DAY 21: Morning Offerings

Morning Offerings

I always believed that girls
like you would never give
me the time of day.

The type with hips like
grandfather clock pendulums in slow motion.
Setting a room on stun, freezing time
and leaving fantasy in their wake,
eyes of men glazed over like
frosted glass watch faces.

So our lives revolved around
seconds of second glances
that would never add up to minutes of conversation.

But then they did.

I told you how I was a morning person
and you said that you could sleep for hours,
sometimes into the afternoon.

I explained how sunlight meant sheer potential
a day with a story waiting to be written.
Hours of minutes with no agenda
except possibility.

And I wondered how you
could possibly sleep all day
and all of the potential moments that
were wasted buried under covers.

I decided that I would give you the gift of my mornings.
I heralded them in as we watched the sky lighten,
you slept on my shoulder
and we fit together like carefully carved cogs.

Watching you walk to your doorstep with dawn in your hair
I remembered how we said we made cameo in each other’s waking dreams
and knew that this must be potential
must be providence.

That night my fingers became sundial stopwatches
by candlelight tracing shrinking shadows
across your skin.

Morning daydreams were interrupted
by the sound of your bare feet
on my kitchen floor.

You wore my favorite button-down
and left over kisses like morning offerings.
Your skin still smelling of the oranges
I had traced along your lips, the curve of your neck.
I wanted to make memories of you synchronize with
the smell of citrus.

I wanted to give you my mornings.

If I were a magician,
I could somehow stretch those last days into weeks.
I could get you to hear the choir claps and halleluiahs
that chimed every time you looked at me.

But not even magic could saw in half,
dissect the moments we spent together enough
to make me believe that I had a rabbit’s foot dangling
from my chest,
the one you’d been waiting for,
disguised in the mornings on a mundane life.

I used to be a morning person
knowing that sunlight meant sheer potential
a day with a story waiting to be written,
hours of minutes with no agenda except possibility.

But mornings aren’t the same
without you in them,
and now I sleep through to afternoons.

As morning creeps across my bed.
I hope that it might find you there,
where you ought to be.

But it never does.

So seconds pass thinking of you
thoughts never manifesting as second chances,
unable to freeze time, and
waiting for you to bring back my mornings.

Waiting for you to give me back the time of day.

DAY 20: Another day of rest

Taking off this Sunday to get ready for Baltimore Finals.

Check out www.slamicide.com

DAY 19: More ideas from the AVAM

Just wanted to post a few things that I found:

"I ask people why they have deer heads on their walls. They always say because it's such a beautiful animal. There you go. I think my mother is attractive, but I have photographs of her."
--Ellen DeGeneres

"If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men."
--St. Francis of Assisi

"Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet."
--Albert Einstein




WONDER DOGS & HEROES
There is a monument in Marshall, Missouri to "Jim, The Wonder Dog" (1925Ð1937), a black and white setter. It is said that Jim was able to follow complex directions spoken or written in a half-dozen different languages. During a joint session of the Missouri Legislature, Jim demonstrated he could accurately interpret commands tapped-out in Morse code. When presented with the list of entries, Jim correctly picked the winner of The Kentucky Derby seven years in a row and was renowned for identifying the sex of unborn children in dozens of pregnant townswomen. After extensive independent testing, even the most skeptical university professors from the fields of psychology, agriculture, and veterinary medicine concluded that Jim was truly a wonder. No trickery or collusion from Jim's owner, Sam Van Arsdale, was ever found. Van Arsdale never sought profits from any of Jim's predictions and refused all commercial endorsements - turning down offers of big Hollywood contracts, lucrative dog food promotions, and six figure bids to buy his beloved Jim.

That there may never be another dog quite like Jim doesn't belie the fact that almost all dogs can hear and smell in a range far beyond human ability. That dogs also exhibit a capacity for extreme faithfulness to humans has made their talents particularly invaluable. Most people are familiar with how important "seeing eye" dogs are to their sight-impaired owners, but in the last few years the number and variety of trained service dogs has skyrocketed by the thousands. Service dogs help warn their owners of oncoming epileptic seizures, diabetic sugar imbalances, and panic attacks. Because dogs have a keen perception of time, they are also being trained to inform forgetful owners when to take medicines.




The single most common theme of visionary artists worldwide is their personal reconstruction of The Garden of Eden - or some other utopian, personal world.

DAY 18: A few fragments

So today I went on a field trip with my Creative Writing students to the American Visionary Arts Museum in Baltimore. HOLY CRAP! If you have not been, you need to go.


The three hours we spent there was an exercise in unfair.

Everyone should go.

Here is something that came out of the trip.




"I'm trapped inside that apple tree"
he told them, but they had heard that sort of talk before.
When you work with shizophrenics,
you get used to the splinters of words that snag
you as you walk down the hall.

But somehow, he convinced them to take
the tree that had fallen on the west end
of the asylum back to the common area.

And this man, who had never
out pen to page, brush to canvas
said "I need to create myself in my own image."

So they let him.
Once per day,
under strict supervision,
he chipped and chiseled away.

And when he was done,
it was exactly as he appeared
the chest caved in from his
ongoing struggle with tuberculosis
like the soil over the uprooted tree
he used to recreate himself.

There was no exageration,
the eyes that were carve into the wood
were the same sad ones that strolled
through the courtyards.

But unlike him, this sculpture
th only work he would ever create
would be remembered
and last
forever.

DAY 17: Crazy week

So I've had a real interesting week with lots of things to keep me from cranking out new stuff. Therefore I have to hit the vaults again. I hope that next week (once grades, lit mag, and finals are over) I can return to new thoughts.


76
Driving into the city I focus on the galvanized landscape:
an arboretum of artificiality that sets the stage for an industrial tableaux.

To both sides of the highway are rows of billboards
--incollapsible dominoes--lined like the mummers we came to see.

Putting on costumes, fabrications which are no way
reflective of their lackluster lives--they seem plain when they
put out our fires and take out our garbage…nut today they are spectacles.

The boards wear their costumes…
NOKEA, MARLBORO, YUENGLING--
the vestments of sequins and feather of the stationary dancers. Yet,
in the distance there is one barren, sickly-white dancer,
naked….

Only scraps remain scattered across its chest
like the bits of glue and paper that nostalgically cling
to a beer bottle. It wears the bits of old fabrications in splotches across its void--
NEWPORT maybe-- but

It stands there an awkward without arms to cover its naked flesh
or legs by which it can run.

Even those wearing the ugly HEROIN DETOXIFICATION CALL…
or WHO'S YOUR DADDY? dna tests are more pleasing than vulgar,

exasperated white.
We wear our NOKEA's and MARLBORO's, even

Our HEROIN DETOXIFICATION CALL…
In designer jeans, haircuts, and metal

studs that seek our most sensitive parts,
procreate, and start dysfunctional families.

Adorn ourselves with attitude like YUENGLING
for to be a the pasty ghost of a fleshy billboard is unacceptable.
For your sake, don't be a barren domino, you are not fixed in concrete supports

And you will get knocked down.

DAY 16: Idea

So we are in the midst of senior superlatives. I was just thinking, what if we had real superlatives that mattered? What if we did them as we got older? Do we already?

Another thing, what if we gave superlatives to classic writers?

Who would you pick for:
Most likely to succeed
Best all-around
Most spirited
Class clown
Friendliest
Least Friendliest
Best Dressed

Post your responses.

PS I know this seems like a cop out, but I am going somewhere with this.

DAY 15: At home for week 3

Something old and pretentious.








OCKHAM SHAVING

FIRST INTENTION
William shaves the faith from
the reason of his face.
“Musn’t complicate the chin
with plurality of hair…
to do so would be vain.”

He finds all the pieces unique
in the basin and laughs—
“I think I will name that one Aquinas”

SECOND INTENTION
William assigns Aquinas
the symbol “hair”
and it begins to loose significance
resembling the other floating
objects in the white water.
Aquinas becomes hair.
No longer particular or individual.
“What a nominal idea,” William says.
As he dumps the basin of universals from
his second story window,
they no longer exist.

It is easier to rid ourselves of the namless.