Sour Grapes.

Up visiting from a charmless winter,
She gives a sound to me.
“Here,” she says. “Take it. It’s yours.”
It carries no weight,
And it does not move me.
It is a dull gray murmur
That makes me realize even more:

I should never have come here.

Where are your clothes?
She asks me,
calling me different names
All morning.

Why did you come here?
An implication
I am currently familiar with.
Sidled with a sad indifference and
A series of regrettable decisions that
Neither one of us were prepared to make
As children.

Why are you so quiet?
In the car
Driving home,
And it lingers there,
But only for a second.

We had to shout last night.
Remember?
We were dancing and then we kissed
In your sisters room
And -

Why are you so quiet?

Because.

I am looking straight ahead.
I am trying to see through
These low clouds
To better make sense
Of what it means
To get older
Everyday.

And still . . .

Something a lot of people don't know about Jimmy Carter is that he used to eat frogs. From the time he was 13 to when he was 19, he used to eat them as practice - should he ever get lost in some Georgia marsh and have nothing to eat. He cooked them over fires mostly, tried a few boiled, and once, when he was 17, he braved one raw. Just bit right into it's skull and gagged reflexively as soon as he heard that little "crunch" and "squish." At 20, Jimmy Carter ("Crazy Jimbo" to his friends) soon realized that he would never possess the ineptitude that would allow for him to become lost in a Georgia marsh.

This story is entirely made up.

I sometimes think of God this way: a made up story about a man eating frogs in a Georgia marsh.

I can't put a band-aid where it needs to go.

I could sit around and keep trying to make sense of Ulysses

Or I could just learn everything I ever wanted to know from Bill Watterson.

Informally, adiue.

You were suddenmotion
Stopped. a still-gliding
Realism suspended, looking
Down and smiling. My own tongue's
Tentative steps across a tightrope, looking
Down,
Overly aware of infinity,
and tornadoes,
Of Allocution(s)
-pilingontopofoneanother-
Accidentally tripping hopelessly
over and over and over again,
Covered in salt and spit,
losing speed, but flooding,
spilling all over the world and asking:
What if you were supposed to be a second language?
"Je vous aime, aussi," You said,
And the world evaporated
into brilliant and small
Forgettable recollections;
always spinning,
always laughing,
Always.

And still–
You never lost your balance.

I lost my balance.
I fell.
I looked back and watched
As you got smaller and smaller
Until I couldn't even recognize you anymore.

You took a more convincing fall off that rope
(But don't think
I didn't see your legs shaking before.
Don't think I didn't see you
Lose your balance),

And while now,
Years later, you are trying again to walk across that string, I would very much like to close my eyes and forget
that I was
ever in a position
to look down at the world
and smile.

Why

I just tried to write a poem.
Fuck poems.

Significance

The sun exploded. It exploded with no hesitation. There was no forethought to it, certainly no afterthought, and absolutely no regard whatsoever for anything else in the solar system. There was a "Geeze, is it hot enough for ya?" shouted somewhere in the middle of a city, by a man of no significance, to no one in particular, and then the earth turned black like a marshmallow fallen into a campfire.

That morning, in a kitchen, just before being turned to cinders, Kelly Henderson held a frying pan under a stream of warm water in her sink to clean off the egg residue leftover from her breakfast. More than anything, Kelly wanted to learn how to salsa dance. She wanted to know what it felt like to move suggestively in public, to lead with her hips, to capture the attention of a room full of strangers. There was a flash and Kelly fried faster than her eggs.

Salsa dancing now exists nowhere in the universe because the sun exploded.

Elsewhere that day, Simon Sherman, a man who enjoyed the fact he had two first names, whistled along the sidewalk while he walked to get his morning coffee. In the midst of his stroll, he recited the only French phrase he knew to himself in his head. Je vous pense tout le temps, he thought, over and over, hopeful that he might catch a certain young lady's attention that day. There was a distinct sound, a pop, the same kind of noise a small bubble blown out of gum makes when it expands to quickly, a precipitous explosion of heat, and the girl (Eileen Anderson was her name) was no longer around (nor was anybody else for that matter) to find out how much he thought about her.

Because the sun exploded, French currently exists in only two other places in the universe.

A young girl named Lizzie woke up that morning with the vague notion that it was going to be an odd day. Having lost her grandmother to lung cancer earlier that month, Lizzie had formulated a shaky comprehension of the concept of death, though it was full of holes and abstractions. Before her Grandmother passed, she had pulled Lizzie tightly into her arms, squeezed her with what little strength she had left and whispered, "I'll miss you, my Lizzie. But don't be sad. I've been so happy with my life."

Lizzie was under the impression that as long as you were happy, death was really nothing to worry about.

Walking into the kitchen, Lizzie discovered that her Father had woken up early to make her her favorite breakfast: French Toast. The little girl smiled and laughed and whirled and clapped her hands, and then there was a flash and then there was nothing.

It really wasn't anything to worry about.