My whole life has been a collection of half-forgotten endeavors.
A half-dozen stand upright and proud on my bookshelf
Many more in the little box on my desk filled with the beginnings of stories I never wrote
Schoolwork I never finished

Outside the window, he walks by, firm-breasted girl on his arm
Because I only loved half and not all of him.
Behind him, a gaggle of girls living amongst themselves,
Laughing and crying into each others arms,
Myself not a part of them because I was too timid, unopened, unliving

I lie on the floor of my room because I am too lazy to sleep in a bed.
Staring at the ceiling shrouded in darkness,
I wonder how much longer this half will sustain me.

Boredom is easy to relieve so as long as it is done with a book.
There is a book of anonymous poems on my shelf that I never opened.
She is a
wilting flower because she shuns the light of the sun.
Sun-baked earth because she rejected the rains
Unburied because she refused to rest in piece

And yet she laments her suffering,
refusing to acknowledge her own short-comings.
She cannot weep, love, cry, exist, be, anything at all,
She can do nothing because she doesn't want to live though she has everything.

Providence works in clever ways.

The Doubter's Prayer

This is my prayer and my offering before you.
Not the words oft mumbled by dwindling lips,
Not the scriptures, hallowed by the pens of scribes,
Not the sacrifices made by ancient hands.
No, this is all I can give
My half-believed god,
Somewhere between father
And the monster under my bed.
(To speak the words would be to look you in the eye.)

Now, past the disclaimers,
Tired admissions of my inability,
I pray.
Lord of my semi-belief,
God of my forefathers,
In my improbable and wavering faith,
Grant me clarity.
Give us peace.

Thank you.



(I love you.)


Came up with it during prayers the other day.
It's missing something.

I was reminded a little of Glatstein's "My Brother Refugee":
"The God of my unbelief is magnificent,
how I love my unhappy God,
now that he's human and unjust."
Look, Abbie! A post!

This is the first installment of a novel I'm worrking on

He curls at the base of a tree, pulling closer into himself, hugging his knees. He wanted to stay like that forever, a bundle of frozen flesh and blood and cloth, immortalized forever in the snow drift mounding all about him. In due course, it dawns on him that he must get up, or he will die, and as much as he hates himself, he does not want to die. Slowly, he manages to rise to his feet, cracked and bleeding as they are, steady himself against the tree. He glances about, trudges towards the frozen road that is partially obscured by the snowdrifts, realizes that he can’t remember which direction he came from.

The snowstorm picks up about him, shrouding his form in curtains of lace. He looks despairingly at the heavens, knowing that he will die. He will die. Providence will bless him at last. The joy of that certainity fills every fiber of his being except his heart, and he wonders why it won’t. It’s want he wants, isn’t it? There is nothing left for him anymore, so why try to live? What is wrong with death?

The wind blows away some light snow and leaves a scarlet patch on the road, barely visible because of the snow, attracts his attention and an unwanted flood of memories rushes at him: his screams when he woke up in the barracks and saw that his closest friend had died in the bunk below him, the lice in his hair, the feel of his flesh stretched tight over his ribs, the endless hunger and fatigue, the heartache that carried him out of Jockey Hollow and into the New Jersey countryside to die while his own blood marked his progress along the country road. Burning tears leak from his eyes and freeze halfway down his cheeks. Memories continue to wrack his heart: the blindness as he stumbled through the storm, his exhausted collapse against the tree, the return to the road where he is now, and the longing to die-

No. He will not die. As hard as it is for him, he will not die. Not while his brothers in arms are still back in camp. He will not sit back and watch while they fight and die for each other and for him. He will not be a coward. A sudden image of the Brits breaking down his door, their bayonets through his sister’s chest as she is pinned to the wall, the release of unholy steal from her bosom, the thud of her body on the floor. No. He cannot let that happen. He will not sit by idly. He will fight.

He kneels down and begins to clear away snow with his hands, some more red. Now he must do this until her reaches Jockey Hollow. He reckons his distance to be half a mile and furiously clears away the snow as he follows his blood. The wind screams in his ears, biting away the warmth of his face and stinging his eyes. He reaches for a scarf at his neck, but he left it in camp, and the wind eats at him there as well. No matter, he will not freeze to death before he reaches the sentries.

It takes him all of the afternoon to reach the American sentries, who spot him crawling toward them through the drifts on his hands and knees. A slight trail of blood behind him.

Immediately they run towards him and lift him up by his arms, half-dragging him past the camp’s fortifications and to the nearest barrack. The door is kicked open and they pull him inside, lift his body and lay it on one of the bunks. He is barely breathing, a small steam issuing forth from his mouth. A sharp pain in his feet and he screams everything he can, all of his pain and misery and shame and love and hate and want and hunger and thirst and anguish, all of it. Again and again, he screams, his body writhing in pain, his emotions carrying him out of the barrack and into the room where his dead friend lies, cold. A rough hand pressed on his mouth, more hands restraining his body. Automatically, he calms, but he is overwhelmed by everything that has happened to him, and so he gladly lets his vision swiftly darken, an empty void where nothing can touch him, not even pain…

Oy

Blogs tend to become whistles in the dark. Malka's prophetic statement that our blog was becoming a bloth seems to be fulfilling itself, so I am making one final plea that the BIMA writers post on this blog. My offer to match each posts with twenty of my own still stands. Unless anyone responds to this plea, this is to be my final post until July, when a new blog is created.

HA!

I take it back. Writers never give up. Please, post something, though. Then I won't feel silly when the people who regulate the blog universe come and read my cries for help and laugh themselves silly.

Capitulation

I give up. I'm not going to spend every day working on this blog.

Renewal of an Earlier Proposition and a poem about anorexia

I stated before in an earlier call to arms that for every post that was someone else's work, I would match that post with five of my own. I am bringing the number up to twenty.
---------------

Hands alighting on a drop of water
Ashes whipped up by the sand and the rain
Craving the emptiness only for wonder
Reaching something, sustenance a curse

Swallowing what is left inside my hollow
Bringing up meals to please only God
Are not the shallow men looking for starving birds
Bones shatter skin in their effort to stretch in taught

Floating in clouds of gold and silver light
Rock hard remembrances of bounties now past
Choosing to die such a slow death of loving me
Suddenly seeing one flitting away 'fore my eyes

Chasing it, following red and blue strips of paints
Seeing it flicker, a dark, sudden gasp
Reeling over to clutch fatal emptiness
A shooting pain cloaks the basket

PLEAST POST!

I will not give up! Somehow I will persuade at least one of you to post something original, not just a comment. Somehow, I will not- and I know this is egotistical, but it is how I feel- be the only one keeping this blog alive. This electronic venture [the blog] shall not be in vain! It will be a success! Were those hours spent in the freezing classroom at Brandeis for nothing? Were our recitations at the festival-thing at the end mere trifles? Have the high-caliber poems and stories and thoughts posted on this blog been mere rubbish? No! This blog is the result of the hard work and effort of ten, dedicated writers. If you are willing to sustain the fire of the BIMA 2008 writers and to ensure that their memories shall not be forgotten, then, for the love of whatever gods of literature are out there, post something.

PLEASE POST!

PLEASE POST!

PLEASE POST!

PLEASE POST!

PLEASE POST!

Remember me

A Poem

Father Time departed this ancient earth,
So forgotten, as the centuries, ashamed, take wing.
Like waning heroes in the after-war
Like blind doves we give ear as our sorrow sings.

There is no place left for love in this bygone land.
Soot and ash settle where eagles once stood sentinel.
At the tarnished, silver gates mourn the widowers.
Among the charred, broken ashes of the homes lie their cries.

They had had no warning even as the sentinel was shot down.
As the raiders on horseback swept through with deadly grace.
They chortled at us rebel scum as we fled in vain,
And suddenly surrounded, we could not flee in time.

(If you are reading this, I have died. I beg for you to remember me, my brethren, and all those who died for the sake of liberty. If you read this message and ignore it, may Providence forgive you for your sin of forgetting those who died for your sake. Oh, and by the way, I was a Continental soldier. 2nd Massachusetts Regiment.

I wonder if people in the future who read this will understand why we remember at all. It seems like we only try to remember important matters, and what we don't deem as important might as well never have occurred because it will be forgotten. To forget is to deny, remember that, whoever you are who found my haversack. I buried it under the root of the tree near the meetinghouse because it has a necklace for my girl in it, and as the British were destroying our houses after Lexington, I did not want them to steal the necklace. I hope that Susanna is alive and well. If our child is alive, I apologize for his or her unfortunate fate of being born out of wedlock. However, if he or she should read this, then he or she should know that religion neither sanctifies nor permit their birth; Providence does. I believe in God, not the rules of the Puritan church, and this nation would do damned well to realize that the former is made of far greater stock, no offense to Puritanism. I practice it anyway.

I don't have much time before we march to the encampment around Boston.

So God bless you, whoever you are. I beg of you again to please remember us.)

- Jonathan Eleazar of the Woburn militia
April 19th, 1775, Massachusetts

News for Ayelet

I'm using your neologism "discarsting" in a novel I'm writing. I had already used filthy, disgusting, muck, mire, mud, soiled, and the lot in a single paragraph, so I decided that discarsting would work.

Originally, the confusing bits were spaced away from the first collumn, but damnable blog editing pushed them to the side.

And suddenly "!EERF" m'I
Thermosphere glass sphere?
Ionosphere as a bird
Mesosphere
Stratosphere
Ozone layer
Troposphere n
Humus
Topsoil
Eluviation layer
Subsoil
Regolith
Bedrock fearful of a fiery death in metallic hell
Regolith
Subsoil
Eluviation layer Goin’
Topsoil d
Humus o
Troposphere w able to breath easy
Ozone Layer I’m being rip qeb traqa
Stratosphere
Mesosphere
Ionosphere veils of color dancing, hitting a solid glass sphere
Thermosphere Choking beneath the
And suddenly I'm, "FREE!"