the Stars are threaded,
strung as to necklace heaven
suspended in autumn sky.
pearls i can’t afford,
but i’ll gladly snip their string
if you will hold out your hands.
Personal
Today in creative writing class i was hopelessly cornered by context. It was not a happy thing; everyone was wielding their contexts against my lonely pen.
Let me ask you: do you write Sedokas about chemical warfare? Or, perhaps haiku concerning god and if he has turned his back on us? Apparently my class does. Mine was just about stars, because i all i can do right lately is look up and look pleased. So, i hid in the corner. Me and my tiny poetry and just a little bit of hope that people are as good as i give them credit for.
If i seem a little out of touch, it’s because all of my free time has been taken up with reading multi-hundred page assignments for class and listening to the new Garbage album. And, man, if you think i got distracted when Tori’s disc came out you ain’t seen nothing yet. Also, i’ve apparently become a popular mecca for Ashleigh Banfield after praising her reporting in the WTC ordeal; i’ll have to find a nice head-shot to display on the sidebar or something; who knew that the random news reporter i was listening to happens to be one of the premier “news babes” of the ‘net? Go figure…
Somewhere in my Communications Theory book it says something to the effect of art introduces a new or original way of looking at life. Right.
I have been having some fussy bitchy unjustified issues with Laurel lately. Don’t ask me why, because there is no why; any issue i ever have with Laurel exists entirely inside of my own head. But, anyway, the first day she got back i just got this vibe from her that Laurel Had Returned and that i had gotten shuffled way down to the bottom of the deck from where i had been before she left. And, why not? Laurel is the pretty one, the talented one, the intelligent one, the castable one. Of course, i never saw it that way at first; all i knew was that i had a dream where we kissed and that it didn’t seem like such an awful idea.
Two years later, the situation is more tangled in my head, and who knows what the situation is like in hers. Tonight when we started talking in our production class all the petty resentment i was starting to build quickly faded out because face to face there was nothing… only things i had created and surmised.
Before tonight’s round of auditions Laurel gave me a ride to my house, and while we were there i played her some songs … two she already knew and three i wrote while she was away. Sometimes i question whether or not anything i do is vaguely artistic by anyone’s definition let alone by the one i mentioned at the top of the post, and today while i was playing songs for Laurel i was playing all my usual games … glancing up and away, shutting my eyes, carefully watching my picking even though i surely know the patterns tried and true. When i inevitably got to “Under My Skin,” Laurel sang along just like she did on the demo recording, and looking at her she was really meaning something when she was singing the words… not just intonations and syllables, but something beyond. I’m not sure if she’s even applying the lyrics to the same time and place that i wrote them about, but suddenly they have life and meaning for her, and according to my communications book that’s one tangible step closer to art.
So, here i am broadcasting wireless from the fifth to last row of our theatre with the aid of the roomies, and there are 30+ people on stage for auditions. 40minutes into the process and our director barely has them onstage. Linsday and Erika and I are here in the back, specifically to observe and to lament how dreadful and long auditions are and how happy we are that we’re not up there. I’m ostensibly skipping out on acting in this one because of my fraternity mini-convention, but really i let them set the date for it with full awareness that it would be a physical barrier in the way of my playing a part in our fall show. And i didn’t mind. So, this is it … me in the audience watching all those poor nervous faces on stage as it begins to dawn on them that they’re going to be here a long time. And again tomorrow night. And again on Wednesday. And for the rest of the term.
I hope they they all break a leg :)