Month: May 2021

May 21, 2021

/ HJ / Leave a comment

should i still be aiming for a word count
if my goal is simply a kind of getting in touch with my creativity
my brevity
my word choice
my ability?

going through poems the other day,
in a frenzy to organize my most disorganized thoughts,
gave me the reminder that i once wrote five hundred words
easily
in one poem
my structure was simply
get the thought out
ponder it
in poem form
use the words
sparingly
but still explore
within words
what the concept means to me

do i not do that anymore?
or was the long form a new addition to the creative family
taking up residence in my brain?

kipventures poetry started out as shorter form,
some days only one to three lines
describing a whole adventure in a strange new place

so…why does nothing feel that familiar anymore?

should i explore what this family of creatives does
in my head?
or is that a one-off concept
simply useful for that singular line
and
(ope, another random memory
this time the apartment kip and i shared
in that house
in Pittsburgh
[what is it with Pittsburgh
recently?]
the sunlight streaming in through the attic bedroom windows
the weird mirrored closet doors
driving around
five below
dunken donuts vegan bacon on bagel breakfast sandwiches
that whole summer
stressful
and yet
such good memories)
what even was i talking about?

i went off on another tangent
in my brain
of when kip and i were first together
mowgli hadn’t even been born yet
but louka was living her
hard dog life
(in dog jail, if the stories are true)
and how do/will i feel about that?
if we do end up being able to adopt
and our baby is already born as of right now
am i going to look back on this time and think
‘i was so privileged, and our baby was so not,
what was i doing enjoying my life
while our baby was in trouble?’
but i can’t know that now
there are too many possibilities
to ponder
i know this is the anxiety
but it also feels like the worst super-power;
i can imagine and contemplate and see all paths,
past, present, future,
the possibilities endless
and they are all in my
stupid human brain
the insurmountable number
being
what makes my brain
damn near explode
(maybe i am super-human
simply from being able to hold all those possibilities
without any sort of fiery
boom,
but who knows;
it’s building up
it could happen
any day
now…)

May 20, 2021

/ HJ / Leave a comment

vaccinated
activated
impervious to what 2021 can throw at me
(jk, that’s a total lie, please don’t be mean to me, 2021!)

what i’d really like is to feel like i belong somewhere again…
i found it last in the troika
and the magpies
and bst

why
do i even want to fit in
i’ve spent my life wanting to be weird,
to be against the grain
to march to the beat of my own drummer.
and i don’t really want to march to everyone else’s drummer,
far from it,
but there is a bit of a feeling of relief
when one finds that someone else can hear their own beat
that at least one other is dancing just as emphatically
empathetically
our bodies moving in similar rhythms
finding a symmetry in our differences
and i think i miss that in platonic friendships
most of all
because i do still have my spouse
dancing to our drum-beats
blues rhythms
and slinky dips
and our silly dances made up of inside jokes
but i need variety
adventure
something new
but something that connects me to more than just me
(and kip and i are, at this point, just one person, if we’re being totally honest)
but where do i find that connection
that dance
when there’s a global panda express still raging on
and i can’t seem to stop myself from observing when i meet new people
and i’m still afraid of the internet, the place most of us are meeting new people/
connecting with old
in this day and age?

i think i just want an acting gig,
as i spoke about with my scene partner for class,
a recurring role on a sci-fi series,
regular acting roles that exercise my imagination so it’s always in tip top shape
silly makeup
making use of my weird look
weird hair
(the hair that that baby said made me look like a rockstar last night)
and maybe i can connect with characters…
that is the way that i often connect,
that was the confusion my first try at college,
wasn’t it?
was i falling in love with that boy
or was i falling in love with his character
or was my character falling in love with him
or was my character falling in love with his character
and on and on and on
connections lasting as long as
a show
or a class
or a simple scene
but they were still connections
(quick/fast/dirty/just how i like ‘em)

May 19, 2021

/ HJ / Leave a comment

my brain
(and bod)
are doing better than they were
the shaking and jittering
the depression and hopelessness
the overly-energized listlessness
are all but gone

but echos remain
and remind me of
whatever the fuck that was
that drove me damn near insane
(or, at least, reminded me of that time
my sanity was not quite a certainty)
and certainly
i’m still careful
traversing on the tiniest of eggshells,
wishing that the weight of what happened last week
would give me fodder for effortless poems
beautiful language
pleasing sounds in my mouth and ears and eyes
(and a sudden reminder of church lock-ins long since past
passes my eyes in a blink
and after being gone
in Pittsburgh, i think, was that particular church,
in less than a second
i’m back)
the creativity i used to have
isn’t gone
it’s just a little bit
changed.

(i mean,
yeah i wrote five million slam-poem-beginnings in high school,
but when did i write a whole ass novel?
that’s right, this year, damnit!)

May 18, 2021

/ HJ / Leave a comment

i guess i could…
use my morning pages time
to read and edit and rewrite and post
all the poems that have come thus far ?

maybe?

~~~

quietly track the purring
in rhythm with the caffeine beats
thumping [softly] out of these
shitty laptop speakers

the aesthetics you always thought you’d have
you surpassed with unexpected privilege
leaving you with the existential question

why?

~~~

and unrelatedly
why
does organizing
make me feel so much better?
.
. .
. . .
(i know why;
it’s because my brain is the opposite of organized.)

May 17, 2021

/ HJ / Leave a comment

everything
is getting grey
while the sun shines brighter and brighter
and i want to be able to see the sun
and the sky
and the stars
but nothing seems recognizable anymore

(and staring at the sun is real bad for your eyes)

~~~

humor
within
tragedy

is it a sign of good writing
or just deeper seeded depression

~~~

smaller poems
capturing
greater feelings

[isn’t/wasn’t that the aim all along?]

May 16, 2021

/ HJ / Leave a comment

i want to do
something
with all these poems
posting them seems the best option
but also
i’m scared.
i’m scared of people seeing them
i’m scared of no one seeing them
i’m scared i’ll succeed
i’m scared i’ll fail
i’m scared of so many things
(when did i get so scared?)

~~~

creativity
breeds
creativity

depression
breeds
depression

just keep that in mind.

~~~

oh
when did i start writing
for me?

May 15, 2021

/ HJ / Leave a comment

my brain is falling asleep in a way
that it wasn’t last night.
the tossing and turning and turning and tossing
like being rocked by a stormy sea
did nothing to lull me (in)to unconsciousness
the wind and stress i felt from my kip beside me
did not diminish my sleepiness
but it did make the actual
falling,
sleep catching,
(falling into sleep’s waiting arms)
not truly take.

but now my mind feels like it could be lulled
(fairly easily, in fact)
into unconsciousness
and i wonder;
is it worth it?

May 14, 2021

/ HJ / Leave a comment

Contemplations of Memories of Musical Theatre College
(In Canada)
those memories i don’t quite carry…
i have the stories
(the ones that i memorized like monologues,
like i do all my important memories,
because i know otherwise
they’ll float away
into the ether
of my mind)
but i don’t have any memories
of egregious things said to me
or a teacher crossing a line in front of me
(though i heard some second hand,
and those do stick in my mind,
as general feelings about particular instructors
moreso than the words/facts themselves)

for someone who rarely understands what their feelings are at any given moment,
i pretty much only remember emotions from any point in my life.
(and unfortunately
the memories that stick out to me
are all pretty much ones that fall under the umbrella of
despair.)

i had fun
at Musical Theatre College
(in Canada)
and yes, there were some crazy things we did
(but i also knew of other colleges that did more [or slightly less] heinous things
said more troublesome things
made more problematic decisions)
but i’d already been in this industry,
and in classes associated with this industry
for over a decade at that point,
so i suppose i had already taken for granted that
this was how we were supposed to find our
‘voices’
as artists.

which is absolutely not to say that what was done is what should be allowed
or is the ‘right way’ to train young, impressionable artists,
i simply stuck my bony chin out
and accepted it as it was(is)
and perhaps that makes me complicit
and perhaps that makes me traumatized
but there HAS to be a better way.

…right?

May 13, 2021

/ HJ / Leave a comment

An Ode to Pet Names

‘Baby’ was never a name i thought was appropriate for romantic interactions
but somehow i ended up with that with you
which became ‘Puppy’
(because we read American Gods at the same time together)
and that turned to ‘Pupup’, and ‘Pupupupupup’
(which might have been part of what spawned the nickname of that show we worked on)
but slowly the one syllable nickname/pet name stuck
and we started calling each other ‘Kip’
chirruping across bookstores
to find each other
and when we were silly
that became ‘Kyaaaahhhhp’
others became ‘Kips’ too
variations on a theme
(most spoonerisms)
and we are still ‘Kip’ to each other
to this day.

May 12, 2021

/ HJ / Leave a comment

combing
through etsy
to find
a piece
of indigenous art
of wood
for the five year anniversary
that suits
us both

~~~

wow
yesterday i was so inspired
to write and contemplate
the original monologue
and today
i am not feeling it
at
all.

(but maybe i should just try anyway)

~~~

(and why do i feel the need to decompress after acting class
whether i do well or not
whether i achieve any sort of catharsis?)
(i still feel a bit like an observer
an outsider…
when will that end and i can feel truly
part
of something?)