Carrot Trees

When I think of my grandfather now, I think burgundy and grey. He's terribly "Hungarian" and he's hazy. He's smoky, he's solitary, he's prickly and he's sad. He plays the violin, drinks port, and sits on patios smoking cigarettes.

But when I remember my grandfather, really remember him, bend backwards a few years, he's outside in his garden. They rented the house, so I guess they rented the backyard that sloped downwards to a creek, but he treated it like it was his, not just something on loan. He bloody farmed it. And when I think of the grandfather from then, the one from when I was little and we would visit after church, the grandfather I was introduced to when I met the world, I think of yellow corn, growing on green stalks taller than I. I think of picking beans, searching the waxy firm pods from the tangle of sprouts; I think of bright orange pumpkins, tiny red tomatoes grown in Styrofoam cups. I especially remember the time my grandfather and my dad showed me that carrots were roots. That the orange bit we ate grew inside of the earth.

I don't know what I thought about carrots before that day. I think I must have assumed that they grew on trees. But it was such a shock to find out that we ate the root of a little carrot tree. Not the leaves.

bare legs and bare toes

Sparrows

I'm waiting for air
that smells like fresh laundry
grass, and new things
carried detectably on warm undercurrents

for bare legs and bare toes
and for the feel of sun on my face

when all the dead leaves from fall
are uncovered by melting snow
and they flit about in the breeze,
looking like sparrows hopping on the road.

Dark Haired

Why couldn't the colonized just learn from the colonizers?
um. Pardon?
I mean like the Europeans lived in tribes so long ago, of course the Native Americans looked primitive to them.
Why didn't anybody think about the colonizers?
And I mean... the family isn't bad.
No.. no, I mean I like my family...
But the family structure. That's not bad. It's patriarchal, I know. And it's been set up that way for a REASON. You know?
No? No. No, my group member might actually be a neo-nazi and how do you co-operate with a dark haired Hitler Youth? And how do you not Dream; I Have a Dream, about the Other, the Second Sex, the Invisible Man, a Language not english.

In my dream I punch the dark haired white supremacist in the pants.

The Artist Plants

There are spindly and greyish looking palms in pots lining the windowed wall of the arts building. On each is a little rectangular white sticker, gone a little beige with age, with a bright red border and letting that reads: THESE PLANTS ARE ON A MAINTENANCE ROTATION. PLEASE DO NOT WATER.

Damn hippies.

Commitaphobe

I'm a terrible blogger.

I WAS doing so well. But I just can't do the commitment! My blog and I, we went on a break. As it always is, one of us had to come crawling back. And considering I'm talking about my relationship with my own blog, I'm the pathetic crawler. No surprise there.

Maybe that's a little weird.

What I had really signed back on to say was, I'm graduating soon. And the recognition of that fact looms over me like the shadow of a monster, that normally resides under you bed, looms across your bedroom wall late at night, in the summer, when the moonlight streams in your window; it's admittedly a bit silly, but daunting nonetheless.