Okay, so...today I get up and find that I did, indeed, fall asleep on my book of Auden and was not just dreaming it. It wouldn't have been as irritating as it was, had I not also fallen asleep on my stereo remote. I had an imprint of its buttons on my face clear through my shower. They were surprisingly painful.

...I had been wondering what great demons had snuck into my room in the night to change the stereo from playing my lovely mix cd to that damn country station with the obnoxious morning show. I wake up hearing some yokel babbling about Cathering Zeta Jones square dancing. Ugh.

And as if that weren't bad enough, the only reason I woke up was because I had the alarm on my cell phone set to wake me up at 5:30. I can't remember why. But it woke me up all right. Normally, I would have slept through it, but I had set the wrong ring tone as the alarm and was startled awake thinking that someone vastly important was calling me, and it turns out to be, literally, a false alarm. How much worse can one's Tuesday get, I ask you?

I also had a rather unsettling dream, but with such a shocking morning it was jarred out of my memory. All I can remember is somehow slipping into a sort of consciousness in said dream enough to think "I really should write this one down when I wake up." But I can't! And that is entirely frustrating.

Onward and upward!

So, I was reading Auden. I don't normally read Auden. Mostly because I am not at a point in my life where I can fully appreciate his command of verse. I'm am not yet at my Verse-Appreciation Phase, we shall call it. VAP for short.

Now, this may seem ironic, if only for the reason that some of my more recent poetry has been "versified" somewhat, all rhythmic and rhyming. But only out of necessity, and not because I wanted it to be. I blame, not Auden, but The Decemberists. Because their songs have been stuck in my head so much lately that I can't sit down to write a poem and not have it come out both rhyming and alliterative. There are many times where I wish I were not so easily tossed about on the waves of indirect influence. It's a very jolting and uncontrollable thing.

So, then I was pondering why I am so easily influenced to change my behaviour or style due to the most random of impressions. There are a few reasons for this, I suppose.

The first one, the one that Dr. Owen would have slipped into my head, would be that I am uncomfortable being myself, and therefore accept every opportunity to reflect the current likeable (to me, of course,) trends in my surroundings.

The second reason being my rampaging need to experience things. To feel things, to taste and be and roll in my fingers every little thing that touches me. I cannot fully understand something until I have processed it through each of my senses. Until I have got it out onto the damn page and made it mine.

Is it normal to want to brand everything with a mark of oneself? I wonder this a lot. It reminds me of a piece I wrote when I was like, 17, that I can't find anywhere, about snow angels. About how I've spent my whole life making snow angels in everything. There is no clean patch of snow that I meander past that I leave alone. No, I have to fling myself onto it, arms flailing to leave a mark of me there. But why? God, why do I do it? I who can so fully appreciate the beauty of untouched snow on a clean field. Who, being a writer, knows the ultimate potential in the sight of a blank page? Thought springs to life when you look at a blank page. Possibilities scream at you from corners of the imagination you didn't know you had.

There is some broken, sparking wiring inside me somewhere, it feels like. Why must I vandalize myself across every inch of my reality, and even my irreality? Can I not accept that There is such a thing as too much. That there is such a thing as overwhelming. As overdoing. Why do I feel such a urge to be the overwhelming and not the overwhelmed? When I really do delight so much in being overwhelmed; but by beautiful things, by things that I can control, and things that are already better without me.

I hate feeling like I have to affect change. I hate that feeling because I am so easily thrown and intimidated and scared away by change. Yet I go about changing, leaving me behind, leaving things and people and feelings and little important things behind me. Swept up on this giant wave of time, that carries not only me, but this building, this street, these people, everything...rushing over the crests in a wholeness that frightens me.

Why do I feel so forgettable? I think that's why I write, I know that's why so many writers write. That somehow, if we can't leave these records of who we are...if we can't leave pieces of us and our experiences behind for anyone who is intrigued enough to pick up our pages, that life is meaningless. That just living is the hard, the impossible thing. Can anyone understand that? I have to get these things out of me, I have to illuminate them in a clearer, straighter line than the one they follow in my winding head.

Robert Penn Warren once said "What is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding? It is the deepest part of an autobiography." I noticed that quote on my Wall of Fame today as I was leaving my bedroom to go to work this morning. I enjoy that quote. A hazardous attempt at self-understanding...why hazardous? What hazard? Because there is danger in going deeper. There is a tug and a pull and a sucking clutch that comes when you dive too deep in yourself. Struggling to find the you that you are. Reminds me of another quote: "A writer isn't a person. It's a whole bunch of people trying to be one person." (I think F. Scott Fitzgerald said that.) The hazard is in the trying as well...

"My own private lynching: / I flay myself, / peel me down layer by layer. // I pick through the scattered heaps I lay in // looking for loose change / in the remnants of my cast off selves."

I wrote that once. It makes sense to me now in a way that it didn't when I wrote it. Poems can be like that. It's why I like them so much, I think. They are always whispering new thoughts to you from their old words. A poem is always new, always waiting.

Somedays, like today, I can understand Emily and Sylvia. I can see the rippled appeal in the shaft of light, in the eager dark...the call of that possibilty: to slip out of yourselves and see if you can still be. To see if you still are, without all of the masks and the voices.