Lyric Essay

                                                         “Of AND In: The Phenomenon”

A phenomenon (Greek:φαινόμενον, phainómenon, from the verb phainein, to show, shine, appear, to be manifest or manifest itself, plural phenomena) is any thing which manifests itself. Phenomena are often, but not always, understood as "things that appear" or "experiences" for a sentient being, or in principle may be so.

      .000001

Textureless, surfaceless, numbness of stone.

Over 60 million people were killed in and around the time of World War II from 1939-1945. Hitler was chancellor of Germany from 1933-1945.

Once on one of my many long days of delivering here and there, I sat at an intersection and just listened. Closing my eyes knowing the light would take a minute to allow me to pass, I tuned out the sound of distant sirens, the chirping of birds and the hum of my own vehicle. I choose to ignore the noise on the radios, the murmur that floated out of open windows and simply listened to the sound of the tires slapping the pavement in front of me as they raced past. The unified pattered of the sound and the almost rhythmic rise and fall as they came close and fell past me sitting there. I could hear the sea with its waves in this tide of motors driving rubber over stone and tar. It was calming.  I thought about the high tide at the 8 and 5 hour and the low tide that creeps slowly only when the wind pushes it out and on for whatever reason in the small hours of morning or late, in the fading of energy to rest again on its known shore. How many waves break each day and what are the chances that the one that brakes for me, does so on this street?

     1:1,000,000

Clumsiness, rhythmless, patternless, shown.

Guido of Arezzo is said to be the inventor of modern musical notation.

There are 97 million songs in the Gracenote database and I’m guessing there are millions more out there.

          There are three primary types of natural selection Directional, Stabilizing, and Disruptive or Diversifying selection. The first happens when natural selection favors one extreme of recurring variation. Much like how humans evolved to stand up right from a primitive crouch. When chosen over time this extreme replaces other extremes and intermediates, which become less common or at times disappear completely. An example is a giraffe. Over time smaller and medium giraffes died off because they could not reach the tops of trees to eat where others progressed like a wave building up able to reach the food they needed for survival.  The second Stabilizing is when the intermediates are able to survive because other extremes of the species are picked off due to the radical variables they carry. For example, albinos of an animal species have a hard time surviving because they cannot as easily blend into their environment and may die off before being able to reproduce because of that characteristic. Like white foam left by the waves that recedes to the uniform of the ocean from opposite shores. The last is Disruptive or Diversifying, in this selection the extremes are favored over the intermediate states which become less common. This type of selection normally ends with two new species as those waves reach as far inland, at times leaving behind pools or great lakes.

        1/1,000,000

Time lapsed and time passed and time skipped and torn.

Between 1501 and 1830 some four million Africans had been transported across the middle passage, the transatlantic crossing, to America.

Martin Luther King Jr. was born on January 15, 1929, in Atlanta, GA.

          In the United States, it is estimated that the number of pets owned is around 74-96 million cats and 70-80 million dogs according to the ASPCA. I adopted my cat from Second Chance in Murray, UT. She was the last kitten they had, probably because she is black and people have silly superstitions.

         The idea that we are all connected by only six degrees of separation with anyone else in the world was proposed by Frigyes Karinthy in 1929. I was first introduced to this concept after watching the movie “Six Degrees of Separation,” starring Will Smith (my favorite living actor), appearing in 1993. As the world expands with its social networks and physical infrastructures that connects places around the world, these degrees may decrease in time despite the rise of populations. The philosophy soon made fact in very real ways. The findings make hopes and yes also Dreams, to bridge the barriers in these spaces between.

Sometimes I wonder if the people who gave up my perfect black kitten think of her and at this moment I wonder if they live near the ocean.

        1,000,000

Foughtless and thoughtless and useless and worn.

Over 3 million people were killed during the long war in Vietnam.     

Vietnamese Mahayana Buddhist monk Thích Quang Duc, as protest to the conflict, burned himself to death in Saigon, Vietnam in June of 1963.

           Eternal Return is the concept that because time and space are thought to be endless you can presume that the universe and all of existence and energy has been recurring and will continue to recur an infinite number of times. The manifestations of moments as endless as the wrinkles in the sea, the vastness of possibility greater than any ocean could be. If you combine that with Murphy’s law, anything that can go wrong will go wrong, although I like to think that anything can happen for good or ill, you can say since both are thought to be true, this means that for every me that may lose at something, another of me wins. Every time I take a step, I could trip, but I could also just be standing. Every moment that I live, in that same moment I am dying.

         1,000,001

Look up and see, as this passes you by.

Lightning strikes reach the ground on Earth as much as 8 million times per day or 100 times per second, according to the National Severe Storms Laboratory.

Your odds of being struck by lightning this year are 1 in 960,000.  Your odds of being struck by lightning twice in your lifetime are 1 in 9 million, which is still a higher chance than winning the Powerball.

You always get asked if you could choose how you die how would you go? I always thought it would be interesting to die by lightning strike. It may be because I am so fascinated by it or because I hope that I would go not only in a single instance but my passing would be marked by a streak of light that few in the area would miss. I find this choice if ever to pass to be true irony; that in the grand scope of things, our life times are so short, so brief, and to end in one of nature’s most fleeting of phenomenon, to also take me along with it, would be symbolic. There and gone like every wave that breaks, but its own unique crash upon the world. And though I don’t think many will go as they would like, they keep buying lotto tickets all the same.

Blinking the life out as you scream out and die.

      What I did for my first random act of creativity and community was a broadside for the assistant dean of students, Stephen Ruffus. We (Canah Tedjamulia and I) were presented with three of his poems and asked if we could create a linol cut that would complement one of those three.  We attempted to make it so other students here at SLCC had the opportunity to learn how to both make the cut as well as the broadside layout using Indesign. I believe the broadside turned out great and we had a few visitors during our printing process along with Stephen himself, Katie Lewis, and Angie Farnworth who helped with much of the final printing on the lino press. We have plans to create another linol for another of the three poems but wanted to get this one done in time for Stephen to gift it to his daughter Jessie.

In addition to the broadside I have also shared 1 poem and 2 flash fictions of my own writing with my service learning partner Andrea Rakowski and her 8/9 grade creative writing students. I have also posted to the social justice cohort blog the open letter (both written and in video format) that I wrote which can be found in my English 2010 page of this Eporfolio and here http://editor.wix.com/html/editor/web/renderer/external_preview/document/febaf82a-9d78-4e3b-a25b-6a2a897b890e?metaSiteId=3f70b7c7-d0ac-4c2d-b467-c12666edf1ec&isExternalPreview=true&draft=true#!Letter-to-the-Man-in-the-Moon/p9fc1/58c4c367e417292ebcee74d9

(Witness/Documentary)

The walks you can’t always pick, the sides you can always step on.

Sidewalks can’t always choose the buildings that are built beside them,

Can’t always see inside them either.

Can’t always make out the whispers found within,

those whispers to God for help, for mercy on them,

on the days that the mailman walked up those sidewalks

and left a stack of impossible numbers that now litter the room

added to the many littered before.

Sidewalks can’t always catch all that salty rain,

can’t always support the weight on this streets shoulders.

Can’t decide when those feet turn down the wrong lane to stores holding bottles,

to the cloaked men around corners waiting with talons to latch on, preying on these burdens.

Can’t stop the cars from coming, parked beside them with suitcases in trunks, with little eyes at their windows,

and they don’t always have the ability or strength to wave good-bye.

Their hardened surfaces fallen upon nightly, fighting back only with those shattered broken bottles, those glints of light long lost spewed with vomit, smeared with dragging scuff marks laid down with those that didn’t make the stairs, litter with all those calloused news ads, those mailbox filling fantasies, side by side with yet more of those impossible numbers, still they reach up to those rooms.

Sidewalk can’t decide when the feet tread home after hunting for work, can’t plan for the yellow slips placed on its doorways.

It is helpless as it is covered with all these remnants, these reminders, rummaged through by those heartless or hungry souls, picking away these last possessions left behind because they have no friend left to help haul them away.

(Formal [Acrostic Poem x 2] and one villanelle)

Trumpet Loudest

Heralds of happiness are not

always followed by

Princes of prosperity or

Princesses of property.

ideally but not often even by Dukes of dowry or

necessarily Lords of luxury but they always

either trumpet loudest or

sometimes they bring the masses to marvel.

sometimes, no always, they usher in a lot more.

               Jordan,

                               Watching your slightly trembling eyelids, closely

guarded by pillows, supported by the stable boards

of a mattress bed frame, enclosed by the walls of a sturdy house, through looming trees,

over beds of grass and dew, a breeze covering

darkness that I am parked outside.  Listening to your

breath alone with unwavering eyes.  Flicking on the headlights I pull away, knowing

you do not, but that your dreams are happy, And I need not

ever worry, nor watch over you any longer.  So, rest for I may never and cannot, for afraid to

dream of you.

                                                                                                                                                                                                              Angela

Run Away

We can all run away

When times are tough we say

The hard part is to stay

There always comes a day

Rough times too much to pay

We can all run away

Our hearts may lead astray

Our minds may find decay

The hard part is to stay

Promise to meet midway

Too often we delay

We can all run away

Lies we try to portray

Lies are all we convey

The hard part is to stay

Holding on to hearsay

We keep reaching this way

We can all run away

The hard part is to stay

(Informal or Open Verse Poem)

Borrowing Boise

Fourteen hundred miles away and one suitcase only to vouch for.

Single-serve apartment in a new place, deposited on,

from review only,

but it will do.

Made it through many states, risking the odds of flight and traveling

Alone.

Was able to defy the  G                          Y  of the black hole I flew from,

                                        R                                               

                                            A

                                                 V

                                                      I

                                                           T

         Dodging the bullet

                                                    by connecting

the dots and

                                                              flipping the coin on the face I’d find next.

Months planning but now I’m here in one of a million places, in this

                                                  solitary island

of an apartment with my five-month travel bag at my side.

The bare walls never seemed so welcoming because I made it here and didn’t turn back.

Tomorrow I’ll buy a bed.

Tonight, the floor will do.

Luckily this solo adventure came with carpet.

                                                                                     Call the folks, let them know you’re alive.

Look over the welcome package: soap, plunger, and toilet paper. Funny…

I didn’t think of that one when planning…

You don’t think about all the things you need when you leave it all behind.

I need this.

And that’s what brought me to

a borrowed pad, a broken zipper, and a laughing Liar.

Met a lot of strangers along the way but the one I didn’t expect was the one I found here,

lurking in these unknown spaces,

these unknown beginnings.

The plan was paid for but the place was owing me more than that moment--it owes me still.

We can take credit that the future isn’t spent yet and I will always remain sitting on that case of

options….

until the debt is paid.

(My Choice Poems)

Attempts at limericks loosely based on my service learning experience.

Your children on books the poster did say.

They sat upon desks, on a shelf, in a tray.

And when the teacher did ask,

where was their latest book task?

They hopped up crying, “they just flew away!”

There once was a boy that was lost in a stare,

on the girl down the row, he thought was quite fair.

When he went to say hi,

from his mouth, he let fly.

“I’m sorry but I think my gum just fell in your hair.”

There once was a girl who thought she had wit,

who tried really hard to write a limerick.

She failed every time.

Messed up every line.

But the teacher said good try, and still took it.

The Bubble

The Diner

The First Date

The Nameless Ones

Moving Mountains