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This week, I stepped into The Arena, an addressless destination for creative freedom. I entered hoping to find the accountability and grit to grind towards an exceptionally praiseworthy and shareable piece of writing, but stepped away with something even better: the permission to have fun.
I recently purchased the URL and website hosting for this blog, pleasantly and humbly surprised by how many of you read it. As the primary source of proof that I do actually have thoughts, posting here brings me a great deal of joy and satisfaction. It also intimidates me. Over time, I have come to expect a certain level of writing from myself -- some personal blend of apologetic pretension, mild quip, and weary but resolute optimism. (Perhaps you have come to expect something similar too.) At my best, it comes easily; I am naturally annoying and prone to oversharing, and also believe in you very much. Other times, attempting to write in this particular style of “good” feels so insurmountable that I simply opt to write nothing instead. This seems like a bad system: either continually one-up myself or stop trying altogether. It's just that I respect you so much, dear anonymous reader, and want to deliver you The Best Possible Content. But ultimately, I know that I am incapable of producing dazzling truths and hot takes endlessly. I can only offer you what I have, and sometimes it will be of middling quality. Kind person that you are, I think you will allow me this trespass, especially if I assure you that I had a nice time doing it. Here's to finding the zest and sucking the marrow, to playing, to spending a little time everyday just making something. Here are seven poems, one for each day of the week.
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when worms have sex
they line their bodies up side-by-side like twin exhausts billowing out of a steady plane. fascinated, i read webpages about “simultaneous hermaphroditism” “slime tubes” “segments 9, 10, and 11” and the “clitellum” then dug at wet soil with bare hands, like a pervert, to see for myself. the last time you and i were prone in proximity i didn’t know about the worms yet. i was preoccupied with other things, like the dinner menu and being loved in grand ways. i wasn’t aware that lying next to each other is a goal of its own. i envy the worms, who have less to prove and get to wriggle peacefully in the dirt all around us. last june i made fruit tarts
to mark a new year and they were "really good!" except for i underbaked the shells and couldn’t find peaches and also the custard wasn’t as smooth as it could have been but no matter we finished them within the week and when you said "i love you" in front of my whole family i believed it easily celebrating life means celebrating moving too fast and making the best of and still not getting it right in the end but enjoying despite my ride home goes yellow, blue, green, green, green
the staccato of life kicks at my heels, strokes my back in brittle and lustrous chrome chrome is the third hardest metal and comes in any color you want, but carbon on a finger still wins. i'm thinking of you (and you and you and you) what we lost to become more complete now, the parts of us that are taking and being taken how can i be sure it's a zero-sum game unless i hit zero? it does not need to be perfect; i am driving too fast to see or maybe i meant the opposite. i am driving too fast to see it does not need to be perfect. A grasshopper died outside of my apartment. I've been stepping over its corpse for the past week. In memory, a haiku:
"mr. grasshopper my front door - your resting place i'm honored, and not" |
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