Monday Night Poetry Club

This one belongs to a great lady. I may have embarrassed myself horribly when I took her back to her hotel last week (I really ought to invest in a belt for these falling-down pants, and I really ought to stop giving gushing reviews of famous writers’ work while we’re skidding down from pothole to pothole in the rain), but that in of itself doesn’t make a difference to me.

Possessions

I sent you a list of what I wanted, and you boxed it up carelessly, as though for the backs
of strangers, or for the fire, the way you might

have handled a dead woman’s possessions—when you could no longer bear to touch
them, the clothes still fragrant, worn, still that reminiscent

of the body. Or perhaps your lover packed the many boxes herself, released from secret
into fury, that sick of the scent of me

in the bed, that wary of her face caught in my mirror—something I said I didn’t want,
where I would not see myself again.

– Claudia Emerson

Rann and I had this Fascinating Argument

… About whether or not violence is ever necessary and what ‘necessary’ means, and whether or not ‘necessary’ = right, and whether or not what’s right ultimately matters (apologies for butchering a pretty deep, animated discussion, but it’s late and I have work in the morning).

I base my beliefs on violence purely from personal experience. I don’t ever read any philosophy on the subject. I wonder if most people are like that – and whether or not philosophy is something that’s congruent to experience, or whether or not it’s vice versa.

Rann, at one point, saiid I’m weirdly abstract and New Age-y when it comes to violence, but when I see it in my mind’s eye, I see it as something very concrete and everyday – the struggle, the screaming, the idea that even if you survive, nothing will ever be the same again.

It hasn’t and, frankly, I’m waiting for it to start all over again. I always will be.