birthday wishes, 9 years ago

"October 13, 2002.  With 24 minutes and 6 seconds of my 17th birthday left, it seems as if a toast to the day is the only thing left in wanting.  And seeing as how the only stuffed animal out of 21 in my room that can talk will only say mooo when squeezed, I suppose I will be forced to be my own best man on my wedding day.
Dearest Natasha.  Today you are seventeen.  It's so hard to know what to say to you.  You whose youth has been padded from real pain like the furniture of the Glass Man.  Ha, you have not praised God enough for time my dear, and each second that ticks out of the corner of your peripheral hearing.  What an amazing feature and aspect of our world time is.  Poets cannot capsule it, and scientists and quantum physics cannot explain it.  A circle cannot define it, nor a line with tick marks.  It blurs past in 18 legs printing past the 68 year old man, and the 13 year old girl calling it to hurry up, its lame leg dragging behind, while she puts on heavy makeup.  I don't know and I can't comprehend.  Your cat lies on your lap like in 3rd grade and in his silky ears there is no difference.  Shadow kills and soon shadow will die.  Don't you wonder if he knows?  Well, anyway, you're seventeen alright and before you really know it you'll be 35 and remembering how skinny you are now, and maybe telling Nasty to go to bed.  Goodnight Natasha of 17 and if my words come back and haunt you, whoever you are or wherever, don't forget to fall on your knees saying, "Holy" and knowing how much of the picture is blocked being in time, but also that without it, what you can grasp, and stories and parables would crumble."

I found this recently in my journals.  It looks like I've been writing the same drivel for years now.  Although I have to admit for a 17 year old, pretty interesting stuff.  As a sidenote, I went through a phase where I thought it would be fun to reclaim bad words by naming my kids and raising them up right, hence Nasty.  Happy Birthday to me!  RIP Shadow.   

a foray into fiction writing....prosaically!

He liked it when she let her hair down.  Liked it when she put it up.  Something about the motion of it, he said.  The way her arms framed her face.  He liked the way her head tilted when she took out her earrings at the end of the day, and the way she held her silverware, so prim and proper, like a lady, he said grinning, stabbing at his dinner with his elbows raised.  He liked the slant of her cursive.  Loved the way she said his name, even when she was angry and especially when she was tired.  He would tell her these things when they first began dating, and she never realized how much it affected her to have someone notice all the mundane choreography she’d developed subconsciously over the years.  And even after they got married, especially when they were first living together, discovering the deep pockets of each other’s habits, he would celebrate each pattern he found.  It’s so cute how you take out your left contact before your right one, he pronounced on more than one occasion.  She basked in his enjoyment, his feeling of luckiness that pervaded from the beginning of the relationship.  And she did not argue with it.

But now that he was gone, she found that she had never noticed his small movements.  She became obsessed with trying the dredge up memories of minutia so she could miss them, but over and over she realized she simply could not recall his techniques of shaving or where he put his keys after work or what he wore to mow the lawn.  She knew his favorite breakfast food should pang her when she ate it, but she did not know whether to cry over eggs or pancakes.  And so she cried over both, rubbing her knuckles hard across her front teeth, a habit left over from childhood.  There was no one left to pull her hand away now. 

putt putt

how lovely it is
to focus one's mind upon
a single goal,
the sound of neon
dropping into a plastic hole.

I almost made it.  12 days, 12 poems(ish).  I wrote this last night, but didn't have internet.  As a side note, I got the job I felt like I had such a bad interview.  It is only 10 hours a week, but it's a start.  It also leaves a lot of things very much up in the air.  I long for that singular goal, but maybe if I go putt-putting on the weekends, I'll be able to wade through the confusion of it all.  I'll be working with high schoolers as a professional encourager, which is a pretty sweet gig.  I graduated from this particular high school seven and a half years ago.  I feel like there are parts of my high school self God wants me to interact with, remember, and not fear.  Those years were so hard for me.  But now I get a chance to turn around and love high schoolers wherever they are at, which is so something God would do.  He loves that redemption stuff.  

by the banks

by the banks of the ohio,
we climbed kentucky ruins,
broken concrete slabs,
in the brilliant, yellow, evening sun.

perspective

today i cleaned the cracks
and crevices, the neglected
corners, and found no gold
coin, but yes, between the fire
place and bookshelf, a web
with twenty dead pill bugs,
suspended in air and time.

good, dad said, the spiders
are doing their job