Corpse de ballet / Imperfect

The only other time I've posted any of my poetry on here, I asked for gentleness. As before, I present to you a classic instance of a new genre I'm pioneering: emo spine poetry. By now (I wrote this when I was still trying to dance) I've much more come to terms with this sort of thing, so if you would, I'd like you all to be as brutal as possible. I don't know much about the craft of poems, but I enjoy them and would like to improve. Also, I KNOW there are some really smart English majors who read my blog. Hopefully you'll have something to say. :)



I'm tired of laying here, trying to remember what it was for my body to be whole.


I want to climb into the mountains and
wrap myself in God
but tonight I can not walk

So instead I feel
the God who pools himself
as numbness across the heel of my left foot

reaching up in patches till
he thrusts his
flames into my
un-wrapped
spine.

I remember what it was to dance
or some days only try to
see congre devant, derriere, but suddenly

the memorable corps
de ballet
has snapped
broken spine dangling
and my eyes fill up
with blood


I was always wrong for ballet
but I loved

the slow music
and the long degages
where I could breathe into my body
and not have to be anywhere
else.

rabbit's end

The other morning I half awoke to the children's screams of Heidegger. It wasn't real, but biting in my sleep none the less.. . All the pieces were there, the piercing shrieks relentless and barely inscrutable. I would know what they could mean if only I would remember the ontic or the ontological, could remember something--nothing? Perhaps, if I would fight through this I'm caught in. . .

and there are other things, as well.

In the introduction to Memoir of a Geisha, there's a metaphor I've been thinking of a lot lately. It suggests, much more poetically than I am about to, that a rabbit running through a field is in no position to tell you about rabbits, but every position to tell you about the field. Somehow, for me, that fictitious introductory essay--or maybe the whole book, I'm not sure--soulfully embodies the experience of letting the world wash over and around you, sliding past in a cool constant stream of words. It reminds me of Tolstoy, this, they way you can see his characters in the way the hang their dressing gowns, the peculiarities of their facial expressions and their pet names for the servants. Tolstoy wrote like a rabbit in a field, and it seems he saw it well.

I love Tolstoy, but it comes clear that rabbit mustn't be my style.

It has been. I am nothing of Tolstoy, but there is a certain detachment in my words. I have an observers voice, except when I'm talking cheerily or melodramatically about myself, or directly communicating towards somebody else. I often lack even his sarcastic engagement with the word he saw; he had emotion towards his characters. It's the same way I read, absorbing obvious themes and imagery, perhaps, but allowing most of the processing, such as it is, to take place in my subconscious--leaving in me only the print of the obvious and the intuitive.

I want to contribute, or perhaps only create, more than I'll ever be able to if all I can see is that.

To some, in particular those who find me already to be an absurdly introspective and annoying overthinker, this must seem very strange--but for the first time in my life, I feel the draw in having my own ideas--really having my own ideas. I have been known for not choosing just because everybody else did, but that's not enough; sorting with my honest judgment, avoiding some groupthink, that's good but not enough. If it appears I have been doing more, it is only because I have been running through what, to most of my acquaintanceship, is a most god-forsakenly unusual field.

I don't need to be a seminal figure, or anything like. . . just to do more than passively sift the ideas of others as they flow coldly past.

Poetry ?!

ok. . . well, go easy, kids, I don't usually go public with this sort of thing. ;)

also, the formatting is somewhat all messed up. Oh well.





My Friend Greg is a Fascist


I wanted to be somewhere warm
and kept moving around on the office floor
and called Greg, who first thing
reminded me I am
a cripple
and tried to focus on the talk
but somewhere between t12 and l4
the silence is screaming
and I focus not to focus on the pain
promising myself a future
and pardoning myself the odd lapse
in discourse

I imagine what he'd be like here
the cold impassive face of this, my friend
wonder if he could see my body shake
and what it would be like
if he could feel the things I feel
the cold, the shaking nausea, and
the God
god
god
the pain, that creeps into, and out,
around, clinging into the crevices of
your awareness you weren't even aware
were there
And know what I have learned
from laying on the floor fighting tears
unthoughtfully hushing the scream
of each new breath, alone

That those are the times
to breathe into your pain
and feel it calm
In every breath to touch the
new-found steel of its core
and then move on.