PIECES OF HONESTY – May 2012
This one I wrote during my third week alone in Austin, when I was subletting a house from some friends on the cheap, and had no job, no plan, no permanent residence, no friends, and all this space and time to fill up by myself. I started to get kinda panicky and sad all at once. Now, about 6 months in, I’m still struggling to feel at home here, but at least my life is not quite this empty feeling anymore.
12/18/11
Man in a wheelchair on the street corner
asked me for a dollar for the bus when I
nodded hello. I said I didn’t have
one (a compulsive lie). He said, “Well,
if you don’t use your voice you won’t
get heard.” All morning and all last night
I’ve felt pent-in by silence, swimming in it.
Silence by the lungfuls. And a deep
rumbling hunger trembling throughout it
and still just the empty house,
the heater clanging and knocking and
clumping mechanically against itself,
not even a gust of wind outside, just
car doors and muted subwoofers
bumbling against the window-panes
at all hours on east 6th street and
me in bed at all hours, barely breathing
and no one to raise my voice to, no
ear to catch the songs I might sing,
not anyone to mind the mountain of dishes
left in the sink, no one to follow the scent
of garlic in oil across hardwood, in socks,
and into the kitchen, no one to walk
through the delightful sunday morning with
and gasp at the white white white of
the heron or wonder what the grackle,
in his impeccable blue suit and spectacular
array of unusual sounds, is really singing of.
Mute joggers, empty docks around Ladybird
Lake, and me, breathing my silence, in and
out, in and out, in and out, in and out.
Each month I post an unedited draft from an old journal or sketchbook. Last month’s post is here.
PIECES OF HONESTY – April 2012
So, April was the craziest month yet in my life in Texas and now I’m still just trying to get some kind of normal routine in my life. I’m not gonna put it on blast on here, but yeah. It’s been a lil crazy. Also, I’ve been working almost full-time on a computer, slowly developing carpal tunnel syndrome, which means when I come home all I wanna do is rest my poor hands instead of edit interviews. So. . . until I find a better job, interview editing is gonna continue to go very gradually. I haven’t even been writing. Womp.
Anyway–April writing from last April.
I decided to put line breaks in on this one. Switched the word order in a couple places. Cheating my own rules, yeah, I know, whatever. A poem on parenting, addressed to the parents:
4/6/11
It’s not about what you think you can protect your daughter from.
Protection is mostly a lie you build around yourself
To make the world less terrifying.
Someday I’ll be able to forgive that, I suppose. Not today.
But I can see how you held the tiny warm idea of me
In your hands, together
and also separately,
And held it up like a flashlight into the lightless cave
of your past its ceilings and floors teethed and infested with shadow.
I think I was hope for you, pure unbroken light. If nothing else,
I think you hoped I would never wander
Through those rooms in your heart that you cannot visit,
That my life would swing its course toward a sureness and peace
you never had the chance to find. Maybe there’s a sort of love in that.
An element of unselfish hope confounded by your own fumbling brokenness.
But I think I’ve spent my life running
from your demons
as if it were a fulfillment of duty.
Each month I post an unedited draft from an old journal or sketchbook. Last month’s post is here.
PIECES OF HONESTY – March 2012
March’s unedited journal-scrap comes from summer on the wild coast of Washington, just at outside the Hoh Rainforest, where the river’s passengers–the small grey, brown, and iron-red stones, and whole, uprooted cedar trees–me
et the ocean. When I type these up, it’s reeeally hard not to start editing immediately. I really want to change up the enjambment (love this word. It means line breaks, more or less) but I tried to respect the lack of line breaks that was in there. I have to be honest, though–I fucked with the punctuation in one place. Misused commas drive me crazy! I had to do it.
8/11/10
Field work day 2:
Thousand year thick ocean-bleached tree.
Ocean wind brine-ing my hair.
Pine. Stone.
The trunk’s stark whiteness
resting on flattened river delta pebbles. Both scraped and soothed. Sea-washed, salted, sun-scoured. Gnarled roots reaching.
This world demands we give so much– the tree tells me as I climb over it and feel its smoothness.
“I know” I tell it. “I know what you mean.”
I can’t tell whether to find life at this sea shore or the peace in
and smooth erasure of death and time.
Maybe also the reminder that death is peace, but this tree has carried and held so much weight, sunshine, and life before reaching its resting place–and it would be nothing but a forgettable twisted bone of driftwood had it not weathered so many centuries in its hulking costume, its mossy, rained on achingly tall and sun-splashed forest life.
Last month’s post is here.
