on the news, it is all suicide bombers, and i am learning to live without sleep or with less sleep. and i read this to myself in the poetry voice, but that's just the way i read it. maybe the words don't fit together at all. and you are thinking. "this shit is jacked." oh, how beautifully articulate you are. how beautifully the sun shines on the coin sitting on the sidewalk. how dear is the sound of the rain. how lovely is putting on a wet bathing suit. how sweet is the hat thrown towards a leaving train. oh how i miss you.

on the news, it is all far away, and i am learning to live far away or further away. and i write this so it will be a pattern, it seems cleaver, but maybe i just think it is cleaver. maybe it is not cleaver at all. and you are deciding. "this writing is shit." oh, how much like me you are. how quickly judgments fall. how softly the day breaks. how silent snow makes the world. how enjoyable is a storm. how sweet is the hat thrown towards a leaving train. oh how i miss you.

Life Plan #9

fuck this being a poet shit. (i calculate limits for fun during english class).

Life Plan #8

move to paris. be a poet.

Life Plan #7

be a hot shot. get rich doing amoral capitalist bullshit. get out early. buy land in a college town. grow carrots. be a writer.

Life Plan #6

go to swarthmore. major in something cool. hang out with helen. go to grad school. be rich and noteworthy. 

Life Plan #5

move to california. go to cca. be a poet. be uncharacteristically chill for the rest of my life.

Life Plans (explanation)

it has become the main topic, and a major cause of stress. i talk about it too much. the sure mass of possibilities is amusing. watch me. 

Life Plan #4

be a poet. be poor. live with helen. be mad when her boyfriend moves in, and messes up our pattern of life. 

Life Plan #3

marry ira glass. 

Life Plan #2

go to reed. visit my grandparents, and other family often. see childhood friends. walk in the rain. 

Life Plan #1

live in a yurt in california in the middle of a fig orchard. have goats, and keep bees. wear a toga. write lyrical poetry. 

it always ends this way, were it is sunday night and tomorrow i will be thrown into the jaws of the week. to i will be torn up, and kept from sleeping, and kept from doing anything except surviving. until it is friday, and the beast spits me out, and i take a shower and call my friends. and then it is sunday again. it always starts this way. 

this isn't done. part one

"She has glass fingers," he says to the doctor, as though it is an explanation. The doctor nods and jots something down before he leans over the woman. She lays on sidewalk. There is a gray sky, and wet cement, and an abandoned stretch of road. Her red hair balloons around her head in almost a halo. Her face is the brightest, the lightest thing in the entire landscape. The ash from the doctor's cigarette falls onto the woman's beaded purse. The man, standing beside the doctor, keeps on  explaining, as he hugs a moth eaten coat around himself, "Her mother was a porclin doll, and her father was a bussiness man."

She had been waiting for the bus when they had come up to her. They held a bible, and asked her for a moment. Her mother had been such a doll, her father such a gentleman; she always excepted invitations. They held her hands, and began to save her soul. The bus came from way down the abandoned street, and they were still holding her hands. It slowed down, and the driver looked at them. It kept going, as they kept saving her soul, as she kept waiting for the bus. 

"He met her at FAO Schwarz, he was there on his lunch break, to buy a birthday present for his niece." The doctor is kneeling in the rain: checking her pulse. Her skin is too smooth, too soft, too cold. The doctor believes for a second that she has died, but then, there is a pulse, and fuck, she's breathing. "He didn't want to just buy her, that seemed weird, you know?" The doctor looks up. "So, instead he courted her." 

"Let's get her to the hospotile." 

"?" 

"I think she'll be okay, she just needs to rest." They are silent as they load her into the back seat of the doctors car. The man slips into the passenger seat, leaving his bike in the street where he'd dropped it when he finally found his friend. And they drive to the hospital. 

i went to church and put together the unite states puzzle. the one with all the states as the pieces, except for the tinny little northeastern states. i need to go write my paper about the colonization of the unite states. but i hate writing papers, so i am not going to do. well. i will do it. i will go do it now. i will stop wasting time and go do it.

brain barf.

and it's not so much that i don't love you as that i have been drawn into a million pieces and don't have enough time for anything anymore anymore. plus i am being forced to memorize literary techecnics which while being vaguely interesting makes me feel like such a douche.  it is bad when you start being like, "i am using repation in this piece in order to achieve the effect of..." which is whatever. i think all that is intuitive. plus it's not meant for me as a writer, but rather me as a student of world literature. which is whatever again. some of those books though, no literary merit. a story sure, but no attention to the language. no thinking about literary techniques.

plus i have a boyfriend, and i have friends, and i have home work, and i have being the president of gay straight alliance, and the being the "you said something non-pc" police, all while still trying to be nice and get some tinny amount of sleep and write in my note book and feel like my own person who is worthy of being alive because i love myself. and i need you here. or something. 

i make up songs on my bike and do creative writing exercises in physics class. the last time i did laundry? washed my hair? good god. the last time i told myself i was going to have down time and did homework instead? like twenty minutes ago. i do, i guess, have a choice. i could leave and walk out and move into the forest. i could stream FUCK GETTING INTO A GOOD COLLEGE! really loud, but the thing is, that would be the hardest thing. the least socially okay thing to do. there are all these things i can't say because they aren't socially okay, and so i really want to say them. and then, because... 

whatever. 

last night i had this whole break through thing that WE ARE ALL TOTALLY FUCKED. that me worrying about my gpa is such bullshit, because there are storms every week, and the storms are destroying things and we are all so totally fucked. nobody seems to think that it is so totally hopeless. they talk about the storms, and they talk about the conference in Copenhagen, but the things don't fit together. no one seems to think that we are all going to die. that doing anything except preparing to raise beet greens, and make housing out of stuff we find in the land fill. when the magnitude of it hits, it hits, and it feels so totally empty, that i have to push it out and worry about my economics home work. 

i hope it's not too late. it's never really too late. people will always keep fucking and more babies will keep showing up, and then even if there are decades and decades where things are shitty and hopeless then maybe someday we'll (humanity) will come out of it. or maybe we won't, maybe we'll all be dead, and the dominate life form will be a certain type of mold, or something. which is cool too. in the big huge unbelievably large scheme of things.

but at the same time it is impossible to think about life like that. i have to think about tomorrow and the next day, and then maybe the next year. because that is what i have control over. i have no control over the ball of rock we live on. if i am really lucky i will be able change the way one species interacts with one part, of something on the surface of the ball of rock. i will be able to make some people treat each other a little bit nicer, or have some shift in the way people think about an issue. that is if i am amazingly lucky. or burdened. 

i feel like it is a burden. feeling smart and able and inspired. being able to put the pieces together feels like a duty. to make shit a little better. to make this all a little better.

and so i memorize my literary terms because i think that maybe, not even because i care, but because i think that proving to someone that i am able to, will make them think that i am smart, and them thinking i am smart will put me into a place where i have more power, and having more power will only allow me to do more good things and be better angled to save the world. i know how words sound good together. i don't give a shit what the fancy word for that is. i don't give a shit about fancy words. 

(i do, however, like fancy cheese)