(I think I made you up inside my head)

Ugh I have so many things going on in my life right now, okay mainly schoolwork, but I fear I'll never finish, each day drags on like the last and just when I think things are finally coming to an end, I sit up in my bed moments before my sleep remembering the things I'd forgotten to do that day. It doesn't help that I'm so addicted to Quizup right now. It's like suddenly all my miscellaneous unuseful knowledge about lit and ancient history and Jane Austen all have some purpose which is to let me win match after match against people around the world and make me feel better about myself at having achieved/ won something. Half the time I'm thinking to myself, "excuse me while I win my way to victory" and then proceed to ignore the things I have to do. Right now, at this very moment, I am ignoring the many many things I have to do and finish and hand in for school and I am half-fearful. I am many halves, and never a perfect whole. But I am very good at quizup (:

Also, why is it that suddenly Sylvia Plath is making sense? I hate that I can identify in some weird way with her, except possibly not her animal attraction to Ted Hughes? Like I read Bell Jar when I was 16 but at that age whenpeople who read her were said to slit their wrists, all I could think of was how prettily she writes. I do identify with Charles Bukowski's 'The Shoelace' though, it's like my jam along with T.S Eliot in that lines keep running round my head. Eliot's 'Lovesong of J. Alfred Prucock' is criminal, it's so apt in every turn of phrase. Do I dare eat a peach? I have heard the mermaids singing each to each... i do not think they will sing to me. I grow old, I grow old/ I shall wear the bottom of my trousers rolled. In a minute there will be time for a hundred visions and revisions. I have measured out my life in coffee-spoons. Do I dare and do I dare? In the room the women come and go, speaking of Michaelangelo. Oh do not say 'what is it?' Let us go and make our visit.

It should be criminal, I tell you, the way it's on never-ending loop. Anyway, back to Bukowski, I came across him while researching about the Hassles and Uplifts Scale for social work, and the writer uses it to reference how the scale which measures these hassles can be used to predict ill-health later in life, and that measuring hassles are a better way of studying stress rather than the using the dominant survey back in 1981 which was to look at the effects of major life events on respondents' lives. And right now I'm feeling the impact of a million little trivial things that are all looking for my attention, but I have none to give! Slow down world, slow down.

The Shoelace

a woman, a
tire that’s flat, a
disease, a
desire: fears in front of you,
fears that hold so still
you can study them
like pieces on a
chessboard…
it’s not the large things that
send a man to the
madhouse. death he’s ready for, or
murder, incest, robbery, fire, flood…
no, it’s the continuing series of small tragedies
that send a man to the
madhouse…
not the death of his love
but a shoelace that snaps
with no time left …
The dread of life
is that swarm of trivialities
that can kill quicker than cancer
and which are always there -
license plates or taxes
or expired driver’s license,
or hiring or firing,
doing it or having it done to you, or
roaches or flies or a
broken hook on a
screen, or out of gas
or too much gas,
the sink’s stopped-up, the landlord’s drunk,
the president doesn’t care and the governor’s
crazy.
light switch broken, mattress like a
porcupine;
$105 for a tune-up, carburetor and fuel pump at
sears roebuck;
and the phone bill’s up and the market’s
down
and the toilet chain is
broken,
and the light has burned out -
the hall light, the front light, the back light,
the inner light; it’s
darker than hell
and twice as
expensive.
then there’s always crabs and ingrown toenails
and people who insist they’re
your friends;
there’s always that and worse;
leaky faucet, christ and christmas;
blue salami, 9 day rains,
50 cent avocados
and purple
liverwurst.

or making it
as a waitress at norm’s on the split shift,
or as an emptier of
bedpans,
or as a carwash or a busboy
or a stealer of old lady’s purses
leaving them screaming on the sidewalks
with broken arms at the age of 80.

suddenly
2 red lights in your rear view mirror
and blood in your
underwear;
toothache, and $979 for a bridge
$300 for a gold
tooth,
and china and russia and america, and
long hair and short hair and no
hair, and beards and no
faces, and plenty of zigzag but no
pot, except maybe one to piss in
and the other one around your
gut.

with each broken shoelace
out of one hundred broken shoelaces,
one man, one woman, one
thing
enters a
madhouse.

so be careful
when you
bend over.