Jonathan Carroll's Blog, page 25

CarrollBlog 2.5

I've Learned

by Omer B. Washington

I've learned that you cannot make someone love you.

All you can do is be someone who can be loved.

The rest is up to them.

I've learned that no matter how much I care,

some people just don't care back.

I've learned that it takes years to build up trust

and only seconds to destroy it.

I've learned that it's not what you have in your life

but who you have in your life that counts.

I've learned that you can get by on charm for about fifteen minutes.

After that, you'd better know something.

I've learned that you shouldn't compare yourself

to the best others can do,

but to the best you can do.

I've learned that it's not what happens to people,

It's what they do about it.

I've learned that no matter how thin you slide it,

there are always two sides.

I've learned that you should always have loved ones with loving words.

It may be the last time you'll see them.

I've learned that you can keep going

long after you think you can't.

I've learned that heroes are the people who do what has to be done

When it needs to be done,

regardless of the consequences.

I've learned that there are people who love you dearly,

but just don't know how to show it.

I've learned that sometimes when I'm angry I have the right to be angry,

but that doesn't give me the right to be cruel.

I've learned that true friendship continues to grow even over the longest distance.

Same goes for true love.

I've learned that just because someone doesn't love you the way you want them to

doesn't mean they don't love you with all they have.

I've learned that no matter how good a friend is,

they're going to hurt you every once in a while

and you must forgive them for that.

I've learned that it isn't always enough to be forgiven by others.

Sometimes you have to learn to forgive yourself.

I've learned that no matter how bad your heart is broken,

the world doesn't stop for your grief.

I've learned that our background and circumstances may have influenced who we are,

but we are responsible for who we become.

I've learned that just because two people argue, it doesn't mean they don't love each other.

And just because they don't argue, it doesn't mean they do.

I've learned that sometimes you have to put the individual

ahead of their actions.

I've learned that two people can look at the exact same thing

and see something totally different.

I've learned that no matter the consequences,

those who are honest with themselves go farther in life.

I've learned that your life can be changed in a matter of hours

by people who don't even know you.

I've learned that even when you think you have no more to give,

when a friend cries out to you,

you will find the strength to help.

I've learned that writing,

as well as talking,

can ease emotional pains.

I've learned that the people you care most about in life

are taken from you too soon.

I've learned that it's hard to determine where to draw the line between being nice

and not hurting people's feelings and standing up for what you believe.

I've learned to love

and be loved.

I've learned…

CarrollBlog 2.4

FIREFLIES

And these are my vices:

impatience, bad temper, wine,

the more than occasional cigarette,

an almost unquenchable thirst to be kissed,

a hunger that isn't hunger

but something like fear, a staunching of dread

and a taste for bitter gossip

of those who've wronged me—for bitterness—

and flirting with strangers and saying sweetheart

to children whose names I don't even know

and driving too fast and not being Buddhist

enough to let insects live in my house

or those cute little toylike mice

whose soft grey bodies in sticky traps

I carry, lifeless, out to the trash

and that I sometimes prefer the company of a book

to a human being, and humming

and living inside my head

and how as a girl I trailed a slow-hipped aunt

at twilight across the lawn

and learned to catch fireflies in my hands,

to smear their sticky, still-pulsing flickering

onto my fingers and earlobes like jewels.

- Cecilia Woloch

CarrollBlog 2.2

Love, Forgive Me

by Sierra DeMulder

My sister told me a soul mate is not the person

who makes you the happiest but the one who

makes you feel the most, who conducts your heart

to bang the loudest, who can drag you giggling

with forgiveness from the cellar they locked you in.

It has always been you. You are the first

person I was afraid to sleep next to,

not because of the fear you would leave

in the night but because I didn't want to wake up

ungracefully. In the morning, I crawled over

your lumbering chest to wash my face and pinch

my cheeks and lay myself out like a still-life

beside you. Your new girlfriend is pretty

like the cover of a cookbook. I have said her name

into the empty belly of my apartment. Forgive me.

When I feel myself falling out of love with you,

I turn the record of your laughter over, reposition

the needle. I dust the dirty living room of your affection.

I have imagined our children. Forgive me. I made up

the best parts of you. Forgive me. When you told me

to look for you on my wedding day, to pause

on the alter for the sound of your voice

before sinking myself into the pond of another

love, forgive me. I mistook it for a promise.

CarrollBlog 1.31

Fuck

There are people who will tell you

that using the word fuck in a poem

indicates a serious lapse

of taste, or imagination,

or both. It's vulgar,

indecorous, an obscenity

that crashes down like an anvil

falling through a skylight

to land on a restaurant table,

on the white linen, the cut-glass vase of lilacs.

But if you were sitting

over coffee when the metal

hit your saucer like a missile,

wouldn't that be the first thing

you'd say? Wouldn't you leap back

shouting, or at least thinking it,

over and over, bell-note riotously clanging

in the church of your brain

while the solicitous waiter

led you away, wouldn't you prop

your shaking elbows on the bar

and order your first drink in months,

telling yourself you were lucky

to be alive? And if you wouldn't

say anything but Mercy or Oh my

or Land sakes, well then

I don't want to know you anyway

and I don't give a fuck what you think

of my poem. The world is divided

into those whose opinions matter

and those who will never have

a clue, and if you knew

which one you were I could talk

to you, and tell you that sometimes

there's only one word that means

what you need it to mean, the way

there's only one person

when you first fall in love,

or one infant's cry that calls forth

the burning milk, one name

that you pray to when prayer

is what's left to you. I'm saying

in the beginning was the word

and it was good, it meant one human

entering another and it's still

what I love, the word made

flesh. Fuck me, I say to the one

whose lovely body I want close,

and as we fuck I know it's holy,

a psalm, a hymn, a hammer

ringing down on an anvil,

forging a whole new world.

~Kim Addonizio

CarrollBlog 1.27

Although it may sound like oxymoron, the term "Impossible Realism" makes a great deal of sense when we permit ourselves to look beyond the quotidian and once again open up fully to wonder, like we used to as children. This is why cheesy horror films and great works of the imagination 'outside the box' have one important thing in common—when they succeed, both leave audiences wide- eyed, hand slapped over the mouth, and awestruck. They make us whimper, laugh or cheer like we never do on normal Tuesdays, Wednesdays or Thursdays in the middle of our lives. But because at their best they fully engage our imagination, we willingly give up our normal ho-hum to live in worlds where orcs exist, Freddy Kruger sticks his claws through the wall, or Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning and sees a bug's body rather than his own. Living in these extraordinary realities we are fully alive and engaged, thinking with our hearts instead of our heads, willing to go anywhere the stories go because we are in their thrall.

For many adults however, wonder is a guilty pleasure like reading comic books, karaoke, or eating Hostess Snowballs. It's something for kids—childish, and beyond a certain age vaguely embarrassing. Not something you admit doing if you want to keep your good standing in the Adult Community.

On the other hand, mention names like Murakami (giant talking frogs), Gogol (detached noses found in loaves of bread), Ionesco and his rhinoceroses, Jonathan Lethem (animal private investigators), the wilder short stories of Hawthorne, Julio Cortazar and his human axolotl, Goethe and Christopher Marlowe (Dr. Faustus, I presume?) and the literati quickly bow their heads in deference.

What is more realistic than a bed? Where do we let our guards down more than when we slide beneath the sheets at night and say okay, I'm done. Then we switch off the light, expecting both us and this hour to fade to black.

Or do we? What about that little engine called the unconscious that never stops working and never stops surprising us with its remix tape of our day? How many times do we wake up in the morning and the first thing out of our mouth is where did THAT dream come from?

I recently wrote a short tale that will be included in my upcoming collected stories about a bed that tells the secret dreams of its inhabitants. The idea came from staring too long at a beautiful black and white photograph by Walker Evans. The picture is of an unmade bed. It looks like someone just got up from either a night full of dreams or messy passion. You've seen that bed a hundred times because it is your bed. But what if you were to wake up one morning and something about that bed was different? What if this thing so normally normal has transformed overnight into something… Impossible?

CarrollBlog 1.24

Because I'll Never Swim in Every Ocean

by Catherine Pierce

Want is ten thousand blue feathers falling

all around me, and me unable to stomach

that I might catch five but never ten thousand.

So I drop my hands to my sides and wait

to be buried. I open a book and the words

spring and taunt. Flashes—motel, lapidary,

piranha—of every story, every poem I'll never

know well enough to conjure in sleep.

What's the point of words if I can't

own them all? I toss book after book

into my imaginary trashcan fire.

Or I think I'll learn piano. At the first lesson,

we're clapping whole and half notes

and this is childish, I'm better than this.

I'd like to leave playing Ravel. I'd like

to give a concerto on Saturday. So I quit.

I have standards. Then on Saturday,

I have a beer, watch a telethon. Or

we watch a documentary on Antarctica.

The interviewees are from Belarus, Lima, Berlin.

Everyone speaks English. Everyone names

a philosopher, an ethos. One man carries a raft

on his back at all times. I went to Nebraska once

and swore it was a great adventure. It was.

I think of how I'll never go to Antarctica,

mainly because I don't much want to. But

I should want to. I should be the girl

with a raft on her back. When I think

of all the mountains and monuments

and skyscapes I haven't seen, all the trains

I should take, all the camels and mopeds

and ferries I should ride, all the scorching

hikes I should nearly die on, I press

my body down, down into the vast green

couch. If I step out the door, the infinity

of what I've missed will zorro me across

the face with a big L for Lazy. Sometimes

I watch finches at the feeder, their wings small

suns, and have to grab the sill to steady myself.

Metaphorically, of course. I'm no loon.

Look—even my awestruck is half-assed.

But I'm so tired of the small steps—

the pentatonic scale, the frequent flyer

hoarding, the one exquisite sentence

in a forest of exquisite sentences.

There is a globe welling up inside of me.

Mountain ranges ridging my skin,

oceans filling my mouth. If I stay still

long enough, I could become my own world.

CarrollBlog 1.23

Tonight there must be people who are getting what they want.

I let my oars fall into the water.

Good for them. Good for them, getting what they want.

The night is so still that I forget to breathe.

The dark air is getting colder. Birds are leaving.

Tonight there are people getting just what they need.

The air is so still that it seems to stop my heart.

I remember you in a black and white photograph

taken this time of some year. You were leaning against

a half-shed tree, standing in the leaves the tree had lost.

When I finally exhale it takes forever to be over.

Tonight, there are people who are so happy,

that they have forgotten to worry about tomorrow.

Somewhere, people have entirely forgotten about tomorrow.

My hand trails in the water.

I should not have dropped those oars. Such a soft wind."

Jennifer Michael Hecht

CarrollBlog 1.21

New Year's Day

By Kim Addonizio

The rain this morning falls

on the last of the snow

and will wash it away. I can smell

the grass again, and the torn leaves

being eased down into the mud.

The few loves I've been allowed

to keep are still sleeping

on the West Coast. Here in Virginia

I walk across the fields with only

a few young cows for company.

Big-boned and shy,

they are like girls I remember

from junior high, who never

spoke, who kept their heads

lowered and their arms crossed against

their new breasts. Those girls

are nearly forty now. Like me,

they must sometimes stand

at a window late at night, looking out

on a silent backyard, at one

rusting lawn chair and the sheer walls

of other people's houses.

They must lie down some afternoons

and cry hard for whoever used

to make them happiest,

and wonder how their lives

have carried them

this far without ever once

explaining anything. I don't know

why I'm walking out here

with my coat darkening

and my boots sinking in, coming up

with a mild sucking sound

I like to hear. I don't care

where those girls are now.

Whatever they've made of it

they can have. Today I want

to resolve nothing.

I only want to walk

a little longer in the cold

blessing of the rain,

and lift my face to it.

CarrollBlog 1.18

When I cannot be with you

I will send my love (so much

is allowed to human lovers)

to watch over you in the dark —

a winged small presence

who never sleeps, however long

the night. Perhaps it cannot

protect or help, I do not know,

but it watches always, and so

you will sleep within my love

within the room within the dark.

And when, restless, you wake

and see the room palely lit

by that watching, you will think,

"It is only dawn," and go

quiet to sleep again.

— Wendell Berry

CarrollBlog 1.17

Those restaurants that offer 3 or 4 course meals for a fixed price. Inevitably there's something on those menus I don't like, want, or wish I could change. So I rarely want to pay the price. Much the same with some people-- you wish you didn't have to take their whole 'fixed menu.' "Could I please have your humor and interesting insights about life, but not the moods and dishonesty."