Tag Archives: art

On Bringing My Daughter to College

This part of my life has always been separate.
Everyday I leave our house behind;
I drive these roads
and walk these paths
alone,
and my two worlds
have never intersected.
Until today.

My time on campus 
has always been about learning
and living dreams,
so it’s funny that it took you 
coming to school with me to teach me
how much of my dreams are already here
in you.

The Little Red House (Bunker 1)

I wonder who the mason was;
I wonder why he labored—
and if he worked alone,
rolling wheelbarrow-loads of brick and mortar,
making tracks other wheelbarrows would follow later,
laden with bodies instead of bricks.
Was he the same Polish peasant
who was evicted in March of 1942?
I suppose if he hadn’t built the house
they would have used another—
they used another anyway—
but would he have continued
eating meals on the half-finished walls,
discarding wax paper where a mass grave would lay,
and singing as he worked,
mixing mortar and laying bricks and building walls—
would he have continued if he had known
how many would would die trapped inside them,
how many children would breathe their last
little breaths of noxious air
while their parents yelled and clawed
their fingers off on the walls, frantic,
begging down the little red house
that what he was building up?

Recipie: Life of Sam Bartholomew

Makes one serving.

Open one large package of unapologetic nerdiness.
Pour entire contents into large bowl.
Add 2 rounded scoops of addictive personality,
1 scoop of skepticism, and
one half scoop of confidence in abilities.
Blend.
Shake in inordinate amount of short-lived but fervent interest in everything.
Fold in family time, literature, learning, and video games until mixture takes on hectic look.
Leave some room for homework (optional).
Add four tablespoons of childish/reckless behavior.
Add half a pinch of patience (to be used very sparingly).
Pour caution into separate bowl.
Open window and throw contents into wind.
Collect what remains and as afterthought to be sprinkled to taste(optional).

Pour mixture into a 5 foot 7 inch pan.
Bake at 98.6 degrees for 25 years.

Warning, final product may not appear this aged externally.

Chill and serve.

Interview with a Zyklon B Handler

You must keep your reasons for doing it
in the forefront of your mind at all times.
There may be things you like about your victims,
things your mind will tell you to try and stop you;
there may be consequences you’d rather not deal with—
mourning families, a guilty conscience,
pleading, begging,
a sleepless night or two,
that sort of thing—
but when the moment comes to kill
the time for such considerations is past.
The death will have pros and cons,
which is why it’s always a sacrifice.
You make a compromise with the universe
when you decide to take a life:
“I’m willing to give up this person’s good traits
to get rid of their bad ones.”
So you tell yourself whatever you need to;
you do what you have to, and,
depending on how well you’ve convinced yourself,
the universe may hold you to a debt of guilt.
You may wish there was another way,
but you can’t just kill a part of someone—
you cannot choose which portions to get rid of—
you have to kill all of them,
the whole body, you understand?
You cannot kill the Jewish in someone and keep the body.
And the Jews were all one body.
There were good people,
men, women, children, even infants…
you had to kill all of them.
They were sacrifices for the future of Deutschland,
a burnt offering made to the god of the Reich.
We didn’t hate the human part of them,
just the Jewish part, and
we hated it enough—
we knew the reasons well enough—
that we were willing to sacrifice the humans
to be forever rid of the Jew.

Campus Tree

It grew in the space between walkways
where students shuffled past year round
hurrying to classes, learning
to fit into their chosen professions—
but the tree didn’t fit in. Not anymore.
It leaned too far south, they said,
and its grasping fingers had claimed
too much of the campus sky.
On a warm day in spring before its leaves budded,
a worker drove slowly to the spot
in crowds that broke around the service car.
The man stepped out and spat on the ground,
scrutinizing the trunk and branches.
He moved around the tree, peering down the walkways,
to see how it measured up to the others in its row.
More campus workers came during classes
and threw red ropes up the leaning trunk.
They hacked and hauled off the abnormal branches,
checking their work against the row
until the tree earned a passing grade.

Utilitarianism

Should I write because I can
or only when I have something to say?
Do I write to build the facade of a writer
or because I need to express my thoughts
and feel I do that best in written form?
If the latter, why doesn’t my journal suffice?
Do I need my words to be read
and appreciated by strangers?
But writing is an act of faith
in the permanence of
the words being written,
and inherent in that faith is a trust
that someone will (eventually) read
and enjoy what’s recorded.
Is art a selfish process then,
used to inflate the ego of the creator,
or is it all presumption,
undertaken by those who
think they have valuable insights
that no one else has had?
Why do I even ask these questions?
Writing makes me happy, so I write—
but even that is rather utilitarian of me to say.

Sailing

I love falling asleep with the windows open
when it’s warm outside and the breeze
is playing with the leaves.
It stirs the grass, the blinds,
the chimes we bought in Nassau,
and my mind. It carries a scent as it sighs
through the trees and into my room—
a green scent that never sleeps,
but tumbles, ageless, from one tree to another,
from one town to another, from one end of the earth
to the other. It cannot be seen,
and so engages only my other senses:
smell and sound and something
deeper, something primeval,
like the force that drives migrations.
It calls me like the ocean calls a mariner.
I lay in bed and wonder where the breeze began,
where it goes, and what it does in between.
But then I remember;
I already know what it does in between.
It stirs the leaves, the grass, the chimes—
imbues them with its scent and is, in turn, imbued.
It stirs me as I lay in bed,
and, slowly, I drift away with it.