Internet Singles #5
{I wrote this song for my grandparents, in honor of their 50th anniversary. Right-click the image to download and listen. Enjoy!}
April 24, 2009
April 6, 2009
Vanity’s Makeover is Learning to Compromise
{Another day, another poem. I think this one might be the first poem to ever legitimately poeticise iTunes. So there’s that. Plus: I dig that I gave this poem a hip, non-sequitur, Fall Out Boy-esque title.}
You feel like change
is in order–
but what?
Scan the pages of CraigsList
for a new apartment,
join a dating site.
Look up a new bar
in a nearby neighborhood.
You open the windows
for the first time
since fall and
notice how similarly
it smells to spring.
The inbetween seasons.
The open-window seasons.
The wandering heart
searching for a reason
to curl like a cat
between the comforting
pattern of your lungs,
fall asleep there
purring and contented,
and never wake up.
But instead, your heart
is a housecat at the window,
pacing on the sill,
measuring life by patterns
of shadows on the buildings.
Kids are playing stickball
in the street, hide-and-seek
and your stoop is homebase.
Ollie-ollie oxen, free!
Cries your heart, but
still, the knock at your door
is only the ConEd man
here to read the meter.
You put your own hand to your chest
because your heart’s meter cannot
be read with numbers–though you
have considered counting cigarettes,
empty beer cans, the play count of
the saddest songs in your iTunes library.
Then you realize: this is the change
that will be leftover from your spent life;
these are the throwaway legacies
of your hardwork lounge of an existence.
Your life amounts to memories
that will be replaced, cans
that will be recycled, and
brown-edged rolls of paper
with scraps of your DNA
in ink and spit.
When future anthropologists study us,
all they’ll have to dig through
is our browser histories.
How, then, should they construct a life
made of Google searches for
“human connection” and “free porn?”
You believe people never talk about
what they truly mean; they talk
in concrete sidewalks,
but never go into the buildings.
They walk the cliches
of safe neighborhoods,
hailing a cab with retread tires of
tired excuses back home
after the bars last-call
the final round of two-dollar
cans of laughter.
You think that art was once
what people used to explicitly state
their hearts’ desires in their most
beautiful form. But why dress it up
in a gown and take it to the prom
when you can Google the subtext?
If Da Vinci was alive today, what
would his MySpace page look like?
What would Shakespeare Twitter?
All you know is: Einstein
would definitely prefer Facebook.
Why spend years holed up in a room,
trying to sublimate the base in hopes
of winning the heart of someone for whom
you’ll forever have to keep up the charade,
when–in that same room–the internet
will let you have it for what it is,
instantly, 24 hours-a-day?
The cat hops down from the window,
setting itself down in your lap
as you split the difference and
peruse “Casual Encounters” posts.
April 2, 2009
NaPoWriMo #2
First Date
Your heart is a metronome.
You are sitting at the bar
and trying to make it look like
you aren’t looking.
But you’re looking.
And you’re practicing the unexpectant
expression you will have on your face
when she walks through the door.
Your heart is a steadily increasing
metronome. And you counter it’s rhythm
by pausing longer between
increasingly smaller sips.
And you wait for the retardundo
of her entrance,
which will restore the balance
between who you are
and who you think she
expects you to be.
April 1, 2009
NaPoWriMo–Go!: PLS #3
Because it’s the first day of National Poetry-Writing Month and I’ve felt tired and sick all day, I decided on the subway ride into the office this morning to write a Haiku. By the time the train had hit Broadway/Nassau, I realized there was no way what I came up with could ever be a Haiku. But it also could not be ignored. I thought, then, that it would make a nice two-hit combo, a-la “Super Street Fighter 2 Special Champion Edition.” Shoryuken!!!
March 31, 2009
In a Foreign Language
A photograph
of Paris in January,
your hair caught in the wind
like naked tree branches.
Behind you, the Seine–
a muted beige vein
like an arm with its hand hidden
behind the shoulder of the city.
Your letters are streets
in which I love to lose myself,
alleys of words spelled
ways I do not comprehend.
How can a man possibly
rely upon the movement of his hands
to relate a beauty beyond words?
It makes me want to curse
in a foreign language.
