Just sent out 10/10 of my college applications. Feeling weirdly disarmed by the whole thing.
If you’re out there in cyberspace, bop over to the college admissions officer reads the essays to read a poem I wrote today thanks to a class led at UMass Amherst by the poet Martin Espada.
The lioness mothers her cubs remorselessly,
Her silence a testament to selflessness,
Shrinking the space she must
Inhabit.
I am too afraid of the powerful blue, the vast ocean is
Too deep and too unknown,
The words my only
Anchor.
Mother takes me to school, claws hidden,
Ocean kept at bay,
I ignore the flowers on the windowsill and choose instead the sky
As a
Distraction.
Willow trees have always seemed unreal to me.
When I was a child I was given a quilt square to depict myself. Yellow yarn hair and
Popping blue button eyes could not convey the bittersweet taste I have always held in my mouth,
Even
At six.
HI ALL!
It has recently come to my attention that the video clips for THE TOLERANCE PROJECT, the lovely and, frankly, inspiring, theatre piece that my Advanced Drama class crafted last semester, ARE UP ON YOUTUBE.
I sincerely apologize for the caps lock in that mini paragraph above, but my excitement is not physically restrainable and cannot be confined to the PETTY PARAMETERS OF LOWERCASE LETTERING.
To those of you who don’t know what The Tolerance Project is, it was a theatre-based response to racist, sexist, homophobic, and generally intolerant and awful behavior that occurred/occurs at Monument Mountain Regional High School as well as EVERY OTHER HIGH SCHOOL IN THE COUNTRY. Our piece was an attempt to right some of those wrongs, or perhaps just bring these issues to light. As student director of the piece, assisting our (visionary) director Jolyn Unruh, we tackled sexism, racism, homophobia, stigma around mental illness, discrimination due to social status, etc. etc. etc. And now, the entirety of our show is up on YouTube. Yes, it is a little less powerful as a series of video clips but I assure you it is well worth your time.
This gorgeous vid is the full show:
And this one is a link to the show as an assortment of clips that you can select individually:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_N7hain6LQ406YzTGmLBJk-UE7PB0nCy
Please watch, comment, enjoy, send out chain emails with this link, tell your in-laws or your 2 year old nephew. As proud as I am of this, I am also incredibly hopeful that it doesn’t end here and now but rather can extend into the interweb and many, many people’s lives.
Alright. I’m done waxing poetic and thinking big. Wish me luck on the first day of school…..
-me
Taught to me by my grandfather. See in updated poetry section.
blog renovation! how exciting!
summer is a good time to write and for me, really, the only time (that i have time). new poetry and potentially stories will be updated but for now, just know that there is some maaaajor summer-cleaning going on. old things will vanish (it was time..) and new things will appear.
thanks to those of you who are still following, hopefully some interesting new things will actually be produced.
that’s all,
me
We preach and we preach of a new society but all I can hear
Over the sermons of the enlightened,
Those misdirected passions of the blind,
Is the voice of my best friend saying,
“She acts like a guy, like she’s not afraid to be who she is,”
And the sermons are silenced with these words and instead a dull roar begins.
The dull roar murmurs many things in my ear.
It murmurs,
to be female is to be submissive,
to be female is to be beautiful,
to be female is to receive and also to give, but never to resent
And the dull roar reaches a scream as it reminds me,
to be female is to be a caretaker
to be female is to be the femme fatale
to be female is to be sensuous
to be female is to be modest,
And the dull roar contradicts itself and folds in on itself and yet grows louder all at once.
We talk and talk of revolution but
Our flags are crocheted by hand and
We darn them quietly when they rip so as
Not to let the men see that we have done something imperfect.
We carefully correct essays to be gender neutral while passing them out to our classes
We insist to those younger than us, you are beautiful while not believing it ourselves,
We swaddle our newborns in pink cocoons of gender norms and we
Feed to our young the words of our own insecurities and we
Inject in our teens the belief that we are not good enough because
Somehow this is something we all believe.
The place of the woman has been somehow confused over time
Confused in that there was any confusion in the first place
Confused over genesis, why Eve came from Adam when
Eves give birth to Adam
Every single damn day since.
The place of the woman has been confused, yes,
Confused why it is not right next to men,
Confused why the place is confined by confusion.
And until my friend and I live in a world
Where her thought would be not unspeakable
But unthinkable
Where speaking your mind and being intrepidly yourself
Is not a quality attributed to the male identity
Until this fierceness, this boldness, this security
Is something that men and women alike can share
Until we can quiet the dull roar and tell it
Just how stupid
Confining
Narrow-minded
And corrupted it is,
Ideological paralytic that it is we must hush it and
Destroy it with
Our own beautifully strongly feminine hands,
Until the day comes when we are allowed to stand in high heels and not be expected to be coquettish
Until the day comes when we may wear our short shorts and kiss boys without whispers
Until the day comes when we may fight our battles and not be called manly for that
Until that day comes,
I will be disregarding every sermon that preaches that today was the better tomorrow we were waiting for because
Today is not that quintessential tomorrow and
I am done waiting I am done walking I am done
Keeping the peace
I am ready to be me and speak me and be free
And still look pretty.
Hi there everyone! New original song, first posting on le Youtube in forever 🙂 Hope you enjoy.
I cannot help falling in love.
This week I have fallen in love with fall, with leaves and trees that are quickly speeding towards being stripped bare of summer’s glow and instead ignited with the smouldering flame that leaves red and yellow searing across the sky. When leaves fall, it is the saddest and most perfect thing. When I fall, let me fall like a leaf. Gracefully. Gracefully and without regret.
That’s a line in a song, “When I fall, let me fall like a leaf, Gracefully.” It’s more beautiful with music, and I think everything is. We need a soundtrack to our lives to be absolutely perfectly complete. In order to fall in love, you may need moonlight, you may need a little bit of magic and a lot of hopelessness and too much relenting and letting go, but above all you need a melody line that carries you through the love. A list of songs that currently are the soundtrack to my life, my relenting and falling hopelessly, deeply in love with fall.
Fixin by Walk the Moon
Sweater Weather by the Neighborhood
This Head I Hold by Electric Guest
Cough Syrup by Young the Giant
Somewhere only we know by Keane
Skinny Love by Bon Iver
Otherside by Macklemore
Je Veux by Zaz
I’m Alive By Aaron Tveit (Broadway Cast of Next to Normal)
Sing. Don’t stop. It’s the only thing that helps us undoubtedly to fall in love every single time and that is colossally, incredibly important. We must be in love with something at all times– it’s what keeps us living.
I haven’t posted in a long time. This poem is my foray back into writing after musical has calmed and I can reflect on life instead of living it at breakneck speed…. And realizing, after all, I am no different than I ever have been, no matter what I tend to think.
The passivity that is definitely not me:
1. The ability to shrug off broken promises like empty shells
Shedding new skin like a cobra,
Slip,
A rote of life, a new self in a breath
The old self dead, shucking away
Left to decay.
2. The willingness to love without limits
To accept and trust without
Words to
Fall into arms and let lips and lips be lips,
Without linking ties that keep me grounded or safe,
But hold me to gravity when everyone else
Flies away.
3. The ease in
Starting anew and forgetting,
Letting bygones be bygones and keep calm in all
Temperaments
Letting emotions and thoughts wash over and not
Take hold
Being passive aggressive, not needing
To play.
These things are concepts
Not foreign to me, part of my vocabulary
Part of the rhetoric
The vernacular
The wise scholars I study in the art
Of passivity
The butterfly that flits, the soap bubbles just so barely there
The bleached-blond hair that fades into the woodwork and the perfectly
Penciled eyes until
Invisibility and
Consent to Conformity
Are no longer even
Considered but
Assumed.
The dangerous line between passive and pushover
The easy high school harlot whose lips belong to everyone,
The drugs that wire her brain and the
Gentle slip of her clothing
As it hits the floor
For the second time this week
Is not me
But could be
If consent to conformity became my own
Reality.
The hair I dye and the eyes I line
The line
The line
The lines I walk are not lines but curves
The asymptotes of where my personality can reach before
It becomes infinitely, infinitely closer to the impossibly prohibited,
The substance that is added that makes you
Zero.
I am a stranger to the art
That art of passivity
Letting the heart be free, no anchors giving grave gravity a hand,
No wings letting flighty fancies be fully realized
Just letting it sit and be
Why can’t I sit
And be?
And you.
Don’t believe the words they say to be true.
My eyes are deeper than they seem, my ears can hear just as well
As any
And I can hear and see and feel and breathe that you are not you
When you are trying to be true
To the consenting conformity that comes along with being
Who you want to be.
You’re faking it.
Your smile is fake,
Your eyes are lidded with lack of sleep
Your stomach is growling and your legs
Are tired.
You are displeased with the way
This is turning out and your coat
Smells like cigarette smoke
And the girl who loves you is watching with tears in her eyes
As you hate her more
Every day.
She is one like you, please, believe it
Open your eyes like hers to see that
The conformity is not a release or a security
But a prison
The butterfly is never happy from flower to flower
And lips hold memories of kisses far longer than any of us can tell
Please forgive her
She is unlearned in the art of passivity
And her heart is winged like a bird or anchored with burdens
And it feels gravity or flight deeply at once
But does not know the peace of a day of rest.
Please forgive her, please, believe me
She is more like you than you can see
My heart is sore from running
My legs, too
At the end of the day my coat smells
Nothing like cigarette smoke and my
Lips barely remember our last kiss and my
Heart throbs from the chains that have fallen off
But wants for them somehow again
The freedom is lonely
So desperately lonely
To be free is to be alone
To be
I have not learned yet to be,
To be passive,
To sit
To let my heart be unfettered and yet not soar
To let you slip away
To realize I am the reason why, yet not to blame
All at the same time
And to hope somehow
I learn complete
Acquiescence.
Ah, sixth grade! It seems that sixth in particular I’ve been looking back on lately, remembering it as I’m anticipating my move to high school. I could catch you up on everything that’s happened since my last post. I could consolidate my summer into a few, simple, poetic words. But I won’t, because some of it hurts, and some of it is simply too wonderful to condense and give to you on a silver platter. Mostly, I’m too lazy 🙂
But I will tell you about sixth grade, just a bit. In sixth grade, I wrote a poem called “Perfect.” It’s not on my blog, and I’m glad for that. It came from a time where there was a girl I knew: who, quite simply , was perfect. But she wasn’t. She was flawed like the rest of us and now she’s one of my best friends, and we’re great being perfectly flawed together. But I didn’t know that. I was ten maybe, and I was younger then, and she did seem perfect, and all my insecurities and my jealousy balled up into this trainwreck of a poem called “Perfect.”
So I’m going to give you the better version, the one I just wrote, the version about where we all see someone and envy their lives, not realizing that they’re really just like us.
Perfect
There’s a girl I know.
Hair perfect.
Voice perfect.
Clothes perfect.
Face perfect.
Grades perfect.
I step away from myself.
There’s a girl I know.
Shoes perfect.
Choices perfect.
Smile perfect.
Life perfect.
Future perfect.
I shudder at myself.
I admired her
I was amazed by her
I envied her
I wanted to be friends,
with the girl I knew
that was perfect.
Now thin, crinkly lines spread across her face
Shards are falling to the floor
The mirror is splintering
Breaking up the image of
My reflection
I’m much happier now, because
I’m not perfect
I’m just me.
Or maybe, just maybe, the person that you envy and want to be like….maybe it’s only you after all.
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