Sun-hot boiler room
Salespeople babble on phones
Blasting out cold calls
Here I clean records
While chaos seeps through headphones
Jangly Sebadoh
For seven long years
I've worked in telecom but
Can't transfer a call
In my database
I find an "Unknown, Jesus"
Works for Bulk TV
Our office empties
And bright falling orange sun
Turns El trains silver
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Handprints
I remember tracing photos in picturebooks
With pens as a young boy
Straining to capture the beauty in images
That had brought me so much joy
And destroying them in the process
Obscuring them with scribbled ink lines
I’d then run and complain to my mother
Who’d patiently listen to my whines
“If you mark something up, you have to live with it,”
She’d gently and calmly say
“Take care of the things you love
The marks won’t go away.”
I had to relearn this lesson with other things
Model planes and favorite magazines
I’d hold on to these things too tightly
And leave handprints on them
It seems
To love is to hold on lightly
Grabbing tightly comes from fear
That your happiness comes from that thing alone
You’ll destroy what you hold dear
Though also these things can leave marks on you
Like newsprint or PB&J fingers
Or patches of white plastic airplane glue
These soft reminders linger
So, too, do the scars left behind
By sharp things you didn’t want lost
Those marks don’t leave your body
The small but permanent cost
Of grabbing on far too tightly
And wrapping your hands around
Things that you don’t need that badly
These lessons are hard, I’ve found
I’ve spent much of my time re-learning them
With the trappings of an adult’s life
Like booze, and fair-weather friends
And a one-time future wife
I left handprints on her once
I’ll admit, though I’m not proud to say
Take care of the things you love
The marks won’t go away
It seems like this poem should end now
But handprints aren’t all of the story
In dreams and forgetting God heals
The Master creates all things, His glory
Is in the wholeness and fullness of life
We grab on to parts and forget
That they alone can’t satisfy
We moan their loss, and yet
We also grasp lightly, it’s true
With pictures and photographs, all art
Is an attempt to capture in a bottle
Images that have stirred our heart
Sun slanting across rusted rivets
Or shimmering through water on lake sand
Are we not children tracing images
That were made by the Master’s hand?
With pens as a young boy
Straining to capture the beauty in images
That had brought me so much joy
And destroying them in the process
Obscuring them with scribbled ink lines
I’d then run and complain to my mother
Who’d patiently listen to my whines
“If you mark something up, you have to live with it,”
She’d gently and calmly say
“Take care of the things you love
The marks won’t go away.”
I had to relearn this lesson with other things
Model planes and favorite magazines
I’d hold on to these things too tightly
And leave handprints on them
It seems
To love is to hold on lightly
Grabbing tightly comes from fear
That your happiness comes from that thing alone
You’ll destroy what you hold dear
Though also these things can leave marks on you
Like newsprint or PB&J fingers
Or patches of white plastic airplane glue
These soft reminders linger
So, too, do the scars left behind
By sharp things you didn’t want lost
Those marks don’t leave your body
The small but permanent cost
Of grabbing on far too tightly
And wrapping your hands around
Things that you don’t need that badly
These lessons are hard, I’ve found
I’ve spent much of my time re-learning them
With the trappings of an adult’s life
Like booze, and fair-weather friends
And a one-time future wife
I left handprints on her once
I’ll admit, though I’m not proud to say
Take care of the things you love
The marks won’t go away
It seems like this poem should end now
But handprints aren’t all of the story
In dreams and forgetting God heals
The Master creates all things, His glory
Is in the wholeness and fullness of life
We grab on to parts and forget
That they alone can’t satisfy
We moan their loss, and yet
We also grasp lightly, it’s true
With pictures and photographs, all art
Is an attempt to capture in a bottle
Images that have stirred our heart
Sun slanting across rusted rivets
Or shimmering through water on lake sand
Are we not children tracing images
That were made by the Master’s hand?
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Love and Vomit and Other Sickening Things...
So my friend's friend posted some art online from a gallery show of some sort, and I think it's actually pretty cool. (Plus I'm kinda lazy and want to post new things while not, you know, creating content.) So check out this link here for now, and I will try to kick it up a notch on my end.
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
The Publishing Odyssey Continues...
As the six of you who are following this blog may already know, I've been shopping a book manuscript for some time now. (Actually, it's not so much a manuscript as a magnum opus--the culmination of all my hopes and dreams and...well, you get the picture.)
Anyway, for a period of a couple months last year, I thought I'd finally arrived in the Promised Land--representation by a reputable agency. (Translation: An agency in New York, but not in a bad part of New York, and not in a broom closet; it's also important that they've actually worked with authors I've heard of BEFORE I did any research on the agency.)
Now that I've had no communication from them in over six months, I'm beginning to suspect that things aren't quite as good as I'd hoped, and that I may actually not have reliable representation. (Granted, I've heard that most of the publishing industry takes the whole summer off, and a sizeable Spring Break, and Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year's and all major Jewish holidays, so they may not have been ignoring me that whole time.) In fact, the situation's a wee bit depressing; I'm not quite suicidal, but I am kind of inclined to hole up in the coffee shops for another winter, hunched over my laptop like a cyber-age Gollum, polishing and polishing my manuscript and muttering "My Precious" over and over.
But I kinda need to, you know, get it out there. Summer is over, and Yom Kippur soon will be. Let the 2010 book shopping season commence!
Anyway, for a period of a couple months last year, I thought I'd finally arrived in the Promised Land--representation by a reputable agency. (Translation: An agency in New York, but not in a bad part of New York, and not in a broom closet; it's also important that they've actually worked with authors I've heard of BEFORE I did any research on the agency.)
Now that I've had no communication from them in over six months, I'm beginning to suspect that things aren't quite as good as I'd hoped, and that I may actually not have reliable representation. (Granted, I've heard that most of the publishing industry takes the whole summer off, and a sizeable Spring Break, and Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year's and all major Jewish holidays, so they may not have been ignoring me that whole time.) In fact, the situation's a wee bit depressing; I'm not quite suicidal, but I am kind of inclined to hole up in the coffee shops for another winter, hunched over my laptop like a cyber-age Gollum, polishing and polishing my manuscript and muttering "My Precious" over and over.
But I kinda need to, you know, get it out there. Summer is over, and Yom Kippur soon will be. Let the 2010 book shopping season commence!
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