Friday, June 22, 2007
1:06 AM
where do we go now
I'm finishing a waaay overdue final paper, running on a sugar and caffeine high (strawberry banana ice cream and 2 mugs of coffee! at 1 a.m!), and doing yet another dance of delay by blogging and asking people not to send e-mails. At least not to my old Yahoo address.Days ago, I woke up at noon and checked my mail. Only to be informed that my ID and password are invalid. I tried again. No go. Knowing that I hadn't changed the password I've been using FOR SEVEN YEARS, I clicked on the Sign-in problems? link and provided the personal information asked for. Only to be informed that they don't match the information in the account. (Well, it's entirely possible my date of birth has changed since I originally signed up.) So I e-mailed Yahoo Customer Care about my predicament. Two days later, I received an e-mail from Pedro (yes, Pedro) saying that my Yahoo acount can be restored if I can provide the correct Secret Answer to the security question I had set up when I created the account. The secret security question, ladies and gentlemen, is:"where do i go from here?"Of course, I have no fucking clue what the answer could be. I've tried to put myself into the mindset of the 18-year-old stranger who asked this question (and smacked her on the head several times too), but I am at a loss. I never fail to amaze myself.My list of possible one-word answers (keeping my old feeling-profound self in mind) include the following:1. there2. nowhere3. anywhere4. somewhere5. everywhere6. elsewhere7. up8. home9. hell10. limbo11. Marikina12. Ateneo13. wherever
14. Wonderland
15. Never-Never-Land
16. down17. away
(The list could go on, but at this point I'm getting hungry, so I'm posting a picture of the SINIGANG I made last week, the first sinigang I've ever cooked. It has all the basic ingredients: kamatis, sibuyas, sitaw, labanos, sili, bok choy (in lieu of the elusive kangkong), baboy. After simmering the pork for over an hour, I threw the vegetables in, poured in a packet and a half of Knorr sinigang mix (ang asim ng tunay na sampalok!), seasoned it with B's Thai patis, and SALIVATED. We made our rice swim in the sour sabaw, scarfed it down in the sweltering heat (28 degrees Celsius, almost like Manila!) and agreed: it tasted like home.)
(It was also Independence Day back home.)
(And I briefly contemplated quitting grad school and enrolling in cooking school.)But anyway, I e-mailed Pedro back using another account, and offered detailed information about my self and my Yahoo folders to prove I own the account, and included my top 2 answers to the security question while admitting that I don't remember anymore what the right answer could be. Let's hope Pedro finds it in his heart to restore seven years' worth of romantic correspondence, of contacts, of work history, of material for my future biographer (you do know I'm kidding, right?).In the meantime, please send all future e-mails to naya dot valdellon at utoronto dot ca. Tell me where I can go from here. Labels: food, life, technology
Saturday, May 26, 2007
12:30 AM
Visual DNA (after Den)
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
2:42 PM
(Surfacing)
This time last week I was paddling in a canoe, sniffling and shivering even under a fleece jacket and three other layers, my housemates and I singing and groping for the next lines of “Anna Begins,” while around us the landscape was rain-softened, the skirts of pine trees lifted as the sun flirted from behind a wash of clouds, the lake’s infinite song barely punctuated by persistent raindrops. I was thinking about the first Atwood novel I ever read, Surfacing, the one about a woman searching with friends for her missing father in the Canadian woods, and that surreal section where she chooses to disappear and live like a hermit in the wilderness to come to terms with her ghosts.
I don’t remember how it ends, only that she reemerges from her foray into oblivion, dazed but resolute, with the sunlight scalding her hands. (Except I realize upon coming home that the last image isn’t from the novel but from an Adrienne Rich poem, “Integrity,” the one that begins with one of my favorite lines, “A wild patience has taken me this far,” and that describes “this hot misblotted sunlight, critical light imperceptibly scalding the skin these hands will also salve.” Oh, how the things we read mesh and wind and find their own patterns in our minds…)
* * *
So yes, I went camping with good friends (the gang was composed of 2 “efficient” Germans, 2 “sadistic” French chefs, 2 “colonizing” Filipinas, and 1 “native" Canadian- American) in Algonquin Park (“park” is a misnomer, really; at 8000 square kilometers, it’s larger than entire countries). As we moved from one campsite to another, I experienced a lot of “firsts” in four days: first time in a canoe, first time to sleep in a sleeping bag in a tent with four other people, first time to carry what must’ve been 1/3 of my body weight during a 2435-meter hike, first time to eat roasted Camembert and that graham cracker-marshmallow-chocolate treat North Americans call S’mores,
first time to shit in a typical “bear box” in the woods, first time to successfully start fires (though I couldn’t keep them alive for too long, ooh, how telling), first time to catch a real fish (!) and whack it on the head (though I couldn’t gut and clean it, also telling). I guess I’m really bad at persevering and seeing things through to the end, especially things I’m weak at…in the wilderness though there’s no escape route, no way of getting around the dishes and sleeping bags that have to be washed and rolled and packed each day, the beaver dams that have to be crossed, the treks that have to be made in order to return home. There was so much wild beauty, from wind-sculpted trees to clear-as-mirror lakes, from mournful loon calls to soaring seagulls, to utter darkness weaving like scarves around your head. I’m such a child of the city, though…my heart lifted to the sound of Joni Mitchell’s “Carey” playing in the van as more streetlights and other vehicles entered our view. Nothing was more revitalizing than jumping into the shower and shampooing the woodsmoke out of my hair…
* * *
Yup, it’s been a while, I know. But I’m back from the silent swamps, with a clear head and words bubbling up, wondering how everybody else is doing. I’ve moved into a beautiful house with two good friends (and with a neighbor's cat, Maude, who comes and goes as she pleases), another school term has ended (ok, with another defferred paper, yikes), a writing mentorship is on the horizon, a teaching assistantship will keep me afloat over the summer, and there are pages waiting to be navigated. Today I am reading a friend’s novel-in-progress, shopping for salmon, writing in my room with the late afternoon light turning my room orange, and cooking dinner for another friend who’s coming over with a Bergman film and a bottle of wine. Summer is just about to begin, work and career crises can be postponed, and life can be good, for now.
Monday, April 02, 2007
11:42 PM
dahil sawa na akong magdrama at gusto ko nang matulog...
Without Devotion
Marie Howe
Cut loose, without devotion, a man becomes a comic.
His antics are passed
around the family table and mimicked so well, years
later the family still laughs.
Without devotion, any life becomes a stranger's story
told and told again to help another sleep
or live. And it is possible
in the murmuring din of that collective loyalty
for the body to forget what it once loved.
A mouth on the mouth becomes a story mouth.
It's what they think they knew---what the body knew
alone, better than it ever knew anything.
Without devotion, his every gesture---
how he slouched in the family pantry, his fingers
curled into a fist, the small thing he said
while waiting for water to boil---
becomes potentially hilarious. Lucky for him
the body, sometimes, refuses translation,
that often it will speak, secretly,
in its own voice, and insist, haplessly,
on its acquired tastes. Without devotion, it might
stand among them and listen, laughing,
but look, how the body clenches,
as the much discussed smoke intermittently clears.
It has remembered the man standing, wearing
his winter coat.
Watch how it tears from the table, yapping, ferocious
in its stupid inarticulate joy.
Labels: poetry
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
2:16 PM
Booktalk
After Maita, Kael, Margie, Joel, Waps, and Larry:
Every year, a version of this survey comes my way -- and my answers seem to keep changing. This time though I'll follow the rules and stick to just ONE book per question.
1. One book that changed your life.
I Like This Poem: A Collection of Best-loved Poems Chosen by Children for Other Children in Aid of the International Year of the Child, published by Puffin Books in 1979, and edited by Kaye Webb. This was a hand-me-down from my brother and sister, so pages were already loose by the time I inherited it at 7. The very first poem in the first section (for ages 6 & 7 -- I think the book sections went up to age 13) was the witches' chant from Macbeth, the one that went "Double, double, toil and trouble,/ Fire burn and cauldron bubble." Not bad for a first lesson in poetry (and life?). This was the book that first made me think poetry was, above all things, FUN, and that I could write it. And that it was silly to put an age requirement on reading material -- which is probably why I read my sister's Harlequin Temptation books at 11...but that's another story.
2. One book you have read more than once.
A Lover's Discourse, by Roland Barthes -- because you can't read these fragments straight through just once. I first read this in 2003, in a creative/ emotional/ academic crisis, and seem to return to it every time a romantic chapter ends -- and I always find something true, something piercingly intelligent, something elegantly written. Hmm. I'd lend my copy only to people I really trust -- the ideas and heavily pencilled sets of initials in the pages' margins are both laughable and incriminating."To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love, to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not -- this is the beginning of writing."
3. One book you would want on a desert island.
Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (also translated as Remembrance of Things Past) -- because it's seven volumes long, because I've never read it, because there's no better time to immerse yourself in someone's meditations on memory, time, and art, than when none of these things seem to matter.
4. One book that made you laugh.
Recently? Split Horizon, by Thomas Lux, whom I find less glib than Billy Collins, and less given to sentimentality than Stephen Dunn. There's a delight and ferocious tenderness and intelligence and, yes, accessibility, in his poems that I like. Some titles in this collection include: "I Love You Sweatheart," A Streak of Blood That Once Was a Tiny Red Spider, Pecked to Death By Swans, and Edgar Allan Poe Meets Sarah Hale (Author of "Mary Had a Little Lamb").
5. One book that made you cry.
Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones, which I read for my Postcolonial Lit class two weeks ago. The climactic chapters focus on the massacre of Haitians in the Dominican Republic in 1937, when General Trujillo wanted to cleanse his nation of the foreign laborers. The soldiers administered a linguistic test on the streets, making people say perejil, the Spanish word for parsley. The Kreyol-speaking Haitians, who could not trill their R's, would be executed. Brutal, lyrical stuff."He asked for “perejil,” but there is much more we all knew how to say. Perhaps one simple word would not have saved our lives. Many more would have to and many more will."
6. One book you wish had been written.
A guide to living as an expatriate scholar and artist, without starving or shivering in winter, without being loveless, and without losing love for your country. Written by Jose Rizal, of course, who managed to finish a medical degree, write two groundbreaking novels, travel all over Europe, love women of different nationalities, and fight for political reforms. All before returning home, before being martyred, before being made national hero. How in the world did he do this 120 years ago?
7. One book you wish had never been written.
Cop-out answer: I wouldn't wish oblivion on any book. Many problems are not the results of the books themselves, but because of the twisted intentions of the people who write them, and the blatant misreadings and manipulations of the people who read them.But look, two years ago, conservative scholars compiled a list of the 10 most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries.
8. One book you are currently reading.
One? But I leave too many bookmarks between too many pages! Fine, the double publication of The Weight of Oranges and Miner's Pond in one book then. By Anne Michaels, who will most probably be my writing mentor next year, so I want to immerse myself in her elegies and sequence poems before meeting her.
9. One book you have been meaning to read.
Sophie Calle's Exquisite Pain. I learned about her just a month ago -- Paul Auster apparently used her as inspiration for a character in his novel Leviathan. The voyeuristic impulse and "forensic qualities" in her work (she's primarily a conceptual/ installation artist obsessed with strangers' private lives, and with displaying her own) intrigue me. Here's a synopsis of the book:"When a lover failed to meet Calle as promised in a hotel in New Delhi, after she had completed a 92-day journey through the Far East, Calle was devastated. As ever, she had kept everything from that journey – photographs, ticket stubs, visas and letters – and in the book, each one is rubber-stamped counting down to the fateful day of her heartbreak. On her return to Paris, she asked a group of friends to answer the question, ‘When did you most suffer?’. Their stories of pain, each of them accompanied by a photograph, interplay with Calle’s own story and daily reflections as she gradually comes to terms with the rejection and her equilibrium is restored."
10. Tag people for this meme.
Because they haven't been tagged (or haven't answered) yet: Egay, Peachy, Jeline, Kit, Den.
Labels: books
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
9:11 PM
Say hello to my new friend!
This is the midget snowman Ben and I built outside our house yesterday afternoon, with red kidney beans for eyes, a green pepper for a nose, four red chili peppers for a mouth, my maroon scarf wrapped around its head and neck, and Maita's fluffy green gloves on sticks for hands. We've baptized him Bobby. Look at Bobby lounging on the plastic lawn chair. Notice that he's naked where it matters. See him snicker while giving the world the finger. That's our Bobby.
* * *
by Wallace Stevens
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Labels: house, poetry, winter
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
2:53 PM
1. Along with his copy of Von Trier's Five Obstructions, Daniel lent me his DVD of Chris Marker's 1982 film, Sans Soleil (Sunless), saying it reminded him of what I've been trying to do with my poetry. A compliment, really -- unless we emphasize the word "trying."But it's true, I LOVE this film that looks like a travelogue and reads like a letter and feels like watching a stone skipping across a pond, sending multiple, overlapping ripples to the edge. I'm not even talking about the seamless marriage of the images with the script -- even just the script itself is gorgeous. From the perspective (an unseen woman reading the letters and observations of an itinerant filmmaker) to the concerns (memory, history, survival in both the city and the wilderness, the function of cinema) to the lyrical language ("Tokyo is a city crisscrossed by trains; tied together with electric wire, she shows her veins"), to its obsession with people's faces looking back at the camera, the film, like the list of Sei Shonagon mentioned in it, "quickens the heart." I WISH I HAD WRITTEN IT."When spring came, when every crow announced its arrival by raising his cry half a tone, I took the green train of the Yamanote line and got off at Tokyo station, near the central post office. Even if the street was empty I waited at the red light—Japanese style—so as to leave space for the spirits of the broken cars. Even if I was expecting no letter I stopped at the general delivery window, for one must honor the spirits of torn-up letters, and at the airmail counter to salute the spirits of unmailed letters. I took the measure of the unbearable vanity of the West, that has never ceased to privilege being over non-being, what is spoken to what is left unsaid."
2. A Lesson in Other-ness:Last Tuesday, the class workshopped 5 poems from my "Lost and Found" series. One poem mentions the common street sign: Bawal magtapon ng basura dito. Despite the footnote with the English translation, Prof R asked me to read the Tagalog phrase and explain its context. So I did, and said there would almost always be a mound of garbage thrown defiantly under or near those signs. She stared at me with a hand against her cheek, fascinated. "Say it again," she said. So I did, more reluctantly this time. "One more time, please. Your language is so beautiful. Humor me." My classmates and I exchanged looks. She must've been high on something again. But I did anyway.And THEN, after a thorough discussion of the poems, she turned to me and said, "Can you say something about the weather in Tagalog?" I raised my eyebrows, and said, with exaggerated shoulder shivers: Oo, malamig ang panahon. Sawa na ako sa snow. Pero tutal, hindi mo naman naiintindihan ang sinasabi ko ngayon -- pwede kitang tawaging tanga o mataba o ... ewan, basta, nawiwirduhan ako sa yo. Ba't ang kulit mo? "Wow," she says, "your language is so melodic. Why not, one of these days, write an erotic poem to your language?" Anobayaaan...
3. I bought myself a small pot of ivy with Summer last week after our Valentine lunch at Thai Basil and last-minute shoe-shopping. The potted plant perches on my window sill, leaves happily outlined in a spring green lighter than the color of their hearts. I want to keep it alive at least until spring thaws all the ice and I see sprouts instead of snow in gardens. Spring better hurry -- a few leaves are already beginning to brown, despite all my efforts and lambing. I've taken to calling the ivy by name. Violan. Haha.Someone asked me how being in this country, away from family and most friends, has "improved" (oh, I hate that word) me lately. I could reply by talking about my apparently stubborn streak of optimism, the resilience (again, maybe just another form of stubborness), the willingness to be patient and find delight in the present even when disappearing seems easier. Or I could just say, I have a plant now.
4. The past week was horribly taxing, from Papa's hospital scare and other emotional events that felt like more than one rug was being pulled out from under me. The fantastic news is that Papa is recovering quicker and better than anybody expected, with the only complication being a manageable diabetes -- which means he won't be seeing ice cream over crepes anytime soon (this picture was taken at Cafe Breton, where my family celebrated my birthday last year without me). Otherwise, the doctors are saying he could be released as early as this Friday!I found myself saying Thank God a lot, wondering how empty that expression really is to me. I found myself saying I love you to family and friends, and meaning it. Again, I'm amazed by the generosity of people who came over to hold me and buy phone cards to call home with, who sent their e-mails of support, who let me finish their wine and sleep in their beds with other friends, who let me cry and talk myself out at the kitchen table one morning. You are all awesome.
5. Please, Spring, come soon. Let me write an erotic poem to you, bwahaha -- though nothing I write will surpass Cummings' spring poems:
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
--the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says
we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
Labels: family, love, movies, poetry, school, spring
Friday, February 16, 2007
3:07 PM
"I am not being trivial. Your separateness could kill you unless I take it from you as a sickness. What if you get stranded in the town where pears and winter are variants for one another? Can you eat winter? No. Can you live six months inside a frozen pear? No. But there is a place, I know the place, where you will stand and see pear and winter side by side as walls stand by silence. Can you punctuate yourself into silence? You will see the edges cut away from you, back into a world of another kind—back into real emptiness, some would say. Well, we are objects in a wind that stopped, is my view. There are regular towns and irregular towns, there are wounded towns and sober towns and fiercely remembered towns, there are useless but passionate towns that battle on, there are towns where the snow slides from the roofs of the houses with such force that the victims are killed, but there are no empty towns (just empty scholars) and there is no regret. Now move along."* * *
My dad had a stroke last Wednesday night, Valentine's Day. He was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance, with skyrocketing blood pressure levels and a clot in his cerebellum. He's still in the ICU, but is lucid and getting better and wondering when/if he can still drink beer. Prayers and positive thoughts for a full and speedy recovery would be greatly appreciated.Labels: family, poetry, winter
Monday, February 12, 2007
11:16 PM
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Last night I bumped into my housemate Ben on the way home. He had a look that could best be described as gleeful. In his hands was a pair of white ice skates."Guess what?" he asked."You bought yourself some skates?""No," he replied, "I FOUND them on the sidewalk. I love this city!""Wow! Why'd someone throw them away? Do they fit you?""No way, but they look like they might fit you, actually."
"Uh, are you sure you want to see me back on the ice?"I tried them on anyway, and they seemed a half size bigger than my feet, but if I wore them with thick socks (as I should) they'd fit perfectly. The tips are a bit gasgas, and the inside fluff is more scruffy than fluffy, and the blades need to be sharpened -- but otherwise they're a perfectly fine pair of skates! Orbit, their front flaps say in fading gold font. We will let you glide in circles around the ice, they promise, winking at each other.I have a vague memory of this children's story about a pair of ice skates stolen by a boy named Peter (?). He wears them and suddenly they have a life of their own, taking him away from the other children on the frozen lake and into the forest and beyond. I don't remember what else happens, only that he turns out safe in the end, if a little shaken. Unlike the gruesome Andersen fairy tale about the adopted girl who puts on a pair of red shoes that make her keep on dancing, across ballrooms and roads and graveyards until she asks a woodcutter to chop off her feet. At which point the red shoes and dismembered feet in them keep dancing and bar her way to the church. She dies of a literal broken heart.I dreamt I died last night, shot in the chest in my high school by a man with a bow and arrow. I had been flying, then I sank to the ground in slow motion, and crumpled up. Richard said dreams about death are good, that they signal transformation. Sure, but what of dreams about being murdered? Jess said I didn't really die, that it was Cupid reminding me of Valentine's Day. Oh brother.
Labels: dreams, house
Friday, February 09, 2007
8:16 PM
Today I stayed at home and forced myself to work on this "Lost and Found" poem series I promised my supervisor tomorrow. I'm stumped, after four semi-complete pieces and two fragments and still no coherent direction or vision. I reread a couple of poems written 3-4 years ago that would've fit thematically into this sequence but that make me cringe now -- such closed all-knowingness and privilege! such appropriation of other people's pain to pound a metaphysical insight onto the reader! I wish I had a piano to pound on right now while I think. I wish Papa were around in one of his lugubrious (HIS word!) moods, playing one of his "putangina" pieces. So thanks to Limewire I'm now listening to mp3s of: Lizst's "Hungarian Rhapsody," Beethoven's "Sonata Pathetique," Rachmaninoff's "Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini," and Chopin's "Minute Waltz," "Funeral March," and "Heroic Polonaise" -- music I used to hear as a child on wet Sunday nights, when I'd hear him over the curtain of rain, and I'd go down the stairs of our old house for a glass of water and see him at the piano, beads of sweat on his brow, torso leaning forward, harmonic thunderstorms bursting from his wrists. That was the picture of the artist I grew up with, that dedication, that erratic fumbling and practicing for a perfection that was elusive, for a phrasing that was his own, and was unapplauded, except in the mind of an admiring daughter.
(The painting is Salvador Dali's "Necrophilic Fountain Flowing From a Grand Piano," 1933.)* * *
Here's an inspiring (if pompous-looking) 84-year old Vladimir Horowitz playing the Polonaise in A-flat major, also called the "Heroic Polonaise." My father's favorite section, I could tell, was that marchy movement beginning at 3:15 with that gong-like chord repeated six times, and later with the left hand moving in a downward four-key wheel. My favorite is that lyrical respite right after, starting at 4:35 and lasting more than a minute -- such a contrast and complement to the majestic torrents of tones earlier. Let the purists disagree, but I prefer Horowitz's imperfect pathos to Arthur Rubinstein's technical elegance in this 1968 recording (the same lyrical passage happens at 4:25 with Rubinstein).
I've also just learned that this was the last piece of music broadcast over Warsaw radio before the city surrendered to the Nazis, almost a hundred years after Chopin composed it in 1842. Wow. Can you listen to it now and put yourself in the shoes of those about to be herded off to face that unspeakable silencing? It's unfathomable.
Labels: creativity, family, music
Monday, February 05, 2007
2:19 PM
The Windchill Factor
I'm pretty sure I posted this poem in one of my blogs years ago (with so many under my belt, it's hard to remember which blog and which February) -- but it's only this year that I've come to REALLY understand it's less about Valentine-less moping and more about wintry despair and sluggishness. This year, I've learned about windchill, how the strength and speed of winds blowing from the lake turn the already awful chill (today at -15 Celsius) into something more frigid (-24). I've learned that "flurries" are not delicious, "cold feet" are not something to be taken lightly, and that "ice-breakers" aren't fun songs or games you do to "warm up" a group. That ice is not my element, that I can't skate and glide across the ice to save my life. That wearing powder blush on my cheeks is unnecessary, as my entire face gets red anyway every time I step outside. I've been fighting this almost instinctive urge to store heat by eating (and getting) fat. I've had to deal with territory wars in the kitchen, over the freezer and Ziploc containers and utensils (one housemate and her ever-present boyfriend have taken to hiding her pans and knives in her third-floor room). I've started apartment-searching again, and today had to walk out into a snowy world -- I felt like I was a character in a TV with really bad reception, bad white static. I miss my black fur sausage sleeping on a pillow beside me.February
Margaret Atwood
Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It’s his
way of telling whether or not I’m dead.
If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
he’ll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. Some cat owners around here
should snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.
But it’s love that does us in. Over and over
again, He shoots, he scores! and famine
crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing
eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits
thirty below, and pollution pours
out of our chimneys to keep us warm.
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You’re the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.
Labels: house, poetry, winter
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