Cruel April

I wrote this a couple of weeks ago and then got too busy to post it, but the sentiment still applies.

April, you're fucking terrifying.
Last week it was snowing.
How can I trust my bare skin to this air?
Do you even remember February?
How this landscape was a frozen cemetery?
How these trees were tombstones?
Now crocuses erupt from open graves
Past clumps of rotting leaves.
Too soon, April, and yet too late!

My mom bought a house when I was grown.
After years of apartments, trailers, basements,
Moving, always moving, she has settled down.
April, I walk through you like that house.
Nature has no memory,
Or these buds wouldn't be so bold, so tender.
When God sent a flood to cover the Earth
And destroy every living thing,
When the waters finally rolled back
And the land appeared, God sent a rainbow
As a promise.
No one thought to hold Him to this.

Once I went away all summer
And when I came home, my baby sister
Took one look at me and burst into tears.
I dropped onto one knee and held her
As she sobbed wordlessly in my arms,
Like, April, you hold me now.

Heartbreaking Jerks and Staggering Genius, Part 1

Sybil Lamb is terrifying.

That's what I learned on the way to the reading and before she got up to read, from all my friends who had met her and also from the other authors who were reading last Wednesday night. She's all big boots stomping and loud, inappropriate banter and sheer dresses with dark, skimpy undergarments and acres of stick-and-poke tattoos and a grin that will eat you for breakfast.

She is also a goddamn genius. The kind that cannot be contained or measured or broken, even by a traumatic brain injury. As she read from I've Got a Time Bomb, she transformed from author reading from her recently published novel into some fascinating troublemaker you just met shortly after the apocalypse, reenacting illegal, illogical antics with friends named after baked goods, reciting dialogue without even looking at the page. At one point, she literally climbed and swung from the rafters of the Marlboro College Campus Center.

Also I'm not entirely sure she wasn't a little drunk.

Also it took her 13,000 years to sign books because she was holding court sitting on the end of the book table and drawing original comics in everyone's book and playing with a toy robot mouse and a ceramic sperm and gossiping/shit talking with Casey Plett and Imogen Binnie, and it was completely worth the wait. Apparently I was smirking the whole time, which is how I express enjoyment, BTW:

"Hey....wanna do book stuff?!" "Hang on I'm just finishing some office stuff... ..."

And if she's as scary as they say, maybe I'd be too delicate to be her friend, but I am so glad she's doing what she's doing and I'll support her work and read the hell out of it (p.s. buy her novel right now it's so good), and I'll totally worship her from afar. Like, maybe really far.

Poem for a Mean Girl

I appreciate
That you're in the universe.
I'll be over here.

Cold-Cocked by the Galaxy

I've had a shitty week. Car broke down, laptop broke down, I dropped my phone and shattered the screen, on-and-off migraines, and some super-stressful work situations.

I like when I can identify some external cause for my woes, especially when it's something over which I have no control. It allows  me to shake my tiny fist and just ride it out. Enter astrology.

So I started asking around, hoping to confirm my suspicions that the sky was to blame for my difficulties. Reports started coming in that I'm not the only one who's had a week from hell. And someone showed me this: the Grand Cross.

Basically, four planets are forming 90-degree angles in four cardinal zodiac signs, and the result is a cosmic shit-show. This has been going on since January and will continue into June, and we're coming up on the peak, where the cross is its squarest.

Oh, also a little thing called a blood moon eclipse. Apocalypse, anyone?

Haiku for the Solar System Being a Dick

Why is life a mess?
Stars and planets all aligned
Flipping me the bird

This is how planets say "Fuck you."

Jumping the Shark

Today's haiku by request from a loyal 17aDay fan, MM:

About a decade ago, in a Midwest Denny's, I watched a kid* draw on his place mat. There were planes flying over hapless stick figures, dropping bombs on them. The bombs were made of knives. The knives were maybe made of something else, like fire. Or tarantulas. I can't be bothered to remember exactly.

For all I know, that kid moved to Hollywood and made Sharknado.

Haiku for an Improbable-Weather-Related Disaster Flick

A child's crayon sketch
Of flying, exploding sharks
In theaters near you

*"Kid" is what I call anyone in their 20s.

Hallelujah, it's raining marine carnivorous fish.

Hitch yer wagon to a dyin' star

Haiku for Freezing Temperatures in This Week's Forecast

Only trouble is,
When your soul's like autumn leaves,
Be prepared to die.

Oh, the humanity.

There's a whole world out there.

One thing that's really stood out for me since moving from the Big City to the Small Town is how much less aware I am of global and even national events. I still get the same articles in my Facebook feed, I guess, but my focus is much more local.

And I wanted that. Going from editing a national magazine to providing direct service within a few miles' radius gave me the personal connections I was missing in my work. And I wanted my world to shrink to a manageable size so I could recover from the burnout of being stacked on top of and crammed together with 8 million of my fellow humans for 5 years.

But there are days when I feel cut off from the world and people who are in tune with and talk about the world outside their immediate sphere. And today, as news of Manning's sentence is making the internet rounds, I don't want to read smart, progressive articles or poignant, pointed tweets about what it means. I want to sit in a room with other people who are outraged or dejected or confused and just feel things and ask each other questions and stare at the floor.

Will that happen at the potluck tonight or around my kitchen table tomorrow or at the coffee shop Friday? Maybe, but probably not. I've felt this way many times recently--when Zimmerman was found not guilty, when Assata showed up on the most-wanted list, when the California prison hunger striker died, whenever there's news of Lynn Stewart's health declining. I could go on.

Maybe what I really miss is talking to people who are working on national or global social justice and a sense of hope for what is happening on the ground. All I'm left with is the headlines and a feeling of isolation.

Haiku for August 21, 2013 (aka tl;dr)

My New York Lefties,
Let's be depressed together
Til we change the world.

Life After Humans

So, you know how the Badlands in South Dakota used to be all underwater, and then the plates shifted and created mountains, and the water drained away, and then it was a jungle full of dinosaurs, and now we see these petrified soil layers sticking up all over amid these grassy plains? Well, me either, until yesterday. Now we both know.

Whenever I think in terms of millions of years on Earth, I find myself smiling with the realization that this experiment called homo sapiens will someday evolve into a new experiment with a species that will maybe not destroy itself and everything around it as quickly as it can.

Haiku for July 31, 2013

They called you "bad land,"
But you used to be a sea.
Anything can change.

Choosing teams for the apocalypse

Last night I made some new friends. Two of them I met as they backed a pickup truck up to the fire pit and started throwing wood and various debris out the back. One of them stated he was drunk (it was around 6 pm). There was thrash metal blasting out of the truck's speakers.

You gonna finish that blog?

I am really good at starting projects. As someone told me recently, my creativity is endless. Which is kind of the problem. All beginning, no end. Maybe the worst idea I've had was to start a project where I commit to doing something every day indefinitely. It is doomed. This blog is doomed.

Sick

Haiku for April 8, 2013

Evil Santa film
Made by Finnish geniuses
Cured me of the flu

For my mad kin

I know someone who is having a really intense experience of being able to foresee the collapse of human society. Technologies, economies, governments, all failing. Their calculations have placed this event in the next couple of years. Everything on the news and the Internet is confirming these predictions. I can see this person's physical health deteriorating. Coffee and cigarettes and weed.