Category Archives: ovhd

chicago, location, ovhd, poetry, writing

Speaking of roses

After a long dry heartless and unfathomable spell of silence I thought of another line of a poem last night – I thought that the stars were scars on the sky’s face. Although this is a personification, it does not bother me, because it is a comparison both in rhyme and in content.

It’s probably not good for anything. When you take time off and have to start up again you always think of such bland stuff. Stars, roses, the moon – too much poetry about all of them. Blah.

Speaking of roses, I was in Letizia’s on Division last week, which may as well be last year for how different it is from this week, and a man was handing out pink roses from his garden to all the girls in the muffin line. Chicago springtime – exuberant. Excessive. My friend from the yoga studio calls it “overcompensating,” and she makes it sound like she’s talking about a short man with a big car.

I took a rose, and the man behind me struck up a conversation about roses, and he couldn’t remember the Shakespeare line he wanted to remember, which I was able to supply to him, having assisted on ROMEO AND JULIET.

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” I said.

He looked at me like I had memorized the OED. I have never impressed anyone so much with so little.

Sometimes I think that if I could only remember everything everyone has said to me, all the conversations with strangers – like the guitar player in the Seattle train station, like the Coors employee in Colorado, the woman in the bathroom in the basement of the downtown Chicago library – I would have enough material to write for the rest of my life.

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dialogue, ovhd, travel

you don’t like it

SCENE: This morning, DARA is reading, for the nth year running, a large group of one-act plays for a high school festival. She is sitting with her travelworn laptop at Janik’s at the corner of Division & Damen. Overhead, an exposed heating pipe is wrapped in plastic-tubed Christmas lights. Underneath, the floor is tiled like a chessboard. To her right is a wall of comic-book art plated in glass stacked like a European museum, where there’s so much art you can’t afford to let each piece have its own place on the x axis. To her left, a flatscreen is streaming images from NASA, interspersed with images of the menu. Galaxy – catering available. Supernova – Stella Artois. Behind DARA, people are glossing over emotions, in that way when someone has given you too much information, and you have to say something – but nothing you can say will be enough. She listens. It’s never too early.

A: (trying) Hey, that’s how life is, right – you don’t like it, hit the road.
B: Yeah. And I did.

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