I Want a Hot Air Balloon.

I think this is a reasonable request. If you all chip in approximately $5, give or take, you could get me one for my upcoming birthday. We could float over the world like some improbable delicious pastry.

I Could Never Care Enough

Sex and love and death. Millions (billions?) of years of evolution have taught me to be selfish, to live and procreate and want want want. A slow kiss full of meaning and longing. I want what I want and I don't want what I need. A sausage McMuffin. I spend my life surviving, doing what comes naturally and feeling bad about it. I shouldn't, you shouldn't, we shouldn't. A moment, a waste, a pile of clean, unfolded laundry. There are things we will never be (skinny kind moral self-disciplined committed meek subtle giving funny honest satisfied awake pleasant likeable generous faithful superhuman), and in the end maybe death is a small blessing, finally we are just a memory in the mind of someone we loved, which is something, then finally, finally we are free to just be nothing.

Morning

Before the first kiss, before the days and the nights of togetherness I was alone, and on a trip to London visiting a friend. I remember thinking of him always, calling him with a calling card and buying new clothes there that I thought he might like to see me in, clothes that could quite possibly change his mind. One night we went to the theatre and a boy there showed interest in me. It seemed like a good way to get even with the him at home for not loving me yet, so the boy and I went to a pub. Wasted drunk we walked through London at 2am, through streets unfamiliar and dark and then finally a park where the boy thought it would be brilliant to take off his clothes. I kept walking and thinking of one who would never do something like that to me, lost and loving him and wishing he loved me. I was 20, young and alone with a vague excited feeling to be on an adventure, the true notions of the evils that could have befallen me hovering somewhere just outside of my consciousness. I walked and walked some more, the tube stations were closed when it made perfect sense to me that they would run all night. I stopped at an internet cafe and emailed him a poem that I didn't write, but pretended I did. Even now at times when I am alone the last line echoes back to me, true and pleading with a clarity in its desperation - 'If there is a place further from me, I beg you, do not go."

A Paradise Island in Outer Space

A tiny ant crawled by my big toe. I gathered him on to my finger and said, "Hello tiny ant. Take a rest from all of your tireless searching and enjoy." I don't know if he did; ants don't really sit still for very long. I named him Geronimo and after a while sent him on his quest for food crumblets once again. Later I dreamed of Geronimo in his cozy little ant burrow, wishing for the soft expanse of my skin and wondering if he could ever be satisfied again with his dry, dusty home.

I Go Walken, After Midnight.

I was a classical cultures minor in college. I had a professor who looked and acted like Christopher Walken, if Christopher Walken had done a SNL skit about an eccentric classics professor. It was uncanny. Once, in a paper, I used the word "simplistic" when what I really meant was "simple." He got kind of shitty about it. I felt as though I had truly failed, here I was, arguably the smartest person in the class, and I had used the wrong word. I never made it up to him, and even now I look back with regret that I wasn't more careful.

Everything in it's Right Place.

All the living things are singing. I wish I could be a child again and dance in this rain that falls like pure goodness on us all. My one cricket is not chirping tonight and I like to imagine that he is damp and happy somewhere, drinking up the water that has come from nowhere, his little cricket belly fat and full. I am grateful for my cricket friend, for breath, for memory, for the past and the future. I am grateful that life is worth it, everything is alive now for this moment, everything around me will someday die, but right now, it is everything.

Tell Me Love, Where Do We Go?

It's the end of spring, and the grass is dying. The yard is straw pushing up fruitlessly through dusty soil. Weeds thrive and bloom. A flock of tiny birds are hopping around in the dryness, cocking their wee heads. They are happy, like me. I don't know what they're searching for when they poke their mini-beaks into the deadness, or what they would find. Maybe they're doing a raindance. Their little drums beat in a rhythm too soft for me to hear. The grass should be at its bright greenest, the rain has failed it. But it lives, the green life hiding somewhere, sleeping until at last a burst of fresh water falls on a warm and windy night. It will come, grass, don't give up. Sleep and wait, rustle in the hot breeze and feel the lively birds on your withered heads. It will come.

To Be Alone

The porch with a foggy night-time air. 11:51pm. My cricket friend sending out his loudest mating call, the same as last night but from a slightly different location. How can his hairy little cricket legs be so loud. It is nearly deafening but I like it. Scooters, walkers, babies wide awake in their strollers with mom swearing into a cell-phone. The night. A cigarette, a thought I don't want to think, a thought I can't stop thinking. A book about sex, a story about love, a poem I write in my head. Do you ever. Could you. I did once. I could again. The questions don't stop and the answers like being coy. To be alone with myself and a one cricket chirping.

The Sweetness of an Unsyruped Pancake

A spicy orange
A burning bottle of pinot noir
The copper I smell in your blood
like a penny

The Restorative Powers of Mountain Dew

I am going to kill whoever told me it was a really great idea to get mostly drunk on a Thursday night for no good reason. Working at a church means Friday morning is pretty busy, what with all of the bulletins and powerpoint slides and newsletters and things that no one cares about. So hungover is not a pretty thing to be right now. It's just good that the pastor never comes in on Friday, so I can walk in with a 32oz. Mountain Dew, a chocolate cake donut, and three Excedrin without having to worry that I still smell like wine/vodka/cigarettes. Being hungover also makes you a really horrible mom. Well maybe it doesn't make YOU one, but that's how it works for me. Driving to school this morning, E. was like, Mommy, mommy, mommy. B was saying ah-my instead of airplane! Hahahah Mommy! Ah-my! She was saying AH-MY! I said I just really...don't care.

OMG. I need an Arby's roast beef sandwich, pronto.

Tuesday night, at the Bible study.

It's easy to want to change, and hard to actually do it. I periodically get the feeling that I am a horrible person and I need to become not so horrible. I'm not sure if I'm right, but I haven't yet evolved. My house is still really dirty, I don't exercise or eat very healthily, I am a night-smoker, I don't do arts and crafts with my kids.

Once, when I still thought praying was a valid option, I prayed that God would just make me different. That all of the things I hated doing (see above list) would suddenly become like second nature to me. Or even first nature. Nature nature. Some people seem to want to clean their homes, some people are just skinny without trying, some people can spend countless hours just doing whatever their children want to do. It didn't work. Nothing ever happened.

It's just me. Maybe God didn't evolve me because he knew there would come a time when I would question his existence until there wasn't really a question anymore. It's kind of hard to think that if I want to change things about myself, there isn't anyone who is going to help me. But I don't really want to change, unless you want me to. Then I will think about it.

A Poem by Mark Strand

The Coming of Light

Even this late it happens:
the coming of love, the coming of light.
You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves,
stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows,
sending up warm bouquets of air.
Even this late the bones of the body shine
and tomorrow's dust flares into breath.