I’ve got the flu and the blues

Which is why getting out of bed to go to school is a bitch, as it always is. Slightly off-center (again), I’m spending my days wallowing in the drain – watching Amelie and listening to Comtine D’un Autre Eté over and over like a wretched lover, reading Murakami and Kundera in excerpts, searching for Django Reinhardt in YouTube and devouring his guitar-playing, talking to random strangers in my head, sleeping at 4am, waking up and feeling nothing.

I wish for sex and cigarettes, but I’m just plain vegetable right now.

And the things I discover:

Instrument of Choice
Robert Phillips

She was a girl
no one ever chose
for teams or clubs,
dances or dates,

so she chose the instrument
no one else wanted:
the tuba. Big as herself,
heavy as her heart,

its golden tubes
and coils encircled her
like a lover’s embrace.
Its body pressed on hers.

Into its mouthpiece she blew
life, its deep-throated
oompahs, oompahs sounding,
almost, like mating cries.

Reminded me of one of my favorite poems:

Cello
Ramon Sunico

You would not think
the way he carries it in
that he carries a thing:

the way he favors
his left hand (which touches
its strings) as if it were a wing

that touched God; the way
his knees cling to its sides
as if it were love. It is

his cross, to love
a mermaid whose hair
can sing, his cross

to bear, a wooden box,
half hourglass, half
hollowness restraining

resonant air, to know
what is not woman, not thing
but voice,

and, with the audience
mute as landscapes,
to let it scream.

My heart is a bruise.

~ by Miss Maybe on August 7, 2006.