Poem (the spirit likes to dress up)

The spirit

  likes to dress up like this:

   ten fingers,

   ten toes,

shoulders, and all the rest

  at night

   in the black branches,

     in the morning

in the blue branches

  of the world.

   It could float, of course,

     but would rather

plumb rough matter.

  Airy and shapeless thing,

   it needs

     the metaphor of the body,

lime and appetite,

  the oceanic fluids;

   it needs the body's world,

     instinct

and imagination

  and the dark hug of time,

   sweetness

     and tangibility,

to be understood,

  to be more than pure light

   that burns

     where no one is --

so it enters us --

  in the morning

   shines from brute comfort

     like a stitch of lightning;

and at night

  lights up the deep and wondrous

   drownings of the body

     like a star.

-Mary Oliver

Of the first week

So I started my first semester at UC Berkeley this week, and while it makes no sense for me to be blogging right now, the time sensitive nature of my opening means that I must post. Here are a few of the lessons I learned, in varying levels of detail...

I don't know what this means but I mean it

I cannot seem to say exactly
what I mean
or what I want to mean
I think
It's like delirium came
and whisked me into it's
happy caravan
though really it's neither happy or sad
That analog was bad
I am slowly unraveling into
a pile of non-poetic brown yarn
woven of a strange lack of basic knowing

Friends, or the people who ruined facebook

I originally signed up on facebook because it seemed a clever little time-suck. Over time, I've kept it because it provides a useful way for me to keep up with friends/family, and it still helps me kill time. I'm generally not one to post inflammatory statuses, or to make critical comments (I don't do it nearly as much as I could). But recently, I've been utterly disgusted by it.

It started last month, when I saw the "change your profile pic to a cartoon" thing start popping up on friends' statuses. The idea was that by changing your pic to some cartoon from your youth, you were helping in the fight against child abuse. This bothered me for a few reasons. First, the ridiculous idea that changing your picture to a cartoon will, by itself, raise awareness of child abuse. Second, the meme's obvious lack of connection to any organization, which is likely because it didn't begin as any kind of movement, but just someone asking their friends to change their profile pictures for no reason, like congress passing a boring bill by attaching it to something noone can disagree with. The most important reason it irked me, is that it caught on among my friends very quickly, which suggests that they didn't think the whole thing through as thoroughly or as quickly as I did. In the long run, I suppose that this was not an entirely unexpected course of action, as I tend to take a more critical approach to life than most people, but still it was just so silly, that it made me reevaluate the nature of facebook, and my relationship with it.

Facebook is by nature, a place for people to show you who they are, with all that that entails. If a person is somewhat private, then their profile will be somewhat sparse. Now, I have never been a normal person. I hold on to somewhat obscure interests, I tend to analyze things long past the point where most people stop, and because of this I tend to expect people to be more accountable for their actions than they are usually willing to be. So, I am newly aware that my friends are not like me for the most part, and that Facebook is not made for me. I'm very measured in my speech, and I don't deign to think that my opinion is of great portent to anyone, (strange, since I have a blog) so I am planning to simply use it less in favor of Twitter, a place where I can rain down my ponderings on an expanding darkness of cyberspace. I wish there was a better way to wrap that all up but it's winter break and I don't write well when I don't have school, so that is all.

The impressive e.e. cummings

One of the things I really like about poetry is that it allows you to use words in a way that shouldn't make sense. By nature, this is a huge departure from my incredibly logical brain, so I occasionally have a considerable bit of difficulty with the practice of it. However, I still love to read it, (which is probably one of the reasons I didn't mind reading the first chapter of The Sound and the Fury, one of the most bizarre snippets of writing on the planet) which is why I thoroughly enjoy e.e. cummings(for the uninitiated, the name is not supposed to be capitalized). He had a way of playing with language that I find amazing, because he put words together that shouldn't logically belong and made them make sense in my head. In a way, his writing serves as a clinic on how the structure of a poem is as important as the diction, because his line breaks add to the message as does his syntax, (or lack thereof). Anyway, enough of my useless jawing about how awesome he was, see for yourself:

ITEM

this man is o so

Waiter  

this;woman is

please shut that

the pout And affectionate leer

interminable pyramidal, napkins

(this man is oh so tired of this

a door opens by itself

woman.)they so to speak were in

Love once?

now

                                           her mouth opens too far

and:she attacks her Lobster without

feet mingle under the

mercy.

                                              (exit the hors d'oeuvres)

Now, I have my own interpretation of this whole thing, but I would like to hear what you guys think this means. Don't worry, it's not an assignment, I just wanna know what you think.