measuring myself against the rainfall

if i were a ruler
i would be able to tell you how much, how long
compared to last month
or New Orleans

rulers have done more to damage the world
by comparing themselves to something more-
or less.
nothing spells insecurity like not measuring up to
tomorrow’s prediction
or yesterday’s record

throw open the doors!
it’s raining.
i want to know the violent pulse from the sky

but how far? how wide?
enough for beauty
but not for irreparable damage.
if you want the door closed, do it
yourself

and what about the leaks?
water dripping onto antique such-and-such
now it’s the whole roof!
and someone else has to fix the problem

measurements will have to be taken

if you measure in
inches,
i will measure in
pyrex or longitude or nanoseconds or eighth notes or
syllables

something incomparable
to lessen
the rain

August 2007

today's email from john

As if Blackwater didn't make you sick enough... Check
out this link. I KNOW dad would have been disgusted
with this turn of events. He was a proud member of
the Foreign Service for thirty years. But he would
NEVER have condoned what the State Department has done
here!!! Condi is a despicable shithead bitch!
Errrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

Me

Here's the link

the beautiful things that heaven bears

I inhaled this little melancholic novella by Dinaw Mengestu in two days. Echoes of other immigrant stories, yet all its own. Read/heard about it in three different places within as many days...you know how that comes to "mean something".

Here's a snippet of a conversation between two African immigrants who escaped violent coups in their separate homelands to come to the US with the naive belief in that elusive American Dream.

Everything is beautiful to you.

Not everything.

But damn close.

You just have to have the right perspective.

Which is what?

Indifference. You have to know that none of this is going to last. And then you have to not care.

And then the world becomes beautiful?

No. It becomes ridiculous. Which is close enough for me.

It is filled with these embedded little gems that make you stop and want to underline them. But I never do.

almost all hallows

Being the grammar nazi that I am, I did a little research to see if hallows needed an apostrophe. I found three variations: hallows, hallow's, and hallows'. I prefer missing apostrophes to misplaced or unnecessary ones, so I opted for the simplest choice.

Party pics from The Burkles' haunt:

circa samhain

For those of you not in the know, I realize a little clarification of my costume is in order, else you might think I have truly lost my senses. I think here you will find sufficient explanation. If you still have questions, you may address them to my personal secretary.

Thanks to John and Jenny for throwing a smashing shindig.
Thanks to the moon for being so resplendent; sorry I didn't get a photo of you.

I want to live in Ireland: "Irish children have a week-long Halloween break from school; the last Monday in October is a public holiday given for Halloween even though they often do not fall on the same day." -Wikipedia

operation homecoming

It was homecoming weekend at Colorado College. Homecoming. A time to come home. Sometimes the measures we take to get back home are drastic. Sometimes we can't figure out how we got so far away from home in the first place. Sometimes it is impossible to go home again. Sometimes we get home, only to realize it wasn't what we thought it would be. Sometimes we are homeless. Sometimes it's a three-run homer. Sometimes we think home is farther away than it really is. Sometimes home is better once we have been away for awhile. Sometimes it is worse. Sometimes we choose to try and make our home in a foreign land, wishing for two homes but finding we have none. Sometimes we have a home away from home. Sometimes there's no place like home.

Sometimes our lives are so dramatically changed by the journey that there is nothing left to do but write.

poster children....

...for All Pikes Peak Reads.

Grant's Zorro is sporting a homemade sword forged from branches in our backyard and fastened together with pipe cleaners. (Only they don't call them that anymore because it's not PC). The cowboy hat I picked up in the Goodwill parking lot where I'm not quite sure what happens... there's lots of boxes full of stuff and men (generally Mexican) sit around on their tailgates and look over the goods. I don't know the rules for this event, but I have managed to glean a pair of nice black shoes, several toys, and that brown hat from them, always for free. (It might have something to do with the mini-skirts and my coy attempts at engaging them in Spanish, apropos to the hat being used for a Zorro costume).
Grant's cape is a black fleece blanket held together by a safety pin, which he found by recklessly dumping out the contents of a clay jar that sits on my dresser. You know. The one that collects all the items that emerge from pockets at the end of the day: all the pins, marbles, pennies, paper clips, rocks, scrabble tiles, buttons, and rubber bands that simply have nowhere else to go.

Bennett's Greek fisherman's hat came from, well, Greece. I bought it when I was there nearly 20 years ago, never dreaming it would end up on a 6-year-old's head (MY six year old!) when he wanted to be Zorro. Together, we threw open the old suitcase of dress up materials, and dug around until we found it. He didn't care that it wasn't a caballero hat; it was black, and that was just fine. His "cape" is fashioned from an old piece of black material I bought when putting on Orpheus and Eurydice with a bunch of middle schoolers. He was lamenting that it had a hole in it, but after my quick-witted explanation of "that's where Zorro got sliced by a sword but narrowly escaped unharmed", it quickly became a badge of honor. It was fastened at the neck with a gold pin I found in my mother's old jewelry box, which also sits on my dresser.

The masks were made by the boys at Acacia Park during the All Pikes Peak Reads kick-off party.

On this evening, they dreamed of being something bigger than they really are, with more courage, more luck, and more daring than they possess in real life. This child's play is fascinating to watch, as little beings don not only capes and hats and boots, but also personalities and attributes. I love Halloween. The boundary between the worlds becomes thin, and we can all, for awhile, dig around in our closets, rummage through history, and become something more. Or at least different. It doesn't take money, only a little ingenuity and a willingness to suspend disbelief.

Bennett: "I want to be a hero when I grow up."
Grant: "So he robbed, but he was good."

today's best

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I am not able to forget the little siren who sang to me so sweetly.
You are a beautiful ghost who lives in the ruins of my broken heart.

(PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.)

smalltown boy

I was listening to KEPC, 89.7, on my way to work yesterday morning, when this song came on. I started singing at the top of my lungs, physical memories of lights and people and my own dancing body flooded my world. When I finally came to, I found I had missed the left turn green light, at least eight cars having gone before me, and mine having gone nowhere. Luckily, there was no one behind to wake me from my revelry with an angry, "I have to get to work, bitch, stop singing!" honk. It has been playing in my head for the last two days.

It was somewhere in the mid-80's and music ruled the world. My world, anyway. I spent the latter half of that decade in college, with a semester abroad in Spain and a year abroad in England. All the while connecting myself to people who would go see The Cure in Madrid or Robyn Hitchcock in Manchester (I drove a van full of 15 students through the roundabouts of Manchester to get us to that show!), or Echo and the Bunnymen in Seattle.

Once upon a time, dance music wasn't just one tedious beat after another. "Maybe," she says with a sigh, "I'm just getting old and I just don't get it."

But when this song came on in the club, we were ALL there, rushing to the dance floor to work out our darkest fears, our dearest hopes, our lovers and friends all together in the same realm. Bronski Beat. I willingly confess to loving this band. Listening to The Age of Consent over and over and over again in my dorm room. Dancing as if my body or soul might explode at any minute. I miss that. There's no place for us of The Breakfast Club generation to dance that will play Bronski Beat. Or Simple Minds. Or New Order. Or Cabaret Voltaire. Or Bauhaus/Tones on Tail/Love and Rockets. No place that I know of anyway. Please enlighten-I desperately need to dance to something other than endless monotonous techno filled with teasingly painful reminders of my past. (I think they're called "samples").