unlock the cage

life is beautiful

Last week a good friend of mine sent me this poem, which appeared in The New Yorker in June 2009. I loved it so much that I decided to send the author, Stephen Dunn, a Pulitzer prize winner, a letter in the mail. I told him I had recently been introduced to his work and that I love his poem and told him thank you for writing it. My friend also sent a letter, separately. And today, we received his response!

Dear Chris + Meghan,
Very sweet of both of you to write to me about my work. Know that it matters to me, and that I'm grateful.

Sincerely,
Stephen Dunn

birdhouse

Hush, restless heart.
Quiet down, reckless heart.
Still the flapping of your wild wings,
and rest a moment in my hand,
so I may tend your wounds with my grace and forgiveness.

For I know you have sinned,
and I know your desperation.
I know your rooms filled with longing,
and then your rooms filled with dust,
and especially I know
those brimming with Love and Sorrow.

But for now I’m interested in the rooms I don’t know at all,
those with locked doors and shuttered windows.
Invisible to everyone and to me,
they open as I sleep
and close up again when I awake.

So hush now, careless heart,
and be still -
I’m after
a lock 
that turns.

on 91st street

All the leaves said,

"Just wait."

I felt you push the wind 

through them 

as they trembled.

So I will wait

under their gentle cover,

allowing the sun to warm my skin

and the rain to bathe it,

 

season after season,

until the snow comes.

the calm in the storm

If You Forget Me by Pablo Neruda
Read by Madonna

("implacable sweetness" is the most beautiful phrase I think I've ever heard)

Today an earthquake came to New York

Today an earthquake came to New York

and also the ground moved beneath me.

i wish i didn't have to title my blog posts

108

I just did 108 sun salutations.
I'm not the same person,
just like I was before.
          And also,
          my legs hurt.

nothing is wasted

It's been raining in New York City for three days, and it's chilly. When it feels like fall, whether it's really fall or not, I fall in love everyday with a person who's not there. I listen to a lot of Ryan Adams and I close my eyes and see the fire treetops and write so many poems in my head that never make it down to paper.

The universe is awe-some. A poet named Laura Gilpin wrote my favorite poem, and I just learned today that she died the day after Valentine's Day in 2007 in Fairhope, Alabama. She studied at Columbia University, so she lived in NYC for a while. So the circles keep opening and closing, and my life has become this beautiful work of art being created in each moment by something that is not me and I sit idly by and watch, sometimes laughing and sometimes smiling and sometimes crying, but always joyous.

life after death by Laura Gilpin

These things I know:
How the living go on living
and how the dead go on living with them
so that in a forest
even a dead tree casts a shadow
and the leaves fall one by one
and the branches break in the wind
and the bark peels off slowly
and the trunk cracks
and the rain seeps in through the cracks
and the trunk falls to the ground
and the moss covers it
and in the spring, the rabbits find it
and build their nest
inside the dead tree
so that nothing is wasted in nature
or in love.

the dance

Tomorrow, when the guests have departed,

the balloons deflated,

and the champagne de-fizzed,

you will sit alone

and contemplate how the years zipped.

But tonight, tomorrow is just a figment,

and with my hand in your sunworn hand,

we twirl round and round,

and I hope that you see:

I’m yours now more than ever,

our eyes, thunderstorm mirrors,

and your heart?

I carry it in my heart.

beautiful no-sun

I wish it were

r

a

i

n

i

n

g

and that I could burrow

where you couldn’t see me

and I couldn’t see you

until my heart stopped beating

and my stomach collapsed

and my brainstorm short/circuited

like number five

(but)

i am alive

i am alive

i am alive

and the sun will rise and i

e

s

i

r

with it.

Patti Smith at St. Mark's Church

Last night I had the most incredible Patti experience thus far, the amazing opportunity to see her read poetry with Lenny Kaye on the 40th anniversary of their very first performance in the same church where it all started. I wrote a review of it for Sound System NYC, and took some shoddy video on my iPhone. This woman is truly inspiring in every way: universally talented, rousing, kind, warm, gentle, humble. She is everything I aim to be in my life. She is a true artist.

I've seen Patti three times over the past year, but this time was different because I had never seen her read poetry before. I recorded her reading "Ballad of a Bad Boy," a poem she wrote about Sam Shepard and his car, over the grisly hum of Lenny Kaye's electric guitar. It was the definition of badass. Turn your volume way up.

monday at midnight

tuesday at two

drunk on tequila

thinkin' of you ma

I drove my car on ma

wreckin' cars was my art

published in amphibi.us

I went to the NYC Department of Housing and Community Renewal today to ask them a question about my apartment building. I walked in and I was convinced it was the bleakest office in New York. It was fluorescent, not just the lights but everything, and there were no books or magazines. You had to talk to the government through a large Plexiglas sheet, and there was a sign on it that said NO EATING, like a zoo. The office is on Beaver Street, so animals were a theme.

After waiting for about 15 minutes a woman waved me in and talked to me for another 20 in fragmented sentences. She curtly asked me to quit clicking my pen. She asked me for a different phone number than the cell I offered her because, she said, the city of New York cannot make long-distance phone calls. I could see the sky through a window, it was very gray outside but the snow had stopped. She went to make a photocopy and I absent-mindedly checked my e-mail and I had an acceptance from Amphibi.us, an online poetry journal. I walked in me and walked out me, but a different me, a published poet me. The fluorescent cooked me like plaster, in the most brilliant, beautiful, living art I have yet experienced.

we are all little boys and little girls

Yesterday was my Kid A reading. It was really amazing - Cake Shop was packed out and pretty much everyone I know in New York City was there, plus a couple people from out of town. It was definitely the largest group of people I've ever read in front of.

My assignment was to write a poem inspired by Radiohead's song Motion Picture Soundtrack off the album Kid A. The song is a part of who I am, and I wanted so badly to do it justice. After listening to the song for the 10,000th time this year, I came to the conclusion that it's essentially a love letter to suicide, a tale of the battle between the good and evil forces that plays out in all of our lives.

Here is my poem. Thanks to everyone who came out yesterday. Sometimes it is like the movies.
---

we are all little boys and little girls

1.
I had a discussion with a friend
over monitors
about Freemasons,
who is one and who isn't.


I said I didn't know what
the big deal was.
People always say artists sold their souls to the devil at a crossroads
to get the talent they have,
whatever talent might be.
He said,
who knows.


Instead,
maybe they sold their souls to God
in the back alleys of their minds.
Because eventually the road ends,
and it's either death or nothing.

People start to believe things they said they'd never believe.
People curl into themselves under sweat-soaked bedsheets.
People tousle the clouds under their feet as they walk upon high,
on rooftops so gilded,
they strip soles of humanity.
People smoke cigarettes and flick ash into the fire.


2.
I have measured out my life with IM boxes.
I have cried onto my keyboard,
drawing myself into a cube with tears running a river through Qs, Rs and Ts.
I have confused names and old faces and
I have forgotten who I am.


I have imagined defenestration
and masturbation
and a different nation,
one run entirely by machines,
leaving people like me
to capacitate and then undo their demons,
all while in their pajamas
or maybe never getting dressed at all.


3.
I am a Freemason.
You are a Freemason
And you and you and him
and his yellow dog too.
It's one of those things
we can never disprove so it may as well be true.


God is a Freemason.


4.
The fall is nearly as thrilling as the high,
and it’s a cheek turned to God.

Because eventually the road ends.
All the parts you thought made you
shut off at once.
The grinding halt reverberates off slick bricks,
the rooftop blown off.


You're left barefoot and childless.
Loveless neon signs vibrate through whiskey glasses,
wooden stools steal your shirts,
people tell you things but you can't remember.


You remember when you used to hope,
but the feeling is distant
like a city you read about in a book but never visited.


5.
I think you're crazy maybe,
but worse yet I think you're dead.
Every day is a memory of the next.


I have seen you beg for your soul,
stirring it around in a bucket of shit,
over and over to the tune of a harp
that's strung with the hairs of the people you loved
who didn't love you back.


6.
At the end of the road,
there’s a sign.
It is the same in all languages, at all times,
and it reads:
What do you live for?
What do you live for?
What do you live for?


7.

I live for a newspaper pressed into seedy cement on the street in Harlem.
I live for nights spent with strangers on SoHo benches.
I live for my mother, who said you can always come home!
I live for saltwater seeping into my skin as I step onto the floor of silent seas.
I live for must, and do, and will, but never should.
I live for the guiding light of glow in the dark stars stuck to the ceilings of our skulls.
I live for muzzles butting mirrors and stretching to their ends.
I live for a saxophone in a subway station squealing syncopated sadness.
I live for reflections in rocking cars, breath beating upon bombs planted in our bellies.
I live for my disembodied spine dancing in the dark to an invisible drum.
I live for church organs and choirs and stained glass thrown across my chest, broken.
I live for visions and revisions and reversing my decisions.
I live for the smell of your incense, your insensitive hands throwing me against the wall.
I live for the fucking Freemasons.
And I live for myself,
The only person who will never leave me,
Because I won't let her.
The law of their God is in their hearts.

i will see you in the next life

My love affair with Radiohead's song Motion Picture Soundtrack began in January of this year. I bought the album Kid A online and was sitting in my room on E 118, listening and writing. As soon as the song came on, I stopped what I was doing and sat straight up in my bed. I started sobbing, and sobbed and sobbed. The song struck a very real chord in me, it felt like it had actually come out of me instead of coming from outside. It haunted me for weeks.

You can hear the original version of the song here.

The song played an integral role in the writing of my first short film, Love Sand, and earlier in the fall I was asked by Melissa Broder to write a poem inspired by it for her Polestar Poetry Series. The reading is Dec. 5 at Cake Shop, and there's a possibility that Love Sand will make a real-life premiere there - I hope some of you can make it!

scenes from a waffle house

I see you in the light of the table lamp, switched off.
Sprawled on your back, chest to the sky, arms open,
I am filled with a sudden rising anxiety that you might take off,
A vessel in flight over swelling waters.

I crawl to you like a fish sprouting legs,
Evolution guiding my fingers over land,
Skin and bones and meat and heartbeat shocking my tendons.
One nail in front of another other other,
No longer starved, they simply linger.

You stir,
Dancing shadows across your face,
Watching me from behind your lids,
Fashioning your limbs into a trap -
I volunteer myself, a nubile victim,
In your sleeping ear: "Tie me up."

We stir,
Coffee and cream across a lacquered table.
Your wheels are up.
In one motion you slide from your seat to share mine,
And in my pouring ear: "With you, silence is not so bad."

Browned on the griddle,
Smothered,
Covered,
I'm done.

in the dark of fall

I've seen three movies in the past five days. There's something about fall this year - the way it's pouring onto the city in wet puddles and cold winds, instead of spreading from the top down with leaves red, then orange, then yellow  - that's making me want to sit inside in the dark and hunt for inspiration on a screen. I've not been disappointed so far. I saw The Social Network Friday night, the day it opened, and the theater was totally packed. Then yesterday Stephen Elliott, increasingly becoming my favorite contemporary writer, wrote about the film in his daily Rumpus e-mail. He talked about what touched me most about the film - whether or not Mark Zuckerberg is tragic, or an asshole, or neither. I wrote him back, which I do a lot, and he asked me if he could post my response to The Rumpus. I was thrilled. I said yes.

Last night I saw Howl and Never Let Me Go. Never Let Me Go was beautiful but ultimately bleak and it made me want to be in love. I liked Howl, mostly for the scenes depicting Allen Ginsberg's interviews with the Paris Review, which you can read here.  He talked a lot about his writing process, and a few things stood out to me as a prophecy for my own experiences with writing. Here's a snippet from that interview, and my response below.

"Usually during the composition, step by step, word by word and adjective by adjective, if it’s at all spontaneous, I don’t know whether it even makes sense sometimes. Sometimes I do know it makes complete sense, and I start crying. Because I realize I’m hitting some area which is absolutely true. And in that sense applicable universally, or understandable universally. In that sense able to survive through time—in that sense to be read by somebody and wept to, maybe, centuries later. In that sense prophecy, because it touches a common key . . . What prophecy actually is is ... that you know and feel something that somebody knows and feels in a hundred years. And maybe articulate it in a hint—a concrete way that they can pick up on in a hundred years." -- Allen Ginsberg

When Allen Ginsberg first read Howl at a bar in California in 1955, he was 29 years old and unpublished. I find that comforting.

I think if people have great things inside of them that are meant to be shared with the world, they will be shared. God doesn't operate on human timeframes. It's quite the opposite. Ideas will emerge in their own time. Before he wrote Howl, Allen spent eight months in a psychiatric hospital trying to '"rid" himself of his homosexuality. I think he was around 21 years old at the time. Do you think he wrote during those eight months? I don't know, but it seems unlikely. I wonder if he tortured himself about not writing. That seems more likely, but still improbable. I imagine it's hard to find time for either writing or self-injury when everyone around you is getting shocked with electricity and lobotomized. The act of brushing one's teeth becomes one's poetry.

Allen shared Howl with the world when he was 29, and I find that comforting. Self-injury is mostly just a waste of time. At my most self-injurious, I never really produced a piece of work I felt proud of. Mostly I just laid around and cried and struggled to find words to describe what I was experiencing and ended up submitting myself to my wallowing. But when I've found my path again, which by the presence of God I've always found a way to do, I've felt invigorated and filled with words. Even if on that path lied sadness or fear or grief, I could find the words for it. Spending a night watching television is better for one's poetry than spending a night hating oneself for wanting to watch television. God is, for the most part, very forgiving about television-watching.

If you were born to express something, do not be afraid. It will be expressed. Just keep writing, or whatever it is that you do. God will carry the rest.

And if you were not born to express something, also: do not be afraid. That too will be revealed in time. You can still lead a happy life and love and make the world better by living through your heart.

It's all useful.

guest post for a rainy day

George Wallace, a friend of mine and talented poet responsible for organizing a lot of the readings I've been to in the city, e-mailed me a poem this morning. He maintains PoetryBay.com as well as the Long Island Quarterly. The weather in Manhattan is rainy and cold and dreary today and it has been for a week and it's going to be for a week more. I've been feeling hints of depression and lack of inspiration, my insides mimicking my outsides. I haven't written a decent poem in weeks. But I really liked his so I wanted to share it with everyone. Sometimes things just happen and the reasons escape us and we go to bed and we wake up with headaches and we take the train to work and we don't know how any of it was possible before coffee.

biggie smalls is rapping on the radio

biggie smalls is rapping on
the radio -- biggie smalls
that’s his name – his
name's wallace too –
that’s right wallace like me
christopher george latore
wallace -- but everyone

calls him notorious

B.I.G. & he's got a　

cousin named Lil

Deceased or something

close to that -- which

& i know it's a little

obvious but I like

that name too & I

like how biggie spits

out his words -- drawls

them out -- a brooklyn

kind of loose easy action

he spits out his words

like broken teeth or

pieces of cement

& i like how

he tells a story

i mean not in the

usual way -- o & by

the way biggie smalls

is dead – shot four
times in the chest
in southern cal

in ‘97 -- that’s

thirteen years
ago -- it’s a
shame --
it’s a
mystery --
like wikipedia
says the murderer
was never
found –
o & by the
way last week
a college kid
jumped off
the gw bridge –
he was gay he was
from new jersey & his
roommates played
a trick on him &
now he’s dead –
people jump off
bridges a lot -- never
make a splash
-- but this one
makes a
splash &
the world
sits up from
its big stew
of nothingness
& says something
-- & now everyone’s
saying something even
ellen degeneres who cried
about it on national tv – every

body has an opinion & for

chrisssake the college kid

had a name -- tyler clementi

– nothing big nothing
notorious -- just tyler
& nothing’s ever going
to change in this world –

christopher george latore

wallace was just trying to

make some money for his

daughters -- tyler clementi
was just trying to find some
love – & me I’m trying to
make out the words
to this song –　 there’s
words for everything –
this world’s a big stewpot
of words – this world’s

a big mystery　 – this world

sits up & then it lies back

down again in its big

stew of nothingness &

dreams -- who killed biggie –

who killed tyler clementi --

murderers never get

caught -- ‘if you

don’t know,
now you know,
biggie’

early morning saturday

I'm up on Saturday at 8 a.m.
It feels like never.
I am not in New York,
I am in some other place where people drive cars
And use radio dials, switching from lane to lane,
Parallel parking in front of their houses
And pressing buttons to lock their vehicles.
They actually use their phones as phones.

Last night someone tried to charge me $13 for a vodka
and I laughed in her face.
I'm snooty about being poor -
That's the only way to be about it.
I watched my friend dance on her own,
And a strange drunk man came up and wrapped his arms around her waist.
She slinked away and I remembered
That some men play games with women's bodies
Like boys with their marbles.

I stood, drinkless and motionless,
Remembering when I used to call this fun:
Standing in five-inch platform heels, wax in hair
And gloss on lips,
Feeling pretty and famous. 
Now I just felt like an outcast,
And it was a long walk home,
And the balls of my feet felt like sandpaper soles.

We went into town this morning,
Bright and early in a red car,
The most gorgeous fall day
Blowing through rolled down windows,
Reminding me of the parts of my old self
I want to keep around forever.

maybe i should submit something to the new yorker

I have a subscription to The New Yorker because one day I got a letter in the mail at work offering me a really cheap deal for being a member of the "media." I was like hell yes and sent in my reply card, eagerly awaiting my first copy. I killed my subway transit hours by reading New York until the day The Hallowed Book hit my desk.

That was last winter. It is now creeping up on Fall, and I have a stack of New Yorkers on my desk. I have a weekly ritual. When I get the week's issue, I immediately open to the table of contents. I find where the poems are, and I read them. I ponder them. I read the mini-biographies of the poets in the front of the book. I debate whether or not to just-for-the-hell-of-it open an e-mail to the poetry editor, free-write some poetic prose in less than five minutes (a la Miss Hannah Miet) and click send. I decide not to. Then I add the New Yorker to the stack of other New Yorkers, a nice little family of New Yorkers taking up residence in my office. I never touch them again.

This week, as usual, there are two poems in The New Yorker. Here is one of them, replicated in its entirety.


ON THE INEVITABLE DECLINE INTO MEDIOCRITY OF THE POPULAR MUSICIAN WHO ATTAINS A COMFORTABLE MIDDLE AGE

O Sting, where is thy death?

-- David Musgrave

While I'm thinking about what poetry is and if I consider OTIDIMOTPMWAACMA to be whatever poetry might be, I get an e-mail. It just says, "Hi sweetheart, how are you today?" My heart stops and starts up again. I am reminded that, sometimes, one line is poetry.

Gmail --> Compose --> Paul Muldoon @ New Yorker --> Subject line --> Poetry Submission --> Email body -->

ON THE INEVITABLE DECLINE INTO MEDIOCRITY OF THE POPULAR WRITER WHO ATTAINS A COMFORTABLE MIDDLE AGE

The fuck?

-- Meghan Blalock

Dunkin' Sonnets

Sadly, thanks to my travels in August totally kicking my ass, I am now addicted to coffee. For the past couple weeks I've gotten a cup of Dunkin' everyday at work - and I thought I might as well make something good out of a caffeine addiction, yeah?

This is just the first line of what I hope will become a sonnet. Yeahhhhhh I know it's almostbutnotquite iambic pentameter, but whatevz. I blame the fact that I was still near the top of the cup when I did this. I'll continue the sonnet one post a week, or more often if I feel like it. There's no shortage of coffee cups to choose from.

i love you already, from afar