playgrounds
1.
Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.—frank o’hara
2.
It is not so much that I miss you
as the remembering
which I suppose is a form of missing
except more positive,
like the time of the blackout
when fear was my first response
followed by love of the dark.—dorothea grossman
3.
That night we were chilling in the backyard and you were all talking about people I hadn’t met, the smoke made me think of old friends and old selves so instead I watched the moon through the silhouetted branches of a stringybark tree. Then something clicked and I left and walked and walked until I found a park with manicured lawns and empty sky and then I sat and watched the phosphorescent burn of street lights swallow up moonshine, all the while waves crashing memories onto the shores in my head. I forget sometimes how nice it is to be alone among strangers, nearby some boys play basketball and a girl pirouettes for her grandmother and everywhere else is quiet, this is the world shrinking to a moment contained in the time it takes to inhale and exhale.
The walk back to the house was calmer. I found more books in the gutter, picked out the ones with curious names and they were an apology gift for my moods and the way I never follow my cues in any given social script. Here is some pulp fiction, here is your wine, here are unfinished thoughts and kisses and a selfish kind of distance. Here is your true home, here is the person I’ve remade myself into, here is my chance to work the clay before it dries and crumbles at the edges…
4.
‘Poetry’, you are saying, ‘is nothing but personality…’
and I look out onto the row upon row of grey hills
and light striking the rooftops, and just at this moment
there isn’t much in my life I’d miss if it were over:
the weird cheerful meanness of people to each other,
about pay, status, odd grudges, responsibility;
work’s meaninglessness – but its opposite, leisure’s abyss!
a snake coiled in the chest morning after morning…
How do I cope when poetry is part of this bullshit?
Part of this racket? What you call ‘personality’
seems something heroic; it seems the rictus grin
on a student’s practice corpse – that breathes iambically
between each line, with their knives parting the skin,
‘love me, love me, love me, love me, love me…’—leontia flynn
5.
Let me revisit this old idea:
All of my user generated content suffers from a peculiar source of gentrification. I’ll start out by thinking, “Gee, this will be a place I can post stupid things. After all, who will ever read it.” Then I will learn that people actually read what I’m writing. Suddenly I feel bad about posting stupid things. Now I need to put more thought into what I do. The stupidest things get cut—and the quality standard goes up. Perhaps more people read it. Next thing you know my internal quality standard has gone up so much that I can’t write anything that meets my own standards. I need to find a newer, darker part of the internet to pollute.
6.
Here is a moment where I consider the necessity of boundaries between the selves we construct for different spheres, what happens when their inhabitants cross-pollinate and we’re forced to lose the frame of references we clung to for so long. Here is a moment where I remember that just as I’ve changed, so have others.
7.
I have longed to move away but am afraid;
Some life, yet unspent, might explode
Out of the old lie burning on the ground,
And, crackling into the air, leave me half-blind.—dylan thomas
8.
Here is truth. Here is focus. Here is a clean week for a clean mind, here is your notebook, here is your heart.
