Lake Michigan Flight Path

Oct 28 01:36 UTC 1999

I thought I'd spent the past year disentangling from Michigan...

Saw a single whie shopping bag adrift yesterday
on the breeze hiigh, high over the shopping district,
catching updrafts, lofting over buildings,
cut loose from gravity -- that's how I'd thought freedom would feel.

Instead, outside, the wind
became a frayed violin bow on power lines
above which I hovered ungrounded and tremulous

the atmosphere too thin -- couldn't hear your voice
whose sympathetic vibrations can't even rattle the stars this far off.

Once, back on your side of the water,
our lives tangled with the smoothness
of a pocket watch until we slipped gears,
ground the transmission down to sawdust
slipped to neutral, 
leaving me kitelike with no anchor
no brakes, no power steering, four windows
and sunroof open, transparent to the wind and drifting.
Trying to halt my flight I snared in the thorns of other trees.
Buildings in tired herds scraped their rough hands against me.
My compass slurred its speech and garbled its directions
under Chicago'd magnetic pull; -- darkened by soot over Gary,
I lost altitude and roosted in the meager grass,
        
300 miles off from yr voice.

I should have known that you with your winged sandals and nebula wind
   telephone would track me down.

Thin threads of breath ballooning out
like dandelion seeds over Lake Michigan.

So I try to replant myself in our native soil somewhat long-distance
if only by the grace of dreams and AT&T --
heartstrings flapping like phone lines in the wind
and your voice a thin fishhook through the aether
catching me, collecting me, holding me like a kite string

against whose pull this time I really fly.

response 2 of 13:

Oct 28 13:41 UTC 1999

all right, I'm only gonna say this once:
I think this is the best poem I've ever seen posted in here.
Including my own. =}

response 4 of 13:

Oct 28 21:04 UTC 1999

Like the conflict in Ben Folds Five's "Don't Change Your Plans".

response 6 of 13:

Oct 29 04:18 UTC 1999

The song is a struggle ... on the one hand, the narrator loves the object
ofhis affection more than anything in the universe, on the other, he refuses
to change his life around to be with her (in the case of the song, moving from
the East to LA).

I'm not quite sure if that's what the poem is about, but that's the feeling
it gives.

response 8 of 13:

Nov 1 21:13 UTC 1999

Re#6:  More or less, only in the other order.  What I intended the poem to
mean was, "I knew I'd be moving away, so I didn't admit how I felt about you.
But now that I've actually moved, I realize that you're important enough to
me that the distance isn't an issue".

Re#7:  Actually, the bit about dandelion seeds reminded me of some things
you've written too.

response 10 of 13:

Nov 4 00:25 UTC 1999

yet another masterpiece in the works.. I wish I could be this artistic 
all the time, but no, university bureaucracy and politics tend to wear 
down that side of me sometimes.  *sigh*

it must be because of the double major =P

I wish I had the freedom to work on nothing save my artistic expression.
I do what I can-- at least I'm taking classical guitar lessons with the 
university instructor..

response 12 of 13:

Dec 28 09:49 UTC 1999

Dan... Damn, boy, you don't post often, but when you do...

I'm gonna send you e-mail.

You kick ass, duuude!  Later.