Useless or Not
Muffins that would not
rise, now in the trash, fill the
room with sweet fragrance.
Writing
I’ve had a stormy relationship with writing. Writing is deeply satisfying when you actually manage to express what you want to, but it’s awfully frustrating when you don’t. When my writing is easy and I say what I want to, I love it and I want to write more. But then I get stuck and frustrated and become drawn to other pursuits that aren’t as tempestuous. Knitting, for instance, is not such an emotional experience. Even activities like programming that do involve a lot of getting stuck and then getting unstuck over and over again aren’t quite as emotionally draining for me as writing. Writing, for me, is all darkness and light: black times of hopeless frustration and despair and then bright times of joy and delight and pretty words. Well, maybe not that dramatic, but something like it.
I regularly write nonfiction – essays, research reports, descriptive pieces – for school and for my website, and it’s something that I enjoy and would like to continue to do in the future. But what I’m really interested in is fiction writing. I’ve wanted to write stories, especially novels, since I could read them, but the strength of my will to accomplish this goal has fluctuated quite a bit over the years. Since actual writing can be so painful for me, I’ve spent much of my time pursuing this goal in doing easier things like researching writing technique and thinking about stories. But now and then I do actually sit down and write something. I’ve done NaNoWriMo several times and consequently produced several large portions of bad novels, and in addition I’ve written some short standalone pieces and bits of larger works. And my head and my notebooks are full of ideas for more. The question is, as always: will I actually go through the slow, agonizing process of writing them?
Here you can find a few stories and other pieces that I’ve finished and been happy enough with to post. You can also find quite a bit of old poetry I’ve written. I still write poetry occasionally, but since I don’t read or study poetry much at all I feel that I don’t have the knowledge and sense for it needed to produce anything very good. So beware!
Opposites
Light from passing cars
sparkles & reflects off trash
like sun on fresh snow
Dew
Look! look!
the stars forget to fade as the sun came out,
and they have melted and fallen into the grass!
Waves & Wind
Waves splashing and whirling and tumbling
over and into and onto themselves
a swirl of froth falling forwards and backwards
crashing over each other again.
An Astronaut Looks Back at Earth
Strange to think –
that tiny blue marble
rolled in barely perceptible clouds
is a whole world –
suspended in a huge starry void
of empty, silent planets –
a whole world, with all its history and knowledge and technology –
small and still
shrinking to yet another tiny star
in an endless sky.
Nowhere
This is part of a series of poems I hope to write about a plane flight.
I have been stamped out,
but not stamped in.
I have miles and miles and miles to go
before I am anywhere –
flying through a hypothetical nowhere,
on land, but not in land.
Somewhere in limbo through the airports and onto the planes,
over countries, over oceans –
there, but nowhere.
Fog
fog over morning:
rain too sleepy to fall.
Ubuntu
Ubuntu is a version of Linux (an operating system, like Windows or Mac, but free) that’s trying to be a normal, mainstream operating system.
Ubuntu, you are like a star trying to be the moon.
You’re perfectly fine as a star, you know,
But you INSIST that NO, I MUST be the moon.
So you keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger…
And do you know what happens after a star expands?
It EXPLODES!
Lace
Lace is a play
on light and emptiness,
the beauty of nothing
creating loveliness.
Dance
to dance is to hear
a voice in the music
a soul, a being, a life
to dance is to follow
the voice in the music
to rise and to fall with the
rising and falling of sound and of meaning
perfectly twirling in the music
to link your emotion with the feeling of song,
stopping and starting and loving and hating
with the music,
to dance and to sing with the rhythm and rhyme
of the dancing and singing of the music,
to slow, to finish, to draw to a close,
with the synchronized slowing, and finish, and closing,
of the fading twirl of the music.