Fool’s Wisdom
How many stories
can one girl tell?
For how much will she
put her heart on sale?
Two cents to publish,
and one to buy –
pennies are poet’s gold.
The world’s weight in words,
that’s where worth lies.
Around the World in 80 Pages
A lot of random magazines wind up at this house and my late grandfather’s subscriptions to several interesting publications have yet to run out, which means we have a lot these magazines just laying around. My toddlers and I like to just thumb through the pages, but every so often I’ll collect all the naturey-explorery (I make up words to go along with my made up games) ones and we’ll take a magazine safari. Such hunts never last long in the land of Short Attention Span Theater, but it’s a great way to see all different kinds of animals, and which ones each favors.
With all of the necessary supplies gathered, we set out for our magazine safari.
Jordan sets his sites on some big game.
Shoot to kill! Or... cut to glue.
Safari... or archeological dig for fossils, depending on how you wanna play it.
Obviously, Shawn's more of a dino kinda kid.
So much time, so little to do.
Strike that, reverse it.
I have so many little projects to accomplish that I am instead getting absolutely nothing done. To be fair, finals were just last week so I have been legitimately busy.
All the ideas, though! Gay gypsy kingdoms, Disney cyberpunk horror, and kooky little kid’s fables, oh my! I’m really excited about the characters I’m creating, so various plot points are developing quickly. A cast of multi-faceted personalities is always my favorite part of any fiction piece (the second being simple yet stylistic prose), so naturally I’m focusing on scenes that develop these personalities, which means the more work I get done the more I see what needs to be done. Not only to portray a person smoothly on paper, but to cushion these highly revealing scenes with broader strokes which will connect them to the larger world inside the work.
This daunts me the most, when I get ahead of myself by trying to imagine what the completed piece must be like — all those words between once upon a time and the end.
I also have a ridiculous amount of craft projects that, for the first time in my life, I am absolutely serious about completing. I know my way around a sewing machine and spend inordinate amounts of time Stumbling through different DIY sites, but now that I’ve come up with The Most Awesome business name/idea (still in development, otherwise I’d tell you all about it–soon, though!), I’m actually going to pursue the inner Domesticraft Goddess within. I’m crackin’ the lid on Pandora’s Craft Kaboodle. I have a month before school starts and most of my ideas are simple in design.
Aside from all of that — because I never fail to have too many ideas all at once — I’m also using the winter break to network and connect with other bloggers and homegrown sites. I have the worst habit of commenting on websites in my head rather than actually taking the moment to actually comment on the site itself. It’s a terrible habit and I even do it to some of my favorite friends who also happen to blog.
This is beginning to sound like a New Year’s resolution list rather than a winter break To Do list, and neither types have a reputation for getting accomplished… so I think I’m going to go now and work on a few of these things.
Paper Trail (Haiku)
Measure ink by length
and sheets like streets; my hands walk
farther than my feet.
From a story Mike told me about how far all the Bic pens could draw. I originally , and accordingly, titled this To the Moon and Back Fourteen Times, and still kind of like it because I like long titles for short poems. Paper Trail hits the mark too, though.
Probability
I’m 2/3 through Sex, Drugs, & Cocoa Puffs (Chuck Klosterman), which I spontaneously checked out from the school’s library yesterday morning.
The book consists of several sort of rambling but witty essays on pop culture with a Gen-X twist. In between the essays are short, almost blog-like “entries” that either mark some kind of final note to the previous point or somehow introduce the underlying message of the next.
In one such little missive, he says that life is nothing but lies and illustrates this theory by accusing the study of probability of being wholly ridiculous. 6:1, 8:2, none of that matters. Everything has a 50-50 chance; it is or it isn’t, it happens or it doesn’t, be or don’t, deal or no deal.
A pet peeve of mine when playing Rummy (or any card game, straight down to Go Fish) is when the losing player flips through the deck to see how many cards stood between them and victory. On bad days, it pisses me off to the point that I’ll smack my hand atop theirs and snap at them to stop.
“But in [n] cards I would have won!” they protest.
How does that even make sense? Not at all, that’s how. If we hadn’t played the hand exactly as it was played we would be playing an entirely different game and the odds of your getting a winning card remain the same: you will or you won’t. It’s always been the luck of the draw.
Last Bad Day
For my creative writing class.
“It’s the last bad day,”
she swears with a whisper
soft as the sheets I pull
up to her chin like a child
and I remember when–
“It’s the last bad day,”
she prays again, but not as
sure as last night, last week;
she’s been begging for years now
and ever since–
“It’s the last bad day.”
Three is her usual as is my
nod and a finger on the switch,
one day she’ll get it right
and then–
Manners
This poem will also appear in a future issue of WordRiot.org, an awesome site to find interesting pieces from poetry to flash fiction. I’m excited for my words to rub elbows with the kind of work found there.
Tell me to go,
I will if you
wish it so.
And in
my leave-taking
the light–
shifting shadows,
snuffing candles,
shutting the bedroom
door
as always.
Allow me to stay,
I’d rather it
be that way.
And sit
until the dead
of night–
shifting shadows,
snuffing candles,
shutting the bedroom
door
all the same.
@death
This poem was recently published in the premiere issue of Concise Delight, and was also selected to be in a future web-issue at WordRiot.org.
bury me, bury me not
burn flesh from bone
grind bone to dust
fling dust to wind
let the world carry me aloft
better that than
some strange, sterile lot
bury me, bury me not
Life as a rough draft.