Hi! This year (2023), I’m continuing my quest to share a poem on my blog and podcast and read it aloud. It’s all a part of my quest to be brave and apparently the things that I’m scared about still include:
- My spoken voice
- My raw poems.
Thanks for being here with me and cheering me on, and I hope that you can become braver this year, too!
For Anne & Maxine
Why is it that the dead
Never listen to my pillow talk?
I am tired, but can’t sleep
Again and again and again.
You snore next to me
And occasionally twitch
As the dog snuggles in between us,
Released from her crate
Because she cries so much.
Again and again and again,
Why is that my whines
Never wake anyone up?
Not even myself.
Ode To Another Nightingale “My heart aches,” he says as if that will change her mind. He quotes Keats, memorizes it the way others memorize song lyrics, drunk, but not on hemlock or an opiate. Drunk one minute and the next. Keats is not pretentious enough a poet to impress someone who sings with dryads and serves dark and stormies every night at the Whale. “Keats is bullshit,” she tells him. “All litanies of bullshit. Have you ever heard a nightingale sing?” It’s like beatboxing, machine guns, not some trembling, deep-voiced opera serenading you. It’s more like a car alarm telling you someone has come too close, someone is trying to get closer, someone . . . The bird is named after men, of course, men who sing late into the night, men who pine with loneliness and drink with bitterness. A nightingale gurgles. A man trills. They both whistle. He doesn’t impress her with his heartache lines, his odes. “Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget,” she tells him. And after another drink, he does.
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems.
The music you hear is made available through the creative commons and it’s a bit of a shortened track from the fantastic Eric Van der Westen and the track is called “A Feather” and off the album The Crown Lobster Trilogy.
