A love song to the metro (10/8)

If I could take scalpel to the city streets,
peel away to its center, from the womb
I would pluck you car by car
know your lights as my own.

Annual masochistic tendencies come out at the start of the New Year. This for me means that I explore what written log I have left for the past year. So though I avoided it for the first week of the year, I couldn't help but look back at my journal--both the written and electronic.

There's a lot I could say about this year and how it killed my dream for The Writing Life as the elite members of the club call it. It did. Or at least right now I feel much more like going for my dream of being a cake decorator than being a Pulitzer Prize winning writer. But I guess when it boiled down to it, 2006 was just one of those years.

In any case, the best thing I wrote in 2006 (in my opinion) was actually written in 2005. I asked my poetry professor, Why is it that the things I write that I like the most are the things that other people enjoy the least? He said, "A poem is like a loose tooth. You just want to wiggle it." I'm still trying to piece together what that means.

Anyway, here's the excerpt from that. It (sadly) sums up the year.

So Loren and I got out early, walking the half hour back down to Foggy Bottom and the snow was coming down, but not touching the ground. I could see the cars in the window buildings and I stopped Loren for a moment, "Do you see that?" He said, "It looks like they're driving up the buildings." That's when I started to cry, but Loren was too drunk to notice. I said to him, "Do you ever think about where you are?"

Maybe I didn't say that. I don't remember.

And not two hours later I was in a bedroom with towels at the foot of the doors and smoking with a boy from my Latin class, his girlfriend and John. He said, "I think you underestimate yourself." I said, "I think I'm pretty dumb." "Too tough on yourself, " he said. Someone said "law school" and that's when everything went to bits. John got real sick and wouldn't leave the bathroom for a while. The two of us stumbled the entire way back to E Street taking a path that I cannot even remember. When we got to his room, John went into the bathroom and locked me out. When he came out and lay on the bed for a moment I had myself convinced that he was dead and I didn't know what to do. What do you do with someone who is dead. He scratched his nose, I took off my clothes. My throat was enflamed, cut through from the smoke. He pushed me away. He mumbled. I couldn't understand. He wasn't dead. Neither was I.