The Old Gods (A Poem)

The old gods sing
in our bones still, humming through
skin, buzzing
at our teeth and along
our lips, their names
hardly forgotten

when the old rage comes, the jealousy
of immortals watching the living stumble
toward Death, rushing there, laughing,
sowing pain along the way. We feel the devil's horns
sticking through, hell's heat stoking
our skin - we want more
than mortality allows, than immortality
too. And yet,

there at sunrise, there along the river's
edge, the waves folding
over themselves, the seagulls taking their way
out over the waters to beyond
clouds and horizons; and there

in our towers and skyscrapers, lifting
off from our islands, to look down on our works
and see just beyond the sky, beyond
the land we're meant to walk and work,

there is the unspoken reverence of worlds
growing in the night, dreamed and built and lived,

and in us below, offering
our meager love to the hungry, to
the poor, caring

without boundary, without reason, only
of ourselves, our words, our thoughts made
visible into lives and cities.

We offer our tribute and receive
the old blessings, sunsets and sunlight,
tracing a finger along the skin
of a lover, our old Gods
of hunger, of pleasure, of love, singing
in our bones - it is time
for worship.

--Matthew Stalbaum, 9/23/11
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It's funny - in a lot of my older poems, you can clearly read the e.e. cummings influence in them. Now with this one, I can't help but see how much Mary Oliver's been influencing me, except without all her talent at describing nature.

I love the idea that there are gods older than God, that there are ancient forces working as the undercurrent to everything we know, but coming out in simple facets of our lives. So I wrote this poem about that, and I honestly didn't expect it to have this wide of a scope when I started out. This is one of those poems that definitely got figured out and explored in the process of writing it - I had no expectation for that last stanza to ever happen, and it's maybe one of my favorites of the poem, and possibly of any I've written. I also feel like I could've stolen it straight from Mary Oliver.

So those are this week's 3 poems. You can almost see a progression in them - Blue, to the Blues coming like an ancient force, to these Old Gods ruling over everything. I'd love to say that I planned that, but as with most of writing, it was all by accident. Hope you guys enjoyed reading one or all of them, comments/criticisms are always welcome. Ciao!

Your Blues (A Poem)

Your blues are coming from far off,
from the old towns, the country fields,
by backroads, too far back to find your way from,
dirt and dust in their wake, willed strong
with menace, with sickness, searching
a long time now for you, here
with your bourbon and your guitar, your soul
and your sins, lost,

while your blues are coming
from so far off, coming to be heard
from your beaten instrument, your sore fingers, your voice
ragged with your bitterness and your aches
running deeper than your bones and coming
from the Devil knows where,

your blues coming to relieve it all
from you, to preach it into the night, gospel of your heart,
to get you lost in it, confused in melody and emotion,
lost in the instinct of rhythm, in motion, your fingers
sliding along your biting strings to play
songs that can't be written, songs played in the dry heat

when your blues, from far off,
with their harsh and cool tones, come to be sung
with everything you've lost, whatever you have
left, whatever hope
had the nerve to stay.

--Matthew Stalbaum, 9/23/11
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I've always been obsessed with the Blues for some reason, I don't know why. But the necessary ingredients for this poem were: a break-up, and watching the TV show Treme. It started off with just the first line, this idea that the Blues, instead of being something we feel from time to time, are something that come for you. I'll probably put this poem through a couple more revisions, it can use some more physical descriptions to give it a harsher feel, but for now I'm pretty satisfied with it. I guess my Blues came.

Blue (A Poem)

blue, still dark
with night, through your window
in the morning
when you haven't slept, blue too dark
to see by, blue shadows
and tired thoughts without the solace
of dreams, caught in blue
darkness, dark blue growing
to blue to light blue, birds
blue outside your window with bright
blue notes, blue morning
to watch rise with blue
thoughts, your empty
bedside, your strange life, day
in and day out blue sky
without rain, endless blue, solid
blue, blue canvass in the morning blue
brighter and brighter, blue
on blue, until eyes close
into darkness, morning
lighting it red, your
blue morning broken by
a white cloud

--Matthew Stalbaum, 9/15/11
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The poem pretty much describes it all - I came up with the idea after a night of intense insomnia where I didn't get a bit of sleep ("the morning when you haven't slept") and noticed the sky getting bluer and bluer with sunrise. I was already planning my blogpost on the Blues on my other blog, so I guess I had a lot of blue on my mind. It was interesting thinking of how Blue means so many different things to us, how the Blues are painful but fun at the same time, how dark blue can look like black but appear distinguished while light blue and sky blue are calming and cheerful.

Anyways, I thought it was a cool idea, I wrote the poem, and now you've read it (hopefully)! It was pretty fun to write too, you can kind of tell I started going crazy with just the sound of the word "blue" by the end. Almost hypnotically beautiful, right?

Drowning (A Short Story)

Drowning

by Matthew Stalbaum

            I don’t remember how old I was when I first asked my father what happened to my mother. But I remember light, speckled by tree branches rocking in the breeze, streaming in through a window and washing over the floor. It swirled like we were underwater, dancing chaotically but with a strange rhythm I couldn’t define; it reminded me of the ocean, its man-swallowing depths, the blue, choppy surface stretching to the horizon and falling off the Earth.

I remember being small enough to fit in my father’s arms, his bear-hugs encasing me completely, burying my face in the smell of his sweat. My own arms only reached to the sides of his stomach, and I would squeeze there tight until he conceded, sucking in his stomach and emptying all the air from his lungs across my neck, like wind from a storm. I would call him “Black Bear” for his dark brown skin and his towering figure, and he would call me “Little Cub.”

 “Little cub,” he said, cradling me. “Your mother is somewhere else.”

            I asked, “Where?”

            “In a place too far for us to reach,” he said.

            Heaven didn’t exist yet for me. There was no world outside of my father’s protective presence. I asked, “Can she visit us?”

            “We’ll discuss it another time, Peter,” he said in that baritone voice of his. Years later, he would use that voice when he needed me to listen to him closely, to trust him. “Let’s get you to bed,” he said, “come on little cub.”

            “Black bear!” I shouted, appeased enough, and his dark face descended over mine in a kiss.

During summers when I was a child, my father would take me to the neighborhood swimming pool. The waters were crowded with kids too young and parents too old to be shy with their bodies. The few teenagers there were just learning self-consciousness, staying submerged in the deep end, their torsos rippling amorphously beneath the surface. Two high school lifeguards sat on high, watching over us with bored looks, begging for and dreading a chance to take action, blow their whistles, and dive in. Circling the pool were those lounge-chairs that held you up with a succession of plastic bands, tight enough to support your weight but loose enough to lose your pocket-change through, colored sickly shades of yellow or green. I can only associate the pool with sunlight and heat, burning the soles of my feet as I ran along the edges. Whenever a storm-cloud approached, we would all scatter before the lightening could strike us down. My father was always the first, leading me along before anyone else even noticed it.

He took me on Sundays, when the house filled with an oppressive lethargy hanging in the air like molasses. I would dip my toes into the icy cold water, my gut contracting with the idea of that iciness all over. After a minute or two I’d force my feet to run against the hesitation and leap, splash, sink into the tundra-waters as they gradually turned warm and soothing. My father in his blue and green swim-trunks and an old work shirt would sit on a pool-chair by the edge, pretending to read, smiling at the sky and his pool-side neighbors and me tumbling about like a young dolphin. I could float along the surface on those buoyant pool-toys, the pool-bottom falling away, my legs hanging freely over what felt like an abyss. This, to me, was what it felt like to hang-glide. From that level the water was calm and clean, light glittering off like liquid glass.

            One day, when I was 8, the pool-toy slipped out from underneath my arms, floating away toward open water. I sank and saw the surface from below: rough, blurry, the sunlight turned dull and flat. When my toes reached the bottom, I made small leaps toward the pool-wall.

The edge felt close enough to hold on to but I couldn’t – the wall was slick, my fingers slipped every time. My eyes and mouth burned from the chlorine; I couldn’t stop choking. The sky and water dissolved into a blue chaotic blur.

Then a pair of hands grabbed at my arms and pulled me into my father’s fearful face. He patted my back as I coughed up pool water on him. “Breathe deep,” he told me while hugging me close, “just breathe in deep as you can.”

            When my eyes stopped burned, I noticed people staring at us. An older woman strolled over. I recognized her, as someone who always came alone. “Is he alright?” she asked my father. “I saw all that splashing but couldn’t make out what it was.”

            “He’s alright,” he said, eyeing her warily. “Just had a little scare.”

            She looked into my face, searching for some sign of injury or weakness, then smiled. “You should have seen your father. He saw you having trouble and he just ran over, full-speed, yelling your name.”

            My father carried me away from the woman and the pool-side, picked up his bag of towels and newspapers, and began to leave. From over his shoulder, I saw a few people still watching us leave, including the older woman, as the world lifted and fell with my father’s footsteps.

           

Soon after this he signed me up for swimming lessons. I burned with embarrassment when he told me the news, but I cooled when I saw that my swimming instructor was a high school girl named Polly. She had curly hair, dark eyes, and the longest smile I’d ever seen. Her navy blue one-piece bathing suit highlighted her lean body and the places on her mid-section where she was a little plump. She towered over me, ruffling my hair and calling me her “little man.” I was too young to know desire, but was young enough to be in love, to want her without knowing at all what I wanted. Every stroke I took was for her, every kick meant to please her, and I could only swim faster knowing, when I emerged, through the water dripping over my eyes, I’d see her there, waiting for me, smiling.

My one difficulty was treading water. I had no problem with motion, mastering every kind of stroke she threw at me. Even diving, which frightened me to no end, I managed to pull off, to her applause and my blushing. But floating in one place was beyond me.

“Move your arms and legs like this,” she told me, “the water will hold you up. Smoothly, you barely have to try.” I couldn’t seem to summon whatever instinct allowed her to bob so effortlessly in the water. Kicking my legs, waving my arms, willing myself to float – gravity always got the best of me. The glassy surface broke and I turned my face to the sky as the water pulled me under, watching the sun become a rippling spark. She’d lift me out with her soft hands, sit me on the edge of the pool, and ruffle her hand through my wet hair. “It’s okay my little man. You’ll get it someday.” I forced myself to face her eyes, lovely and caring, and all I felt was a painfully clear sense of all the things I couldn’t do.

           

At ten I had my first asthma attack. In the car, rushing to the hospital, I gasped for breath, slowly wheezing, air thick in my lungs. My father took one hand off the wheel whenever he could to rub my back. “It’ll be okay,” he repeated like a mantra, “we’re almost there.” When we arrived, my father lifted me into his arms, a sensation I never thought I’d feel again. I had begun rebelling against being a child already, craving the open world of the adults around me. For a moment, as he shut the door, he squeezed me in a way that cramped my already suffering lungs. But as we went inside, my head against his chest, I found it a bit easier to breathe.

The doctor put me on a nebulizer, a small beige box with a tube – breathe in medication, breathe out smoke. We took one home with us, and as soon as my father got the medicine for it, he placed it in the living room and plugged it in. There, like an ugly beige headstone among our stereo-system, TV, and all the fragile figurines my father had found at yard-sales, sat my nebulizer. I put up with it that day, too tired and breathless to struggle. The smoke billowed out around my head as Tom and Jerry played. I blew smoke after them on the screen but could hardly keep my eyes open. I dozed off at some point and woke up to the feeling of my father carrying me again. I pretended to still be asleep until he laid me on my bed.

He was determined to pull me out of my asthma with a regimen of three fifteen-minute nebulizer treatments a day. My attention span could barely last one. I couldn’t have asthma – I was ten, it was summer. I had to run, race, chase, wrestle, leap, and fly. Instead, our living room filled with smoke.

My father always sat across from me in the living room, pretending to read but never flipping the page. I couldn’t pay attention to any TV; I was too consumed with catching his eyes jutting over his book. He reminded me of a warden I had seen in a glimpse of a prison movie once. The man had sat on top of the prison wall with a rifle. A prisoner tried to run, and the warden, with the same look as my father’s, calmly picked up his rifle, aimed carefully, and fired. The prisoner went down. Sitting in the living room with that nebulizer, I was reminded how large my father was. Black Bear.

He worked from home, usually in an office room. After I was confined, he moved his laptop into the living room, typing up office documents and spreadsheets, reading the screen calmly through my smoke. This let him keep an eye on the heat advisory and air quality forecast on the weather station, his new favorite channel. The world was no longer blue skies and green grass but colored in codes and warnings, Oranges and Reds, like a nightmare. On Code Red days I was forbidden from leaving the house, and on Code Orange days could only leave minimally.

Outside my friends played happily, not burdened by the weight of their lungs. Sometimes I would even see Polly walking by on the sidewalk, short-shorts letting her show just how long her legs were. Whenever she passed by I felt my chest shrink in a strange way, an asthma attack without the loss of air, and as she drifted out of sight I would get lost in dreams of escape, walking alongside her out there, suddenly her height, her age, no longer her little man.

It was inevitable that I’d try sneaking out, if only to see an open blue sky over my head and not our cracked ceiling. I crept close to the door, toes pressing lightly into the carpet as I tried willing myself to float. I was absolutely silent, a ghost, air.

“No going outside,” my father shouted from the living room. “Code Red today.” It had been so all week.

“I want to play outside,” I said. I was already so close to the door, only needed to turn the handle and pull and I’d be there, outside. My father’s heavy steps came trotting down the hall. By the time he arrived, I had the door open, watching him defiantly.

“You can’t,” he said.

“It’s not fair!” I shouted, “I hate this! I’m going outside!”

I turned to face the doorway, but the streets were empty, the sweltering heat casting waves in the air. Everything was still and quiet. I felt the asthma like a jacket on my lungs, ready to tighten and pull me back down under.

“Peter,” my father said, and I knew I wouldn’t get out, that I would only be tossing myself into the sea to drown again. And my father couldn’t lift me out so easily anymore. We both knew that. He put a hand on my shoulder and pulled me back inside, and the door swung shut on the world.

She was tall, my mother, with skin as dark as my father’s and light brown eyes that seem to glow in every picture of her. She was born in Virginia and raised in DC, exploring the city streets with her cousins, never staying out past dark. She enjoyed reading and running most of all, tearing through adventure books faster than her parents could buy them, sometimes stealing them from a nearby used bookstore and returning them when she was done two days later. She met my father in college, introduced by a friend who knew they both liked The Rolling Stones and foreign films. She died while delivering me, and I’ll never know if she ever got the chance to see the baby she loved so deeply.

I discovered all of this in journals my mother kept since high school, two pages written everyday for twelve years. They were buried in a storage closet I had never bother exploring until my asthma developed. She wrote in cursive, her handwriting flowing across the page like a stream, like a melody. The last entry is marked a couple days before I was born, and she wrote about her bulging stomach, how she wanted it gone, wanted her body back, smooth and athletic, and she wanted her baby, me, in her arms. The last half of the journal is empty.

It took me years to read through all of them, from that summer of my asthma to my first year of high school at fourteen. I’d read a couple entries every night before bed, the box hiding safely underneath my mattress. I suspected my father knew but couldn’t bear saying anything. I hunted our house for their Rolling Stones records, carrying them and an old record-player up to my room. As I learned how to use the device on Sticky Fingers, I heard, for the first time in my life, my father’s door down the hallway closing shut. I attached some headphones to the record-player and closed my eyes, shut off in my own personal world as Brown Sugar started to play.

I saw Polly again just before I left for college, walking through the neighborhood. The years that had passed were written on her face in wrinkles and worry lines, and her belly bulged with the beginning visible signs of pregnancy. I wondered if it was planned or an accident, instantaneous and irrevocable.

Despite this, despite having gone through a bad break-up weeks before and feeling spiteful and lonely, I still felt the old pangs of longing, the strange desire to impress her without fully knowing why. Her long legs, her lean body, her dark eyes, all had me as entranced as from those days at the pool, and I hated myself for it. I wanted to not want anything, least of all a girl I hadn’t seen since I was a child. But it wasn’t my choice.

I was walking in her direction. In one instant, she was giving the ground a worried look; the next, she gave me a small, polite smile, and I felt the instinctive pain of not being recognized. Up close, her eyes were still lovely. I could have tried to bring it all back, could have called out to her, her little man. But I let her go along, submerged in her thoughts, fears, and longings, and I stayed smothered by mine.

I was taken in by Boston College, over 400 miles away from my father. During the first two years I called weekly; by junior year, every other week, more or less; by senior year, monthly. I omitted the flu’s and hangovers, the work stress and school stress, the asthma attacks, migraines, and panic attacks that all required medication. “What’s going on with you?” he’d ask.

“Oh, nothing,” I’d say, glancing at the various pill bottles on my desk, sterile white and dark orange, sitting next to my sky-blue inhaler.

In senior year, during one of our typical conversations of his questions and my one word responses, he asked, “How’s your asthma doing?”  

“I think it’s going away,” I told him. I hadn’t used my inhaler in over a year; there were panic attacks to care for instead.

“Are you sure?” he said. “Be careful anyway, I’ve never believed it really goes away.”

“Sure it can,” I said, thinking to myself, it goes to a place too far for us to reach. It didn’t surprise me that he’d think of asthma like cancer, going into remission only to reemerge years later. He didn’t need to know how I’d place my hand tight on my chest at times, breathing rapidly, taking in as much air as possible and never feeling it was enough; he didn’t need to know that his son, hundreds of miles away from home, was still drowning, would always be drowning. “I’m fine,” I said.

When the attacks hit, I always do the same thing. I lie in my bed and face the ceiling, getting lost in the white paint. “Breathe deep,” I say calmly. I think of my mother. I think of open spaces. I think about how free I’d feel outside this body of mine. I close my eyes. “Breathe deep.” 

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This story originated from an assignment in a fiction-writing class to write a two-page short story about a physical fear we had. The 1st draft was limited to the initial pool-drowning and maybe the asthma as well, and was more non-fiction than anything - in fact, every single significant detail was pulled straight from my life. But I tried writing it from a different voice than the voice I'd write in for non-fiction, so, to me at least, it was still fiction. Every draft after that I distanced from myself more and more - my Dad is white (not "Black Bear"), my mother's very much alive, I didn't go to Boston College, etc. I mention all of that because the basic idea behind the whole story is still very much true to me, which I think applies to all my writing really. 

I should thank my fiction class for the suggestions they gave me in class on this story. It's still somewhat of a work in progress, but overall it's something I can post here with a smile. After a few more trimmings and dressings I even plan on submitting this to a short-story contest - not expecting 1st place or anything, but they give out prizes for up to 10 or 15 stories, which isn't bad (and still promises money I believe!). Anyways, if you have any thoughts or criticisms on the story, feel free to share. I hope you enjoyed reading it, au revoir!

Funeral (A Poem)

Dress me
up in clothes I
never wore, a suit,
tie wrapped tight around
my neck, slacks
and shoes you'll never
see, steps
I'll never take.

Dress me in
peace, no wrinkles
on my brow, no smile, no fear,
no envy or hate - no, dress me
clean, asleep,
dreaming.

Dress me in a life; choose
carefully your words
and thoughts - they are more
than body or deeds
allow; dress me in
your love. I am less

than your me, something
more, a life that words can never
have: wholly
human, divinely flawed, dressed
already, dressed again, buried

already
in skin, love,
soaked in it
all, drowned in it.

Dress me nice and send me
home. They'll know who
I am.

--Matthew Stalbaum, 9/6/11
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I'm not entirely sure about the last stanza (it might be better cut out altogether), but overall I'm pretty happy with this poem. I think the idea's pretty clear when reading it. I've been enjoying this style lately of going through some event piece by piece, from concrete descriptions to increasingly distant and abstract ones. I don't feel like I'm stealing so blatantly from e.e. cummings!

Anyways, this is the last of my 3 poems for posting this week. Next week, if all goes to plan, I'll hopefully have another short story to post up here. Comments are always appreciated, from compliments to criticisms. Thanks for reading, ciao!

My Father is Bob Dylan (A Poem)

My Father, with all
the words he's never spoken, tangled
in silence, nestled
in the basement with the words
he never sang aloud, singing
from the bottom of his lungs,
the pit of his stomach, humming down
where no one
will hear him.

My Father at home
with the strings, picking
hard and surely a song
he didn't write, singing
for himself the words the world
has heard time over time, but
it is his song, a pain
only he understands.

My Father with his guitar, playing
songs he cannot teach, not through
our silence,
him down in the basement, and me
up in my room, us each
playing our strange music,
no melody or pattern, only our fingers
at heart.

--Matthew Stalbaum, 9/9/11
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I personally consider this poem unfinished. It's probably one of the hardest times I've ever had writing a poem, only because it's so straight-forwardly about my Dad, it's a weird sensation. It's that feeling when you write about someone that you're doing them an injustice - in this case, it's not that I'm afraid of painting him in an unflattering light, but that the poem isn't accurate enough, that it doesn't fully get at why I had the thought that my Father is Bob Dylan. I'm posting it here for general suggestions. I'm also considering writing a short story with this premise, which might go over better, but it's all up in the air right now.

Backfield Football (A Poem)

Their bodies under
the summer sun, glistening
and strong, are eager

for contact. Unrelenting,
their charges crash,
rarely breaking; and when

they fall, they lift
each other from the dirt
as brothers. They laugh

when they bleed, scarred
with the day, their limbs
aching and awoken.

--Matthew Stalbaum, 7/18/11

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I wrote this poem after playing my first ever game of tackle football this summer. I exaggerated the beginning a little bit I admit with the description of the bodies and everything, and writing about the experience like this does feel a bit strange, like I'm betraying it somehow or giving it more importance than it really has. Still, I wrote the poem, and I think it gets at that spirit of football played, not for professional reasons like the NFL or schools or anything, but just for fun. I want to touch up on some of the words in the near future, but I'm so satisfied with that last stanza that I don't mind much. 

A Six O'Clock Appointment With Death (A Short Story)

A Six O’Clock Appointment With Death
by Matthew Stalbaum

Max answered the door to find the mailman there, looking inexplicably solemn, holding out a stack of bills and magazines. On top, eclipsing a bright IKEA logo, sat Death’s appointment card. Max, only twelve, had never seen one in person before, but he knew the image well from movies and TV shows: Death’s scythe, tilted to the right, the long blade shimmering against a glossy black background. The quality was impressive, actually, but Max didn’t see the family keeping it around. “Sorry about this,” the mailman said. “Is Gary home?”

Gary was Max’s Grandpa, and was, for a man in his 80’s, in great health, well enough to take long walks through the neighborhood, then come back and lift Max up off the ground, feet dangling freely. He spoke loud and laughed louder, and enjoyed boasting that he could still shoot a deer from fifty yards, and would if Grandma hadn’t forbidden him from hunting ever again. This was not a man marked for Death. “Must be a mistake,” Max told the mailman. “Grandpa’s fine, date’s probably wrong. Thanks anyway.”

He forced a smile to be polite and started closing the door. It stopped sharply on the mailman’s foot, wedged against the door-frame. The mailman shook the pile of mail impatiently, the black card sliding along the IKEA magazine, silver blade glinting in the sun. “No mistakes,” he said. “Just take it to him please? This is hard enough as is.” He sounded honest and uncomfortable, his eyes pleading for an easy exit. A few cars drove by slowly, while the white mail-truck hummed softly by the curb, ready to continue on with the day’s deliveries. USPS policy required Death’s cards be hand-delivered to an actual person at the address. Max felt a tinge of remorse over this. He also didn’t believe much in bureaucracy. He opened the door back up, enough to stare at the mailman, and stood dead still. His nose itched, but he held his hand back to maintain the glare. “You can keep it,” he said, with a nod to the card. “Pretend it got lost. Mail gets lost.” He liked the idea of Death being waylaid by his cards falling out of sight to the mail-truck floor, slipping between the seats, getting blown out an open window and carried away with the wind.

“Doesn’t work like that,” the mailman said, “he’ll show up anyway.” Max stared at him a bit longer, his mind reaching for another bargaining tool that couldn’t be tossed off by a strict adherence to scheduling and paperwork. He stomped his foot in defeat and took the mail. “This sucks.”

“I deliver these every day kid,” the mailman said, “I know.” He began to leave, paused for a second. “You’ll live, trust me. Take it easy.” Then he walked back to his truck to continue his route, driving over to the next house to slip their mail into the slot. Max watched him carry on, but the mailman couldn’t sense his ill-will across the street. He settled for sitting down in one of the iron-work chairs on the porch and dropping the stack of mail on the small table beside him.

Cloud-shadows passed over the house and the lawn, casting the neighborhood in alternating light and shade. A cool wind blew through, nearly carrying the black card away. Max snatched it in mid-air, by reflex. He still had yet to read the details, but his curiosity wasn’t burning for them.

He and his parents had come down from New York City to Virginia for their once-a-year trip – they all hated Virginia. The air was too humid, there were too many mosquitoes. But Grandma and Grandpa were there, and despite being eaten alive by the insects, Max loved when his parents and grandparents sat on the front porch after dinner, during sunset, and talked of days past, becoming their younger selves again. Everyone had good stories, but Grandpa’s were the best. His words were the most poetic, his voice growing deep and rugged as he lost himself in his days growing up in the deep-south, working in the Navy, then as an ambulance driver. Max could close his eyes and see the old man’s life play out: the ocean stretching to the horizon as a battleship swayed beneath his feet; driving, sirens blaring, through rush-hour traffic, weaving only inches away from other drivers. Time shifted beneath that voice. Now there was Death’s card, and Max felt that the day should match the event, that storms should have been howling and hard rains falling. As it was, he sighed and glanced at the card.

It was a typical appointment card, unassuming and ominous. The surface was so smooth it was unsettling, the sensation sticking to Max’s fingers until he rubbed them along his jeans. Up close the scythe-blade was cut sharp, and the wooden handle was finely detailed, with swirling patterns in the grain, impressive if not a little too showy. Max flipped the card over for the details and winced. Printed neatly by hand on three separate lines: “Gary Parson, 6 PM, Natural Causes.” “Are you kidding me,” he huffed under his breath. It was already noon, which meant only six more hours of Grandpa, and not even enough time for sundown, when the day’s circumstances and the fading light made his stories glow in Max’s head. He noticed, at the bottom, a phone number, under the heading “Death Services.” Max walked around to the side of the house and pulled out his cell-phone.

A woman picked it up, speaking in a hollow, monotone voice: “Death services, how may I help you.” Max wondered vaguely if the souls of the dead could be hired as receptionists.

“Gary Parson residence?” she asked.

“How did you know who…”

“Caller I.D.” she explained. She added, “Sorry for your imminent loss.”

“Could we possibly reschedule?” he asked, “maybe next week? Or even move it down a few hours? Nine or ten tonight would be great.”

“No-can-do, no rescheduling. We understand this is a difficult time and can refer you to grief-counseling…”

“I don’t want grief-counseling, I just…can’t he come some other time?”

“Can’t swing that honey, the boss has to keep his appointments. If he let you change a time of death, then suddenly everyone…” Max could hear the mailman’s hopelessness in her voice too, droning on her pre-prepared speech that she probably gave every caller. Now Max wondered if Hell meant being hired to work for Death. “I can put you through to our complaint department,” she offered, “though you may be on hold for a while…”

“I don’t think I have that kind of time,” he said.

“Well thanks for calling,” she said before hanging up. Max wondered how many people called to complain about Death – bad timing, absurd causes, poor service to his clientele. He probably misspelled names, frequently.

Grandpa, seated in his recliner in the living room, took a few seconds to read the details of the card, then flipped it around to admire the front. “Nicer than they used to be,” he said with a chuckle, “I’m surprised. They used to look like they came straight from Hell.”

“But you’ve only got six,” Max checked his watch, “five and a half hours left! The card’s practically useless.” The rest of the family was out back, still oblivious of the news. “You don’t even look sick. Don’t you think it’s messed up?”

“It seems a little soon,” Grandpa said, “but no pain is a blessing. Not many get that.” He tossed the card on the table and sank deeper into the recliner. “And at least I get to be with you all before he comes.” His eyes closed, he breathed easy, the wrinkles on his face smoothed in peace.

“But it’s unfair!” Max said, “he’s ruining our visit. Death sucks!”

Grandpa smiled, leaned forward, ruffled Max’s hair. “Dying’s no big thing,” he said, “we all gotta do it. Now,” he said as he stood, taking the card, “better go break the news.”

Out back the air was cooler, and there was the smell of freshly cut grass. Everyone took the news easy. Grandma hugged Grandpa for a long time and kissed him. “It was a good life,” she said quietly, “we’ll just have dinner early then.” Max’s mother, Denise, cried calmly for her father, then wiped her tears away and smiled. Grandpa gave her and Max’s father a hug. They all spent the day with Grandpa casually, letting him choose the TV channel, sitting in silence with him on the porch. The house was quiet and calm, the family at peace. The black card sat on the coffee-table.

Max trailed Grandpa through the house, hoping for him to tell more stories, but the old man was content with silence. He wanted more, wanted his family to break their complaisance, to share his own outrage, confront Death, hold him off at the door when he finally came. He wanted consideration, someone to acknowledge what was sacred and suddenly ephemeral. Even more than all of that, he wanted Death to realize, for once, the importance of time to those who did not have nearly enough of it.

They ate dinner at 5:00. Conversation was lively; for spare, fleeting moments, Max would even forget about Death’s appointment. For one last time, Grandpa began to tell stories about when they first moved into this house, when they were younger people, different, adventurous – Max was enraptured. “Your mother” he began, and suddenly he saw her, his age, nothing like the calm, book-loving homebody she was now, racing boys (and winning) for fun, taking in stray cats, breaking her arm climbing a tree that was too tall. And Grandpa became 40 again, racing ambulances across the county, dodging traffic, driving incredible distances at impossible speeds, seeing people he’d delivered to the hospital walk out days later, alive and smiling. Max could see them super-imposed over each other, ghosts of the past possessing the present, their younger selves laughing through their older bodies. Max wondered if this is what happened when people died: a window opened up and the past sprang back to life one last time before something else was swallowed up into it.

At 5:59, Max glanced toward the front window and saw him coming across the sidewalk, black robe and all. Where his face should’ve been was a cavernous black hole, covered by his hood. Max saw him look around at neighbor’s houses, wave to a car driving by. He seemed strangely friendly, if not a little awkward. At 6:00, when the doorbell rang, the family shared pained smiles and glances with each other. “I’m guessing that’s for me,” Grandpa said with a wry smile on his face. He stood up to answer the door. No one had noticed that Max was already there, swinging it open.

Death’s head reached to the top of the door-frame, while his scythe reached his shoulders. He looked down at Max and waved hello with a hand covered by a black glove. “Just in time,” Grandpa called out to him. “Max, let him through. Could I get you anything? Tea? A bit of food?” Death shook his hand politely and patted his stomach.

Max stomped a foot to regain his attention. “You’re late,” he lied. Death shook his head calmly. “Fine, you’re early then. Come back some other time.”

“Max,” his mother shouted, “Don’t be rude to guests.”

“He’s not a guest,” Max yelled back, “he’s Death, and he could’ve picked any other day, any other time to come. He didn’t even bother to ask us when would be convenient.”

Death heaved with a sigh, his robes swaying gently, and reached into the loose, hanging space of one of his sleeves. Max hoped it would be a blank appointment card on which they could write whatever date and time they wanted, “Gary Parson, Date to Be Determined, Cause: However He Wants.” Instead, Death pulled out a brightly-colored brochure, holding it out to Max. The cover read “Understanding Death: Not an Enemy, But a Friend.” Beneath it was a photograph of Death on a playground, young children climbing along his robes and laughing.

“I don’t want a brochure,” Max yelled. Death’s hand twitched back nervously. Max looked up into the space where a face should’ve been and began to feel like a bully. The way Death’s hood was slumped down gave Max a vague impression of sorrow, but he chose to ignore it. Death sighed again and placed his gloved hand on Max’s back, leading him out onto the porch.

They sat on the steps out there, Death on the left and Max on the right, looking down the endless street at the houses, people coming home from work and going out to dinner. Death’s robe brushed against Max’s skin – silk. He leaned his stick against the ground, pointing the blade towards himself. Max saw that the metal was worn and dull and had probably never been polished. The wooden handle was splintered and rough.

Death took a deep breath and began to make frantic gestures with his hands, somewhere between sign-language and charades, trying to explain himself. Occasionally he shrugged helplessly as he gestured to himself and the things around them. The longer he went on, the more Max wanted to stop him. He had imagined Death would be commanding. Now he thought it was a marvel he didn’t trip over his own robes. Death finished his display, breathing heavily, and the blackness of his face was tilted as he looked over at Max.

Max avoided Death’s gaze, looking down at the brochure he was still holding. “Your Death, unfortunately, cannot speak,” a bullet-point read, “but he has your dearest sympathies.” Another one: “Death, like your local policeman or the mayor of your town, is an essential job that must be done to keep our Cosmos running smoothly.” Even Max felt like it was talking down to him, but he could feel his thoughts shifting, his anger giving way to something more difficult to cope with.

He glanced down the street and saw another Death knocking at someone’s door. The Death glanced around casually and noticed Grandpa’s Death, and the two waved cheerfully at each other. The other Death gestured to his wrist, where a watch would be, but Grandpa’s Death just gave him an OK sign. Max could almost imagine them working at an office, typing in cubicles, chatting over coffee. The Deaths’ conversation was interrupted by the door opening on the other Death. The people of the house welcomed him in politely, the door shut, and the street was quiet again.

The sky had begun turning a dark blue. Passing cars honked their horns at Death, waving back as he waved to them. Max hunched over and wrapped his arms around his knees. “You just came too soon, is all.” Death rubbed a hand across Max’s back and shoulders, the glove moving awkwardly over his shirt. Max looked up and saw the blackness of his face staring at him with that tilted look again. He was so painfully human, it was hard not to imagine eyes there, filled with sympathy for the people he left behind.

Finally, Death stood up and went inside. Max followed him in, but stayed by the door. Death approached the dinner table, where his family still sat, listening to Grandpa tell a story about the first time he had ever seen Death, when his own mother had died. The Death in the story sat down and had tea with her and listened to her complain about the world as it was then. Grandpa’s Death leaned against a chair, too taken by the tale to bear stopping it. No one said a word, they only listened. Despite the black robe and scythe, Death looked entirely natural, comfortable, part of the family too.

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It's not often I post short stories here! Hopefully and ideally, I'll have a new one here every couple weeks, so here's hoping I can maintain that schedule.

I had this story idea for years before writing it to have workshopped by my Advanced Fiction class this Spring semester. It began just as a story about a boy confronting Death, but the bits about the past and storytelling, about the appointment cards and the kind of world that would make, didn't come up until later and later drafts.

This is my latest draft so far, mostly the product of laboring over this the past two nights. I'll say, I don't think it's a perfect story, but I am pretty pleased with it, which is maybe what you have to accept at a certain point when you're a perfectionist. It's a simple and enjoyable little tale, and that's good enough for me. Feel free to leave comments and criticisms (they'd be preferred actually!), and I'll be back next week, most likely with a set of poems to post.

Build (A Poem)

find yourself
a country, find yourself a house
to grow your trees around, to shade
from summer heat and showers, to keep
cool and still;

then grow
your flowers and gardens, nurse their seeds
until to your horizons stretch
your colors, your fruits, and pick them
gently, into vases and bowls,
enjoy what you've mothered
while you can;

then fill
your house, build it again from the inside
out, blossoming with the tables you built
from your trees (you choose what goes on them),
the chairs you made with your hands (who sits in them),
the air you've breathed from the flowers you picked
and tended (what is spoken, what is sung), fill your house
with family, and yourself, keep the windows open and fill it
with the breeze and the rain, heat and frost,
take it all, fill
yourself,

the sky, the seas,
silence and noise, color and darkness, your lover
in bed, naked and soft, your lost ones buried beneath
dirt and time;

open your eyes; find
yourself a world;
make you a home

-- Matthew Stalbaum, 8/24/11
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This is my most recent poem, and probably one of my favorites among the recent ones I've been writing. Which isn't to say it's perfect. Reading over it again, it could possibly use more of something, though what and where I'm not sure yet. Qualms aside, I like this one because it starts off simple and concrete, and builds to something more abstract. I'm curious as to how people read the final stanza, if it comes off awkward or not. I worded it that way specifically with a certain intention in mind, but it is a bit of an obscure intention I fear. One thought is it needs more of a transition from the concrete to the abstract. But enough self-deprecation, it is what it is, and at the least it was a pleasure to write. Hopefully it's at least an interesting read too.

Waking and Walking (A Poem)

it is hard, rising again
to your feet where you left them
shrouded in the grass still and sinking
inch by inch in the dirt,

slower still finding your footprints, the one
& the other trailing before you
browned & flattened, before the wind
wipes clear the field, and you are lost.

it is hard to again find your step,
the left & the right, the forward
motion uncertain of the falling & rising
and how it never stops,

slower still knowing
your way (blind and silent once the step
after last is taken) how steps come
to steps, to field's edge, into

the town where you are unknown, the people
watching you, walking too;

you each offer your bread, your bodies,
your hurt and your love, until you have nothing left

to give except hands to carry each other
into the wild, to build again, free

-- Matthew Stalbaum, 7/15/11
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Here's my usual bitching - I'm not that happy with this one. The ending stanzas are still off to me, and though I like the idea of them, I feel like they need to be thought over more. I mostly wanted to post this one because it's the first poem I wrote in months, so it kind of speaks to me on that level - this is me finding my own steps again, recovering from graduation and saying goodbye to all my friends, feeling burnt out from reading and writing. This is my recovery poem. Maybe the last stanzas don't fit because they go somewhere else, I'm not sure yet. Thought and criticisms would be helpful to any and all who have any.

Love and Lost (A Poem)

Love and Lost
by Matthew Stalbaum

you have lost
again. it was dear
this time (it always was), you won't
be the same (you never

are, you
are gray and blue, are sorrow
for a time, shaped
by the loss, a void, and

alive, still - there is more

to lose (it will all be
dear, time knows how much
we'll have to lose, how much

left to love) still, when all
is lost, more to lose
and love, still

-7/18/11
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I stopped giving some commentary on these poems, but I kind of miss that, so I'll say a few words after each one.

I've been trying to edge away from really general, abstract poems like this one, but something about this one works for me for some reason. It came out of this idea I've always had, that mankind ultimately has the capacity for an endless reserve of hope, that we could continue on against even the bleakest circumstances. People always talk about how much we have to lose, or what a man would do when he's lost everything. But I choose to think of it as, even if someone has lost everything, there are still things left to love. I tried to weave and tangle up the pessimism and optimism in this poem so people could have differing interpretations - even after reading my background commentary, hopefully you can still read darker tones in it.

Deadlines Deadlines Deadlines

I feel like every few months I come back to this blog with more promises that I'm probably going to wind up breaking. Well, now I don't have pesky school as an excuse for not living up to said promises! If only that were a blessing.

As a fresh college graduate who aspires to be a published writer and novelist someday, it would do me good if I actually bothered getting my works out there in the world. Here's where that's going to start, hopefully. My biggest problem with writing is speed - I go slowly, or sometimes not at all. I'm very good at tricking myself into thinking that a paragraph is a hearty day's work, which would maybe be more forgivable if the next day wasn't just a re-tooling of that same paragraph. It takes me weeks to get our 10-15 pages of a 1st draft, and I won't even be revising and editing anything else. As you can see, this production line has some quirks in the system.

So now I'm doing something that no sane person would ever do to him/herself: deadlines. Not just with blogging, but in general with my writing. For instance, the short story I'm working on now must be completed by tomorrow, at any point before going to bed. Will the story be good? Probably not. But it'll be a completed 1st draft, which is really what I need right now. Here's my general schedule of deadlines:

• Every Friday: something creative to blog, be it poetry, short stories, scripts, etc. My expectation is that it'll vary between poetry and fiction on a bi-weekly basis. So poetry today (at least 3, any less requires a longer poem to be involved), fiction next Friday, then poetry again, etc. till the end of time.
• Every Friday: a Nobody's Rambler blogpost.
• Every Other Saturday: a completed 1st draft of a short story. 

It's complicated, but it works out nicely. Today, I post 3 poems and a post on Nobody's Rambler. Tomorrow, I finish a short story. Next week I split my time between starting a new story and editing a story to be ready to post on Friday. That gives me one week to be heavy on writing, then the next week to be heavy on editing. 

Of course, all of this works out perfectly while I'm jobless and have nothing to fill my days except writing, reading, and applying to jobs, but if I come into roadblocks when I do find a job, I'll either adjust accordingly or kick my ass into gear. Either way, shit will get done! 

So that's my typical back-on-track blogpost. Let's see if I have a need to make another post like this in a few months like usual!

Alchemy

Not from nothing:
These words, these worlds; Nothing
is lost or gained - Transmutations
mix elements into new forms, words
into sentences into thoughts into
poems, songs, stories -

Lovers into life, which begets
lovers too; Midnight epiphanies
never said, only smiles and embraces
which alight new smiles;

Chain reactions, flurries of sparks, collisions,
swirling acids, boiling bases, the catalysts
breaking & binding & melting & coalescing:

lost old limbs to find new
limbs, bones, machinery bent towards
new, or old - reborn to repeat
until all new is old, all time contained
in us, all.

Life, love, thoughts, words, all
from a central ember too dim to feel - nothing
lost, we sparks from sparks, everything
gained, frozen ink becomes You
& I - Finite & infinite, in us:

--Matthew Stalbaum, 12/24/10

seeing you again

looking at you
now, i see only

the faint ruddy specks
of past blushes

roars from car
radios speeding by

as we stood on the
sidewalk, wondering

if hope would come
to fullness

and the night's memory would
drown in a moment

or two, so now, when
hearts no longer thunder

my eyes still gleam
with a certain haze

a foggy understanding
of where we are

or when we stood, when is
it all?  i've forgotten, its all

muddled in the strange
sting of looking at

you now, all that
was, and is, are you still

here, or do i see a dream?

--Matthew Stalbaum, date written=???

NaNoWriMo - Success!

So, earlier tonight I finished what I thought would be a grueling, painful, miserable experience - I wrote at least 50,000 words in the month of November, thus accomplishing NaNoWriMo!  WOO HOO!

And yet this post breaking my hiatus must be delivered with some bittersweetness, since, though I've won NaNoWriMo, my novel remains unfinished!  And by a good 10,000 words probably, if not 15,000.  So, why am I not rushing through those last 10-15,000 words at this very moment?  To put it simply: homework!  I was able to stay on top of work, do papers, stay on top of reading, and everything else while writing the novel, but the end of my Thanksgiving break will be met with a short presentation (for which I only just now finished the reading necessary to start it) and having read Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf, neither of which I'm close to done, and which will have to find a way to be done in between hanging out with friends epically from Friday to Saturday night.  Let's just say Sunday won't be much fun.

I'm going to go more into the experience of NaNoWriMo on my other writing blog, Wordswords, but I will say that going through it has really given me a taste of what it means to be a writer, in the sense of knowing that you have to write everyday, preferably at the same time, urged on only by the blind faith that whatever you're writing will, by some miracle, make enough sense in the end for you to edit it into something coherent - not necessarily good, just readable.

As for the future of this blog, I do want to keep my NaNoWriMo writing habits up, as I've written approximately 137 pages of a story in 25 days, while it's taken me, in the past, two weeks to write 10 pages. In my defense, those 10 pages are edited while written, and therefore much more readable than what I just produced, but still.  So I plan on, by the end of December, having a fully edited short story to post here, and will put out a short story every month from now on.  If I have the time, I'll try to write some poetry to post here by the halfway point of the month too, I have had a few ideas for poems lately that I just need to sit down and write, perhaps this'll be my motivation for that.  As for my NaNoWriMo novel, I'll try my best to finish up this rough rough rough draft during December, but I doubt editing for that will start for years, and my God does it need work.  But, as a sort of future promise, I do want to edit it, so perhaps sometime in the not too distant future some chapters might get put up here, just not anytime soon.

It's glad to be back though, and to my fellow NaNoWriMo-ers who have yet to make it to the 50,000 word-count, keep going!  You can't be far from the mark, and I'm sure that you can do it.  Au revoir!

NaNoWriMo Hiatus/I Dropped the Ball

As you can very well see, this isn't a short story - that's right, I lied.  While fiction writing classes keep you very well-honed in terms of writing new material, it does get difficult to find time to edit other things.  I imagined I'd have hours and hours of time left to me for both writing and editing, but 21st birthdays get in the way unfortunately.  But there will be a short story here by the end of December at the latest, that I will guarantee!  

Why not November?  Well, for those who remember my latest postings, I am doing NaNoWriMo during the month of November, and I highly doubt that I'll have time to edit another short story while writing this novel, along with school papers/presentations.  But all of my energies after this novel is written will be devoted to editing like a mad man - not this novel of course, that won't be edited for a good half a year.  But I'll try to have a damn fine short story by the end of December, two if I can work fast enough, but don't get your hopes up.  

Anyways, that's my story right now.  I'll try to write some poetry to post here sometime though.  Wish me luck for NaNoWriMo!  

NaNoWriMo - Do It!

I didn't expect to write anything here so soon, at least not until the end of the month, but I seem to have gotten myself wrapped into something insane and awesome, exciting and terrifying, and I thought all of my millions of billions of non-existent readers should try this too.

A friend of mine just introduced me to NaNoWriMo, which I had seen mentioned by some other friends of mine but had no idea what it was.  Basically, you write at least 50,000 words of a novel in the span of November 1st to November 30th, which comes out to around 1,667 words a day, or about 5 pages double-spaced I'd estimate, 2-3 single-spaced (if you're into that).  There isn't much of a catch - it can be any genre, including Novel-Poems, meta-fiction, and even fan-fiction, just as long as it's a novel.  You can plan it out before hand as much as you want, just as long as all the actual writing takes place in November.

Two friends and I talked about it, and we decided, yeah, why the fuck not!  The way we all figure, this will undoubtedly be a terrible, terrible first draft of things, but it'll be there to be edited or revised, probably rewritten in my case.  And if it sucks, hey, how many people can say they've written a novel!  I've actually been doing some planning for novels I figured I wouldn't do until far into the future, including some graphic novel ideas I have.  Maybe I'll use one of those, maybe some idea I haven't thought about for years, maybe something completely and utterly new I think up an hour before the clock strikes November.  It'll be a terrifying experience I'm sure - I tend to self-edit while writing, which I just won't be able to do if I hope to write 5 pages a day.  But it'll be a great experience too - one of the things that prevents us from writing, I think, is just a lack of motivation.  I could write an extra hour today, but I'll be able to write tomorrow too, so no big deal.  Except now, every day I don't write is another day I literally have to write more - shit's gonna be crazy man.

And I implore anyone and everyone to try it too!  Worst case scenario, you don't make it, but you try damn hard.  Personally, I don't think anything is lost by failing to make the 50,000 words.  A friend tells me that only one novel has been published out of all the ones written for this, and I'm probably going along genre-lines that'll make a publisher's head spin Exorcist-style, so seeing the story I wrote next month in a book jacket is not exactly one of my expectations in life.  So you really don't lose anything by trying, and you can only gain, even if you somehow only get 48,000 words, or some painful amount like that.  You've still got 48,000 words to edit into a novel!

I've actually been planning on writing one novel idea I've had, but that's not the novel I'm gonna write.  For one thing, I technically already started writing that, and for another thing, I feel like this is an opportunity to just kick back and let go - why do an idea I've been entertaining seriously when I can invent an idea as it goes along and see where it takes me!  It's been long time since I've written a complete mystery story.  In high school when I'd write, I'd start with a basic premise and just let things go from there.  Even now I hardly ever know the endings of my stories when I start writing.  It'll be a thrill to barely know the middle as well!

I'll still post something here at the end of October and November short story-wise, possibly with an excerpt of this "novel" if anything is reading-worthy, but definitely no guarantees on that.  The hardest part will definitely be writing consistently everyday, while also keeping up with school reading and assignments, and staying on top of short stories I have due for my Advanced Fiction class.  So I'll be writing a novel, a short story, and at least 2 presentations during November, not to mention reading out of Ulysses and reading a Virginia Woolf novel a week.  I might go insane.  But you gotta be a little insane to write a novel really, so why not give it a shot?  You can't even lose your sanity, I probably never even had it to begin with.

We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties (Not A Poem)

So yeah, I haven't posted here in a while!  I've written a few poems since the last one I had here, but nothing I'm really happy with, and to be honest, few of the poems I've been posting here have been all that good too.  My idea when it came to posting here once a week at least was that it would keep me writing, and I planned on having more of a variety of things, or at least more variation between short stories and poems.  I have been writing short stories, though not as efficiently as I could be, and the poems I've been writing have been less out of a true feeling for the topic/subject and more as just something to show here for the weekly post, which really just makes a bigger backlog of poems that need serious revising.

It's funny that I wrote a blog recently about the myth of inspiration at my new writing blog: Wordswords (a place where I write about writing, no actual fiction or poetry there).  I agree whole-heartedly about the myth of inspiration when it comes to fiction writing and prose, you need to write everyday if you really want to get better at writing, regardless of whether you feel like writing or not.  I suppose the same goes with poetry - you need to keep writing it if you want to keep improving at it - but right now I don't have the time to think about poetry that much.  I don't want to write a poem down in 10 minutes, then have to finish the reading I'm doing, and then haphazardly edit it later when I post it here.  You get a shitty poem, and I get something that I won't even be able to revise again for weeks or months.

So I've come up with a new posting schedule for this blog: monthly stories, possibly bi-weekly poetry.  I'm not happy with how slow it takes me to write a short story, and most of the stories I end up writing I become unhappy with anyway.  Deadlines have always helped me, strangely enough, so I'm giving myself a monthly deadline for each story I work on.  By the end of October, I plan on having an at least semi-polished short story to post here.  Obviously it won't be perfect, but it'll be at the stage where it's ready for outside criticism anyways.  Ray Bradbury could write a short story a week - sadly, I'm not him.  But I want to be!  So I figure if I keep up this pace, I'll slowly get better and more in-tuned with writing fiction prose, and maybe someday I'll crank out stories at that speed.

As for poetry, I will try to post every other week.  I say try because, honestly, if I don't have anything good, I might not post.  But for the most part I want to keep my poetic sensibilities active, so I will take my hand at writing poetry as much as possible, and I will read poetry more, and if I have multiple poems that I'm proud of, I will post them all.  Also, if I have any poems written around the time I'm posting a short story, I will post them then too probably.  Either way, I will try to keep things moving.

So yes, that's the story of this blog right now!  Fret not you faithful readers (all none of you), I'm still posting weekly at Wordswords and Nobody's Rambler, so you can always get a consistent helping of my thoughts on whatever it is I'm rambling about each week.  With all of that being explained, and a new goal in mind, I bid you adieu, perhaps to see you in 2 weeks, for sure to see you by Halloween!

A Room of None's Own (A Poem)

I wrote this poem last night actually, in honor of my empty suite-mate's room.  My roommate had gone to bed, so I went out into the common room to do a little reading and writing.  I saw that my suite-mate's door was wide open and no one was there.  I went to close the door and just noticed how sad the room looked without anyone there - you could see all of my suite-mate's belongings, evidence of his life there, but in the dark it all looked so lonely, like it had been abandoned or something.  So I decided to write this poem about empty rooms.  I'm not unhappy with this poem, so that's good.  My only issue with it is the ending; I edited it just now to where it is, better than the first draft, which was probably more unfinished than anything, but I'm not sure it's exactly what I want, and it'll need some revisions in the future.  Still, it's a nice little poem.


So yeah, nothing else more to say really.  Feel free to leave comments and criticisms!  Every bit of feedback helps really.  I'll see you again next week, internet!
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A Room of None's Own
by Matthew Stalbaum

how sad is the empty room
filled with one's belongings, one's
life in fact, but empty

of the heart, the steady beating
against drawers & drawings, practicalities
& eccentricities;

a room empty
of coughing, late night snoring, dreams
wheezing out of contracting throats,

without the sparkling of bleary eyes
in the open light - moonlight & lamplight
transformed by a face, pale in its absense;

a breath, a blink, a beat:
the room pulses to life - a shut door
seals the soul in the body,
and the room is colored again.

Waking (A Poem)

I feel the pain of all those poor souls who had brilliant, amazing, intriguing vampire stories just before Twilight came out, and who now could care less about them thanks to over-saturation.  That's me for dreams and Inception.  Seriously, I came up with a few story ideas involving dreams, and then Inception came out, and now all I can think of when I write about dreams is "we have to go deeper."  But I wrote this poem anyways.  The original idea of it actually stems from Neil Gaiman's Sandman series: at one point, the character Delirium tells her brother, Dream, that she thinks everyone already knows everything about everything, but we make ourselves forget because that's the only way to deal with it.  I came up with this poem specifically while I was vacationing in Virginia recently.  I can't remember the dream that made me think of it, but I suddenly found it odd that so many dreams never end.  Obviously that's mostly a matter of timing: you're in the middle of a dream, your alarm clock rings, you wake up.  But I've had countless nightmares in my time, with their fair share of horrifying creatures coming for me, about to be revealed as they come through the door or the shadows - and then I wake up.  So of course I couldn't help but wonder what the terror just beyond the end of my dreams was.  Maybe it's a monster of some sort, or maybe it's just some form of knowledge that terrifies me. 

It's not my best poem, but it was interesting to write - it's mostly an idea I had that I just wanted to express in some form, and a poem seemed the easiest way.  Leave me comments if you like/hate it!  Criticism really is always appreciated.  I guess my next post will be from New York, so we'll see what the city inspires me to write.  Au revoir!

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Waking
by Matthew Stalbaum

we wake before our dreams
end, before the shadows
are revealed, our secrets
waiting behind the black

--from there it dissolves,
  memory too, into smoke
  but I wonder

over that last moment, lingering
another second past our eyelids
fluttering open:

perhaps nothing, the edge
of imagination, that which
goes beyond what your mind
can dream, or

perhaps everything there is
to know, we have known all
along, held behind the shadows
beyond dreams, waiting


for us to be ready (or not);
to see it all, and finally
have no need to wake again--

perhaps that is my greatest
nightmare.