Friday, May 14, 2010

Memories, Nothing but Memories.


On the way down to Jersey yesterday night, I perused my computer's old files of poetry and photos of family and my early years in college at the Daily Nebraskan (forever my happiest memory). I'm amazed at the content of some of the files, not all of them poems, but late-night rants of me talking about religion in 2003 (noting, by the way, that I was looking into Judaism) or dreaming the ideal vision of Christmas morning that same year (happiness, a tree, family, snow). I have pictures of long-since-dead relatives, decked out in Victorian gowns, and yet another, still, of the grandmother I never knew playing around, wearing the army-issue hat of the grandfather I never knew. (I wish I knew where the photo was taken, what landmark sits in the background, or what exactly they were doing out on what appears to be a cool day.)

My computer, it seems, has become a hotbed of history and memory, and sometimes it's just hard to swallow. Some of it, however, makes me wonder why I got so old, so young. My poetry precedes me, in all things. I'm not sure why I stopped writing, but it happened when I moved to Connecticut. I have breakthrough spurts of emotion and lines, but they're fleeting. That poetry used to be my therapy, especially when I slammed, standing in front of a crowd made silent by rhymes of death, the Holocaust, and being Jewish, and hollering, hooting, over lines about my figure and the words "you could be the first fat miss America."

Here's something old, something from September 9, 2001. It's weird, because, well, two days later it happened. I'd never connected it before, actually, but sometimes, I see these things coming.


Apocolyptic Atmosphere

Someday
the stars
will fall from the sky
and land on your head
and the
moon will fall into your hands
and melt before your eyes
with star dust crawling across your skin
and fireflies and dragonflies will buzz beneath ur chin
all before the world comes crashing in.