two parts of a whole

Along the shore I stood,
And listened to the break,
That did all it could,
The shore to give and take.

And how loud I thought,
The little water against the shore,
Says what it ought,
While silent stays the more.

This may be the only poem ever inspired by longshore drift.

The Jen Jude Years...

While your guitar gently makes me weep

Back propped against the armrest,
Your axe carefully cradled in your arms,
I wish I could rest against your chest,
And make music under your charms.
Positioned to be your most alluring,
And yet this was not your intent,
I dont think there is any curing,
My belief that for you I was meant.
You alone can drive me to express,
Opinions that are not my own,
With your tremulous touch of tress,
Which waters ideas already well-grown.
I dont think you appreciate how,
Your slightest slyest action,
Causes sweat upon my brow,
And my love to hope for a reaction.
So now I write with my mind racing,
While you silently sleep unconcerned,
That I seem doomed to chasing,
A love that will never be returned.

Dreams

I have seen the firelight,
Illuminate your brow,
Happen as it might,
It is but a dream for now.
I have been woken from my sleep,
By the touch of your flaxen hair,
To find my slumber deep,
Was disturbed by the sun's glare.
I have pledged my love for you,
And received the same in kind,
And while the first is true,
The latter is only in my mind.
I have spent a full life with you my love,
Satisfied only when we were together,
But for now this is a dream like all the above,
Which come what may I will dream forever.

The White wave

Draped in mist I could not see,
The full extent of that dark deep,
Which I had read could set me free,
Or till my death make me weep.
I wondered whether I should flee,
Or into those whirling waters leap.

As I used the scales in my head,
A white wave laid me out with a smack,
And made for me the decision dread,
As it tossed me into the waters black.
It ceased to matter if I should have fled,
Because now there was no way to go back.

The wave had not meant to carry me at all,
And as soon as that body realised I rode,
Upon its fluid form it let me fall,
For it did not wish to carry such a load.
I can never forget how I stood tall,
And all the new views that this had showed.

There are other waves which I could ride,
To try and recapture that fleeting feeling,
But to do this I would have to hide,
That I did not find them as appealing.
For it is that white wave for which I've cried,
And whose wounds my body is still healing.

Long Walk Home

Greeted only by the west wind’s sharp blast,
I make my way through the foot deep snow,
And see from the long shadows that are cast,
That it will be dark when my head hits its pillow.
The road ahead is harsh and hard to tread,
And though the scene can claim its rightful due,
It is the loneliness that fills my heart with dread,
As I know the emptiness of my return is true.
The darkness hinders my forward progress,
But far worse is the light from other houses,
Who by their warm hearths serve to stress,
My empty house and all which that arouses.
For it is true to say my house is not a home,
And that lifelong lonely I seem set to roam.

Of Meg

When winter’s last chill blast,
Blew cold and frozed my ass,
A girl without one stole what protected mine,
In hopes that I would be more saccharine.
But even though she took my favourite coat,
I would not be Miss Perry’s pet stoat,
Patiently waiting for her to take my ermine coat,
And eating weevils.

And so though it meant an icy fate,
I rather tried to make her more irate,
For though I followed as a good stoat pet would,
My actions were straight out of the hood.
East Compton.
Biggie-style I jibed and quipped,
And verbal light fantastics tripped,
But as Notorious’ rhymes I got to know,
Other traits of his I began to show,
And so it should be no surprise,
That inattentiveness...brought on by arrogance...should also be my demise...
And so the woman with the scarlet hair,
Managed to lead me to her harlot’s lair.
I Loki in Loker.

I had laid no silver thread,
And so in her cretin’s labyrinth would soon be dead,
But as I stood awaiting my fate,
Wondering what twisted desire of hers I’d have to satiate,
I suddenly felt the chill fleeting,
In a manner too pleasant to be the central heating,
For I found a Cali girl had eclipsed her harlot’s moon,
And all at once sent me into a swoon.
For Meg is the sun,
And she’ll have fun fun fun...
I wish they all could be California.

And so for many months I’ve endured,
Kicks from Laura’s feet unpeticured,
All in hopes to get closer to that fire in the sky,
Always fearing that Icarine I’d fly.
How High?
Then just last week I got my first kiss,
And I have to say it was bliss,
But now I think she’s worried that “she’ll get in trouble,”
And that should something burst our burgeoning romantic bubble,
That the cream of our friendship will sour,
But without the taco improving power.
That the stoat will show his weasely traits,
And send out crazy love poems secretly filled with hate.
And so my position to solidify,
I’ve character witnesses who’ll testify.
That I make the best apple pie.

So let’s not say no go,
But let’s rather just take it slow,
For patience is a virtue and I’m in no hurry to compromise yours,
And gentle progress usually assures,
No hurt feelings if things go wrong,
Because no-one feels strung along.
But I think the feelings that are ensuing,
Are definitely worth pursuing,
For though I used to doubt it too,
Now I know our love is true,
Cause even when you send me dry e-mails about your internet connection,
Baby you still give me one hell of an erection.

Like a Virgin...

I wish I could take all my lovers back,
I didn’t mean them I swear!
But there are no erasies in the sack,
Virgins come but once and that’s unfair,
‘Cause I threw my virginity away,
See, I saved it for too long,
Like a fine wine kept for a special day,
Laid out growing full-bodied and strong,
Till one day you feel you’ll never pop,
That luscious cherry red seal,
So frustrated you start fumbling with the top,
Jam the corkscrew in and break the cork in your zeal.
That’s how it was for me,
A beautiful 1981 Sauvingon Blanc,
Rich with hints of elderberry,
Dished out like convenience store plonk.
“My first” seemed nice I suppose,
Even though she sort of raped me,
Not that I was exactly screaming “No!”,
But I thought it on the inside see…
I really liked this other chick,
Who had just rejected me…yet again,
To be with her boyfriend who was a total dick,
Leaving my self-esteem lower than it’s ever been,
So my roommates drag me to this party,
Where “my first” pulls me on the dance floor,
She’s grinding on me and acting all tarty,
So I let her lead me downstairs and lock the door.
Confused, I just stood there,
Not contributing in any way,
Unless you count my semi-vacant stare…
And I wondered should I initiate foreplay?
So I move to stroke her nipple,
But I reach out and I’m repulsed,
Slowly undressed by her like I’m cripple
Because to her I’m just a dildo with a pulse.
I felt like one of those sexual retards,
A knocking post for every nurse on the ward,
All boner and no brain. He always gets hard.
Mount up! He’s too stupid to even know he’s scored.
I started watching her on my cock sliding up and down,
And wished I was having that much fun,
When sex-ed came back and with a frown,
I wondered aloud, “Should we use a condom?”
“What!?! What did you say?
Have you got something to tell me?
Do you do drugs? Are you gay?
Oh my god! Have you got an STD?!?”
Recently devirginized I knew if I had a disease,
That it probably wasn’t transmitted sexually,
But tell her she popped my cherry and get teased.
Fuck no! So I muttered something about pregnancy.
“Oh! Don’t worry! I’m on the pill.”
And back she went to her pogo dick,
And I decided it was best to just shut up and be still,
So I thought of England and watched the clock tick.
2 minutes and 43 seconds,
Not bad for a first-timer eh?
And I was still hard so I reckoned,
Best not disturb her while she’s still getting laid.

Some time later, it seemed like hours,
I mean that ‘cause it was dull,
Not because I’m boasting about my sexual powers,
She slowed her pace and there was a lull,
“Oh my god! Are you ever going to come?”
“Oh I already did. Sorry about that!
I wanted to wait till you were done.
You know till you’d had…a proper turn at bat.”
If I’d cared I’d have felt like a moron!
“Look what you’ve done. I’m shaking.”
Uh oh! She’s angry about the condom,
“You’re the best,” as she starts taking,
Her clothes to the bathroom to put them back on.
She comes back and I insist I didn’t do anything,
“Yes you did! Now I’ve got to catch my bus.”
I start yawning and feigning,
That I’d love to walk her but sleep I must!
“No. You’ve done enough!
I’d love to stay the night but I’ve got work.”
Helpfully, “Make sure you have all your stuff!”
“Ha! Call me next week for a do over, you jerk.”

I spent the next three days,
Figuring out how to turn my fuck buddy into an ex,
And realize there’s no polite way,
To get out of no strings attached sex.
“I didn’t enjoy it,” sprang to mind,
“I want someone I can date,
And you’re not really my kind…
Listen let’s just end it while things are great!”
Then she calls and she goes,
“So uh…ummm I’ve-aah,
There’s something you should know.”
Twenty minutes later she says she has Chalmydia.
“Which means you probably have it,
You take one pill and it’s gone…
That lying sack of shit!
I can’t believe my ex lied to me all along.”
I was strangely unaffected by her tale of woe,
And thought two things as she gave her confessional,
1) Do I have to break up with her now? NO!
2) I just became an after school special.

Reluctant as I was to tell her,
That I was a virgin in my 20s,
I made damn fucking sure,
I told it like 6 times to Dr. Cassavetes,
“Doc, I mean, talk about bad luck,
I mean my first time and the thing with her ex,
It’s not like I’m fuck fuck fuck…
I should not be the poster child for safe sex.”
It’s clear the Doctor didn’t see me as a victim,
Bizarrely cruelly cursed,
And as I left I thought about the dictum,
That you never forget your first.

And not just because of bacterial guests,
Which by the way are gone so never fear.
It’s memory that’s the real pest…
The one thing of which you’ll never be free and clear.
But imagine if you could forget them all,
Every one night stand and sometime lover.
How much harder would you fall,
If you thought there had never been another?
Because each old partner takes away,
From how perfect you find your current love,
By being better in some way,
Till grass-is-greener thinking gets one of you the shove.
The first one may not always be the one,
Who ultimately suits us best,
But if we’re ever going to stay with someone,
We’re going to have to forget about the rest.

If I was a soldier...

I’m not the soldiering sort,
You wouldn’t find me in a fort,
I would not like it on ship,
And I get embarrassed when I strip.
I would not like it in mess hall,
When privates’d jam things in their maw,
Because I don’t like crudity at all,
And I doubt they serve crudite raw.
I would not like being under attack,
I would not like being in Iraq,
Chasing scorpions from my sleeping sack,
And trying to get sand out of my crack.

But when the recruiters came along,
All big and buff and strong,
I have to say I flirted,
With the idea of donning a khaki shirt.
Partly because I was intimidated,
By the enlisting men’s booming voices,
And partly because they intimated,
I was their number one draft pick choice.
“You speak how many languages? Latin, what and French?
Look at those biceps. How much do you bench?
Listen, son, the Airforce is the thinking man’s military branch,
And way up high there’s a far lower chance of buying the ranch.”
“Don’t listen to him. A cultured man like you!
Join the Navy and you’ll see the world too.”
“Thanks I already saw it with my parents.”
Partly true but really I’m fishing for compliments.
“You’re strong AND smart! Just what the army needs!
And you’ll get medals for all your deeds!”
“Just like Cub Scouts,” I said,
“Exactly,” and all three nod their heads.
The Coast Guard and Marines,
Were nowhere to be seen.
The Coast Guard,
Probably doesn’t recruit that hard,
And I guess the Marines were smart enough to know,
Not to come and offer me their praise,
Because no-one dumb enough for them would ever show,
At any Harvard recruiting day.
Suddenly the other three have applications in their fists,
And complimentary pens that I can keep if I enlist.
So I smile, mutter something about flat feet,
And they yell after me, “You have a beautiful retreat!”

But there’s a part of me that wants to sign those forms,
To have fixed values. To have fixed norms.
To look so clean in my military press,
To fuck the prom queen in her dress.
To have my men and order them about,
To scream and march, parade and shout.
To miss a bullet by a hair’s breadth,
To take my men and order them to their deaths.
To have the glory and feel the esprit de corps,
And be certain there can be no freedom without war.
To always know what’s right and wrong,
And get teary for the old corp’s songs.
And having risen to the highest rank,
To be placed in a mausoleum large, cold and dank.

But service is a double-edged sword,
And I wouldn’t like following someone else’s word.
I hate to make my bed,
And I don’t like the idea of being dead.
I don’t like getting beat,
And I can’t stand cream of wheat.
I wouldn’t like sleeping in a pit.
I can’t stand people who are full of shit.
I’d never be top brass,
Because I’m crap at kissing ass.

I’d be some low ranking officer,
Entitled by education to be there.
My unit would be a total disgrace,
My medals would be out of place.
I’d run the illegal poker game,
And scratch the er from Sgt Pricker’s name.
I’d be the guy for contraband,
Selling army rations to the natives of the land.
I’d be staff HQ’s little hellion,
Running his own pointless rebellion.
And every chance that I’d get,
I’d write dissenting poems for the hometown gazette.
But nobody would care,
And I’d think it unfair,
That you can quit a job and leave a wife,
But the military is with you for life.

So if they enact the draft,
And I have no choice but to serve,
Even though it seems daft,
Don’t give me the burial I deserve.
No folded flags and bugle calls,
Don’t give me hushed church stalls,
Don’t pin my medals on my chest,
Just follow this my last request:

When heroes fall in death we raise them up again,
To take their palls and cloak as kings those who once were men,
Their death around protecting what we thought they were in life,
Till we are bound unto their glory which we repeat as strife.

So if I should fall,
Leave my body where it lays,
Lie it there without a pall,
My face buried in the clay,
Unmourned, unrembered, unglorfied,
Nothing but a corpse...cold and dead.

The Two Americas

As every 13 year old girl in America already knows I am the reality asshole du jour on the WB’s newest reality show Survival of the Richest. That 13 year old girls know this is more of a tribute to their loyalty to the station than the quality of the show. According to the WB’s website, “SURVIVAL OF THE RICHEST matches people from opposite ends of the American dream to see if rich and poor can work together.” And Survivor shows the ability of the human spirit to triumph over adversity…

Like most of reality TV, what Survival of the Richest does is create a human train wreck so appalling that we can’t look away. We become enthralled by the human spectacle in a grand old tradition extending back through the days of the gladiators and down into the gooey depths of the primordial ooze. Amoebas jousting…

Reality TV is not, as so many amateur cultural critics have claimed, a new phenomenon and it is not the end of civilization. Rather it is a continuation of human civilization’s fascination with seeing their fellow man at his most vulnerable. The gladiatorial competitions of Ancient Rome required massive amounts of blood letting because, what the crowd really wanted to see, the emotions on the gladiators’ faces were out of the crowd’s view. The camera made cinema possible and the low priced digital video camera made reality TV possible. Rather than having to script out every last shot to conserve precious film we can now record every moment and sort it out in the edit. Now never you fear this isn’t about to turn into a justification of my performance on the show. I’m not going to take up the reality villain’s cry of, “It wasn’t my fault. The editors made me look like an asshole.” I was a huge asshole on the show. And I was fantastic at it.

Because you see the real reason to do reality TV is for your own personal amusement and the only reason to watch reality TV is for your own personal amusement. The reason not to watch is for some wider socio-political understanding. Clearly I hope you know this and yet so many don’t. For while Survival of the Richest purports to be an examination of an America divided along financial lines it really serves as an examination of an America divided along lines of belief. It just so happens that these two lines fall in roughly the same place.

During the course of the show, in true reality and I might add personal fashion, I make a spectacle of myself. I walk around the house in pink pashminas, swim only in a wetsuit and regularly drop such salacious soundbites as, “I like to make waitresses cry and then when they’re most upset I usually sleep with them.” That people understood my tongue was placed firmly in cheek didn’t surprise me. That people didn’t understand this, disappointingly, didn’t surprise me. For, there are two Americas. The first is permissive, post-modern, post-ironic, generally younger, generally better educated and typically coastal. The second is, well, the opposite. These are the people who save themselves for marriage. These are the people who believe in God and government and the conflation of the two. These are the people who send me hate mail. My favorite thus far came from Caroline in South Carolina. The choicest line of which was:

As I sat there watching your show I had to say to myself, “I question the moral integrity of this young man.”

Caroline is either the inspiration for Dana Carvey’s “Church Lady” or deliciously ironic. It’s not for me to say which one of these two Americas she falls into. What I can say is that “the poor kids” on Survival of the Richest were, to a man, in the believer category. They believed not only in God but, perhaps more shockingly, in the process of reality TV. Their faith in God is a separate issue but to believe that the way to reality glory is by winning the challenges?!? How dumb can you get…I mean really. Who believes that? My Kansan team mate Johanna is who. So much so that when I tried to explain to her that it was essentially a popularity contest she went around telling people she wanted to vote me off…which would of course have meant her own expulsion. They’re jackals, Johanna! Give ‘em an excuse and they’ll turn on you like a desert fox on its own young. It pisses me off even thinking about it and whatever thread I was drawing out of all this meaningless stupidity is now well and truly lost. The important thing is this…

No-one wants to be voted off the island so everybody tries to agree that they’d all be doing so and so a favor if we all vote them off. That’s why you don’t tell people you want to vote off your own partner. Jayhawkers…