Summer Solstice

Let the summer fun begin!


1. Hammock Time
2. Tina's School of Driving
3. July 4th Cookouts. Yes, in the plural.
4. Play Date with Newly Engaged friend Kate
5. Christmas in July Wedding of M&M
6. End of One Class!
7. Beach Days!
8. Batting Cages
9. Mini-golf
10. More Hammock Time
11. Salem Willows with baby AnnaLynn
12. Margaritas at the 99
13. ILLINOIS TRIP!!!
14. Jordan's Birthday!
15. End of last class!!!!!
16. Illinois State Fair!
17. Boyz II Men and MC Hammer Concert
18. Day trip to St. Louis!
19. Bike riding with Dearboyfriend
20. After dinner walks with Big Jim
21. Falling asleep outside while reading

iPhone Fail: Frank Prevails!

I tried mercilessly to use my iPhone to post this poem the other day. Copy and pasting on this beast still alludes me, as does talking on the phone WITHOUT accidentally hanging up.


SLEEPING ON THE WING


Perhaps it is to avoid some great sadness,
as in a Restoration tragedy the hero cries "Sleep!
O for a long sound sleep and so forget it!"
that one flies, soaring above the shoreless city,
veering upward from the pavement as a pigeon
does when a car honks or a door slams, the door
of dreams, life perpetuated in parti-colored loves
and beautiful lies all in different languages.

Fear drops away too, like the cement, and you
are over the Atlantic. Where is Spain? where is
who? The Civil War was fought to free the slaves,
was it? A sudden down-draught reminds you of gravity
and your position in respect to human love. But
here is where the gods are, speculating, bemused.
Once you are helpless, you are free, can you believe
that? Never to waken to the sad struggle of a face?
to travel always over some impersonal vastness,
to be out of, forever, neither in nor for!

The eyes roll asleep as if turned by the wind
and the lids flutter open slightly like a wing.
The world is an iceberg, so much is invisible!
and was and is, and yet the form, it may be sleeping
too. Those features etched in the ice of someone
loved who died, you are a sculptor dreaming of space
and speed, your hand alone could have done this.
Curiosity, the passionate hand of desire. Dead,
or sleeping? Is there speed enough? And, swooping,
you relinquish all that you have made your own,
the kingdom of your self sailing, for you must awake
and breathe your warmth in this beloved image
whether it's dead or merely disappearing,
as space is disappearing and your singularity.

Frank O'Hara
[1957]

Worst dream ever . . .

Last week I had this horrible dream that one of my friends was having a seizure. Let me be more specific, in each "scene" of my dream I was doing something different, at first I was at work, then I was at a restaurant with friends, then I was at the movies. In each scene, he was in the background with some friends of his own, he would start to seize, and his friends would run up to me and tell me I had to find his medicine. At first I questioned them, saying can someone even take medicine when they're having a seizure, shouldn't we call an ambulance instead . . . etc. Each time everyone would just yell at me that he needed his medicine and that I was supposed to know where it was. When he stopped seizing he would yell at me telling me he almost died and it was all my fault. I pleaded with him each time to just tell me where his medicine was so that I would know the next time, but he'd just get up and leave with his friends, shaking his head in disappointment. By the third time in the movies I woke up from my dream mid-seizure in a cold sweat, crying. It was by far one of the worst dreams ever. And I don't need Freud to tell me what it means . . .

I'm no Florence Nightingale, nope, it ain't me babe.

I'm on a boat . . .

They got a copy of Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," which neither of them had read.

Even I know they should have got a copy of Twain's Life on the Mississippi. D'oh!!

Read the whole article here.

But attempting (yes key word "attempting") something is better than not having tried at all.

Sweet Dreams, Saturday Night Lullaby

Enjoy the final bit of beautiful May weather. Sweet dreams til sun beams find you . . .


Dream hard and play fair,
xoxo,
Cindy Mayweather

Bedrooms are better than kitchens

So thanks to Ms. Wonderland this song has been rolling around in my head.



And now after that nightmare I just find more bedroom scenes for my musings.

Susan Boyle

You, dear, light up my life. Fuck American Idol, this sensational lass (with one of those sexy brogues I love) made Simon Cowell smile more times in a minute than the lot of you have all season.

I Dreamed A Dream


Favorite Susan Boyle quote, "A lot of things can happen that have been really sad and you've got to cover it up. You either laugh or you'd greet (cry). And we'd all be greeting, that would be a terrible mess." (from itv.com)

Saturday Night Lullaby

Hey diddle diddle,
The cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon.
The little dog laughed to see such a sport,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.

Dream a little dream

Ground
A New Poem
by Rae Armantrout

Custom content feed.

Let me tell you something personal.
As a child, I worried about quicksand.
I don't know why I mention this.
I feel no connection
to the child who had that fear,
instilled, as it was,
by '50s films about explorers,
hokey
and tainted now.

I hold out my hand.


*


Brownian motion;
primal shudder.


The way it's hotter


to go to bed with someone
while imagining


yourself
to be another person.

Caring is Creepy

I've never been a fast reader (easily distracted, hello?). Doesn't mean I don't care about things with the same conviction as others. Just on a different frequency (and sometimes in a different time zone), I'd like to think. Illiteracy, next to poverty, is one of the saddest tragedies this century faces. First we take away a man's basic right to subsist (Late Latin subsistere to exist, from Latin, to come to a halt, remain, from sub- + sistere to come to a stand; akin to Latin stare to stand), next we neglect his intellectual need to read. Yeah, there's a need for speed, but there's a need to read. Big Jim's not "big" on the novels, but he tears through newspapers and he never graduated high school.
The first letter I wrote for Amnesty International was on behalf of a group of youngsters from Turkey who were caught "speaking out" against their leader at the time. I will dispense with the details (as I cannot remember them, that is why there is a job for historians, politicians . . . etc.). If I were presenting this as an academic somewhere, I would do my research. But I am amongst friends, and I'd like to get at the source of the problem. So yes, caught in the depths of Socratic method, these youths ranging from the ages of 6 to about 14, I believe, were carted away and thrown in prison. Promises were made by the police that they could see their parents if they signed a confession. Not a single one of them could read. They ended up signing confessions that condemned them to prison. I wrote a paper about our responsibility to try to end world hunger. In that paper I hoped to show that at the very least we need to start acknowledging that how we "define" certain things, classify them, in some sense judge them has to come under scrutiny. We can't be afraid to be wrong about tradition. There is no greater source of rebels and idealists than the youth. So there, on that day, on those park benches in the hearts of those youths burned a fire for change. But because along with a basic right to subsist, children are not being provided another basic tool of survival, basic skills in reading and in writing, this fire for change is easily snuffed out. The written word has existed . . . how long historians? Yeah, it's that important. I cry when I think how much darker my world would be without reading and without writing. My mother read to my brother and I every night. Every night whole new worlds were introduced to us.
I was taught the art of imagination. I learned how to dream.



Ameliorate.
Provide the world with legs to stand, next provide them with wings to fly.
Be happy (not as a pig content with what one has) but as in Aristotle's Eudaimonia. Flourish. Inspire and aspire.
By our hands, be we whole.

Because it's a shitty day out . . .

I've been catching up on Julie Doucet and then going back and rereading some of her old stuff and it's just making me feel good lately. So I feel like writing a little blurb right now on Lip Plumpers so I'm going to. I "should" remove Product Whores from my Blogroll, but I'm not going to. They did an interesting little piece on Soap and Glory's Sexy Mother Pucker (which I own and love and like the post's author, I too, own way too many lip plumpers). I don't even necessarily think I need them, the plumping of the lips that is, I think my lips are fine the way they are. My dirty little secret . . . I like the burn. I'm a freak. It's odd enough I like make-up, as my close friends point out I rarely wear it, but I LOVE to buy it. Love it. Soap and Glory is my new obsession at Target. With catchy titles and silly little Anne Taintoresque puns/blurbs/photos, I can't resist. Feet Dreams may be one of my favorite products I've tried. I work on my feet all day, so after a shower/bath I really do feel like I'm "in a deal with the devil" (one of the silly blurbs on the bottle) when I rub the pups with this green-glorified-aloe-goo. With my lips on fire, my feet calm and cool (less chance I'll run), Ripple by my side, my heart on my sleeve and Julie's My Most Secret Desire under my pillow (there's always a book under my pillow) I sleep like a baby and have sweet cookie-filled dreams.

Actual last night I had a dream that my cat Sleepy Douglas (Sleepy for short) was eating Ripple, my ferocious rat. As long as it was a dream . . .