humbly submitted

I hardly ever put my own poem drafts up here. This blog is, in many ways, an exercise in self-exposition. All my poems ever have been are little cliff overhangs, under which I can hide. Too decorative and encoded to feel anything but safe.

Today, I guess, I feel like retreating.

And, as I intimated in my post previous to this one, I really did have every intention of filtching that "tautology" line from Harvey. It's so good, it begs response. I have, in fact, epigram-itized it.

So, here's a draft of a prose poem that's probably (I dunno... maybe?) in conversation with this other poem I posted about a year ago:

Little jinx on a wet mount slide

Technically, “lonely me” was a tautology.

Say, you forget your suitcase at the airport. Scratch. You go to baggage claim; see it there, brimming a little --wombats, satin pink ribbons and adultery. You laugh at it and hail a cab. Your cab driver says, “lift your skirt.” Your cab driver asks how your thighs feel, naked, pressed against the cab seat as they are. You and your cab driver get really fucking high. You don’t have to be a pervert to recognize analogies with syringes. Li’l plunges, li’l pricks. Playing hard-to-get would be untrue. Lonesome you? Not so mercurial. Truer, the (anti-) body fights that which is foreign. This is all it ever is, isn’t it? How new lovers inoculate each other. What sweet, sweet skins we break. Rules, too, would be redundant. Inoculate me, then, baby. A little pathogen between friends can only fortify the ligatures. Even such bondage is not periphrastic, not ekphrastic, as I, in isolation.

of jinxes that persist

I suppose it's really too much to ask that I arrive at my destination on the same date that my boarding pass lists. After all, these dates are clearly mere suggestions to the air travel industry.

Tonight, I was scheduled to go back to Nashville to spend 9 days going to the NaFF offerings and hanging out with my baby schmogface Noah. When I arrived at the airport, it was sunny and lovely and still outside and the signs at the gate indicated that everything was running on time. Soon however, there was a delay... and another delay... and then, they pulled off the plane, saying that there was no way I'd make my connector... and, well, it's the same old tedious story all over again. I am an airplane jinx and really, the sooner I learn to accept this, the less stressed out all of this will make me, I'm sure of it.

Needless to say, I'm back in my apartment in Alexandria tonight. I have a rescheduled flight at 6 AM tomorrow.. which means I have to be at the airport between 4:45 and 5... which means I have to leave my apartment no later that 4... which means, in order to get my ass out the door at that hour, I have to rouse myself no later than 3. 3 fucking AM. I may have seen 3 AM on the other end of the day several times in my life but I have not once begun a day at such an ungodly hour. And by "ungodly," I mean that I assume that even God is on hiatus at that hour.

Now, I really don't know what the deal is with air travel these days...but this is really getting ridiculous. My dad suggests that I invest in a horse in hopes that he/she would be a more reliable mode of transportation. However, I don't know that my coccyx is up to the challenge. I'd be one serious mosey-er subsequent to one such trip.

This sucks. I fucking hate being a jinx.