Poetry on the Foam

I ended up hauling that foam mattress from my parents' house to my new place and putting it in my office... or maybe I should call it a studio, since it feels more creative than anything else, not quite so work-oriented right now.

It was a beautiful day here so I opened my windows and read for some long hours, all sorts of poetry, the kind that makes me weep.

Ever since I was a child, poetry has had the capacity to make me feel both wounded and exalted by beauty at the same time. It's an excruciating, piercing sensation, when some metric taps out the rhythm of your own heart, when words on the page seem to seep into your skin.

The foam mattress was positively tinny, pounded thin by over 20 years of wear. I think my friends and I used to sleep on these same mattresses back in high school. So, lying there, reading Baudelaire, I thought of my own little "fleurs du mal" -- the peccadilloes of youth that seem so grand and tragic at the time, that really end up being nothing.

The beauty of that, though, is that when they happen, those tiny traumas between friends, they feel so immense, and it's only 15 years later, lying on the same foam upon which you fell from grace, that they shrink to become gems, the anecdotes you will tell for the rest of your life.