Archive
“You should change your blog name to ‘Clantily Sad'”
I’m still alive, sort of. Still lacking in motivation to produce any form of original content. My blog is like the stepchild in a broken home that I give inconsistent amounts of attention to and can’t decide if I like or not.
Filler post for December.
I’m running out filler material for this place actually; most of the poetry I wrote in high school does not stand the test of time. (Oh, the angst. Never quite The Pain Tree bad, but still cringe-worthy enough to never be shared.) But there was some clever enjambment in here that I still like.
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Nerdy, Angry, Fuck
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- Literature / Poetry / Emotional / Free Verse
I think it’s hot when strippers cry on their master’s
degrees, when meteorologists make innuendos
when your mother pretends to be Jewish.
Sometimes I wish I had synesthesia
so I could palpate youtube’s
myriad turtle sex clips with my retinas
though I wish there was more to do
on a Friday night than watching
ugly animals fuck online.
I have a Dukakis sticker on my teenage
mutant ninja turtles lunchbox from 88′
It’s currently filled with positive
pregnancy tests, disposable cell phones
and a picture of your mother.
Love insurance premiums: $99.99 a month!
Good student discounts. Press 1 for more options.
It’s like that time I asked why she didn’t
love me anymore and she replied
“supply side economics.”
I told her her metaphor sucked;
our relationship had too many uncertainty principles
to be graphed criss-cross on an X and Y axis,
We were more like 2 out-of-sync sine waves reaching for infinity
until the tequila ran out.
Para continuar en las lenguas románticas
oprime el número dos.
I sent a letter of complaint to her new
PO Box in MN, asking her to return my soul
for the full amount, in the payment method
in which it was received.
She doesn’t know it, but she’s still
the spaces between my fingers
when I’m clawing for sanity in my sleep
and the moment mid-clasp, when I stop.
Go limp.
Lips.
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Vietnam War Poetry
Depression has been kicking my ass recently, if it wasn’t obvious already by my normal political commentary having been replaced with long, introspective ramblings about love and sadness.
[Corey Booker is a Senator, and this is one of the few times I really wish I was still a resident of New Jersey. Oh, and apparently the shutdown is ending. Good week for Democrats.]
Here’s a poem that I didn’t write, but saved a long time ago and still like.
—
khe sanh rivers
by shotgunmessiah. Sep 16, 2003
sometimes when i remember how it was
I’m drinking cheap liquor from a tin cup I
had from the war and I can’t hold it
steady and it falls in the floor, spills out and
runs in the cracks in the wood and
it reminds me of that time in Khe Sanh when it
rained all day, pissing down in the muddy streamers
and collected in little pools and
wore tributaries in the mud and when it
stopped
there was a little girl skinny and naked with
just a rag wrapped around her waist and
she huddled in the waste and shit of the village
when I walked by she looked me with
these huge eyes driven deep in her face and
she held out her hand and said probably the only
word she knew “water” and again
“water” so I give some water in the tin cup I had
and she holds it and stares at her own big
brown eyes and then she crouches down
in the mud and carefully pours the water out
into the ground and flows in the rutted cracks
and makes little rivers
and when they ask me what it was like
I say “follow me” and take a cup and
fill it with water and
I go outside and pour it out in the ground
and they say “what does that mean” and I
point at the water trickling dirty through
the cracks and I say “that’s what it means”
“that’s what it’s about”
and they say I’m crazy and they
go away and leave me dripping water
on the cobblestones and laughing and
there was a little girl in Khe Sanh
who knew the truth even though
she was blown to hell the next day
Poem For Sunday – “Something for the Boys” by Heather Bell
(CC) Creative Commons, attribution, noncommercial, 2005. Candice Hall.
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Something for the Boys
1. i sure as hell wasn’t east of eden, more like west of grant boulevard in a city that should be burned down. He was test-driving my new car, i was thinking how people are kind of “exit only,” and i’m always the stupid kid jiggling the handle outside for hours.
2. i don’t know if people wear hearts on sleeves anymore. it seems a stupid idea anyway. when you’re drunk and fucking you’re most likely naked too.
3. in the parking lot of walgreen’s an orange cat hit his car’s hood and i jumped, frightened. he was smiling a little when he said he didn’t love me anymore but let’s be friends! let’s get our prescriptions together! let’s be the regularly scheduled program! and still drink pepsi and go to church! in the parking lot of walgreen’s i kept thinking about that cat. like, what if it was homeless. and needed me.
4. i collect magnets on my refrigerator and coffee mugs from displaced little towns. so far i have one mug. and two magnets. i also collect love letters. i have almost the same amount of letters as the amount of blowjobs i have given and handjobs i have given and times i have worked like a drug mule for the united states government. which is not very much.
5. he told me he wanted proof of this love thing i was always talking about. i said here’s your proof you asshole and i flicked him off. some people will just never get it.
6. i just want to love someone like a jew about to be led away to crucifixion.
7. mama tells me its like archeology. at the top is mostly used condoms and old beer bottles. don’t mistake dirt for beauty. unless you want dirt, she says. some people want that, she says. some people do.
8. my most recent finding sleeps in my bed like a roman arch. he told me he might want to live by elephant head road. i think that sounds fine to me. i wonder if you hear them at night, the thunder of their mating so clumsy and outrageous. he says maybe maybe doll baby and trips over our suitcases, laughing.
9. i start collecting postage stamps for all the places we will go. a couple years ago i was dating this guy who had a box in his room labeled “human remains,” but when i opened it there was nothing inside. i’m so glad i no longer know that guy. postage stamps seem much easier to keep track of.
10. i wake up suddenly at four am just to make sure the man i love is still breathing. he finds me in the closet hours later ripping up the love letters, laughing, calling them communist propaganda, mosquito nets, pornographic material. i say look at these, these chain letters. don’t you hate chain letters? so do i. so do i. no one ever replies unless they are really desperate or really in love.
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From Heather Bell’s Poetry Collection: “How to Make People Love You.”
Cross-applying Poetry Fundamentals to Prose
I’ve been super busy this week with socializing and job searching, but I have been trying to maintain this blog on a semi-regular basis. When I’m lazy or there’s no interesting news about to comment on, I’ve decided to default to a good autobiographical life advice post.
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For those of you that don’t know, I used to write poetry. I never thought it was that good–more like broken prose with clever enjambment. (I never did write a sonnet that I was fully happy with.) There were some cheap PoMo tricks, like line breaking on a word with multiple meanings, that I used very often back then and still do, to some extent, in my prose. But I haven’t written anything that was more poetry than than prose in recent years since non-fiction has consumed my soul.
I will testify that studying classic and modern poetry when I was a teenager has greatly improved my general writing skills as an adult. English profs know it well: When you start analyzing poetry on a functional level below interpretation and meaning, you start paying attention to literary elements like syntax, punctuation, and rhythm. And all writing starts to “flow” better.
Alliteration and assonance all over everything. < See what I did there with “alliteration” and “all?” There are also “v” sounds in “over” and “everything” that create a cohesive sound pattern. (Repetition of consonant sounds is called “consonance.”) These techniques and literary devices work, whether you’re consciously aware of them or not, and this is generally how people judge a work as “good”–based on these literary devices embedded in historical standards.
If you’re a writer, it’s good to be consciously aware of these literary devices (not to be confused with the larger concept of literary techniques), so you can use them to your advantage.
Check out those links that I hyperlinked above if you don’t know anything about poetic devices. If you’re a writer that wants to get better, and you haven’t already, start paying attention to the poetic devices that you already use.
Feel free to ask questions in the comments.
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[Edit: Sorry, I had to manually fix the HTML since it formatted weird after I prematurely submitted.]
Riddle Me Pinks…
- by ~FireSoulPhoenix, Mar 5, 2007, 7:14:58 PM
- Candice Hall
she’s passed
the point where peripheral vision
blurs into her inverted gut
and she cries about the virus of society
she’s afraid
she’s catching tonight
the way she’ll waste
bootlaces in urinals
to see what shape they make
when they float
leave
bumblebee pinstripes
and chalk scrawled
half past noon,
on the changing station
a graffiti-fied gaffe)
“this is the art
of perfecting denial,”
she’ll exhale
before passing to the right
because she’s just that much
of an insidious
fuck
like the festering manifestoes
of bad hair dye jobs
and thrift store sweaters)
it’s Sunday now; she’s alone in a crowd.
the children will be coming home
for Christmas and she’s
let the cat out again.
Gamer Girls Poem
Helllllllllo wordpress. Been a while. Have a poem. Originally from my deviantart.
Tricks are for chicks.
When I screamed “BITCH!”
after you shot me in the spine,
you were as silent as your gun.
You simply gyrated your shoulders,
mouth in a little “O [snap]” shape
and danced.
I didn’t mean it, you know
and next time I get the magnum
your eyes will bulge,
a bovine before a poleaxe
and I’ll aim for your neck.
and it’ll be
“CUNT!’
“WHORE!”
“SLUT!”
“FUCK!”
and so on
until someone has to pee.
At which point
the other will unpause
and proceed to slaughter
the helpless unmanned man.
Cause gamer girls,
unlike boys,
are bitches.
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