Morning Must-Do List (Day 365 at Painted Rock Creations)
- Wear impenetrable armor to prevent the How-In-The-World-Did-You-Get-This-Job-Managers (HITWDYGTJ-M) from detecting my actual flaws.
- Google what to wear to make walking, sitting, and walking away easier to do when you’re wearing a shield on your body and mind.
- Eat a protein bar (or several) like I am starving during the morning team meeting to stop myself from opening my mouth to say that any intelligent, forward-thinking person would see the HITWDYGTJ-M’s ideas to purchase cheap plastic rocks won’t work.
- Cancel my hair appointment so that my long strands will continue to hide my eyes that roll during meetings.
- Send an email to my boss (and cc myself) that gives him ideas that will work like hiring artists to create templates for new looks, if that’s what they want.
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I hate the sea. At school someone said there’s under-ocean canyons deeper than ten cathedrals, full of cold and starving things with mouths that can open wider than their own bodies and fins with glowing bits they use to seek you out. They just stay at the bottom, waiting for drowned things to sink. I can’t imagine going down, down, into the heavy darkness, and watching these little lights getting closer and closer, and knowing what’s behind them. I can’t think of that.
They won’t have missed the lantern in the shop. They’ve got loads of them, cheap things, only paper, with a thin card platform underneath holding a tea-candle. So I don’t feel too guilty about nicking it, even though Mr. and Mrs. Chang are really nice.…
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On my white windowsill
among dainty tea cups,
a ceramic bird house, a
blue and white vase from France,
lies something dead.
As he flew past, for it is an insect,
was he dazzled by these objets
d’art as he sought to free himself
from the confines of the house?
The crane fly is a beauty
has he procreated already?
He lies folded up like an
origami soldier,
diaphanous wings at rest.
A body so slender
you wonder how
all the parts fit inside.…
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Baudelaire is, without a doubt, a father of the prose poem form in contemporary writing. Yes, prose poems existed long, long before, notably in the Bible’s “Psalms Of David.” There are other historical examples as well. But for all practical purposes, one thinks of Baudelaire who made prose poems an accepted style with the publication of Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil) in 1857.
Recently, I read one of Baudelaire’s prose poems, “The Old Woman’s Despair,” in which an aging woman tries, unsuccessfully, to admire a newborn baby boy. As the woman approaches the baby, she is shocked that the baby sees her and begins to wail, as though frightened or repulsed by the old woman. The result is that the woman suddenly has a sad epiphany about being old and decrepit, and of no longer being able to please.…
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for Anne Sexton
A boat in the garage, one last sail, one last row. Inside out finished, words through the seam, bedlam in grey and green.
Those matches never blew out the darkness. Never lit the street, never lit the dream. Never dammed the beckoning sea. The vessel. The tethered boat at the edge. Never sealed the fracture, the malacia, the fault between role and creator.
The lapping Charles calls one final, fifth time. Hysteria sets in, welcome in this place, manic in this space, carbon monoxide the elixir. Red cells swim like fish back and forth, at last the awful row.
A boat in the garage, one last sail, one last row. One final, fifth time.
– Ti Sumner
Author’s Note: I wrote “46 Anne” in response to Anne Sexton’s poem “45 Mercy Street.”…
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Affixed to your bedpost was
some mask I had made you
for Halloween maybe three years
ago, before I started to
scare you and before
I ruined holidays and important dates
and made you want to start
taking down all of your calendars
and reminders from your walls.
I spent an entire afternoon
thinking of you and of the sentimental
value in making something by hand
that would coincidentally outlast
our relationship,
and I got very caught up in the music
I had on and how much I
adored you,
and that the mask looked
sort of silly in the end,
like someone much younger had
been painting and adding shapes,
though it was coming from
a part of me only you came to understand.…
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My father used to drown family dogs in the lake on our property. When the dog would get too old, beyond its years of usefulness, he would take it on one last walk across the fields.
He was not a cruel or punitive man; when asked, my father would explain that the reason he did what he did was that “the old boy’s taking up space and don’t do nothin’ for us anymore” and “we only got so much and can’t afford to waste a thing” and “it’s better to put it out of its misery.”
“If we got a new puppy, what would it eat? Where would it sleep?” He’d say.
Rationale aside, I never slept well the night after a drowning.
Every drowning was the same, almost ritualistic.…
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