November 22nd, 2015

Strangers, Portishead 1994
For Collinsville


sometime I will tell you about the first time I heard this song
it has something to do with painting my bedroom at 15
and how that room felt like a comfortable cage

and how, in a rose-colored chair from the second floor
I would watch dusk fall on all the gathered
houses like a net or a veil, trapping us, binding us, hiding us

and think of all the things I wanted but didn't know yet
you were one of those things, and when my skin itched
with fever under that ceiling, it was a burning to know more

to be more, to break out of myself. The room was carpeted
and I used to lie on my belly and write while kicking my legs
up and down to exercise my hamstrings

This is all true. I am from that carpet and that chair and this
song and those painted walls and the prefabricated wardrobe
I learned how to put together because the room didn't have a closet.

I am from the sick feeling of anticipation as the nail polish dried
and my head floated, free at last, drifting on the fumes. I am from the
light blue sadness of heavy dusk pressing all the factory houses into the hill.

I am from the laps I ran up and down that street and all the sweat
rolling down my back on summer days as we walked around the little
town feeling our own beauty for the first time while the cars honked

and the construction workers whistled from a roof above and our
summer shirts clung to us like the last bit of our childhood. I am
from the shame and glory of that moment especially

May 6th, 2015

Dollars and Cents, Radiohead, 2001

there was something in his smile
like the thrill of seeing letters
together that never go together

like a q next to a t
and a z squeezing
between

do not hesitate

hestiation leads to stale bread

and saltless lips

close in
you are a gazelle who hunts

draw your hooved feet to your breast
and arch your back

you have lost their sharp teeth
before and haven't you
regretted the loss of the loss of blood?

you need the comfort of their
clutch

and you know, you wild gazelle
with twigs in your hair,

it is not even the animal you want
but the pain it brings

and this pain is a long sigh of wind
against the curtains at night

it is a rhythmic twitch in the wrist.

May 5th, 2015

Angeline PJ Harvey, 1998

How It Feels to Be A Thing

 
The hoods of your eyes cloaked me and I could not see 
the silk rope as it came to me like a lost thing, unremembered

having already bound my hands, you poured the tea and began
a dialogue between yourself and your hand 

Shall we you said to your hand hurt her? We shall said your hand
and then you let it hover over my face, but never let it fall.

And I waited for a long time for your hand to hit
and while I waited the night grew darker and then

I remember only disappearing and watching a cpoy of myself,
far below, sit and wait as I drifted up like smoke  

to the empty bowl of night that had collected all the 
ones before me, and we spirits, swimming about, 

looked down on the burning buildings and the tulip 
trees blooming and thought about the space between 

things and how the space between your hand and our
faces was full of a thousand wars and a million words

as swollen as seed pods. 

March 14th, 2015

 Summertime Springtime,  Hunter G. K. Thompson

yesterday's coffee in a pot
and the bubbles move together
and then apart like the pangea

something has broken off and
been reformed, but I can still
see how the pieces would have
fit.

I really should just fall in love
again - I am very bad at making
only one cup of coffee.

February 8th, 2015

Song for A Blue Guitar, Red House Painters, 1996

In the dream I sent him a letter
from the driveway which somehow
elicited a noise complaint from the neighbors

And I realized there were two "I's",
the "I" I was speaking from
and the "I" I was speaking to.

I don't know what this means,
nor who "he" was, but there were
many people in the dream I do
not see anymore, and I woke
to a sadness I am outgrowing.

I am drinking and drinking
the coffee to swallow the lump
in my throat

and trying to remember the specific
texture to the walls of this life I have
built, and why it is here that I am,
and why that is good.

God, you are my God. I banish
fear in your name in the dark

and speak to you in whispers of a
little girl. I swear, in spite of it all,
last night I felt your hand on my cheek

February 16th, 2015

Nostalgia, Hunter G K Thompson, 2013
 
When all the grasses
are dried and collected
for the fires

When the dried wax
is gathered
for the same

When the songs
change because the
notes are warped

we will become old
and find other
faces to tend to.

January 10th, 2015

Track 2, Sigur Ros, 2001

I keep going back to dark corners in which I've hid
versions of myself - the tobacco fields of Simsbury
the shadows of Elizabeth garden

When I go back I expect
those other girls to have accomplished
a great deal in my absence

one will be training a whole colony of rabbits
another will be twisting dandelions into someone's hair.

I hate to look East, even if that's where
the city is. Its mouth yawns against the dawn
or dusk and rips the sky apart.

My back to the plow, I work the land
while keeping an eye to the setting sun.