Shorthand for Nothing

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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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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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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