Factories and marching bands

This morning I woke up to the sound of "Holland" playing, off of Sufjan Stevens' beautiful album Michigan. It lyrically paints an August on the lake, and it is a warm day in mid-September as I write this, but still the song always makes me think of late fall..

Fall is my favorite time of year. The crisp taste in the air is perhaps God's very best creation. But "Holland" is for when that has come and gone. There are soft flurries with huge snowflakes out the window and I sip on some tea, curled up with a book under a quilt... all is calm, all is bright.

"And I guess that was your accomplice in the wood chipper..."

I recently heard of an old friend who was going through a tough time, and everyone seemed to know exactly why except for that person.

I'd like to think I'm more self aware than that, but I'm not. My problems are simple and not devastating by any means, and yet I walk myself into the same troubles again and again like a lab rat who hasn't yet figured out that, no, neither door one nor door two has cheese behind them. I face setbacks and turn to my friends, confused at how this new set of circumstances could have possibly cropped up, like William H. Macy's character in Fargo, shocked that his plan (which involved thousands of dollars and staging a kidnapping) isn't still completely on track.

I am certain that my friends want to smack me awake, to show me my own reality, just as I wish I could with this old friend of mine. Perhaps they know more about me than I know about myself. In fact, there's a good chance of that.

Life is easier to view from the glass above it. Living it is the messy part. I'm saying nothing profound.

I love you guys,
Charlie

"I read the news today, oh boy..."

I really should get away from posting at the wee hours of the morning. The typos and run-on sentences are hard to read later.

At any rate, here's a duo of poems that I have been toying with lately. As always, please feel free to critique them. The first is an old one that I think is almost ready for public consumption and there's a new one in there too. Enjoy!


honesty is the best policy.

late one night, the Girl Who Never Lies
went into the bedroom of the boy she loved
and cut off his manhood
so she could truthfully say
that she hated all boys


death of innocence

two kids scared shitless
the boy wondering how
not bleeding could be a bad thing
and the girl wondering how
she could have become
the girl in those videos
from health class

they lay in the black
this kind of death is new
they wonder what was to be
and what will be now

together but
completely alone



Eh, since this is a weak showing after not posting for a month, I will toss a stupid haiku your way as well.


wasted opportunity

every line precious
the syllables dwindle down
this haiku sucks ass


Alright alright. I promise to have a real post up here this week or next. Promise.

Love,
Charlie

Missing the point

I had the unique experience (for a broke college student) to have my feet in both the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean within 48 hours. Neither time was a particularly clean experience, taking place in two fine and very different armpits of The World: Nicaragua and New Jersey.

My trip to Nicaragua was for ten days with my church from Damascus, MD. It wasn't quite a missions trip, as we went to churches already established and, to a certain degree, thriving in terms of most everything (except funding). We stayed on a farm (don't tell the customs people please!) just outside of Managua, the capital city, for about five days, and traveled to extremely poor villages in and around Somoto and Somotillo for five days.

As with most third-world countries, the streets have no names. You get directions by remembering where the Old Cathedral used to be in the 1980s and then count blocks. It's tricky. Also, the roads are very rarely paved, and never paved well, leading to the longest bus ride (seven hours) of my life. Then we would pull into these places that were living in 1880 and do things like hand them Bibles and soccer balls and frisbees and flashlights. We would pray with them and sing with them and teach the kids some Bible stories. Then at night we would go to the house we were graciously put up in. My brother Daniel and I spent our time in Somotillo in a house that was one room, about twice the size of my bedroom, with cinder blocks, logs and cardboard making up the walls and roof. The floor was dirt. There was no electricity or running water.

I hated it, and realized that while this was some sort of sick cultural experience for me, for these people, this was their life. They would know no other way.

Reaching Wildwood, NJ for the annual Wildwood Beach Ultimate tournament the day after I got back only caused me to further furrow my brow. As people were starving in Nicaragua, people I had met, here was I, dropping way too much money to stay near the beach in a hotel. Here we were, unable to finish our pizza and funnel cake.

I thought about American imperialism while I was in Wildwood. All the sweatshops in Managua and all over that country, all those ads for Coca-Cola, even the poorest villages. Those "On the Run"s next to some gas stations we grew to adore, the only places in the country (that I know of) where you could have air conditioning and a flushing toilet. America has Nicaragua, and many nations, in an economic stranglehold. It was always sad. Seeing it was enraging.

I thought of the beach we went to in Nicaragua, some small tourist trap we went to for the afternoon as a treat. The weather was beautiful, but the water was more or less impossible to be in, on account of some brown, dark sludge that was on the surface. And while the busy season is in the winter for them, it was unreal how empty it was. Unable to make this oasis easily accessible or completely desirable, the economy was missing out a potentially very good tourist industry to an extent. Even Wildwood, where in a matter of three days Sara stepped on a sewing needle, Tracy found a scuba knife in the surf, I stepped on glass and a nail and Dan stepped on something that made his big toe bleed a lot, they had money flowing in at a tremendous rate. Because in America, if the beach sucks, build a roller coaster.

I was angry. Where was the justice in this? How could I, as a Christian, just be content with seeing this? What could I do? Where were the picket signs? How could anyone be anything more than glad to be an American? How could they be proud of what we are?

And then it sank in. This isn't why I went to Nicaragua, to be jaded and cynical. I met people who had nothing, and yet fed me three times a day. I met people who didn't speak my language, nor I theirs, trying to tell me how much it meant to them that I had come. I saw people thanking God for what they had, and really, truly meaning it. I saw middle class youth giving up their summer, and last spring, and this fall, and all year round for the next many years, to help their church grow and prosper, so they could do more good in Managua and in the impoverished areas more and more as time goes on. I met a lady who showed me her home, built for $1,200 completely on the offering collection of my church and dozens of others. And I watched her eyes tear up as she smiled proudly when I said her house was beautiful.

And I saw God as I stood in a circle of Americans and Nicaraguans with my eyes closed, praying in our own languages the Lord's Prayer, Our Father reaching across the cultural divide, the language divide, the economic divide and showing us that we are all brothers and sisters of the same heavenly family.

I waded a little deeper into the freezing Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by joyous, drunken ultimate players but alone in my thoughts. I thought of my friends in Nicaragua. I thought of Adrian, whose funeral I missed while I was away. I thought about the past year, the good and bad. I thought of my family, and my friends, past and present.

And for the first time in a really long time, I thanked God for what I had. And really meant it.

"But we decide which is right, and which is an illusion..."

Well, the last few days have been rough for me, some of the pain self-inflicted. But the community is reeling from the loss of Adrian Wilson, who passed away a week ago. I don't know how good I would be at a tribute to Adrian, so I won't try. He was a great kid, heart of gold, and he is going to be missed tremendously. Please pray for his family and his friends, especially Frank Eanes.

I wrote a poem about time and leaves and love. You know this can't be good. But it's the only decent poem I've written in a month, so forgive me for how Robert Frost the themes are.


daily calendar

the tear-off sheets fall like leaves
leaves that can't come soon enough
leaves that will be too late to save us
leaves that are already too late to save us


I am heading to Nicaragua on Monday with my mom for a fellowship trip for church. My brother and sister are already down there for an immersion program. Maybe a week and half in a country where many have nothing will change my life-view, even a little bit.

Maybe that's all I need to snap out of this funk. A fresh look.

"He was bored and tired of my laments..."

Brand New sucks.

I really hate the boring cookie-cutter style of rock that they play. They are a high school garage band that made it without any real reason, or true inkling of talent. It's the worst kind of music, where it's bad, and they don't appear to care because they are laughing about their four bland, artless chords all the way to the bank. Mike told me that they had a new album out that was amazing. But Mike couldn't be trusted with something like this... he liked them when they were terrible!

It was my first day back in my apartment in over a month. Mike and I were burning incense and working on a puzzle of the Civil War, piecing together our fine country's history with Sia playing in the background. When her album ended, Mike put on something else.

It was dark, heavier... it fit how I felt to a T. The last time I was in the apartment, I was in a ball, in nothing but boxers, shivering and sobbing with no tears coming out of my eyes. Though I could see, in my mind was where my reality existed, far more real than the floor of my apartment or Duke or later Mike and my mom talking to me. In my reality where I watched myself die, again and again. I couldn't figure it out... I knew I had so much to live for. I have people who love me, friends all around, a good life. And yet my prison was showing these things to me and I couldn't escape. They didn't go away for days, waking or sleeping. They were there as my pastor and mom drove me home, at the hospital, at the ultimate tournament I played in despite my condition, as I threw up on my empty stomach. I never did want to kill myself, understand. It's just that that's what consumed me. It's not all that I thought about. It's what I lived for three days. And now this Zoloft was numbing me up to the world. A few days after the puzzle, I would park on the sofa and sit. And think about nothing. And care about nothing. And listen to Pink Floyd. I would stay there for a month.

But right then, the Zoloft hadn't gotten me all the way. And this album was playing, each song better than the last. Finally we got the the fifth song on the album. It started soft, slow, hazy. Then, almost two minutes, there is a drum fill, and the track is suddenly coated in guitars, dissonant and distorted, with the singer's untamed voice, moments before soft, now in agony.

Then just as suddenly and only half a minute later, the song shifts back into gear, lead in by four words from the vocals and the guitars suddenly falling into order, the words soaring.

I set down my puzzle piece.

"Your beauty is supreme.
Yeah, you were right about me.
But can I get myself out from underneath
this guilt that will crush me?
And in the choir I saw our sad Messiah.
He was bored and tired of my laments,
said, 'I died for you one time,
but never again.'
Never again.
Never again."

I sat down, stunned by this song, this powerful music. The song went back to the beginning's soft, dark contemplations, repeating and building, and building... as I sat, the second wave of the song reached it's peak, and somehow stayed there, riding on those wild guitars once again. Finally it hit the shoreline, not so much breaking as getting dispersed by the beach.

I didn't cry. I hadn't cried in weeks. But there it was. The song that caught the moment of being back to my private house of horrors. Beautiful and terrible.

"Who is this?" I asked Mike.
"Oh, it's Brand New's latest album," he said, smiling back at me and popping a puzzle piece into it's spot.

I later found out that "Limousine" is about a girl and a limo driver who were killed by a drunk driver, a tragic story (found here, here and here). But for me it was the song that made me feel something one last time before the drugs swept my emotions away for a while.

Music (and real music, not just songs), has a way of sticking with me, of making sense of things I cannot. There aren't words for everything.

But Brand New... they aren't so bad.

"the tolls i take r running me out"

I'm not sure what that drunk text message that is my title meant in the first place, but I think I agree with it. Here's a new poem. As always critiques are welcome.


The Confessions of a Yard Sale

They may tell you that they are moving soon
and there's simply no room
for that nice, near-new loveseat
in their place in the city.

But that's where Gary the Guinea Pig
got stuck and starved last spring,
and they just can't stand
how much Gary stinks on a hot day.

(They aren't moving at all.)
You can have the loveseat for $50.


If you are a reader of this blog still in Towson, Grub Street (Towson University's literary magazine) is out now, with my poem "Classroom Map" published in it. You can find it almost anywhere on campus, or so I hear. The whole magazine is really really good. My favorite poem is about zombies who wish they could be more normal, but aren't sorry for eating our brains. I don't know why...

There's something so amazing about having your name in print alongside something that you are proud of. I'm not a great writer, but I'm pretty good and I enjoy it. And I know I have heard something about a blind squirrel before...

I'm moving to Grantham close to permanently starting in the next week or two. This is an exciting time!

Love to you all,
Charlie