kaerla

[kaerla]

Hey. Why isn’t the moon landing a national holiday in the US. Isn’t that fucked up? Does anyone else think that’s absurd?

[kaerla]

I think this silly little masterpiece of wholesome queer joy would flourish in the tumblr ecosystem so please enjoy ❤️

[kaerla]

[kaerla]

Ch. 17

https://kaerla.substack.com/p/ch-17?sd=pf

[kaerla]

Ch. 16 Safe Landings https://kaerla.substack.com/p/ch-16?sd=pf

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[kaerla]

[kaerla]

Oh my heart:

the lovely wives for a DTIYS from instagram (✨)

[kaerla]

Another new blog.

[kaerla]

Frustration

Vote, they said; Vote, as if waiting a year with that intent will make these daily atrocities somehow, less atrocious? Against my stated will, again and again, I'm made complicit - again and again. Wait, we're told. Vote, they say.

This is how people get radicalized.

[kaerla]

Long Poem 04/25/2018

I.

Do you know in your marrow bones the truth of the thousand mile journey beginning

with a single step or

How to eat an elephant?

At some point, you have to just…

Get and up DO,

Whatever it is:

Drive the moving van across the mountains,

Hitchhike across the country,

Leave what you know behind.

So here we are,

Janis and me,

Blue eye and brown,

Taffy colored hair,

And liking to smoke.

II.

The center is the ways we’re the same. The fat one, the ugly girl

Who doesn’t trust (for damn good reason) and how we learned to be in the world

on Our.  Own.  Terms.

Freedom’s just another word,

Pretty baby.  Don’t you cry, now.

It’s the time of the season*

When the livin’ is easy, now.

There’s nothin’ to lose,

On the eve of destruction*.

Pretty baby, don’t cry.

Nous sommes stardust*,

Nous sommes golden*;

Chut, joli bébé, ne pleure pas;

Jolie bebe, ne pleure pas maintenant;

c'est juste un autre mot.

III.

How is it I can’t

Remember a mis-heard lyric?

There’s a difference between

“*mumble*” and mis-heard;

There is no

“Kiss this guy”

With you.

IV.

Freedom, nothing.

                                      Freedom?   Nothing.

                                         FREEDOM.  

Nothing.

V.

Well I’m gonna show you baby

That a woman can be tough.

Take that piece of my heart -

and we will come back 

better,

and stronger

than you ever feared possible.

VI.

Ooh Janis, child -

A Janus child,

One face devil may care

One face

Weeping at (perceived) failure.

We are stardust

We are golden,

Body beautiful,

Webs of matter

Anchoring spirit.

The truth of Janis,

While her “failure”

Is the biggest lie

society laid upon her.

VII.

We share our eyes,

Deep-set observant:

Summertime,

Love, how we don’t

Fit.

We share a question,

What is real versus

Real for us, and why the hell

Are we so different?

We manifest diametrically:

She, out there pioneering her way

me, cultivating the ability

To pass, to hide in plain sight.

Neither could do

what the other did

To save our lives.

We share a need for…

Someone to tell us

We’re ok.

VIII.

I wanted a kaleidoscope -

Our eyes, our mouths,

Our cigarettes - not

flat and black and white.

IX.

I don’t understand.

I Don’t Understand.

I DON’T UNDERSTAND,

And I don’t know what to ask.

Dali’s Melting Clocks

With Janis’ face.

How are we similar, how are we

Different,

What goes on beneath the surface

That I just don’t seem to grasp?

X.

Under the ice,

through a glass darkly,

Behind the cellophane,

Beyond the veil of death.

There are no depths to reach.

XI.

In a Tarot reading,

Each card has a meaning,

And

Each position of the card

Influences that meaning.

I know this like I know

That Janis’ eyes are blue.

I know the broad meanings of the cards,

And the positions they’re laid out in;

But for the life of me,

I cannot put them together.

XII.

Janis means so much to me.

She’s the soundtrack of my life,

A woman who made it, large and loud,

Who took up space and

Never 

once 

apologized

although it could be argued that

she killed herself to do it.

XIII.

Fuck off, man, I snarled.                          

Don’t NOBODY grab me -                       

Smashed his fuckin’ lights out                 

with a bottle of SoCo from my bag.

Smashed his fuckin’ lights out

With a bottle from my bag.

Smashed.  His fuckin’.  Lights out.

With a bottle.  From my bag.

XIV.

If I could smash my brain like that,

Maybe I could find that deepness

That I know that I am missing.

* = alternating lines from Janis’ hits “Me & Bobby McGee” & “Summertime” with lines from other songs that were popular at the same time:

“Time of the Season” by The Zombies, 1968

“Eve of Destruction” by Barry McGuire, 1965, &

“Woodstock” by Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, 1970

[kaerla]

With song lyric.

[kaerla]

I might call this Piece of My Heart.

[kaerla]

The scholarly article from which I gathered my quote for class tomorrow (04/25/2018)

[kaerla]

RiRi. 04/20/2018

For your writing reflection, here are some questions to consider: From reading the text, what do want to emulate? What ideas were sparked for you that you want to apply/try out with your topic? What poem most sparked your imagination? What has the poet given you permission to do? What research questions do you now have about your subject? What are you curious to know now about your music icon?

I see this as less a book of poetry, such as “Mr. West”, and more a book of reflections.  This isn’t a bad thing.  I simply observe that it seems to be so. Ms. Rosenthal and me, we seem not to be poets in the Whitman/Plath/Lennon style.  What happens instead, I think, is that our thoughts sometimes arrange themselves into what could be poetry, and sometimes what is poetry.  The forms are writable, but its not the forms that make up the poem, nor the words, exactly - or at least, not the words and forms specifically.  Maybe a poem is the words, PLUS the forms, PLUS some other indefinable thing and it’s that THING that I’m missing.  I’m too focused on words and form, forms and words.  7 lines and 14 syllables per line with a volta at the end is just a structure and a structure lacking a presence or a soul if you will is just empty... just as RiRi’s image is empty of HER, just as Janis felt empty when she wasn’t performing, just as my poems feel empty of depth and meaning.

I feel the best, and get my best reactions, when I’m trying not to dig too deep, when I try less hard.  Those moments are the truest reflection of who I am and who I want to be I the world, I think.  It’s another thing that Janis and I share:  a desire to touch people.  (although it also highlights a big difference:  she’d take “touching” literally while I am deeply figurative in this desire).  

I don’t have research questions.  I just.... look, read, absorb, until something catches my attention and them I’m off down that rabbit hole, looking, and reading, and absorbing.  sometimes I can trace it back to the beginning.  sometimes I can’t.  Details are difficult to keep track of.

Janis continues to be a fascinating rabbit hole, even after all this time.  I wonder what nugget of information I’ll stumble over next?

[kaerla]

April 15, 2018  Little Girl Blue

There was a question, which visual media would you like to study of/about your icon?  And I knew that this film had been done but I hadn’t gotten around to watching it and so tonight after dinner as I was collecting my Janis biographies to return to the library tomorrow I thought  hey, I should watch Little Girl Blue. So I did. So many things struck me between the eyes as I watched: Janis was a cuckoo in a nest of sparrows. Janis used heroin like Sherlock Homes used cocaine. Janis had deeply internalized the idea that a woman needed a man to be complete.  No matter how successful she became, she always felt as if she was a failure because she never got married or had kids.   At least twice, that I caught, an image I used in my portrayal of her was mentioned:  For Janis, being on stage and performing was like making love to the entire audience all at once.  There is no high like that in the world. How do you come down from that, after the show is over?  Clearly there are hundreds of performers who can and do on a fairly regular basis, but it was a thing that Janis never learned, even as she became more proficient as a musician. Cheap Thrills, her first album with Big Brother and The Holding Company, was a huge bundle of potential.  Her first solo album was an aberration.  Pearl, her second and last solo album, was a glimpse of what might have been.  You can hear that she’s maturing as a performer and musician, and that she’s got a good band behind her and a good producer in front of her and that both the band and the producer aren’t there to use her for the money she could make them but want her to stretch and grow and blossom and BECOME the performer she’d hinted she could be when she started with Big Brother.   I was ticked at the idea of Janis having an affair with Dick Cavett.  He’s so.... starched up and buttoned down, you know?  Of course, that could be in part why they did.   Finally.... I wish that I could be as emotionally honest as Janis was.  That final moment of the film when my eyes were misty and my throat got a little chokey when I felt the loss of this woman and my own sorrow, I thought that moment of emotional vulnerability would be a good place from which to write some poetry but it just wouldn’t happen.  My training clamped down immediately and hid the raw emotion behind the structure of trying to form coherent thoughts, and the emotion dwindled to Janis just... wailing, in the background of my head until I reach the end of the post and her voice simply fades out and that moment of sorrow might just as well never have been. 

[kaerla]

My Best Day In Class Was Reading This Out Loud 04/13/2018

Julia In My Mind (If Not My Hands)

Bring on the roasted potatoes! Bring on the roasted potatoes.      Ready to roll.      Ready to roll.      Ready to roll.      Ready to roll. I like to smell something cooking, it makes me feel at home. I like to smell something cooking, it makes me feel at home. I like to smell something cooking, it makes me feel at home. I like to smell something cooking, it makes me feel at home. Bring on the roasted potatoes! Bring on the roasted potatoes. Bring on the roasted potatoes! Bring on the roasted potatoes.

(I first heard this around Mrs. Child’s 100 birthday in august of 2012 & experienced one of those throat-choky teary-eyed moments which tells you this thing matters to you.  I played it again, and swore that one of my next tattoos was going to be “Bring On The Roasted Potatoes!” because it’s so uncomplicatedly joyful, so joyfully specific, and so specifically a part of both who I am and who I wish I was.)