Poetry Corner

Here's some free verse I've been dabbling with the last couple of months. Be proud of me! The poems have titles!

Beats

I offer you my big black heart
coagulating in tinny cold
and burn with breath throw a punch
gnash and crunch the piling snow
because you're smiling because I know
hot steam engines hurtle past
fireball fury fist clenched pumping
you count snowflakes stitches stiletto
clackity-clacks on icy tracks
not black bruises heartbeat woes
not our frostbit toes.


Eulogy

Bury me beneath the kitchen linoleum.
Speak to me when the air conditioner hums,
when the curtains I picked
fill the room with blue light,
when you stare through windows
and don't see your own lawn.

Leave your lilies in a milk bottle on the porch.
Think of me when the bananas go bad,
when the scarf I knitted
scratches your neck red,
when you walk under Christmas lights
and don't know your own door.


They Say I Am This Woman-thing.

Singing hymns in muffled nighttime
(soothing whispers stroke my neck).

Sacrificed for cherry cheesecake
(translucent as a broken eggshell).

Spread like thin communion wafers
(hands across my belly skin).

Scattered onto threadbare carpet
(bright as prism-shattered light).

Fact: Women Like Shady Guys

It is an undeniable universal truth.

It is one of those mysteries of life that has boggled male and female mind alike since the beginning of the written word. Maybe the good guy gets the girl at the end of the story--but not until she's gotten her tryst with the local hooligan out of her system. And if she's lucky, that local hooligan will turn out to be the actual good guy.

I bring this up because I'm reading Jane Eyre again for my Feminist Literature class. My boyfriend has read it before, for high school English, and we were discussing why any self-respecting girl like Jane would fall in love with a man like Mr. Rochester. While it never occurred to me to question Jane's attraction, the relationship between Jane and Mr. Rochester made him dubious.

Trying to find an explanation, I took a poll of the girls in my apartment:

Roommate #1 said "Yes, girls like shady guys... Probably because they are mysterious. But good guys can be mysterious too. I like good guys... And some girls just want to rebellious."

Roommate #2 said "Well, yeah, girls like shady guys... I know it's true, but I can't put in words. I don't know. Maybe they want to change them."

Roommate #3 said "Girls definitely like shady guys. Women like to give. They also may just like the badness."

I fully admit my own attraction to shady guys (and all of you girls out there denying it are not being honest with yourselves), but I do have a hard time giving a reason.

Perhaps if I give a definition of what I mean by shady: shady guys are not safe, or predictable, or considerate. They take risks, and change on a whim, and say and do what they want when they want to do it. They curse like sailors, pinch you on the bum, have a wicked grin, and ride motorcycles. They smoke, and drink, and (after drinking some more) sing at an obnoxious volume. They punch walls (and people who have it coming), play pranks, skip work, flirt with everything that moves, and tell dirty jokes.

They probably do a lot of other things unmentionable on my PG-13 rated blog, but that definition is already painting with a rather broad brush. Shady Guy is an archetype, and I'm sure his real-life counterparts are much more complex and fall on some shade of gray between "Wholesome" and "Drug-dealing."

Shady Guy shows up all over the place in popular culture--from House to Edward Cullen (how I hate to juxtapose those two, but they both remain true to the archetype), from film noir detectives to Romantic byronic heroes--Shady Guy is inescapable.

But has Shady Guy always been attractive? Is his attractiveness inherent or manufactured? Why does the decent but boring guy lose out?

I Would Date Robert Heinlein

Apparently, girls aren't supposed to enjoy reading Robert Heinlein. At best, his critics claim his target audience was adolescent boys (true enough) and his novels aren't able to hold the interest of female readers. At worst, he was a chauvinist pig and therefore unworthy of female interest.

I like Heinlein. I am a girl. A conundrum.

I haven't read too broad a swathe of his work yet--I've only finished Starship Troopers and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and though I started Stranger in a Strange Land I've been derailed by the beginning of the school year--but one of the reasons I enjoy Heinlein is because I like his female characters. When perceived by male characters they are inherently set apart, different, special. Woman are so different from men they cannot be compared. They are a mystery, a precious enigma.

I admit that such a point of view is not in vogue and does not reflect current trends in gender role enlightenment, especially because the sheer alien aspect of women in Heinlein novels borders on making them objects. But doesn't that gulf between the sexes exist? How much ink has been spilled, breath wasted, tears cried over the misunderstandings between male and female? We are alien to one another.

But keep in mind I'm also the kind of girl who laughs at barefoot-and-pregnant jokes and read John Donne's sermon discussing whether or not women have souls with an open mind.

The Epiphany that Brought Us Here

It's my first blog entry and I'm already upset with my title. No matter what ANYONE says, hyphens are ugly. Unless you combine two of them to create a dash--I find dashes quite rakish. But hyphens stitch together words like Dr. Frankenstein stitched together body parts: the result is awkward and stunted emotionally at best. But sometimes words just roll off your tongue and into the air in front of you and won't be swatted aside.

Perhaps it wasn't a good idea to begin my very first blog and my very first blog post at 1:30 AM.

I am a college student. Only starting my third year, already been a senior for a semester. I'm a Type A bitch when it comes to grades, or, rather, I used to be a Type A bitch when it came to grades, but then I had an epiphany: choosing to read Heinlein instead of Dostoevsky did not make me a bad person. Baking cookies for my friends rather than busting my butt studying for that 98.6% in Brit.Lit.II did not make me irresponsible. Sleeping the night before a test rather than staring at the popcorn ceiling of my dorm room reciting spanish verb conjugations for hours did not make me an idiot. It meant that I was a well-rounded (damn hyphen) individual. It meant that I had a life and that I wanted to keep it.

Such realizations are probably indubitably obvious to the rest of you, but I was honestly astonished. And very very relieved. My life is changed forever. For example, I now have time to attempt a blog. I am going to write about whatever I want to write about on a regular basis. Hell yes.