Shorthand for Nothing

I like this one.

So much reminds me of you,
but mostly, it’s the dark,
and the faint glow of
red numerals on a digital clock.
There was nothing to see,
no sound but your voice,
and despite the clock
I never noticed how late it was–
it was always too early for that.

In the desperate solitude of the dark
I can still hear you
telling stories I never quite understood.
I’m not sure I do, still–
it was really just you I was hanging on to,
not your every word.
Sometimes I still talk to you,
knowing you can’t hear me,
when it’s dark
and I’m reminded of you.

There are some nice lines in here! This one is about the same girl most of these ended up being about. I’d spend hours talking to her on the phone every night, just lying in the dark. My alarm clock was the only illumination. The reason this one is remarkable is it’s the most directly and honestly about her. This was deliberate. The title (which one or two people might know; I won’t repeat it here) has her name in it. It’s one of two things I’ve written which does.

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These were the first two poems I wrote in 2008. I almost gave them each their own post, but there’s a striking similarity between the two. The first one is about new year’s.

Did you kiss me at midnight
because you wanted to kiss me,
or because you wanted to start the year
on something positive?
Or does the question even matter?
If it was only the moment,
can I not recreate the moment?
Did I not give you
something positive to start the year on?

There is, I think,
a fundamental difference between you and I:
while I labor over meaning and motive,
you just act.
This is why, when looking back,
you kissed me at new year’s,
and I’m still worrying about it.

Again, I’m not sure if I had someone in mind when I wrote this, though I do know that if I did, we did not kiss at new year’s. I think I was working on New Year’s Eve. We had tacos.

This is the second one:

Mostly, I hoped that
everything would be okay.
That was two years ago.
I really thought it would,
like wishing had power–
not wishing
on childhood superstitions
(though I did that, too)
but simple hope.

I’d styled myself a realist,
which is a pessimist in denial,
but she drove that all away.
I smiled, laughed, dreamed,
hoped,
but the worst thing was
I believed it.

There’s a difference
between hope and hope:
the trick
is not to confuse the two.

This one is pretty disjointed, but it has some good lines. I like that I used the same device to end both of these poems. (I’m also really fond of starting them with questions, especially “Did you/did your” questions.) Normally this wouldn’t merit attention, but they were also right next to each other.

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This is from Wallace Shawn’s The Designated Mourner. All due thanks to Mr Sean Nelson.

After the night I saw Judy, as the months passed, I lost my job, but I kept up my habit of walking through the city. And there was something else that began to happen, where every time I thought of the word “I,” it sort of echoed or rang out in my mind, and I was troubled by it. The idea of the self was obsessing me now. What were we all constantly talking about? I didn’t get it. The self. The self. What was the self? Well, one afternoon, one cloudy, drizzly, late afternoon, I was sitting in my apartment writing in my diary, and unfortunately I’d managed to spill my tea, , and my hands were wet, and so was my diary, and my clean laundry, and a bunch of forks, and the clothes I was wearing, and as I reached for a rag and started to wipe things up, I suddenly understood it, very very clearly — and the clarity made me queasy, as if a door had been opened and bright light and oxygen had flooded into my brain. As the rag sat soaking in the tea on my lap, I understood that my self was just a pile of bric-a-brac — just everything my life had quite by chance piled up — everything I;d seen or heard or experienced — meticulously, pointlessly piled up and saved, a heap of nothing, a heap of nothing which had somehow been compressed into a sort of form and had somehow succeeded in coming alive, and which quite ridiculously now sort of demanded tribute, declared itself great. And the amazing thing was that I’d gone along with it. We all had! We had all bowed down, we had all worshipped, each one kneeling before his own separate self, each apparently obsessed by a single question to the exclusion of everything: what will happen to this self which is mine? Will “I” achieve magnificence and success?? Will “I” be admired? Will my marvelous self express itself? How idiotic! And how boring. How boring, how boring, how boring, how boring. And was this obsession even sincere? Did we honestly feel that no questions but these were of any interest? I wondered if the show of adoration wasn’t perhaps just a little overplayed — whether all this overacting didn’t possibly reveal an element of pretense.

And as I thought all this, I felt I saw standing by the window in the fading light that very creature, that self which was mine, that ludicrous figure whom I’d approached until now with such ostentatious displays of respect — such fervor, groveling, hand-kissing and tears — and I went up to the figure, the unpleasant little self, and sort of pulled it by the arm in the fading light, and I spun it around toward me. And then I threw it on its back and kicked it smartly in the face, and then I sat on top of it, grabbed its neck, and choked it and strangled it and bashed its skull against the floor until it stopped squealing, stopped gasping, and was gone.

And what a fucking relief it was. All that endless posturing, the seriousness, the weightiness, that I was so sick sick sick to death of — I’d never have to do any of it ever again.

I would walk the streets like a cheerful ghost, and no one would know my secret. It would really be funny.

Reposted for reference, I guess.

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Like many of my writing, this one has something of a history:

You were an ancient clock,
beautifully crafted,
carefully honed,
Roman numerals on the facing,
wound daily,
maintained carefully,
and none could deny your beauty,
your effectiveness.
I could never bring myself
to replace a part, however,
and even with loving maintenance,
painstaking repairs,
eventually your endless tick
stopped.

Only I could see it coming:
to the last you gave no sign,
no indication,
neither through arrhythmic ticking
or inaccurate timekeeping.
You kept your secrets,
and even I could scarcely tell–
I swore there would be more time.
When at length you would tell time
no more,
I felt almost cheated:
no climactic moment,
no epic time–
just one last tick, and then
silence.

I wrote an earlier poem called Like Clockwork, which was sort of about an old broken clock I had but was mostly about August of 2005, when it was written. The clock was very beautiful and that poem is one of the ones that I’ve always remembered writing. I know everything about it. It is reproduced at the end of this post. I have cleaned it up slightly; at the time of writing I did not think capital letters looked very nice.

So “Like Clockwork, Revisited” is about another relationship, and you can see how differently I viewed it. I can also perfectly see all of the problems that perspective came with, but that is another story altogether.

The original piece is here:

You were the gears,
I was the pendulum.
The clock was wound–
together, at first,
we kept perfect time.
But winding won’t last
forever.

You turned more slowly,
and I could not keep
swinging on forever–
not without you helping.
The harmony that made us tick,
so beautiful, so perfect,
slowly faded away.

Our chimes were once a symphony
sounding by the quarter hour,
announcing to the world
our perfect time.
But it’s only haunting now:
the keys are wrong,
the sound is broken.

You would not turn
and I would not tick.
We sat on the shelf for a time.
The hands did not move,
the chimes did not play.
Our music was silenced.
Wind it up–

The time was not perfect,
the chimes were not right,
and nothing was quite the same.
Your spokes were rusted,
I became arrhythmic,
never could keep going without you.
The clock stopped.

“Wind it up” is lifted directly from Radiohead.

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Another one from the archives.

You’d make a wonderful actress.
I can see you on the silver screen,
eyes bright, a room full of people,
a captive audience–
something you never had in me.
They would hang on your every word,
make a note of everything you say,
because, after all,
you’re the star.

Would you even enjoy it?
The attention, the praise,
the undue adulation,
everything I never gave you?
Or do you think you’re entitled,
that your magnificence is eminent?
Either way I can see you,
accepting an award, feigning modesty,
but in your eyes,
there’s always that look,
like you deserve all this.

This is one that struck me on the read through I was mentioning a few days ago, because I wasn’t sure if I’d written it about a real person. That is, I am pretty sure I know who this could be about, though I’m by no means certain, but it’s not a very good description of her. I like this one, though it’s not the most brilliant thing ever penned, and it sounds a little petulant.

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I should probably qualify this: these poems came from an aborted attempt to write a poem every day in the year 2008. I lasted for a month, so I ended up with about 30 or so poems. I may post all of them eventually, but some of them stood out as being worth writing about. They aren’t all very good, but I found them interesting for one reason or another.

This is a pair of poems that I seem to have unintentionally given nearly identical titles. The first one is called “I Promised” and it goes like this:

You probably don’t remember
everything I promised,
but I do. They were the kind
where every one of them is “never”
or “always”
or something like that.
Now I always wonder
whether that was a good idea.
See, it was meant to make you happy
(or maybe that was me)
but I don’t know if you cared,
and anyway you don’t now.
But a promise ought to mean something,
and I can’t help but wonder
if maybe you still think it did.
I think I meant it.

I wrote a lot of poems and stories on the variation of “words like everything.” I will probably keep doing so occasionally. This is a pretty straightforward treatment of the subject of promises and words like everything.

The second one was called “I Promise” (present tense!):

It seems like
any time I make
some sort of promise
I always forget
about the variables
that go into
decision making
and assume that
everyone
acts like I
want them to.
It’s never
like I imagined.
Sometimes I wonder
if my imagination
isn’t working
against me
so I don’t
have to fulfill
my promises.

I’m not entirely sure what’s going on in this one.

What’s interesting here is the thought that maybe these were meant to be related. I have definitely played games with titles before, linking concepts. It’s actually one of my favorite things to do with otherwise unrelated stories, because the title can give them a really strong thematic link. Since these were never intended for public consumption I’m not sure if that was the plan. Nevertheless…

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A quick one.

The worst thing you ever did
is something I can barely attain.
For each of my aspirations,
you surpass it flawlessly,
achieving great heights,
as though my effort was nothing.
Maybe it was,
but is that any reason
for you to go on like this:
better and more talented than me
and not even trying as hard?

No joke, I think this one is about how awesome I am.

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(I think I’m going to do more of these ‘post a thing that I wrote and then ramble about it’ things.) I once sent a friend of mine some of a batch of poems that I wrote in early 2008. As I read through them and sent them to her, I commented on some of them. On one I noted that its meaning was inscrutable even to me. It started with the lines “Left turn only / once defined your destination,” and I’m still not sure what that means. The full text is here:

“Left turn only” once defined
your destination.
And, after hours on a Tuesday,
the blur of traffic signals–
the prohibitive reds, flashing
but never changing–
became too much,
and you would stand for hours
at a single intersection.

By day you could follow the crowds,
but at night,
with only the occasional passing car,
the isolation was crushing.
None of the distant lights
cared for you,
if they even knew you existed.
The most reaction you could get
came from the crosswalk signals.
Even then,
it was only so long
before “don’t walk” would flash again.

Did I just like the line? Did it mean something? I have no idea. I wrote this poem about making an impact, about isolation, and about destinations, but I don’t know why I decided that left turn only would have any meaning. Was it merely suggesting that, at night, you don’t have to turn left in the left turn lanes in Seattle (which the poem, as much of my poetry, was definitely about)? Was it instead suggesting that the person described in the poem was once defined by restriction and was now paralyzed by freedom?

I don’t know these things, and this is weird, even to me. I could probably tell you what inspired most of my writing, even though I am probably too prolific for my own good at times. I know these stories. And yet, here’s this. Some of the others are the same way: I have no idea what I was thinking when I wrote it. Not in a ‘wow, this is terrible’ sense, but in a ‘I don’t recognize these emotions’ sense. I’m not sure how I feel about that.

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I’ve been reading various authors talking about the theory that democratic states never or almost never make war on each other. The theory goes that they will still make war on non-democratic states (perhaps because those states are non-democratic), and that non-democratic states will make war on anything, but that democratic states never attack democratic states. I’d heard this theory before, of course, but this time, reading through it, something struck me about it.

These authors are describing democracy as a plague of zombies.

My thought process here went through two steps, actually. First, I was struck by how like a game of zombies this might be. One of those games where one (or more) person(s) starts as the democratic state zombie, and the democratic states zombies then go around trying to convert infect non-democratic states zombies, and some of the more enterprising non-democratic states zombies might try to throw their comrades under the bus in the hopes of surviving for longer. Some might willingly join the democratic zombie team, because of their love of peace brains.

Of course, I quickly realized that it was like a game of zombies because this also more or less adequately describes an actual zombie plague. The zombies, whatever their starting numbers, have an all-consuming hatred of everything that is not a zombie, and desire to either convert it to their number or destroy it. But zombies, in my mind somewhat confusingly, never fight among themselves. Perhaps undead flesh is not as delicious, or is not nutritious in the least. Perhaps there is an alliance there. Who can say?

In the meanwhile, the survivors cannot be relied upon to band together against the outbreak. Some small bands of survivors might, but by and large it is every man for himself. Some will fight one another. Sometimes this is for survival, sometimes for resources, sometimes because they just don’t like each other. Sometimes they hope that, by appeasing the zombies with a sacrifice of flesh, they will be left alone.

But as modern American thought would be quick to remind you, you cannot avoid the plague forever. Eventually the zombies will win.

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My netbook has arrived! And the case thing I ordered and my external DVD drive thing. I have finally, after many months of dealing with my laptop’s manifold issues, reached a point where I have basically full functionality again. On everything! I can watch DVDs, listen to CDs, carry a functioning laptop with me, get things to work that don’t work properly on Linux. The woes that were caused by tea being spilt on my laptop have finally been more or less mended!

I haven’t had a lot of chance to play with the netbook yet, but I am pleased with it so far, and will have a more thorough review in the future. I did play with XP and give it most of the settings I’ve had forever (on my old XP machine, which is virus-infested and as such I haven’t managed to salvage the data yet). There is just no wireless in my dorm so I haven’t had the opportunity to log on to the interwebs and really play around and buy Diablo. I think that will be my activity for tomorrow.

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