Gifts

After many bus rides, a man lies down in bed and realizes that some travel is better than some destinations. This man traveled by bus across state lines. He traveled with friends all around him but with one in his lap. Now he's home and staring at the ceiling, thanking some celestial spirit for the gift of love. Though his bed is comfortable, the bus rides that got him there were much more comfortable. He feels lonely and counts out every speck on his ceiling: every person he knows, every star in the sky. No use. And of course he feels lonely because just hours ago his body and feelings were intertwined with another. Now he wishes he and the other were still, as he lies still. She (the other) gave him a gift: warmth that affronted a winter outside a bus window. The trip was bought in full, the hotel and the bus were rented, but this girl gave him a gift of innocent company and happiness. He doesn’t feel happy all that often. Hence as he tries to sleep, he wishes his blankets could match her soft skin.

Feeling love, if only for a few hours, is a gift that consumes all of one’s surroundings and channels all energy into touch. Roudin couldn’t capture this energy in his sculptures, which we thought were funny to see after our bus ride. For a good two hours, we met up in the Philadelphia Art Museum. Then it was briefly back on the bus; stoic. As we left that bus, our arms let go and whispered goodbyes. We would take different busses going home, then different cars going home, and finally different steps leading to different bedrooms. I’m finally home. It’s been two days since my gift. Winter never seemed colder.

Impetus at the Round Table

Crowded in a room of people,
Pupils,
Proud debaters and agitators,
Shakers,
I listen hard to the ground, to an inner conscious,
I wish.
It’s all disjointed.
The people,
They look hard around the table,
It’s a complete mess,
A lever is pulled and the room retrogrades,
Back to a fire-pit,
Into a hole:
A roundabout discussion,
Your opinion, my opinion,
Greater or equal decisions.

I’ve got to supplement this moment with a capsule,
Swallow it whole and sour.
Ingest this round table of aggression.
My stomach would dissolve these characters,
These people who stare until we all become translucent,
Shapeless and cover-less.
One should ask us to grapple with this idea:
“Collective consciousness”
But by now it is too late
Dissipated memories are we,
Around the boardroom of discussion.
Products of round table retort,
Forced into a deepening crevasse.
Separate cognitive angers,
A hole of debaters,
Impulses of disagreement.

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Based on AP lang classroom table

Freewriting with Music: A Cemetary Row, a Solemn March, and Nothing Happens (Means Nothing)

In an old sweatshirt reading old essays listening to old music,
“Cemetery row is not such a bad place, don’t you want to go" (Cemetery Row- The Minus 5)
Yes! I do, finally a sound that contemplates what I find beautiful,

“Give this booone to my fath-er-er; he’ll rememberrr huntin’ in the hills when I was ten years old. May my looovve reach you all, I lost it in my self and buried it too long." (Dead Man’s Will- Iron & Wine)
Exactly! This is what I will give, total attention, expectation, elation…
Love.
O.k. I’ll stand there while you point that machine this-a-way.

“What a beautiful face I have found in this place that is circling all round the sun" (In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by The Neutral Milk Hotel)
Perfect. Like talking points let’s watch these people spin rhetoric death traps, with our sodas and lawn chairs out in the sun; sitting, lying, breathing, singing.. sighing... dying….

“Someone found the future as a statue in the fountain, an attention in a pool of water wishes were the blue- everything means nothing to me” (Everything Means Nothing to Me- Elliott Smith)

Really? Me neither because in this cold blue water crystallized by the voices, sounds, feelings, pictures, a dictator wakes up from a death-march and realizes that he was a ghost his entire life, Sending signals down his spine and chills to his men.
I’ll lead this march if you have a point, a saying, a meaning, a time!
And let’s recount the days that brought us back to the beginning.

As a cycle once said, everything is a prophet.
The future is analogous with the past but present, present is the story we tell ourselves "does not exist".
It’s the instance of a cycle that always ends,
no amount of machinery can explain that,
no amount of man power can change that,
no amount of love can rearrange that.
Wack!!

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Works Cited

Calexico, Iron & Wine. Dead Man's Will. Rec. 2005. MP3. 2006.

Elliott Smith. Everything Means Nothing to Me. Rec. 2000. MP3. 2000.

Nuetral Milk Hotel. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Rec. Summer 1997. MP3. Robert Schneid

The Minus 5. Cemetary Row. Rec. Winter 2006. MP3.

August Rush

A sound heard everywhere,
Complete and a gift,
The swiftness of weeds in the wind, the pace of the city as it walks,
Write it down.
Measure out a bridge between conscious and cosmos,
Make the point at which you stand be exactly infinite,
And from around, sound will seep inward,
And from inward, music will extricate.

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Based on the movie "August Rush"

All Things Familar

I walked my dog today. It is October and as standard for this time, the leaves are falling and effusive people are talking about the color and shade outside. My dog and I walked one block outside: the paved streets of a more-country-than-suburban neighborhood; the large and gracious trees and their gifts of leaves; a consummate wind that touches everything at once; the political signs of hope, change and redundancy. It all looks familiar. So when I looked out the window, I thought of how beautiful everything was and how many thousands of times more I would see this exact picture. My dog, nervous and expectant after having his leash put on, ran out the door and waited by the electric fence line as I prepared for the cold.

In the open the cold is abrasive. All the dead leaves look fresh amongst the earth. I have to carry my dog across the fence line because he can’t understand that a human contraption dictates where he goes, much less that I changed his collar for a leash. A car passes, a man-made wind adds to the incessant displacement of leaves, and we walk out of the driveway to begin our route.

He waits, wags his tail, and looks but there isn’t any understanding in his mind. We turn onto South Ten Eyck and the road elongates. I can see for miles in this one street. There are thousands of leaves around that seem to call us to travel in the bright sympathetic Sun. But we, my dog and I, know that nature cannot supplant real affections. We ignore the Sun’s warmth as today it is clouded by thousands of miles of cold nebula. On my route I pull my dog as he pulls back. He runs sideways and as far into lawns as he can before I rein him in. We pass houses and wind and more leaves, all with distinct familiarity.

We turn left. My dog finally pulls to the side of the road and poops. As he does this, he shakes and looks pathetically small. This was the point of this walk. If he were not an animal and did not have certain needs then we would not have gone outside. If domesticated animals did not have to poop, humanity would encase them in walls, indefinitely. Humanity? It is the tool that tries to organize everything but cannot even organize itself. What is the value of this animal? Can it think one up and write one next to nature’s books of laws? My dog is known as it; like a thing that is bought and sold; like slavery; like humanity’s poor track-record. All of mankind believes in a religion of predestination except in a way that we think we are better than everything. As I watch my dog, I cannot think it reasonable for me to deprive him of his nature or that I am better than him. He lives inside, cold and alone, above the frailty of self-pity. With freewill I fall into innumerable pieces for no apparent reason everyday. And at this side of the road, where he shakes and is now peeing – scared as if some unseen hand will slap him as punishment – and watching around him, I look into his face and see all things familiar.

We take another left onto Linklane. My dog, mine, is happy to be leashed and to have his direction dictated in the open air, instead of in a fabricated home. His life is within walls made by his master. But he doesn’t actually have a master. He has walls and leashes and strings, as if a puppet who is ordered to perform in front of no audience for the rest of his life. I travel on whim: on a bight windy morning suitable for chores and freewill. I do what I please with only a few strings for an audience of parents, teachers and friends who all do what they please with similar strings attached. My dog (it), fully conscious and alive, sits on the couch with a leash in his mouth and waits to go on this familiar adventure one more time. Outside effusive people walk and talk with freewill amongst the familiar leaves, streets and sky. Inside my dog focuses hard, trying to figure out why everything seems so familiar.

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Merriam-Webster. Main Entry: Familiar
3: a spirit often embodied in an animal and held to attend and serve or guard a person
4 a: one who is well acquainted with something b: one who frequents a place
"familiar." Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. 2008.

Merriam-Webster Online. 23 October 2008