Refrigerator

 This poem is meant to be heard, rather than read.

Here is a link to what it sounds like.

 
“Haiku are easy
But sometimes they don’t feel good
Refrigerator.”


You reorganized my refrigerator.

Three weeks before you broke up with me.

We had been playing house for the weekend, spending every moment in each other’s company, and we were hosting a dinner party for our common friends.

Cooking together with you was always a frenetic form of joy.  Our differences in culinary philosophy just great enough to leave us combative-to-the-point-of-turned-on whenever we opened one another’s fridges.

Every time I opened yours I wanted to stop what I was doing and throw away the half-dozen cardboard carrying structures and bags, each now containing one yogurt, or apple sauce, or string cheese, or whatever girl-dinner food you’d been using lately to counterbalance the fact that you really do not cook for yourself, despite being such a talented chef.

And every time you delved into mine you yelped in derision as the wide doors slammed open, shelves rattling and overflowing with sauces and seasonings I’d used once and ignored for a year. . . or a decade.
 
And so in that frenzy of cooking and preparing you had shouted “I AM REORGANIZING YOUR FRIDGE” in an outdoor-voice and I had laughed back with delight that you were welcome to it, and kissed you, and returned to whatever I was doing, because you are brilliant, and rational, and my kitchen could always use the help.

I figured, I’d talk with you about it later, and get you to tell me your reasoning, so I could enforce whatever zoning laws would determine where my mustard, and butter were allowed to live, and know where to marshal my cheese forces for the next Charcuterie board army.

But there were so many things to do before guests arrived, so I didn’t take the time to ask you about the information architecture choices you were making. . . until, well, it wasn’t really appropriate anymore.

So now, whenever I go for a drink, or to feed myself, there’s a moment of hesitation and confusion, as I stare into the abyss of order that I don’t understand.

It’s not chaos, there’s clearly a reason the leftover black olives and the miso are nestled so close together – salty flavors?  Packages of roughly the same height? .  . . brown things?
 

I don’t know what’s what, right now.

Three weeks after that dinner party, when you were telling me that what I offered couldn’t be enough for you – that the only options were extremes and you knew I wouldn’t choose to be your All, so you were choosing to make me your Nothing – it seemed the best we could remember in terms of logistics was to agree that I would hold on to your spare pillow, until we might be on speaking terms in the winter, that you’d tell most of our friends so they didn’t have to hear it from me that you’d decided we couldn’t make this work.

And at the time I didn’t think to say “wait. . . can you . . .just. . . draw me a map of my fridge I guess?”

Maybe I should have, because the confusion always makes me remember your feet spinning lightly across my kitchen floor, your hands full of my possessions and provisions, your singing voice clamped around my heart like a vice, and the sense that I was comfortable and safe with the uncertainty you were causing, because I trusted you to do what was best for me.

I am glad that you did what was best for you, too.

I didn’t bite my tongue and keep the words behind it that morning because I thought you were wrong about us.

You made it clear by what you said that you weren’t wrong about us.

So I will struggle, with all that I am, to wrestle myself into the form of a man who can accept this least-welcome “No” as a gift.

But I reach now for a grape, or a beer, or a salad dressing, and I am standing in the rain on the street in front of your house. Watching your eyes fill with tears.

And I’m not gonna reset it.

I won’t put things back “where they go.”

This is where they go, now.

Because sometimes grieving looks like crying.

And sometimes grieving looks like muttering “shit” under your breath, every time you reach for the mayonnaise.

"Religious Trauma"

I can see you in the distance
I can hear you, from afar
Should I offer some assistance?
Should it matter who you are?

I don't have much baggage about religion -- the religion I practiced, as child, and as a young man, was pretty direct. I'd say I focused more on service to God than worship, and that seemed to suit us both just fine from my perspective.

But damn, do I have some baggage about church ladies.

We all get hurt by love
We all have our cross to bear
but in the name of understanding
your problem should be shared
Confide In Me
Confide In . . .

If you've never lived in the deep south, maybe you've had the luxury of missing out on the peculiar experience of having someone look you in the eye and tell you something warm, and kind, and thoughtful. . .

"That was a beautiful performance."
"You're one of us. You belong here."
"Any space I’m in is one that is explicitly welcome to you."
"I've always loved the way you see things."

. . . and then realizing that they would never, ever say that same thing in a context where anyone else could hear them. And perhaps, in fact, in the context of social pressure to say something else, they'd say the opposite.

"He's got a long way to go."
"Anybody should feel welcome here. I don't think we should have to change for her."
"publicly inviting you to something wouldn't feel authentic to me."
"He's just so cruel and combative."

Let's just say that it's a world that elevated going-along-to-get-along to an art form.

I can keep a secret
and throw away the key
it's sometimes hard with these things
but do you
feel safe
with me

My mother was an army brat, who took more after her infantry-officer father than after her artist mother, and put everything she owned in a van and drove out of the South as soon as the ink on her high school diploma was dry.

She kicked around the West (Colorado) and the North (Minnesota, Michigan) for years. Got married. Had a daughter. Hated the cold but loved the culture. The directness of it. The honesty of it. Clear and crisp and cold and true.

She came back to the South just before she had me. But she hated it.

We all get hurt by love
We all have our cross to bear
but in the name of understanding
your problem should be shared
Confide In Me
Confide In Me
Confide In Me. . .
Confide In Me. . .

She spent my youth trying to figure out how to move North again. Struggling with her position as a brilliant, cunning, and opinionated woman in a place where Women Did Not Speak Their Minds.

She was a rebel with 9 causes and no fear and she ran afoul of . . . well, everybody.

Skip or twist
the choice is yours
hit or miss
what's mine is yours
Skip or twice
the choice is yours
hit or miss
what's mine is yours

She taught me to be wary of any statement you only hear in private.

If a person won't say it in front of someone else. . . you can damn sure believe that it's less about whether or not they really believe it, and more that they want the benefit of you thinking it's how they feel.

We all get hurt by love
We all have our cross to bear
but in the name of understanding
your problem should be shared
Confide In Me
Confide In Me
Confide In Me. . .
Confide In Me. . .

So today, when somebody tells me they think I'm valuable to their community . . .

Well, let's just say that sometimes, I have a hard time believing it, and an easy way of testing it.

"I love that you feel that way. Would you mind saying it in front of a crowd of your friends?"

Lyrics: Ben Lee - Confide in Me (2002)

I've had this blog for half my life

 That seems like a long time.

Change.

When I got back to my apartment from that vigil, I didn't have a patch of dirt that felt like the one your memory should be settled in.

And I didn't write about it then, but the printed sheets of paper that told us the measures of our communal grief were embedded with seeds.

Starting over again
Show us how this should end
Read the words we know so well, try to find a fault in every phrase
Now sing along, does the meaning change?

So I put the sheet aside, and when I moved into my home in Georgia, I put that sheet on my refrigerator door, because I am nothing if not morbid.

And periodically I thought of you, but the idea of putting that paper in the ground never sat right with me in that house.

Boys brought up a separate pair, they stayed along a singular demand
Write it out in phrases spent, heighten every stake, the rent is raised
We're turning down every sad request, stranding us so far away from you

I moved to Boston.  The sheet came with me.  Another apartment.  

Another yard.

Another fridge.

I couldn't.

Save me anyway, save me anyway, but I'm not coming home today, I'm not coming home to stay, you'll wait, I'll be gone

I don't remember where you came from, before Macon.  I know we talked about it, once, on a run.

I do remember the echo of the pain in your voice, and something in your tone telling me that the place before Macon was one you'd left, or maybe fled.  You'd wound up kind and vivacious and warm in spite of that place, not because of it.

So, in some ways Macon was as much your home as anywhere, but it never felt like it would be the wrong thing to bury that paper somewhere else.

But I still didn't do it.

Springs came and went.

We moved forward and you
Settled into a life where nothing was new
When your words were watered down, we'd steal the page and help you read aloud
But like a song finds you in your bed, it leaves you in your sleep, to read alone

It's been sixteen years.

I reached Pittsburgh two years ago. Another fridge.

But this year. . .

Maybe it's the yardwork I've been doing.  Something about the way this house is the first place where I've felt a joy when the yard turns to vibrant green in the spring.    The way I've been motivated to dig, and to move pavers, and to sit outside just to stare at the grass like an Octogenarian.

Maybe it's the woman with the kind eyes, who crinkles her nose a little like you did when she laughs.  
Her questions have clawed at my edges, and when I answered her questions with my own this winter, I found a story enough like ours that I almost screamed aloud in my empty garage, staring at my phone in one part horror and one part comfort.

Grief loves company.

Maybe it's watching my longest-running intimate relationship fade, dissolving under the weight of distance and dissonance.  A comfortable friendship growing in its place.  Acknowledgement of change.

A different kind of grieving.

Couldn't leave a message on your line

You couldn't find the words to tell me what you were thinking, that night.

I'll never have answers half as loud as the questions.

But I can put this paper in the ground.

I can crumble the soil in my hands.

I can bring water and wait for the sun.

I can welcome change.

Modern Skirts - Save Me

2 so far.

In which I update the title of this post to reflect the number of woke women I know who have shared that twitter thread where a woman explains men's fashion history to men while aggressively talking down to us.

I can't control how failure makes me feel.

I can't control how mistreatment makes me feel.

I can't control how being taken for granted makes me feel.

But I can control how I respond.

Inhale.  Exhale.

Do you like Apples?

So, many Blues dancers in the national scene, it would appear, still feel justified thinking we're somehow handicapped by our choices and the community value we place on transformative, low-authenticity, (often melodic) dances ...

I say that because in a conversation about how important the ability to dance to rhythm is, I got told this, a couple of days ago.

"a lot of the "fusion" aesthetic is etherial [sic], not really paying attention to rhythm, not setting a base rhythm of movement, and that has then infiltrated other dance communities."

(It's worth noting that the person who made that statement didn't attend fusion dances. They just felt they were qualified to speak authoritatively about us. Also notable is the fact that in a thread full of other skilled blues dancers, including many who dance fusion, no-one stood up to that person and told them they were talking out of their ass--because this myth is widespread and pervasive.)

That comment was brought on as part of a conversation praising the caliber of top-tier blues dancing happening at BS2018, (aka "BluesShout!" but I like to use the acronym, obviously).

aaaand I just heard that one of the coolest Fusion organizers and teachers I know walked off with 1st in the M&M competition at BS this weekend.

...

Hey snobs in the blues community: Do you like apples?

Cause one of us just won your mix & match.

How bout them apples?

😆😂😆😂😆