I’m half-way to my quota for today (the 2nd), so here’s a break. I can think of two really good things that might happen during these 29 days: One, writing makes one a better writer, and two, at the inevitable breaks from sitting in this chair, I’m going to get a lot stronger. I find myself doing pushups and stretches on break, getting the blood flowing, and to just distract myself from the frustration or the story.
I can’t say the story is going to be good, but it will be completed. It feels good.
It’s November 2nd
And I haven’t started my novel for NaNoWriMo yet. It’s almost Nov. 3rd actually, so I guess tonight I have to get going.
Plus I have homework, but grades are nothing!
see yuns later.
I figure I have to write about 2000 words a day to win this thing now. Or complete the challenge, anyways. Wish me luck.
Somebody Said…
Somebody once said,
“There are two kinds of people in the world, those who walk into a room and say, ‘Okay, here I am,’ and those who walk in and say ‘Oh, there you are.'”
I saw it on a quote site, but can’t find it again, so there you are. I think it’s interesting what this says about people. Sometimes I feel like I’m one, sometimes the other. It’s impossible to put someone in either category all the time, but we are always either one or the other.
Also we have words today:
These words are pretty opposite in their connotations, although thanks to the tv show, felicity has a certain connotation of a pretty, curly-haired, hare-brained female.
Discuss!
I think I’m going to make this a regular Wednesday thing.
“Words of Wednesday” Or “Wednesday’s Weekly Words” or something else like that.
I have gone and submitted
The following to The Atlantic Monthly’s Student writing contest. So I’m taking them off the blog for the near future, at least until I get the rejection letter.
Japanese Steel I
Keep On
Sonnet II
Also, I’m listening to John Denver’s Leaving on a Jet Plane right now. It’s awesome.
Sonnet III
Sonnet III
On Becoming Aware of Death
Maybe it was the year the Challenger failed
on TV, maybe the year they showed the standing
man in front of the tank, his hand pale
against the olive-drab paint in the square in Beijing
and he refused to move. He’s crushed under
tread and they showed clips on the news
for a week, or maybe two, but over and over
again. These were not it, but I still had curfew
at dark, and my parents watched ABC
because they knew and trusted World News Tonight
with Peter Jennings. It was the night he
showed the men kneeling down blindfolded in line
and said something about gross images,
then black and white exploding blood and heads.
–NOTES–
Yes, it still needs work. Especially in the metrics. But it is much farther along than how it started out:
I think it was fourth grade
the year the Challenger failed
or maybe later, the man standing
in front of a tank, unmoving, slowly
crushed down under treads in Beijing.
They showed these on the news, but
these were not it. It was when,
on ABC (my parents were Jennings’ fans)
they showed the men, blindfolded, on
their knees, lined up straight, heads bowed,
hands tied, grainy black and white,
each shot in the back of the head
by his own AK-47-wielding executioner,
that I knew Death’s face.
Which not only poorly fits the form, but also makes a poor poem, being circuitous and too laden with my own realization when it is so obviously stated in the title. Plus, ‘Death’s face’ sounds trite to me. Also, anyone who has seen these clips will recall them in detail without my forcing those details on them. The final image in the current revision is sudden and shocking, definite, while the last line of the draft is unoriginal and forgettable. That final punch is important to this poem, and reinforces the impact seeing this clip had on me. It made me throw up, all the dinner I had just finished into the toilet, and I felt sick for some time.
While we are attending
The finalization of the story of the saturday party, how about a bunch of poems out of my journal. Unedited, as always, with the exception of notes made in the margins.
Rifle
Rifle
When held in hand,
this eight and a half
pound plastic and metal
loaded machine
does not seem
like enough to kill:
it is a toy.
Even when pocketed into
the shoulder hard
and strapped to arm
and targeted to paper
it does not seem
like enough to kill:
it is a toy.
Even when trigger pulled
so slightly
and recoiled through to feet
and body returned to rest
it does not seem
like enough to kill:
it is a toy.
Until the sight of blood
blooms on a chest
and the iron scent
drifts on two-hundred
meters of flat desert breeze,
it does not seem
like enough to kill:
it is a toy.
–08 May 2005
Spring, Fort Bragg
Spring, Fort Bragg
In spring in the pine foothills
of North Carolina
the wind pulls
mustard yellow curtains
across the firebreaks.
Pollen collects
on week-old rain puddles
where mosquitoes breed.
Yellowed camouflage trucks
no longer green and brown
but an even matte yellow.
Yellow paste makeup
covers even the eyelashes
of the Marines, changes them
to the ghosts they will become
given time and war enough,
colorless death pallored
faces in blank pine boxes.
–08 May 2005
The Drill Instructor
The Drill Instructor
with thanks to Ted Kooser, for the phrase “shoes carved from obsidian” from a lecture at the Library of Congress
An Air Force Officer
told me once,
before I enlisted,
that the worst thing
in his Basic Training
was hearing the metallic
click of the Sergeant’s
tap-augmented shoes
before the lights flashed on.
So, when I got to Parris Island,
I was not prepared
for the sound of a natural-
shod horse on the worn concrete
floor of the barracks.
The Drill Instructor,
shoes carved from obsidian,
(unscarred, unsmirched
even after a day of shining
in the sun the sand the rain)
approached like gravity
at nine point eight meters
per second squared.
faster faster
unchecked
obsidian shoes
drum concrete echoes
and suddenly an index
finger appeared
one centimeter
from my eyeball,
smudged the
plastic lens
of the birth-
control-
goggles.
–07 May 2005
A Word, the Sound
A Word, the Sound
This was unintentional:
a bridge, somewhere,
away in the country,
was lowered
with a word.
a dam, far away,
on a trickle stream,
was opened
with a word.
This is how floods
begin.
a trickle, slow
and small
but just enough
to overflow banks or roads
downstream.
Animals know the sound:
low grinding scraping slow
crack.
They flee.
We humans always know better
but a man
with his lightning skis
or biting boots
will start it
tomorrow or today
or next week:
The slide the death
ride the avalanche
that will hurl him faster
than before and through
barriers such as trees
and snow and ice boulders
the size of cars
and in the end he will lay,
under a ton of the earth,
that will melt in a month,
crushed.
I should have known:
the rumbles were there
the stream swoll
but her lack of confession
allowed hope.
(hope may be worse than love, in this manner)
While sleep-walking
the choice made the switch thrown, the word said.
The sun came out and with it the crack
and I knew
but I knew not
so I climbed
one foot at a time
until it all gave out
and here I lay in the valley
crushed.
–05 May 2005