Were You Once A Sailor?

I want to post, but I don't want to post. My eyes are so tired they feel like they're going to bleed. But they feel like if they do, it will be dry blood.

Because they are so dry.

I flipflop a lot.

I like things and I don't; and I like to do things and I don't want to do them, and it's a confusing place to be.

I wrote a sestina because I hate sestinas. And I like my sestina.

Also, I was in the middle of writing another sestina, although I hate them, because I enjoyed writing the first one so much.

But I was interrupted. And haven't gotten back to it.

In high school they tell you not to use the word got, or variations thereof.

I say fuck them.

I love got.

If I Were Getting Paid For This, I'd Be Fired

I tired taking a nap in the grass today, but it my eyes weren't black enough. It was also very hot, very nice hot, but hot on my jeans which are the wrong pants to wear while basking in the sun. I tried to sleep with my arm over my eyes but I was so afraid that I would fall asleep and have a strange arm-over-face tan that it didn't work. When I rolled onto my stomach I was much more comfortable. My eyes weren't red, and it was cool on my tummy. With my face that close to the grass I could hear the all the snaps and shearing from the bugs crawling around. I didn't move although I felt them crawling over my arms. I was close to the grass. The grass smelled like wheat grass and I remembered the small plastic cups that Jamba Juice serve wheat grass shots in. I didn't fall asleep.

• For the past three days Yahoo has had diet tips on the front page.
• The guy sitting next to me is looking at pictures of food. He's looking at really well made pictures of food, and looks at them for a long time. And he coughs a lot. It's too hard to concentrate.
• I had a chocolate croissant for breakfast.

This Sounds Like A Good Idea

I think I should be a tutor. I always have these near black-out moments when I fantasize about helping kids with homework. Not sexual fantasies...but those horrible ones that you have driving on the freeway where you can just picture the car smashing into the median and feel your face scraping along the concrete.

Note: My eyes are very quick to well up with tears. This is why I should be a tutor: I was reading the "Tutoring Notes" section on the 826valencia.org's Tutoring Notes page, and when one person recounted a scene with a kid who was just not interested in his paper, and making use of a gramatically incorrect and run-on sentence, I will demonstrate the scene without finishing the intial clause:

The kid hands the tutor a balled up piece of paper, which makes the tutor sad, but they don't show it. He was writing on "All Quiet on the Western Front" and this is the sentence from the post that this kid wrote: "The soldiers made lifelong friendships that didn't last very long."

And the tutor said it was the best sentence they'd ever read, and I thought to myself, this is the best sentence I've ever read, and then I got all teary eyed.

I feel like I could do this with kids and I have tutored before, but elementary school math is different than high, junior high student dealing with 'horrible' English papers. So I get really excited about that, and when I get excited I get teary. And when I've witnessed, or am talking about some great feat of human kindnes...

One time there was a BMW commercial on tv. The car is driving around a dark and wet road bordered with orange cones, and behind each cone is a man in uniform. The BMW makes this elegant curve and then pulls up beside a cone. A man reaches down, tightens the air cap on the tire, and the Beamer resumes it's arcing race against the length of the commercial. My eyes welled. You see the problem.

So my greatest fear about tutoring then is that I'll be so damn motivational and brilliantly life-changing, that I'll be running around as a weepy young lady until pretty soon none of the kids will want to go near such a soggy, freaky tutor.

Maybe one day I'll have nice fantasies of living in a hermitage...

This May Not Be Interesting, But It's All True

1968 Spiegel Catalogue

it’s bare-armed to keep you cool
all summer long
bow and streamers in back
state size

The mom looks at the daughter looks

at the sister whose skirt comes just above the knees.

The mother looks at the daughter looks

at the dress and sees the flat curve where

breasts should be, at the flounce at the hip

where hips should be. Later that evening,

after the roast and the potatoes are scraped into the

trash, she will unpin her hair.

She will sit on their bed and kick off her white heels.

Hair unpinned she removes her dress, showered

with stay-in pleats, and picks up from the floor

her daughter’s dress, garden-full of flowers on a float

and slips it over her head. Shivers before the mirror

bare-armed, hand washable, her breasts push outward

her hips almost visible against the celanese,

fortel, polyester and avril rayon blend.

She swatches her bare thighs back

and forth, and closes her eyes a little.

It’s just a dance in this moment, it’s just a foil for the roast

and potatoes, it’s just a jackknife hammered into her heart.

Babies Eating Lighting Bolts In Flowered Dresses

A couple nights ago Cameron (Jackson) and Jack (Morgan) and I attended a reading at Pegasus books...for the sake of those present, I will not name names, or make any reference to characters ficticious or otherwise. Let's just say that there were some poems, some maybe happened to be interspersed with epistemological essays on lighting. Sometimes, as it happens, readings last about half an hour per person. So there were these essays, interspersed by essays, read as if reading a poem, for a good solid long ammount of time.

I'm taking a geography class this semester. We learned about lightning. This is what I learned. I made it into a poem :

Lightning

Travels at speed of light (186,000 mi/sec)
Cloud to surface charges move downward in (approx.)

50-yard sections, producing a path along which a charge is deposited.

The circuit is complete when the charge reaches the surface.
Thunder is a result of lightning.
The air around the lightning bolt is heated to extremely high temperatures

(50,000°F). Pressure from the heat causes the air to expand (explosively), pushing (compressing) surrounding air and causing a shock wave (within first several feet)

then continues as sound waves.
Boom.
Approximate speed of sound: 761 mph (at sea level).

Nothing of this nature should exceed 47 seconds.

The coolest part of the reading was how her dimples shuddered and trembled and grew more pronounced depending on the stretch of her mouth during words.

And the really cute cabbage patch baby.

Я довольно танцевал бы

It's twelve o'clock. And by 1:00 pm I need to have painted an exquisite array of hands. If we're talking in terms of realisitcally I don't think that's going to happen. Probably because I've decided to do this instead. So.

Let's talk about poetry, as it is the "Hallmark of Poetry Month." And let's talk about crap poetry, as it's easier than talking about good poetry.

Has anyone ever read a good sestina? I'm genuinely curious as I find it the most repugnant form for a poem. Worse than knowing your towel is moldy and taking a big streamlined whiffle full anyway. (You need to know good ol' southern-humid-towel-mold to fully appreciate the awfulness of the sestina). I have a feeling it's the general idea of it that makes them so bad, but perhaps it's just that every example of a sestina has just sounded like the writer is desperately trying to kill themselves via making the worst poem possible full of the stupidest ideas that (due to the form contraints) end up being repeated on and on for 39 lines. (Thus killing themselves through a cycle of deep depression, insecurites, reduced libido, headaches, nausea, blindess etc.)

I do like a good pantoum, however. There's this one: it's really good. I can't find it. I've spent a lot of time looking through poetrymagazine.org, and it's not happening for me. It's in a book at home, and I'll find it, and fix this now dead post. I am committing the same suicide as the dillusional sestina writer...

Perhaps now I'll paint.

Music To Shed Skin To

What is the difference between listening to music surround sound with speakers, or through tiny earbud headphones? It would be easy to say that you're increasing the level of intimacy simply because speakers are external, earbuds are internal, sensuously little soft things sticking right inside of your ears. Music as an earfuck. Is it so hot because it's the closest thing to an outside brainfuck? =the consequence of sound...much different than words on the page. Even at they're most dynamic, they can't extend and make you feel as if some hot dry worm is actually wriggling around your ear. I like it. New fetish perhaps? Where people just listen to music all day long and get off on it?