Home is Wherever I'm With You

Hello, you. How are you? Good, I hope.

Me? Oh, me, I'm home.

I'm not sure what that means for this blog, but let's see.

ShitShitShit

It's been almost a month! Ohmahgawd, I'm sorry. But here's a sestina and a pantoum for you. Just for you.

A Sestina on Teacups, Marathons, and Overdone Cultural Clashes

The Breakfast Club resolved to meet every Sunday morning.

During their allotted time and in their allotted space they would discuss the news:

Troubling dreams, sabzi recipes, fashion, and what their children

Weren’t doing with their lives. Tapping their teacups

With the soft part of the spoon, clicking their tongues,

And nodding concernedly, they would tuck their saris around themselves for the rerun

Of the fifty-year old Indian woman’s harsh reality. All the club members would run

Behind her, simpering at her hysterics and aware of the nuances of mourning.

They would catch each tear with outstretched hands and spooned tongues.

The Sunday news was passed around ritually, but it was never new.

Each story was a retelling of the same; old tears, yellowing teacups.

The porcelain cracked silently with each sighing spoon tap for the children.

The children had no idea what they were doing. None at all. These new-age children.

Without a backwards glance, they dropped their culture and ran

After this ungrazi, gordai idea. It wasn’t theirs to forget, the teacups

Broke subtly, just as Sundays were God’s made morning.

Each dismissed pooja and every blond girlfriend brought home stabbed anew

The Indian mother’s wound of a heart. The forgotten mother tongues

And the preponderance of short skirts made them fear how tongues

Would wag at the next club meeting. They shook their heads at their children –

If they had no culture, they had no anchor. The members remembered their newborns.

And I often imagined my mother’s mouth running

In circles about how I no longer take time in the morning

To do breathing exercises, enjoy my food, or think of God, as she refills teacups.

I am not invited to these meetings. I only put away the teacups

After. I rinse off the brown lipstick and try not to think about the quick tongues

That lapped up my mother’s chai and crocodile tears each Sunday morning.

I wonder if every generation was the same – the mother’s cried because of the children

And the children tried to live despite the sadness. Were they always running,

Since the beginning? I’ve heard this story before, I’m sure. Not newfangled.

My mother was from before all this, from old New Delhi,

And she was carried to the new world in marriage. She only brought the teacups

Her mother gave her. She left with tears, but I wonder if she was also on the run.

She brought her idols and ideals with her, but did tongues

Lash in her absence? Did they berate her for her soon-to-be children?

They would grow up with out paranthas for breakfast every morning.

So, did she run too, from her mother? Was she unable to renew

The cycle? The breakfast club meets every Sunday morning, and they sip from teacups,

Wagging their tongues, remembering their own mothers, and shaking their heads for their children.

Pantoum Loosely Based on the Iliad

And the god who loves lightening never missed a word

Of what was whispered under the clashing of spears

And over the clanging of thunder, he heard everything

In the breath of fallen men.

Of what was whispered under the clashing of spears,

Few could make out the meaning, historians argued

Over the breath of the fallen men

Ready to ascribe sentiment to the long dead.

Few could make out the meaning, and historians argued

About why that battle was fought

Ready to ascribe sentiment to the long dead,

The story fell headfirst into romantic tomes.

Why was that battle fought

Atop the deep green of a well-loved land?

This story fell headfirst into romantic tomes

And the bloodshed lay forgotten among the rosy tones.

Atop the deep green of that well-loved land

Waves of men surged against each other,

The bloodshed lay forgotten among those who retold it,

But the lightening god looked on knowingly.

Waves of men surged against each other,

Ready to die and ready to fight on,

The lightening god watched knowingly,

Prepared to pluck up the dead and gone.

Ready to die and ready to fight on,

The men yelled and screamed and cried,

Prepared to pluck up the dead and gone,

Rememberers chose their meanings carefully.

The men yelled and screamed and cried,

And the god who loves lightening never missed a word

Rememberers chose their meanings carefully

But over the clanging of thunder, the lightening god heard everything.

Look at me, being all published

http://browngirlmagazine.com/2011/04/we_live_in_aged_times/

That's a poem.

I have other articles on this website, if you're so inclined. I don't recommend them, though, they're really rough.

It Would Be Great

If you thought my lack of updates was because I have a wild and roaring social life. That'd be swell. So, keep on thinking that.

Quarter-Life Crisis

The shitty thing about being an English major is I am constantly confronted by poets and writers and characters that have achieved more in their short, hedonistic lives than I
probably ever could in twice as many years. You know that dumb phrase "more in his little finger..."? It's like that. It feels horrible.

I realize it's a little outrageous to try to compare myself to such great people as Byron or Keats, but I'm mad right now. I mean, just look (to the left) at that suave, tuberculosis-suffering devil. He totally knows he's got it going on.

It feels so silly to sit in school learning about them rather than being out in the world, writing on napkins in dingy bars or traveling through South America while keeping a photo/doodle/poetry journal. I am literally staring out the window AT the glorious LA sun rather than running around in it and getting grass stains on my diary pages. That is the peak of privleged-suburban helplessness, I swear. It's like facing the fact that you will never amount to much of anything.

We talk constantly in class about the "script for happiness" that disillusioned writers spend so much time talking about. And we bring in examples from our own lives about how it's like we are all trying to attain the unattainable model of happiness and success. But I don't think for a second that any of us really lets it sink and settle in the dark places of our

hearts. I mean, I totally want to write or do something ground-breaking, life-changing, movie-making (see to the left (Ben Whishaw, you sexy sexy man)),* or limit-traversing instead of sitting inside discussing those that have already done so. At the same time, though, I can feel my own extremely disenchanting lack of talent or drive. I want it, yeah, but I can't even tell you convincingly if I have the ability to ever achieve it, let alone before I'm 21.

When I was about 12-14, I found this horrible Vampire Fiction book (pictured here)

about this girl who follows a dangerous-looking, shady man back to his mansion in the mountain. And the next thing she knows, HE'S A VAMPIRE (marginally better than Twilight, fer shoor). She then becomes his blood bank and house servant. Eventually she kills him because she's a vampire slayer. Anyway, the point of bringing up this badly written book is because the author, Amelia Atwater-Rhodes (also pictured somewhere below (doesn't she look just like Willow from BtvS?)),* apparently wrote her first novel at the age of 14. You know what I was doing when I was 14? I was reading Meg Cabot, mooning over fictional boys, and rocking Docs, Hot Topic witticism shirts, and glasses. I had no publishing aspirations. I was TYPICAL. Well, I was typical for my misfit-type. But I wanted to be wonderful. So, I sat down at my desk, with my legal pad and pencil. And I strained and strained and strained for a story idea. None came instantly to me so I decided I had no writing talent, and I went to go watch Inyuasha. How pathetic is that? What a sheer sign of my lack of drive, talent, and movie-worthy ability. Even at a young age I knew I was doomed for nothing but fashion awkwardness. Awesome

Well, I think about now I'm getting to stuck in my self-pity, so I will leave it here. My main point is that I need to write more. Now that I have a better grip on what I can say and how I say it (and I've also lost the Hot Topic shit), I think I'm more able to try to achieve something. It's all about the pursuit, right? I doubt I'll create anything publishable (we all know this blog is a wash), but I should probably try before I lose this animas. *sigh* I guess I should go try to actually write now. Woe is I, that I can sit around all day and TRY to write. Obvs I am Keats incarnate. And we have cures for TB now, so I'm not worried.

* I apologize for my use of double parentheses (it's usually because I just have so much to say (and I don't know how to grammatically do so))

Quick Explanation

I realize I never really got around to explaining my blog's title/ url. This is mostly because when I picked it I thought it sounded crazy-poetic with its reminiscent nod at 90s female singer/song-writer music. I am very ashamed of this. Very very ashamed.

While I Wait

I'm waiting to hear back from a professor about whether I got into his poetry workshop or not. I'm also waiting for sleep. It's all very tiring.

But I figured since I'm waiting, and since you're waiting by extension, that I should give you something while you sit with me. This is a very very old poem. And at the time I was in love with it because I could use it for a bunch of things (which meant I didn't have to write a new poem). It seemed to go over well with others #kanyeshrug. Consider it a token of our friendship:

Cloudy Walking

There are clouds outside,

Obviously,

That are pushed across the sky

by wind, maybe

but it's almost like I could run through a

meadow

Throw up my trusty grappling hook

and latch onto a cloud for the ride.

The sky could be blinding blue

or not ~ it could storm

it doesn't matter to me, really at all

just that my face was numb with water vapor

and intangible fluff,

Just that I was high up, above all of it,

lying down on the edge of the field,

and not falling into a valley,

That the world could stretch out underneath

like the bottom of a glass-bottom boat

and trees became easy to believe I am stepping on them.

I want to cloudily walk above it all

on the glass of my glass-bottom boat

so I can rest my grappling hook and

pull out my captain's hat and

take the wheel of my cloud.

So it could float, lonely if it likes,

above it all and into everything more,

Daffodils to morning glories to moonwort,

I would commandeer it through the night and day

Until it fell apart around me

and let me rise down to my meadow.

Set down on my back

under nothing and it all

stars for eyes and a moon,

the sky can fall above me.

I'll follow my cloud,

cloudily walking through the stalks and around the flowers,

following that cloud through the black and the gray, until my meadow finished,

cloudy walking out to morning.

As you can see, it's very awkward and dull. I feel like this is me showing you embarrassing baby photos of myself.