now that you are eight
you pedal-fly and don’t look back
but you’re only eight
I’m posting from a campsite again. This year, the medium boy has a level of independence that leaves me anxiously waiting to hear his bike bell and know that he’s fine. We let the line out, then pull it back a little, let the line out, pull it back again. For him, this is exhilarating and scary and slightly difficult to navigate. Is he ready? Am I ready? Almost.
Today? I wrote for kids.
Fairies, elves and dragons.
Tomorrow, I’m writing horror
And this might sound like bragging–but–
I will use the F word
In so many creative ways.
Noun, verb, adjective, interjection…
I can F for days.
Some will get the vapors,
Others just turn up their nose,
But when you’re writing messy life
The underbelly has to show.
In my real-life conversation,
I don’t F this and that with ease,
But my characters F an awful lot
When faced with extremity.
I guess what I’m saying is
You can’t sanitize real.
My pretend people have to tell you
Exactly how they fucking feel.
It’s sort of funny to me how people extrapolate what and how you write to your own personality. They expect Steve King to live in some sort of Addams family monstrosity, when he’s really someone’s Grandpa and puts a sheet on his couch so the dog doesn’t get hair all over it.
The imagination is an amazing tool, and you don’t always get to pick which doors fly open in the middle of the night. I have these flawed people come to me nearly fully formed. It’s my job to put them in situations and see what they do–and it’s not always nice. *shrug*
Checking you out checking out
Maximum packs of pills
Some cold you got there, lady
Bags of refined crystals for me
Socially acceptable RDA implosion
Dying slow, but dying too
You don’t smile, you don’t have one
Fingers to face, worrying at it
Eyes here, there, at me, don’t see
I tug my shirt over my tell
Breathing hard from standing still
Hungry to hate, settling for you
I’ll go straight to the needle
Finger sticks to pay a different piper
Both buying to use ourselves up
I used to self-medicate depression with sugar. I had a high-stress career and a lifetime of bad habits behind me, and I’d buy a couple of candy bars on the way home from work just to deal with the anxiety.
At one of my stops, I ran across a couple, both buying four boxes of generic Sudafed. Not rocket science to figure that out. With age I find greater compassion, and I realize that we all cope somehow.
I’ve broken the candy habit, for the most part, and I’m not on my way to the DIABEETUS. The depression is mostly mild and comes and goes. I still want a bag of candy, I just don’t buy one. I hope those folks are in a similar place.
don’t get your shoes wet
small lawyers got around that
technicality
I don’t actually begrudge them this particular adventure–I’d be worried if they didn’t immediately and desperately want to play in every creek they see. He was waging a losing battle against the water skippers, flinging mud and small stones only to watch them regroup in an instant. I believe next time he will request a flame thrower.
Our summer traveling in the car
Started out kind of rough.
The squabbling children escalated
Until I’d had more than enough.
They screeched and fought every minute
With intent to harm and disturb
Until I PULLED THIS CAR OVER RIGHT NOW
And sat them down on the curb.
I gave them quite a lesson there
Right by the side of the road.
They thought they might be walking home
From a two towns away zip code.
I let them back in on conditions
Which since then, they’ve mostly met.
Like all siblings, they bicker,
About things they should just forget.
This normal silly bickering, though,
I find easier to survive.
In an imagined car of silence,
I switch to internal drive.
It turns out, I’m not quite able to compose a rhymed English sonnet in iambic pentameter while I’m driving. I was in the car for 5+ hours today, and while I usually do compose verse in my head on the road, keeping track of the syllables and rhyme structure without writing anything down was too much. So I let my brain make this, not at all inspired by anything that did/did not happen in the backseat today.
Also…this may/may not be a completely true story.
I found this little vignette all set up for me, and the play on “throne” was too delightful to pass up.
As a side note, I apologize for the crappy quality of the poem type. I had to insert that as a picture translated through three programs, because I could not get the formatting to work no matter how much HTML I crammed in there. An hour later, I decided that it added a certain “vintage” quality to the poetry and it’s actually the best.
I promised myself that I’m going to write a sonnet for tomorrow, just because I haven’t done that since high school. Dusting the rust off the iambs right now.
To say a child grows like a weed
Is rather unfair to the kid.
While children eventually do move out,
I’ve never seen a weed that did.
We weed and weed, and still we weep. Oregon is where noxious plants settle to raise their families. They move in and holler “Sanctuary! Sanctuary!” whenever we start pulling them up. We feel so sorry for them and their little tykes, we just don’t have the heart to—yeah, you’re not buying that, are you? Would you believe we have terrible allergies? No? Hmmm. At least they’re all organic.
I balanced that egg on the mustard,
Trying hard to fool myself.
No surprise later that day
When it catapulted off the shelf.
SPLAT! On my foot it fell
From its too precarious nest.
Vaulting over the relish with gusto
When the fridge door I did wrest.
Oh…okay…I loudly sighed
As I wiped the yolk off my leg.
At least now the problem’s resolved
Of storing that extra egg.
I like to give the universe opportunities to surprise me by violating the laws of physics. It hasn’t happened yet, but I hold out hope.
O, the glorious Outdoors!
We marvel at your Splendor!
Except for that last camping trip
When you put me through the blender.
Three days at the local State Park,
Should have been a plate of s’mores.
After two days we were done.
Quoth the raven, “Nevermore.”
We lost one kid for quite a while
On the banks of the Willamette.
Frantically searched and called for an hour,
Nightmares running the gamut.
Until I went to get the Rangers
Riding my bike, heart steeled,
And found him in the motorhome,
Giggling at the pages of Garfield.
Okay, that ended well, I guess,
So we didn’t go home right away.
Dad and I had a couple of stiff ones.
Tomorrow would be a new day!
Let’s start that day with pancakes!
The favorite breakfast of the boy!
Oh my god, this version of mix
Is loaded with processed soy.
For most people, no worries,
The texture’s a little different.
We got to call the ambulance
From the rural fire department.
An ambulance in a campground
Makes you instant celebrities.
While he rode his bike that afternoon,
I repeatedly answered, “How is he?”
We spent the rest of the trip
Reacting to everything at DEFCON5.
We were completely done having fun.
We just wanted to get home alive.
It is my sincere hope that this last trip will forever be The Worst Camping Trip Ever®. If it gets worse, it edges into actual life-altering events. It’s a bit on my mind as we prepare for the next one. The campground is by the ocean. I’m considering requiring life jackets 24/7.
in this middle age
I find a crucible of
molten metal me
Middle age is often an inflection point where a person decides, again, what direction their life will take. I like this image of the crucible. The metal has the potential to become something strong and beautiful, but must be handled with care lest it reduce its surroundings to ash. Mine has not yet been cast, but I think I see the shape of it shifting underneath the surface.
(Coincidentally, element 43 on the periodic table is technetium, a transition metal that is radioactive and mostly not found on Earth, but rather in red stars. Transition, indeed.)
YOU SHOULD BE HAPPY 