we need to make a word for those days when
i avoid the mirror. when i try to meet my eyes without seeing my face
and the outline of my hair is disguised
by how often i work to mess it up,
deliberately shaping insanity amongst my dark locks to hide the disaster
it forms on its own.

it is a self-conscious anti-beauty that makes me wish for hijabs
(i am sorry for my sacrilege)
and bald heads. i want to erase my hair my face my hands my lips my nose my chin
everything but my eyes because in them, i am only ever able to find beauty.

i want to tie-dye my complexion sunburnt until i am
unrecognizable even as a doppelgänger of myself.
i want to lop off every strand of hair i have so painstakingly grown back
and choose not to care since i refuse to blow-dry.
i wish for the ability to make everyone else’s vision as blurry as my own
or the power to airbrush their reality, touching up here or there until i am
“beautiful” in the way they say i ought to be.
i wish to project the composite image of a dozen good photographs
to cover up the image today captures
and i hope for the right to someday build a caricature of myself
out of words and sharpies and fabric,
stuffed animals and the days i like my hands, satellites and moonbeams
and ripped magazine pictures

and somewhere in the shadows of this sculpture,
i will hide my bloody heart.

a few days ago, i found beautiful postcards and they are in need of recipients.

if you leave me your name & address i will send you one.
i find snail mail to be comforting. the act of writing out the words in my messy scrawl, getting too excited to be neat and running out of space before finishing my sentence so that the last line is a bunch of tiny cramped letters all smushed together, finding something in your mail box at the end of a long day.

***

more new poems to come. my poems came out all funky today, twisted and scrunched into sideways shapes and backwards letters. i’m working on it.

i just got a flickr.

so now i can post my artsy pictures somewhere they belong.
check it out: http://www.flickr.com/photos/inattentiveclockwork/

i apologize for the clockwork’s increased inattention. it will try to be more attentive in the future…but i remind you, dear readers, that the inattention is part of its nature. just be patient. love to you all.

*

–this is a part of a something–

One way down and through the rabbit-hole,
we came out on the other side of the world
dazed and confused
and kept forgetting our direction;
lost here (in the middle, at the
center of the earth, magma-scented and carbon-dated)
until we found ourselves,
translated and reevaluated
and sent twice through the wash cycle.

*

“Under Glass//Inside the Mirror”

I need to paint my world in shades of
yellow, leave myself no quarter to hide in the shadows
and bring the sunshine inside
find it a place to dwell in-between my eyes//
back-lit and stereoscopic//submerged.
Unlike my twin sister (who lives layered
between glass and quicksilver)
I never learned to joke about the pain in my hands.

*

“conversations about obscure citrus fruit”

all poets fall into spirals/quicksands/ruts//
using and reusing all the same phrases
sometimes.
lately i am stuck on “the shape” of things,
the blurry line between contours and edges
and falling back on the word “i” all too often;
finding solace in the familiar grooves
that stock sentences have worn in my keyboard and fingertips.
it’s//trapped, caged and contained.
and my mind flutters past the same old stories,
seeking some way to hash them out past recognition,
writing and rewriting
until those voices fall mute and new ones
can emerge.

It finally got cold here too, chased me inside and locked the door
to keep out the monsters and I’m afraid of the shape of your shadow,
chasing me down to pin me to the wall:
stick a needle through my spine and I’m a perfect specimen of a butterfly
(caught, trapped, flightless…just the way you wanted).
It’s the little bit of bitter after you swallow a sip of coffee,
it’s the little bit of sour at the bottom of your throat,
it’s the taste of my kiss and the swing in my step,
it’s the reason you don’t take me home at night–
it’s the lie until the lie becomes bigger than both us, bigger than the monsters and
the shadows and the reasons I go running and
I can taste them both when I try to chew: gagging me, choking me
(the lie and the running, the bitter bite of your promise and the knowledge that I won’t keep it).
Don’t tell me I’m beautiful or I’ll rend this beauty from my cheeks,
don’t tell me I’m solid or I’ll go out and prove my own impermanence:
none of our silhouettes remain when the house of cards comes tumbling down.
We’re flying down the sidelines, shouting down the highways and
soaring past six floors of windows to the ground.
You kissed the dirt for me and I slammed into it,
tasted dust on my fingertips and if you can’t find flight at least
you can go out that way.
At least you can go out with a bang, with a cloud of smoke
and simulacrum of pain and at least you can be dedicated to falling
if only because there’s no going back.

This is one of those times//I have done lots of things I’m scared of lately, I have colored my soul sacred and bent backwards to kiss history in the hopes that ritual will save me, I have let the sleep eat away at my bones until I am legless, armless, without shape and lost in all of this//This is one of those times//You’re going to ask what this means, you’re going to pretend you know what this means, we’re all going to play at being deeper than we are, submerging our heads underwater and breathing slowly until our chests cave in and our hearts sync up and none of us are people any more//This is one of those times//

(I wrote these over break…I was having what I call “a Chuck Palahnuick day” when I just fall into these holes in my head and have to dig myself back out slowly.)

I want to see the places (where) music connects to people.

I imagine them as strings of light, thin fibers that glitter in darkened rooms
and sweat-soaked daylights,
they are what is meant by delicate, strands so narrow they seem more fragile
than porcelain, than spiderwebs and eyelashes and scotch tape.

Lying on crumpled bed-sheets, with our faces pressed into the pillows
we share anthems and choruses.

We reach out to press our fingertips together in one tiny sliver of connection,
stretching across the abysses in our lives, stretching across the silences.

Sometimes strangers are the only people
who stop me from feeling so alone.
Sometimes strangers are my only salvation.

We hum the songs our brethren sing and don’t know why
those notes are the ones that came to us.
But we feel the tug in our bones and eardrums of music that echoes across continents.

Somewhere deep in the hollows of our hearts
we resonate together.

i am falling sideways, i am disappearing through the cracks
i am held up by a hundred hands, i am holding a hundred hands up

*

some people are empty
not without substance in the traditional sense but made of delicate
cross-hatching
of relevant colors instead of ((more solid materials))
we are more easily defined by the SPACES
between lines than by the lines themselves

i cast no shadow in these moods
my two-dimensional shoulders are a
cosmic and caustic mockery
i become a parody of myself

*

We were dancing until we ran out of breath
and howling at the moon
We were doing drugs and sinking ships
and losing the will to swoon.

And all this is running through my head
set to some kind of tune…

i have been carrying around a sketchbook i got for christmas with a set of watercolor pencils. the pages are all still blank…i haven’t found anything worth drawing yet. i always feel as though the first page of a new notebook needs to be just perfect. nothing has felt “right” yet.

this is a strange sort of homecoming. it is all too evident that i don’t quite belong here anymore. everything is a little fuzzy at the edges, as though the world can go either way: become more solid and take me back as one of its own or disappear altogether. perhaps it is all the silent spaces. middlebury is so full of noise and laughter, i rarely listen to the quality of the silence around me. and here there is always a time when everything falls quiet and my thoughts can keep me awake.

it is nice to pretend that i belong here again though.
it is nice to have so many places that i can call my own.

in the center for the arts at school there are two pieces of art along the wall that leads to the dance studios which i love. one is a pencil sketch, on several large sheets of butcher paper that have been taped together, and the other is the painted version of this drawing. i like looking at the differences between them, overlaying the sketch on the painting in my head. the lines are looser, inexact. it is the dream of the painting, the pre-performance. i want to draw things like this. the loose outlines of reality.

we are loose outlines of reality. it seems a lonely state.

but “you’re not designed to be alone” –frank turner

i think this is part of what i love so much about college. even though it is exhausting to always have people around, it is also affirming of our own existence. if someone is visiting your room then you must exist just as much as you dream you do. there is no chance that life is unreal when everyone is around you, when arms hold you, when people pile on your bed, when laughter surrounds you.

so here’s a hug to tide you over until we can all go back to our new homes… <3

i have these really beautiful friends.

i don’t necessarily mean that they are attractive, although that is or is not true in certain cases. i just mean that they are beautiful: for who they are, for the hugs they give and the words they write and the way they smile, for their ability to laugh, for their warmth, for their uncertainty and for their power. for everything they already are and everything they will someday be and i love them for this and for more than this.

i love jillian clark’s poetry (i have to say her names together, it just feels wrong otherwise) and i love duncan’s photography. they make me ache inside in good ways. i love that matthew coleman turbeville would gladly bitch-slap any boy who broke my heart (i would do the same for him). i love iracema, my roommate and how we have learned to live around each other. sometimes we are together, rocking out and sometimes we are just in the same space, freaking out. it works. i love thomas for making cake and leaving milk in our fridge. i love pete for telling me i’m “langweilig” (did i spell that right?).

i didn’t expect to love college this much so quickly.

we are all miniature cataclysms in our own right.
and i’m a cuckoo hen woman (which is a double pun in japanese because hen means strange, thank you spoon).

at school i come up with these crazy projects i don’t have the resources for so while i am home i will:
-make christmas cookies
-sew a quilt
-start (and finish!) my earflap hat (but first fix the pattern)

i am very very very very very very very very very very very behind.

i need to write almost 40,000 words before the end of the month. in five days that is.

also canada is nice. montreal is rather large. especially after small town vermont. i kind of miss my midd kids but i am happy to be here with spoon and matthew. the noise quality is different. (less people noise, more vehicle noise.)

today’s song is “beach song” by speechwriters llc.

“And I’ll be back to save the world, sing my songs and get that girl
And I will try to live my life like I believe in something more
And when it all seems less than great I guess I’ll put my trust in fate
Just sit back down and take my mind off and try to stop aching for you”

© Dave Lowensohn, Speechwriters LLC, 2002