photo: 'My Angel and My Devil' by Thomas Hawk

You never let me in

and yet your melody haunts me on the nights

when I am least able to sleep.

If someone were observing

would they see both of us,

apart, elusive,

distinguishable?

Or does everyone assume

we are the silhouetted outlines

of drunken doubles?

We are passable as twins

or even as the same person.

But I do not know you well,

and you do not know me 

at all.

Stay here, all the same.

Keep me company.

There is warmth in even 

the ghostliest flesh.

You do not let me in.

i.
Snow erases even itself,
an artist painting white onto an empty canvas;
tricks of the eye, depth and illusion
a blank.

You walk, in a black jacket,
past trees bent with icicles.

We all hold
the weight of winter in our limbs.


ii.
In April,
we feign surprise when snow
flurries past the windowpanes.

Even in this thaw, we feel
frozen inner landscapes

down to the bare bone.

"The wheels just keep on turning.
The men just keep on marching in.
And the inner heart divides."
- Company of Thieves




What we have found here is gold,
if you are on a west-ward search for uncharted
emotional territory.

The mental pictures in my head
shift
to some blurred-edged
image I have of you
now.

I don't have anything to say.
To either of you.
You A are something long awaited.
You B, something I have held onto for too long.

Which is which?

I've been compromising,
-- for who?

This poem was by request: Jarred wanted a poem where everything rhymed in -ology. I compromised and did every other line. A suggestion for the reader; read it out loud, it may flow better. Or read it on the page, if you prefer.

Phenomenology; Or, The Meaning of Life

for Jarred

I'll study anything that ends in -ology

I say to you, with hints of worn frustration,

if it explains (but with no false apology)

the purpose that we crave with desperation.

You look at me, confused, as though mythology

more than the words I give, makes sense to seek.

But daily life is closer to theology,

as every breath is closer to mystique.

As in earthquakes, the grip of such seismology

seizes the richter scale of each experience

and leaves us now to reach for blank cartography,

charting meaning 'til we are granted sense.

Lost in the mists of ancient ideology,

we feel our journey aching for release

through any framing form of etiology,

although no cause, or reason, brings us peace.

We live within neurotics of neurology

and trap ourselves within our own constraints

along with haunting cries of phantomology,

unable to afford themselves restraint.

Awake at night, no help from pharmacology,

we shudder at the sounds of crippling fears,

but then alight in day to ornithology

that sings melodious grace into our ears.

I think you have created angelology,

because you need angelic-lined defense

or some invented kind of teleology,

an end or purpose steeped in recompense.

The ancient Greeks found reason in astrology

as if the stars were formed in strict design,

that then drench heavens with a cardiology

straight from the core of what could seem divine.

If answers born from any etymology,

or definition, give us actuality

that we may miss by searching in biology,

I may be tempted to redefine reality.

Past culture, past our inner anthropology,

we look for answers; where should we begin?:

In landscapes of the personal topography?

How bodies reach for hearts outside their skin?

Indeed, life seems more tender than chaology;

a semblance of an order, more than just

the chaos we prescribe to sociology.

We're lucky when we live for those we trust.

It's not a complex figure of cosmology,

No complications bigger than our hands

Entwined. It all returns to love and more psychology

Of whatever we can use to understand.

In the end, no matter what the -ology

we choose, or where we plant our feet;

we sketch this, love, discrete phenomenology,

to help us make our world seem more complete.

"The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent. But if we can come to terms with this indifference, then our existence as a species can have genuine meaning. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light." - Stanley Kubrick

Poetry is:

- the first thing

- the first in a series of...

- a series, a pattern

- the illusion of a pattern

- making sense of things

- allowing things the sense they deserve, whether all sense or non sense

- another kind of music

- another side of an already-two-sided life

- a window looking out onto something that changes

- a kaleidoscope of images or meaning

- more things to read

- more words to form

- the form my dreams take

- form

- content

- form & content

- so much more than form or content

Freewrite 3

Our house makes me think we may live in a Jazz Club and not even know it (or notice). The kitchen, at least: piano progressions, wailing brass while the onions sizzle and the salad is shaken. The living room may be more closely linked to an opera house, with a cathedral ceiling & a baby grand for company. We sink back into the plush comfort of couches that are directed into the room, and towards the piano, rather than towards the TV, which shows where our priorities lie. The bedroom is a bookstore. Poems sheet the bed.

Freewrite 2

If only we could do more in the first few minutes of waking. Sometimes I wish I could write a poem in half-consciousness, to see the way my mind's handwriting looks (which is why I love the times I fall asleep in class and my notes drag off like this [illegible handwriting]). What does handwriting say of our personalities? When I'm not scribbling, I can actually (and do actually) write very neatly. Precision is the word I would use.

Freewrite 1

Through the library corridor,

you can see her hiding

in a marbled alcove -

shoulders shrunk with concentration

over the magnet of the page

and all you can think of

is how her body sings;

its frame the fiddle

she swung into a melody

until all hours last night,

spilling out the pub door into black,

stumbling you home.

My Fleetwood Cadillac is, for all intensive purposes, a tank with leather interior.

Externally, it is indestructible with two scars: 1) a cracked parking light from months ago when my mother dented a man's side door in a parking lot, and 2) a scratched side mirror from last week when I demolished someone else's by taking a corner too quickly.


Internally, it is the perfect road-trip car, if the engine itself were stable enough to manage long distances. Instead, we frequent the drive-in and pretend it is a sofa.


I am worried that I am the opposite of my car: a soft-leather exterior that cannot afford itself protection, and a tank of an interior who has hardened prematurely in order to compensate.


I would rather be the mirror of my car: an exterior of a woman who can take care of herself, independent, strong, able to be the anchor in the midst of a torrent,
but internally soft, caring and full of trust, protected enough by my substantial exoskeleton.

The stressed syllable is the one anguished between regular words found

in the bowels of the dictionary,

sitting on the shelf of a deceased man's legacy.

"It was finally when I was telling only the truth that I was telling the most lies." - Nietzsche

Billy, the magician I met this weekend, says: Always telling the truth is actually omitting... it is not rendering the relative quality of truth. Not everyone can accept the truth.

Some people would die.

And here I am, thinking honesty was the best policy.

I am learning phonetics, as though it is a new language. See below:

Olivia wrote a vilanelle the other day for our Poetry Workshop called "The Artist".
It is about the many, universal variations of how people react to art, with distancing, perspective. It is about the empathy of an individual subject, of wanting to protect or sympathize with the artist.

"I watched the artist slowly torn." - Oliv

This made me grab hold of a variation; of the "I" as defensive on behalf of the artist. Which led to the following sketchings:

Let me buffer the delivery of reaction.
I will scour the newspapers and cut out the reviews, so you will hold up windows instead
until you are ready to hear them.
I will hold them until that point.

It reminds me of the scene in 'Finding Neverland' when J.M. Barrie's play is a flop, and his maid cuts the reviews out of the newspaper, so that when he is sitting on the park bench and unfolds the paper, we see his face through the outline of the absent article. What love, what empathy. What care.