Think of the damage I've done:

the roofs torn, the basements flooded,

the cars flipped over in the wind.

I broke a CD

on your kitchen floor, 

dropped a mug, sat down

among the shards and pressed my face

against my knees with your hand on my spine,

rubbing circles, trying to bring me back

while outside the trees shook and shook. 

We have an apartment, 

three rooms and a bath and a cat

who demands our attention as we sleep

curled into each other,

you, dreaming, me, breathing, 

shaking the walls with the force of my breath, you

waiting for a day you don't have to repair.

Waiting for daybreak, for a sunrise

without a storm. 

I don't yet know enough

of this language of adults to say

I'm sorry

and know that you believe me. 

Take cover in the eye of the storm. 

This rain is a baptism. 

It will wash us both clean. 

I wrote a song while walking home from a chem exam. Why was I walking home from a chem exam at 8:30 at night, you ask? Because college sucks sometimes, that's why. Also life sucks, sometimes. For everyone. BTW. Fortunately, we have the internet to entertain us, and, if we're lucky, songs about the internet posted on the internet to entertain us exponentially.

I recorded it roughly so you can get an idea of the tune.

Oh yeah. Profanity warning. 

WikiHow can't tell me how to love you
WikiHow doesn't have a fuckin' clue
I went to Yahoo Answers, they said shove it up my ass
So I went to SparkNotes, told me how to pass my class

but WikiHow can't tell me how to love you
WikiHow can't tell me how to love you
WikiHow can't tell me how to love you
WikiHow doesn't have a fuckin' clue

about my arm around your waist
and your disappointed face
and your perfect lips saying that we're through--
what did I do--

WikiHow can't tell me how to love you
WikiHow doesn't have a fuckin' clue
The Wikipedia page on love's
all hearts and doves and stars above
and dopamine and serotonin,
no apologies and no atonement
the Internet's no place to go
to look up what I should have known

WikiHow can't tell me how to love you
WikiHow can't tell me how to love you
WikiHow can't tell me how to love you
WikiHow doesn't have a fuckin' clue Read more »

The slam (open mic) tonight was a lot of fun. The next one is on December 21 at 7. Hope to see y'all there. 

I got a new boyfriend. His name is Icarus. I made him out of candle wax and feathers from a toy that my cat ignores. He stands on the windowsill at night and watches me sleep, and when I wake up he’s always in a different spot— on the dresser, or on the floor, or in the oven— I know it’s not my cat, she won’t go near him. 

He’s pretty cool, as boyfriends go. He’s a good listener. It’s nice to have somebody around the house. His face is kinda lopsided and has a deep scar down the side from my fingernail accidentally but it suits him. I gave him a kabob skewer as a sword and now he guards me when I sleep because I sleep a lot and anything can happen, people can knock on my door and want to talk to me or kill me. I stopped going to classes and I quit my job by not showing up for a few days so I have lots of time to sleep and watch British teen dramas on Netflix and I think that’s why my dreams are so vibrant and so much more real than the washed-out daylight when I wake up, when the sun’s setting, when it’s five o’clock of one more day of the lost month and I guess I’ll do laundry tomorrow. People are walking past my window. I live in the basement so I just see their feet, shiny black office shoes and high heels getting wet in the slush and it’s getting dark and this is my time so I go find Icarus and we watch the rest of season three together. 

  Read more »

You stop to hear the silence on the stair
that binds the coffeeshop against the street
and leaving, leads you to the door
that opens to your touch and must be home,

to listen to the heaving of the air
though the gaps of ribs where buildings meet

and startle at the clatter of the feet
of faceless faces pushing for their share
as coffee splashes hard against the floor
and with a pressure you can barely bear
you take a wary swallow of the foam.

In thirteen days it will have been a year.
You walk a tightrope and ignore the pit.
You can always taste the salt and fear
and within your room you choke and spit.
You walk inside the crowd and do not fit

between the bodies and the tunnel walls.
Late at night the city presses near.
The tightrope shivers and you do not fall.
Your breathing is the only thing you hear.

UPDATE: No rain. Glorious sunset. Amazing slamming and music. Thanks to everyone. At one count, I spied more than 60 people listening to everyone's brilliant wordsmithing... THANKS! (gg)

NEXT EVENTS:

Saturday, Sept. 22 at 2 p.m. at Main Street Landing in Burlington Come support the Millenial Writers On Stage (to be recorded and aired at a later date on VPR). Come cheer on the selected writers! We need audience! This is part of the Burlington Book Festival

Friday Oct. 12, 7 p.m., location to be announced, at the Brattleboro Literary Festival. Selected writers to present work live (recorded and aired later on Vermont Public Radio)

Friday Oct. 19, 6 p.m. old Burlington College Building (now COTS) at North Ave and North St. Burlington, SLAM!

Saturday Oct. 27, 10-4:30, ANTHOLOGY 4 Celebration of Words: Workshops during the day including Reuben Jackson, Rusty DeWees, Robin Fawcett ... and more

YWP kicked off our 2012-2013 slam season with an outdoor poetry slam at the Battery Park bandshell TODAY, Friday, August 17 from 6:00 to 8:30. Come for an evening of poetry, music, excitement, and general YWP festivities. Read more »

Automatic writing is writing without thinking-- sometimes, without being aware of what you're writing. Surrealists call it writing from the subconscious. Spiritualists used automatic writing to get in touch with ghosts. They claimed the ghost was guiding their hand or inhabiting their arm. Other automatic writers wrote in Martian. Automatic writing was a pen-and-ink version of a ouija board. 

Automatic writing resembles stream-of-consciousness, that free-writing technique of writing down exactly what's on your mind, but with a surrealist kick. Write without trying, write nonsense, write whatever pops up in your head. It's stream-of-subconsciousness. 

Write in response to any of these surreal photographs. What's going on? Why is it happening? What will result? What are the subjects and what do they want?

Photos from Robert ParkeHarrison's book The Architect's Brother.

Surrealism is nonsense-writing, a form of art that abandons logic for the senseless, seeking to unlock the creativity of the unconcious mind. The surrealist movement began in Paris in the 1920s as an extension of the Dadaist's rejection of logic and order. Surrealism grew from automatic writing -- stream-of-conciousness -- into the juxtaposition "inside the same frame, elements not normally found together to produce illogical and startling effects." "The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be -- the greater its emotional power and poetic reality."

During the next few days, I'll be posting surrealist games and exercises. Some work when you're writing on your own, like automatic writing; others are social and born of collaboration, like surrealist Q&A.

QUESTION&ANSWER

Click on the COLLABORATE tab at the top of the page and ask it a question-- any question. Post. Give it an answer, not necessarily to your question. Repeat until you run out of questions. Answer other people's questions, sensically or non. I'll use a random number generator to rearrange questions and answers into unintended configurations, and post them to see what wisdom we can glean.

Questions asked by past surrealists: Read more »

The same moon shines over most of Ukraine:

just as damaged

and as noble. The buildings here

are held together with rust

and moss creeps across the concrete.

Behind me are the soft pads

of foxes' feet on scattered leaves.

I am disintegrating.

I scatter skin cells and hair.

I spit, and the night spits back.

There are no stars.

The silhouettes of damaged homes

are human figures, slumped and shaking,

and in the distance Tower 4 hums softly.

I am cold

and the mosses reach

and the foxes turn and run.

For a while, nothing.

I am remembering

there are worse lives to be had.

I am realizing

there are better reasons to disappear.

The last time it rained like this was the summer after my freshman year of high school. I was fifteen, just barely, and fighting to understand my new compulsions, the strength of my budding sexuality. I ran out into the storm and spun with my arms outstretched. I shouted at the sky. Chance dared not defy me. I was invincible. 

It's that same heavy rain tonight, four years later, the summer after my freshman year of college. The storm is windless and brutal. I stand next to my boyfriend on our porch and watch lightning split the sky open. The rain is carving lakes into our driveway and when lightning strikes I can see individual drops suspending and shining, burning holes into my retina. They hang in the air as if time has stopped. Four years condensed into a flash.

It's been exactly ten months since Seth's father died. Eight months and a week since the night I was raped. A year and two days since Seth and I met. Almost two years since I first fell in love. Two and a half, and three, and four since I first thought I had. Lightning never struck that night I danced in the rain, fifteen years old and lost in my head. It was all mirrors and tricks in there. My skull was stuffed full of electricity. Now I breathe it in, and let lightning fill my fragile lungs. Read more »

My heart has hands. Long, slender red fingers poking out from the center of my chest, grabbing, grasping other people’s vascular tissue and refusing to let go. My hands are predators. They’re always hungry. I use their fingertips to stroke the inside of some lover’s arm. They’re extra fingernails to bite. When I’m angry, I dig those stubs of nails into my palms; I have four fists: two for each type of beating. When I’m lonely, they can hold themselves.

Every day when I walk home I scan the sidewalk for signs of life. Bottlecaps, discarded gum, acorns, even bits of gravel—things that move when I kick them, proof of existence. Walking is falling, and catching myself again and again on every bended knee. When I’m not falling I’m floating, I can see into third-story windows, watch people type or kiss or brush their hair.

I'm standing on hot asphalt at the edge of the Connecticut River, testing my balance on one old railroad tie, waiting in line to cross the border into Vermont. I can see the trees from here—a line of dense, deep green bleeding into the deep green shadows of the water. The leaves ripple in the breeze like scuffed carpet.

I haven’t been to Vermont since I left for college in 2015. I’m nearing forty now, and I’ve been dreaming of home for months now. When I close my eyes, I see forest shadows patterned on the inside of my eyelids. I doodle cornfields and dandelion leaves on my legal pads at work. I painted my apartment green, but the flat pale planes of Forest Moss only mock the vibrant memories of my childhood. My houseplants’ plastic leaves gather dust.

“Papers?”

It’s my turn. A man in a gray uniform is holding out a hand. I pull a bundle of envelopes from my backpack and he sorts through them.

“Passport?”

Mine is dark green. It has a moose stamped on the front. He flips the pages, examining the various states’ emblems, and finally presses a smudgy NEW HAMPSHIRE BORDER onto the soft paper. “You’re clear.” Read more »

Photo prompt-- Whaddaya think?

ofinal.mp3

(NPR's Morning Edition.)

I've stayed away from media all day, on purpose. There's a limit to the amount of coverage of different people's opinions on one man's death I can take. But I turned on the radio this afternoon, just to see if anything's changed.

(Coverage and interviews in New York, VPR interviews, clips from youtube videos of last night.) Read more »

You look like a photograph of yourself taken from far far away and I don't know what to do and I don't know what to say...

The dark is thinned by streetlamps, layered by leaves, and thick with a manic shouting that absorbs itself, swells and mutes and swells against the ragged slap of shoes on dirt. They are yelling rules. They are crossing lines. They are spilling out a madness that washes with the light across the curb. Read more »

And in the end it's just sad, isn't it.

And in the end it doesn't matter what we think, or what we say, or what we write, or the arguments we present in defense of illogic and emotion, or my reaction to your reaction to something that has, really, little to do with either of us, in the end.

It's not the end yet. Read more »

I wasn't in school today. I had no exams. I was sleeping when it happened. I wasn't in school today and if I had maybe I would've been walking down that hall and heard the shot. or maybe I would've seen him loaded into the ambulance. he was in my brother's grade; maybe some twist of fate would've made them best friends. maybe he never would've, had to, caught up in some overwhelm of MUST and

gunshot. Read more »

There’s a place out on the edge of the horizon
that chases the sun as it sets,
that measures the lengthening of shadows
in eyelashes, in fingernails, hands,
arms, bodies, lifetimes—make a wish—
as the sun burns orange, pink, just a sliver there,
eyelash, eyelid—winks
out—There’s a place on the edge of the horizon
right up against the shoulder of the highway,
twelve lanes shooting past, glittering with motion
and the thrill of Soon
Not Here, of destination, Read more »

My sacrificial slam from this friday, performed with a fever coming in waves-- the source of some interesting commentary and facial expressions on my part, so I hear.

-B

  Read more »

Missing you has become

background noise,

a song I always have on

chords so familiar I sing them along

to the end, to the next time

you're here & you're gone.

Your absence is a hole

in the ground, a missing foundation

over which I-- build-- anyway--,

fantastical structures of toothpicks & pens,

ink making patterns in nothing & then

it crumples & shatters & falls in slow-

motion to fill the hole in my head

again-- fill

  Read more »

Posted September 29, 2010 in Uncategorized

Read more »

usagi.mp3

Slammed round one at YWP Slams I. Tied with the boy for whom it was written.

  Read more »

[ http://www.foundmagazine.com/find/798 ]

Information rules

the rules of exchange

an eye for an eye

a tooth for a brush

a smile that glitters, and glows, and sells

medicine to clear your head

with some side effects

wide wide wide wide open up

  Read more »

Old poem. Same feeling.

20:35 & it's raining again,
rain tapping at the roof outside my room
outside the window where I lay
among the lumps & tangles of my bed,
one hand reaching up to almost touch
the screen--

20:37 & it's thundering
idly, grumbling; these great clouds
rolling over each other, shaking drops
off onto our shingles, sheet metal--

20:39 & the peepers
are desperate, screaming--

I'm thinking about heat, about
sweat, about communication
& how the space between us

was so thin, the heat of skin,
electrons repelling electrons; Read more »

For gg's rant challenge-- I delivered this standing on a table in the Castleton cafeteria, to the general enjoyment of the lunch crowd and acute annoyance of the cafeteria staff. Read more »

You had your chance. The camera got there first
while you languished, stale, caught up
in capturing the glint of rain on roads, walls,
roofs; light filtering grayly through a veil
of cloud. You were grasping for poetry
in this scene so familiar you can sketch it
with your fingertips in the dark-- You have.
Your teacher says repetition is the key
to mastery. At some point you'll realize
she means tuition, and stop paying.
For now you hold her words in your mouth,
tasting possibility. You'd like to sketch
this scene on her body, tracing the angles Read more »

woke(?) to campus streetlights
rose & dropped & coughed into my hands
all blurs of blue & black this paint
this light
this liquid night in droplets in my palms
fingers
lungs

held my breath til I could breathe

stood leaning on the windowstill
gulping night humidity & hoping
emerge whole from 3 a.m.

a pair of lungs on legs

a pair of dripping eyes

i am eating strawberries one at a time small and tart and candy-sweet

i am dizzy but thats okay i just stand and breathe

in dust and smoke and particles of carpet-fiber

i am not even waiting

look i am emotionally self-sufficient

in

this state of mind

im not sick i cant be sick

i can still think just not like normal i dont have breaks between thoughts

look no punctuation this glorious spin cycle of words

(you skim)

incontinuous

(milk)

no no no

look

stay home and help me make little

communists

gpa.mp3

Recognition night-- the gym bleachers all pulled out, the kids lined up in the first three rows and the parents sitting stiffly behind them. Before us, a podium and a table with a stack of certificates and a small pile of goldish pins. We lined up in alphabetical order, sat and conversed blankly. Indifferent. Read more »