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30 de Septiembre 2008
en media res
remember art history class? or even comparative literature? i think i live there, in the middle, like a slice of life and today it is frustrating because yesterday i had to tell a story in practicum and
it seemed to me like it was time to begin, but I didn't know how to introduce myself properly or explain things so everyone seemed as though they felt a little jerked toward the story. That bothers me because I can't figure out why it was so sudden to them when i thought i was doing everything right so that it wouldn't be, sudden. And I get that a lot, from martin or whenever I start talking--there is a certain shock value perhaps because of the delivery system/method. Part of me can't figure out why they feel as though I have interrupted them, their thoughts, the expectations, and part of me doesn't want to figure it out because I want them to be shocked awake. I don't often want to make things intelligible, I like the idea of parables because unless you really want to know what is going on, you won't. it is something similar with poetry; unless you bring yourself to the poem, you won't know what is going on because the poet isn't about the business of explaining herself, but rather is explaining your life to you using her way with words. That is why poetry is an art form, why parables are art. You have to interpret, you are expected to interpret, experience, be interrupted even if you read the introduction, or know the poet personally. it is about confrontation,in which i am well versed.
my guess: people don't see me coming. They don't think I'll open my mouth and they will easily understand but the truth is they won't understand me by using the same tools they use to understand everyone else. It is like I speak another language, sometimes, most times, accidentally. And it only hurts when people are angry with me because they don't understand. And it is only confusing when I forget how possible, how prevalent this reaction is. And it is only inconvenient when I want to speak their normal English and I simply can't figure out how to. and it is only sad when i think i will lose myself if i try to do what is expected just to communicate how very much i am losing by doing so.
but there is good news:
The one hurdle I am happy to jump is the disassociation hurdle. I am pleased to say that I am more able to feel it happening and recognize it, and even, occasionally, pull myself out of it in a timely manner. next up, if i can keep in rhythm as any trackstar will tell you is to learn what causes it. And also I am a lot less ashamed of myself than I used to be, in general and i think that helped yesterday. I wasn't destroyed, i didn't destroy anyone else (both of those possibilities are now just possibilities, not certainties). It should have been a celebration when i got home to tell martin of all this triumph. but as i try to talk to him (and i think lots of people in love will understand this) I keep tripping over the things I need on my way to where i think i will get them and I am bruised and bloodied from the falling down.
Posted by crymytinyflood at 9:07 AM | Comments (0)
27 de Septiembre 2008
the darfur readings
Dear Darfur,
I wrote you a letter and then remembered you couldn't read it.
I sent you money and you used the paper to wrap your wounds
Where does your hope come from? Why is hope the uncommon commodity here? We hoard it and bury it, like treasure in the sand.
How easy it is for me. I assume you have no hope but what I might accidentally send
I think I have it all
At 27 I bought a house and knit a scarf. That same year you buried a child and worshipped in a desert. I took a class on global constraints, you took up a sword and walked ten miles to use it.
One day when I know enough to help you it will be too late and so I try to sit still and listen for your voice on the wind. For the cries of the newborn before he knows hunger and anger, before he has to stand on his own feet and shake his own fist.
And so Selfishly, I take the time to think my way through the territory of your problems, your future, because mine is wrapped up in it.
I am not the refugee and yet
I am wrapped in the sogging blankets of your story, huddled close and very afraid because I have so much to lose.
I have no need to be the refugee but I run from your story because, even in a desert time,
You rain on my parade, the way hurricanes seem to swarm and swallow all that we possess over night,
the way a monsoon season requires a pointed preparation or leaves room for none at all.
I am not the refugee
I am not the refugee and yet
I know you and use your story to escape the pain of my own past. Images of you fill my mind and displace the nightmare knives come down to slay my slumbering innocence or the drivers of my so-called destiny wildly maneuvering toward the last crash.
I have you, in pictures, as real as possible. In the silken glossed desserts of the National Geographic you are smiling at your brother, squatting over a family meal. Once, I wanted so badly to keep you with me
I tore at the black and white photos of the dentist office Smithsonian. I swore out loud when I nearly ripped your ear off. The hygenist looked up from her chart in shock. What could possibly be so upsetting
in the kind pink florescence of the waiting room, your toothless face?
Three squares of you: in the first you greet a friend, in the next your son dies and in the last you smell a rotting pig corpse. I think it was some kind of experiment: when do you grin, when do you chagrin? And I, barely able
to rip you from the text,
(the lines and circles surrounding you, trying so hard to explain you)
without destroying you.
You,. You are upsetting. Your face tells the truth I thought I wanted to see.
I lie to myself, I tell myself that
Everyday I nearly destroy You And it terrifies me to think that you may have already been starved or murdered before the photo was even color-corrected by some lackey, working to earn his own cubicle, or the next telephoto lens with which he can hold you at a distance.
He sits,
hunched and maligned over a computer screen, having given up even a modest dream of changing the world through the whining pathos of stills.
I am not a refugee,
I could send a thank you note to you, for your suffering. I may one day learn how to compose such a thing, because you teach me what pain is, what the end of my road looks like, even as you come to me, pixilated and two dimensional.
But I won't send the thank you just yet, because tonight I may fall into one final sleep and wake up to the oasis for your thirsty soldier sons and the end of the road no longer dragging out beyond the strength of your sisters, because tonight, like many nights, I am still terrified by my mother in the grip of her angry husband, by my father's stoic absence still boring a hole in my heart and I may meet you there, to deliver my thanks
myself.
Sincerely,
...
Dear America,
First I will say that I was asked not to swear so you will have to insert the four letter words as you imagine them. I trust you to be insecure enough to imagine more than I would have anyway.
I am angry with you. You betray and cheat.
I am ashamed of you. You lie and complain. I am afraid of you. You hoard and yell. I know you can't face yourself because you can't answer me, you can't look me in the face and hope I will forgive you
Which of us calls you father anymore?
you are the angry step-father, claiming me as your own only so you can exploit me, disregard my first fathers. Every night you drink yourself into an oblivion just to dull the pain. Even though your beer is mediocre, your cars are slow and your philanthropy is laughable compared to your reality television and football team expenditures.
My real father is the son of immigrants who ate beans and rice through the depression, bending tenderly over lettuce in the fields of your San Fernando valley, my grandfather noticed the blonde children waiting for meat and milk until they starved to death. My real father was a guard at the prison where you sent Charles Manson to be punished by a lifetime supply of toilet paper and snickers bars.
And just like that wrinkled old murderer,
You lead with a limp and pretend you will recover.
Recover what? A memory drives you to strive for super-hero global status. But the memory was always just a memory. When did you ever have your you-know-what together? When did you ever take care of me, my family or the other?
There is something sparkly about you, but even as we have added more stars to the flag, the unlucky 13 stripes, the legacy of divide and conquer, the blind hoping to subdue and fill, the pilgrimage to the holy land of consume and develop haunts us.
But how could I leave you?
I remember when we were young together and I heard stories scrubbed clean of prejudice and poverty. I was told you were kind and broad, that you had a thrilling geography and enough buffalo
the endless plains their thriving bivouac.
It wasn't a lie, but it wasn't true. There was blood on the cotton gin and now there is talk of more fencing at the border.
How can you wrap barbed wire around your heartland? How can you claim to care about the deserted peoples? I know you, you sneak:
you hope you won't have to take care of them unless, against all odds, we all vote for love
i stay because I can't leave you. I feel something like Stockholm syndrome when I think of your clear cutting and smog. You haven't killed me yet, why would I leave? As long as I stay there is a chance I might see you repent.
I would say I wander your streets looking for signs of hope but I am too smart to risk the knife fight and too scared I might meet your rapists. It isn't safe to look for hope here.
I don't know how to live with you or without you. If I could choose a new problem, a new country, I don't think I would.
So I vote angry and often, I write hard and hope to die free. I wash my hands of this overworked soil and then dig another flower bed in what is left. Like an idiot, like an asylum escapee, like a former prozac addict I paint my pain on your walls even though you call it graffiti and threaten to arrest me. I bake cakes for my neighbors and invest in your shaken, not stirred mutual funds. I watch your movies and laugh when I see myself there, behaving recklessly, well-dressed and eating out--seeking pleasure in your sterile, emotional art forms.
American community is held together by one bobby pin for the flyaways and a strip of scotch tape for the campaign posters but held together nonetheless and I guess that will have to do, for the endless now.
God knows how you suffer, how you hide it and why. I would rather not.
And so I remain, affectionately, ambivalently yours,
...
Posted by crymytinyflood at 4:16 PM | Comments (0)
24 de Septiembre 2008
please come
i'll be reading.
for more info:
http://www.conspiracyww.org/
should be interesting/fundraising for darfur
especially since there will be liquid bread!
Posted by crymytinyflood at 11:12 AM | Comments (0)
20 de Septiembre 2008
on second thought
this is the poem i put here and then took down but now i think it isn't quite as violent as it once was so you can have it back.
"i know i would apologize
if i could
see your eyes
cuz when you showed me myself, you know,
i became someone else..."
Home-things ::
I find nails rusting like heartbreak
and giving way to the slow steady sanding,
patching time and crime and punishment holes in the wall
first I smooth off
the first layer, then I see
a line in the second layer:
as wide as a grain of sand.
i think about you and whisper to myself
about all that insulates, me,
it could have been yours.
But like a murderer,
I do
the time
when the heartbreak ache is home improvement.
And to escape
I burn off my fingerprints
(the first layer, then I see
a line in the second layer:
as wide as a grain of sand.)
Over the sound of a squirrel rustling in the attic I recommend the story of you-
how I lost myself:
"If he has a tattoo on his arm
hopefully its just three backward sounds
that way, when I reach to hold him,
to use him
to steady myself, by the feel of soft skin and ink stretched over the sweet strength of life and limb
I feel, the ancient word,
grace, under my thumb."
All the while thinking
There was grace in the skin as I held it--
burning away who I was--I was
unafraid
to be unidentifiable--
(the first layer, then I see
a line in the second layer:
as wide as a grain of sand.)
Now I feel
differently:
a thumb tack slides, silent, like divine intervention,
it glides through the white space
atop a photo of your face and I press so hard
the knuckle, not the print, strains under the pressure
of holding onto you.
Posted by crymytinyflood at 10:52 AM | Comments (2)
17 de Septiembre 2008
if you love me
you'll watch this and then, with renewed vigor, search out and watch the seinfeld hour every weeknight for as long as we can keep it on air by silent faithful petitionary watching.
no, it doesn't matter if petitionary is a real word; it has all the form and function of a real word.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBWPf1BWtkw
be forewarned: you might like bill gates a little after watching him do the robot. i'm a sucker for the robot.
Posted by crymytinyflood at 3:46 PM | Comments (0)
16 de Septiembre 2008
all the crashing, thrashing and the dreams
martin dropped his bike yesterday because he wasn't really paying attention as well as he could have.
and he is fine, but i am not.
the what ifs are getting me down today.
i want a husband who never crashes the car. who never burns the toast, who never waits too long or hopes too big.
i want a man who never flexes his intellectual muscle just to show off, who can't always answer the questions or minimize the chaos. i want to never worry about him and never cry when he breaks my hopes in half over his knee like a twig. i want a husband who knows when to have a baby and when to flip the pancakes, who knows all about interpersonal relationships and countertransference and how to say i love you when it matters most.
but that might not happen, even to me.
and even though i hopehopehope i can't deal with desire or identity in the helpful ways.
and then one dream wakes up, even while another lay there thrashing like a fish on the boat deck:
yesterday as i was washing my hands in the third floor bathroom a very pretty woman looked me over and asked "are you the poet?"
what could i say?
i have the crazy hair and disheveled look about me, i have the logical lover and the broken down dog. the funny old car, racking up parking tickets on the street outside the accreditation defying graduate school. and god knows i drink enough beer and i can tame a shot of wild turkey with ease which is as much to say i write when i'm drunk and beg for mercy when i'm sober
so i said yes. and laughed a little, not even shyly and definitely not at her.
because i have always wanted that sort of thing to happen... i have always dreamed you would have known i was a poet before you even knew my name.
along those lines
i'll be participating in another sort of mars hill attempt to save the world.
Free Form is a safe, open place to share creative expression. A night of music, poetry, and good people. Come express yourself or merely sit and enjoy the beauty.
Saturday September 27th at the Green Bean Coffee House. (210 N. 85th Seattle, WA)
8:00 - 11:00 p.m. Come early to get a good seat.
There will be 16 open mic slots (come early to sign up for a spot) and we will have three featured performers:
John Burkhardt and Holly Grisby - amazing musicians from MHGS. And also Seattle spoken word legend Rajnii Eddins will be featured.
Coffee, tea, pastries, and desserts will be available.
All proceeds and/or donations at Free Form will support Pilgrim - Uganda's Move on Malaria. Please come and support this incredible movement.
Email Andrew Bauman at Abraveheart21@aol.com with any questions.
thank you
Posted by crymytinyflood at 4:47 PM | Comments (0)
11 de Septiembre 2008
i forgot to tell you this but it is real important:
see, there is one woman, who i like a lot, she is a poet too, she saw me once and she asked me if i have a tattoo (in my experience, people with visible piercings get that question quite often). i said no, but i always think about getting one. she said we should go together and to let her know if i decide to get one because then she'll know it is time for her to get one.
she is probably in her late fifties. she is waiting for the right time.
one sunday, only a week or two after that, the pastor, my boss, preached that sometimes--especially in seattle--the gospel shows up pierced and tattooed.
at coffee hour that day she caught me at the cookie table and looked right at me and said, "see! i knew you were the gospel!"
i still get goosebumps when i think of it. maybe you should too, i'm just saying...
Posted by crymytinyflood at 11:16 AM | Comments (1)
come pick me up
martin keeps playing that song over and over again. he pulls the car over to the side of the street, leans over and not only unlocks the door,
but pushes it hard so it swings open
like the door is an extension of his arms flung open to welcome me in one wild gesture
he picks me up from church history class (which is messing with my heart and my head in the way that sexual disorders messes with the counseling students--they should just call the class church disorders, but ATS won't go for that) and "I wish you would" is playing in the background like cathedral bells marking the noon hour. the bells beg me to look backward, look forward. faith, hope, ding, dong, faith, hope, past, future, dong, dong, dong, and then do it again.
when they ask me what i'm taking this, my third year at seminary i should say Church Disorders, How Not to Hate and Integrating Responsible Parties... Theology One hasn't begun yet so i'm not sure what to call that (mhgs calls it "Theological Mosaic" but somehow i'm already wondering if it should have another name based on the syllabus alone) this year begins with lessons about hate, integrated pastoral personalities, and sharing responsibilities. i think i can explain:
the new vicar asked if i have days off. i said i think of the day off as a day when its ok to accidentally swear (insert canned laughter from other staff members present) or show a bra strap, or wear my painting pants.
she asked about book club. i said that is technically off because i tend to swear there.
it has come to my attention, though, that some (most?) pastors--especially children's ministers--have two personalities. and i don't think i could handle that.
here is how it works: we start out thinking that we should behave a certain way. then one day we don't like it anymore so we address some close friends, who may be parishioners. we ask them to stop thinking of us as pastors in certain context. so they attempt to do so.
here is where it gets interesting:
sometimes, as a pastor, I think that this system breaks down because these parishioners who are also good friends, are incapable of seeing beyond the clerics and it is their fault. as if the parishioners are two dimensional people who simply can't imagine their pastor as other than preacher, communicant, marrier, burrier (barrier--hmmm), baptizer. but what if its the pastor, what if we can't stop acting like their idea of pastor? it is just as much about how the pastor acts as how they perceive her.
if you trick your parishioners into thinking you simply gave up swearing, drinking, smoking, brutal honesty, arguing, overeating, burning the toast or any other vice the day you were ordained then of course they will either see through you and mistrust you. or they will think you betrayed them when they come over and see that case of pbr in the fridge.
let's be honest: i took this job because there was swearing in the narthex on my second visit, and i wasn't the one doing it!
so then i started thinking about perfectionism, especially because i received marks that would make any olympian proud
in old testament and philosophy but practically failed my exegesis paper.
there is this person i stopped hating, no, it isn't mccain (i still hate him). it is this person, let's call him rico, even my husband has a man crush on--martin reads Details now because it is delivered to the seminary free (chalk one up for the gay infiltrators). and i thought maybe it was the bucket of Sessions or the end of the week of intensive classes with dr. craig barnes, a man who could accidentally turn anyone into a nicer person. but i'm thinking maybe all this time i hated rico because he was always trying so hard to be perfect, to be all things to all people, and that afternoon i stopped hating him so much because he seemed a little less interested, if even for a moment, in being mr. right. maybe it was the way he was leaning, or the words he said or the way he said them... i don't know.
i thought, at first that i was becoming nicer (as unlikely as that is). now i think it was just as much about his behavior as mine.
maybe this next part should be another entry entirely but i just don't have that kind of compartmentalization going just yet so it is here:
at text study we read matt 9.9-13. nevermind all the normal exegesis--the lead pastor remarked that the part he can't get over is that matthew just takes off after Jesus. in response i waited for a lull in the conversation and then i spouted off my own theory which was mostly like this:
"what if (it may be poor exegetical method but, honestly, i always start that way)
jesus was walking by matt's office one day, and frustrated by a lack of sleep or whatever, he walks into the office and tells matt something like, hey, come outside with me, i have to show you something, and then once they get outside jesus says follow me, and matt's interest is piqued because jesus takes off in the direction of matt's own house. so matt starts thinking one of his kids is suddenly ill, or the house is on fire. when they arrive at matt's house jesus says something like, hey do you have anything to eat? and matt looks at his watch and realizes he isn't going to make it back to the office today, or maybe ever. so they sit down and have a few beers and chat. and come on, even matthew would probably be disinterested in collecting taxes after a few beers with jesus, right?"
so by this time all the pastors sitting around are howling with laughter and one shrieks about what they must be teaching me at that crazy mars hill. and i admit to just barely passing my first exegesis, class and avoiding theology classes like the plague. but then the laughter dies down a bit and the lead pastor, who is one of my favorite people in the whole world--through no fault of his own-- says "well, that is probably more accurate than the way i imagined it."
don't get me wrong, he is a complex man. hopefully, by now you know that i tend to represent people in my stories as boobs at times, even if they aren't.
but, all i really mean to say is that that felt pretty damn good.
yes, it felt pretty damn good.
screw all my friends, they're all full of shit.
i wish you would...
i wish i could.
so i'm that much closer to the commencement,
i have big plans to
cower in fear
in my favorite sweater
all the old love letters fresh in my mind.
with the windows clear
you know you could
i wish you would.
Posted by crymytinyflood at 10:18 AM | Comments (0)
5 de Septiembre 2008
vespers again
Kj asked me to speak about this little by little part of the Mary Oliver poem she chose as text for the vespers service, so i put on my train shirt, that says "Family Where?" and read this little chapter at the vespers service. (i'm getting pretty good at new student orientation stuff!)
"But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode"-from Mary Oliver's The Journey
My mother is a singer. In a most generous, professional way she used to tell me "your little voice carries" (I could match her pitch, and then some).
I knew, even at five years old, that she meant my voice was too big, that my self, was taking up too much space,-- burning through the sky like a rogue fire cracker, bleeding through the walls she built to protect me, threatening to set the forest on fire.
And try as she did to teach me to control myself, I was explosive.
I am ambivalent about my little voice carrying on, I love the way my whole body resonates when I hit the high hard A as I attempt to shout something straight to hell. I love it, until the people who love me run for cover.
So I try to sometimes, keep quiet. But when I do
I think of that little-girl-me behind big bangs and thick braids, little by little losing her way
The scratchy little voice moving slowly away, unfairly pitted against the science of the Doppler effect.
The question that darts around in my mind, the mean little thought that ricochets off one fear and then another: how will I be heard over the static of your desires?
I see now that
My hopes and fears form a constellation of fireballs looming loud and wild in the black night above the rooftops where my loved ones live. It is hard to know what to do about the way these thoughts rumble, pop and hiss.
if the Pleiades threatened to engulf you, Would I silence the strident roar of all seven fireballs,?
How would I tell a whole constellation to lower its voice? And why?
The answer came like a red star collapsing. I began to believe there had to be another way, a way toward being heard, a way to tell, without so much yelling. So I called Zach Brittle and begged to come to mars.
When I landed here I began to think the oxygen had been sucked out of the atmosphere because I heard deprived, depraved things about finding voice--but mine was not lost! I thought these people were nuts to encourage me to keep talking, keep writing, obviously they were just being nice to someone who had already said too much, and too loudly.
Turned out, here (on mars?) the atmosphere is different, the voices don't carry the old things, in the old ways. And so they said, if I kept at it, there was more to find,
to be refined.
In the heat of healing, my fearful, abrasive little voice and the ideas it carries soften like grains of sand becoming clear smooth glass.
the what and way it carries, is changed. The frantic tones that used to force their way through the violence of my childhood are little by little changing into something stronger, able to carry more than simple shame,
Little by little the voice that forced its way through chaos is more a joyful noise,
a barbaric yawp over the rooftops, crying out in holy contradictions and bearing good news of great joy for all people.
In gentle, brave tones that little voice keeps me company on the long dark days and nights of the sweeping seminary cosmos. Each little idea on the wind in my larynx, even the little bits of ideas humming around in my brain are like lightning bugs bobbing playfully, joyously.
And what is more, little by little, I am learning to capture the tiny fiery sounds before they disappear,
With the pen in my hand like a sparkler on fire, I draw them out against the dark, I quickly put to right the lines and circles, order them on the page and they look so fancy against the justified margins. (Justified!) Just in time, before the flame tires out and when it does I learn to wait a little in the dark, for another one to light.
So you have landed here on mars, up near the sun in between a few sexy stars where your desires mimic the flame and light of the sun, your bright hopes are settling in, set off against the sweet cover of night. Yes, you've landed on planet seminary, somewhere in a system held in place by the gravity of a good solid graduate education; woah. let that sink in. Hear my little voice telling you: you have landed, here, where the little voices you were once ashamed of will, little by little, stop sounding so awful, as impossible as that might seem. Soon you will reach out and turn down the volume on the editors trying to out "you" you and you needn't be afraid of their silence. Out of the quiet your own voice will rise like a comet,
and ours will rush to harmonize with it, and a song will go, lilting out over the landscape that used to confine you, your little voice, my little voice carrying light out into the dark.
and that was that thank God.
Posted by crymytinyflood at 10:58 AM | Comments (1)