Please pick the cobwebs off my woolen sweater.

Turns out, all I needed was "a little caffeine and perspective" because things are fine now. Actually, that's a lie. Things are not fine now. Things are not fine because there are still "FOR SALE" signs that could send me into a panic and life is still having its choices made by a flipping coin.


I could sit here and write about my thoughts on the beauty of tartmongers and "Trouble," but I think I'll just let you read a poem instead. Because I'm writing again, and that's a relief. I'm scared to share this, because no one reads my poetry, but now you are. Oh.

This Ain't Fiction, Folks

He asked me if I ever wrote fiction.

I said that I did because I thought

that I did. So it wasn't really a lie.

But the truth is that I'm afraid

of the devastating "Write What You Know" ideology.

So afraid, that my fiction

becomes mere fact.

It's all tainted with my insides and

the peanut shells in my pockets and

the cockroaches on the baseboards of the summer house.

My fiction is just the facts.

About how the toe-headed,

helplessly adorable

Methodist

likes my best friend better than me

because she's beautiful.

And a better poet than me.

My fiction is about how I spend my vacations:

seeing plays by British playwrights,

and eating Pad Thai,

while watching Swiss-German movies,

drinking American sodas.

Because this is America, my friends.

We are nothing more than a 

conglomeration of the rest of the universe.

This universal conglomeration

doesn't even have an official language.

But if it doesn't even have

an official language,

then why are people yelling from political pulpits

about if people cross our

magic-marker-ed borders, they ought to

learn our language? Bonjour?

If we don't even have a real-life language,

then why am I being yelled at,

in English,

to Write What I Know? Bonjour?

Sometimes, I get all worked up,

and I just have to pause.

And remind myself that talking

is really only singing, singing, singing.

It's just singing, singing, singing,

on the same note,

with a few syncopated accidentals

for punctuation (flat)

All I know is that I want to fly,

but I don't have silky wings,

like the bats,

or the hallow bone structure

found in birds of flight.

And all I know is that,

at the end of the day,

I don't really know anything at all.

Not for sure.

Not for real.

But I am you.

And I am us.

And we are everything -- everywhere.

We are the playground children.

We are the obsessive-compulsive mother,
checking the locks once,
twice,
three times,
afraid for the babies.
We are the starving artists,
we are the lost songs,
we are novels upon paperback novels,
shelved in public libraries.
We are the Shakespeare plays nobody performs anymore.
We are the B-list.
We are the drop-outs and graduates,
we are the honey-mooning lovers and divorcees.
We are antithesis.


So hold my and become a part of it.
Love me, and become it.


And if you can't be a part of it --
if you can't be it,
stop reading.
Because if you can't be a part of it --
if you can't be it,
then you're not ready for stuff yet.


But I hope -- I ache, even --
to know that you're still reading.
Because what I'm writing,
right now,
ain't what I know.
It's just what I feel.


It ain't fiction, folks.


It's just the facts.


Forever, I hope.
All my love,
Addy