#notebook jotting

[3socks4feet]

Speaking of Valentine's Day. I'm doing one zine a month this year (aiming to). This counts as my poem today. I'm way behind.

(27/365)

[3socks4feet]

Weird's a Disease

(Scarygirl poem #2)

I been housing that shit

I been eating that shit

I been eating shit since I was a kid

Weirdgirl, you're too weird.

You're dreaming, you're drooling.

Keep that all to yourself, yuck.

I ate that up and it kept me full.

Through cardboard boxes taped and plane rides taked and breakups breaked and orgasms faked and failures and degrees and visits to the ward

where I was finally read the nutrition facts.

It's making me sick and it always has.

Why didn't anyone tell me

that it is inhuman to feel this awful

all the time?

and that it was all caused by

what I eat?

I been eating my potential

and it's not agreeing with me.

What's a girl to do?

Doctor said take this, it'll scramble you up

and shake it all loose.

It sure did.

I vomit on the floor

everywhere I go now.

I don't wipe my mouth, I smile.

Because what's a girl to do?

Gotta get it out.

Eject, evict and empty.

The more vacant my insides

the lighter I feel.

(5/365)

[3socks4feet]

Siren Lament

Stinging in my throat, unsung words I wish you knew.

Unfurling, drifting thoughts that I want to share with you.

To hear yours too.

Passing ships, uncertain evening waters, flag obscured.

The carved wooden maiden on your bow.

Do you love her?

And does she sing to you

the way I long to do?

Would you like that too?

I can count the times that we've shared land.

So why! Come closer. Help me understand.

Negatives of fleeting moments hang in wine-red corners of my mind, begging to be developed. They move in languid rocking waves, back and forth. Ghostly sunken bottles, hardly there at all, all but for their clinking against my ankles. Rooms of smoke between my ears I flick the light imagine it's your mouth I lose my mind I lose my structure I capsize yet again I fight the urge to pull you under with me but don't be afraid please please believe me I don't want to. I don't want to. I don't want to.

I mean no harm, just lost at sea,

with hopes to dredge what sings in me.

[3socks4feet]

Unrequision

Just once

your hands against my skin.

Just once

to taste what could have been.

Just once

please tell me, yes, again,

the reasons you don't want me in

your life.

No parts for me to play.

Your life

is full, no room to stay.

Your life

a code I must obey but

your voice still haunts my mind some days.

A station that I know will fade.

Distance invites, static invades.

As autumn breaks down

summer ceases to play.

Summer cedes

summer's seeds.

May I

make up for harm I've caused?

May I

erase my pleading songs?

May I?

Just once, then I'll be gone.

I promise I won't keep you long.

Just once.

[3socks4feet]

R-Rated Rapture

I just had sex with the universe 

and the universe came inside me. 

(8/365, based on a true story)

[3socks4feet]

Empty Seat

Are you still out there in the audience

O stark, silent spectator of my suffering?

Snuck in the side door without purchasing a ticket,

you can't fool me.

I still see your name uncrossed on the guest list,

though I try to avoid looking these days.

I rented this whole theatre out for you, you know,

and as long as your seat is full the show will go on.

Whether you choose the front row or in the back corner near the fire exit.

I can write you a part if you feel inspired to join.

Cheer if you have had enough.

Even your booing is something I have come to crave.

I will write another act for you.

Compose another song for the score.

I am no dancer, but I will dance.

I'm not singer, but I will burst my lungs for you to hear me,

like I did

before.

There was a time I thought you looked at me...

Right?

I really could have sworn.

Maybe it was the reflection of my own hopeful gaze.

Is there another chance

to pull your nice eyes

back into mine?

I will build a viewfinder to make it easier for you.

The stage lights are too bright.

Even squinting I can't see.

Are you there?

I hope you're there.

Maybe you're there.

I hope you're there.

Don't turn the lights down.

I don't trust my eyes, only my ears.

Cheer when you've had enough.

Even your booing is something I have come to crave.

[3socks4feet]

The Lives of Girls and Women

Some passages that stood out to me

"...the thought og being naked, stabbed me with shame in the pit of my stomach." (41)

"Being dead, it invited desecration. I wanted to poke it, trample it, pee on it, anything to punish it, to show what contempt I had for its being dead." (43)

"The active verb confused me. He died. It sounded like something he willed to do, chose to do. As if he said, "Now I'll die." In that case it could not be so final. Yet I knew it was." (44)

"Being forgiven creates a peculiar shame." (55)

"They were talking to somebody who believed that the only duty of a writer is to produce a masterpiece." (59)

"I thought of them watching the manuscript leave their house in its padlocked box and I felt remorse, that kind of remorse which has on its other side a brutal, unblemished satisfaction." (60)

" "You want to hide your brains under a bushel out of pure perversity but that's not my lookout," she said. "You just do as you please." " (64)

"...scenes from the past were liable to pop up at any time, like lantern slides, against the cluttered fabric of the present." (70)

"Other people than Aunt Elspeth and Auntie Grace would say to me, "I seen that letter of your mother's in the paper," and I would feel how contemptuous, how superior and silent and enviable they were, those people who all their lives could stay still, with no need to do or say anything remarkable." (77)

"I floated beside him in his big cream and chocolate clean-smelling car, ..." (80)

"I thought she was an idiot, and yet I frantically admired her, was grateful for every little colourless pebble of a word she dropped." (82)

"The question of whether God existed or not never came up in church." (91)

"The idea of God did not connect for me with any idea of being good, which is perhaps odd, considering all about sins and wickedness that I did listen to. I believed in being saved by faith alone, by some great grab of the soul, But did I really, did I really want it to happen to me? Yes and no. I wanted it to happen, but I saw it would have to be a secret. How could I go on living with my Mother and Father and Fern Dogherty and my friend Naomi and everybody in Jubilee otherwise?" (95)

"I was happy in the Library. Walls of printed pages, evidence of so many created worlds, this was a comfort to me. It was the opposite with Naomi; so many books weighed on her, making her feel oppressed and suspicious." (111)

"I was always betraying someone or somebody; it seemed the only way to get along." (112)

"His presence was essential but blurred; in the corner of my daydream he was featureless but powerful, humming away electricity like a blue fluorescent light." (145)

"And this was what I expected sexual communication to be like - a flash of insanity, a dreamlike, ruthless, contemptuous breakthrough in a world of decent appearances." (152)

" "Oh, I wasn't in danger of marriage." "You had your singing. You had your interest in life." "I was just usually having too good a time. I knew enough about marriage to know that's when your good times stop." "(161)

"..."There is a change coming in the lives of girls and women. Yes. But it is up to us to make it come. All women have had up till now has been their connection with men. All we have had. No more lives of our own, really, than domestic animals." " (164)

" "...Once you make the mistake of being - distracted, over a man, your life will never be your own. You will get the burden, a woman always does." (165)

"Well groomed girls frightened me to death. I didn't like to even go near them... Nor would be coarseness ever be translated into their fineness; it was too late, the difference lay too deep for that." (167)

"...I was shaken, imagining the other surrender, more tempting, more gorgeous even than the surrender to sex - the hero's, the patriot's, Carmen's surrender to the final importance of gesture, image, self-created self." (171)

"I liked the word mistress, a full-skirted word, with some ceremony about it; a mistress should not be too slim." (172)

"Men and boys hung around the steps. I could not see their faces, and did not look. I just saw their cigarettes or belt buckles or bottles glinting in the dark." (174)

"I felt happy. I was no longer responsible for anything. I am drunk, I thought." (177)

"I found the bathroom and used it without closing the door, later remembering." (179)

" "You think you're too good for anything. Any of us." "I don't!"... I felt amazement, not that I was fighting with Garnet but that anybody could have made such a mistake, to think he had real power over me. I was too amazed to be angry, I forgot to be frightened, it seemed to me impossible that he should not understand that all the powers I granted him were in play, that he himself was - in play, that I meant to keep him sewed up in his golden lover's skin forever, even if five minutes before I had talked about marrying him. ... I opened my mouth to say whatever would make it clear to him, and I saw that he knew it already; this was what he knew, that I had somehow met his good offerings with my deceitful offerings, whether I knew it or not, matched my complexity and play-acting to his true intent." (222)

"If we had been older we would certainly have hung on, haggled over the price of reconciliation, explained and justified and perhaps forgiven, and carried this into the future with us, ... We had seen in each other what we could not bear, and we had no idea that people do see that, and go on, and hate and fight and try to kill each other, carious ways, then love some more." (223-224)

"I turned around, went back into the hall to look in the dim mirror at my twisted wet face. Without diminishment of pain I observed myself; I was amazed to think that the person suffering was me, for it was not me at all; I was watching. I was watching, I was suffering." (225)

"I opened up it up at the want ads, and got a pencil, so I could circle any job that seemed possible. I made myself understand what I was reading, and after some time I felt a mild, sensible gratitude for these printed words, these strange possibilities. Cities existed; telephone operators were wanted; the future could be furnished without love or scholarships. Now at last without fantasies or self-deception, cut off from the mistakes and confusion of the past, grave and simple, carrying a small suitcase, getting on a bus, like girls in movies leaving home, convents, lovers, I supposed I would get started on my real life.

Garnet French, Garnet French, Garnet French.

Real Life." (226)

"People's wishes, and their offerings, were what I took then naturally, a bit distractedly, as if they were never anything more than my due. "Yes," I said, instead of thank-you." (237)

[3socks4feet]

Thoughts During a Free Jazz Music Program

Am I pissing my pants or not right now?

It sounds like the music is in pain.

There needs to be a payoff for the audience investment.

Where is the throughline? Any recurring ideas? Any development?

Y'all did not need to bring that many instruments to play three notes on each.

The trombonist did not need to bring both a tenor and bass trombone.

More instruments/stranger instruments does not make it a more interesting performance (for me as an audience member).

Even one of the musicians was surprised we stayed for the whole thing.

You know what would sound better than this? Something beautiful.

WHY NOT HAVE tonal or rhythmic grounding SOMEWHERE?? Why does it have to be atonal and chaotic at all times?

As an audience member, it wasn't satisfying. Is it satisfying for the musicians?

If nothing can be "wrong" there are no risks or stakes for the performance

(15/365 , I watched three free jazz sets this evening and these are real reflections that arose during/afterwards. I like experimental music but this just made me upset. I'm counting this as today's poem. If free jazz can be music this can be poetry!