.blue.room.

My mom put me on the swim team for 8 long years of my life, under the guidance of an Egyptian coach. And he surely knew his stuff, since we had heard some fluff that him and his wife had almost qualified for the Egyptian Olympics team in the past. Their children certainly were part dolphins, we wagered, slipping through the water all the way to the regionals, nationals, and junior olympics. The rest of us were jellyfish, littering the pools like plastic bags.
And what made it all the worse, was that the pool we practised in was a 50 meter pool, rather than the standard 25 meter one that we swam at the meets. The distances we swam were the same, but without that extra flip turn and push every 25 meters, we found ourselves in the middle of the pool.
I used to imagine what I'd do if I suddenly saw a shark materialize in the deep end, slowly swimming over from the diving end of the pool. Nevermind the chlorine content: this was the special shark, bred to punish boys that grabbed onto the lane dividers during the backstroke. And most of the time, I found that I wanted to sink down to the bottom of that pool and just sit on the bottom forever, shark or no shark. It was an empty and silent place.
And then I would hear my coach, yelling at the top of his lungs as we approached either side of the pool. Yelling at us to pull harder, swim faster. He had quite a voice on him, that Egyptian, and we could hear him 5 meters away and half underwater. In all likelihood, we probably did pull harder and swim faster as we approached him, if only so we could turn around and swim away from him sooner.
I haven't swam in a while now, having a brief stint with laps at the rec centre pool with a friend that was trying to get in shape. I tend to either feel that I'm just standing in water being cold, or that I feel compelled to swim all the laps that my body can't keep up with anymore. Nevertheless, I'd love to take that 11 kilometer bike ride out to the quarry this summer with some friends and maybe float around for a bit. Or maybe sneak into the Canterbury pool and hot tub late at night. There's no pressure to pull harder anymore, of course, but there's always that moment, after having jumped in, when I'm once again alone in that underwater room, stuck between a shark and an Egyptian.

.by.the.side.of.the.pool.

boys will be boys.
growing up as one is what you'd expect:
dirt and grass and melted action figures,
ninja turtles and x-men grimacing
with blackened faces and cracked shells
it was a surprise we ever got new toys at all
nothing belongs
to little boys
everything is taken

Vigil

I waited by the window all day.
Streetlights came on, halos
full of moths. Even then
I stayed.

I see no reason to grieve--I've got
this grey world for that.
And if you come home
I'll have kept room for you
where my sadness should have been.

.button.eyes.

She likes boys!

the O.C.

I need to be rich, I've decided.
I wasn't born with good taste for nothing.

.chasing.street.lights.

wet roads
and slick tires
make stopping that much harder
but at
1:30
in the morning
there's not much reason to

.death.under.the.lights.

and when you
are old enough, you
can play at those
old characters, one
tragic death after
another

when the director finally yells
"Cut!"
you'll sit up miraculously
healed, and pushing aside
hospital sheets, no longer
heavy like stones

meadow

the fog rising from the tall grass
is not like the cold breath of god.
and the morning sun behind it
is just yellow yolk. no
romance in how
it feathers the clouds above me.
but i do remember this:
if i love you is not enough then
nothing is.

.fingertips.

these days, i'm never sure whether my fingertips are black from dirty guitar strings, or bike grease

and whether a new hole will wear through my jeans in the knees or seat

whether my scabs will scar, like ghosts of an injury

the signs of usage creeping over my body
when i'm broken, i can be discarded
like an old chain holding onto its links
with broken fingers

mansfield

not as entertaining as the name would imply, a field
of men. or a man's field

filled with what, tomato vines? and maybe
the men run barefoot through

the fruit. they make
paste.

.virtual.memory.

With regards to first shows always kind of sucking, I would like to say, Thank god for the computer.

April

I've spent all my money--is it
the end of the month yet? I never leave
the house anymore. All I need is the dust
caught in sunlight, morning
pouring through the blinds.
In the alley, a dog barks at a man
who yells to the trees.
What were we doing here anyway
other than getting by?

.ivy.over.brick.

Remember that time when you were feeling lonely and out of it? First year at grad school, I think it was, because we were all still around, rooted to the porch and doomed to be townies, but you were making something of yourself. We were pretty proud of you.
But you still called one of us every day, and talked about how you were stranded in assfuck nowhere, and we told you to be quiet, because you were living in downtown Montreal, and that was a hell of a lot more interesting than our one-road town. We missed you as much as you missed us.
So I hope you remember that tape we made for you that one time: the one where we played an old record of 80's one hit wonders in the living room. You know, all those bands that eschewed "The" and any more than one word for a name. And they must have known something, naming themselves after all sorts of geographical locations: Africa, Kansas, Boston. Hell, there was even Journey. You can't top the epicness of that era, and maybe that cheesiness is what made it so appropriate after we had our cheese and wine dinner without you.
And if you dig that tape up, I think we'd all like to listen to it when you come back for the holiday, because we were all too drunk to remember us gathered around the living room on rugs and chairs, squeezing cats and all of us singing at the top of our lungs to those brilliant retarded songs. We knew all the words, and every last sax solo, and lord knows our voices probably ended up drowning out the actual record.

Yeah, we should definitely listen to it when you come back, before newer technology creeps by us like ivy over brick. Before we lose the ability to hear ourselves at all.

Scavenger

There is no other way to say it-- I'll
have to be quiet now.

How we lived like wolves, miserable
for each other, desperate.

Where does love go when finished?
Under the moonlight, half-starved--

you were enough for you.
I'll scavenge for your scent

on my pillow, I'll take

what I can get.

.backyard.treasure.

It seems silly to even talk about it, but I have the recurring story of how my uncle Thomas decided to go his grave early, following the death of my Aunt Tilda. It wasn't as if he had a death wish. No, no, he just had it up to here with life above the ground, as if the sun and stars were the hands of a clock ticking away without a snooze button.
Uncle Thomas had been a carpenter by trade, so he spent a month or so designing his coffin, embellishing it with the standard decor one saw in his living room. And in fact, there were several items that were from his living room: sawed off lamps, his small television, the hideous upholstery that Aunt Tilda had knitted one Easter.
There was a huge yard sale after Uncle Thomas had finished his coffin, wherein he sold the rest of the house and its belongings. Remember how I said one day I'll be able to carry everything I own on my back and move from town to town without a worry? he said to us. Well, it's like that, only I don't want to move anywhere anymore, so I'm just making my house as small as I can make it. Which, in the end, turned out to be the size of small camper. What the hell is this, Tom? A horse coffin? my dad joked. But in his voice, I noticed a roughness like the unsanded wood that Uncle Thomas had been working with. Nothing a few cans of beer wouldn't polish off over a barbecue.
And that was my Uncle Thomas's funeral: nothing more than a large family barbecue, with his friends showing up for the free hot dogs and beer. Us kids knew no better, and ran around poking each other with sticks and climbing trees like we always did, until Uncle Thomas shot off some fireworks to get our attention. Hear hear! Let's bow our heads! And nobody did, of course, but the parents and grown ups all went around and said a little phrase about their favourite memories of Uncle Thomas, which I suspect was just to humour him. My mom wanted nothing to do with it, though, and told him flat out that he was going to be back inside in a week to watch the Lakers game with some Cheetos.
So she wasn't even outside when my Uncle Thomas saluted and climbed into his giant coffin, which he referred to as his Viking longboat, which he had somehow lowered into a giant hole he had dug out in his backyard. My dad joked about the duck and cover drills from their childhood, and that his coffin looked more like a fallout shelter. Do you really want to do this Tom?
But my Uncle Thomas was dead already, so he didn't answer. He just climbed down into his coffin, and expected us to pile the dirt on after him. None of the grown ups wanted to do it, so us kids made a game of it, pretending we were pirates hiding treasure, or squirrels storing away food, or anti-paleontologists, protecting the sacred remains of the long lost dinosaurs.
Anyway, that was the last time we really saw my Uncle Thomas. We talked to him sometimes when we were in his backyard (it was part of a short cut to the creek) and stopped for a while, and one time, we even managed to slide a can of beer to him from above ground, but that hole has long since filled up with dirt.
After a while, we stopped hearing from him altogether. Maybe he finally died down there. Either way, he left the world and all of us long ago, and sometimes, I can't blame him. I think about looking for that treasure map once in a while, and digging my way out of this life.

The Evening I Nearly Forgot You

I turned off the light and listened to the dogs
downstairs, their chorus of yowls.

I was getting used to being alone, reacquainting
myself with the sounds the house makes

when you're not here. The furnace kicks on, angry.
The neighbor's heavy footsteps on the other side

of a too-thin wall. I wanted these sounds
for company. I wanted my loneliness

to fill me entirely, make me
another woman, someone you couldn't love

not even if you tried.

thick be the tension

in this house. how many more months until I move?

.bristly.

I've been trying to learn a Thao song that involves hitting the strings with a toothbrush.
That is all.

nothing good

I'm in one of those moods when I think everything I write has been crap & will always be crap. How to shake it, how to shake it?

.moped.

Music always seems to find you at the perfect time. Or is it that you happen to latch onto whatever it is that seeps into your earholes at that moment? Either way, it always feels a little bit like predestination, even for the most non-fatalistic cynic of us.

So the rejections start rolling in, and I realize that my escape to Canada is being delayed by at least a year: a year to replan, rescheme, and work my ass off in a graduate program to reapply for the Ph.D program.
Orchestrating the mad dash to figure out how I'm going to afford Chicago next year is Thao Nguyen's solo album, which I finally managed to get a hold of, and the last track, Moped, is definitely a winner!
So is the rest of the album of course.

And hey, whatever, Chicago, and the University of Chicago for that matter, are by no means terrible places to be.
A year to plan.
A year to scheme.
A year to crank out a thesis.