NaBloPoMo?

Yes, that's right. It's National Blog Posting Month once again. This will probably be my only post for the whole month, but that's okay right? This is my one evening of effort. But actually, it's not much effort since I'm just going to copy and paste some stuff below. Poetry, that is. So, I guess I should start off with what I've been up to as of late.

I took the GRE last weekend. It was effing terrible. 'Nuff said. I've been working on my graduate school applications off and on. I've got 4 going right now and just have to work out some stuff with my "statement" and such so I can get my recommendations rolling. My goal is before Thanksgiving break. That's next Wednesday. The writing sample I am going to use is a paper due next Monday for my 19th Century American Literature class. It's a 10-12 page/7 sources paper on Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Nathaniel Hawthorne's crazy short story "Wakefield." It's all about how the men in both texts think they're in control of the women, but they're so obsessed them that they're actually the ones being controlled. It's the only thing I've actually cared to work on for a while. Everything else has been pretty awful. My Philosophy of Music and Philosophy & The Holocaust classes have been taking all of the life out of me. They're just plain awful and both ridiculously writing/reading intensive.

A former John Carroll student is doing the JET programme right now (luckyyy) and hooked all of the advanced Japanese students (5 of us) up with high school pen pals. Mine is Manami and she's seventeen and has been taking English for her whole life. She wrote me a few weeks ago and I sent her a letter back last week. She writes in English with a P.S. in Japanese and I write in Japanese with a P.S. in English. It's good that she wrote first because then I knew how much decorating I had to do on mine. A lot.

Since my poetry midterm portfolio I haven't spent any time writing poems. I got a little burned out and because the entire class is absent just about every day and never does anything I just follow suit. But I (finally) got the portfolio back today (a month later?) along with a big A- so I figured I would post a couple of the poems from it. Once again, I'm not a poet. Don't hold this against me.

*

The Seesaw

My great-great Grandfather was a lumberjack
In the hills of West Virginia.
Those were the days of plaid shirts,
Pipes filled to the brim with tobacco,
Moonshine, and two-man saws.

His suspenders kept his pants up,
And his mouth kept on puffing,
But it was his hands and arms that worked
One end of the jagged and curved beast.

Its teeth stuck out for inches
And prided themselves for their sharpness.
Each one placed specifically and designed
To rid the earth of Mother Nature.

The wooden handles left blisters, then calluses
while the man on the other end was so in rhythm
With him that they had the same heartbeat,
As they sang the same song.

But now the saw hangs above my fireplace
Above pictures of me in wooden frames. Made in China.
Not only decoration, or dare I say antique
But the end of America, or what it once was.

Rock and Bite

The day he retired he drove his car
Into the woods and proclaimed, “I will never
Drive again!” He took the rocking chair
Out of the house and onto the porch.

He sat there for years, eating candy bars
And sharing them with my Pops if he was good.
He rocked and talked while looking at the trees,
And breathing in the fresh West Virginia air.

But what did he do for all of those years?
Eat chocolate, rock, and just enjoy the same scenery?
Wood creaking with every rock,
Blood sugar rising with every bite.

Until his stroke, and my grandfather
To follow in his footsteps, and that rocking
Chair rocking slowly in the front if my fireplace
In the wrong neck of the woods.

*

So, before I go- 1 more thing. Or 2. Check out Nomenclature and KateSpace who are actually participating in NaBloPoMo. And also, hello, is there anybody out there?