Pulled Apart by Daisies

How dulcet and downy these pure white blooms,

and bright with honeysuckle heart.

Halos in a meadow verdant

on a casual afternoon.

With their button eyes, they bewitch--invite--

to guard our unwary repose,

hamocked in a grassy nimbus,

while plucking their petals alate.

But to icy fingers their petals transform,

and with cold fervor into "nots"

our peachy love-flesh is torn--

an unrequited holocaust.

You say with harsh finality:

We were pulled apart by daisies.

When Poems Procreate

I love it when my poems get procreative.

While I loved a lot of things about my May 13th poem, I liked it in pieces. There were some lines I loved too much to discard. Instead of "murdering my darlings," I gave them their own poems.

The first grew out of a revision exercise where I began by writing the poem backwards. It's a revision technique I particularly like, because it opens my work up to a lot of new meanings. I call this one "Worry Habit."

I used to know
what unquiet thoughts
would make you
put down the guitar,
loved in calloused hands,
and make you pick at your nails
instead of the soothing strings,
unable to distract you,
even now.



The next is "Missed Communication"

When words neglect emotion
you speak in notes
plucked with frenzied fingers
saying better and faster than your mouth can move.

Against the guitar your torso lies still
and says nothing of what is in your head
but the song you play
again, again, again.

You sing in strings with a vibrato
I do not understand
and a tone I cannot touch.

You beg me to hear your tune,
and I do,
I just wish these were words I knew.



The final poem I titled "Homeless."

You are the place I once called "home,"
the scent of May and
a southern sun on the back porch,
the tree outside my window
whose branches hum me to sleep.

I felt it in my body
lying still
to experience the senses of awake
and lying there
I fall asleep.

You are still "home,"
but now you are twenty-four-hundred miles away
and I walk through you in memories
smelling of dreams
where the scent of May has dissolved,
and the sun never sets behind the house and,
cut down, the trees don't sing.

I remember what it was like
to feel you,
but memories are too insubstantial
to touch and be touched.

Unicorn Meat

Somewhere a virgin is traumatized.

We used her as bait for our feast-hunt,

and shot the unicorn who pillowed

his head in her chaste lap.

A  fine meal for our fete,

we lusted after the innocent, 

tender flesh in our mouths,

and sucked the juice from the

insides of our cheeks.

We fattened our lungs with its mystical spice,

clinging to our ribs. 

We ate the sweet body

for forgiveness from our sins,

the manna taste of immortality,

divinity on our breath--

the immaculate animal bringing us 

closer to heaven. 

A bloodied skirt banners our thirst for unicorn meat. 

Post-scripted Poems

Not usually a procrastinator, I'm making my way through endless stacks of peer's poems--poems from my spring term "Poetic Forms" course, poems I should have decorated with my comments long ago, because I have so much authority on the subject. The poems are due for return to the poets tomorrow, and I have roughly 60 poems to go. For each poet, I've made a neat, stapled pack of all their poems to give back. In only a four week class, I don't know any of them very well. I know some by their consistent vernacular or voice, the font they habitually use--Julie always uses Calibri, at which, as a Cambria girl, I detest to look. I've spoken to Chris once or twice. He game me a ride home once when it rained, even though I clearly had an umbrella and there wasn't much more than a desultory drizzle. Beyond that, I don't know these people well enough to give them anymore than a smile or an awakward and forcedly-enthusiastic "Hey" when we pass one another on campus, so I don't know why I'm bothering to spend an hour giving each person feedback on their poems, but I am. I want them to do well on their final, and somehow I think my comments will help them make good revisions (I later learn that for most, they don't). 

 I slash and underline and emoticon (yep!) my way through their poems, struggling to find anything constructive to write on some of them because they are so obscure or unclear. As I critique Antoinette's (yes, that is her real name) poems, I feel compelled to comment on her talent for word choice (as if the professor hasn't done that enough already). Really, I secretly don't like this girl because people mistake her random smattering of words as "fresh language". My language would probably be just as fresh if I picked words out of my biology textbook too. 

Regardless of where she gets her material, it still works for her, and I feel like I should tell her. 

After going through all her poems, I write a small postscript on the front page of the packet, which I begin with a generic line that says something like, "I've really enjoyed having this class with you" as if I'm fourteen and writing in the yearbook of a classmate with whom I've only pretended to be friends all year. 

When I finish with Antoinette's I decide I need to do that for everyone, because I don't want anyone to feel left out. Simultaneously, I gag, reminded that this is exactly the type of thing that gets me labels like "sweet" and "adorable"--both labels I hate. More than this, I know that I am acting exactly the way people outside of Utah think people inside of Utah act--nice, because, well, we do. 

Except I don't feel like a nice person. As I write each postscript, I can think of a lot of other things I'd rather be writing than a compliment. Though I desperately want to write to Julie, "I hate the font you use. It makes me feel an irrational and unwarranted anger that overshadows the warm reception  your careful diction and musical style deserve." Instead I write, "I enjoyed working on the Pablo Neruda presentation with you. You have great insight." I want to tell Chris, "Your feet are HUGE and knobby" because they are and I somehow think something constructive will come out of pointing that out, but I can't think of what that would be, so instead, I thank him again for the ride home. Though I'd like to tell Michael I think he's a tool for imitating e.e. cummings and Robert Hunter, I comment instead about how his work is "adventurous, ambitious, and admirable." It's all these things, but it's also annoying. And for the one kid I just want to tell "You suck," I say "You have a distinctive style!" 

It sounds cheesy and lame to say that I actually care about these people and want them to feel good about themselves, but I do. There are a lot of things about these people that really annoy me and make me never want to see them again, but I know that pointing out how much they annoy me isn't going to do any good just because I am likely to never see them again. Plus, a lot of the things that really annoyed me weren't things anyone could change (like Chris's feet). I don't want these people to leave this class and feel like some girl in the class hated them and only had bad things to think about them. I don't want them to be self-conscious or think they were terrible poets. 

In the end, I remember the goal I set for myself a year ago: to leave things better than I find them. It's a goal at odds with my personality at times, because I do enjoy being blunt with comments like "You're an example of a self-tanner fail." Sometimes, it's necessary to dish out a little tough love, but this situation isn't one of them. 

I didn't get to spend a lot of time with these people due to the structure and length of the course, but as someone who greatly appreciates the art of poetry, I want my peers to have positive associations with their experience with poetry. I knew that even if I don't have any tender feelings for my peers, I did have tender feelings for where each of us were in our progression as poets and for the pieces we wrote (some of which were really bad, including my own work). I know that often times when students don't like a particular subject, it's not because they don't like the material, but because they had a bad experience they associate with it. In this situation, I do not want to become that bad experience. 

So I hand back all those lovingly-commented, postscripted packets. I don't feel like a better person, but at least I acted like one. 

Dear Muse

It's dark in here, without you--
I'm stuck banging around the walls
of my creative corridors,
bashing in windows with the hope
of letting in a little light,
only cutting my hand--which bleeds ink
all over the floor of this asylum.
I crash into furniture uncerimoniously
set in the center of a room--there is no
place to sit or sleep it off, and there's certainly
no glass of warm milk on this nightstand.

I try to feel for a way out, tottering against corners
that don't exist, imagining handles that never come,
reaching above my head for trap-doors that never
existed, or a piece of rope leading to an attic I know isn't there.

The floor-boards mock me
with their cackles and sniggering creaks,
and the clock tsk-tsks away with it's pendulous head
in taunting sympathy. I think "help me" but nothing
breaks his beat. Soon I am full of sounds who
would make a song, but there are too many notes
I can't make out.

I support myself against a wall and wait for morning,
remembering how you control the sun,
and thought you'd take a walk to get some fresh air--
without telling me when to expect you back.

I'm left whimpering into the darkness,
on legs that are too tired,
trying to keep open eyes that are too sleepy,
wishing wishing there were a lightswitch.

Your hands tanned from daily runs, 

soft from reading books but for 

calloused tips you use for guitar picks,

notes and time signatures in your knuckles;

you sing in strings

with a vibrato I barely understand.

You're exotic as the place I used to call

"home"--twenty-four hundred miles away,

once familiar, changing while I'm not there

even if I resist.

You set down the guitar and dig at your nails

--the anxious habit I recognize--

I want to reach across and still your hands

and ask, "What's wrong?"

I used to know the answer to this. 

Far

I have lived too long in the city,

breathing exhaust haze,

seeing cement,

to feel 

meaning 

in the forest

or smell the floral spray

of unaffected life in the country.