What Do Women Want? by Kim Addonizio

I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what's underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty's and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I'm the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I'll pull that garment
from its hanger like I'm choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I'll wear it like bones, like skin,
it'll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.

To X. (With Ephemeral Kisses) by Erica Jong

I hear you will not fall in love with me
because I come without a guarantee,
because someday I may depart at whim
and leave you desolate, abandoned, grim.
If that's the case, what use to be alive?
In loving life you love what can't survive:
and if you grow too fond and lose your head,
it's all for nought--for someday you'll be dead.
Maintain a cool detachment through the years.
Wear blinders, dear, put cotton in your ears.
Since worms will taste the tongue that tastes the wine,
burst not the grape against your palate fine.
With care, your puny heart will still be whole
the day they come to fetch your tepid soul.
And as that strumpet, Life, deals her last blow,
you'll have this final consolatio:
you'll snap your flippant fingers as you fall,
and say, "I never cared for her at all!"

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front by Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. Want more of everything made. Be afraid to know you neighbors and to die. And you will have a window in your head. Not even your future will be a mystery any more. Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer. When they want you to buy something they will call you. When they want you to die for profit they will let you know. So, friends, every day do something that won't compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who does not deserve it. Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands. Give you approval to all you cannot understand. Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed. Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest. Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns. Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years. Listen to carrion--put your ear close, and hear the faint chattering of the songs that are to come. Expect the end of the world. Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts. So long as women do not go cheap for power, please women more than men. Ask yourself: Will this satisfy a woman satisfied to bear a child? Will this disturb the sleep of a woman near to giving birth? Go with your love to the fields. Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head in her lap. Swear allegiance to what is nighest your thoughts. As soon as the generals and politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn't go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.

Excerpt from Addiction by Sonya K. Hess

Mistaking my silence for love,
I held my breath and let you finish.
I had considered offering to drink one
If that could keep you more alive
But my weary smile after the fifth bottle
Held a certain adulterous honor.
The night, soft silence and saturated black,
Pleading against the panes,
Held us and let me think
What I should have said:
If I can betray my love
Then why can't you?

Ray LaMontagne Shelter and Hold You In My Arms

People Like Us by Robert Bly

There are more like us. All over the world
There are confused people, who can't remember
The name of their dog when they wake up, and
people
Who love God but can't remember where

He was when they went to sleep. It's
All right. The world cleanses itself this way.
A wrong number occurs to you in the middle
Of the night, you dial it, it rings just in time

To save the house. And the second-story man
Gets the wrong address, where the insomniac lives,
And he's lonely , and they talk, and the thief
Goes back to college. Even in graduate school,

You can wander into the wrong classroom,
And hear great poems lovingly spoken
By the wrong professor. And you find your soul
And greatness has a defender, and even in death
you're safe.
------------------------------

On the note of love, I like this quote from poet Marie Howe...

"It takes so much courage to love, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s always been difficult, but in this age and in this culture‚ capitalism doesn’t want love, it wants us to buy and eat a culture that spends its money on defense systems—where so many of our communities are lonely and false, shattered and dangerous, and children’s hearts broken very early. Remember when the Surgeon General said the most pressing medical problem in American culture was addiction? Is addiction thwarted love giving up the hope of human connection?The fierce, real, clear energy of actual love, intentional defenselessness, the “unromantic daily love” of changing a grown man’s diapers, or moving someone’s car on street cleaning day so she can sleep‚ this daily love keeps many of us alive. To act in this world, without irony or condescension, as the younger sister does, seems to me an act of great courage. The long journey from the head to the heart."

Today we dropped Conor off at Camp Blackhawk, a camp for kids with epilepsy. They had only one nurse for forty kids, which isn't a good ratio, but the counselors seemed well prepared. Hopefully he'll have fun. It's really different without him home.


I made Alfredo sauce last night. It turned out well, but had a bit too much cheese.

I'm In Love by Charles Bukowski

she's young, she said,
but look at me,
I have pretty ankles,
and look at my wrists, I have pretty
wrists
o my god,
I thought it was all working,
and now it's her again,
every time she phones you go crazy,
you told me it was over
you told me it was finished,
listen, I've lived long enough to become a
good woman,
why do you need a bad woman?
you need to be tortured, don't you?
you think life is rotten if somebody treats you
rotten it all fits,
doesn't it?
tell me, is that it? do you want to be treated like a
piece of shit?
and my son, my son was going to meet you.
I told my son
and I dropped all my lovers.
I stood up in a cafe and screamed
I'M IN LOVE,
and now you've made a fool of me. . .
I'm sorry, I said, I'm really sorry.
hold me, she said, will you please hold me?
I've never been in one of these things before, I said,
these triangles. . .
she got up and lit a cigarette, she was trembling all
over.she paced up and down,wild and crazy.she had
a small body.her arms were thin,very thin and when
she screamed and started beating me I held her
wrists and then I got it through the eyes:hatred,
centuries deep and true.I was wrong and graceless and
sick.all the things I had learned had been wasted.
there was no creature living as foul as I
and all my poems were
false.