Stream

Untitled

2011-01-23T15:33:00.000-08:00

his willing cigarette,
raw red on concrete,
her joy old.

End

2011-01-23T15:32:00.000-08:00

evening looms like
our angry impression,
dead grass from morning
sees no blossom;
a monument to
summer smoke.

Bonfire

2011-01-17T07:35:00.000-08:00

For the aweless;
our children.
Laptops, iphones,
forest fires on T.V.

2011-01-09T13:36:00.000-08:00

Found Poem III

2011-01-08T09:52:00.000-08:00

So travelers tell:
Women bore beacons
playing silent sounds,
their voices dying without a gust
like hums amongst the glimmering
and strengthless dead.

Found Poem II

2011-01-08T09:49:00.000-08:00

When it was not clay,
when smoke stood up,
when the cherry hung with snow,
I picked a stone and
aimed it beneath the blue of day.
The bones of man,
the long road,
how idle and alone.

Found Poem I

2011-01-08T09:48:00.000-08:00

What is it but a flower?
they hang us now
and bear the blooms away.

Two Fridge Poems Deemed Worthy

2010-12-27T10:01:00.000-08:00

I

Between evening
we sleep like dead grass
you sound out silhouette
through this cigarette
our metaphor

II

To live in Snow
when life can but
mushroom
cloud light

Some Doubt About Yellowstone

2010-10-04T16:15:00.000-07:00

On our move eastward, Seamus and I stopped in several of the country's most beautiful national parks, some of which elicited some surprisingly skeptical poems like this one.

They tell us
its natural
though we killed
the wolves to replenish them.

The geysers are controlled
by the wizard of oz,
sulfur yellow the imaginings
of that man
behind the curtain,
or the raw work of a man
in the crust of the earth,
he is injecting
blue food coloring
for the droves of RV drivers,
and the plump house wives in
pre-faded Yellowstone sweaters,
and the creaky bones of the awe-less,
whose hats are blown
onto the rust-mats
surrounding the unbelievable cauldron: the grand prismatic spring.

But mountains tell a true story;
their upper halves lifeless,
dusted with sugary snow,
their foothills unmolested even
by trails.

Trails are the way we know nature,
a solid human pattern in
unknowable greatness:
boulder rocks, marmots,
glacial creeks,
downed trees covered by nothing
but the silver
they've been given
for their absence of bark.

The grand prismatic spring, Yellowstone National Park.

from wikipedia

Flash Fiction Anyone?

2010-06-06T22:51:00.001-07:00

Check out the flash fiction I have been writing at http://lizfairchild.wordpress.com

It Happened Before

2010-05-28T16:12:00.000-07:00

Some say it is a misfired
synapse,
this moment that seems
like a memory.
In the initial moment,
the waking moment of the dream,
you wondered
how you could be in a situation
so ridiculous.

"They used money against me
while I was asleep"

Poetry that replaces journal,
journal that replaced memory,
poetry that replaces something else
or sleep.

"They used money against me while I was asleep
because I was vulnerable"

Veins of roads,
webbing land,
creating ownership
and islands,

"They used money against me while I was asleep
because I was vulnerable in money"

I must touch everything
or how will we know it?

excerpt from Faulkner's, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem.

The Season

2010-05-09T18:42:00.000-07:00

The weather conspired to keep me here.
In the fly infested
flame of last spring,
heat boiled my intentions
of leaving
into a syrup sweet enough
to keep me. that spring turned to the next,
and because I
found a moment,
the weather returned to
its normalcy, sprinkling
rain on
weather beaten bicycles,
its rhythm biting
pavement with familiar syncopation.

National Poetry Month!

2010-04-17T12:01:00.000-07:00

The first week of poetry. More to follow...

April 1

How many revolving
painful
situations
drummed up from
an arbitrary heart of glass,
How many unimportant
leaps
of anger
drudged up from an ashtray
how many more azaleas and
fuschias; the flowers of my childhood,
closing up and eating all but
happiness.

April 2

Waking from anxiety to the mental purr
of half written poetry,
ideas that were profound in the silence of night
but were lost to the mind of waking morning.

And what was lost?
just neurons firing a random sequence,
neurons lacking the sense of an ego.

April 3

A poetic mind cannot be kept,
it is a crater dug out in the ordinary,
a crater temporary; soon filled by
a bulldozer dumping money.

April 4

The camel humps of the dunes,
blackbirds too ordinary for this landscape,
fog the color of sand.

April 5

get out of the city.
run from the city.
the city is a machine
the city is an invention
the city made needs
needs created by the city
needs that grip you to the city you never needed.

April 6

I've sat myselft next
to the same situation
in this, the present.
"The future doesn't exist," he says,
after an explosion.

Like she is saying, this girl I don't know,
The fat rich white man wipes his ass
with the paid dollars of my debt.

April 7

Bright patches through the clouds,
people who flinch in the sun, or
flinch in the rain, or in the glow
of the sun after a violent rain, the rain
that lasts only long enough for me to run through it.

A work in progress

2010-03-31T22:09:00.000-07:00

A flash fiction piece I am working on a for a contest, the theme being, "In the Woods". The word limit is 150.

He worked on the bird reserve, a fair ways out of the city. I took the train there. He'd been given a house as payment and was making alcohol in the kitchen cupboards. We took cups full of the stuff and slunk off to his room. It tasted like fizzy lemons. There were pressed plants hanging from the walls, their latin names written below each on an index card. He told me a stories about a local women with a gnome garden. She killed her husband by pushing him onto the train tracks. He was a conductor and she took his job after killing him.

We went on a walk around the estuary; a dried out track, a clump of forest off to our right. Over there in that forest, he'd said, I found a ghost lamp lit up, with an extension cord leading off to nowhere.

Some Poems About the Revolution

2010-02-16T20:52:00.000-08:00

These poems are in response to the comic book Seamus is currently inking/visioning.

Refulgence

It was a new text, and

his refulgent eyes shone in it brightly.

no sudden darkness, for a candle was lit.

The text did not contain any life, it was

a story about something stationary, an inanimate thing

in a place filled with nothing.

Its brevity alarmed him (there could be no plot without a life)

but its few words contained poignancy.

Effulgence: The Middle of the 17th Century

Poignancy!

Poignancy, Poignancy!

To be free, the trees and moss!

More greens; radiant splendor.

LOST POEM FOUND I

2010-01-10T08:37:00.000-08:00

Last August when my boyfriend and I moved, I lost two of my most valued journals, one of which had a great deal of poetry in it. Last night, Seamus found both of them in an unlikely place, his "empty" laptop box! I feel renewed.....

We searched for whales between shore
and the horizon, thinking shadowed swells
were humpbacks breaching.
The ocean teamed with life
below but we could not see more than

shadows,
shadows that were not whales,
waves,
waves tipped onto the shore,
boats,

a fishing boat that trolled between the jetty
and some unmarked outcrop,
leaving brief brown waves behind it.

The sound of this great ocean drone
drowns out the language beneath it,
a language we will never speak; language
transported on green sea ripples.

The Black Oystercatcher

2010-01-02T10:19:00.001-08:00

Before today, they were invisible
and as black as your ink.
while you drew them
I looked in silence
at those birds up there on Pewetole island.

they dove in search of chitons,
in search of food from hard shells,
limpits, mussles and molusks,
they dove down from the island's
sitka spruce,
and made black ink.
you used it
to draw me, up there.

New England Poems for Seamus

2009-12-29T15:30:00.000-08:00

I

Old Houses, their
refelctionless windows and walls
date stamped for vindication.
These are the houses of a revolution
seemingly remembered but long forgotten.
The revolts here are between yacht men and teens.
There is a struggle in the iron river.

II

On first look, the river glazed in ice.
The night brought wind and
the ringing of a single bell, chained
above a window outside the house.
On second glance, great chunks
of ice missing, carried away by the wind that rang the bell.

III

This morning the river moved sluggishly,
plates of ice housing the brittle dark banks.
Bridges, iced metal.
Roads from dreams, houses stacked with windows,
an absence of grass, and the red shutters
of a house built for a revolution.

winter is not the time for a poem

2009-12-08T17:20:00.000-08:00

december is young;
the ice has already chewed through her.
she is so frozen now that she cannot tell
a poem from a hole in the ground.
There are moments of white and
a series of grey months that do not lead to words.
she sees shadows and shapes that are not there;
glimmers of nothing caught in the pre-dawn silence.
The days will peter out into wordless nights and
she will cut holes in things with a sword.

Mt. St Helens II

2009-08-03T22:22:00.001-07:00

There was mockery and spectacle
our backs ached from stooping
like apes
and when the mournful cry
of a lonely elk
rose above us
we
paused only
long enough for impatience to seed;
the elk's tall figure present in imagined moonlight,
a real mystery neglected,
and an omen dead.

Mt. St. Helens I

2009-08-03T22:00:00.000-07:00

So dark everywhere that the trees were not remembered
over the sound of our own voices.

Minds
much louder than our fire,
we watched the wings of insects in a
glowlight that wasn't theirs

and reason?

The trees laughed,
their moss a flamable smile for our stupidity.

The Ocean

2009-05-17T22:23:00.000-07:00

the ocean is a vast pair of lungs
heaving with catarrh,
swollen with greatness and
swelling with yellow-white froth.

these old lungs suck air like a trumpet
blowing past the stale air inside itself,
giving the ear wanton repetition.

these lungs are only the salt and water
of a great surface and
below this surface some say there are
a mountain of intruders making life.

I know there is nothing down there.

Life below the tumult
of waves hitting lungs
is as unforeseen as an aftershock,
a watered down idea like a drunk's imagination.

suffering is

2009-05-15T13:57:00.001-07:00

1. insignificant
enough without thinking
or knowing that the planet
is all one organism.

The mushroom grows
beneath the surface,
spreads its sponge and fiber
across the curve of the earth,
linking with roots of aspen groves,
linking to each other,
linking to themselves.

2. A burn on my arm
is the death of one cell, not many.

And the sea washing over me is
the sea washing over itself.

And a deep shudder of sadness is a
Drop of water from a spray of sea, evaporating.

Relativity

2009-05-15T13:55:00.000-07:00

The sun’s size
and yet,
a cloud big enough to block it.

The Cit is Ugly

2009-05-15T13:54:00.001-07:00

Here in these cracks
next to the gum wads,
the old cigarettes,
some dust from me and you,
is a flat, hot weed, growing.

"A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far"

2009-04-17T20:40:00.000-07:00

We held this potential contradiction
and we held each other
and the magnolias
peaked at us
through the moonlight
outside the window.

Poem Written While Walking

2009-04-16T20:16:00.001-07:00

1. And he said, "My memory is poor."
but poignancy is not lost
in the short term of his memory.

2. And he said, "The empty lot is beautiful."
I went back to see a painting,
a wall and a treeless tree
with two long buds
like broken fists unfurling

3. Eyes full up from too much sight
concepts make eyes brim
a punctuation mark holds
a globe
or a concept
small and meaningless
small and black
ridged
unchanging

4. I do not
can not
write concepts
only images
pictures
stimulus

5. Yellow hat,
woman points west in the dog park.
Cracked pavement like rivers
telling the tale of
parking lots from the past.

Telephone wire like licorice rope
Music, bikes and garbage cans

"He went out for the paper and never came back."

2009-04-13T18:46:00.000-07:00

After a night of heavy dreams, this poem was the first waking thought I had.

To be so sure
that nothing was right
as to walk away
and never come back.

Trite

2009-04-10T13:54:00.000-07:00

Accusations revolve in me
like the cogs of a clock working
backwards:
You are a coward and
a liar,
a man without tact.

Where you are,
damp foliage waves accusations,
drips honey-water,
taps you on the head whispering,
"The sunrise hates you."

For the first time I
feel the thickness of my
coffee spoon,
as I swirl in cream,
watch the bubbles pop,
or become heavy and sink,
and I am sad
and it is meaningless.

Spring Poetry

2009-04-06T11:09:00.000-07:00

On most days
to finish reading
a poem is to put the book down and
let the heavy lines
sink through your subconscious,
slip down your throat,
stumble near the heart
to be absorbed by your
spongy lungs.

But when light hits
your morning window
and air
smells of cooking blossoms
you must turn the page and
read on,
the sun awaits you.

Half-built

2009-04-04T02:26:00.000-07:00

We climbed up in that half-built house after we fought, after I refused to go on the roof of your house. It was night and the half-built house had no door. There was an unplaced bathtub in the foyer. The steps were jagged gaps, the walls faint structures, only seen with imagination. On the second floor we walked toward the back and looked at a tree above a mound of concrete and dirt. Its branches blurred into the night sky.

We walked through windowless windows and sat on the tiny slanted roof built only as facade, or perhaps a cover for the non-existent porch below. I cried. We could view the park from where we sat, off to our left.

Then we said nice things, unspecifically remembered, and we climbed back inside. Leaning on a beam for an unformed wall we both felt a ghost and left, never speaking of its presence again.

Something Lost

2009-03-30T21:34:00.000-07:00

Facing the alley below
this chair in
City Lights
I feel my ghost.

She is the ghost of something
I lost in this city long ago.
She follows me on buses;
into the park.
She avoids the fog
and when I board the plane
she is gone.

City Lights Books, San Francisco. My natural habitat.

And

2009-03-14T01:53:00.000-07:00

"Speak of an angel and an angel appears," he says outside of the bar, my bar, the dive bar. And I am only passing. And I think about the angel from the day before, how he stopped and asked for a quarter, then turned and said to the two of us,"You are better than average," and how, "It is better to burn out," like his cigarette,"than to fade away," like his cigarette, and how he left us embracing and how that wasn't enough.

Just before the man outside the bar says, "Speak of an angel and an angel appears," I try to miss the lines in the pavement. It is superstitious. I think of the synchronicity of the day, other people's problems placed against my own ashy problems, burned out in an ashtray, and I wonder when these things will be resurrected to confront me.

My short breath, induced by alcohol. I couldn't have done anything differently and so I didn't.

Time is Money

2009-03-10T07:17:00.000-07:00

And she threw a plate at him,
and the next one threw a beer
bottle through a clap of thunder,
but I just chucked a handful of
change on the pavement,
mostly nickles and dimes,
no pennies.

Powell's

2009-02-23T11:01:00.000-08:00

These books are
built to live in like a shoe;
narrowing possibilities
expanding possibilities
carving language into you,
dissolving pictures,
forming pictures to put
in mental boxes and
place on shelves.

The group of older women tote shopping baskets full of various sized books. Their arms hang unevenly: the right one almost drags the basket down another unknown aisle, the left points and searches. Some of the women lightly kick their baskets, allowing them to slide on the shiny pavement floor. They scan the shelves for a title they recognize, a cover that intrigues them.

A boy sits cross-legged, blocking most of an aisle, leafing through a stack of Asimov novels.

In the Powell's coffee shop I read Frank O'Hara and look at everyone. The boy across from me is searching for a good translation of "The Golden Ass." I pick up John Berrymen and read a poem about suicide.

Pests/Ghosts

2009-02-18T22:40:00.000-08:00

First, it was the moths. In the humidity of summer, my room filled with living moths and then with dead ones; the window sill lined with furry winged bodies. Eventually, when the days grew cold, I swept a pile of their dried bodies into my paper garbage bag and was done with them. But the cold brought no solace. Rats gnawed through my walls and forced there way into my room. Twice now, the rats have been killed with a strange poison, and while they have not returned again, the warming air has brought many flies.

My World View

2009-02-18T22:33:00.000-08:00

I am glad that the street I live on is flat. If I am sitting on the roof and a biker passes below me, he glides along leisurely and with a smile. If I lived on the side of a hill and was seated on my porch, the bikers passing would be in the midst of a struggle. Perhaps, if the hill was big enough, no bikers would pass me at all.

The Tree of Knowledge

2009-02-12T21:00:00.000-08:00

He was a person defined
by what he wasn't
defined by who he wasn't
defined by himself,
huddled by an oak tree,
arms suddenly stretched
so that someone might know him.

The Trap

2009-02-03T07:44:00.000-08:00

As the Rats chewed their way
into
my whiskey dreams
they said
You are not a human
but a weak rabbit
feeding on incandescence.

Morning

2009-02-02T07:18:00.000-08:00

In the dark morning I rode the loaner bike to work with no helmet and no front light. The bike has a skull on the back of the seat that lights up when you knock it. It is too short for me and one of the pedals is loose. Now the sun is rising and the ominous feeling this ride gave me is beginning to dissipate...

The City

2009-02-01T13:40:00.001-08:00

Your reflection in
black granite,
walking.

Green

2009-01-31T18:39:00.000-08:00

After taking this picture John said, "They look like a bunch of craps. Fucking lilys"

My thoughts were somewhat different.

Signs of spring are coming seemingly early. I keep thinking of the first stanza of The Wasteland, "April is the cruellest month, breeding/lilacs out of the dead land,mixing/Memory and desire, stirring/Dull roots with the spring rain.Winter kept us warm, covering/Earth in forgetful snow, feeding/A little life with dried tubers..."

Walking home from work I came upon the most delicate white flowers, their tiny clean heads hung down, ashamed at their early bloom. But I am grateful for the return of spring, it makes poetry much easier.

IMMORTALITY!

2009-01-31T18:37:00.001-08:00

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_nutricula

The Old Creek

2009-01-19T08:52:00.001-08:00

I walked the wrong way and
ended up in the dry creek bed.
I have never seen a creek in the bed.
It is an old grave,
I am lost inside it.

Untitled

2009-01-19T08:49:00.000-08:00

And the ocean grove was over-run
with auburn beards and cans of Oly.
And by my side the spirit of a poet,
outlining the trees with verbs and poignancy,
a romantic song rolling on the tongue of the sea.

Father

2009-01-19T08:48:00.000-08:00

“It's the Foster way” he said.
“To control every situation.”
And the whole time he spoke I could not help
but look at his all-white beard,
and the way I did not know where his chin was
or what his chin looked like
or what his face looked like.

The Vulture

2008-10-05T22:40:00.000-07:00

The accuracy of my memory stopped concerning me when I realized that I could no longer remember much of anything. I feel sure that each new memory erases an old one. My memory is eaten away at by something within me and because of this, I log everything that happens in my day. I note conversations and how I feel about them; I write down the color of the sky. My notebook is my second skin. Yet, each moment that I attack with my pen is already dead. I am feeding on the carrion of the past and now makes me hungry.

Detrite

2008-10-04T10:02:00.000-07:00

Detritivores are organisms who feed on dead things. They eat rotting plant matter; the soggy orange leaves that pile in drains, moldy bark and decay. They also eat animal waste and some eat dead animals. Vultures are not detritivores. They are just scavengers. Examples of detritivores are worms, fungi, bacteria and protists.

The root word, detrite, means worn out material.

In a bar I had a conversation with a stranger about memory.

"When I was a kid, I remembered everything," he said to me, glugging at his beer.

"Yeah, I definitely remembered more than I do now." We ordered shots and drank them without really tasting or thinking. The bar was dark and seedy.
"Do you have any memories that aren't real?"
"Well," he said, "I suppose none of them are real, in a sense. I mean, we can't touch them. They are intangible but they are all we have."

There was a great deal more to this conversation, but I do not remember it, and I cannot remember the stranger's name. It has been eaten away, or it blends with many other nights like this one, talking to a stranger in a bar.

The Man Who Always Looks Different In Pictures

2008-09-28T18:38:00.000-07:00

The man who always looks different in pictures. He is a good friend of mine. He is average height and has jet black curly hair. He is very handsome. I have looked at many of his pictures and in one or two, he looks like himself. In other pictures, he is smiling or straight-faced. Sometimes he is flushed from alcohol. In a profile shot, his features look soft and feminine, his expression passive and sweet. There are pictures where he is dancing and his head is thrown back; his mouth agape, trying to gulp at the music I cannot hear. There are pictures where he is surrounded by beautiful women and he simply glows. In other shots he looks bored and is tragic or ugly. But it is not merely a mood or expression that is captured. He defies self and appears so different that at times, there is no shadow of the man I know.

We have no pictures together. There is no evidence to say I am friends with this morphing man. When I look at him in reality I can see his various selves flash in his face and in short, I am afraid. Who is this person and why is he no one?

I have discovered that maybe he is me.

The Life of a Machine

2008-09-22T18:05:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I stood in front of the huge windows of the bakery and watched the lines of loaves shoot out of the oven and onto a conveyor belt. The temperature in the oven must have been perfect because each loaf had the same swathe of brown across its top. The conveyor belt wound around and down toward the floor, where three figures in white hairnets eyed each loaf for imperfections. The yeasty, hot smell of fresh bread wafted out of the top of the building and I felt comforted. This was the first time I had passed this place. In the evening I went by again. The place was lit only by a strip light in the very center of the factory. I would describe the light as looking like steel or maybe tin. The oven near the window had a few flashing lights on it.

I went out of my way today to go back. This time there was no bread and I noticed another conveyor belt, just above my head. With all the loaves I had seen before, I had failed to notice it. There were random bits of bread on it and they weren't moving. Without the fresh perfect loaves shooting out of the oven, all I saw through the vast clean glass was a machine. A machine working poorly. A man in a white hairnet swept flour off the floor below and I waved to him, but he didn't see.

Light Pollution

2008-09-13T10:08:00.000-07:00

It was late night and the water was indescribable. It glimmered; there was a blue light reflecting on the river's surface from another bridge further south. William was pushed up against the bridge's rail.

"If you think this is beautiful," he said, "you should definitely do shrooms."

"But I already think it's beautiful. Why do I need shrooms?"

"Those colors would just pop."

"They already are popping."

It was true. When I stared at it hard enough,it looked like the lights were flashing from below the surface of the water and swirling and bubbling upward.

Then William said, "Looking over bridges makes me want to jump."

"Yeah. I know what you mean. I would never have the balls to jump, though."

Neither of us looked at each other. We were both mesmerized by the water. The sides of the river were tinged orange from the streetlights and the highway. Whenever I think of light pollution, I think of these streetlights. They make everything look like a seedy seventies movie.

There was a long pause, I think William and I were trying to access the distance between us and the river.

Eventually I said, "I think you should jump."

He got up on the rail and jumped out, feet first. When he hit, the glimmering blue was interrupted for only a moment.

When he finally surfaced he yelled, "I'm Ok," and began to swim toward the seedy streetlights. I was really glad he was alright. It was a warm evening and by the time we got home he was completely dry. In the night, the whole thing began to trouble me. What bothered me most was how little he effected the surface of the water and how no matter how hard I try, describing the way the river looked is impossible.

No Change

2008-09-10T10:53:00.000-07:00

Each morning, the perfect blue of the sky reminds me that there will be no change. It is a deep blue just overhead, but fades to a washed out, flat blue near the horizon. The time of day makes little difference to this and the sunset is unremarkable. It is like the atmosphere is thin and weak.

I sit on my porch and let the sun penetrate me, drinking a lukewarm cup of coffee from earlier. The men next door continue to rebuild that house; their tools drone away at the day, ceaseless until evening.

Last night I dreamt that the sky could change, but only if blacked out by moths. When I woke a moth beat itself across my room, hitting the wall repeatedly and rebounding, unable to change, unable to realize that the wall would always be there. It kept me awake for hours, eventually I opened my bedroom door and turned the light on in the hall. Soon the moth was swarming around that orb; I could see it hitting up against the bare bulb. I closed the door and went back to sleep. Towards dawn I woke in a sweat, the heat of the sun already penetrating me.

The First and Last Thing

2008-09-07T19:42:00.000-07:00

The first thing that happened was a squirrel bit my ankle. My boyfriend, Herman didn't believe it. He said, "You are always hurting yourself. YOu probably just scraped yourself on your bike pedal again." Its true. I do that all the time. But I really was bitten. I was coming out of the cul-de-sac early and the little fella just sorta scampered out, reached me and bit. My first thought was to call poison control, or animal control or something, but the fact was, I didn't want to sound like an idiot. Bit by a squirrel. How many people a year are bit by squirrels? Not many, I would guess. And the ones that are- I bet they are embarrassed too. So I just kept walking down to the coffee shop like I do every morning. It is almost fall, as you know, and there was a spattering of leaves on the driveways that I passed. At the coffee shop I ordered a latte and asked for a band- aid. The cute dude with the mustache that works there, he gave me a band-aid and a cute smile. It made me feel better.

When the latte was fully consumed I made my way to water my friends plants. She is on vacation with this tool she has been dating for three years, they are in Hawaii, and I have been appointed flower hydrator. The thing is, I lost her keys a few days after she left. All of her plants reside on the balcony. For more than a week, I have been trying to water her plants by throwing bowls of water at the balcony. I have figured out that if I stand almost in the street, and sort of launch the entire bowl of water, some of it hits the basil plant in the right hand corner, and the lavender plant next to it gets a fair soaking. The other plants, however, aren't looking so hot. The tomato plant is weeping, it has floppy leaves I mean. I keep hoping it will rain, and I can be let off the hook.

The last thing that happened was that Herman broke up with me. "I can't take your dumb lies anymore. Bit by a squirrel? Get a hold of yourself."