Paranoid reflections
Another (very short) poem that began on Twitter and was reworked when I realized that the last line was, by mistake, a total lipogram.
I get defensive next to those who don’t know they’re unlike me
Turning my cheek before they see how close they come to strike me.
No blood is drawn so I think that should work out, good and dandy.
But I don’t know if I’m too proud or too much of a pansy.
Twitter poem–expanded
Sometimes I Tweet in rhymed couplets. Usually just, like, four lines at a time. More cryptic than specific.
Today I started doing that. Then it kind of grew. And grew. Until the point (I’ll leave it to you to guess which) where I was like “no, this is too much for other people’s news feeds/enough for a blog post.”
I still say “bleep no” in my head and wince
Without movement. Though it has been years since
I took you seriously, didn’t laugh.
In spite of all of this, gaffe after gaffe.
How often does a generation splinter
But reform after mourning in the winter?
Or, how crowded was my bandwagon stop
Subtracting out for everyone who’d drop
Off in the years to follow, years of loss?
Every pause, every station, there’s a cross,
An intersection, way to transfer off.
There is no shortage of reasons to scoff.
Sometimes we blow a lead. We sigh. We rage.
Sometimes the newsmakers make the front page.
We roll our eyes with distance and with shame,
Far more then when we lose another game.
Another question I haven’t quite reckoned.
Why do I feel the need to write in second
Person? Two lines per rhyme and three per tweet.
The hemiola pushes me on, feet
By feet. On the one hand, I can disguise
Specifics with “yous” instead of the “I”s.
It’s like a trite love song with a trite chorus.
For people like me, the same lyrics bore us.
But if I say some you has made me sad,
It’s so generic that everyone’s had
Something similar, even if distinct.
But when our thoughts are trendy enough, linked,
Then all the world is saying the same thing.
And what more use can my tossed-off words bring?
I don’t want to be a bandwagon-rider;
At least when I’m an absolute outsider
I know no fellow fans will speak for me
And get me wrong. But who is left to be?
A generation fades into the past
Step by stop. Someone has to come in last
Be the end of that season, of that group.
Of course, in Chicago, the train lines loop.
Giants 21, Patriots 17
I don’t remember how many football fields I’ve ever seen. I could come up with a decent guess for in-person, but what about over the screen?
They are standardized, the white yard lines (which never, from my seat, look a yard apart, always more like feet) drawn on top of the green.
I’ve stood on a long but narrow lawn, and tried remembering (“How far away were you from the stage? Imagine a football field.”) And although
I know they’re supposed to be a unit, when it comes down to gauging with them in my head, I have to shrug and say “No, I don’t really know.”
But after misused timeouts allow the clock to tick along at what is for football an unusually clockesque pace, the last drive comes at last.
They zoom out. And though I don’t care who wins, the distance from the fifty-yard line or somewhere to the endzone has never looked so vast.
