Sassistas! Our dish on the social soup.

Lines of Connection

Yesterday afternoon, a Verizon technician showed up at Flannista's home to repair a very staticky phone line that was also impacting my internet connection. He hoisted a ladder to a connection box at the end of my court, and then hoisted another ladder several blocks away at a larger connection box. After 20 minutes, Derrick told me that the problem was "old copper wire that Verizon doesn't want to fix anymore because they want you to upgrade to fiberoptics. But don't worry, I fixed it. I put in a new line for you.  It should be good for a while."

Derrick then stepped into my living room to retrieve some important-looking-repair-thingy he had asked me to insert into one of my phone jacks. I went upstairs to check out both the phone and internet lines and when I walked back downstairs, I saw Derrick staring at the art on the walls.

DERRICK:  Did you paint all of these?

FLANN:  No, I just collect it.

DERRICK:  I've never seen so much art in a living room.  Everywhere I look I see something I want to look at longer.

FLANN:  Thank you.  Repairmen don't usually have that response to this art.

DERRICK: But I'm not a repairman.  I'm a poet.  I write poems and short stories.  I publish them online in MySpace.  I've always wanted to paint -- you know, paint myself.

FLANN: Why?

DERRICK: How can you go through life without baring your soul?  You've got to put it out there, man. Look at yourself in that deep way. Send that healing right out there.

FLANN: You ARE a poet.  Thanks for making my day.

DERRICK: Thanks for making mine.  I'll never again see anything like this in someone's house.

FLANN: And I'll never see repairmen the same way again. Thank you.

At the moment, the static is gone from my phone line and the internet seems to be humming along.  The connections -- so many of them -- are working beautifully.

 

After Every War

After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won't
straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.

Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall,
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.

Photogenic it's not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.

We'll need the bridges back,
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about
who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes
sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.

-- Wislawa Szymborska, "The End and The Beginning"

   1996 Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

 

Trees Beside You

When the floor drops out, as it has now,
you cannot hear the squirrel on the wire
outside your window, the wheels spinning
on the road below. You want only pity
and are presented with the unbelievable
effrontery of a world that moves on.
But wait: this is not the person you are.
You’re the kind of person who
sits in dark theaters crying at the collarbones
that curve across the dancers’ chests,
at the proof of a perfection they represent;
a person who goes out walking in a four-day drizzle,
sees a pot of geraniums and is seized, overcome
by how they can bring so much (what else
can you call it?) joy. You love the world,
are sure, at least, that you have. But be truthful:
you only love freely things that have nothing
to do with you. You’re like a matchstick house:
intricately constructed but flimsy and hollow inside.
You’re a house in love with the trees beside you -
able to look at them all day, aware of how faithful they are -
but unable to forgive that they’d lie down
leaving you exposed and alone in a large enough storm.

-- "Another Poem About the Heart" by Jenn Habel

 

Artichoke

 

 

O heart weighed down by so many wings.

 

-- "Artichoke" by Joseph Hutchinson

 

 

Pretty

Let's hear it for poetry and how it can help us express

what we really need to express.  

Listen to Katie Makkai define the word "pretty".