Hi! This year (2022), I’ve decided 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!
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support.
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.
Hi! This year (2022), I’ve decided 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!
What kind of person does that?A person person.
What kind of person does that though, really?
A person.
That’s not an answer. That’s a nothing answer. It’s just an answer you don’t want to hear.
If you know that, why’d you say it then?
I didn’t know it until I said it. That’s how life works. We don’t know things. Look, the other day, my sister told me on the phone that she shakes after she has a colonoscopy. She’s old now and she’s had three. Every time she has one, she shakes and shakes when she gets home, almost collapses into bed. She’s fine the next morning. Her daughter’s a nurse administrator, and she told her that it was the anesthesia. But I think that’s not what’s happening.
What do you think is happening?
I think her body is remembering things she worked hard to forget.
But why do people do that?
At our dad’s funeral, a man showed up, and I heard her whispering to her husband the same thing I was whispering to my daughter, which was “Oh my God, why is he here?” We were talking with the same moan about the same man.
Who was he?
A man.
Who really was he though?
All his friends called him Uncle Hal, the kiddie’s pal.
And he was at your dad’s funeral?
They were friends.
But why do people do that?
Because the body remembers things the brain tries to forget. The moans become men become memory stuck inside of us, impacted, curled away. My sister hates having those procedures not just because they are invasive and it’s weird having people studying your rectum. She hates it the most because of the shaking afterwards. She told me that night that sometimes she worries it will never stop. I didn’t have the heart to tell her.
Tell her what?
That it never does.
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support.
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.
Because she’s not some drugged up doper or anything like that, but shivers have taken control of her whole entire body because it’s cold, cold, cold in Bar Harbor, Maine and it isn’t even winter yet.
Because she’s huddled behind the dumpster outside of Geddy’s. There’s a giant lobster claw at the front part of the restaurant and a massive moose on top of the ceiling because that’s what gets the tourists. Fake moose. Broiled monster lobster claws, red with death and sprinkled with white Christmas lights.
Because it gets to be too much, huddling there against the cold and the sun’s rising over the Porcupine Islands, so she gets up. She gets up and she heads out to the wharf where all the lobstermen tie up their skiffs, so they can get out to their moorings. The wharf’s not much of anything really, just a lot of pilings holding up a parking lot and then there’s some docks holding the skiffs. WE get
Because she runs out there because sometimes no matter how cold you are, running makes you warmer. It only works until you stop, though. When you stop running, the sweat against your skin turns you even colder. That’s why she usually don’t stop running.
Because she does today. She does today because today she is cold, cold, cold all the way into her capillaries. Today she is cold, cold, cold all the way into the roots of her teeth.
Because it’s not winter.
Because it will only get colder.
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support.
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.
Hi! This year (2022), I’ve decided 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!
King Kong Trolls
The self-appointed
writer-guru
on Substack
with four-
thousand
devotees
to his biweekly
missives
has decided
there are
no
more
geniuses,
really,
not any
more.
Someone
needs
to tell him
that he
just doesn’t
know
where to look.
The geniuses
aren’t banging
their chests,
King-Kong like
in their glory
despite being
ground dwellers,
telling the world,
“Look at me! Look
at me as I roar
and pontificate.”
They are the
discarded,
dreaming,
creating,
thinking
outside
the main
streams
of
plagiarized
discourse,
unnoticed
beneath
the giant
feet of
oversized
apes
capturing
all the attention
as our culture
dangles
from
their
plump,
hairy
digits.
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support.
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.
Hi! This year (2022), I’ve decided 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!
Loneliness
He is known as he enters the emergency room, jeans sagging off his waist as an orderly ambles
To meet him. He is hunching at the precipice between lobby and hall, intake and bathroom, and
Ready to be seen. It is hard to be seen these days in a little Maine town full of tourists
If you are Old. It is only easy right here, right now, in the liminal space before becoming
A patient. We watch him totter, trying to decide. Go in? Stay out? Become
Or remain. Before we arrived here ourselves for broken bones; children who gulped down
Their own therapies in too many numbers; corneas scratched by tree limbs; we had to make
Those decisions, too. Did we want to save ourselves or should we just embrace
That all we are is pain and numbness and pain? We came, but others didn’t.
We sought help. And waited and waited for it, looking at our origins in heart beats
And blood levels, skeletons pinned and set straight again, stomachs pumped,
Eyes numbed with drops we are told not to get addicted to. In his room now, just curtains
For walls, the hunched man yells, Hello. No answer to his polite entreaty. Hello. Hello.
There is no easy cure for him. Hello. He gives up, changes tactics, and bellows. I have to pee.
WordPress won’t really allow me to format this the way I’d like so I’ll show you a screenshot of how it is meant to be.
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support.
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.
That goes all the way around the ship, even on the outside.
I feel like I’m on that every day, just going down.
Hey. Is that your puppy eating something?
I tell him, She chews at the roots of things, too.
Every day.
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support.
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.
Hi! This year (2022), I’ve decided 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!
The Retouch
They take me
And blot away all the flaws.
A sun spot becomes plain flesh.
A wrinkle vanishes.
The eraser moves over my whole image.
Sometimes I wonder if there is any me left.
In college, a poetry teacher insisted
We could not write about baseball hats
Or dolphins and I still wonder if manatees
Are allowed, poems about commodity cheese,
Trailers, dog farts. Or is still only proper subjects?
Why is it that we all try to erase
The deepest parts of our hidden centers,
Hardnesses that refuse to be blurred out
In image or word.
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support.
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.
Hi! This year (2022), I’ve decided 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!
So, this week I’ve decided to read one of my grandmother’s poems instead. Full disclosure: I have a lot of grandmothers and they are all dead and this one was about 4’10 at maximum height and this grandmother was already 75 when I was born.
Luckily, she lived a long time so I got to know her. But her poems? They were hidden away and only brought out when my little hobbit dad begged her to see them. It was rare. She, like me, was pretty fearful about sharing her poems and her art.
But art and communication and thought isn’t meant to be hidden away, is it? So here’s to Grammy and here’s to being brave.
Grammy Barnard Poem #2
March 11, 1927
A Wish
Love, she goes hand in hand with spring,
To thoughts of this girl then you will cling,
Go dear, and to her tell,
Of the desire you have in her heart to dwell,
Tell her while sweet spring is here,
Tell her while she still is near,
Tell her of moonlight, tell her of flowers,
Tell her of love, and its wondrous powers.
Hey, thanks for listening to Carrie Does Poems. These podcasts and more writing tips are at Carrie’s website, carriejonesbooks.blog. There’s also a donation button there. Even a dollar inspires a happy dance in Carrie, so thank you for your support.
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.
