Anywhere

You responded. Social networking sites have made us all think in terms of status updates. 2009 has ruined my writing and made any new poetry trite and forgettable. You think that’s perfect, but it makes sense. I added that to another list I’m not allowed to make.

Then I consider what’s relevant: current questions of great intrigue. Summer and sex are on everyone’s mind, and these questions have afforded me a certain amount of ridicule. To one close friend, my responses are pathetic. Another half-heartedly attempts to assuage my concern. Nobody cares about themselves more than themselves. I am smitten with me. I am the cutest couple.

And I depended on these same sights to see what mattered, to see where everyone was, at one moment. I found myself like the depicted insane in overacted old movies: pulling at hospital gowns, but only because I needed to see my shoulders, screaming slurs at no one, but blurry nurses and the potential for relief: the morphine drip. I didn’t want to seem a seeker, a term Jane had used in our last session. That was about the dentist and it seemed legitimate.

This was too played out, but I was 30 hours in without food or water and could only roll my eyes when she said “resident.” Then my nurse went on lunch and no one could find her or cared to come back to tell me. At some point, Jody was on the phone and I struggled to find the name of the hospital. I was anywhere.

There was an oblong rock rolling over in my stomach. I tried to sleep sitting up. I tried to drink water. I tried to look around, but everyone had work to do, work to go to, work to stay at and I had to keep my hand over my headache. I was anywhere, and I was the only one there, and barely so.

It's not always briliant. Sometimes it looks like this:

Genesis:

Here's where I stand, here's where I stand to affect a bigger change, and here, then is my change. Nothing revolves, repeats, or is that revolutionary. This is not my coffee shop, this is not my tide, this is not my nagging colon, this is not, simply.

Exodus - Exit Us:

This is not simply put, this is not some hole, or whole, or gaping completion or otherwise ineffective prefixes. Regardless, it could not then be youth, or even something comparably tender.

Through Chapter 15:

I keep reading without saying anything out loud and I keep writing for an equally silent audience. Today I said it comes from a different place than speaking. One does not substitute the other. They are not complimentary, parallel, or even paradoxical. I will say I don't want to say these things out loud, and through my cryptic writing, I have a very public way of working out something private, while keeping it private. Today I thought I was brilliant, and follow suit.

Turns out, I care.

I am anxious. I am anxious about school because I didn't spend any time being anxious about it before classes actually started.

I am anxious about Ross and how my family is going to cope with the current news. It's not what we originally thought, not nearly as bad, but it is something we weren't prepared for and somehow, it seems worse.

I drank a beer and it put me to sleep immediately. I woke up an hour later to too little too late, to text messages, to low blood sugar. I made couscous and tried to substitute almond milk for chicken broth because I didn't have chicken broth and water never seems to work. I ruined couscous. Can you imagine? I made stir-fry. It didn't turn out as wonderful as I had hoped, but I grated parmesan over it and somehow that saved it. Still, stir-fry hurts my stomach.

I am standing up on my own and writing to an invisible audience. Being unrelenting is lonely, but I think I must do it on purpose.

Guess where I was when I wrote this:

I am somewhere in between –

Ode to our drunk, coked/out “youth” in line for dirty bathrooms 

and the 30-year-old sophisticates still riding high on bicycles. 

I am fooled, I am foolish.

Through thick and through thin.

Lately all I can eat is spinach. Lately all I cannot be is a drunk. That is a lie. There are so many resolutions to be had, and all of them about me do not alleviate the confounding guilt I feel for attempting selfishness.

So I stick around, there is no new news. 

On Anna Karenina

When once I had Plath, today, Tolstoy made sense.

From Anna Karenina:

Page 423

"He soon felt that the realization of his desires gave him no more than a grain of sand out of the mountain of happiness he had expected. It showed him the mistake men make in picturing to themselves happiness as the realization of their desires... He was soon aware that there was springing up in his heart a desire for desires - ennui."

Page 436

"At every step he experienced what a man would experience, who after admiring the smooth, happy course of a little boat on a lake, should get himself into that little boat. He saw that it was not all sitting still, floating smoothly; that one had to think too, not for an instant to forget where one was floating; and that there was water under one, and that one must row; and that his unaccustomed hands would be sore; and that it was only to look at it that was easy; but that doing it, though very delightful, was very difficult."

Page 438

"He felt for the first moment as a man feels when, having suddenly received a violent blow from behind, he turns round, angry and eager to avenge himself, to look for his antagonist, and finds that it is he himself who has accidentally struck himself, that there is no one to be angry with, and that he must put up with and try to soothe the pain."

For a Final Post: An Examination of Fake Love

I wrote this six months ago.  I like the writing, but I could care less about the content.

For any way I was wrong and not enough, I’d made concessions and complied and never wondered when you would call because I would call first.  I knew it was okay this way, with you.  And now I compare and can’t remember why you were so awful.

But I digress.  No, I concede.  I let you be how I remember you, which incidentally isn’t very well.  I love or am in some comparable mire.  I search for it again so I can relax and understand it’ll hurt this much with someone else and I didn’t let go of that torture in vain. 

I wish I had something better to say than anything about your uncomfortable dirty mattress, the dog, the dander, the grease like tar.  The hair adheres so I won’t forget you two.

Piss water beer, boxed wine, well whiskey.  I couldn’t care less.  I just want my off switch and, my parents’ money, dip my hand in the bees and compromise integrity for a tall, dirty, cheap drink.