Schopenhauer goes courting

What we share is a door past the subject’s cognizance. And when you come in you won’t want to stay or leave. You’ll be, at the same time, locked in and locked out of the immediate object—

ours— to rattle windows behind ghostly curtains or tap on the pane to stand in the rain with the holly bushes.

The degree to which phenomena is a comfort is, naturally, a bucking horse, which is to say, that the whole house is falling a million miles an hour until your eyeballs burst into flame, your spine a lightning bolt. This essence of intimacy, past the principal of sufficient ground, leaves you whining why but still willing, an eternal hurtle whenever you find it. Inside, underneath or hanging from the gutter— you will not escape.

What isn’t destroyed will pull its jacket back on, shake shoulders at the cracks, and wish it were just hung over— wandering in the grocery store saying I I I me me me you you you? To babies in the cart, less lost than the parents who search for ways to compare brands of pudding. Is that what you wanted when you snuggled and clutched and your pillow at night?

my mothers side of the family

The Cranes. All legs, thick and sturdy—

Kentucky living

Gardens and no running water

Else Lula’s baby wouldn’t have died in childbirth

Deszmer ran for the neighbors—

the scar on her chin, eighty-two years stubborn from falling

Ralph ran off

crick ran dry

family carried on, the children too,

With school, the army,

becoming nurses.

Vaughn spends her parents' money on a motorcycle

Kermit plays his mandolin for Ida

Annie, with fur coats still growling

in the closet and mother of pearl hair brushes—

Annie, a lady with lockets, my sister’s name-sake.

Who came before the Cranes, who saw the Lion’s Head ship

as wooden deliverance from Ireland’s hunger?

Later they roosted in Oak Ridge, behaved, made the bomb

made quilts—

I got the quilts.

The one I sleep under tonight one example.

my living noggin demands desegregation

I have this notion that intellect and emotion aren’t exclusive, compartmentalized experiences, but rather complimentary and related bodily functions. After all, its been a pretty long time since people have come to discover that the anatomical heart is not the headquarters of emotion, but rather the skull-contained brain houses feeling, memory, and general cognition. Given, one may perceive certain feelings and stirrings in other parts of the body such as the gut ect.; but even then, these sensations are processed and discerned back in the brain. And if all these powerful things are in similar if not overlapping vicinity, why do we insist on separating them? A thinking brain can cause joy, wonder, fear, and shame just as any "outward" relationship can (unbeknowest to the subject) trigger academic themes, concepts, and conflicts within the interaction.

University classrooms should come equipped to discuss, experience, and behold emotional responses from its students and professors, as the journey of knowledge and discovery is fraught with feeling. Its time for the stereotype of the "cold intellectual" or emotionally void academic to be dispelled. Thoughtful learning should be conducive to an emotive human. And while one category does not replace the other, emotions can be intellectualy discussed; intellect can be percieved by emotional avenues.

proud that it was a page long.

The first story I ever wrote was in first grade. It was about an indian princess named Wild Flower. I think she was gathering firewood when she was stolen by a hunter. Her horse was left alone without her. That night, Wild Flower rescued herself by stealing this hunter's gun and boat, and rowing back home. Her horse's name was something that began with the letter "P."

I didnt know how to write a romantic love interest. I wasnt sure who should save Wild Flower. Somewhere in my head, the hunter was the lover-- but I did not leave them together. I will find the horse's name in a dream somewhere.

I wonder if all the stories we write and tell in our lives are just efforts to retell that first one.

Birthday poem

How to become a poet:

Take cold baths with bars of soap,

Gaze into mirrors until you make yourself cry,

Watch yourself cry.

Hang white laundry from your balcony so it flutters in the wind

January through April, post letters to whomever--

Develop an affinity for prescient foods:

Ice cream

Milk

Mushrooms

Snow

Keep your feet cold.

Dream of floods and ribbons

And when it comes to your twenty-first birthday

Do not look back

Do not look ahead

And most importantly of all,

Do not, do not, do not look around you at this perfect taboo moment,

Else risk losing it all: no birds lingering in your baptismal fountain--

And your clumsy hands holding naught but bathwater.

a dream

I know this town.
It has a tall building or two, arranged in a circle. I think if I traveled around this circle fast enough it'd make a whirlpool. I'd drain quick down it glurg in the tub and I'd come away from that place, just in time too tick tick boom the sonic crash itd be lost forever I escaped the apocolypse on the back of the rat in the sewer. Where will I take my plague too?

a prophesy for 2011

My friend is going to have a baby, Charley. And I am going to have a baby play. Like Charley, my play is forming and growing in my stomache; it will come when it is ready. But unlike Charley, since it is art, it will sort of be like an alien.

Happy new year.