modem madness

My intestines knash their teeth
when pages don't load
and tabs of work to complete line up with
grey circles turning in the corners, churning
coffee up my lower esophageal sphincter.
Pressing a reset button and unplugging a cable are not
satisfying solutions. So,
I slam the computer into my bag,
take a deep breath to un-knit the gut-teeth
stretch up
stand up
fill out the shape I now am
and walk out the door

breathing moving air that sends and spreads
the knashing teeth to the tips of my fingers
so I'm ready, when I get to the cafe
and open the computer
but now all I want to write
is a poem

The Next Elegant Step

Usually, all we get is a glimmer. A story we read or someone we briefly met. A curiosity. A meek voice inside, whispering. It's up to us to hammer out the rest.

                                       -Po Bronson, What Should I Do With My Life?

I’m at a crossroads in life. One of those times when you are stopped in your tracks and find yourself suddenly without direction. The road where you came from is not an option - that much you know for sure. There are plenty of side roads, and it’s possible that they could loop back to where you need to go, but they feel like escapes. Distractions. The trouble is that the road ahead - your only real way forward - has not been constructed yet.  There may be a few trampled weeds hinting at the shadow of a path, but for the most part, you’re on your own. If you want to get where you’re going, you’re going to have to build it from scratch. And that is a paralyzing thought.

I don’t believe we have to be one thing when we grow up, but that doesn’t make being thirty and directionless any easier. I didn’t go to school for medicine, or law, or engineering, which in many ways leaves me a lot of freedom. I’m not locked in - I could be a teacher one day, a food critic the next. I could open a yoga studio or learn the art of sportscasting or sell insurance. It’s not only the commitment that I’m afraid of, though. I’m afraid of wasting time. I’m afraid of choosing poorly. I’m afraid, above all, that I won’t find work that is meaningful, that is me, and that is making the world a better place.

I know I am asking a lot. I’ve always been a perfectionist. But I have this feeling that I’m on the cusp of something. I’m tired of taking the side roads and I want to forage ahead into the unknown. I want to do the thing that is the hardest to do. The trouble is, how do I do it when I don’t know what it is? In Po Bronson’s What Should I Do With My Life?, he observes that of the hundreds of people he interviewed, those who had succeeded in finding a calling often had nothing more than an unquenchable hunger to go on: "The call was muffled and vague at first. That blank urge is the call.” The trick is, you have to let that blank urge take you somewhere. Anywhere. You have to take what a friend of mine recently referred to as the Next Elegant Step.

All the self-help books on this topic - and trust me, I’ve read a lot of them - say the same thing: you need to stop reflecting and start acting. They argue, rather ironically, that it’s time to put down the books, stop taking personality tests and making lists and weighing pros and cons and imagining your ideal life - and time to jump out there and try something. It’s like dating: you’re not going to meet the perfect mate just by listing qualities you’re looking for on multi-colored sticky notes and rearranging them endlessly while holed-up in your apartment. You’ve got to take a leap of faith, swallow a heaping spoonful of vulnerability, and go meet real people in the real touch-taste-see-hear-smell world. Why is that so unbelievably scary?

I don’t know, but it is.

Today I was chatting with an acquaintance after church and happened to let it slip that I'm unhappy in my job, and ultimately, my field. She asked a question that I usually dread: "If you could do anything in the world, what would it be?" This time, I took a deep breath, put aside my embarrassment about lofty, unattainable dreams, and stumbled through an outline of what I like to call my Evil Plan - that glimmer of a maybe-sort-of-ill-formed-idea in the back of my mind. This girl that I barely knew did not even flinch. She listened, asked clarifying questions, and commented that the skills from my current job would really come in handy in the development of this next one. She didn't provide some magical lead, or offer me a million dollars in seed money, or help me understand my own desires any better, but somehow the conversation was part of a rite of passage for me.

Like the plot of a yet-unwritten novel, I have been afraid to spoil the ending by leaking any hint of my Evil Plan to anyone outside of my personal journal. But that has also allowed me to get away with ignoring it - with watching the months float by in silent paralysis. Now I am learning that speaking my dreams aloud - even when they are foggy and silly-seeming - gives them flesh. By letting people in on my secret, I allow them to do two things: I empower them to hold me accountable, and I give them the opportunity to help me. Neither of these is comfortable. They are, in many ways, the hardest thing.

And for me, that is proof enough that I have begun to take my next elegant step.

Solstice

Get up from your chair at the kitchen table,

pull on your boots, and step outside

into the crust of the snow

while there is still a little light left.

Stand still, and listen

to the sound of this briefest of gaps

between night and night.

The air is thinner today,

as at the peak of a bare mountain

where a lone hiker triangulates with the sun and the moon:

three points in cold space.

Do not think of days to come,

rolled out long and thin like dough, cluttered with shapes and voices.

Instead, face the waning light of this dense, unformed day,

where the shadows on the snow fall backwards

and only whiteness stretches out ahead.

Behind you: a thousand cups of coffee,

a thousand rings of the phone and impatient glances at the clock.

Behind you: that summer night on the porch, that thing she said,

that question, that aching sorrow.

In front of you: unbroken snow.

Do not cast your heart backwards.

Instead, think of this day, this hour,

this blink of light between sleeps.

This day is not a cloud or a block of marble:

there is no figure hidden within it.

Watch the long shadows fade into the snow,

love them, and let them go.

And when the light comes again,

think outwards in all directions,

like a stranded sailor guessing towards the shore.

All Souls' Day

There's something about a warm wind

The air full of leaves

Torn down from the trees, swept up from the ground

Unwilling to settle into rest

They sing like a Shakespearean chorus

Preludes in a minor key

Foretelling fates but leaving the stories themselves

Suspended: waiting to be acted

But also not quite written

And what looks like a gray November morning

Is stirring with the scent of not yet

If I Had a Window

Here's the most recent "finished" poem I've written. I think it was about a year ago. I think it had something to do with my attempts to figure out what landscape painting was supposed to be good for.

If I had a window I
Would sit and watch the cars go by
And roll along, and roll away
And roll into another day

The wall here is no good to me
When it's all there is to see
You know drywall's such a sorrowful sight
When it's all you see for day and night

Outside the door, out in the hall
There hangs a lamp, and that is all
A cold and silent corridor
With bare walls and a polished floor

But all I want to do today
Is watch the cars as they go away
I swear I'd need no other guide
If I could only look outside

The Little Things

Wrote this in 2011 but thought I would share because it's seasonally relevant...
***************

Earlier this week, I bought a bag of candy corn at the drug store and put it in a desk drawer at work.

Every morning, I forget that it is there.  Then, at some point a few hours into the day, I open the drawer looking for a highlighter or some white-out or stamps, and voila!  Someone has sent me a secret surprise!  Delighted, I grab a handful and shut the drawer.

A minute later, this time with no pretense of needing the white-out, I open the drawer and grab another handful of artificially colored, sugary goodness (which, by the way, claims to be “made with real honey!”).  Perhaps 45 seconds later, it happens again, this time unconsciously.  Open, shut, chew.  Open, shut, chew.  I am compelled - I can’t stop - MUST HAVE CANDY CORN!

Ten or fifteen minutes into this routine, I choke on a piece of candy corn that, in my manic haste to pump corn syrup and yellow #5 into my blood stream, goes down the wrong way.  I pause, take a few long sips of water, and breathe.  My body has saved itself from near-death by tiny triangular confection bullet.

In that instant, self control is restored.  The mind is back on top; all animal appetites are at least tentatively subdued.  I go on with my day.  The drawer stays closed, and all traces of yellow-orange-and-white striped thought vanish from my brain.

Embodiment

Sorry my first post is about gross bodily functions, but you have to start somewhere, right?

***********

Our bodies often speak to us, but we're not always very good at listening.

Today my body shouted. It wolf-whistled at close range and then exploded in a tantrum of frustration. It yelled, "STOP! SIT DOWN, SHUT THE F#$% UP AND LISTEN TO ME." And, as you might expect, I didn't have a choice.

First, it went for the jugular. I got a sore throat, and it hurt to talk and swallow and breathe. 

Then it took out the nerve center by delivering a pounding headache, which turned into a migraine. I fired back with a round of potent meds and the headache subsided. I had this under control.

But neurons still weren't firing like they should. My head was fuzzy, and I started to forget things, mess things up. I saved over an important document at work and couldn't recover it. While I was fumbling and disoriented, the next wave struck like a tsunami: massive head congestion. 

I couldn't breathe, everything was heavy, snot everywhere. You could hear me losing the battle every time I tried to speak. I grasped for office tissues, whose sandpapery consistency left me looking like Rudolph after three blows. Every part of my face seemed swollen - nose, eyes, temples...

Oh, and a zit the size of Mt. Fuji had erupted at the corner of my mouth.

I grossed everyone out at an interdepartmental meeting with all the loud, juicy nose blowing. The guy on speaker phone was singing silent praise that he, at least, was insulated from the vast plumes of germs that filled the air with every uncontrollable sneeze. 

Yes, the sneezing. Perhaps it was exacerbated by the poorly-constructed tissues, but the episodes had reached beyond the powers of any antihistamine to contain. Each sneeze was bigger and more mucus-laden than the last. Like some nightmarish negative feedback loop, one led to the next led to the next and I grew rather awed at the ability of my body to produce mucus at such a rate.

As I drained tissue boxes and traded phone calls about the interview I was supposed to be conducting, I had one of those unmistakable twinges of twisting, halting pain in my lower abdomen. But I wrote the cramp off as sneeze-induced. The interview was cancelled. I went to the bathroom to relieve my bladder of the pressure from a liter's worth of tea only to confirm that yes, I was indeed bleeding. 

It felt like my body was one big hemorrhage. With an email titled "Going home for the greater good," I left the office. As I sat on the train, I prayed that the parents who'd taken their children for a midday outing would forgive me for contaminating everything around me. I'd stuffed my pockets with tissues, but it wasn't enough to make it home. As I stepped off the train, I was possessed by a demon sneeze that shot forth violently and was caught only by my bare hands. I'd been slimed, Ghost Busters style.

I curled my disease-infested hands into ecto-fists and walked out into the glaring sunshine. In the fresh light, I noticed that there was a long snot stream down the front of my skirt, and another on my jacket. I was reminded of a man I saw on the subway once who had a twelve inch booger hanging from his nose and made no effort to remove it. He was not in a good place that day, and today I was not much better off. At a certain point, there is nothing left to do but surrender control.

I entered my quarantine, changed clothes, made soup, hit the couch. I am listening, dear body. I hear you loud and clear, and I'm not fighting anymore. Now what was it you were trying to tell me?