Elegy

Run away with me, keep going till 

we finally loosen our fierce grip on real.

Tell me, explain this life-wreck.

Answer me, are we here or have we strayed?

I swear this, promise it, some days all I want is

cigarette smoke all around, flinty glances drifting 

through the haze, smoldering love sparking burning 

through veins and the sweet basic release of skin on skin on skin.

Other days I can’t think about anything but young summer 

evenings at the creek and finding snakes and climbing escaping

into trees and crying into sudsy sinks - slimy dishes and blame for all the world's ills,

and more dishes - and running running running through the corn fields and 

tag-you're-it and sprinting heaving lurching fleeing through 

that sudden july thunderstorm pitching sadness anger bitterness into the wind 

and arms legs face into the hail.

This is for the incessant dragging riptide of my adolescent years. 

This is for the house I might have loved and the

first time I snuck out of it. This is for the 

city I wished to call home and the 

brother I grieved for while he lived. This is for the 

boy I loved then and even now and the 

sound of his voice over the telephone. This is for the 

coffee-shop on the corner of that north virginia town and the 

raspberry chai that flavored a lonely year away and the 

art studio that saved me. This is for 

you and your goddamn gorgeous mind.

And when I think that someday I might look at a little girl with a 

familiar ski-jump nose and bright old-soul eyes and know that she might

grow into someone who could write her own elegy of a young life with

the same worries and joys and losses and longings,

a knot of contradictions pierced by bright and dark strings strung 

permanently through other people’s hearts,

well it sometimes

makes me weary 

and it sometimes

gives me hope.

I must remember to tell her to travel light as often as possible.

poem - January 2012

Reclaimed

I thought I was growing up faster by giving myself away,

lending my bad traits out, wrapping my uniqueness in star-printed paper.

I realize now that I’m in the business of reclaiming myself.

I didn’t know 

I wanted to take me back.

I didn’t know.

I need to admire my hair because it makes me want to shake about

and dance and groove and spin and bounce along with my curls,

not because you once told me you could lose yourself in its twists and turns.

I long to look at my stomach in the mirror and love it 

for its soft stretch-marked record of the days 
I spent stumbling into the word ‘woman,’

not hate it for the time he took the extra food off my plate 
and patted my belly as if to say,
“no no, this is your fault, you are better than this.”

He was right. I am better than that.

I’m better than that old mental snapshot of myself, 

sectioned limb from limb into a million fragments of other people’s opinions. 

I am the sum total of all the times I’ve laughed so hard I cried. 

I am the cumulative effect of all the moments I’ve spent 

running in a thunderstorm and smiling at fireflies.
I am the gold flecks in my eyes in the sunlight, with
or without mascara. I am made entirely of the glowing moments,

like pressing my back to the grass, staring at stars on stars and feeling 

so lifted yet within my body, stretched out upon the ground.

I want to adore my feet for the places they’ve carried me, 

for the shoes they’ve danced to shreds and the cliffs they’ve sprung off,

not avoid looking too hard at them in fear of remembering the day 

you massaged the hurt out of them, because it inevitably reminds me 

that you’re not going to take my heart in your hands and squeeze 

it till it fits back together again like a hunk of clay, no scars, new.

I ache to accept that my heart is not something to be fixed,

that it can proudly wear the layered glaze of every person I’ve known,

that all the colors of their laughs and words and sweet sighs 
can mix, swirl, melt, harden -
and I can wear it around my neck,
hanging a little to the left,

like a pendant to be proud of - 
not a martyr’s bleeding heart,

but a precious gift to me, reclaimed

and to you, forgiven.

poem - July 2012

Praise

(part of the series; Love letters with Modest Mouse)

you were the dull sound of sharp math when you were alive, 

no one’s gonna play the harp when you die.

the irony of our last name strikes me today,

the name I inherited at birth - laudadio, lauda dio -

it means “praise god” in your father’s first language,

italian - a riot of gorgeous sounds I grew to love between 

my stooped grandfather’s natural stutter.

lauda dio, the epitome of roman catholic doctrine.

yes, praise god because it makes you good and righteous and holy,

until it doesn’t anymore, or never did in the first place.

after all, you cannot expand from loving, praising, admiring anyone 

who forces it out of you, who requires your dedication as a means to an end.

Better to praise the gods in our fellow stumblers, 

wanderers, strugglers and pretenders.

Better to love one another for the holy hell of a fight 

they face when simply opening their eyes every morning. 

Better to praise them for getting out of bed anyway. 

Better to love them when they just can’t do it that day. 

Better to believe that within every single person 

is the same spirit that lifts inside of you when fireworks burst, 

when thunder cracks, when your dog wiggles and runs and jumps 

and barks and smiles at the sight of you coming home.

Goddamn, if we could all love each other like that.

Better to understand that punishment is just another way to express selfishness.

No, it is not lost on me that you can only praise the god of yourself,

I felt the truth of it clock me in the heart 

on the day that fact became the means to our end.


poem - April 2012

Knowing

I’ve known horrible.

Disaster hailstorms on the heart,

break-your-soul months,

tears trapped in well-meaning jars,

landslides of secret wishes into the abyss.

I’ve known tragic.

Families who’ve tripped over

love - their every move forward

cracked the surface of good intentions,

plunged into ice-cold regret.

I’ve known sorrow.

I could tell you of a life 

I spent walking on eggshells,

the weight of my every step

too heavy to keep the peace.

But - and this is the secret

to waking up with the dawn 

and knowing you’re ready 

to live 

another day -

I’ve known beautiful.

I’ve seen that sometimes, 

if you remember to look,

the moon summons her smile 

through a perfect tree-branch frame.

I’ve known luck;

I’ve loved people with more depth than a skydive.

poem - June 2012

Gravity

I'm getting so slack with my writing habits since I've been home. It's bothering me. So, lovelies, here's some thoughts from my backyard:

I took an old beach towel and a book outside to relax and read and enjoy the sun and wind, but it's a little colder today. I'm a bit chilly but it's refreshing anyway. Laying here looking up at the sky and the tree limbs above me reminded me of a habit from my childhood. I would lay smack in the middle of the two-acre lawn at my dad's house and close my eyes for a while. My family always thought I was napping. I think I wanted them to think that, but anyway, I was taking some time to just ponder. I'd press my fingers into the grass and dirt and seriously will myself to feel the earth moving. It was during those years in school when you're just learning about all the wonders of what it is to live in a universe, the specifics of gravity and orbit, and the incredible incomprehension that is an infinite universe filled with countless galaxies like ours. I loved those small moments to myself. Looking back, I was a strange little kid. I guess that's what happens when the gravity of a family weighs so heavily on children.

Here's to remaining sane in the face of all those facts that threaten to hurl you into oblivion.

I'm seeing Rusko tonight in Philly, so a review of that will be coming soon.

Never Quite Free

This is how I'm staying so serene through packing up my room, writing papers, taking finals, saying goodbyes, leaving leaving leaving once again. I love this band, and you should too. The Mountain Goats will make you better at life. Just listen. Do it.

inner monologue -- 3 days from home. Breathe in, breathe out, don't forget to laugh.

Fire-Tender

The soft line of her mouth underscored my mornings,

the first creak of her step into my doorway enough

to jolt my mind from far away lands filled with lives
too lovely, too dangerous to consider when awake,

lest hope take hold. I imagined those rare night terrors
that flung her flying down the stairway were beautifully

freeing. Carefully constructed resolve broke in her sleep,
walls she never let fall, steely scaffolding splintering when

consciousness split layers. Winters, when electricity failed
in our converted-barn-house, as darkness seeped from corners

she slumped next to her pile of five before the fire, tending
to us all. She found ways to hide warmth in the worn and rough

wooden beams, storing laughter in jars on shelves among
the mousetraps. Her fingers splayed on my scalp, combing

the tangles from my mind. I never noticed the moment my
breathing slowed, until I drifted again on tides of dream-comfort.