I began this blog a while ago and let it languish. I came back to it because I needed one as part of a project for a class in "New Media," whatever that's really supposed to mean. New to whom, exactly? Exactly. At any rate,as such, I tried to play nice, write respectfully toward my audience, not thrash or howl, use nice language; all the things my prof would expect. I even refrained from whipping out innafuckinpropriate portmanteau words, which are an especial favorite of mine, but which almost everyone else abhors. You jumps through the hoops when you wants the grade, and ooh yeah, Chombatta, I wants the grade. I wants a crack at grad school and I wants a job in a university, where it smells nice, where it's quiet, where I doesn't has ta wash my hands
before going to the bathroom. And besides, there's nothing wrong with playing nice.
But I wanted to throw down a little after the class ended, get wild, jettison the nice. Start tossing around the filthy F-word (you know the one, Father -
worse than 'feck'), getting dirrty with the erotic poetry that Mrs. Disaffected hates when she reads it - whether it's about her, for her, to her, or couldn't possibly be about her, either way. Even more ambitious, I wanted to plant a flag here in blogland for my progressive agenda and spout off about things that piss me off, like intolerance, hate, illiteracy, and the banal celebration of all three known as life in Armpitas, Indiana.
Since I am easily as lazy as I am disaffected, this has not happened. Be warned, blogmongers, because it will. Eventually. Some time in the future. Bank on it.
In the meantime, here's a poem (-ish) that I composed partly while driving and partly internetally last night. I should have jotted it in the car, because I lost part of it and it won't come back. Like the
man says, the shit's always better when it's pouring out on you, straight from the celestial recording room, and you only have to stand there with a bucket to catch as much as you can.
On My Way Home
When
Soichiro says, Come fly with me,
his emblem, Hermes' winged sandal,
shows you that he's serious.
The library
kept me too long
again,
but the power's
on at home,
and the sun is
bright,
but not
too hot
today.
My bright-smiling girl
is swimming
with her grandmother,
and I am late collecting her
for dinner and bed.
I will need Chiro-san's wings.
We might stop, after I dim
her smile, steal
some mirth from her sunred cheeks,
bring the idea of Going Home
into Grandma's house,
the opposite, the absence
of Going Home -
We might stop
at a little stand, where
brown,
round-faced boys
and girls stack their
grown
things high.
The board bows
beneath
the weight of what
they have wrought
from the ground,
these children.
They are so timid
in handing me my
crinkled
brown
bag of cucumbers,
so timid,
in taking
the few coins and bills
I offer in return.
Their black eyes, so serious,
snapping
when they smile
up,
suddenly so bold.
I wonder, driven away
by Chiro-San's wing,
if those serious children,
when they are grown, will
be
the kind of people
whose demeanor
follows a natural oscillation,
from timorous to fierce.
I love those kinds of people.
It comes easily to me
to find a way
to love
those children -
Ignorance, for one.
I don't know
anything about them
past the fact that they
are children.
It's enough.
