whats real

i'm reading this book about students
who aren't the best-
who eventually become dropouts, sell drugs, get pregnant

and what they say, feel, and believe
and just know, so incisively
so intelligent, so insightful
so much heart and dream.

it just makes me think.
maybe it's what wright wrote about in american hunger...that there was depth to him because he had known pain and hurt and injustice.

what am i learning, and what do i want to learn?
what do i think about, and what is there out in the world to think about?
so much, dazzling array.

like when i woke up this morning and wished i didnt have to go to class so i could think about something else.

it's like a dream of something bigger
and when you grow up it gets smaller and smaller, that dream
dries up

i want so much for things to be perfect
when i'm listening to something beautiful, seeing something beautiful
i want a continuation of that from people, no interruption but synchronization.
i understand when people say that sometimes no words are better than words
and yet it's not that-
i just want something else, a better language, that is higher than that of this earth. or captures that deepest sense of the beautiful found in the earth. because there is much. sort of like light pouring forth from the mouth

and just thinking about,
man, when do you figure out who you are? apart from circumstances?
when you're stripped and punched and pulled at
and you see what you're made of, or what's at the core, mass of shining and burning metal and star, that's at the center of you
think most people are too scared to find out.

this craziness

what is this life?

be true.

think ive realized

a life lived in love is a life in which you can be broken or hurt.
and trying not to be hurt, to be cold feels so good.
but think it's already happened- lots can get to me, and cut.

to be full of You,
your joyful and unceasing love,
to delight in
and to give away, freely.

...i am grateful for late nights, and conversation.

it is yearning that makes the heart deep.
- augustine

figuring out where i'm supposed to be-
my heavenly

i wonder

if we were to take everyone's hearts,
how beautiful or ugly a person's would be.

i wonder what mine really looks like.

tonight

my depravity makes me sad.
really, really sad.

i think God is gracious though.
lets things be better than they ought to be.

but it still makes me sad.
i hate it.
very much.
but most of the time: not enough.

esther's adventures in manhattan

makes a date with someone
is happy
wakes up late
looks at her phone, groans
missed calls
sometimes is ashamed
and tries to go to sleep again
thinks about not calling back/copping out.
i hope this will not happen tomorrow.
i also hope this is not the person i will be.

on another note,
i would like to fill my life with decent people. mm.
good to see a high school friend today, and to talk with an elementary school friend.
they are, decent people. more than that, kind, make me think, people.
i feel rich- very much so.

who'd be your desert island five? woah. hard. maybe not something to think about.
good night,

prolific writing-

i've been looking for this poem all my life.
okay, on and off, for about three years.


this gentleman came to the iowa writing workshop when i was there [junior year of high school], talked about writing and poetry, and read this poem. i remember thinking that he was extremely intelligent, and precise, and softspoken. a bit metaphysical, but very human.
i wish i had written to him and asked him for this, because it hadn't been published yet-
but here. i think i listened to it, and was electrified. it has to be spoken out loud, perhaps only in his timbre- reading it now to myself, i can't quite get the same effect. and this may be hallucination, but i think he said this originated from an image, or another poem, of two men in a holocaust camp, looking up at a wire, a bird dancing upon it.
______

Twittering Machine
by dan beachy-quick

I see I must rewire the Twittering Machine
Whose song was lightning
when lightning-struck—
And then sang singe, sang smoke: elect

-ric elegy, perpetual elegy, the fuse
That fused syllable to
sound is blown, is
Blown, and now the dry-throat on noting

Nothing drowns. The gold-sheathed wire
Soldered to star
sang both the star
’s celestial thread that fretting through

The night kept the night a needle-width
Undone, and sang
yellow the yellow
Thread unmending the sundress wife kept

In closet December-long. And longer:
Through darker months
none could name, none
Name—since, ever since, that star whose light

Powered the Twittering Machine’s ever-song
Died, was always dead,
though nightly seen,
Is still seen, cold but brilliant overhead. The gold

-sheathed wire withered, tangent to the moon.
Now a fungal-wire aches
down cemeteries
To find a decaying song. Earth-battery—

It winds the dynamo by a ceaseless, clock-
Work turn, clock-
wise turn,
But the Twittering Machine refuses song.

No, no—not refuse, not refuse. We’ve rewired
The mechanism. Stars
are silent, trustless:
They lock the dark vault they seem to pierce.

Music of the spheres? buzz, no test-pattern,
Program cancelled, shut.
Now one dark talon
Sheathed in darkness drops unseen from sky

And scratches the earth as the earth turns.
Do you hear that sound
of gravel on gravel
Grinding? That music is our music now.

________

more, i like reading his writing, the way he articulates his thoughts. he loves philosophy, and i think it shows. from an interview:

4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?

...Another influence, though quite different, was in studying the Blues tradition in America, from slaves’ field hollers to juke joints of the Mississippi Delta to the City Blues of Chicago. I love the way in which one musician would hear another play, take a lyric or a lick from him, and incorporate that into another song. That expanding voice of Anonymity unfolding in each individual mouth moves me greatly, and seems, in my mind, to parallel how tradition functions in poetry. This ties back, actually, to the question about philosophy—for it’s just as Seneca said when writing letters to his young Stoic. He’d often end a letter with a quote from his philosophic nemesis Epicurus, and say something to the effect of: “You ask me why I mention his words? Because what is true is everyone’s.”