Thursday, August 13, 2009

Candid Shots

After that weekend in Seattle last spring, I found myself spending hours at a time scribbling lists of phrases in no particular order in random notebooks, trying to capture a thousand memories. I keep stumbling across those pages. Sometimes, it seems better not to try to organize the fragments. They are what they are.

Bittersweet
Life is made of pictures.
Plowed furrows flashing by,
Perspective, all angled from the flying shadow outward,
From the shadow of a little enclosed adventure.
Laughter
Loud music
Love somewhere inside.
And yes, I volunteered to sleep on the floor so I could
at least be next to him
within arm's reach.

They say it's always rainy there.
It was sunny for us
Sunny, and purple benches, and purple flowers,
And pictures in sepia tone in little corners of a garden.
Smooth bark that was hard to keep a seat on.
Sunny over in line with the emo kids
in the rain.
Sunniest in that dark basement of a venue,
With hot sweaty bodies and too much noise
That shook the dust from the ceiling.
Sunniest there.
For me at least.

I don't remember any rain, those days.
I still have the key to that place,
And the ferris wheel ticket,
And the band ticket,
And the parking ticket,
the good kind, of course.

Life is made of candid shots.

4 comments:

William Michaelian said...

This is wonderful. And I love the visual effect. For me the poem ends with “the good kind, of course.”

don't be emily said...

Funny you should say that. The last line was an afterthought, added after the rest of the sentences on the page. It may disappear yet.

~im just only me~ said...

I like this, of course :)... maybe you could work the last line into the first two?... bittersweet pictures/ life is made of candid shots...
or something like that? Just a suggestion :)

Dayna said...

lovely visions... friendship and courtship and all the love that brightens the world, even on the rainiest of days...