Remember When I Had A Blog?

Sunday nights have always been dangerous for me.

My best friend in college and I would consistently get the “Sunday Night Blues” after our whirlwind weekends, usually cured with bad movies, fleece blankets and Tostino’s Pizza Rolls. Tonight, with my weekend schedule making it impossible to sleep before 2am and my laptop taking up shop next to me in bed, I decided now was a good of a time as any to start a blog. Really? Really.

The background: I just got back from living in Seattle for three years where I was exposed to this crazy world known as Spoken Word Poetry. It pretty much changed my life and if you haven’t checked out a slam: GO (steps down from soap box). April is arbitrarily the month where poets test the limits of their writing and challenge themselves to write a poem for each day of the month. I had been thinking about starting a blog then but decided that tonight, October 5, 2008, is close enough to April for me. Thus, Remember When I Had A Blog was born.

I’m hoping this can be a place to share some of the poetry I’ve been working on, display other people’s work and hopefully share musings/ comments/ general judgmental observations on life.

First poem has literally never been seen/ heard by anyone but me and I just finished it last night. I wrote it for my last time on the open mic in Seattle but never finished it there. Enjoy & if you got something to say, comment!

For the Place I'm Coming From

I never was the type of girl who dreamed of moving West
Always harbored my post-college dreams somewhere between Chelsea and the Village
Never dreamed I would be 3, 000 miles away from Atlantic summers swinging off porches of every memory I had before 3 years ago
When the itch to leave comfortable kept me up at night, kept me haunted with nightmares of lonely
of far
but soon reminding myself that cheap thrills come in giving ourselves goose bumps
So soon I was dreaming of a new air in my lungs
Pressing deeply on the lips of some new city

Seattle

Where a .org girl could afford a drinking habit and an apartment in the city
Where hipsters are not just trust fund babies in disguise
Where everything was anything but familiar
Thank you for being anything but familiar.

Thank you

For the first sign of spring hitting you like Rainier hovering over I-90,
Leaves you breathless
Like rain
Like Colin Meloy’s music and Buddy Wakefield’s words.
Like the Olympics ground swelling with these verses, making it feel like home

Seattle

For baristas with a truck full of stories and nothing but ears to sing them to
For this Hill having a story to tell and a hidden mystery to prove it
For the most interesting souls
The raddest tattoos
The sincerest of eyes

Thank you

For Sunday afternoon latte art watching people’s lives bounce off the Bauhaus Balcony
For poetry beaming through windows of now-vacant theater basements
transforming
conforming
To Seattle’s new look but always remembering the power of its core
To those who convinced me to go to that first slam and licked my ears with wounds that still pray to heal

Thank you

My 12 season cycles of Seattle echo in my ears like the whirl of a rainstorm
And I’m up at night with phantom pains of limbs that live 3,000 miles away
With only the sky to hold us together

A forever dot in my constellation
Guiding me towards the coast I once called home.