Poem of the Day

Today, I got up on time, and so I did not have psychotic dreams
about rapists and kidnappings like I have had the past few days
where I have slept in until 12 or 1.  Yay, reading days, you have no point.

Walking to church in so much slush = more difficult than walking to church
in the snow.  Today I went to temple prep which engaged persons are supposed
to go to, but there was only one engaged couple and like five prospective
missionaries, and everyone else was just
there because they didn't want to go to Sunday School
because spoilars, it is boring.

List of things I saw yesterday:
a bird outside my window in the pine tree
a pretty picture of a lighthouse
a girl totally biff it right outside the HBLL.  She slid in the snow
and landed on her knees and faceplanted.  Bummer.

List of things I heard yesterday:
a conversation in the library about what the abbreviation "FEC"
in a text meant.  The conclusion reached: "Future Eternal Companion.'
inhuman sounds issuing from a study room on the fifth floor.
The culprits: freshmen watching a movie.
a song about the Berlin Wall

Pablo Neruda writes lovely love poems, but so does ee cummings,
who I love with my whole entire soul.  Also, this poem briefly mentions snow,
which I hope we will start getting instead of this gross grey slushy stuff.

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
by ee cummings

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

Poem of the Day

The Effort
By Billy Collins

Would anyone care to join me
in flicking a few pebbles in the direction
of teachers who are fond of asking the question:
"What is the poet trying to say?"

as if Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson
had struggled but ultimately failed in their efforts—
inarticulate wretches that they were,
biting their pens and staring out the window for a clue.

Yes, it seems that Whitman, Amy Lowell
and the rest could only try and fail
but we in Mrs. Parker's third-period English class
here at Springfield High will succeed

with the help of these study questions
in saying what the poor poet could not,
and we will get all this done before
that orgy of egg salad and tuna fish known as lunch.

Tonight, however, I am the one trying
to say what it is this absence means,
the two of us sleeping and waking under different roofs.
The image of this vase of cut flowers,

not from our garden, is no help.
And the same goes for the single plate,
the solitary lamp, and the weather that presses its face
against these new windows--the drizzle and the
morning frost.

So I will leave it up to Mrs. Parker,
who is tapping a piece of chalk against the blackboard,
and her students—a few with their hands up,
others slouching with their caps on backwards—

to figure out what it is I am trying to say
about this place where I find myself
and to do it before the noon bell rings
and that whirlwind of meatloaf is unleashed.

Poem of the Day

It's a long one, but reading it while listening to Hootie and the Blowfish is lightening my day. Is that even a legit verb? Making my day better, I guess. Rather pleasant, and such.

Ode to an Artichoke
By Pablo Neruda
Translated by Stephen Mitchell

The tender-hearted
artichoke
got dressed as a warrior,
erect, built
a little cupola,
stood
impermeable
under
its scales,
around it
the crazy vegetables
bristled,
grew
astonishing tendrils,
cattails, bulbs,
in the subsoil
slept the carrot
with its red whiskers,
the grapevine
dried the runners
through which it carries the wine,
the cabbage
devoted itself
to trying on skirts,
oregano
to perfuming the world,
and the gentle
artichoke
stood there in the garden,
dressed as a warrior,
burnished
like a pomegranate,
proud,
and one day
along with the others
in large willow
baskets, it traveled
to the market
to realize its dream:
the army.
Amid the rows
never was it so military
as at the fair,
men
among the vegetables
with their white shirts
were
marshals
of the artichokes,
the tight ranks,
the voices of command,
and the detonation
of a falling crate,
but
then
comes
Maria
with her basket,
picks an artichoke,
isn't afraid of it,
examines it, holds it
to the light as if it were an egg,
buys it,
mixes it up
in her bag
with a pair of shoes,
with a head of cabbage and a
bottle of vinegar
until
entering the kitchen
she submerges it in a pot.
Thus ends
in peace
the career
of the armored vegetable
which is called artichoke,
then
scale by scale
we undress
its delight
and we eat
the peaceful flesh
of its green heart.

It's cool how you can be paradoxically anti-war and empowering women and exploring the importance of everyday life in a poem about an artichoke, which is a tasty food that I now feel like eating, with melted butter and lemon juice. Mm.

Also, while typing this, Hootie and the Blowfish ended, and "Before He Cheats" came up on my ipod. There's another piece of poetry for you to explore, if you will.

Read previous sentence: sarcastically.

Poem of the Day.

Carry

I want to carry you
and for you to carry me
the way voices are said to carry over water.

Just this morning on the shore,
I could hear two people talking quietly
in a rowboat on the far side of the lake.

They were talking about fishing,
then one changed the subject,
and, I swear, they began talking about you.

-Billy Collins.

Some Lists.

#1: More Rockin' Library Titles, Many of Which Would Make For Some Nice Band Names of Multiple Genres.
Parrot in the Oven
Leroy and the Cavemen
Girlhearts
Jason's Women
The Stalker
Cowboy on Ice
A Boy No More
The Muffin Child
The Solid Gold Kid
The Girl of His Dreams
Patti's Pet Gorilla
Bizzy Bones and Uncle Ezra
Chameleon Was a Spy
Suza and the Bride Doll

My favorite: Caroline and Her Kettle Named Maud
Title Find of the Week (But Not in the Children's Section) By One Jon Smith: Pop-Porn.
Nice title, bros.

#2: Some Songs That I Had Stuck in My Head, But With the Wrong Lyrics, Which Took Me Forever to Realize
"Bring a corpse, Jeannette, Isabella."
"Traitors and pirates now fight him in vain."

#3: Things I Ate for Dinner Last Week
Wednesday: Andes Mints + Value fries from Wendy's.
Thursday: Lasagna. Yum.
Friday: Dinner at Osaka's, where they have an entire MEAL of GYOZA. HOLY COW. Though it is too bad Yamato doesn't have the same thing, since their gyoza is five thousand times better, I think because they cook it in different oil that doesn't taste quite as burny, but still. It was scrumptious.
Saturday: Moar lasagna.
Sunday: Lentil soup + raw vegan ice cream + a salad of strawberries, greens, sprouts, cauliflower, and Cafe Rio dressing. I've never known how desperately much I like cauliflower. It tastes just like broccoli, but without the Satanic texture.
Also: It started on Sunday because I can't remember what I ate on the other days. Something.

#4: Some Notable Dreams of This Week
Two nights ago: I was an extra on the set of the new Twilight movie. People kept dying on set because everyone hated Twilight so much so they kept sabotaging the set, which looked like the pit underneath the Tower of Isengard. An actress stood on a mountain and gave an epic speech about how Twilight would overcome all things. An old man was sad.
Like a week ago: I was a vampire, which just meant that during the day my face was just a skeleton, which I tried to cover up with a scarf in a department store so people wouldn't know I was a vampire. It kept getting harder to breathe and I kept trying to figure out why, and then I thought, oh, it is because vampires don't have to breathe, so I kept trying to stop myself from breathing, but I couldn't. In retrospect, this is probably a good thing.
Also like a week ago: Miranda and I went to a concert. She was seated by one of the Beatles, who was not a Beatle but looked like a member of Kiss. Then I spent the concert trying to name the Beatles and figure out which one he was, but I could not, because my Beatles knowledge = nothing.

#5: Some Marvelous Things My Swahili Teacher, Who Is Wonderful, Has Said in Class
"No hurry in Africa. Just very relaxing."
"That fish will run away from me on the bus."
"What happens with my cats here?"
"You go to the Rift Valley Area, where the weather is so friendly."
"I know I dream about those scary things myself. They come after me in the night."
"I always remember sometime when I dream."
"You know...is good."
By the way, my Swahili teacher can say 120398123098123098 times more things in English than I can say in Swahili, since all I can say is:
"Jambo"
"Amina" (=amen)
And also the last for months of the year: Septemba, Oktoba, Novemba, Desemba.

IN CONCLUSION, I am going to bed now.

The Library on Saturday Night

Is a fun place to be! But in the children's section they have some old books with some rockin' titles. Here are some examples:

C, My Name is Cal
D, My Name is Danita
When She Was Good
The Meanest Doll in the World
I LOVE YOU, STUPID!
Monkey Shines
Bristle Face
The Nip and Tuck War
On a Lark to the Planets
The Mystery of the Pilgrim Trading Post
Take a Chance, Gramps
Love and Betrayal and Hold the Mayo!
Something Terrible Happened
The Kidnapping of Aunt Elizabeth
On the Trail of the Space Pirates
Franz a Dog of the Police

On an unrelated note, I've owned these shoes since the 10th grade, and they reek. And yet I refuse to take them off my feet because they are the greatest shoes in the world. Thank you, Margaret, for the greatest birthday present of all time. Excepting the Backstreet Boys cd I got in the year 2000.

THE END.

So sometimes

You are just sitting there in the library, and you should be doing your homework but instead you are checking your email and some obnoxious student you are paid to help has emailed you blaming you for not emailing him to tell him when he can take his late test, because obviously you are the one responsible for his grade, not him. And then you are annoyed and want to email him a string of obscenities, but you do not and instead divert your attention to other time-wasting activities on the internet, and then you think about the Hogi Yogi turkey you picked up at the yogurt shop the other day and how you wish the bookstore was still open so you could buy crayons to color it in, and then you start looking at the book titles of the children's books on the floor of the library you are on which all have names like Slam! and The Magical Electronic Elephant and then you think about how some men have really, really thick, dark hair on their hands, and how you are glad you have nothing on your hands except for the letters THS because you saw your little brother's school play today and you listened really hard during all the songs so you could hear his trumpet in spite of all the singing. Then you wondered what you would dream about tonight: your cousin coming home with no hair or as an old crippled Asian man with a thin stringy mustache that touched the floor when he walked into the terminal and you didn't recognize him but then you thought, oh, that must be Casey, and then you started crying because he was home and you were happy. Then you thought I really, really don't want to write those papers, so it's a good thing the internet was invented so I could spend five minutes writing a stream-of-consciousness blog post and then post it without reading it just because it's the internet and who is actually going to read this anyway, and then you felt better.