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.
While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every other weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!
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.
While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every other weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!
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.
While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every other weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!
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!
"Bored and aching, I just wanted someone to love me."
We were visiting Mom’s best friend,
An aunt who wasn’t an aunt,
She taught school, the job my mother dreamed of
Before unplanned babies and rushed marriage
Turned her life into breaths clutching
At meaning. The ladies stayed inside with coffee
Laced with Kahlua and words steaming
At the edges of truths while I walked to the lake,
My body lurching forward. Last child by so many years
Made me a lonely only and I started singing
To the waves and the trees. The water-stained boards
Of their dock made me think of mermaids and tears.
Bored and aching, I just wanted someone to love me.
This is why I am a poet.
The dog emerged from the woods to the right,
A Doberman. One of Mom’s men friends
Had a dog like this. I reached my arms open, hugging the air
And the dog bounded into them. From the deck of the house,
My mother screamed, Carrie! No!
Bored and aching, I just wanted someone to love me.
This is why I exist.
What are you? I whispered to the dog as her tail wagged
And tongue lapped my face.
When the grown-ups came running out, the dog shifted,
Guarding me from their strange worries about credit and affairs,
Husbands who might find things out, children they left
Behind them, coughing and clinging to life.
They implored me to come with them. My hand ran
Along the dog’s fur and for the first time,
I felt powerful. I found a dog, I yelled, but she really found me.
The water clung to her fur the way I wanted to cling on
To that moment. Could she have really heard me wanting,
Singing need and loneliness into the waves and trunks
Of crooked spruce trees, my sadness hooking lines into the granite
That gave our state its name? Someone’s husband
Convinced them the dog meant me no harm. She didn’t.
Dogs never did. They still never do.
Bored and aching, I just wanted someone to love me.
This is why.
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.
While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every other weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!
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.
While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every other weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!
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!
"Celebrity"
Your life could be hated so much.
Once celebrated, you must know the joy—never.
Sitting by the sky’s vastness,
Listening to the screams
Hitting you. You must remember
To open your arms and tumble to Earth
And see if anyone embraces your bones, ascends;
Sometimes we feel like skeletons.
Ligaments, muscles, neurons barely holding it together.
We make so many into angels, waiting
For the fall.
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.
While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every other weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!
There was recently a piece by a lawyer/poet critiquing a younger, more celebritified (we made up that word) poet that caused a bit of an uproar for multiple reasons.
Here’s the thing: Just because a poem doesn’t speak to you or your ‘idea’ of what a poem is doesn’t mean that it’s not a poem or that the person who wrote it isn’t a poet.
One man writing about one woman doesn’t get to decide that woman is or isn’t an artist or a poet no matter how adamantly he digs in his heels. One liberal doesn’t get to decide that about a conservative or vice versa. We shouldn’t think we have the power to label or un-label another person.
Being a critic doesn’t mean you have to be an asshole.
It isn’t just people on the internet though.
We were walking our puppy, Pogie, and our older dog, Sparty, this weekend, and a woman Carrie often tries to avoid stopped to talk.
The woman said that we needed to take our chunky, arthritic Sparty on more walks so he could lose some weight. She has no idea how many walks Sparty goes on. Disclosure: It’s more than it seems.
Next, she looked at our newly painted blue stairs and said, “Oh, that white splotch is still there. That’s been there forever.”
Then she gave our chubby dog a dog treat. A couple actually. Yes, the same woman who told us we needed to walk him more to lose weight.
Here’s another thing: Being observant doesn’t mean you have to be an asshole either. People don’t need to be celebrities for other people to want to take them down, to criticize, to refuse to say one positive thing.
In this world? It’s so easy to criticize each other, to snark, to deride.
But just because something is easy doesn’t mean that it’s right.
You know what’s hard? It’s finding bits of good in people that have given up on themselves and finding good in people who others have given up on, too. Yeah, it’s so much harder than just criticizing, but you don’t evolve if you don’t do the hard stuff.
And evolving? That’s sexy.
We all think we’re good people. I’m sure that woman walking her dog does. I bet that angry poetry critic and political pundit does.
But here’s the question for all of us: When was the last time we helped someone who was having a hard time?
Here’s another question: When was the last time you ignored someone when they were doing poorly?
Did you criticize their dog, how often they walk them. Did you say, “The blue of your front steps is nice?” Or did you just say, “Oh, that white splotch is still there?” Did you write an essay about how a young Black woman in her early twenties was not a ‘poet,’ and how her poetry, her voice, had no merit?
Authentic leadership and character requires lifting as we climb, not stomping on people below us so hard that they are dragging themselves through the dirty ground or yanking people above us off the ladder so forcibly that they break bones and spirit in their fall.
Nurturing other people’s talents even when it’s hard to see those talents? It’s a skill. It’s leadership. It’s what being a good person is about.
Lifting as you climb is more than a slogan; it’s a way of life. And it’s a good one.
Topple as you ignore? Stomp as you criticize? Doesn’t really work quite so well.
We are all human. We are all flawed, but we are all capable of so much more. Let’s help each other achieve those great things, the great selves we’re capable of.
We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook.
Carrie is reading one of her poems every week on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That’s a lot!
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!
No one wants to admit that the moment they are home alone,
They start singing show tunes or childhood hits,
Pretending the crowds are adoring as they slide in socks across a hard wood floor
That isn’t actually a stage and there is no TikTok video being made.
Only we, random humans with our ridiculous bodies,
All gangling and bulbous, opposable thumbs a highlight
Want to be famous in secret—so many dreams sung off-key
Into the space of the kitchen, the only audience the dogs
Since the cats wisely look away.
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.
While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every other weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!
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.
While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every other weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!
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!
This poem is (I think) part of me delving into a character of a young adult novel work in progress.
Spring
My nerves are jangled, frayed.
Panic touches the under layers
of all my skin, and I take off,
breezing past Jackie and Joe
in as fast a walk as I’m capable of
without actually running.
“I’m out of here.”
I announce this
like I’m some kind of bad ass.
Spoiler: I am not a bad ass.
If I was a bad ass, I wouldn’t write poems under a pseudonym;
I’d be able to pass a damn driver’s test.
“How are you going to get home?” Jackie calls after me.
“I’ll walk.”
“It’s five miles,” she yells.
“Just go to work. I’m fine.”
And that’s it; that’s as much yelling back through the halls that I’m capable of. I’ve turned a corner and am pounding down the stairs, hanging onto the handrail as I go down, down, down even though the bannister is probably covered in germs from everyone else hanging onto it. I let go and unbalance hits me.
This world is pain.
This world is me
lacking balance.
This…
I am two seconds away from crying as I move past people and push through the doors. The outside air is a little cold. Spring has barely sprung. But it’s full of promise, normally, the smell of dirt losing its frozen solid nature, the buds on the trees popping through the tiniest twiggy limbs.
Branches.
They aren’t limbs.
They are branches.
“I don’t know how to exist,” I whisper as I start walking.
“I don’t know how to exist in all this life.”
There you go. That’s the thing.
I don’t know how to exist in this life.
I don’t know how to survive in this life.
How do I spring?
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.
While Carrie only posts poems weekly here, she has them (in written form) almost every other weekday over on Medium. You should check it out!
