do napowrimo 2009 (a poem a day during April)

Twenty-two years later
I can only mostly forget you.
The things I don’t forget,
I may soon.

But now I can remember your little red Dodge,
and how things sped up
when your dad died and I was
the closest shoulder.
And recordstore smokes, listening to our cool.
Mixtapes. Notes on windshields.
Riding to the club in the bed of Doozer’s El Camino,
sodium streetlights dotting overhead.
You said they looked like shooting stars, but
I was just counting them.
I remember (sort of) me before I broke.
And fights about being high.
And the hazy outlines of a few fucks.
But mostly I remember waiting.
And not trusting.
And being trusted when I shouldn’t have.

And now, here, we talk again.
And we can’t even agree on our memories
about how things ended.
You say I left you.
I say we drifted apart.

You tell me all the things that you haven’t forgotten.
“Yeah, that was great,” I type.
And I nod an invisible IM nod,
knowing I don’t remember ever being all that good.

more participatory and inclusive

I don’t know if I’d call it a nickname.
Those who knew me didn’t call me that—
Only those who didn’t.
(It’s all I gave them.)

But the notnickname evolved a voice,
becoming a ‘he’ not me.
And that little fucker would leap
and sing
and do what I couldn’t.
Unbridled by the self-doubt of reality.

More conjoined twins’ battle for independence
than a case of symbiotic growth.
Twisting from spotlight to shadow.

So

he’s out.
Ex(or)cised.

I’m left, bettered and torn,
a quieter new song.

Centripetal whips in a fixed orbit.
It’s another case of what-almost-passes for feels-like-flying.
I sit, Swiss-swing taffied between
terra’s pull and the shove of my mechanical arc.
Spinning, eyes drying, I’m torn between
what I think I should be feeling
and beige pessimism.

I’m not flying or falling or in any danger of either.
My feet dangle, but press back
as the twist winds up.
I want to lift this useless lapchain,
scooch up, and stand on this bucket.
And at the apex,
be flung,
to soar, if only for a moment.

But. It starts and ends on the ground.
The middle is a respite with a proactive breeze.
The best part should be the view—
if only they didn’t build these things
in the middle of goddamn amusement parks.
Wait.
I think I can see my car.

I wonder at the upgazers too afraid to trust this rickety spindle.
Do they not want to fly?
Content with their lot?
Or do they already know all that this isn’t?

Because I started late, I didn’t get send out a request for 50 words for today’s poem prompt. Anyone have some words they can give me?

I’ll try to make up the three poems I missed.

Here’s a 30 minute dash at day 4’s paintchip poem.

Anonymous

To be named ‘anonymous’
is still to be named.
It is different from choosing to be unnamed.
Undiscovered.
To be truly anonymous,
one must become invisible.

The paint is gray, and so Anon. named—
to perhaps imply that all other flat, plain colors
deserve greater identity,
based on some shade bias,
or from the context of being things
that are not the things
that are neither black nor white.
(But so is green, not too.)

Gray wears anonymous
for when light fails to bend, all shades
fade to it.

Light is vision’s god,
and all manner of optical inverts
and per-/deception effects
refract white into colors,
and make far-away-smooth
distinct from the near-rough.
The wavelengths remain the same, ever,
as do the brain’s practiced acts
of infill and sequence.
It is the light that moves, giving less
to reflect upon.
Until only the shortest surf of color murmurs
against the funhouse mirror of the two-axis flip one inch in my head.
The difference is not one of vision,
but rather of interpretation.
As light dies, color creeps past
the misnamed anonymous
to the vanishing point.