i think people forget that its ok to like some bad music. everyone likes bad music. and not all shallow music is bad. yeah sure maybe this song about partying is just about partying but so what. people at parties probably want good party songs. like if your top song on spotify is one of the latest pop hits theres literally nothing wrong with that. its messed up that people get all high and mighty about listening to weevil and the heebiejeebies or whatever while shitting on some other person for liking mainstream artists.
i wasn't supposed to write about roses or blood or silver, about hearts or wings or galaxies; my teacher used to press her hands, firmly, to the top of our poetry stacks and beg us - love different. she was bored of it. i'd go home and write something with each of her off-limits words, emboldened by spite.
for a stint of time, i was a reader for a poetry magazine, shifting through thousands of submitted writings, each hopefully printed onto my tiny laptop screen for next-submission-viewing. one editor had a pile where we would put all the poems with parsnips or cauliflower, one pile for long-thin emergency rants that devolved into a blank scream, one pile for mentions of belladonna and chartreuse - for a whole year, i'd go to bed hearing chartreuse and silver and cities playing in my head in calligraphy. every three months, the beautiful public eye would become just-fascinated by pretty things. unusual, beautiful monstrosities. one winter, all about daises. the next, a fascination with posies. i watched the world spin from catching love in language to the same five phrases - help, it's ending, i'm alone, help, it's dark here, come home, help -
later, as an english teacher, i saw patterns. every semester, one million essays about four specific things. it wasn't pretty enough to be a teachable moment: the content they wanted to discuss was all extremely violent; a broken anthem of climate change and constantly being videoed is destroying us. i would wake up shaking, worried their visions were prophetic, soon-to-be-true. selfish, i couldn't handle the constant semester-to-semester panic they scribbled into six paragraphs, MLA-formatted text. read the world is ending fifty times every month; sob to your therapist i'm not doing enough, tell your students: please, no more violence, i don't have the right stomach.
each one seemed the same poem: we're dying, and nobody is coming to save us.
there are very few celebration poems these days. i want to rest my hand on a stack of poems about love in big red wings. love in a jacket, standing under an open galaxy. love written on the bicep, in an anatomically correct heart, with an arrow shot through the center so you can see the pink viscera of surviving a wound - so you know that even permanent tattoos are permeable. blood on the snout of a newborn lamb. silver rings around the pink scales of a pigeon's leg, and love with her hand around the ribs of a bird. i want to read boring essays about lunch. about which video games run the best graphics. about carnivals. about love in big cliche terms: standing in a garden of parsnips, clutching daises to her chest, eating raw meat over the body of a rich man.
i want to open the poetry magazine and have pages of sonnets about bluebells. about survival. about a mundane, beautiful spring. about sitting with your dog on a front porch, writing without spite, happily toying with the idea of ice cream.
my student sends me an email. i know you said to write about what brings you joy. but nothing really makes me happy these days. i don't know what i'm doing.
I wish- I wish I could explain to everyone who wasn't there the pure adrenaline rush of watching all your fav dsmp members logging on nov 16th like an hour early, they're running around doing last minute check ups on their gear and trying to figure out who the traitor is and then, almost on queue, Fundy light-heartedly remarks "let's hope Wilbur overslept" and then you get a twitch notification: "Wilbur Soot: smithereens"
I finally watched The Sound of Music and like I get it now, I get it.
It’s a beautiful two hour love story of a strict man finally opening his heart again and then a fifty minute public service announcement to hate the nazis. Brilliant.