STRANGERSONG

I'm writing poetry again and dreaming about Dante Alighieri.

(In my head, he has a certain someone's sovereign mouth, with an elegant gap and glassy dark eyes.)

Last Monday: I was waiting for the bus at four A.M. on my last morning in Pittsburgh. Streets were cold and mostly empty. Dawn's unlucky--full of dead starlight. Hannah and I were sitting in the bus shelter. Too early to speak but a goodbye was imminent so I tried to use our last minutes well. It's strange how a city is its own entity. The best thing about talking to Hannah is I never have to worry if I'm making sense. She understands the suggestions in things, she knows that ambiguities are seams. While being understood is not the same as making sense, I am comforted. I looked at the sleeping buildings in which a few scattered windows were still lit. My mind scrambled to make a pattern out of the randomness, a constellation or key. None came. It's strange how you can think you know a city, and even come to think you own it somehow. I've only been here a week but now Pittsburgh's something else. Before it was just a name. Now it's a place I went once, when I was eighteen, to see a friend and it was cold. . .

There was almost no one on the airport bus. It made me feel like a nighthawk. How silent and spare is the city bus at Four in the Pittsburgh A.M. How sad and rare. I toyed with the idea of living the rest of my life in verse. The ways in which an old, romantic form could rearrange my modern heart. Something an ex-lover once said about form poems: that they were closest to real life, that you can only work inside the constraints you're given. That despite our best efforts, no one gets to live in free verse.

Still deliberating on whether or not a poem is a livable space. If there is light and corners and blankets to stay warm. There's a wooden house in Pittsburgh that is graffitied with Chinese poetry. Known simply as "House Poem." So maybe. Just maybe....Still wondering about my professor's offhand comment that fact and fiction come from the same etymological root, which does not denote real/unreal but merely "a construction." A Factory.

While on the bus, I thought about the night that C told me I was a passenger in my own life. That's been weighing heavily on me ever since. Sitting on a quiet bus in a gray town, I wondered if it could be true. I'm almost positive it's not, but I can see where he'd get that idea. I guess I can forgive him for it. The truth is I like being a stranger to things.

Lathe biōsas.

Camus to You, too.

I just finished Albert Camus' The Stranger and I was a little underwhelmed. So it goes. I liked it fine. It's just that I like my absurdity to have more of a kick to it. If there were an absurdity calculator with DADA being ten and instructional manuals being zero, I'd figure that this story would land a five-and-a-half.

Then again I guess the book was no more or less absurd than, you know, existence.

Let's take a look at the last twenty-four hours of my life:

1. sleeping most of the day.

2. waking up, finishing The Stranger, and returning to sleep.

3. At least 146 worshippers dying in a stampede at Naina Devi temple as they trek to show reverence.

4. watching Boogie Nights for the first time...with my aunt.

5. scavenging the internet for T. Rex downloads for the better part of three hours.

6. Both of my best friends leaving for the beach without me. sigh.

7. new species of dinosaur fossil discovered, dubbed THE DRAGON.

8. tomatoes&steak for dinner.

9. talking to two different childhood friends for the first time in years.

10. Dirk Diggler's penis.

11. getting a text message from the Jonas Brothers.

12. worrying about college.

13. rediscovering my youth via BALLOON-A-ROONIES.

14. getting invited to an aVODKAlypse party celebrating the SUPERCOLLIDER.

15. lightning strikes 91 people in Norway.

16. dreaming of nothing-again-nothing.

There it is. Real life is at least as, if not more absurd than a Camus novel.

[LE BATEAU IVRE]

I go out in the later parts of the night, the earlier parts of morning, when even a common streetlamp is enough to make me sick with my own romantic yearnings. I keep reading Rimbaud and projecting his face onto the young men I meet. I dream through my first impressions, whispering, Do you sleep? Are you exiled in these bottomless nights?



















Strange turn of strangers. Went with Lorrie to an apartment full of people I didn't know. Every face abuzz with drunken pink light. Of course I didn't say much of anything to anyone. I swear to god I'm socially inept.

So Lorrie suggested I graph the people there?

















There was a guy named Dan who wanted to read my journal. Although he introduced himself with a fake name for whatever reason. Hunter. He talked about haikus but I was less-than-committed to the conversation. I'm sure I was preoccupied with something stupid. Like the way the radio tower looked like a vertebral column.

Never have I ever. The moon looked like something Garcia Lorca would note.

And every night it's my body flying across the bridge, over the waters, moths and shadows. I close my eyes I get a headache I think: Me. Finally the daughter of something.