Leah is asleep. I am wide awake. Partly it is too much coffee tonight. Partly it’s that two different people (I don’t think they were in cahoots with one another) said that I was the craziest wise person they knew, or that I was the wisest crazy person they knew. I keep gnawing on that like a dog on a particularly interesting bone.

I’m also itchy. My body can feel the storm coming. The changes in pressure keep changing the temperature in the house, and pulling the curtains against the window, or blowing them into the room — the wind sucks the heat out, or blows the cold in, and I’m comfortable for 40 seconds, and then the weather changes again.

I was impressed by tonight’s feature at the Java Hut. Grandma Dave and Chris August make an excellent pair. Chris’s poem about being in the car, watching an argument between a preacher and a clot of kids outside a punk club made perfect sense. So did Grandma Dave’s poem about “You are Math.” They’re very good at working with one another, except that Chris needs to lay off the self-deprecation. His work is good, and it’s shitty to see him/hear him urinate on his own work before he reads. Stop that, Chris. It’s unattractive, and your work makes a powerful contrast with Dave’s — you don’t need to pretend your work is crappy.

I keep wishing I could throw open my writing like that, and write with much more freedom from rhyme or meter. It’s not a style I feel comfortable with, though. Maybe that’s my project for this fall — learning to write more freely. Maybe I’ll even start using “I” in my poetry.

Nah.

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