C'mon talk

Oh, Jarle, my Norwegian earworm!

Album "Solitarity Breaks" @ iTunes: http://goo.gl/k1J2v Amazon: http://goo.gl/RxNCN Embassy of Music: https://www.youtube.com/user/embassyofmusic

The not-asking

When you ask her
where her shoes are,
she tells you finally,
haltingly
that she's outgrown
them all. 

Turns out she's been wearing her 
battered, torn snowboots to class
for two months, maybe three.
She's been wearing them 
all the time, whatever the weather.

Valentine to my songbird

"Are you crying?" asks my songbird.

She leans in my bedroom doorway wrapped in a bath towel. Damp and pale and shining, she has just emerged from what she would call an "epical" (epic + magical) shower, where she's been singing for 45 minutes.

Argument against a virtue

The mug of white warmed milk. The overbred, ribboned dog. The kiss unkissed, or too dry, too tame. This life belongs to the wretched, the dirty. There's no sense in mending it, not now. Your life is no less or more a life than that of the woman hanging her husband's bleached boxers in the sun for the sixtieth, seventieth, hundredth time. What she remembers, you will never know.

Blonde ambitions

iphone-20130213111858-0.jpg

More fun, please, with a side
of ombré and razoring.
Tell no one of my dark past,
my ashy roots, mined silver.
It's my hair and I can curl
if I want to. You know what
they say about the little girl
with the curl in the middle
of her forehead, or you don't.
Chopped, cropped, ready
to co-opt stray laughter,
impertinent glances,
insouciant thinking, even
a bit of winking. Bring on
the parade of unremembrance,
rainbows all bows, no rain.

Dear

Dear, I made a pot roast last night in the slow cooker. I added vegetables, because vegetables are en vogue, if the food shows I watch are to be trusted. I shaved parsnips and carrots and made them smooth. I tried to imagine your face, the soft skin below the prickly indignant stubble. Maybe the only stubble you have is on your legs. Dear, if you would only write or call or find me in this great big world, I would know such things.

Green light

The traffic light is a bullshitter, gives me just enough time

(every time)
to fall hard for the red. No matter what I do, no matter what
I say, the green's on its way and my job is to move along,
(every time)
quit my staring.

Reasonable

At this very moment in time, Isabella Cosette Flora Wilhelmina von Matternhaus the Only and Ever is being unreasonably reasonable for a puppy of thirteen weeks of age.

I catch her in the act of being unreasonably reasonable all the time. Right now, she is relaxing reasonably on her little round bed in front of the electric faux-woodstove. She seems to enjoy the flickering electric flames (as do I, as did Sir James) and the warmish if anemic blast of air emanating from the unit.

The mad ones

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars....
— Jack Kerouac

Adler's Waupaca and Palace, WI, May 14, 1942

Hello Pretty Girl,

Here I go again. Still using company stationery. One of these times I'll use something else and you'll wonder who is writing. Perhaps I better explain something right now. This is going to be a very poor letter. I'm in an awfully bad mood to-day. You didn't know I was moody, did you?