Chaos Like a Motherfucker

Close your eyes.

Take the stuff out of your hands.

Listen.

That's how Jim starts. As a junior, I heard these words and scoffed internally. I was much too cool. (News flash, Sammi. You're a fucking loser.) So I watched and waited, turning my head left and right. Are these kids actually closing their eyes? Really? Oh my god. How could they be caught doing such a weird thing? It felt like church. Kneel, clasp your hands, pray. But Jim spoke despite my haughtiness. I closed my eyes in an act of conformity. But when I did, there was the poem in front of me. Not particularly long, but red, definitely red. Sweet and arching, stretching across the horizon of my mind. This, I decided, would be my church.

***

You might be able to tell, but if not, I'm telling you I spent the weekend at the Champlain College Young Writers' Conference (CCYWC). I hadn't written poetry in like maybe two or three forevers so I was pretty much quitting writing indefinitely. That's a lie, but momentum is important in writing. Difficult to maintain, easy to lose. Anyway, I went to the writer's conference and I wrote. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. I actually appreciated my notebook. I stared at, willing the words to appear on the page, which turned out to be an entirely ineffective method. I learned that in order for words to exist, they must be created--combined and coerced into collaboration. (Us millennials have no idea how such "arcane" technology works.) Beyond this discovery, I found the words, ideas, pieces, poems, babblings to be of a slightly greater than terrible quality. They were almost, like, good, or something? I liked my writing? The words I wrote didn't make me cringe when I read them ten minutes later.

In one craft session called Translating from English to English, we were given a copy of "Child" by Sylvia Plath (included at the bottom) and told to rearrange it, tear it apart, contradict its every assertion and create something new.

I.

my cloudy blindness is one of many ugly lackings
I reject gray geese,
the extinction of the old

the negated existence you ignore
December rainflake, colonist's cigarette
gargantuan

wrinkled stub
empty bath, blank
never meant to be illustrious

This troublous
clapping of eyelids, bright
sky filled with stars

II.

beautiful eyes
fill, wringing

meditate--want, should be

names:
Your
You
I--wrinkle

hands stalk dark images


So I did that and then I wrote a lot of prose. We read this poem called "Pluto Shits on the Universe" by Fatimah Asghar (included at the bottom), which was awesome, and then wrote a response.

Literature, we assume, is unchanging. There is Wordsworth and Emerson and Shakespeare. They are white and male and, therefore, their words are defining. The writers who follow, we assume, because we are told, are white and straight and male, and therefore defining. But Pluto "realigned the cosmos," creating beautiful change. The western literary canon "tried to order [Pluto]... tried to make [her] follow rules," said if she didn't how could she be a planet? But to Pluto, your day is "an asswipe. a sniffle. Your day is barely the start of [her] sunset." She is more than you. Pluto--not white, not male--redefined and "realigned the cosmos." She "shook the sky" and when she "broke your" straight, white, male "solar system," she opened a new sky, and "the sky is blue-gold: the freedom of possibility." Robert Frost said, "Writing poetry without rhyme or meter is like playing tennis without a net." Bu I know what Pluto would say: "Fuck your net."


Then I came home and some asshole took out my wisdom teeth, so now I'm dumb. But I wrote another thing, which is part of a longer piece of prose I've been working on. So here's that.

Amy put the office phone to her ear, pressed the number nine, and took a deep breath before punching in Ed’s number. The phone rang and rang and went to voicemail. Hi, you’ve reached Ed. Leave your name and number and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. She didn’t bother to leave a message. Phone tag is the only way to talk to Eddy. She’d call him. He wouldn’t answer, but ten minutes later, when he looked at his phone, he’d ring back immediately. Amy pushed back from her desk, her brain turning from James, the bastard, to Ed. In high school, Ed partied. Amy, programmed to be overprotective, always either accompanied him or picked him up afterwards. He’d call from Angie’s or Calli’s or Margaret’s and she would get out of bed, one in the morning, and drive halfway across town. Ed would stumble out the front door and clumsily clamber into her passenger seat. His drunken rants were famous, always almost eloquent and, if nothing else, consistently interesting. Funny and almost insightful. During Amy’s senior year, Ed called. “Hey, Amy. I… Can you come get me? I wanna go home.” She didn’t remember the house but when Ed opened the door to her car, he was crying. Big, sloppy tears complemented with a stuffy nose, which he blew into drive-through napkins from her glove compartment. Amy didn’t say anything. He fiddled with the radio, putting on something slow and calm and low. The night gathered around them and the only light seemed to come from the headlights. It pooled in front of them, an unreachable mirage. Amy’s tires chased the light and Eddy stared out his window. A cemetery appeared on their right—a cliché of fog and eeriness. After a moment, Amy heard Eddy stop breathing entirely and then his breath returned in a heavy rush. She glanced at him quickly. His face with covered in darkness, but she heard him sniffle. “I—I just,” he started. Amy asked if he was okay. “I was looking,” he said. “I was looking at the grave stones and I just thought, holy shit. One day, that’ll be me, ya know. And I felt hollow, like there was nothing inside of me. And hot and cold, like the whole inside of my hollow body was hot and cold. And I thought, holy shit, that’s gonna be me one day and what the fuck am I gonna do ‘til then, Amy? Like, am I gonna get married or have kids or like, am I ever gonna get a job? We’re dying, Amy. We’re dying. What the fuck am I gonna do ‘til then.” Amy’s foot had automatically tapped the brake, slowing and stopping next to the cemetery.

“C’mon, Eddy,” she said. “Calm down. This is what happens when you drink.” Amy rolled her eyes, trying to quell his fears, but she knew this wasn’t what happened when he drank. He was drunk, she knew, but this was just Eddy.

“Listen to me, Amy,” he pleaded. “Look at them. They’re there and we’re here and one day we’ll be there but that’s the only thing that’s not moving. Think about everything else, it’s like, something you need to like, figure out. Like everything is a question and on the other side of the that fence is the answer.” His head turned to face Amy, but he didn’t look at her, but, rather, through her.

“Eddy,” Amy’s voice was soft and quiet; she hoped her tone felt like a warm hand on his shoulder, on top of his head.

“Yeah, Aims?” The air stagnated around the hearts of the still and silent living. Amy knew if they sat there too long, became another unmoving thing, looking at and through each other with their pool of unreachable light guiding their short ride, there would be no chance for decision or question. They would be determined. She knew they would be dead with no babies or spouses or jobs. Societal conformity or not—no matter how much they moved, or didn’t move—eventually they would stop. Just hollow existences—simultaneously hot and cold—who only needed one answer.

“C’mon Eddy. Let’s go home. Mom will start to wonder where we are.” But her eyes didn’t budge; they peered, through Eddy, through the window, through the metal fence, through the eerie fog and into the future.

“Yeah, okay.”

***

Anyway, that was CCYWC. I tried to type all of this with a bag of ice on my face. Have a good week.

"My heart is my armor

she's the tear in my heart

she's a carver

she's a butcher with a smile

cut me farther

than I've ever been"

"Child"
Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.
I want to fill it with color and ducks,
The zoo of the new

Whose name you meditate -
April snowdrop, Indian pipe
Little

Stalk without wrinkle,
Pool in which images
Should be grand and classical

Not this troublous
Wringing of hands, this dark
Ceiling without a star.


"Pluto Shits on the Universe"

On February 7, 1979, Pluto crossed over Neptune’s orbit and became the eighth planet from the sun for twenty years. A study in 1988 determined that Pluto’s path of orbit could never be accurately predicted. Labeled as “chaotic,” Pluto was later discredited from planet status in 2006.

Today, I broke your solar system. Oops.
My bad. Your graph said I was supposed
to make a nice little loop around the sun.

Naw.

I chaos like a motherfucker. Ain’t no one can
chart me. All the other planets, they think
I’m annoying. They think I’m an escaped
moon, running free.

Fuck your moon. Fuck your solar system.
Fuck your time. Your year? Your year ain’t
shit but a day to me. I could spend your
whole year turning the winds in my bed. Thinking
about rings and how Jupiter should just pussy
on up and marry me by now. Your day?

That’s an asswipe. A sniffle. Your whole day
is barely the start of my sunset.

My name means hell, bitch. I am hell, bitch. All the cold
you have yet to feel. Chaos like a motherfucker.
And you tried to order me. Called me ninth.
Somewhere in the mess of graphs and math and compass
you tried to make me follow rules. Rules? Fuck your
rules. Neptune, that bitch slow. And I deserve all the sun
I can get, and all the blue-gold sky I want around me.

It is February 7th, 1979 and my skin is more
copper than any sky will ever be. More metal.
Neptune is bitch-sobbing in my rearview,
and I got my running shoes on and all this sky that’s all mine.

Fuck your order. Fuck your time. I realigned the cosmos.
I chaosed all the hell you have yet to feel. Now all your kids
in the classrooms, they confused. All their clocks:
wrong. They don’t even know what the fuck to do.
They gotta memorize new songs and shit. And the other
planets, I fucked their orbits. I shook the sky. Chaos like
a motherfucker.

It is February 7th, 1979. The sky is blue-gold:
the freedom of possibility.

Today, I broke your solar system. Oops. My bad.

Abby strikes a pose

Duncan does a dramatic reading of Green Eggs and Ham

Geof Hewitt AKA Nicki Minaj