steak knives

I was looking today at the sleeves of my favorite shirt. The shirt is a blue, long sleeved long john shirt. I noticed again that over the wrists on both arms of the shirt there were cuts over the delicate flesh of my underarms. I had been noticing it the last few times that i had worn this shirt and I couldn't come up with an explination for these lacerations. It just struck me today how long i had owned this shirt. I used to wear this shirt when i was a sophmore in highschool. I remember now how i would wear this shirt under a t-shirt that something delightfully cliché high school rebellion on the front of it like an interlacing of bones that makes a line or maybe there would have been some flames to show just how badass i was. I remembered the way that I would wear the undershirt. I would take those shirts to my kitchens and expose wrist. then i would take out a steak knife (never scissors). A steak knife shouting with teeth and i would run this blade over the wrist untill i had a slit. I would use this as a thumbhole so that my shirt sleeve formed a sort of half glove for my hands. I don't call this an undershirt anymore. I just wear it without any type of dramatic cover. but my shirt, even though I forgot how they got there, still carries it's scars from when it wasn't enough to wear as my only shirt

letting go

It is so good to finally feel like I have closure. I feel like I finally have a place of understanding with my ex-girlfriend now. Both of us can clearly see that we had a good connection, yes, but we are just not right for each other. I feel no wanting to be with her in a relationship anymore. not even the smallest trace and that is a great feeling. It was had to let go of someone i was so close with. she was my first love. We are friends right now too but we have both admitted that we are going to drift apart. It feels so good to just say that and be OK with it. I find that I am more myself now than i ever was with her. I like who i am right now. I finally feel like i am completely ready to try to be with someone else (*wink wink* (sorry I couldn't help the awful humor)) Life feels so open to me right now. I know, this is a lot of "I feels" but I just love my outlook on life right now. I have my optimism back. I love that i am getting back to the roots of myself. I feel like I can look at myself and say "I kick ass". If you can't do that, I pity you. things seem to be falling into place for me now that I can say that. Well there are somethings that I am unsure about but there are good signs.

I thought it a bit out of odds that I have this site going yet i have hardly any poetry of my own on here. to alleviate this, I have recently added a few of my poems. I hope anyone who actually reads this enjoys them and I will post/write more soon i hope.

A Tiger Downtown

He was doing little more than lying on the ground
He rubbed his paws with his tongue and wafted his tail.
As the sun warmed his frame,
Coming to the stop light behind us
Was eighteen wheels of beating thunder.
At this sound, the beast stood up
Fur became chiseled stone.
And eyes ran the crowd,
While his claws
Sank into the sidewalk.
His panicked steps
Pounded
In all directions
Threatening to erupt.
And all I could do
Was watch
For in this moment,
My life existed in every
Pulse of the tigers heart
And on the point
Of unshackled teeth.
Until the truck passed into unheard distance
And the tiger laid down at his owners feet
With me marveling at the orange coat.

Again, a real story. This happened when a guy from an animal preserve had a tiger with him in downtown Farmington. I admit the tiger was not nearly full grown at about 185 pounds but he was still an imposing presence.

Pancakes

When I came back to the table
I found that my breakfast
Of blueberry pancakes
Had vanished
And since my brother was the only other person home,
I knew where my pancakes were.
I thought, "maybe,
I should forgive him.
What are a few pancakes among brothers
Who laughed on swing sets,
And lost hours on games of basketball
So we had to scramble to unload
The dishwasher before mom would get home.
All they really are is,
Some flour, and milk, and eggs.
Sizzling on the skillet so they fill the
Whole room with pancake steam
And blueberries that burst when you bite
Into their flesh
Covered with the glaze of maple syrup
Going down with a smooth cup of…
I don’t care, I want my pancakes back."

I don't really have much to say about it.

Catching points of light while growing up

Mommy has left the Folgers can for me.
I hold the nail just like my dad showed me
Last time. It’s rise and fall into the top
Until I’ve ripped the can enough. My feet
Touch grass spewing with cold; Calling the light
To make the sky spin around in my mind.
Then I begin to run so hard that I become
The night. I stop and stalk that which I love
Again I halt the glide the bug has flown.
Bringing the light in pairs to make a bulb.
After enough I subdue my mind to
The light. to morning when I will set them free.
Green dots will breathe their light into my hands.

this one was done for a poetry class that I was taking to teach our class about meter. The title is important for this one.

Twelve-Years and Three-hundred and sixty four days old with a day left until I’m cool

With Bastille Day not even
Twenty-four hours away,
July thirteenth was bound to be exciting
And what made it even better,
Was that I was with two of my best friends
At Beaver-Brook camp grounds.
We three each had a box of twenty
Mini, frosted doughnuts
And then we peddled so we could
Play eighteen holes of the two best types
Of golf, which are mini and Frisbee,
But by the end of that
We were hungry and thirsty,
But after seven Pepsis,
Eight hamburgers,
And a single bag of chips
We were ready to set out again,
But this time
We went to the stream,
So we could catch frogs
Like we used to
When we were little
But now with me
The oldest of the three about to turn
Thirteen
We weren’t so little anymore,
And we showed it by the way we rode
Our fifteen-speed mountain bikes;
Jumping over all the pine tree roots
On the side of the road and running through
Potholes on
The dirt roads which
We took back to our campsite,
Just in time for spaghetti noodles and after
Eating them, my mom went out for a canoe ride
So we got out the one hundred and forty-four
Pack of morning glories and cut them open
One by one, pouring black powder into a Pepsi can
With one that we saved for a fuse
So we could make our wall of orange;
Which mom saw across the lake and
She told us to go easy on the pyrotechnics
When she got back so we played poker and I knew I couldn’t lose with
KKKKA;
Then after the game we went to bed so
I could have my first memory of being
Thirteen
Which came when the clock read 2:52
And I stuck my head out the tent just in time
To barf acrid spaghetti noodles.


This one is a pretty damn accurate acount of me turning 13. I think this poem came out pretty kick ass.

My First Meatballs

this poem has not been worked on since it's original composition so it's still in it's infancy

Unknowing that I would need
Breadcrumbs to make meatballs
I made my own by running
A serrated knife over a piece of bread.
I then added the 1/4 cup to the pink
And began to dice onion and garlic.
The thin, clear, plastic cutting board that my
Grandmother had given me
Refused to say on the strip of counter
My apartment provided.
It ran to the sink,
Claiming it was dirty and refusing to aid.
Anger saw my blade hard through hot garlic.
After swirling the ingredients together I placed
Balls of the mixture on a pan. Spread out
Like the needed room to flatten.
Like I was making cookies. Meat cookies. I put
the oven to B and began to broil the meatballs.
They seemed flimsy to me. I then placed them in
A pot of Rague. I regretted that I had not made
My own sauce. I remembered a summer when
My father planted tomatoes beyond count
and we filled wheelbarrows with bumpy red
Berries and our kitchen smelled of sauce for weeks.
Now, my meatballs fit into the sauce
More neatly than I had imagined.
As though they belonged in their
little tomato bath.

Ode to old men who drive snowmobiles in areas such as "Bonney woods" and "Flint woods" even though they are clearly labeled no vehicles

You made me get off the trail
Fuck you

(haha obviously this is not meant to be taken seriously)

Reflection on writing

Even though i am quite aware of the benefits of student journaling, i have to say that journaling for me did not feel a meaningful enterprise. I think this is due largely in part to the requirement to journal on a daily basis. there were days that I found that I truely had something to write about but many of my entries were little more than a contenplation of what i could write about to fulfill what i believed to be an appropriate length for a journal entry. I know that this is a nessecary requirement for the assignment. If all students were just allowed to journal when they felt like it there probably would have been many students who would have had 2-3 entires and the point of having journaling occur is to get students to write on a regular basis as a way to improve their literary skill. The benefit is that it gets all students to become frequent writers. If there had not been an assignment, i would have still written many of my entries out, but this wouldn't be true for many of the students. Also, it should be noted that I may not have enjoyed the assignment because it felt like a chore to me but the project IS school work. It can't all be fun and the point of school work is to teach students and the assignment has doccumented success.

?

I feel like i just don't know things the same way that i used to know things. when i think about what is going on in my life, I just don't know whether to look at it in a good way or a bad way. I used to always know things were going to be ok. I used to always be able to just believe that if I waited things out, there would be a solution soon. Oddly enough, i just can't let myself say that life is all miserable. I can't believe that all there is in life is misery and mistakes. HA! even trying to decide if i'm a pessimist or not seems hopeless at times. It's hard to say that I don't have a clue. Like everyone else, I want to have all the answers to life; but I think having honesty is better than having answers. I also believe that with honesty, eventually true answers can be found. I can't let myself have answers if they are only answers to make myself feel better.

reasons

I just realized i saved this as a draft yesterday instead of publishing it
I went to work today and I got really sick. I was only on shift for about 1 1/2 hours and i ended up puking 6 times. I had to go home. When i got back to my mom's house i started to take a nap. I only took a nap for about 45 minutes and then i woke up feeling ok. I went to get a drink and i realized that my dad and my brother were at my mom's house packing up my brothers stuff. I ended up talking with my dad at my mom's for a while. I ended up talking to my dad for about 2 hours before i was planning on meeting him for the day. It felt good. I really needed to see my dad and my brother because i was just feeling down. Because of the extra time, my dad also ended up buying groceries for me which was good because it helped me out financially more than the last few hours at work would have. I think maybe I was supposed to get sick. Getting sick sucks but it eneded up helping me out alot in the end. It was what I needed.

Today should be a pretty decent day. I'm going to be seeing my dad tonight which I'm pretty excited about. He lives in Jacksonville Florida so i don't see him very often anymore. He's coming up to Maine to lead the way back to Florida for my brother. Matt (my brother) is moving down to live with my dad. That will be kind of weird for me. I still see my brother on the weekends now but after this I won't see him very often at all either. Hopefully this can be a good experience for the two of them though. It may be hard because they end up fighting a lot generally but it has been a few years since the two of them have been around each other for an extended period of time and hopefully they have both grown up enough to get along.

cleaning

So i finally got around to the much needed chore of cleaning my apartment today. I had been picking at it over the last few weeks but i didn't really find time to go all out and pick it up. For most of winter break and then for the first few weeks of school, I was down and pretty much just lived in my own filth. Luckily, that last sentence wasn't a true depiction of it. My place wasn't filthy it was just cluttered. for example, my 22 books for this semester were just scattered across my living room floor. I decided that dirty cloths stay where ever they land when I take them off. But Today i finally fixed these messes (and various others). It felt good. I actually hate cleaning but it's nice to look at my place and say "wow, another human being might not be emberaced for me when they see this place". I could do a little more cleaning honestly but hey, i'm not a perfectionist

Feb 2nd

I missed one yesterday. I had a pretty decent day yesterday. I actually had the day off from school and work. this is rare. I had planned that I was going to take the day easy and just rest. I figured i could sleep in kind of late and then spend most of the day lounging around. I figured i would make going to the gym be my only real thing i did that day. This went pretty well for most of the day and it was nice. The only problem is that i have been noctournal lately which is strange for me since i have always been a morning person. So when i was sitting around at home and my friend asked me if I wanted to hang out with her and some other peeps at around midnight I decided it sounded like a good idea since I wasn't remotely tired. I went over and then i didn't end up getting to bed until 6:30 in the morning. I stayed up until 3:30 the night before. The worst part is i was just around by myself but i wasn't tired yet. If i don't knock this off, i am going to have a hard time making it to my 8 am class on tuesday.