a.lashbrook's writings

A cup of tea this morning?

You choose the mug whose walls grow the hottest.

Staring at your reflection in the kitchen window

(at the way you stir and swirl

with the strongest blade of grass you could find

within five yards of your front door)

you'll consider your meeting with a slender tabby

in a few day's time.

And the tea, for ten years,

has yet to reinvent itself, though the blame

me

the cat bats at my nightgown

lying black and dark upon the sheets

as the wolves in hills not far

deplore to the night sky

the death of a mother, brave and young.

and the cat stares at me, eyes round

surely moons in this bare-lit room.

you

and oh how the smoke settles in the valley!

you lie in bed at night, eyes watering

you are a bird, tremulous as a bird

with a broken wing, sore and crying out upon the sweet earth,

oh, but your beak moves not!

some bird you are, bent feathers and silenced,

tumbling from your branch,

The standard heat of reaction

of my brain cells, while chattering this morning,

have quieted with a sigh. Where, I asked you,

where is my intermediate? Give me words!

My silenced hippocampus is hungry for literary digestion

but has an ache, now, with the current military occupation

of Gibbs, Hess, and their army of musketed kiloJoules.

The other day in Econ class I got in an argument with my student teacher about environmentalism. Mr Martin asks the class to bring in current events every day, and since no one in my class is concerned enough to read the newspaper every once in a while, I brought up the subject of the recent acquisition of the polar bear to the Threatened Species list, but the Bush administration has absolutely no intention to actually do anything to otherwise protect the species; ie, continued oil drilling in Alaska, no reduction in emissions, no additional protections, etc (may I bring up the fact that the US is one of the LAST countries in the developed Western world to not sign the Kyoto Act?).

Have the child come

And sooth my grumbling belly

And hold my fingers closely

While she closes my skin with brightly colored buttons

And though no weight of cardigans keep me warm

"The Unbearable Lightness of Being" is the best book I've ever read [although I'm not totally done yet--almost], and I am SO excited about the movie, which I'm going to watch tonight.

listen to me, my shivering child

whose only movement is a chilly trembling

and it as shall [pardon]--will result

in an internal atrophy my love

or could be similarly typed my'life

or could be yours so move young

one who shivers in the evening?

and listen to me, you, or--no,

listen to you, me--while your cells shrivel

I stand in a corner, I burn

" We're not that puritan that you can't have naked bodies - but it has to be done in the right way, with charm and passion"

-Sol Olving, Head of Norway's Kreativt Forum

 ..."Naked people are wonderful, of course, but they have to be relevant to the product. You could have a naked person advertising shower gel or a cream, but not a woman in a bikini draped across a car."

I feel like the world is coming to a steady end. I know how pessimistic that sounds--but everything in the news is just so. We are experiencing a mass extinction. Our economy is going down the drain. There are more human slaves now than at any other time in history. The polar ice caps are melting, and the sea levels are rising. The age expectancy is lowering in many parts of the U.S., especially among women. Tibetans and several countries in Africa are undergoing genocides.