A mundane, slow-moving disaster movie

Sitting in the bar window, the sunlight
refracts through my pitcher of Switchback
shooting slivers of rainbows onto
the pages of my book.

The sunlight is so clear and warm,
it almost fools you into thinking
it’s a nice day outside.

My friend Mikey says that
windows in the wintertime
are not windows,
just projections of nice days.

I remember Februarys in Georgia:
difficult and cold,
frustrated by the deception of sunshine.
If I had only known that was just
the surface--
a veneer of winter
over a temperate climate.

This is why I'm not getting a Ph.D.

Going to see the Gilmores,
to see Yalies who get dressed up
in dresses & suits & brooches & ties
to have drinks with their friends
on a Friday night,
who pithily talk about intellectual matters.

I want to be clever, have witty conversations while half-drunk
about t.s. eliot and heidegger,

but there’s no room for me here,
no place for me to freak out,
to make perfectly valid comments, like--
What about the pope, huh?
only to get blank stares.
or yell--
No! no! that’s bullshit!--
flailing my hands about,
how i do when i’m myself
around people who know myself.

In my hobo-chic clothes
drinking musty red wine
and smoking spliffs on the sly,
I tell people that I work at a co-op in Vermont
and insist that Bridget Jones Diary 2: The Edge of Reason is a meta-text,
while white couples hold hands limply.

The lonely-hearts couplet

“You can’t play frisbee alone.”
“Get a fucking dog.”

Untitled

tired, hungover, hungry,
it was rainy outside
and i didn’t have my coffee yet

i go to look at the cover of the Times,
like every morning--
my heart crushed from the night before
again and again
drinking and making bad decisions--

i glance at the headlines
but the above-the-fold is dominated by a gigantic, full-color photo
of a brown pelican
covered in oil
flailing
struggling out of the water.

we are both so tiny
and so far from each other
and from anyone who can help.
but i will live.

a co-worker walks by, seeing my tears,
rubbing my shoulder,
understanding the sentiment
if not the severity of my reaction.

and all i want to do is drink the oil,
drink the damaged ocean
and die
for that pelican.
he is better than me,
better than the rest of us
combined.

and then i go to work.

This is why I hate New York/cities/corporations/life

I just bought
and drank
an iced coffee
from a fucking McDonald’s
without realizing it
because it was called
a fucking Cafe Metro.

a haiku, of sorts

you can't play frisbee alone.

Best Life Ever.

Best Life Ever.

We know everything was built to expire, so I guess we've done everything -- Modest Mouse, "We've Got Everything," We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank

Life is of nothing much and too much. - Nick Hornby

We all went to college and got degrees, some of us in things we like. Maybe actually love. (love)

And now we all work in grocery stores, in restaurants, in banks, in department stores. We never thought we would have jobs like this again. We are new people in a thousand new places at once. We are children with access to alcohol and technology and sometimes bigger vocabularies. We wonder if this is what failure feels like.

We wonder if it's all passing us by.

The alarm goes off in the morning and we want to cry. Getting out of bed seems the wrong way to start the day.

On Saturday nights, we stand in stores at 7pm, getting ready to do laundry, staring perplexed at the endless options of detergents.

We stand on porches at midnight in sweatpants drinking wine from a box and smoking cheap cigarettes. We think we are better than this. But we are wrong--no one is better than this.

We all hate our lives. But even this hate is laughable, a joke. We say 'hate' as easily as we say 'awesome', as often as we say we love inanimate objects. But never people. Loving people never seems worth the effort or the risk.

Why reason?

Drinking helps with life. What other people call hungover, we call morning. Our stomachs are stripped, our bodies are weak, our minds are leaky; money flies out pockets, to be consumed in mere seconds. Moments are all we have, and a moment with a drink is well-spent, happy or sad, in company or alone, remembered or forgotten.

We want to die before we get old. And why shouldn't we? We're bored already. We'll be happy when we're dead. We don't have the desire to care anymore. Cynicism and schadenfreude are our gifts. We are playfully pessimistic. We have absolutely no time for absolutes. We can only categorize by extremes, even as everything is grey. We are afraid of life. We always seem to want to be somewhere else. We want to just be where we are.

And so, everything is AWESOME. Whatever we are doing in the present moment: AWESOME. We could see this as the failure of exuberance, of exaggeration, of a loss of meaning of words. We could say it better, but whatever.

Do we repeat ourselves? So we repeat ourselves; We are infinite--We contain nothing.

But this flaw is also our one strength, our ultimate celebration of the present. Whatever we are doing is the worst or best thing that has ever happened, ever. This is how we talk. We live in a hypothetical space. We are catchphrase-making machines. We put blinders on the past; we refuse to look at the future. But the present is all we are guaranteed, all we are assured of.

So we look around and we realize we are the people we want to be: the young ones who sit in restaurants and don't eat and drink for hours and laugh really loud. We are awesome.

We will make it through this life. This day. This hour. This song. This cup of coffee. This cigarette. This drink. This morning. This night.

We ain't going nowhere. And somehow that is fine.

[submitted to burlybirdzine in March 2010. unpublished as of yet.]

Undeniably excited

and disproportionally happy:

http://common-line.com/2009/07/poetry-by-kara-brown.html

afternoon in Vermont

it's odd to feel the baking sun when the only heat is from the rays themselves and not the air around you. one small cloud could make it cold again.
But for the moment my skin was pink and warm.

untitled

6 aged
former creations
in the back
of your own
mind whispering
truths and
nonsense to
the rising tide

untitled

her body is not cut;
it is comfortable.
when they lay in bed
her smooth tummy contours
to his own wonderfully imperfect body,
not in submission, but
with welcome.

We were just kids

running through the jocular rain,
climbing a slow and creeping vine,
songs against my ears
eager and witty with hilarity
off-the-wall neon voice,
moving, making, massive
or in a place unknown.
space and time raging within
yawning, yearning, there for me
a present yearning of my soul,
a passing or a promise,
angles and lines are beautiful to me,
no dumbing, just funning,
escape--easy or true, i'm with you.

The Other Sunday

The phone never rings on
Sunday, silence and it's
all around, only the radio
playing, and all quiet
above the whispers
and the screams, and on the
refrigerator sits a message.

untitled

hi or hello?
what did you
say to me because
I can't remember--
I saw you walk
by but your
words missed me--
so what did you say, hi
or hello, or
was it even
me?

Epic silliness

Hickey-pokey, we ride along,
Under the purple tree,
Through the mountain and over the wood,
Comes the gallant three.

They watch, they wait, they listen,
And when they hear no sound,
They run, they shout, they bounce,
Because the square is round.

Never such a turquoise day,
Or such a polka sky
Will ever be seen by two or three,
As like the fuchsia hound.

As like the fuchsia hound, my son,
As like the fuchsia hound,
It moos, it gurgles, it holds its breath,
For a duck walks upon his sword.

This is the end of our adventurous ride,
Though the trolley finishes the way,
We hope you had a caucus time,
And never plant corn in May.

Firecracker

Bark and run,
sniff and scratch,
sleep and eat--
life for me--
clueless but loyal
and loving
jump and run
off

untitled

as the wood moves
in black and
brown on my pen--
swirls--
white smudge along
the table powdery and
flowing in and out of
a dot in creases;
it won't wipe off--
while gold leaps out
and tells
truths I didn't
dare to think be
cause they are
too reassuring.

An apathetic couplet

I could've said this better
but whatever.

love and lobsters

jesus came from heaven
to earth
on a suicide mission
to save our souls.

but who will save the lobsters
from being boiled alive
and gobbled down with butter?

With apologies to William Carlos Williams

Men in Suits

how much depends
upon

men in suits
yelling

exchanging make-believe
money

inside a shiny
building.