Under Sea Garden

San Antonio
by Naomi Shihab Nye

Tonight I lingered over your name,
the delicate assembly of vowels
a voice inside my head.
You were sleeping when I arrived.
I stood by your bed
and watched the sheets rise gently.
I knew what slant of light
would make you turn over.
It was then I felt
the highways slide out of my hands.
I remembered the old men
in the west side café,
dealing dominoes like magical charms.
It was then I knew,
like a woman looking backward,
I could not leave you,
or find anyone I loved more.

The haiku meme was posted again. And yes we had too much fun with it.

All of my Girl's have been bolded (except the cut tag, which is mine) and the others are, well, mine. Dude, we talk about some random stuff on our journals. HEH.

(You can make your own haiku's here.)

( have been flickerings stray desires nights she turned to karot and said )

Vex Me
by Barbara Hamby

Vex me, O Night, your stars stuttering like a stuck jukebox,
put a spell on me, my bones atremble at your tabernacle

of rhythm and blues. Call out your archers, chain me
to a wall, let the stone fortress of my body fall

like a rabid fox before an army of dogs. Rebuke me,
rip out my larynx like a lazy snake and feed it to the voiceless

throng. For I am midnight's girl, scouring unlit streets
like Persephone stalking her swarthy lord. Anoint me

with oil, make me greasy as a fast-food fry. Deliver me
like a pizza to the snapping crack-house hours between

one and four. Build me an ark, fill it with prairie moths,
split-winged fritillaries, blue-bottle flies. Stitch

me a gown of taffeta and quinine, starlight and nightsoil,
and when the clock tocks two, I'll be the belle of the malaria ball.

We were tagged. We have done a meme. I would right more but I am dying of bird flu. Har.

Meme of Random and Inside Jokery




Also I am going to be on week FOUR of my jury duty and the world is a bleak and unhappy place. Rar rar rar.

Misgivings
by William Matthews

"Perhaps you'll tire of me," muses
my love, although she's like a great city
to me, or a park that finds new
ways to wear each flounce of light
and investiture of weather.
Soil doesn't tire of rain, I think,

but I know what she fears: plans warp,
planes explode, topsoil gets peeled away
by floods. And worse than what we can't
control is what we could; those drab,
scuttled marriages we shed so
gratefully may augur we're on our owns

for good reasons. "Hi, honey," chirps Dread
when I come through the door, "you're home."
Experience is a great teacher
of the value of experience,
its claustrophobic prudence,
its gloomy name-the-disasters-

in-advance charisma. Listen,
my wary one, it's far too late
to unlove each other. Instead let's cook
something elaborate and not
invite anyone to share it but eat it
all up very very slowly.

karotsamused here.

Starting in about an hour and eleven minutes, Rune and I will be gone. Gawn. Up in the snow, where hopefully our colds won't kill us and I might even get a day of skiing in.

I know neither of us are huge presences on the Interweb, but this is a notice on account of we're gonna be gone.

There might even be pictures when we get back on Jan 4.

:D

Everyone have a happy new year.

And, Rana? We wanna get together with yoooou. Can we play later? <3

It all started when my mom told me I could buy a new sweatshirt, as long as it had my college logo on it.

You see, when my dad had taken my brother and me on various trips to see colleges, we'd purchased myriad sweatshirts from all of the institutions...except the ones we eventually chose to attend.

By the by, this is karotsamused.

When my job at the Bookstore at my Hallowed Place of Learning brought me in contact with some sweatshirt styles other than the College Lettered Sweatshirt in Blue And Gold, I found myself a bit covetous of others' purchases. Thus, when I asked if I might purchase a sweatshirt for myself, my mother agreed on the grounds that it was in fact from my place of work.

This week, we're having a 40% off sale. On items that were, last week, 20% off. So that's 40% off things that were already priced at 80%. The hell is that math? 46% percent off or so? I have no calculator. Blargh.

But anyway, I got a sweatshirt. At my Bookstore. For $19.77. NINETEEN. FREAKIN. SEVENTY-SEVEN.
At Bookstore prices, that's a crappy t-shirt.

...

I love this sweatshirt. It is black, and the hood is big enough, and the logo is not stupid. I bought it yesterday, and after I got off work and had a shower, I decided to wear it to Rune's Family Holiday Dinner last night.

...Now, Rune has a big family. One that has to gather in separate locations at separate times, half because it would be impossible to gather that many people in one place, and half because the two sides would make that one place explode.

So we met at the Gma's, for the Gma's Side Of The Family sort of thing, and the house, normally pretty cozy with five people, was... packed.

Pack. Ed.

There was the Gma, and Rune's parents, and all of Rune's aunts and uncle and their spouses, and their offspring, and their offspring's spouses and offspring. And then the Friends, which consisted of me and this one guy who held the camcorder a lot.

There were two itty bitty half-Japanese babies, and their very Japanese mama (adorably trying to correct her Very White father-in-law's mispronunciation of her name - "Yu - KI - ko." "No. YU - ki - ko." "Yu - KI - ko. Right? I don't hear what's different!")

There were also ... well. They were all about my age, I guess, or a little older, but since one of them asked Rune her age, they probably assumed I was older. But four barely-legal boys, all about six feet huge, and broad as doorways. (Rune says the eldest is about twenty-five. Ha-ha.)

They were all rather sweet, in their weird Barely-Legal Boy way, and apparently I was unconsciously on my game.

See, as soon as I walked in, I think there was the radar ping. Girl-That-Isn't-Family does a lot to make me attractive. XD

I realized I was getting hit on about the time the youngest one told me he was a writer. And that he was getting ready to write his second Album, and was in the process of recording for the first.

Which is no big deal, especially in this area, since the music scene here right now is exploding. But when I brought up a friend of mine, actually a very talented white hip-hop artist, who had recorded his albums and was in the marketing stage, and was finding the most challenging thing was being articulate about his work and making sure he was putting it out in the right places, I got this response:

"Well, marketing isn't hard if you're good."

...I think you really needed to be able to hear it. And see the little face of "Aw, man, she knows -other- guys?"

Boys. He started laying it on a little thick in the middle, and by the end, played Family Man (although this was rather genuine and in a lot of ways he was sweet. I enjoyed his company). He was funny in the Multigenerational Photo they all took - excluding, of course, me and Camcorder Guy (who took the picture).

But after The Boy left, I turned to Rune's Gma and this exchange followed:

Me: *wry* You know, I think he found me attractive.
Gma: Well, dear, I don't see why he wouldn't have.
Me: -! What do you know? You're blind!
Gma: *laughs*

On the way home, Rune confessed she wanted to growl at him. I confessed I sat with my ring showing in a very shiny fashion after the hip-hop bit of the conversation.

Heh. I got hit on at the family dinner.

...HEH.

The Tow Truck Driver's Story
by Elizabeth W. Garbe

You meet all kinds of people in this work.
You have to be polite, twenty-four hours
a day. It was a brutal winter night,
I'd worked since four a.m., finally coming in
to sleep when the phone rang, a guy calling
from up on Appleton ridge, saying
he needs a jump. I asked, "Can't it wait?
There's still snow on the roads, the plows aren't
All through. It'll take me three hours at least
to get there with the roads like this." "Ok,"
he said, "I'll wait." I went to bed an hour,
before he called, "It's an emergency."
The storm had eased as I headed out,
But the wind had been so bad, I had
To stop and climb over the drifts to knock
the snow off signs to see where to go,
a hard dark climb up to Appleton Ridge.
Over three hours to get to a lonely
country farmhouse, light glowing brightly.
Then a man in, I kid you not, a red
Satin smoking jacket comes out and waves.
I think he's waving to me, and wave back,
But it's a garage opener and out of the dark
A door rises, lit like a museum,
A car, glittering white and chrome beauty,
It was a 1954 Mercedes.
A Gull-Wing. You ever heard of them?
I think they only made ten of them.
Its doors lift up like a gull in flight.
I bet it was worth a million dollars.
I ask, "Are you going to take that out?"
"Oh, no, we just got back from Jamaica
I want a jump to make sure it's ok."
It starts like a dream, purrs dangerously.
"Oh good," he says and walks away, waving
his arm to close the door, never saying
a word, left me standing there in the snow.

Coats
by Jane Kenyon

I saw him leaving the hospital
with a woman's coat over his arm.
Clearly she would not need it.
The sunglasses he wore could not
conceal his wet face, his bafflement.

As if in mockery the day was fair,
and the air mild for December. All the same
he had zipped his own coat and tied
the hood under his chin, preparing
for irremediable cold.

karotsamused here.

So.

The apartment, ne, Cozy Home, is a wonderful warm place with only one limitation.
It seems we blow a fuse if we run the toaster oven and microwave at the same time, and the fridge happens to kick on.

We did it for the first time last week, when one of our landlords was close by to flip the fuse for us, and leave us completely confused as to how he made the lights come back. But we were joyful.

Tonight, the error was repeated, by my beautiful little Mexican.

I, being intrepid and more fully clothed, called the landlord and was told that the folks that run the liquor store downstairs have a key to the big cage what holds the fuse boxes.
So I trekked downstairs, explained the situation, was laughed with at with by the proprietors, and given a key.

Upon entering said cage what holds the fuse boxes, I found that there were. Um. Lots of them. Also water meters. So I called Rune and made her put on pants and bring me a flashlight.

We toodled around for a bit, trying to figure things out, then gave up and called the landlord again.

I think we really freaked her out.

Run decided it was a good idea to just start pulling levers. Especially the big, rusted one that didn't look like it had been pulled ever.

"My thought process was: If you pull the lever, the box will open!"

Once it got pulled? The light in the stairwell went out. ... Ah.

Cue Handsome Neighbor A. He lives in apartment number two, and was the only other person around to notice that all. The power. For the entire. Floor. Went. Out.

This is about the time where I am laughing madly and explaining exactly what's going on to the landlady.
I had a feeling Rune shouldn't have pulled that switch. Once we flipped it back up, the lights came back on. Yay!

By this time the landlord was resigned and in hysterics all at once. The language barrier is occasionally quite interesting in our neck of the woods.

But uh. I assured her everything was fine, and she heard other people laughing, and we haven't gotten any more frantic phone calls. :D

I returned the key to the liquor store guys, Handsome Neighbor A laughed good-naturedly and assured us he'd done it a bijillion times, and we all went upstairs.

The lights in the Cozy Home? Still out.

Cue me running back down to The Cage and jimmying it open (on account of it didn't really close in the first place :B ) and flipping the fuse.

A few times.
Ah.

About then Hansome Neighbor A, being the good man that he is, came down to make sure the cage had locked.

Me: Hey, wait! I'm still in here!
HNA: What? What are you doing? Is it still out?!
Me: Yeah! D: D: D:
HNA: ... *comes in* *flips switch* *flips it again*
Rune: *on phone* OMG THE LIGHTS ARE ON :D
Me: ... <3
HNA: :D

So we went upstairs again and now are in the process of resetting the clocks.

We love you, Daylight Savings Time.