Poems

I'm not very vocal about this but i absolutely love poetry. I have lots of books for a college student, and many of them are books of poetry. Collections of various authors, books of neruda and billy collins, nothing too crazy, nothing that deems me super cool and edgy. but it's better than nothing. some of these books have poems that have brought me to tears, made me wonder about myself and the earth and the interactions between people and why and how we can be so flippant about so much beauty around us that it hurts me, it hurts me on a deep level.
so tonight i started poking through frank o'hara poems (thanks beastly). after reading having a coke with you i moved on and started reading more. then i found this poem and i loved it.


Animals
have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

it's no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn't need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

i wouldn't want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days

he doesn't often use punctuation and i love that! he has another poem you should look at that i love called a true account of talking to the sun at fire island. it's so great, it just makes you want to live better, you know? and then somehow i stumbled on this poem by Pierre Reverdy and it's called for the moment. i liked that one, too! and then i remembered this very small lecture that i just happened to attend with a friend last semester. a man named brian doyle, who lives in portland, came and talked with us and read to us. and i loved him. i really did, no joke. the way he read his writing is exactly how i read mine out loud to myself, i felt like he was one of those people i could sit at a restaurant and talk to for hours and hours and hours and absolutely never want it to end! what a rare gift. he read a piece i have yet to be able to track down, but i found this little mini-essay he wrote about getting fed up with his son. i'll only put a little bit of it on here:

Yes, he was picking on his brother, and yes, he had picked on his brother all morning, and yes, this was the culmination of many edgy incidents already, and no, he hadn’t paid the slightest attention to warnings and remonstrations and fulminations, and yes, he had been snide and supercilious all day, and yes, he had deliberately done exactly the thing he had specifically been warned not to do, for murky reasons, but still, I roared at him and grabbed him and terrified him and made him cower, and now there is a dark evil wriggle between us that makes me sit here with my hands over my face, ashamed to the bottom of my bones.

I do not know how sins can be forgiven. I grasp the concept, I admire the genius of the idea, I suspect it to be the seed of all real peace, I savor the Tutus and Gandhis who have the mad courage to live by it, but I do not understand how foul can be made fair. What is done cannot be undone, and my moment of rage in the hallway is an indelible scar on his heart and mine, and while my heart is a ragged old bag after nearly half a century of slings and stings, his is still new, eager, open, suggestible, innocent; he has committed only the small sins of a child, the halting first lies, the failed test paper hidden in the closet, the window broken in petulance, the stolen candy bar, the silent witness as a classmate is bullied, the insults flung like bitter knives.

it's just so passionate and beautiful and so full of feeling. i relate to it a lot. the writing style and voice i mean. not really the essay, although i have definitely felt this way before. 

i'm trying to figure out how on earth i'll be able to afford my roadtrip/ time with antoinette. i really can't see the amount of money i presently have helping me get very far. and my parents didn't seem too keen on the idea of giving me more. they seemed to like the idea of the money being taken out of what would be given to me for my birthday. ugh. i hate restrictions! 

anyway, at school, not always, but specifically this school year, i've had plenty of alone time. i used to absolutely detest being alone, i really did, it would put me in a panic. and now, i feel a little stressed if i don't have tons of time with myself. to unwind, look at the websites i want to, listening to whatever sad or moody music i want to, or justin bieber and lady gaga on repeat if i want. i like being able to stare off into space and daydream, constantly daydream, although i guess that's not fully healthy. i should be living more in the moment, and i will soon, very soon, but for now i'm going to get the last of the winter blues out of my system.