Artifice · and · Intelligence

Ahem. It's been six years now since I started this, and it's gotten rather stale and ill-fitting. Sooo....

I have a new livejournal. Please add it to your friends list if you would like to continue hearing about my sundry adventures. I would be much obliged. I will also have it fed into Facebook like this one, if that is your preferred method of snooping. Here it is.

http://mvoskan.livejournal.com/

I believe I will make the first post on my birthday. And if you don't know when that is, shame on you.

The news, to be brief: back on Martha's Vineyard. Not working quite yet. Rebuilding a bicycle. Cleaning up my wrecked house and getting Athena back on her diet. Poor thing couldn't get up the stairs today, my dad has made her so fat. I'm pissed off. Dad is still incorrigible, the rest of the family aloof and preoccupied, and it's raining. I've been trying to write since I got here to very little avail. I even spent three hours in bed this morning listening to Sigur Ros and napping and listening to the rain and writing... but it didn't amount to much. This needs to change. Or I need to just send out ten submissions a week to keep myself from feeling lazy. Yes, I think I'll do that.

Off to purchase more submission envelopes. Ta.

I am a straightbacked squarebuilt yelloweyed brave, and I can't look back.
It's going to take a warrior to get through this.

Seeing you stretched in the sun with your hair fanned out
bit like a diamondback to my achilles tendon.

I saw Big Bear in the pink moon.

I dreamed my room was a ship.
Weigh anchor.

Like when I spend the whole day asleep and then wear dark clothes (pants! shock!) and sit in the dark reading Camus and listening to Deftones all evening.

I'm in a creepy mood. The full moon is monday. My roast is tomorrow night.

Right now I can't even think past this hour. My yerba mate saturated brain won't allow it.

That's probably for the best. Tweak on, little crazy.

Oh dear and merciful gods.
Senioritis is a copout for those with little about which to worry.

Right now I am of one mind, like an ocean in which there is one very large beast.

I want to go home. I miss my dog and nice bicycles and the front yard hammock and the vegetable garden and my goldfish and my office and my kitchen. I love my home. But I don't want to go there if you're not there too.

You're hard to leave in a parking lot. Much more difficult to leave here.
It's easy to move away from college, I keep telling myself. As easy as cutting off my right arm and burying it in a mangrove swamp and listing home one-sided.

Easy.

Even if I cried a little reading Nathan's poem. And forgot a line in Zan's and had to start over.
Thank you, everyone, for the applause. It means so much, and it wouldn't be any fun at all without you. Seriously, you made it happen. The place was packed and I was proud. I love you all.

And riding seven miles to a party and back with dancing in between, priceless.

I want to read more poems. To sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world.

(Especially if it means I get to kiss you again.
You know who you are. And thank the gods you do.)
You're hard to leave in a parking lot.
I'm trying. You'll have your perfect sentence soon.

I have three papers to write for the rest of my undergraduate career. Three piddly papers. And every time I sit down to research or put things together, even just thinking about anything academic, my brain automatically presses itself shut like the mouth of a stubborn baby who won't eat its cheerios. And then it screams "what's the use?? if you haven't learned it yet, you're not going to!" and all I want to do is run off to a festival or a ship or take a train somewhere.

With exactly one month left, I feel like I'm just here for posterity now. Out of respect for technicalities. Or something.
Though I am giving a poetry reading tonight. That's something.
And on the 1st of April they're (friends and comrades) roasting me at my favourite bar. That's amusing too.

But I still look around my room and imagine how I'm going to pack everything. I look at my stack of empty copy-paper boxes and imagine them full and taped and the room an empty tiffany-blue capsule, like an advil gelcap, or a vacant robin's egg.

I'm ready to leave here. I'm ready to ride my bike to my awesome job and try to forget that I've fallen in love and that I should be going to graduate school.

Limbo.

And ask her to lend you five hundred dollars. I hate asking for money. I haven't asked either of my parents for money since I came to college, but I needed to ask for help. More importantly, I need to learn to ask for help when I need it more often.

I was freaking out, but she helped me calm down. Moms are good for that. She also told me that she'd brought Marciana's two bikes (Willy Mason's old Cannondale and her own happy little blue Free Spirit) to the Island on her last visit and put them into my shed. Without my having told her I'd been riding again. Psychic moms are often difficult. But sometimes they are awesome. She is also bringing the Crestview down for me, in addition. I'm so riding the ten miles to work in Chilmark when I get home. I bet my leg could do it if I took my time and all my supplements.

Been casting around on Stephy's Schwinn like crazy for the last two days. It's curious to me that I'm still learning where all the little streets go. I like riding around in the pretty parts of town and pretending I'm just on vacation here. I'm hoping it will make it easier to leave.

As I told my mother, I don't want to live here. I wish I did, but I definitely don't. There are just a few things that will be very hard to leave behind.

(So if you read this, and you really want to expatriate...
come home with me?)

Airfare is ridiculous right now. So I researched my dad's crazy plan of Amtraking it, and I'm rather fond of the notion now. It's half the price of a plane ticket, it'll be an adventure, and I can see some more of this coastline I've been flying over four times a year.

As Stephy pointed out, it's an appropriately Henry Flagler-esque way to end my college career. Much more romantic to clack away waving than to crawl into a bullet and get shot into the sky again. And a twenty-four-hour train ride with my father? Talk about material. If I didn't write a novella about it I would be stupid. Or maybe the beginning of another book...

Some lives are so much more beautiful than others. Beautifully lived.
AMAZING weekend. Really great to see the Lobby Girls and of course Cameron, photos (and one really -painful- video) forthcoming.

I really can't describe how that place makes me feel.
Except that it makes me want to sing dirty songs and fall off of horses for a living.
And knowing me like I do, that's probably just what will happen.
I'm okay with that.

I have the greatest friends on earth.

P.S. I can hammer a nail into my face now. Galvanized sneezes, woo blockhead! Up next: eating fire, perhaps?

I just don't know what I want
...is what I've been telling myself
but I think
moreover
I know exactly what I want:
everything.
And I probably can't have it.
And I don't want to leave this behind.
And sometimes life is so incredibly
and profoundly sad.

i feel like i have to be perfect tomorrow and i kind of hate it when i get this way. and damn it, i even went to a new group tonight-- which was awesome and helpful in a lot of ways, but i still got home and had to give myself a haircut and scrub my face so hard it hurt and shave and tweeze and moisturize etcetera.

i don't really think it's feeling like i need to be perfect.
i think i just want to be pretty tomorrow.
and i might be a little nervous.
and maybe it's just fun sometimes to pretend pretty.
yeah, it's fun to pretend.

no, i am happy today.
it's just frustrating to not really know whether i am or not sometimes.
i've got so much going on in my little birdcage-ribcage that it's hard to identify
and discern the light from the dark.

but i must have been happy
because i gave a great presentation
and got a 100% on my exam and a little note from Darien,
and i lied out in the sun and got grass in my hair
and made jokes that everyone laughed at
and felt kind of famous for no reason at all,
just extroverted and interesting and engaging and charismatic--
at least i felt that way.

now i'm not sure how i feel. but my hair is happy and my skin is happy and the inside of me feels like it's about to be, about to be extremely happy, but i haven't let the levees go yet, because i'm still holding on to stupid doubt and reservations and just the smallest shred of fear.

i'm just full of too much. and filling up with more.

...and the full moon is on the third of march--- AND a total lunar eclipse... arrrrooooo... mothers lock up your sons.

Nothing quite cheers one's dreams
like getting charming drunken facebook messages
in the wee hours of almost-asleep--
or puts a little squee in one's morning pajama-time
in the office like
exciting acrobat news.

Word.

you know how you make little movies in your head
daydream cinematography
imagining how something you really care about
would most ideally work out?

and every time you try to play one of your
daydream reels
they burn through on the projector
and the movie is ruined?

well imagine how you would feel
if the most important movie you've made
that you can remember--
the one that took the longest to make--
the one that cripples you whenever you think about
how it will probably just be destroyed like the rest--
so you've never had the courage to put the reel on the projector--

imagine how you would feel
if it actually
played.

(will probably be the title of my chapbook i'm almost finished with)

well guys, that's it, all the cards are on the table.
forty valentines, every card.
he knows how i feel.
right there in red ink.
and you know what?

i'm awesome.

and i kissed my bartender last night
just because i wanted to.

i made my lovely bartender a valentine
out of the pretty labels
of all my favourite beers
cut into little shiny hearts.

i gave it to him today because he needed cheering up
and so did i.
it worked.

when he met me at the other bar
later on
he gave me a rose
the yellow kind with the pink edges
and i carried it around all night
like a trophy
even though it meant much more.

he's beautiful.
i wish him well.
i'm glad i made him smile
again
and this time for a reason i could discern.