Because she goes so well with blueberry crumble cake

A sonnet I had to write in imitation of John Donne (at one point there was a "nay!" in it that soon became deleted).

Revive my sputtering heart, you the icèd
Grandè no whip skim vanilla lattè
Whose steaming non-fat sip is why I pay
The starry labor bucks of the overpricèd.
For I, who dallied foul with white mocha,
And lay with the double-blended extra hot
Spices of Chai, have false tastebuds not
To sample Tazo juices’ berry flava,
When “The regular, please”— ever tempting
With her seasonal fits of pumpkin or
(Dare I say?) gingerbread—burns in my core
And Esophagus? My love is too strong
To taste the sweets of another drink,
Or of another flavor shot to think.

That last chiasmus was hell.
In other words, I really like grande skim vanilla lattes (but I lied about the whip).

Some old writing 2

Writing from like 2 years ago, wow I have been super unproductive recently...

Theoretically

It was muggy at best,
A southern panorama of gauzy warmth and damp distraction
The afternoon class was in an outdoor trailer or
“Individual motorized unit”
Our school’s dedication to positive educational environments
We had notebooks
And anonymous poster boards
Scissors
Glue
And all the while the iridescent singe of philosophy hung heavily in the air
Lanky and silver haired,
Gratuitously charming
He asked, “What is your heart’s desire”
And the boy said, “To be fit in body and mind”
He was vain because he was intermediately attractive
And she said, “To save people”
Phony altruistic future middle-aged women,
And they said, “To be a millionaire, to have super powers, to rule the world”
(That was the despot in the class)
And then he leaned my way last
And asked the question,
In a waft of hazelnut caffeine and certainty
I paused
Hoping to concoct a brilliant reply—
A scholar’s approach to existential questions
A consciously timeless, excessively deliberate daring display of ingenuity!
Potentially in complete alliteration
But all I could think of was
“To be content”
What a disappointment
“That’s all you want? To be content? Your heart’s desire and that’s it?”
But I couldn’t say
“I want you and everything about you and everything you will be and might be your smell your intention the space around us the objects you converged with your contemptible optimism your nicotine breathing your constancy the corner of your gaze you for eternity you and your misery for the price of my interrupted isolation: you and just you”
So I said yes,
“That’s it.”

To Hell with E.E. Cummings

i preoccupy myself with
your animation
that provokes my premeditated distraction:
a bro,ken narrative along the
lines of your face,
which induces an onslaught of quixotic
v
-e
--r
---b
----ii
-----a
------g
------- e. The worst being
love
and its second perpetrator has to be
depth

To hell with ee cummings
I demand the unembellished—the physical lexicon,
The linguistically unexpressive image of
Your eyes
Not resplendent like the stars and heavens and
Your heart
Uninvolved with blossoms, buds or nightingales
Or with mine for the present.
(Empty)
Phrases safeguard action and mock intention,
So go ahead and capitalize your sentiments,
Ensure your intimacy is of Roman lower case
But there is enough space between us that
My words
Must be unquivocallysuffocatingina

nimpenetrablerwrittenembrace
Or else this verse and its euphemistic predecessors mean
Nothing
To hell with poetry
I would trade a resoundingly flawless adjective,
An aesthetically provocative stanza
For a kiss

Vocabulary

I could not think of a single word. That expression on his face was singular. It deserved one entry that could be flipped to, pinpointed. It was a flicker—maybe a one-syllable adjective, one that rang with full but deep intention. He walked up to the bench; she walked up to him, and bang! There it was. I was looking at him. I don’t know what she said, but I was looking at him and his singular expression. Give me a word. It was so exact, the way he looked at her, so unequivocal. Rummage through the piles of your daily phrases. Shuffle through the boxed-up vernacular of your past. Poke and prod at every half-formed verbal manifestation of your physical life. I need a word. I need one seamless, even, fit of a word. I need a word because if a word for that does not exist, then what will become of us all? Imagine if you were me, if you had seen him there by that bench, and her by that bench, and in one fragile instant of lips moving, and vocal chords constricting, he feels something in him that pulls the muscles in his face so that he looks? Blank. That’s what I am.

Risk it all, and dive into the muddy spring of your private passions. Drown yourself for one moment, because in that moment of frenzy, in that gasping anticipation for what is necessary and what must be, you may breathe in that life-giving word that found its way to a boy and a girl and a bench. I didn’t hear what she said. But I do know he felt. You can’t go to them. You can’t walk up and sit at that bench because everything will break. She will put a lock of hair behind her ear and fold her arms, and he will lower his eyes and put his hands in his pockets. And when you try to listen to them and look at them, the word will turn to many words. Do not let his face become many words. Do not let them speak again. I didn’t hear what they were saying, but I did see his face. And he looked with the same single intention as a gun pointed at the heart.

Memoir of Billy Danger

Sometimes, I get in these moods. It’s like after I watch some heavy Indie flick that makes me want to smack someone then ruminate about it in the shower for three hours. Or after I read some fucked up avante-garde mess of text, and I end up in this crazy Dostoyevsky-ish pattern of psychotic thinking driven by a Holden Caulfield way of deciphering life—something like that. So, I went outside with my sheepdog Philomenus, drank a gin and tonic, and sat on a lawn chair breathing. I sat there and breathed for an hour, in and out, really huge breaths.

Everything was fine. But when a man looks at everything he has and feels nothing, then it’s time he moves on. When you’re particularly vulnerable and subject to erratic impulses, it’s best not to be around anything that could induce strange decisions. Unfortunately, sitting outside on that musty night my attention was drawn to Philomenus. So there I was, contemplating my life, and Phil conveniently runs around the yard chasing some birds. And I watch Phil and I watch him chasing these goddamn birds around the yard, and I see myself walking into the kitchen and pulling out my address book, and calling my real estate guy Lee and asking how much property in New Zealand is. So, Lee calls me back and gives me the descriptions of some available estates, and I’m like, “No Lee, look, I want property with hills and grass, nowhere close to the cities, I’m talking wilderness Lee, yeah, like valley near the mountains.” And he keeps telling me there’s this 25,000 square foot monster that some retired corporate head just put up for sale because he had a condition so he needed a warmer climate, and I keep saying “No Lee, look, just find me some patch of wilderness by a damn mountain where there’s grass.”


So Lee hooked me up with this contractor who specializes in atypically complex structures. I tell him I have a project for him in New Zealand. Basically, I want him to build a natural looking hut with good utilities because I can’t do without long showers, and I’m not intending to make this a Walden experience or anything. So, he takes his guys over to this gorgeous property in the middle of nowhere and they build a really quaint-looking cottage that sits on the edge of these beautiful little hills at the base of a mountain range. I call up some distant cousins from Scotland who may or may not actually be related to me and they found some local shepherds whom I then flew over to my hut. I asked them how I should set up the pens and what sheep I should get, and if Phil can be trained to herd them, or if I should get some other dogs. The whole process takes about six months, and a couple million dollars, but finally I had this inhabitable hut, a couple dozen sheep, and Phil.

Now, let me take a moment and acknowledge what you’re thinking, by means of inserting a Flaming Lips lyric:

I don't know where the sun beams end and the star
Light begins it's all a mystery
And I don't know how a man decides what’s right for his
Own life - it's all a mystery

Here is my artistic effort at explaining the state of mind that drove my actions. And a little psychedelic alternative rock never hurt anyone. Anyway, I was just sitting there that foggy night, and boom: life. I guess my shepherd desires welled up right there, right from that spring of mystery, just a bubbling mess of spontaneity and unshaped longings.

I Was There

Lights go out,
I’ve been waiting my life to be here,
But I only knew that four days ago.
Twenty thousand people behind me but the only four that count
Are right there, right here, in front of me—
Poised in front of a silver fogged backdrop,
Beams raking into, through and out of their dingy forms,
Breaking apart on the awkward edges of headstocks,
Microphone stands, amps, a glaring rock and roll truss.
Vibrating,
That collective shudder, running from fingertips to spinal columns,
To the pivots of the knees,
Until I think, “I’m going to fall”, except that I know I can’t,
Because I’m fixed, eyes, brain, vital organs,
Fixed to that solitary, opening note,
To the first of each committed beat and crash,
Every vital undertone of plectrums plucking,
To that an agonizingly stirring articulation
Of plastic and metal and wires and sentiment.
He whirls,
Tosses about the stage, pushed and prodded by forty thousand voices,
Ninety-seven lighting fixtures,
And all the while I’m so close I can see the dark stains,
The dripping product,
Of his everything being thrown at us, at me.
I reach,
I pull every riff and vibrato, every resonating chord,
Every motion of his spirit, every vault of his chorus,
And I fill myself with it,
I fill myself and spill over,
Inundated by the speed of sound.

Random Song Lyrics
Potential band name: Running Barefoot

Why don’t you sit with me?
Here, on this heap of stardust and broken bones
Here on the other side of the evening silver and rose scents
Come sit with me and run your hands in the sky
And dangle your feet in the grass
Shake your hair in the wind
From the running current of dripping nighttime

Sit here and let me be with you
Let me sing to you in shattering poetry
Let me talk to you in velvety tones and burning notes
And sugary lifts
Let me croon in a whisper and a sleepy rhythm
In a twisting wreath of rainy life

With an upturned face half-lit and half-open
A lock misplaced and threaded with the backwoods
Because we came from there
Right there a little farther up the hill
And the white beaches and the gray rock dunes
But there’s only a little bit further for you to come
And sit, here with me, here in this divine
Unreligious disorder that’s just a little more perfect
Just a little more unbearable then that one below,
The place you came from
Just a little more perfect

Sit here and let me be with you
Let me sing to you in shattering poetry
Let me talk to you in velvety tones and burning notes
And sugary lifts
Let me croon in a whisper and a sleepy rhythm
In a twisting wreath of rainy life

Because it’s all we’ve got,
And it’s all I can see from now till just before the bright end
To the farther side where it gets a little lighter
For you and maybe for us both, we’ll see
But it won’t be anything at all
If it’s missing you and all of this,
I want it just a little more perfect

And let me be with you
Let me sing to you in shattering poetry
Let me talk to you in velvety tones and burning notes
And sugary lifts
Let me croon in a whisper and a sleepy rhythm
In a twisting wreath of rainy life

Some old writing...

Some old poetry:

Daphne saw the same gray

but when they sniffed and groaned with the anticipation of the first droplets or when it fell and they pirouetted with a makeshift adolescent freedom, tongues waggling in lustful impatience, nervous fingers peeking from nylon cuffs, chirping in gaudy tunes

she retreated to the elapsed and non-sensual; a painted picket fence always latched and a grassy slope, a bend of shrubbery by the two mile tree line and night, always night— music lit and moon spun, an echoing voice peppered by glints of illumination against a backdrop of the clear sweetened aftermath. It always started because of the window, maternally ajar, a single cable of salubrious sanity wandering and waltzing under her beech wood pillow cases, into the feathery folds of a suffocatingly dreamless slumber

which they said she did too much back then (but they didn’t know)

And now it seemed like sleep was never more then marked hours gauged with bent fingers and forgotten phantasms of something infinitely wonderful and unscientific

interrupted or never began because of the window. She lay against a spread of particulars on recycled paper and a torrent of high pitched this and that mongering from outside the shut glass extinguished the light. Deeper resonance led to the jersey twin sheets and the girl guided the brush strokes of a viable portrait after a calculated proof (that is, 85%) and a conjured validation, and only then after the two second stare and the acrobatic hand, after a wait one moment mark the door wheezing mess of desperation and humanity did the light go out.

Daphne saw the same face so as to avoid the one in the unfocused corner, a quick uncertain smile and a single worded conversation that was always, always enough.
The scent of the flower is a matter of life
Salt black rocks, suctioned starfish, leaping salmon splash and forgetting the rubber soled shoes
Is a matter of life.
That one melodious laugh in the western dry heat and the sugar crystals from the sweets on fingertips and the clothed icy dip of feet and the vacant white beaches slightly rocking from the dawn birthed waves and the bits of morning tinsel on the grassy path and hardback gold lettering and remember that one summer not so long ago and you: you are a matter of life.

“You are trying to understand humanity in 120 minutes.”
“It’s 119 actually.”
“You’re an elitist.”
“At least I make the effort.”
“I don’t care about them because they don’t care about themselves. Why do we try so hard to understand them, their jokes, their backwardness, the homicidal, the suicidal, the masochistic. Not everything needs to be confused. Not everything needs to be sufficiently witty and sufficiently monotonous and sufficiently fucked up.”
“But everything should be a fantasy? That’s what you want, isn’t it—castles and knights and dragons?"”
"Don't forget the hobbits."
"So you just ignore reality?"
"It's better then reveling in human imperfections."
“That's a cop-out"
“But it’s not a pretense.”

Daphne heard the same words, but they were blurred in partial truths and wordless breaches, and she tasted the same uncertain texture of inexperience, organic and roughly saccharine but wanting in the unshakable heady fumes of the decanter’s aged scarlet
But always Daphne felt the same

Deeply

Norrin Radd

Howdy,

I'm going to start writing this blog to record my New Zealand adventures (and maybe find a home for my creative writing). But for now, since the "janetwu" space was taken, I figured I'd explain why I picked the domain name. Thus- my favorite poem by Heather McHugh:

What He Thought

We were supposed to do a job in Italy
and, full of our feeling for
ourselves (our sense of being
Poets from America) we went
from Rome to Fano, met
the Mayor, mulled a couple
matters over. "What does mean this 'flat drink?' someone asked.
What is "cheap date?" (Nothing we said lessened
this one's mystery). Among Italian writers we

could recognize our counterparts: the academic,
the apologist, the arrogant, the amorous,
the brazen and the glib. And there was one
administrator (The Conservative), in suit
of regulation gray, who like a good tour guide
with measured pace and uninflected tone
narrated sights and histories
the hired van hauled us past.
Of all he was most politic--
and least poetic-- so
it seemed. Our last
few days in Rome
I found a book of poems this
unprepossessing one had written: it was there
in the pensione room (a room he'd recommended)
where it must have been abandoned by
the German visitor (was there a bus of them?) to whom
he had inscribed and dated it a month before. I couldn't
read Italian either, so I put the book
back in the wardrobe's dark. We last Americans

were due to leave
tomorrow. For our parting evening then
our host chose something in a family restaurant,
and there we sat and chatted, sat and chewed, till,
sensible it was our last big chance to be Poetic, make
our mark, one of us asked

"What's poetry?
Is it the fruits and vegetables
and marketplace at Campo dei Fiori

or the statue there?" Because I was
the glib one, I identified the answer
instantly, I didn't have to think-- "The truth
is both, it's both!" I blurted out. But that
was easy. That was easiest
to say. What followed taught me something
about difficulty,

for our underestimated host spoke out
all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said:

The statue represents
Giordano Bruno, brought
to be burned in the public square
because of his offence against authority, which was to say
the Church. His crime was his belief
the universe does not revolve around
the human being: God is no
fixed point or central government
but rather is poured in waves, through
all things: all things
move. "If God is not the soul itself,
he is the soul OF THE SOUL of the world." Such was
his heresy. The day they brought him forth to die

they feared he might incite the crowd (the man
was famous for his eloquence). And so his captors
placed upon his face
an iron mask
in which he could not speak.

That is how they burned him.
That is how he died,
without a word,
in front of everyone. And poetry--

(we'd all put down our forks by now, to listen to
the man in gray; he went on softly)-- poetry

is what he thought, but did not say.