Scaffolding

I know it's technically April now, but I did write this poem on what is still MENTALLY March 31st. So it still counts as my Day 0 poem, darn it.

My thoughts are walled up behind

Rebar and concrete. Enclosed by

The shaky scaffolding of a future

Being carefully built towards the sky.

My words are wrapped up in

Blueprints, sheets of constructional 

Calculations, so esoteric the

English language can no longer

Translate them.

The clarity of mind I held in

Such high regard when my head

Was a meadow, an open field,

Undeveloped,

Has fallen by the wayside as bulldozers

Level the ground and architects

Draft piercing towers and engineers

Lay the foundations and the

Scaffolding. The miles of rickety

Planks on pipe on concrete feet that

Supposedly support it all.

Standing under these steel skeletons I

Can catch glimpses of the far-off

Horizon, and at the summit of my 

Scaffolding I can still reach to touch

The sky, but I know as the walls

Close up those open frames, my

View will slowly shrink until my

Gaze is stuck firmly to the

Sidewalk. I know my wallless world will

Become confined until I can't

Leave this city any longer.

I understand.

I want it to stay this way forever.

I like to scale the massive I-beams and

Sit above the world, feet dangling,

My hand holding a bit of rope in case I

Fall. I like to balance on these naked

Two by fours, walking the gap between

What will one day be buildings. I like

The way my scaffolding looks like

Spiderwebs, and with my hands reaching

Up to the next bar, I can become

The spider. I want my world to remain

Unbuilt.

Let's stop construction, at least for

Now. We'll throw up shanty towns

Instead, little lean-tos and shacks in the

Shadow of my skyscraper skeletons,

Only meant to exist for a month or

A year or maybe

Four. Nothing permanent, nothing

Made of iron or plastic or steel -

I'll live in wood houses with

Tin roofs and sleep under

Tarps when it's wet out, and every

Day I'll take my hammer and nails and

Walk through my unfinished towers to

Just keep on building my

Scaffolding.

XXXX-

2013 Kickoff!

I'm happy to be back in April 2013 for my third year in a row with NaPoWriMo!
Look forward to some angsty poems about the future, many dissertations on my current life, several idiosyncratic science metaphors, and at least one made-up word.
Good luck to all y'all fellow WriMos out there: may the poetry-writing begin!

$200,000

1, 2, 3, 4, 5. 5 zeroes.

My future.

I see it laid out before me in numbers, but not in money.

I pay the 1.25 bus fare every Tuesday night,

I have $1,000 worth of kayak-shaped plywood in my basement,

And if I dropped EVERYTHING today maybe I could get a job that pays $20,000 a year, tomorrow.

That's 4 zeroes.

But as for those 5 zeroes, that two hundred thousands dollars -

That's different.

Yeah, I see it in numbers, but not in money.

I see it in years.

I see it after my first 17 in a hopefully long life,

I see it from my 26th, and LAST, semester in the public school system

And I see 8 more semesters up ahead.

Yeah, I see 4 planned years before me,

But I see the potential, too, for years beyond.

I see 27 month Peace Corps tours

And 4 months as a ski bum,

I see 6 weeks spent in Europe and 1 climbing Mt. Rainier

In my future, I see a 6 year odyssey of travel, of exposure, of life -

But not in those 5 zeroes.

Not in that crippling debt.

In that I see 4 glorious years and 1 decade of soul-crushing worry.

I see a straight path where

4 years of college becomes 2 years of grad school becomes 40 years of work -

But I don't see the less than or greater than symbols, I don't see the variables, where is my choice?

Because let's be honest, numbers can't quantify how I feel about that debt

It's feeling like you're so far underwater you don't know if you'll ever resurface

It's seeing your future stretched out before you and adding two - brick - walls -

It's hearing the hesitation in your friends' voices and wondering, if they are as scared to hell as you are

Because there's no way

You're getting out of this

Whole.

But -

What am I saying.

There's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 - 5 zeroes.

But - they're just zeroes.

They're nothing to be afraid of

If they're nothing

At all.

XXXXX
(This poem is really meant to be PERFORMED, but I don't have footage of my reading, unfortunately.)

Little Reassurances

Tell me it will all matter, someday.

Tell me the world is still spinning.

Tell me the truth would hurt a little less, if I didn't lie so much.

If I absorbed words and stayed quiet.

Tell me that after all this, it will still be the same tomorrow.

Tell me 17 isn't young enough.

Tell me the rain is still and the earth falls towards it.

Tell me I'm alive. Tell me I'm really, really alive.

Tell me the world is small and the world is big and the world is mine

Tell me you're mine.

Tell me anything. Tell me whatever you want,

As long as you tell me in that quiet-real voice of yours,

Which tells me it'll all be okay.

XXX--

Diffuse

Somewhere along the line I started

Trying too hard.

Some days I want to turn everything into a poem, but

Those days nothing gets written down.

Some days I just want to speak. Perform everything

Like it's spoken word or it's slam or it's something,

Even though it's just words.

In the end it's all just words.

God, breathe in breathe in.

Don't exhale. Just breathe in, in,

Don't stop. Let your breathe diffuse.

Some days I pretend to be profound.

It helps me sleep.

It helps me dream.

When every word is precisely significant -

Well, that's a comforting thought.

It means this, too, will fade.

God, breathe out breath out.

Don't. Just don't.

Thoughts diffuse like

Light. Through the blanket

You threw on to keep it from waking your parents.

Starlight doesn't diffuse. It doesn't lose itself through the lightyears. If only

We could be so strong....

God, just shine, shine. God.

Don't stop. Please never say you'll stop.

Unfocused. Like water spreading up through paper, diffused.

Softening it's resistence to the world

Making it unusable.

Making the ink blur, blur. Smear and dull.

Let's run away. Let's exist in letters and pens,

Let's case ourselves up in envelopes and send them over oceans.

If I was contained in these pages, would I be happy?

As happy as I seem between their lines?

God. Don't ask that.

Just write it and be done, send it and be done.

Don't live in those - that's not the way to breathe.

Let go, let it slide down the mail slot.

I want to turn all the lights off. One, two, three.

Let's be black for a while. I have this crazy idea

The night sky will fill up with lights.

My phone is going off. A doorbell song

A jarringly slow jazz number cut in elecronic tones.

And that means love. That means life, means reality.

It's something hard to hold onto, those tinny little notes.

They cut into my skin.

Ah. Breathe. In and out, for once, breathe.

Be even. Let it all flood in and recede

Simultaneously. Don't ever fill up.

God, don't let me fill up.

Let's take the bus again. I like it when the doors close

It feels like coming home.

Like locking the deadbolt.

I don't mind the one twenty-five fare, just

Leave me the transfer slips.

I'll pin them on my wall with your name.

Fading out. Like radio through mountain passes,

Struggling to hold on. Wanting desperately to float away.

Don't try the tunnels, they never work.

They never, never work.

God. Ah. Ah, I am alive. I forget sometimes.

If I lived within this keyboard, would I still?

Would the letters slowly diffuse over my surface,

Form an even plane of words?

Scattered. Like stars, like starlight.

It retreats into your eyes, eventually.

It's traveled so far and it seeks comfort

In those little glass domes. Give them rest.

Then send them back, so they too

Can come home.

Home. Sometimes it feels like my own.

Tonight, it feels still, with the lights on.

Sometimes a thought comes out, and bleaches in the rays

Let's turn the last lamp out. Let's go dark.

And let the light diffuse.

XXX--

Shoulders

Well, the rain fell like

Straight pencil lines,

And my tight shoulders,

My tight soul unfurled

Blossomed like

Like something poetic, maybe a flower,

But for now just call it an umbrella:

Inverted, filling up with rain,

Its little hands gathering up the drops to

Hold them close to its center,

Its spindly branching heart.

Tomorrow when I twist up out of

Spiraled blankets on my bed,

My shoulders, my soul will

Wrap themselves back up

Into sea-shell whorls,

The folding blades of my bare back

Turned towards the glass-cold sky

That gold-melt sunrise sky

That reminds me too much of the summer.

But for now, well, the

Rain falls in

Straight pencil lines,

Graphite marking up the

Dome of sky above me;

And my shoulders, wound

Into spindles around my soul,

Unfurl; like something poetic, maybe,

Or for now let's just say like

A ballerina's bun,

Her hair spiraling out of its tie

To fall heavily down

On her shoulders.

XXXX-

Definitely Not

My head hurts.

My - frontal lobe, it's aching,

No not from - the calculus work I was doing,

No it's not from this

iPad I've been staring at - I

Think I'd know the difference -

No, my

My head hurts

My head hurts not because I've only

Gotten - only - 6 hours of sleep each night,

Not because I've been

Filled to the tip-top, to the peak of my skull,

To the ends of my hair with

Stress over the future,

No,

That's not why it's

Just that my

My head hurts

My head really - hurts -

And it's not

It's not because I ate less dinner and

More toast that

Inexplicably included brown sugar, it's not

It's not that I've been indoors all afternoon with these

Piercingly inorganic lights no it's

It's not for those reasons it's that my

My head hurts

Just that my head hurts

Because -

Because of you or maybe because -

Because of lack of you

My head hurts

Because I

I wish so goddamn desperately you were here and I

I can't pretend that this doesn't feel like

Living "normally" -

This wash of numbing - of dulling -

This ache that is only that my

My head hurts -

My head hurts -

Because you're not

Not here with me -

No not

Because of the caffeine in that

Chai tea I drank half an hour ago, but

Because that tea

Reminded me

Of you.

XX---

Off-Season Poetry

Well, it's not April, but why not put a little poetry up here anyway. I'll be posting some of the stuff I've written in the last four or five months.

THE END

WOW.
Well, that's that; April's officially over, and with it, NaPoWriMo. I enjoyed it so much this year that I'm considering challenging myself to a poem a week for the next few months. We'll see how that goes...
Until next year!

From One Month Ago

You know it’s been, one month and nothing’s changed

I’m still here thinking about that feeling, trying to regain

The poem that started off this track, it’s the same but now

I’m writing for the future instead of what’s back, behind –

You know it’s all, it hasn’t changed for what,

For nine months now at least and I’m here, still the same

Pages open, the thousands of photos and, the tens of

Thousands of words I’ve read, letters on my knuckles like

Letters on your back, like letters I still lack I can’t gain,

I follow this pattern again and again and I don’t. I don’t try

To escape from this loop it makes me smile more sweetly than

The bitterness I cry, I don’t ache – like the way I did

The rake across the lungs in that grade, it’s different from

The same. Instead I smile so damn, so wide, my friends all ask

I stopped trying to hide, I let go and they, they turn away but

It’s still there, so raw and so full and so bare in my lungs

In my chest, I don’t wait I don’t rest I explode, open and up into it

It’s the same. It remains. It’s the same.

And no, nothing’s changed from one month ago, and no

I don’t try to pretend I’m not waiting on edge

At the edge of my book is the dates – and they wait

And no, nothing’s changed from one month ago. I’m still

Writing poetry about leaning out the window sill,

Waiting for the next, explosion of smiles and meanwhile

I wait still.

X----