fallen verses

Silence is so much stronger at night,
As if the day has noise just from its light.
Flick the switch and it becomes a tomb
and the sound of a heartbeat is cause for fright

Silence lasts so much longer at night-
the wind is unseen, but still felt
on the skin and dimly dead leaves take flight.

The day is full of noise and of light.
Prattling voices crescendo in the distance-
I shut the window, close the drapes and hide.

The clearest silence is found at night
And I keep my house open to its echoes-
Oh your voice, your voice… No. Only the quiet.

But then the day is noise and a shifting light-
I wonder how to trust something so inconstant.
Inevitability calls for surrender. There still might…

Yes! Twilight carries victory and the silence of night.
I wait though it may be an eternal post
At this border of worlds and of lights.

Quite a large number of people find this site by searching for “How to break up with your girlfriend.” I doubt everyone is looking for this, and the search term, “creative ways to break up with your girlfriend” was a definitive answer (that people are looking for a how-to). I have broken up with a few girlfriends and I have some thoughts on both “how to” and “creative ways” which I will happily, if perplexedly, share.

Also, I know that a large percentage of my readers who read this site because I post interesting things are women. Please, feel free to comment and help these guys who are desperately searching for help.

Certain truths

There are some things you should keep in mind when breaking up with your girlfriend.

1. Breaking up is hard to do. Cliche as it is, it’s true. Presumably for a relationship to have gotten to the stage where there is some question about method of break-up, it was serious enough that you probably care about her and she you. It’s emotionally painful, even if it is the right thing, to hurt someone.
2. You will be the shithead. There is no way around this one. You’re intentionally hurting someone, even if it is the right thing to do. Deal.

Those truths being understood, there are more-shitheady ways, and less-shitheady ways.

Tom’s “preferred” method

I prefer a face-to-face in-person talk if that is possible. In a public but not exposed location. No one wants to break down into tears in front of a crowd of strangers, but privacy could be detrimental (to your health). The least bad way for this to go is for you to say something along the lines of:

I think you’re really amazing. But I think we are looking for different things right now and it isn’t fair to either of us to stay in this relationship.

Bonus points if you mean it. Alternatively, this may be okay:

I think you’re really amazing, I do. But I just don’t love you. And you deserve to be with someone who will.

Liberal use of “I’m sorry” may help in avoiding bloodshed.

But what about honesty?

Ordinarily, I’m a big proponent of honesty. And that’s the great thing: one of the two above statements should be true! You’d have to be a right shithead for the both of them to be lies. I would say that the above are being honest in the nicest way possible. I mean, really, if the goal is to create a better world, shouldn’t we want to be nice to people we have shared meals/shared movies/shared beds with? If honesty and/or niceness aren’t that big a deal for you, there are… other… options.

Other options

Note: these would fall into the category of really bad ideas. But Schadenfreude might make them funny.

Facebook
If you and your soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend have disclosed your relationship to the jackals on facebook, you have some interesting opportunities. Between the wall and all those nifty sketching and word-game plugins, you should have methods of communication galore! Step one: write something mean. “I think you’re ugly,” as an example, would get the point across. Perhaps, “I’d rather fuck a dead fish.” Play, have fun. Violate the terms of service and get banned. It’s up to you. But write the terrible thing, then set your status to single and start sending messages (to other women. Extra points for “mistakenly” sending one to your ex with someone else’s name. Maybe her best-friend or her sister’s name. Maybe her mom’s name. Depending on the age group–by which I mean avoid anything illegal–maybe her daughter’s name.)

Youtube
Ah, Youtube, font of endless clips of illegally copied media and generally terrible videos. It truly is a democratization of media and you can abuse that. One idea is to make a video, dedicated to her, wherein you have one of her favorite songs playing and you start by extolling the wonderful times you had. But, it’s not all flowers and candles. She has flaws (and obivously you do) and you should talk about them. At Length. Bonus points for making out with another woman (see above list) at the end.

The Classic “Walk-In”
An oldie, but a goodie. Best suited for breaking-up with someone who has a key to your place (but be ready to change the locks!). At some time you know she is going to be coming over, by prior knowledge or by arranging it, make sure you’re in flagrante delicto with another woman (again, see above list) when she comes in. For the younger crowd, making out would work just as well, I think. The wonderful thing about this method is that there are two options. Either she leaves and you’re broken up, or she joins! And hey, option 2 means she’s a keeper!

Break-up Poetry
Most people consider poetry an excellent vehicle during the “wooing” phase of a relationship, but we’re all about breaking the rules, aren’t we? This technique requires an embarrassingly large delivery of roses to really work. So embarrassingly large that she immediately reads the card out loud (or someone else steals the card and reads it, even better!) before she knows what it says. As far as what should be written, I don’t think there’s any real need to worry about longer forms, this is one you want to keep short.
Consider limericks!

There is this boy from Kentucky
Who thinks he’s so very lucky-
he screws you all night
and your sister all day-
the luckiest boy in Kentucky.

Or Haiku! (haiku-like, anyway)

sweet jasmine-breeze- kissing you in the twilight- I’d rather die
oil-slick halibut- dead and slimy are better- than you in the sack

The point is, it’s more about the content than the form. Feel free to ignore “the rules” of poetry in this situation. Embrace off-rhyme and sing-songy rhythm. Even if it isn’t great verse, she’ll be surprised that you wrote something from the heart.

Email
For the most part, email and text messaging don’t offer the same opportunities to create a killing machine motivated by vengeance and embarrassment aimed at destroying your car, then your social life, and then killing you. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have any fun with them. Corporate mailing lists offer worlds of opportunity. You’ll probably get fired and there may be issues with privacy laws and there is the possibility of being sued for some form of harassment. That’s what the economics crowd call “opportunity costs.” Remember: “CC:” is your friend.

To clarify, I find some humor in everything between “Other Options” and here, but they are BAD BAD BAD ideas only meant to cause pain and humiliation. No one deserves that. No one. I mean that: NO ONE. The best revenge is living well. The best break-up is one where both people are if not happy, then content and hopeful for the future.

On the joys of sharing a dorm room

The whisper of skin on skin-
Lines of moonlight cast
through the blinds
tickling the curve of her back-
The fragrance of beer,
cigarettes and latex.

I don’t think they can see the scowl
as I put in the earplugs.

This was a response to Carolee’s prompt to “watch” something we’re not supposed to see. Incidentally, at the top of the window in which I worked on this I had typed: “GAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!! I cannot think in verse!” Check out the other people who have taken a look!

Note: I’ve never shared a dorm room nor watched anyone else have sex. One of the joys of the arts is imagining situations. “Write what you know” can be rather limiting sometimes.

I read An Abundance of Katherine’s by John Green today. While there are many things I could say about it, I will only say that it was very good, and I recommend to people who like to read things with plot that are not predominantly about disrobing.

Anyway, after I read the book, I was click-click-clicking around the internet, watching some Brotherhood 2.0 videos, then checking out the NerdFighters forums, and the list of recent forum activity had at its top a post “Your First Kiss.” There are 45 pages and 535 replies in this thread!

I read some of them and was planning on going to bed, but then I was thinking about that myself. My first kiss. And many of the kisses that followed it.

My first kiss was not too different from many other peoples’ first kisses, I imagine, save, perhaps, that I was older. I was seventeen, had just graduated high school, and had just started dating a girl I had done theatre with. We were on a date, I took her home. Outside of her door, she stood two steps up (she was rather shorter than I was), and we kissed. I later wrote the poem below about that experience, but, aside from being my first kiss, and therefore one of the most memorable romantic experiences in a person’s life, there isn’t much to be said.

Between then, and my last first kiss I don’t remember many of the kisses at all. My last first kiss was very early in the morning after having been out all night with the girl I later married. I was dropping her off at the house she was house-sitting and we were in my car and it was really, really great (though, with her, they were all really, really great). Then, after she got out of the car and went inside, Faith Hill’s “This Kiss” came on the radio. Serendipitous, I thought.

I wonder if it’s strange that I don’t remember the first kisses in between. I think the answer is no: The first one was important because it was the first one. The last first one was important because… I wouldn’t have known it at the time but it was the woman I loved more than anything who I later married, so it was very special. The rest, now, are just kind of there. From the perspective of those relationships, did I feel the same? I can’t remember, those were all quite some time ago.

I also wonder if it’s strange I don’t remember my last kiss. I also suppose no. After all, I didn’t really expect it to be the last kiss while I was involved in the kissing, thus it wouldn’t have been remarkable as an occasion to be remembered….

Goodnight

We stand outside your door
try to say goodnight
while we wonder if anyone is watching
The wind speaks softly
in return your hair dances
pirouettes on air’s imaginary currents
You step close
We meet
I am shattered into the moment
like glass being broken
Shards of me fall
leaving only my lips pressed to yours
Eternity comes and goes

Goodnight

And that is a peak inside my head at midnight on a Sunday.

EDIT: I just want to add a quick two things: (1) the first kiss was actually before I graduated high school, not after, oops; (2) and that was spring of 1998 and the poem was written in February 1999–it’s not a recent work.

For various reasons, I have never been able to participate in National Novel Writing Month. I have wanted to. I write terrible stories, but I think that’s to be expected from someone who is not a prose writer.

I have an idea this time, and I think it may be interesting to write it. I very much want to start now, but No! I must wait two whole months.

This of course coincides with (the original) National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo). Some people might consider that to be an additional aspect of the challenge: write 1700 words a day for a novel and do a blog post.

What I wonder is whether I should setup another blog just for NaNoWriMo or keep it all here on FallenVerses. When I say setup another blog, I mean something like FallenVerses.org/NaNoWriMo. Though I may use another theme. Not sure. AH! Only two months to prepare for all of this, what am I gonna do!?

“What makes me fall in love with your WoW blog” by Larísa

Recently I’ve been thinking about why I like some WoW blogs more than others. There are blogs where I eagerly lick every single word that comes out. They’re so excellent that I always feel I’d wanted a little bit more. And then there are other blogs, some of them actually very well established, with hundreds or thousands of daily visitors, who leave me absolutely indifferent.
You could say it’s just a matter of taste, a gut feeling or something like that, but I’d like to explore it a little bit more. What exactly is it that makes me fall in love with a blog? What do some blogs have that other lacks?
* * *
After some pondering I realized that I should go further back in history to find the answers. - all the way back to the old Greece. I think the well known authors and philosophers from that era would have become excellent bloggers. They really knew how to catch an audience.
According to the classic rhetoric you should use your Ethos, Pathos and Logos, which is exactly what many of the best bloggers do, whether they think about it or not.

Go. Read. Probably ignore the links because they won’t mean anything to you (which is okay).

Back? No. Alright.

Okay… I think Larisa raises some really interesting points about breaking down stylistic elements of communication. The examples meant quite a bit to me, because I read those blogs every time they post, but for the rest of you, I hope the ideas made sense even without the highlighting.

I think those classical elements (ethos, pathos, logos) are pretty much inherent in human communication whether it’s formally assembled or purely random conversation. I also think the -os that is dominant is going to strongly alter the way the communication is presented. Not that there are hard and fast rules involved, but the more logos-directed, the more likely you are to find more structured, ordered types of communication.

Really, lists and thesis-oriented paragraphs favor communication with discrete and/or sequential data. Mostly informative.

Getting into pathos and ethos, there is a breakdown of the form into something more free-flowing (ah, no hating! sweeping generalisations!) where disparate elements can go together. There is no need to contain and, for that matter, you can conflate and mix metaphors all you like when you don’t need to prove anything!

Blogging fits an interesting niche, I think. As a method of communication, it serves well enough in any mode. (though I think there are limitations to the medium, but that’s another topic) Poetry, as a method of communication, I don’t think fairs all that well with logos. We tap into pathos, perhaps ethos. A lot of poetry is about bypassing reason. In a way, you could call poetry a form of propaganda. Political poetry (most especially from the “wrong side”) could easily be considered propagandistic. And anyone who know any literary criticism should be able to BS about the propagandistic nature of poetry about love, or nature (and how the poem/poet reinforces stereotypes/the patriarchy/heteronormativity/[insert -ism here].)

Is that all poetry should do? Should verse be instructional in a factual sense? There are some poems that present factual information. I think those are mostly side effects of the trope of the poem rather than the point. Would an instruction manual in verse be poetry or just a collection of really bad rhymes?

As part of a much larger question of what is poetry, and what is art, and what is artistic prose that is poem-like, we can consider the nature of poetic communication. I’m fine with keeping poetry in the realms of the emotive rather than the intellectual, but that excludes poetry that plays with language without meaning… it’s a fuzzy, fuzzy, fuzzy line.

“Will you please try to hear what I’m telling you now? Will you let me attempt to explain what you mean to me?”

He waited, studying my face as he spoke to make sure I was really listening.

“Before you, Bella, my life was like a moonless night. Very dark, but there were stars–points of light and reason. …And then you shot across my sky like a meteor. Suddenly everything was on fire; there was brilliancy, there was beauty. When you were gone, when the meteor had fallen over the horizon, everything went black. Nothing had changed, but my eyes were blinded by the light. I couldn’t see the stars anymore. And there was no more reason for anything.”

I wanted to believe him. But this was my life without him that he was describing, not the other way around.

“Your eyes will adjust,” I mumbled.

“That’s just the problem–they can’t.”

“What about your distractions?

He laughed without a trace of humor. “Just part of the lie, love. There was no distraction from the . . . the agony. My heart hasn’t beat in almost ninety years, but this was different. It was like my heart was gone–like I was hollow. Like I’d left everything that was inside me here with you.”

“That’s funny,” I muttered.

He arched one perfect eyebrow. “Funny?”

“I meant strange–I thought it was just me. Lots of pieces of me went missing, too. I haven’t been able to really breathe in so long.” I filled my lungs, luxuriating in the sensation. “And my heart. That was definitely lost.”

I’ve stayed up rather late tonight. It’s okay, I suppose, because I don’t have to work tomorrow (yay!), so sleeping past 8 am won’t get me into any trouble.

I was… am… up late because I was reading. Looking for Alaska by John Green. Despite the fact that it was “young adult” fiction it was really good. I’d suggest it wends its way onto everyone’s reading lists.

And, as books are wont to do, it left me thinking. Yes, it was about high-school students. Yes, they smoked illegally and drank Strawberry Hill citrus wine and those are things I never do*. But those are just details. It ends up a story about human interaction.

As we get older we back away from experience, I think. Some of it is repetition: been there, done that, got the t-shirt and all. Some of it we judge before we experience it based on previous experiences. We shape ourselves by the experiences we have and our responses to those experiences. Who we are then influences what happens in the future and how we react. We fall into this endless cycle of experience and response that leaves us absolutely certain of who we are.  After all, we have crafted a world based on and reinforcing that notion that the “Me of this moment” is the “Me that must be.”

I don’t think that’s true, though. I believe we all have a vast capacity to choose who we are and who we are to become. In people not yet jaded by experience, they have no choice but to explore those questions. Sometimes the answers are surprisingly good, sometimes horrendously bad. But the ignorance, the naïveté of youth allows those questions to be answered in unexpected ways. It’s being able to play the “what-if?” game without a hint of irony because those ifs are all possible, and not crossed off the board based on predetermined definitions of identity.

We can only be who we are, no more, no less. But I think most of us don’t know ourselves as well as we think we do. I challenge the world: next time you are confronted with an option and you are going to dismiss a choice because it’s silly or “not me,” look carefully at it. Ask yourself if maybe you’re wrong. Try to see the world through your eyes as if it was newly formed and a world of possibilities was laid out before waiting to come into being. Because they are.

*I’ve never smoked illegally**, though I have drank Strawberry Hill. I don’t at all recall how it tasted.

**Dammit, I have. On the plus side, I don’t believe my parents read this. Not that they’d really care about a couple of cigars over a decade ago. It clearly has not become a habit.

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It’s a static-crusted world:
constant interference from the streaming
24/7 into our minds
which are as alterable as wikipedia.

The data in the table is corrupt
and we need to reindex;
we have forgotten to back-up
emotions. Memory is salvageable-
it is watching television without color
and we soon bore of it.

Attention is the microtransaction of the mind.

Sign the check,
enter your pin,
wait for the confirmation email and continue.
Always verify the information is correct.
No one can retrieve you
if you have lost
the password.

One thing I’ve always struggled with in my own mind is whether it is appropriate or not to contextualize my poems. To explain them. A dictum from most critique I’ve done is that it is best to not speak at all, to not provide answers: ultimately, the poem stands on its own in some journal or some book and that’s that. However, I feel that viewpoint neglects the benefits of the medium of blogging. Here, we are not limited by page count. We can collect information and hyper-reference and cross-reference, and probably do other compounded-reference words that I don’t even know!

This poem was written in response to two things: Jillypoet’s read write prompt (you can read others’ replies here), and a snippet of lyric from the song in this Brotherhood 2.0 video. The lyric that prompted this has since been removed as I opted to not write a love poem. I think perhaps I write too easily in that genre. So, a departure, a deviation, one of the damn few poems I’ve written this year. In case you happen to be curious (and I still plan to work with it, probably in some sort of love poem) the lyric that I “caught” was: “As in a mirror, dimly.”

Brotherhood 2.0