A poem is born:
Before Everything, sometime in
March, I was riding home on the subway from Grandma, tired, my
walkman jacked all the way up and speeding by graffiti scrawled walls. And I whipped my head back,
trying to see if I'd seen what I thought I'd seen, and I had, and I whizzed out my notebook, (
infernal notebook, always with me,) and got these thoughts down quicker than anything,
a poem was born.
The Stand Alone Bitch comes home at last
and stumbles out of her shoes
on the way in.
HATE it when they call me that,
she mumbles, and trips over the heels
(they point off a-ways, directing her to god-knows-where)
She doesn't give a damn tonight,
and scrunches in a shirt
three sizes too big
reheats a frozen pizza,
pops open the last warm beer
flops on the couch.
The Stand Alone Bitch
god, she hates that name
yeah, she's sick and tired of that shit
and tonight she wants to know
Can't she just be Jane?
A Noder is born:
So that was that, it was a poem that stayed in my
little black notebook with poems innit, and kind of faded,
like most of my poems, stagnated a while. It was born out of imagination and extrapolation,
STAND ALONE BITCH scrawled in a subway tunnel, drawing on twinges and making a
case out of it, (
isn't that the way we all write?), no-one'd ever called me that, but
I thought it sounded good.
And then I found Everything, and needed a username, and stand alone bitch sounded too good for me, and the poem suddenly sounded real, I was being tough and hiding from family, being rude and hiding from friends, being hard and very lonely, somehow inverted that and became me, here, stand/alone/bitch
...and I deliberately waited a while before noding this poem, not because it's false, and not because it's true, but because it's both. It's false enough that I can put it up without feeling naked, but true enough that I'm still not sure it should be here. ACK!