Wet Feet

nose in the pages

once upon a time, i used to digest several books a week. good books, bad books, everthing from r.l. stine to jane austen. i had a rating system, 10 being something so trashy i could barely cop to reading it (v.c. andrews, anyone?) and 1 being so culturally relevant and groundbreaking and Important as to make it almost indigestible without intellectual Tums in the form of a snotty literature professor.

i miss that total immersion into imaginary worlds. i miss the spark it triggered in me to create my own worlds, or at least to chronicle the worlds that i spend most of my waking life thinking about (you know, the worlds that aren't this one).

a few weeks ago i borrowed "rapture of canaan", which is about a 5 on the junk-o-meter. given that i'm out of practice (i haven't read a work of fiction from start to finish since the last harry potter book came out) i expected to lose interest or fall asleep quickly, thus breaking the stride and adding the book to that pile of books i'm going to get around to reading. which isn't so much a physical pile but a vague list of lost books in my head.

imagine my surprise when i tore through it in a few hours. like i'd never taken years' hiatus from reading. it felt great, like the first warm spring day after a long cold winter. my neglected neurons stretched their dendrites in the sun.

so today i'm wandering around the bookstore drinking my coffee with miriam pacified in the stroller with a soft pretzel, and i decide to buy the first book that catches my eye. the junkier the better.

the cover of "darkly dreaming dexter" has the black/white/red color combination that reminds me of my childhood bedroom,  the name "dexter" when we briefly considered for naomi if she was a boy, and something corpse-like. so i pick it up. and actually purchase it (that might be the most shocking thing of all).

i made my way home navigating a city sidewalk, simultaneously steering the stroller one handed and reading the gruesome details of a serial killer's nights.

this is the life ;)

at the end there's a poem.

I wrote this poem a couple of weeks ago, and was too bothered by the last two lines to post it anywhere. But Jul helped me see a new way to arrange the words, and even though it's still not quite right, it's much better than it was. The subject matter is more appropriate for the secret blog, but since it doesn't mention anyone is particular I'm posting it here. skip to the end of the post to read it.

Did I tell you I was doing nanowrimo again this year? I told myspace. Anyway, again, it got really depressing really quickly. I have a hard time being both dark and funny. I need to be dark, because one of the reasons I write is to exorcise the dark matter from my concisousness. But if I write directly from that place of naked fear, if I write directly about the things I'm most afraid of, it's all I can think about, and I lose my sense of humor. So, I was thinking I could never be a ficiton writer because I can't do that to myself, I can't live that way for months at a time while I work on a story.

So I threw five couples into a potluck dinner party. And I'm finding my darkness coming out despite the light subject matter. By the end of the dinner party, these people who looked like stable, normal people, tunr out to be a bunch of degenerates and assholes who don't really like each other and aren't very likable themselves. there's one character who I love who is the trigger for the whole thing. At the beginning of the story everyone feels sorry for her, but you learn by the end that she's probably the smartest most likable one in the room. The only problem is that it's national novel wirting month, not nation short story writing month, and a novel, this ain't.

Anyway! Here's the poem.

Touched

A thumb

Drawing down

Stretchy lace

From milky hip.

A tongue

Sliding down

Tender lobe

To sweaty crease.

A hand

Penetrates

Beating heart

Through heaving chest.