What I Am Doing to Pretend

The day is dragging, and so I'm here, feeling like I want to put some of my own words down, since I've been posting so much by other people.

I just want to say: I've been stuck. Leave it to a really, really, horrifically unjust working situation to sap the fun right out of my creative self. I couldn't write a word for months. It didn't even feel like I was the same person as the person who wrote words. But I'm so tired of whining about that, and I know the only thing there is to say is, enough. Do it anyway. Write something, anything, now.

And I'm working on that. I've been doing The Artist's Way morning pages most days, and I keep a small red moleskin notebook in my bag, and jot notes on the train. (This morning, a rainy morning, I saw a little Asian boy in yellow rain boots, and yellow raincoat with blue and green trucks on it, and a bandaid on his left cheek. He stopped on the steps inside the train, held is mom's arm while she got out their fare, and I wrote him down.) These are cursory gestures, mostly. But they're what I have, and I think of them building momentum for me.

The other thing I'm doing: submitting two items a day to literary journals. Back in the day, I used to do these all at once. I'd rent a season of Alias, and spend the entire weekend admiring Jennifer Garner's back muscles and stuffing polite queries and stacks of poems into envelopes. It would take me hours upon hours, but I would do 50-75 of these in a go. Now, I've had to accept, my life isn't like that. I don't have hours upon hours. They simply don't exist. But I do have twenty minutes between waking up and washing my hair. Those I have, if I hurry on the hair routine and make my lunch the night before. And it feels measly to only have a wee little pair sent out each day, but they're quickly adding up. In a month, I'll have sixty. Except that sometimes I miss a day or two, and I'm trying to be okay with that, too. If I beat myself up, tell myself what a sorry excuse I am to not even be able to push out two a day (and yes, I AM that mean to myself), I never get back to it. And, like I said, the slow and steady momentum is what I'm counting.

Last weekend, Sam invited me on a writing date, bless his soul. We went to a coffee shop, he ordered me pretty little pot of minty tea, we staked out a couch as our territory, and we both typed for a few hours, our laptops perched on our knees. I don't think I got anything good out of it, but how romantic, no?

Another Poem to Love

Swan Falls in Love With Swan Shaped Boat
Christina Kallery

BERLIN (Reuters) - A swan has fallen in love with a plastic swan-shaped paddleboat on a pond in the German town of Muenster and has spent the past three weeks flirting with the vessel five times its size, a sailing instructor said Friday.

He's not half nuts, this German swan, to love
Something so near the actual, you might squint
from shore, squishing sand beneath your toes,
to see its broad white belly part the shining

green, neck angled always toward the clouds
deflecting every antic of its frenzied,
mini-suitor. This happens, right? Who among
us with a single red corpuscle hasn't dug in

and waited the whole doomed thing to its conclusion,
wanting some chill beauty to paddle its slow turn
toward us on the man-made lake? In your case,
not a Muenster tourist boat, let's hope, but more like

the narcissist with lovely eyes and a voice
to unzip things to, or the one that cut the right
profile but sank like a Petoskey stone. But still,
in spite of tearstains, sucker punches, fists to the glass

jaw, the dumb heart beats, and tries again. See,
there he goes, beak agog and hissing at the rival
birds, wings spread to seem more menacing, black
webbed feet paddling frantic through the algae.

Then night sets and a silver moon beams down
on bird and boat, afloat alone, and in the pale
light looking for all the world like the shape of love.

link: from failbetter

Poem for Sam, Upon the Occasion of Valentine's Day (Or Several Days Thereafter)

This Year's Valentine

by Philip Appleman

They could
pump frenzy into air ducts
and rage into reservoirs,
dynamite dams
and drown cities,
cry fire in theaters
as the victims are burning,
but
I will find my way through blackened streets
and kneel down at your side.

They could
jump the median, head-on,
and obliterate the future,
fit .45's to the hands of kids
and skate them off to school,
flip live butts into tinderbox forests
and hellfire half the heavens,
but
in the rubble of smoking cottages
I will hold you in my arms.

They could
send kidnappers to kindergartens
and pedophiles to playgrounds,
wrap themselves in Old Glory
and gut the Bill of Rights,
pound the door with holy screed
and put an end to reason,
but
I will cut through their curtains of cunning
and find you somewhere in the moonlight.

Whatever they do with their anthrax or chainsaws,
however they strip-search or brainwash or blackmail,
they cannot prevent me from sending you robins,
all of them singing: I'll be there.



from: The Writer's Almanac

A Sweet Little Poem that Made Me Smile

LOVE

What I know about love
could fill a bottle cap.
But sometimes
I use the word because
it feels good
and right to do so.
If we wait to express
something until we fully
understand it, we would
stand around like they
did in the depression
waiting for apples and jobs.


Ann Menebroker