Life on Queen Street

A choice between sleep, coffee and food (and exercise)
Sleep was chosen
A mistake
It seems
All things lost in seeming, sleepy eyes and empty brains
Retreat to instinct
Stagger
Roam unto the 7-11
Manna in a travel mug
Chemical clarity

The bean is a lie

When your first reaction to an otherwise perfectly sweet story is "dude, you just got a puppy - you are so not spending the rest of the day in bed snogging your gf" are you a) officially old or b) someone who knows too much about dogs or c) no fun at all?

I met the Fellowship of the Bean at Sbux (it was a meeting of the complete set, too - whoo) and I wrote poetry. I wrote a lot of poetry - three new poems today alone. Finished them today, anyway. They and two of their friends are off to the class anthology, one other is being held back to send to the Poetry Review of Ireland: more because I believe my collection of rejection slips needs to start somewhere than I think it's something someone would publish. Then again, I'm still shocked that serious people take my poetry seriously, so maybe they'll love it.

Meanwhile, today's Bunny Comic is awesome.

And because I actually worked today, I get to play! God, it's been so long since I've done this, I've forgotten how you format these things... (and I have "Space Oddity" on my iPod? Huh).

Title: Watershed (1/2)
Rating: PG (harsh language, implied violence)
Spoilers: The Terminator
Characters: Sarah Connor
Summary: There's a moment when the future becomes real and it's not pleasant.
Author's notes: When bored, I play with narrative voice. If you don't like stories in the 2nd person, this is not the fic for you.

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( You’re nervous when you arrive for your ultrasound )

Linkspam from around the Intartoobz:

You are all Jet Li's bitches.

Sarah Jane Adventures better than Torchwood? I'm a big fan of Torchwood's first season and I'm liking the second large. The ep of the Sarah Jane Adventures that I've seen was cool but not great so it's hard for me to judge relative merits. But, as The Evening Herald opined yesterday, I can't help but wondering if some of the "Torchwood is crap" sentiment springs from resistance to a show which is headlined by an openly gay man who is not camp and a career woman who is not girly.

Positive review of Teeth - kind of interested in this movie except for the gore and spurting blood bits. I saw Black Sheep in November and that overdrew my personal gory movie bank for the next year, I think.

From cleolinda, In the midst of the Heath Ledger media insanity, Star Jones stands out as a voice of reason. Yeah, I'm kind of shocked, too.

Also from Cleo: Warren Ellis is a douchebag (additional commentary in, appropriately, comments): ( exerpt )
Yo, Ellis - your enfant terrible/Intertoobz iconoclast routine is tired. Also, when making the decision to be a scold, always doublecheck that you aren't merely being an asshole and that the target of your ill-advised ire actually deserves it. That said, way to burn bridges, man. Also, you and John Gibson in the same boat? Nice. Very nice.

While I'm on the subject (of suicides real and alleged), I'm reading Birthday Letters, Ted Hughes' book of poetry about his life with Sylvia Plath. I find it the most astonishing love poetry but others in my class think it was a mercenary attempt to cash in on his relationship with Plath, which I think is bullshit - if you're going to 'cash in' why wait 35 years? My tutor probably has it closest to right when he said that this was Hughes' attempt to have the last word on an issue that had dogged his career. Birthday Letters was published in January of 1998, Hughes died of a heart attack while undergoing treatment for Colon Cancer in October of that year.

I wondered at the difference in attitude between myself and my disapproving classmate. She is older by 30 years, I would say, than me and though she may herself have been divorced, I understand that her parents' did not. But I look at the friends I went to high school with, all in our mid-30s now (when did I get so old), and see that, of our parents, half divorced during our childhood. To live through that experience gives me a different perspective on Hughes' silence on his first famous marriage while assholes engorged on their own self-important sense of outrage were chiseling the Hughes name off his wife's headstone, a name she shared with her children. I think refraining from commenting was neither uncaring nor an admission of guilt but a deliberate decision not to defame the memory of his children's mother or give fuel to scandal by engaging in a public debate. A divorce is not the same as the death of a parent but it still represents the end of a family and I've seen the wounds left on children by parents who allow their own sense of hurt and outrage outstrip their concern for their children. So while only those involved know the truth of it, I choose to respect Hughes for his discretion.

As I say, the poetry itself is astonishing, although I've been told it is not Hughes' best work. But I find it striking and rich with both passion and regret:

From "St. Boltoph's"

First sight. First snapshot isolated
Unalterable, stille din the camera's glare.
Taller
Than ever you were again.


From "Chaucer"

"Whan that Aprille with his showres soote
That drought of March hath perced to the roote..."
At the top of your voice, where you swayed on a the topf os a stile,
Your arms raised- somewhat for balance, somewhat
To hold the reigns of the straining attention
Of your imagined audience - you declaimed Chaucer
To a field of cows.


From "The Blue Flannel Suit"

You waited
Knowing yourself helpless in the tweezers
Of the life that judged you, and I saw
The flayed nerve, the unhealable face-wound
Which was all you had for courage.
I saw that what gripped you, as you sipped,
Were terrors that had killed you once already.
Now, I see, I saw, sitting, the lonely
Girl who was going to die.