Shorthand for Nothing

I left this on a napkin once for a waitress who just looked like poetry. I don’t mean that to be weird, but she was cute on a level that made me want to leave this for her. I don’t think I ever saw her again, which is weird because I was there all the time.

She smells like quiet drives in the rain.
The weather is cold and unpleasant
but the car is warm
and the windshield wipers freshly changed
(And from the car it’s easy to imagine:
the rain is clean and renewing)

And despite the clouds blocking the sun
it’s bright out
and the colors are clearer
than the sunniest of days.
Such a day could not be called dreary.

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Here is the rest of it. There is literally no break, I just randomly cut off where it was before. Click the clicky for part one.

MELISSA: Because I don’t understand me. (Pause. Rising, but not to get away from NICHOLAS.) I don’t–there are things I don’t know, and if I don’t know them then you can’t. And I–you can’t treat me like I’m a child or, or like you know more about me than I do. Because you know me, Nicholas. Right? You know that I’m me. That’s the best thing about me.

NICHOLAS: I guess.

MELISSA: Or at least the most salient. And you’re not–you make it sound like you’re better than me, and I don’t like that. I don’t want to–that didn’t sound like I think I’m–

NICHOLAS: I understand.

MELISSA: And I really–you–you’re a good guy most of the time, Nicholas. I–I’m sorry if I snapped at you.

NICHOLAS: I understand.

MELISSA: It’s just that–well, I–

NICHOLAS: And I’m sorry, too. Sometimes I just wish you’d–sorry, sorry. I don’t want to go into that.

MELISSA: (Reflexively; without apparent irony.) Christ, Nick. Don’t apologize. I hate apologies.

(NICHOLAS watches her for a sign she is joking; he sighs heavily and stands up.)

NICHOLAS: I did have a reason. Apart from just–

MELISSA: (Wryly; she appears to be on her guard again, and is now enjoying herself.) Apart from being the worst person in the world?

(As NICHOLAS continues, MELISSA sits down begins unwrapping her scarf lazily. She is no longer watching him.)

NICHOLAS: –apart from that, yeah. I felt like, tonight, there was–well, I guess I just wanted to know which game you were playing. I guess you won’t tell me now.

MELISSA: (Momentarily startled; she quickly finishes unwrapping the scarf and leans back to cover this.) That would be telling, wouldn’t it?

(NICHOLAS sighs and shakes his head and sits down. There is a long pause. She is staring into the middle distance, lost in thought. He keeps glancing at her and opening his mouth as if to say something, but on seeing her decides against.)

MELISSA: (Hesitant.) You know, it’s weird for me to say this, but there is a reason I was so harsh.

NICHOLAS: You mean me, right? You’re going to say it’s because of me.

MELISSA: (Confused.) Well, yes. You’re–

NICHOLAS: (Rising suddenly.) Oh, fuck you. I don’t know why I bothered. I tried to be nice, you know. I didn’t have to. I don’t have to deal with you at all. I didn’t have to invite you out, or care about–(He stops himself and finishes with a line that is clearly not what he was going to say,) care about what you have to say.

MELISSA: No, you–

NICHOLAS: No, I get it. Say no more. You win again. I should have known you’d never change. You never do.

MELISSA: (Explodes.) How dare you? You never listen. You never understand. You don’t know how much alike we are. You don’t know anything at all. You don’t know–

NICHOLAS: How much fun you have tormenting me? I get it, Melissa. I get that you don’t care about anything except your fucking games. Keep them. I’m done.

MELISSA: Christ, Nick.

NICHOLAS: Are you going to sulk because you can’t have your way now? You’re such a child. You’re such a child.

(NICHOLAS turns his back. MELISSA stares at him. She is more hurt than angry, and this has her at a loss for words.)

MELISSA: (Quietly, with an effort.) Nicholas, I want you to listen to me.

NICHOLAS: (Still fuming, but now he is questioning himself.) Why should I give you what you want?

MELISSA: Nicholas, please. I– (Trails off.)

NICHOLAS: (Turning to face her again.) You what? You WHAT? What do you want, Melissa?

MELISSA: I just want to–to say–

NICHOLAS: Do you want to get the last word in? You can have it. I don’t even know why I talk to you.

MELISSA: It’s–I think–I think I–

NICHOLAS: (As if addressing a tantruming child.) Use your words.

(This is too much. MELISSA stares, aghast, and rises.)

MELISSA: I think–I think I should just walk.

NICHOLAS: No, wait–

(MELISSA exits quickly, leaving her scarf. NICHOLAS stares after her, fuming at first, then starts after her, stops himself, takes the scarf, starts again, then stops one last time and sinks into a seat on the bench, neurotically wrapping the scarf around his hands.)

(Fin.)

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This is the first of three or so play proposals I’m going to write and present to my group. This one was the easiest because I had already written the characters, and I already basically knew their story. This is only four pages or so of the play, which I expect will be seven to ten pages long. Thoughts are welcome. I may finish this even if they ultimately don’t decide to go with it. I may also call the play version Game Theory, but that may be too nerdy and not pretentious enough. This is a pretty rough draft, also.

The play opens on the bench of a bus stop. It is not particularly important in what city the bus stop exists, except that it is winter in the northern U.S. The lighting comes from above, as a streetlight, and ideally there is the suggestion of snow on the ground–nothing too heavy, but enough to emphasize that it is winter.

NICHOLAS is standing with his hands in his pockets. He wears a winter jacket and a scarf, but no hat or gloves. He is not looking at MELISSA, who is seated on the bench, bundled in hat, scarf, jacket, and gloves.

Despite being more lightly dressed, NICHOLAS does not look bothered by the cold; as the play opens he is simply looking down the road, perhaps thinking he sees the bus coming. He is still enjoying himself from an enjoyable evening. His back is to MELISSA, who, in contrast, is shivering, and watching him. She had as much fun as he did but is currently simply bothered that it is cold.

MELISSA: Is that it?

NICHOLAS: No.

MELISSA: This bus is never coming, Nicholas. We should have walked.

NICHOLAS: You’re just being impatient, Mel.

MELISSA: (Absent but impatient. She has made this correction to Nicholas a hundred times before.) Melissa. And yes, I am impatient.

NICHOLAS: (Amused, sitting.) It’s got to be two hours’ walk home from here.

MELISSA: It’s cold, Nicholas. (Rising, checking the schedule posted on the sign.) What time is it?

NICHOLAS: None at all.

MELISSA: (Jokingly, but she is clearly a little annoyed.) Then what good are you?

NICHOLAS: None at all. When’s the next bus?

MELISSA: I don’t remember.

(She sits, facing away from him. For a moment neither of them speaks. He rubs his hands together and blows on them–his first sign of noticing the chill. Eventually she turns so that she is no longer facing away.)

MELISSA: I was glad you invited me out tonight, though.

NICHOLAS: Hey, it’s nothing. I hadn’t seen you since–

MELISSA: Yeah. I had fun. Really.

NICHOLAS: Good.

MELISSA: Even if you should have let me drive. If it weren’t for you and your obsession with public transit–it’s cold, Nicholas.

(She is joking, but NICHOLAS is evidently annoyed by this. His next line is spoken with a forced, chilly calm.)

NICHOLAS: You didn’t have to come with me, you know. It’s your car. Go where you want.

MELISSA: (Rolling her eyes. She is quite aware that she has offended him.) Christ, Nick. Don’t treat me like a child.

(NICHOLAS is startled at the shortening of his name. He calms down, but his demeanor is different. He is sullen now, and hurt.)

NICHOLAS: (Trying for sincerity and faltering.) I’m–it’s just–with the roads, and–I didn’t want to–I didn’t think you cared.

MELISSA: I didn’t. (Pause.) I’m now realizing my mistake. But I mean it, Nicholas. I had fun tonight. I’d really like to do it again some time.

NICHOLAS: I don’t think you’ve ever admitted to a mistake before.

MELISSA: I’m sure I have.

NICHOLAS: Not once.

MELISSA: Maybe I’ve just never made a mistake before. One of our many differences. Is that so hard to believe?

(Beat.)

NICHOLAS: (Wryly. It is evident there is a point to this.) Remember the time I brought you to game night? And you challenged me to a game of chess?

MELISSA: (She sees where this is going and doesn’t like it.) I was drunk. I barely remember.

NICHOLAS: (Insistent.) And you were so sure you’d beat me. You told me that, when you started. “I will make you lose,” you said.

MELISSA: I was joking, Nick.

NICHOLAS: (This time ignoring the shortened form of his name.) And you said you’d only come to watch, because you only play games you know you can win, which is why you’d–

MELISSA: (Speaking over him; he ignores her.) Yes, all right, I get it.

NICHOLAS: –play me at chess. And then when you really started losing, you–

MELISSA: (Rising, both physically and in voice. She is angry now.) I get the point, okay? Yes, I remember. I made stupid moves on purpose so, so–

NICHOLAS: So I couldn’t claim victory.

MELISSA: NO! (Pause.) And so what? What do you want, Nick? Do you want to prove I’m not perfect? Is that it? Prove I don’t like losing? Beat me at my own game? Well congratulations! You win. Are you happy? You finally beat me at something? Christ. I don’t understand you. One minute we’re having a perfectly nice evening and even having fun–FUN, Nick, do you remember that?–and the next you’re–you’re–attacking me because of some, some personal failing.

NICHOLAS: I’m tired of–of whatever it is you do, Mel. (She mutters “Melissa” irritably but he ignores her and she doesn’t seem to expect him to do otherwise.) And maybe I do it too but just once, just once, I want you to be honest with me.

MELISSA: (Now pointedly ignoring him; turning her back and looking at the bus schedule.) Where is that fucking bus?

NICHOLAS: (Rising now, also.) Don’t ignore me.

(MELISSA fumbles in her purse for something. Eventually, frustrated, she removes her gloves and throws them on the ground.)

NICHOLAS: (Kneeling to retrieve the gloves.) Talk to me, Melissa.

(She stiffens and stops fumbling, and goes back to sit down on the bench. NICHOLAS remains where he is, watching her, but otherwise still. There is a long pause.)

MELISSA: (Cryptic.) I never play a game I can’t win.

NICHOLAS: I gathered that. (Pause. When it becomes evident MELISSA is not going to say anything further.) I want more than that, Mel.

MELISSA: Yes, I know. (Pause.) And that’s all you’re getting. There’s no winning this game you want to play. And that’s all everything is, okay? It’s a game and I don’t really like the odds, so I’m not going to play. Okay? Are you happy? Are you convinced?

NICHOLAS: (Sitting down next to her, not uncomfortably close, but close enough that she looks uncomfortable.) No. That’s just another game. I know you, Melissa. I know how you work. I know you can’t just mean what you say, or say what you mean, or whatever. And I think you can, if you want to, but you don’t. You know?

MELISSA: (Amused, but not unkindly.) I don’t think you know me very well at all, Nicholas.

NICHOLAS: No, I do, because we’re exactly the same. It’s painful sometimes. Sometimes I see you and I just want to–

MELISSA: (Interrupting. No longer amused.) No we’re not. You don’t know me. You don’t know anything. Isn’t that your big thing? “Just enough knowledge to know I don’t know anything?” I’m not some–some–some–

NICHOLAS: Doppelganger? (MELISSA is flustered and gives up.) I know you don’t understand, but–

MELISSA: Fuck you. I understand everything that matters.

NICHOLAS: What’s that?

MELISSA: ME. Maybe I don’t know everything about me but I know enough to know, we’re not the same. You’re not me, you have never been me, you don’t know what being me is like, and you–

NICHOLAS: So you don’t understand me?

MELISSA: No!

NICHOLAS: So how do you know we’re not the same?

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This one is nice.

after a shower and a shave
and generally cleaning up
for no one but myself
and maybe a dream
but mainly myself

i’m out of several things (bread
cheese
aftershave) but it’s been a long night
and i’ll still be hungry in the morning

what’s really bothering me is
(apart from everything else)
does anybody else notice
when it’s been a long night?

I think I wrote it because I wanted to write one without capital letters. Success! It is about how sometimes, when I haven’t slept well or I skipped a shower or I haven’t shaved I wonder if anyone notices. Sometimes the idea of someone saying “man, you look rough” has this weird appeal to it. I don’t know.

When I showed this one to Janie, she said that “this one would be cool to find somewhere on a dirty scrap of paper.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

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New feature! I am going to tell you what you should listen to. I’ve had people ask me where they should start listening to some bands, so I thought it might be helpful to write up a little guide with that in mind. Everything that I listen to is excellent, of course, but it can be difficult to choose an in, as it were. Today we will look at The Decemberists‘ catalog. (Click the clicky for their Myspace page, with some tracks, to listen to.) (more…)

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This one is from a different archive: from a bunch of papers and printouts I made for a class. I believe the assignment had something to do with writing about a room from our childhood.

She used to sing every night
quiet, peaceful songs.
I’ve forgotten most of them
but I still remember her voice,
and her silhouette on the edge of the bed.
Her voice was not a siren’s,
but the call of gulls and a familiar foghorn announcing:
the ship has safely returned.
It brought us peace and guided our voyage
to the land of dreams–but dreamers often lie.

It was dark as she sang,
so we could see nothing
(not her, not my father’s chest against the wall,
filled with treasures from across the sea).
Her ship sailed by night,
so our ears were content
to hear the gulls and the waves
lull us to sleep.

One evening the sea was quiet
and the horn did not sound.
We expected shipwreck
but heard nothing
and slept uneasy that night,
no song to guide us to our dreams.

The horn we heard at sunrise was not hers.
It was light and warm and everything was wrong:
the stars were gone by day.
My father’s ship sang songs of shipwreck,
and it sounded empty and hollow.
It did not weep. I took up his ensign
and followed his course:
there was no other course to follow.

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This one is patterned on this poem by ee cummings. It is called Not A Cynic, which is kind of a thing.

Humanity, I hate you
because you laugh at misfortune
and your smiles are insincere.
I hate you because
you’re afraid,
and afraid of talking about being afraid.
I hate how you
never stay long
and don’t say goodbye.
I hate how you always remind me
how much I’ll miss you.
I hate that you
are cruel and sweet and sad and hilarious.
I hate your gentle caress
late at night,
chasing my fears away
and my worries
and all of my doubts. Humanity,
I love you.

This is probably my more successful patterned-on-another-poem poem. The other one is called Song of Myself, patterned on some random lines from the Whitman poem of the same name.

If my lovers suffocate me,
it is my own fault,
not hers,
not an accident of my creation
or upbringing,
but my fault for giving her
anything less than myself.

Listen.
If I am not I,
I am nothing,
whatever my intentions.
This is clear to me now:
I can be no other.
I hide nothing from
the searching eyes of the world.
If I sound another’s battlecry,
what is it but some barbaric yawp,
some shapeless noise
polluting the night?

I let the chilling wind
embrace me,
smiling as it stings my eyes,
freezes my flesh.
It is around me,
until ‘me’ is all there is,
my suffering, my triumph,
everything,
and I will not go quietly.

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Unlike the European explorers,
I cannot land my fleet at new worlds,
my holds laden with gifts,
and marvel at someone so different.
There are no new names
to give new wonders–
but there are no new wonders.
Everything is named and charted,
and not even by a man
desiring to find and name new things.
Even so,
I long for unfamiliar territory,
for a land to explore,
some new world to claim as home.

Sometimes I write poems about things that are historical. This one is about how much it bothers me that the new world was found by people who were mostly interested in new trade routes, and now I’m looking back at it and thinking that they were probably still just as excited to find this completely new world. Even so: the world is pretty much charted now, and sometimes that’s sad.

I’m not so keen on subjugating the natives and killing them with my diseases, but that’s not the point.

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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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