

Also, I have been watching The Game of Thrones, which might account for my overt morbidity.

Words of the Winter

i read the new glitterpony and thought many nice things about the poets who submitted its limbs. but a confession is always a lovely thing for a friday, and so i must say Billy Cancel had my favorite line:

attained your zenith in low pressure
troughs but i loved you nonetheless nimbus upon the edge of rain

Billy Cancel- From the slime adhering to each propeller

check it out.

Delectable Morsel of Info

Number one: where are all these pictures of olde time brunches with hatted people coming from? It seems everyone and their mom is having brunch with people in fedoras. And by everyone, I mean mostly the dear Molly Crickman. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised by the number of fedoras in her pictures but I am. So deal with it.

Number two: much love to Russia. For those of you who are not me and therefore cannot read my blog stats, you should know that Russia is seriously interested in me. So watch out America, Russia loves Americans that eat a ton of fruit. And Russia, you should know my life changed the day I first tried pierogis. It was a good day. 

Number three: the first new recipe has been posted to my other, less-about-me-but-still-kind-of-about-me blog. If you've never tasted or seen frogmore stew, crawl out from under that rock and prepare your face to receive the beautiful bounty that is a big, steaming bowl of something tasty. The Essential Pantry- Frogmore Stew Do it. You know you want to.

Tape 2, side 1

Today we talked about her father and the way her boyfriends are reoccurring nightmares that always resemble the Sylvia Plath poem Daddy. I'm unsurprised by this bit of information, seeing as her instability in intimate relationships sent her to me in the first place. I have started to condition her to resist self-destructive urges in dealing with other people. The key, I told her, was to listen closely to the things they repeat over and over again. These are the important things, the things that float around in their heads, kept aloft by adipose tissue and a chemical cocktail that even I can't replicate. Find these things, and memorize them. Repeat them over and over again. Mention them in their company as often as possible but never make the inference seem forced. It has to seem natural. Speak as frequently as possible about the time you went to a wedding and saw a clock made out of a wagon wheel, about how you laughed at the same joke once, that you both often wear jeans. It is vital to reinforce sameness, uniformity. That is how people fall in love, I told her. And once they are convinced of it, it is easy to convince yourself that this was how it was supposed to be all along. His thoughts are now your thoughts and the chemical cocktail pickling your brain is full of the same useless, repetitive material as his. This is exactly how things are supposed to be. This is what we talked about until our time was finally up.

Dancing Squid

This is one of my favorite times of day. The early morning shadows hint at the so recently breached night and the filmy, pale light of day encroaches ever closer, ever farther into their hazy territory. The fog has not yet lifted from the endless miles of farmland, its frosty murk seeming more like a pool of dreams than a congregation of water. The squirrels on the hill I know so well are startled to see me here so early. I am interrupting their morning routine, just as you are interrupting mine.

I think about you often now. Last night you told me people take life too seriously, that it is impossible to plan for everything. Though you didn't say it, I know you were talking about me. I know you're right. I look at the sharping edges of light on the sidewalk and ponder this. It is ironic that you, of all people, should comment on this to me. I wonder, do you know that I'd never planned on you? Isn't it funny that the one thing I take seriously is the thing that seems most improbable, most absurd? This makes me smile as much as it worries me.

When I told you about dancing squid, the delicacy made by decapitating a live squid and pouring scalding hot broth over its body, you were intrigued, maybe even amused. I told you I think such a practice is barbaric and cruel. You paused and then said the squid was dead and the mechanical jerking of its limbs, its frantic headless attempt to escape the scorching broth and its throne of noodles, all of it was merely electrical impulses. It could not sense the pain it felt. Inexplicably, I felt the desperate desire to ask if you believe in soulmates but as the silence blossomed between us, the words dissolved like salt on my tongue.

Online dating is for mid-thirties career women who like cats and want someone to play Scrabble with. So, me in ten years.

I have noticed every day
I become more dull, and I don't
mean boring, I mean lacking
in sharpness, in focus.
I am becoming fuzzy. I forget
the cadence of the poems
written about me, can't seem
to count the lines and rhymes
in my head anymore.
When I think of you
lying in my bed, I recall
your absence from my bed
and resort to searching
Google for bits of information
you will never remember
to tell me; you were in a play
that had Chili in its name
and swam more laps than
you or I can keep track of.
Your parents live on a street
named after a nut, in a house
you were a child in. I imagine
you running through the yard
with your twin holding hands.
Your twin has a slew
of pages on his life too.
Somehow, this is what
helps me fall asleep on the nights
when the bed is bigger than me.

And now it's time for something completely different

Today we're going to learn how to write a limerick. They seem easy enough but I'm sticking to a strict anapestic foot. And since I can barely remember what an anapest is, this could take awhile. But I will succeed, and keep you posted in the mean time.

And for your reading pleasure, here is an adaption of a limerick my ex-boyfriend and good friend Matthew Mahaney wrote about me:

In Shakespeare and Austen she trusts
with a larger than average bust
she attracts wanton glances
and unwanted advances
but she'll crush all their hearts into dust.

Haiku baby

Three words too many
One short of enough supine
Legs as long as thyme.

That's a haiku, baby. Yeah.

This conversation actually just took place

Leah: And I would handle classical music. Well, I would probably handle everything pre-1900.

Stefan: Haha though I don't think I've heard music trivia before 1950.

Leah: Really? Huh...

Stefan: You have?

Leah: Well, I guess my experience is skewed since I played with hipsters.

Stefan: Haha where do you play hipster trivia?

Leah: At the Old Fashioned. And sometimes at Adam's house. You know, the kid with the mullet.

Stefan: Sorry, the correct answer was 'you've probably never heard of it.'

Leah: But you have heard of the Old Fashioned. I know you have. We were there. But you've probably never been there for trivia night.

Stefan: Yeah, I know. I was just saying the hipster response :-p

Leah: So was I. You've probably never heard of trivia at the Old Fashioned. No one has.

Stefan: Do they keep it secret, in the back, like an opium den? Those dens have great trivia.

Leah: As a matter of fact they do. It's so secret, not even the Old Fashioned knows the trivia game is going on. It's like totally meta.

Stefan: Wow, what's the prize?

Leah: One of Edgar Allan Poe's toenails and the ironic satisfaction of being proven better than a group of people who think they are better than everyone else. 

Stefan: Lol, the greatest prize of all. 

Leah: I didn't tell you that in hipster trivia there's only one question- what is the meaning of life?

Stefan: How long is the trivia?!?!

Leah: Well, I've been doing it for about three years now. Continuously. 

Stefan: And no end in sight.

Leah: I offered an answer last year but was told it needed to be more specific to be accepted. It also had to include organic food and boat shoes.

No aspect of this conversation has been altered, aside from Stefan's atrocious spelling/grammar.

I woke up in the wave
Again the sea had washed
Soft colored stones between my lips
And left me silent with dreams
I have tried writing for days
Now and nothing
Will come but you and your
And you again. I know you would hate
The way I talk about you
To people who don't know
Your name or face. You hate
That I talk about you as if
You are already gone,
That you never were, like a widow
Speaks of the man she lost
To the war, the one
That never came home to marry her.

Visitation Rights

When I spoke
to you today you said I might
explode from excitement &
I gave you permission to date
Kiera Knightly if I was
blown to smithereens
by my own heightened anticipation,
to which you replied, hellz yea.
You know, of course,
that should you not mourn
my loss for at least the proper
3 month time, I reserve
the right to haunt you &
I hear Kiera Knightley hates ghosts,
especially the jealous types.

By definition

By definition I am
something that recycles thoughts
I have overheard while passing
through the doors of
buildings and a thing that whittles
time from the day's sunlight
and thinks it is not
quiet as spectacular a feat
as the way tomatoes
can resurrect the dead
memories inside a person
I love and barely know; it is
an elastic thing that has repercussions
and reasonings and seasons
that drift away like bitterness
over the march of time.
I am by definition colder
than I was three months ago,
in the spring when the snow
still made the nights reflective;
I know less and feel more
and have a suspicion that this
is the beginning of an apocalypse
of words; they will not come
around anymore or sit with me
when I am alone and lying
between two cold sheets.
They will not have been
saved, as the others were.
Simply and easily they will
die as soon as I let them. 

I am in the stars again

There are bruised limbs I wake up
and don't remember how
they were born or marked.
These are things to be
remembered, aren't they? I can
grasp a grain of sand
between my teeth without gasping
or faltering forward I can
step into the shadows my body
calls from the quiet of green leaves.
I peel the white skin from a birch
and crush the poison berries
red against the paper
until my fingers bleed with juice.
This is the way we were taught.
I am keeping the cupboards open tonight
to let the spirits out, just like grandma
used to do with the floors,
and the hollow cavern of her chest.
There is salt on the threshold
and all the beds have been freshly made.

title page

When I first started submitting my poetry to literary journals, I ran across one journal that requested the writer send no poems regarding dead relatives or pets, rhyming (in the improper/inexpert way) or lists sent in the guise of poems. While I think these are in general excellent regulations, there are times when the only way I remember you're human is by listing. I keep lists in a spiral bound notebook of all the things you've ever said or done. I re-read them before I go to sleep at night and each night sighs out loud,"Ah, that's so poetic." I can't help but agree, since the night could swallow me up like it does to the stars over and over again. I wonder sometimes if this isn't a poem, if the words in my head are or the stop sign on the corner of Few and Williamson. I wonder if you are a poem, and that is why I re-write and re-read you every night, so I can remember your words when the time comes.

New Rules

From here on out all people will be judged based on the shape and quality of their eyebrows. I have a whole complex theory about personality traits correlated to eyebrow structure and I think I just proved causality. Take case study #7, for example. Man in his mid 20s with sparse, poorly shaped arches, lacking all definable color and structure. Consequently, he possesses a weak personality and insatiable need to be defined and validated by others. In case study #19 we learned that women with overly arched brows are overly arch people. This revelation was verified by case studies #13 and #5. The eyebrow/disposition relationship seems to be as valid a manner of judging people as any other. And besides, I like eyebrows. They are the backbone of the face. So I guess if you have weak eyebrows, your face is lacking a backbone. Sad.

Also, I have entered a new phase of my life, and since my life phases are largely defined by the foods I eat, this new phase is going to be dubbed the sandwich phase of my life. Because right now I'm on track to eat close to two sandwiches everyday. They are so goooood.

Brief list of things that should cease to exist

• Creative pet grooming
• People who creatively groom their pets

Next Year

I predict that next year I will live alone, with a robin's egg blue bicycle I have named Doris. I will store Doris in my small living room, which will be completely devoid of furniture save for the 1970s vintage swivel chair I bought from St. Vincent De Paul when I was 20 years old. The cat that I will find or buy by this time next year will be black or gray; she will be female and I will name her Wallis, but I will always refer to her as Moo-Moo. This is a habit I developed at age 5 which I cannot seem to rid myself of. The hobbies I will have will mostly consist of crocheting, writing poetry, cooking, playing various obscure sports and noticing the small details about people that no one else ever notices. I will eat string cheese in my 1970s vintage chair as Wallis stares at me petulantly and I will wonder where all the other people like me are. At this point I will realize the others are doing what I am doing; sitting in their own thrift store chairs, eating their own cheese, being glared at by their own cats. I will resolve to go out and find these others, and their chairs and cheese and cats. However, instead I will sit in my apartment and tell Wallis about the man I will meet who will spend Sundays counting my freckles and telling me stories about his life as a boy.

Just in case you were not paying attention here is the recap of the awesome things happening this weekend:

1. Friday, May 13th: Friday the 13th; prepare to be brutally murder in a unnecessarily creative manner.If you're lucky you may be the sole survivor. If you are blonde, female, attractive, a minority, over the age of 30 or a child, you will not be the sole survivor.
2. Saturday, May 14th: My birthday, otherwise known as the official holiday celebrating my birth. My cousin is also graduating from college on this day.
3. Sunday, May 15th: The Milton St house graduation party, otherwise known as disaster waiting to happen. It will be epic, and few will likely remember it. 
4. Monday, May 16th: Furlough day; the day to go to the beach and lay in the sun too long. 

Ah yes, this is going to be a glorious weekend indeed. 

Social Science

The men of the Social Science building have constructed a partition that completely surrounds the largest lecture hall in the building. They have banned entrance into the area under construction. Today I saw a man in a hard hat exit the construction zone carrying a large folding banquet table. I am 97% certain they are throwing a huge, 4 month long party in there. The table definitely proves it. I guess that explains the sounds of 50 Cent and Lady Gaga that have been wafting through the halls.

Scheduled Events

My life is abundant with appointments. The poplars down the street have become uprooted and parade around the boulevard like sorority girls on pledge day, their green canopies like the parasols the girls prance around with. This too is a scheduled event that takes place in accordance with the stretching of daylight. The space between my eyes narrows and that is how I know that it is time for something to happen, time to say something. It is as if even the three year-old gripping my hand is metering out the seconds with his eyelids.

Summer

It has come to the point where I know most everyone now. There seems to me to be a lack of strangeness in the world; there are no more blind men waiting at the appleyard gate, hands outstretched and a smile like a clean, open wound. I can walk down the street and talk to people like I know them. I suppose in a lot of ways I do. I recognize the sweater draped around their shoulders, because they told me the story about their grandmother and how they peeled it from her dead hands and wept into it for days. They only wear it when it's sunny and almost unbearably hot. But these are bits of other people. That sweater is their grandmother. So is the memory of her. I get sick sometimes of trying to sort through what is shit and what makes sense when you pour enough water over it. Does it make a difference that I have no more ways to say sorry? How can one stand on the edge of the forest and not look between the trees? I ask myself this when the fiction writer I know begins telling me about this thing or that, that he is doing, or writing, or thinking. I ask myself if his mustache is ironic, if he thinks it is, or if I should. I ask myself what the fuck difference does it make anyway. He'll be dead before you know it, and so will I. I guess I'm just tired of waiting for summer and the days when the sun shines longer than the stars.

Love Letter

There are three ways to enter a room without being noticed. It is not necessary to explain them, nor can I validate that there are only three, but there are at least three.

If you walk outside on a day when the grayness of the sky is roughly equivalent to the weight of your open palm, cupping a walnut, it is likely that you are having thoughts of earthworms and cannot speak more than a few clipped words without exhaling deeply through your nose.

In the street there are days that last forever because they are wrapped in the liquid feel of time like I am wrapped in skin. You can wade through it, freeze it, dig gullies to usher it into a different valley where the crops have grown pinched with drought.

Blue was invented by a Jewish man who made papers in the 18th century. In an attempt to understand the complexity of his wife, he pulled the sky down around him and presented it to her on the occasion of their marriage.

Lessons Learned

So, apparently I am not very squeamish. The apple I was eating mysteriously materialized a bug out of nowhere. And half of it was missing. I did not feel even a ripple of distress, other than wondering how the bug got in there in the first place, since there were no visible holes. My only thought other than that on the topic was, "Hmmm, extra protein." Then I laughed to myself.

I have also figured out something about people. If a person asks another person a series of questions about likes and dislikes and does not receive what is in his or her mind a satisfactory answer, the asker will stop asking and likely stopping talking entirely to the responder. I learned this first hand in a bar once. A guy asked me a series of pop culture questions to which I replied, "I don't know" or "I don't watch TV". After about two and a half minutes, he stopped attempting to talk to me. Here is my theory about these happenings: people like to have common interests, but more than that, they want to be around people who care about things. When I say "care about things", I don't mean "the planet" or "the whales" or "the state of public education". I mean non-altruistic, non-serious things. Like hockey, kayaking, knitting or cooking. People like people that can relax but more than disliking a goody-two-shoes, people like to know that other people can care about something that is not earth-shattering or mind-altering. They want other people to care about everyday things, common things. Because (and here's the important part), if one cannot relax and love the mundane, how is one ever to love a common, mundane person.

See what I just did there? I just blew your mind. Am I right? Probably, on some level. Am I wrong? All the time. But I have to come up with some sort of system to figure out what the hell is going on around me and thus far, this is the best I've got.

(Also, I understand and appreciate the irony of essentially saying the in order to relate to people one needs to relax and be able to live OUTSIDE of one's head, while simultaneously proving that I live inside my head. Yes, I know, irony.)

Marching into fiction

I am no longer having conversations.
Everything I have to say
will be written as a poem.
I read your fictions
on Monkey Bicycle today
& I was unsurprised
to find they sound like every
conversation you & I have
ever had. Figures. Leave it
to a poet to write fictions
that sound like the poems
he speaks everyday.
I am certain you will
be thrilled to know I'm still
paying attention. I am. Now
you know.

There were your lips
and the vinyl record my mother played
every Sunday, the smoky voiced one.
There was red nail polish seeping
into the frame at the left hand
corner, the plush carpet that may
have been moss, since I can see green
and smell the dampness I remember
from the way your body fell
on leaves that day in September
before I could dream
a hundred ways for you to die.

We start again with your mouth
and I scribble it in my notebook,
before its color and expression fade.
This is what I have been told
to do to understand what I think
of you and your not being here.
But the images move, will not
stay fixed in my mind. I cannot tell
if you are dead or alive, if I can
see or am blind and dreaming.
The world will not stay blurred,
will not separate itself into frames
and paragraphs. There is no cohesion,
no stickiness and everything runs
towards the inevitable end, the blackness
and my forgetting again.

How to be a private eye

First, find a trench coat. Preferably non-descript. Belt it around your waist in a feminizing fashion. Pop the broad collar up around your face and learn to peer into the space between it and the brim of your hat. You must wear a hat.

Second, find a shadow that obscures your face. Preferably one that is frequented by junkies and hookers. Spend hours here, hunching your shoulders around your ears. Take one of the aforementioned hookers into your charge. She should be pretty in a dirty, street-worn way. Smoke your cheap cigarettes furiously, blowing the smoke out your nose like a chimney. Do this until it doesn't burn anymore, until you cannot taste or smell.

Finally, opine narratively to the invisible person who follows you everywhere. Talk about dames and the itch between your shoulder blades. Start referring to your feelings as hunches, as you pull whiskey from your flask and grimace to show your teeth.

Repeat steps one through three until, when you go home at night, you go anywhere but home.

Let's just say that in the brief time that I knew you, you had a profound impact on my feelings towards fatty fish. Other than that, I think there is little notable about our interaction. Oh, and you taught me not to appear as smart as I am because it makes people uncomfortable. I will henceforth pay little attention to what someone is saying to me and pretend that basic math is not one of my strong suits. My social life and cardiovascular system say thank you.

This is just getting ridiculous

Look here. I ordered a deranged cat that would functionally murder any semblance of the social life I currently enjoy. And what did I get? A motor skills challenged high school classmate in my 5:45 yoga class on Wednesdays. There is a reason I have not spoken to this individual since the day we graduated. And his lack of flexibility and miraculously warped sense of balance is extremely distracting when I am trying to focus on my intuition. First the Square, then my block, then my cafe, my restaurant and now my yoga studio? Are you serious?! Please return to sender immediately. I refuse to pay for shipping and handling.

To-do

I really need an anti-social feline to go with my new bicycle and cookbook obsession. Preferably one that will eat my entire herb garden in one day and vomit it all back up, in various places around my carpeted apartment, before I get home from work. It would also be nice if this animal had various health problems that made it impossible to give away or set loose on the family farm without a profound sense of guilt. And they should be uncommon ailments, like cat eczema or an allergy to pet dander. A combination of both would be perfect. Yes, that is exactly what I need to go with my Allegra McEvedy cookbook. That, and some fresh sardines.

Notes on a Populist Uprising

This is not the former Soviet Union at the turn of the 20th century. This is not Egypt. Well, no, this is Egypt but not yet. That is what the people are saying. They are like one great mouth filled with teeth. They are calling the governor Hussein and Mubarak and Hitler. I suppose as far as surnames go, they are all the same thing. I am sleeping in the marble arms of the Capitol tonight. It was not until tonight that I understood that the wings of the building are not wings, but arms. This place has no hope for flight, and can only be half of what Kali and Durga are. Four arms instead of eight. A demi-god. We have been advised that if at some point the State Troopers, with their bleary eyes perched in every stairwell, ask us to go, to refuse would be civil disobedience. I know what this means. It means illegal. It means being still when no one else is. But I don't understand it anymore than the nineteen year-old boy sitting next to me, with his guitar and peanut butter and jelly. Civil disobedience died fifty years ago with the good doctor, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. It was withstanding high-powered hoses meant to sweep you off the face of the earth, like a blight, like a spreading fire. It was going to school to be taught to hate yourself because you just wouldn't learn your place. It was the Little Rock Nine. This is not where I live. This is not my home. This is not Birmingham, AL in 1963. There are two hundred bodies scattered around the marble hallways. None of them has been asked to leave. Unlike the struggle for civil rights, this time the police, most of them, are on our side. They are sympathetic. They offer us water and coffee, a listening ear and shoulder to lean on. I don't think they will ask us to leave. But it is more than sympathy. At night our numbers dwindle to a small corp of determined compatriots, but with daybreak these halls and the streets encircling the Capitol will mobbed by tens of thousands of supporters. It is not our words, the shouting and brandishing of signs that make the authorities cautious but rather the sheer number of us. We are growing everyday that they stay the same. The drum beats seem to never end. The voices never seem to end. We are living in a tyranny of fear and something has to end. I will not sleep tonight. I will watch the younger ones. They are too eager, too much like Peter Pan on a great adventure. This is their movement as much as it is mine.

I can only imagine how pissed off Ben Jonson is about no one knowing who he is anymore. Sorry Ben, you had the 16th century all to yourself. It's just cruel irony that Shakespeare's fame would only grow with time, while yours would recede into the mystic recesses of academia. But as a consolation, you should know, some of the smartest people alive think you're better than Shakespeare. Some. Most of them think Shakespeare kicked your ass.

Every day that passes I am convinced could've been saved by a steady diet of firm words and well-thought out food.

Paperback Writer

I guess I just started a novel. I'm not really sure how it happened. It feels like a one-night stand. The morning after, you are sitting in bed, alone, wondering what in the hell happened last night. There may be a vague sense of shame. There may be a sense of bewilderment. But above all, there is confusion and the undeniable fact that what just happened, just happened.

Resolutions, version 2K.11

1. Say the word "like" 20% less frequently
2. Get a haircut every 6 weeks
3. Buy more shoes and fewer kitchen accessories
4. Learn to beat box
5. Make fat stacks of cash
6. Stop making so many damn lists