Tuesday, January 27, 2015

Poetry Corner Whenever-I-Feel-Like-It

My God

Sandra Beasley

My god is a short god. My god wears jeans.
When he swims, he has a lazy breaststroke.
When he gardens, he uses his bare hands.
My god watches reruns of late night talk shows.
My god could levitate but prefers the stairs
and if available, the fireman's pole. My god
loves bacon. My god's afraid of sharks.
My god thinks the only way to define a country
is with water. My god thinks eventually,
we will come around on ear candling. My god
spits chaw. My god never flosses.
My god reads Proust. My god never
graduated. He smiles when astronauts reach
zero gravity and say My god, My god.
My god is knitting one very big sweater.
My god is teaching his terrier to beg.
My god didn't mean for icebergs. My god
didn't mean for machetes. Sometimes
a sparrow lands in the the hands of my god
and he cups it, gently. It never wants to leave
and so, it never notices that even if it tried
my god has too good a grip, my god, my god.

Monday, January 26, 2015

I'm Alive! Sort of.

Greetings to my twos of readers! No, thine eyes do not deceive you: I have returned from my non-Amish blog Rumschpringe and have so little to report of the experience that I wonder how the hell I've been writing actual content here for so long. Two posts in three months--one of which was a poem written by someone else? Good work, Margoshes. But what's that, you say? I've never looked better? You're too kind.

I've had better days, though; I suppose I should start with that. I miss Orcas immensely. I wake each morning feeling like I've just taken a seat at a table in a junior high school cafeteria, only to have everyone stand up and leave all at once. I feel left behind in so many ways that sometimes I honestly wonder if everyone else is living in fast-forward while I'm still adjusting the tracking on the screen of my life. My friends have amazing jobs that they love. They're getting married and having babies, and I'm going to sleep every night in the same bed in the room in the house that I slept in when I was five. I flip through the pages of my National Geographic and pray that by the time I have the resources to travel again, the places I want to see will still be there. It's hard not to feel like a failure.

Normally, to snap out of this, I would take photographs. I would play the guitar and sing and write poetry about waking up in the middle of a windstorm. But ever since I got home in October all the light and the music has seeped right out of me. When I sit down to write, I tell myself that there's nothing I could possibly say that someone hasn't already said. I think, sometimes, that even my inner monologues are plagiarized.

Maybe--hopefully--this will be the week when my meager job qualifications are enough to qualify me for something I actually want to be doing. Maybe this unseasonably warm January will turn arctic and I can walk down the street at night in the snow and not hear my own footsteps.

Maybe I'll think of something that no one's ever thought of before.