backyard crowing ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ode My favorite lyric of the day: "True love could have been a contender." -The Pretender --------- I'm going to tell this diary that I am about to finally embark on my music paper. I have been avoiding it like the plague for the past few days, and I can't understand how I can let myself down like this. Get on it, bitch. YouTube is not life. I need the summer to be here already. I'm not looking forward to seeing my mother every day at all. I am eager to begin again. Here is a poem I transcribed from Ruth Ellen Kocher's collection, One Girl Babylon. Ode To the Woman Who, On the Day I Earned a Doctorate, Mistook Me For a Shoe Clerk I want to tell you I loved how your shoes flecked into an east coast diner's creamy Formica imagined them on my wide feet (yellow and crusted to my truck, to the bar, to my classroom, to my office, and yes, I imagined the thin slips of leather embarrass and thrill me as I walked the procession, gowned through long speeches by deans I had never known, I could have forgotten the head cap of my mortarboard, and beeswax. I could have forgotten your tap on my shoulder heavy on a sparse tree near the top of Saba Island, but I didn't. I did not tell you that you were mistaken, even after ten years of waking to the same black mole on my shoulder-- a student in my arms because the year had mugged her and left her bruised. volumes of Gertrude Stein replaced the stench of the toilets because government programs for us kids at risk, risked us. every brown face in that store name-tagged, your beautiful never to read this poem aloud in your home as Esperanza, will sift through your ears and fall into the forgotten spaces the chasms within your shins and fall to the hollow of each smooth does not need to hear them, not from your lips, because she peel an orange into the distance measured between love how it becomes her life, like the words of this poem, and how, 1:27 am - Wednesday, May. 09, 2007 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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