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.

13 responses total.

I hate you.
YOu get Most Hated of the Year award.

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. =}

I guess I'm looking for ways to make it clearer.  The intended recipient read
it a few times and sort of went "huh?".  (After I explained it, the response
was "yeah, I thought it might mean something like that", but still, "huh?"
is not a promising first reaction.)  What did you guys hear this as meaning?

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

(For those of us who don't own that album yet?....)

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.

there's a few places where it's a little jolting, like the part where you
thrust us suddenly into the "other side of the water" part.   but there's so
much amazing imagery that those small points could be smoothed over to
complete the effect you're going for... it wouldn't be difficult, with so much
already spun out and defined, it'd b like adding a creshendo or a rest here
and there, it would only add to the effect you've already set up.

there's a few words that jump out at me, that remind me of some things I've
written: heartstrings and the bit about dandelion seeds...

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.

it did?
<beams>

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..

I've got one.  Wish I had it with me.  :p

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

I'm gonna send you e-mail.

You kick ass, duuude!  Later.

re:3 (not that you remember what you wrote, back then, anyway, dan, but oh
welp. Some of us are just slow, so try to be kind) 

The person is a dork. This poem made me want to cry. A lot. Not sentimetally,
but in a "damn, that is one good poem" sort of way. And anyone who responds
with "Huh?" gets a dork award.

(Not that there's anything wrong with a dork award... I know a couple of
people who have more than their fair share of dork awards that sit in the
closet gathering dust by the mome... and they haven't stopped collecting them
either. <wink>)

But such is life.

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