Things I Wanted to Write

Sometimes I like to write. Mostly poetry, sometimes other things. Studying creative writing in Virginia.

[tiwtw-blog]

Seasonal Affection

On that Midsummer evening, you sat on my porch And said you would not share your 60 cent cigar with me, Even though you were dropping ash on my Hawaiian vest - The one from Salvation Army that made you look cheerful -. I wanted to whisper  'Honey, you can't kick me out of my own party' But you were coming down from a rage that was breaking your feet And I could not have said a thing. So I was silent, toppling inside my own head, When a car drove in a zooming echo and it played a song. The song was not with you. Who were you then? Who, The person from that song I remembered and the silent stalling while  You thought, at least, my sadness, to be your privilege.  It was not and I am sorry.

[tiwtw-blog]

I-I walk in a room, you know I look so proud. I’m movin’ in this here atmosphere, where anything’s allowed. I go to this here party, and I just get bored, until I look out the window, see a sweet young thing, humpin’ on the parking meter, leanin’ on the parking meter - oh, she looks so good, oh, she looks so fine, and I got this crazy feeling that I’m gonna (ah-ah) make her mine, ooh, I’ll put my spell on her - here she comes, walkin’ down the street, here she comes, comin’ through my door, here she comes, crawlin’ up my stair, here she comes, waltzin’ through the hall in a pretty red dress and oh, she looks so good, oh, she looks so fine and I got this crazy feeling that I’m gonna (ah-ah) make her mine, and then I hear this knockin’ on my door, hear this knockin’ on my door, and I look up into the big tower clock and say, “oh my God, it’s midnight!” and my baby is walkin’ through the door leanin’ on my couch she whispers to me and I take the big plunge and oh, she was so good and oh, she was so fine and I’m gonna tell the world that I just (ah-ah) made her mine and I said, “darlin’, tell me you’re name - she told me her name, she whispered to me, she told me her name, and her name is, and her name is, and her name is, and her name is - G L O R I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I, G - L - O - R - I - A!

[xmarksthisspace-blog]

[tiwtw-blog]

Charlotte Courthouse, VA

Porch sitting, you tell me, is an old practice around here and there Is a lot of space. A lot of porches will mark your time –

Two heavy decades of family women in post-funeral circles Gin sipping and whistling smoke over the ramparts, Talking about heat and other unwelcome guests, or the county land Up for sale and bereft houses that will not be occupied.

The black cat lies down next to the swing, I name her Betsy. She and I like these lambent porches with the 50-cent pirate lighters, Half in and half outside, thoroughly wrapped in the warm smell Of your mother's citronella candles where Yes, you can see the disconcerting expanse of the sky.

And I know that you must have been sitting here  Catching summer bites at seven and sixteen, swinging contraband like The bad you had inherited and escaping  To abandoned fronts of strange houses, rolling paper at dusk, until,  From a distance, the ends of your lips were the same color of fire As the acid fed hydrangeas, glorious and scarlet from neglect.

[tiwtw-blog]

Michicant

Tonight, it is a very persistent sort of happiness that wants to walk through the wine and let me know - I have not earned the right to come down, and in case I take privilege from the suffering that does not know itself, I have at least the morning.

[livphotoz]

[tiwtw-blog]

I Remember This

Over a bit of Spanish mackerel in Sri Lanka, you lick the mustard paste from your thumb and say it tastes just like the Kerali curry from our trip last December, but with extra pepper and  do you know if they call it curry? Do we? On the sightsee, peering at an assembly of lotus and  the lanterns hung over a beach in elaborate formation you shout but isn't this just like Orissa! the wind, it has the same wet calm and it makes me happy to think of home;  Not sure, but I am nodding nonetheless. The roads are crowded, someone hits our car from the back, the frown on your face is faint when you tell me  now look, I would still prefer this to America;  and haven't the Chinese taken it all over anyway?  When it gets to be too hot, we sit under the Bodhi tree and  I agree that it does indeed look like the Banyan.  And if I did not know your fantasies so well,  I would tell you how a place can be itself, but you have already  moved on from my mute reasoning, and now point  at the elaborate Buddha gilded in floral devotion, telling me their gods remind me of Bangkok, and don't they look just a little like ours? 

2013 

[homoscarfiens-deactivated201812]

Visit Original Link

[tiwtw-blog]

Monsoon

These years, we are not dancing in the blue light Of a lantern in the Calcutta chai shop I had seen in Some previously necessary dream and in fact, We now move in the same intricate dance of the monsoon With its grey evidence of the month, us, Repulsions on the map of this overcast city With no tendency to mutual geography. But darling, watching drops fall into my tea on the sill, I know that you too must hear the mango cart rolling Down that street and that the same musty petrichor will rise To your balcony with no sense of a mausam to escape, But only the rumbling frenzy of a post-orange sky. 

[apsychologykid]

[tiwtw-blog]

Comptine

you were playing comptine that day out in the living room when i woke up and heard it in my sheets, except i'm not sure you got past the first seven   notes and when i came in,  it was in imitation of your cat, i started when you found another sound and had i known you would play the piano for me,  i could have asked for so much more. 

[bostonpoetryslam]

It is difficult to be sad while eating avocado or listening to rap music but I have done it a couple of times

LK Shaw, “Miss America,” from the For Every Year project 

[tiwtw-blog]

Bangalore and its ridiculous orange sky. I'm not having it.

[tiwtw-blog]

Atomic Tangerine

Past pumpkin and the pretention of princeton orange, Portland orange, or the color of papaya whip, Which seemed like the dripping stasis of eggshell off-white,  I was looping the brush in a curl through atomic tangerine, When you came down to help in a dress that was positively gold -  Or something else altogether, I could not have said,  In between the obscure parts of that familiar spectrum -  Darling I was like a balefire that summer day.  But you were atomic and you were tangerine - or something else altogether.

[tiwtw-blog]

For Margaret, After A Party

After Frank O' Hara You sprayed Febreze to get rid of the smell From the joint we has passed around nine strangers  And I was sprawled out on the flock print sheet  Fashioned from a curtain and  You didn't know it because you do not always know What I am thinking but then  It was about the other ones, before you,  When happiness seemed to be coffee  On the clock like a routine declaration of love - and How I was withering with the need for it  Until you were loping onto the scene with a refusal to  Exist in any way but the way I had seen you first, Red-eyed, mouth pointed in a smirk and  Your talent for erasure a reassuring tenant In my capacity for nostalgia. How did it happen? I took in the gin and smoke of your skin                                          Until it was euphoria and  Not the other way around. 

[tiwtw-blog]

McCafe, Frankfurt Transit

After making my way from concourse Z to A, which of course happened to be right next to each  Other, in the Dewey logic of airports, I sat with My 2 euro coffee and croissant  Watching the taxi dances on a gloomy tarmac, And what would have happened? If one of those wheels Near the plane's wings turned backwards and  Exploded, so that the businessman in seat 50A Looked from the small trap window  As though he was suffocating   While a requiem screamed from his custom headphones, Oxygen masks stuck in the top panel - why, Eyes comically wide in the realization  Of the doors melted shut for a mass funeral where Frankfurt would see what the sun looked like. 

[tiwtw-blog]

"menses", my mother called it