on killing darlings

Hemingway
who I officially hate
said
"write drunk; edit sober."

And I hate him again.

Stupid man.fights
Stupid boy.
Stupid. Stupid.

And then Faulkner
supposedly said something
about "kill
your
darlings."

No.  I will not.
I cherish every moment.  The sweaty
sick flu virus
the diapers
the

stupid bits.

Cooking macaroni & cheese
and hot dogs
and pudding.

Those things.
Do not make room for deep
poetry.
But are,
in them their they
very selves:  Poems.

On Being A Drag Queen, trapped in a woman's body

Watching the queens
on bravo
and remebering my childhood of drag queens
and YMCA
at the bar,

when my mama would bring me
coke with lots of cherries
and a man would show up in a black velvet pant suit
and a lot of hair
and shoes.  SHOES!

with eyeliner
and a lot of make up
and some tucked bits

I am inspired to go looking.
I google "green frog."
I google "gay bar"
I google "small southern Louisiana shrimping town where we lived
in the back room and I got picked on
because my mama
made some "choices" ......."

I get about five results.
Seriously.
Who gets five hits on google?

Who?
Oh, Ru Paul,
I adore you.  But.
You got some splainin' to do.

To Want

Jealousy curls up in my heart,
a cat in a warm blanket.

She makes herself comfortable,
stretches, laps cream
that doesn’t
belong
to her
with a rough tongue.

Purrs.  Her fur is silky.
Her claws are sharp.

KAW Oct 12

Observation

Monday
morning is regret.
A dropped favorite coffee cup,
a broken garden sculpture.
The pond inexplicably empty of water.
Cramps and headaches,
and remembrance of one last scotch.

Even the crows call
in the rainy gloom,
for some other day to
show its face.

Cold.  Pull the covers back
over your head, wait in the dark
for a friendlier day to smile at you.

Kaw Oct 12

Lessons

My daughter wants to learn
to play the piano.

It is a worthy goal; music is a path to many
wonderful places.

She doesn’t like to practice,
however.

She wrote the names of all the notes on her
keyboard, with a sharpie, on pieces of tape.

She wrote them wrong, and has been playing the notes
a little off.  E follows C which leads to A at the wrong moment.

At practice, after trying, and failing, to fix the error with
another sharpie, we resolved to tear away the tape.

The tape stuck tight.  Refused to budge.  My daughter gave up.
Left to play with the computer.  Said “You finish it.”

I think of the looks the piano teacher gives me,
her suspicions of my lacking parenting skills.

Like a mom trying to be good, I continued, doggedly, to pull at the
shredding scotch tape.  Little “plinks” and “hums” of electronic
keyboard answered my efforts.

It sounded like some frustrated improvisational Jazz.
Coltrane, but without the theory.  Or talent.

I thought about my own music lessons of many years ago.
How I hated to practice.  How I never really did it, but
was good enough to fake it.  To mix with more loyal musicians.  To have fun.
To be in the Symphony.  But always,
at the edge of being revealed:  fake.

Remembered Tchaikovsky.  The victory of the final swell of marching music.

Think about hating to practice anything.
Get the labels wrong.
Jazz.  That’s what it is.

KAW  Oct ‘12

On Loss.

I once wrote
a poem for a friend’s lost marriage,
the hot kisses of temptation that chased love away,
she, a small horse bolting from the herd.

And one for another
whose lover’s kiss of betrayal
landed her not one piece of silver,
not one memory of comfort.

There was another about my own young love
and what we held close
       dying in the summer, unnoticed.
This one was funny.  It made
people
exclaim
with surprise at its
final sentence of reversal.

I’ve written poems about sex, about death, about
sonogram pictures.  About tears
about rage about tiny
green lizards tasting
white flowers
and bee laden hummingbird feeders.

You know.  Innocence.  Experience.
That story.

There are too many about Goddesses.  Especially
the ones that taste red fruit, find it worthy of winter.

And so, trying to sit, and write about
the loss of a friend’s mother,
(too soon.)
Trying to find comforting words
something to soothe the tears, the need to push away
knowledge of being the root, now, no one else
above to shelter (us) from that last long breath.

Only the sky, and clouds, and a moon that is still there.

So.  Instead of something needful,
I find lost poems, like a little lint in an old coat pocket.  

KAW, 2012.

Perigee

Rising, golden through the trees: the moon.
A bride revealing herself slowly, shy, peeking.
We stand and
we stare. Like children,
we are moonstruck,
never having seen
something so magical before.


Remember that,
people still cry, fight, die, shun, include, live, breathe, exclude.

All these same old battles return to us again and again.
this never ends, this longing to know, to feel, to share.


The moon again reminds us that we are
only this,
small, we are only ending, finite.
And yet, we are always here.


We can see each other, sometimes, but not touch, not know.


And we envy the moon.


KAW may 12

Maia's story

Maia found out how to type a story into a word processor today. This is the story she then wrote:
The cat who is missing a tail.
A cat was missing a tail who wanted it back. Then it realized it was under a spell. So, it was going to be hard to get it back. And he went to get it back. He went and bumped into a forest that was on fire!
The cat backed up. He looked behind him. In a tree, he saw a knight’s clothes. The cat put the knight’s clothes on. The knights’ clothes fit! And the armor was strong enough to go through the fire. And the cat will not get hurt. And the cat can go right through, and went on.
Soon…The cat was so hot. And then, the cat saw a lot of water, and they were shapes! Two kinds of shapes! A triangle, and a circle. He ran to a circle. Then he jumped off very fast! The water turned to ice. Then he jumped to the triangle; the triangle did not turn to ice. Then he looked over he saw a enchanted forest. His tail must be there! The cat must get past the puddles! So the cat jumped only on the triangles. And then the cat was at the enchanted forest. And went off. He went by some bouncy mushrooms. Then the cat bumped into a giant mushroom. It had a mouth. It opened it. The mushroom was so big, the mushroom is going to eat the cat!
Will the cat get away? The cat ran for its life! The cat saw a knife. The cat ran to the knife! The cat gets the knife, throws the knife at the mushroom and kills it! And that was the guardian of the cat’s tail. The cat puts the tail on and when he opens his eyes the cat is home.
THE END.

Damn. I am totally impressed. She's not even 7!!

Dandelions

She brings me dandelions
every time she sees one.
The yellow ones,
especially.

This little girl,
this small goddess, small
star
her heart so large so kind.

She writes books which she
illustrates
herself.

She fights
back when someone is mean.
Meows like the fiercest cat you've ever met.
Extends claws that catch.

She shivers in her sleep
when she has a bad dream,
curls up like a bean next to me.

I want to pull out anything that scares her, but
know those things will make her even stronger.

Dandelions grow everywhere.
Lion's Teeth...
She brings them to me, and for that,
I can never, ever
be anything other than amazed.

KAW March 2012

Opinion time

We are going to paint our house, exterior. I'm going to post pictures and let you all vote on your favorite color scheme. :)

Here is what the house looks like now:

Ha ha. Just kidding. I wish! Below is actually my house, with lovely snow on it... not a good picture of the house, I know, but as good as I can find right now:

This is OPTION ONE, as close to my house as the virtual painter will let me get:

That's a chocolate brown, with swiss coffee trim & black shutters. (Lincoln cottage black, thank you very much.)








Now OPTION TWO is gray:

Same color trim, shutters & door.

What do you think? My house, now, is too blah beige. I hate the lack of contrast in colors, and we already have the shutters, so they will not be hard to add.

Seen, not heard

So, because of a conversation with a friend who is trying to find a church where she can take her kids & focus on the church, not parenting her kids constantly, I was thinking of the old phrase "children should be seen and not heard."

Honestly? What a load of crap. This phrase has got to be a holdout from the days when middle to upper class folks all had nannys or servants who took their noisy kids away, and they saw them only on special ocassions, dressed pretty and told to be good. When people had a relationship with their nanny and/or maid and/or whatever you called it that was like what people should have with their mom and dad.

We took Sean & Maia to church this Christmas eve. We haven't really been to church since they were babies because the last time we tried, Sean was completely wigged out by the giant pipe organ. Too loud, too many people, too much. So we had skipped that Easter service (about two years ago now) and gone to the Riverwalk instead.

So on Christmas eve, we tried. Sean got a laugh when he "hooray"ed the bell choir and thought that was awesome, so kept making the "hooray" noise, even when it was time to not. Dad had to take him away. They had a good time driving around looking at Christmas lights and chilling while Maia and I stayed at church.

You know me-- I have about three minutes of tolerance for people staring at my son when he makes noises. He cannot help it, and I see every little glance, every frowny face, every whisper of "if he were my kid I'd whip him." You can glance at me once or twice, and then, if he's still making noise, yeah, it's STILL US. Thanks a lot for playing. And then I lose all concentration on whatever it is I'm supposed to be enjoying and focus only on every noise we are making, every wiggle, etc. I honestly am trying, usually, to keep him calm & quiet. But people don't notice that, they simply notice that their movie is not in perfect silence. I honestly wonder, sometimes, what it sounds like in their houses. It must be really, really quiet for our little noises to bother them so freakin' much.

And it really pisses me off that it's usually old ladies giving me the evil eye the most. Seriously woman? You're trying to imply that your kids (if you had them) were always perfect angels, who never made any noise, and we are just so rude to impose upon your perfectly orderly life for thirty seconds. What a load of crap. If one happens to have a naturally chill, naturally quiet kiddo who likes to be still and quiet, then consider yourself the exception. Usually, they want to do something FUN. And sitting quietly in some uncomfortable place, listening to some guy rant about something that doesn't make sense to us is NOT fun. (Why is it, actually, that we adults think it's fun? Maybe we've all been brainwashed....)

We have kids in this world for a lot of reasons. But mostly, we want to express our love for each other, to see a reflection of our spouses, our families, our love of humanity. And people, I hate to break it to you, but KIDS ARE NOISY. They don't know "the rules" and they sometimes can not hold still for five minutes. It doesn't mean they deserve to be hit, or punished. It means that you, the adult who is supposed to be intelligent and educated, need to chill the furgh out and remember that you were a kid too, and you probably wiggled. You probably made noise. You probably laughed too loud and cried when you were sad. You probably got bored easily. You might have danced when you were happy about a special food or a special something.

We should, as a general rule, not expect kids to act like grown ups. We grow up too fast as it is. Enjoying life should be what we do.

No one should be "seen and not heard." Using our voice and expressing our likes and dislikes should be what we all do. Yes, polite society should learn that there is a time and place for quiet. Yes, we need to teach our kids to behave in public situations. But we should also cut parents (and each other) some freakin' slack when it doesn't work. We've all been there. I know when the doctor's "appointment" is thirty minutes + past what it was supposed to be I want to scream and yell and roll around on the floor, too.

Anyway. This isn't about me-- nothing in particular happened to inspire this rant, but I challenge us all to be heard, sometimes. Not just seen. Having a voice, having a will of our own, is an important lesson. And I'd rather have kids running amok in my house, turning it totally upside down, every single day of the week. And if I forget that lesson as my children grow older and quieter, I hope someone smacks me.