Nostalgia #1

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I have trouble with nostalgia. But I also basically exist for it, at a certain level. I have problems with it. that last poem was about it too. I'm working through it. How do I write about it? dunno.

you can take this as an assignment if you like. apologies for any roughness.

Nostalgia #1

I’m looking at pictures of you
while I pick my outerwear apart
because I think about unlaced
boots plowing through rural
street snow, you pressed to my ear
like a can with different kind of cord
and I can’t get through
without laughing at nobody in
the middle of a field, praying
service lasts for another moment,
and you’re there, pressed against
my ear, hundreds of miles
of farmland compressed
like an advent accordion;
I dreamed of you going to get
pancakes on Christmas morning
on Christmas Eve, and stirring
your coffee with your wrist
angled that way, and the apparatus
is on the verge of seizing – but still,
trees and stockings, all yours - you sheared
them from everything else, and even
then there’s a loss that’s tooth- sized
dancing through my hydraulics
that leaves me sitting in my car
afraid of shit dissipating until I can’t
find a bit of you in gas station creamer,
can’t see you in tail-lights, can’t
feel you bumping in the white spots
on a filter skin, can’t hear you
dancing in front of eighteen-foot
windows, nailing love into a deflating
airbed with broken stemware, and I just
sit there, picking holes in my gloves,
my gut puckered in nothing,
looking at pictures of you.

Comments

  1. KateRoseDecember 8, 2010 at 12:45 PM

    This is somehow more raw, more blood and sacrifice, than a lot of your (lovely) more abstract work tends to be. I like it. I want more.

    ReplyDelete
  2. JonDecember 9, 2010 at 5:09 AM

    thanks kate! it's a little mushy sometimes I think, but i've been needing to unload lately, personally, so a lot of the stuff that may be appearing here is going to be so. not that that's any justification.

    I find that I'm good at vocalizing in writing deeper, more complicated hurts, but I'm terrible at simpler pain. So I'm working on that. also working on being a little looser, because my current "full-time" project is pretty constraining, which is good, but I need to ground somewhere.

    Thanks Kate. it's been so long since anyone commented on any of my stuff - this really made my morning.

    ReplyDelete

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