When I wake up, I think about you

In the middle of my day, I wonder about you
And when I go to sleep… I dream about you
I just can’t seem to get no fucking rest!
Real shit

And, boy, am I tired of this

For someone like you to roam around in my mind
Like a kid at a theme park
If I think about you in my day, can’t I at least dream in peace?
Well, it’s 5:30 a.m.
I guess that’s my answer
Fuck

Tarriona “Tank” Ball

Crystal Wilkinson’s Perfect Black is a powerful, approachable collection. From family to racism to food, Wilkinson writes with an authoritative Black voice. I digged a handful of her poems, but “Praise Song for the Kitchen Ghosts” is such a mouth-watering essay on food. I also love the typesetting and illustrations in this book.

I never thought I expected anything from you
Until the day you hugged me like amnesia
I guess I expected for you to hold me like I was the
Type of thing you could not forget

Maybe I expected too much
Maybe I should have never let your arms
Drive up and down my body
As if they were lost
Looking for a fucking rest stop

Whether it be my body or my heart
Maybe I had too many lights on
Made you feel safe, like I was shelter
The kind of place that you
Hide your boredom in

Don’t touch me if you don’t mean it

Don’t make me feel like some weekend hotel in New Orleans
You’re not yourself here
Maybe I was wrong for expecting more from you
And maybe you were wrong
For giving me something to expect

It’s not my fault you left your intentions in New Orleans
And picked up Misleading, you carried it in your book sack
People will say that you cannot control your feelings
But your hands…

Your hands are your own
And you didn’t just touch me
You held me
You held me like if you let me go, morning would come too soon
As if we only came alive at night

Because soon as the day would hit your back
I would be a stranger to your heart
I would be a foreigner to your eyes

I had no need to wonder how it felt to have a Sun who was
embarrassed by its sky
How dare you make me feel like an eclipse to your shine?
A dark hiding place for your wet dreams
A busy spot for your fingers when they were not busy holding sticks

When morning comes
You will jump, Adam

You will treat me like a friend

And you will visit me while everyone is asleep

I will bend my back to suit your body and you will hold me
Like you should have this evening…
When I asked you for a hug
And your arms felt like quiet
Like quick
And I could hear my confidence walk away with an awkward limp
The type of walk ya get
When a motherfucka like you
Likes to trip someone
That’s walking towards you with the same body
You held them with
So I’m confused…
Was I a punching bag or a pillow?

Tarriona “Tank” Ball

Early Saturday morning, I was googling for an English translation of a Vietnamese song. I couldn’t find what I was looking for, but I came across Vương Thanh’s translation of Nguyễn Du’s Truyện Kiều. Except for attending an afternoon with Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai in DC, I spent most of my day adding the English translation to my Truyện Kiều page. I also redesigned the webpage and added some illustrations. The most consuming part of the project was trying to match 3,254 lines. Since we are celebrating National Poetry Month, I encourage you to read The Tale of Kiều in Vietnamese or English or both. I must confess that the English version is easier for me to understand. Here are a few opening lines:

Within a hundred-year lifespan in this earthly world,
Genius and Destiny have a tendency to oppose each other.
A turbulent mulberry-field-covered-by-sea period had passed.
The things that we saw still deeply pain our hearts.
It’s not strange that beauty may beget misery.
The jealous gods tend to heap spites on rosy-cheeked beauties.
Turning scented pages of an old volume under an oil lamp,
I started reading a long-ago tale of love and romance.

Translated by Vương Thanh

poetry, that which had never failed
failed
all i invented were new ways to arrange things as time On my nerves
every word they say another source of fucking chagrin
in poetry as life, forms appear meaningless before my anger. i cannot find “a logic” aside
from straight dope capable to pierce the exactitude of pure rage. losing the original
thread or intention of the poem emotionally or its having spent itself in encounter with
its Master emotion

Simone White (an excerpt from or, on being the other woman)

So far this year, I have read mostly poetry. I am wondering why I even read poems when I don’t understand most of them. Unlike novels and nonfiction, poems are short; therefore, I can read them whenever I have a few minutes here and there. I can pick up a poem whenever and I don’t have to try to remember what I have read already.

Reading poetry has replaced my endless scrolling on social media networks. I don’t spend time on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn anymore and I have no desire to check out TikTok, Instagram, or any new social media networks. I am becoming anti-social online and poetry keeps me company.

Without a doubt, I am still a novice poetry reader. I don’t have the technical skills to break down poems; therefore, I rely primarily on my own understanding of what I can pick up. My poetry book reviews are based on my own level of comprehension. I can’t tell if a poem is good or bad. I can only tell if a poem speaks to me or not.

When I first started to write about music, I wanted to communicate what I heard. Even though I had no formal music training, I could pick up music elements such as melodies, harmonies, rhythms, vocals, lyrics, arrangements, orchestrations, and improvisations. With poetry, I don’t have a clue. I can’t figure out the format such as the breaks, the spaces, and the flows. Sometimes poems with unique structures I couldn’t tell if I were supposed to read from left to right or top to bottom. I might audit a few classes to learn to appreciate poetry.

Then again, I am always excited when I come across a poem that I could understand. Even if I could find one poem from a collection I read, I am happy with that. Reading poetry books has become finding poems I could post on my blog. To celebrate the National Poetry Month, I will post a poem a day for the entire month of April. Subscribe to my RSS feed for poetry or bookmark my poetry category and enjoy.

I am an ignorant fucker. difficult to be close to in that i am unsentimental and intimate with everyone. This is connected to the problems I am working through regarding metaphor. As a form of patriarchal control over language and a currency of poetic power. My ex-husband calls me an “ignorant fucker” when I complain that his hugely pregnant white girlfriend, who I do not know who I tolerate since for the last month and indefinite future my son must live in her house two days in a week, cannot show up unannounced in my child’s classroom where I pay all the bills and I watch and half do nothing and half help in the acquisition of literacy and reason. I say this is no place for this white woman; she is a free rider on my labor and love for my son. I will not support any white people with my work. I tell him all of this pretty loudly. He calls me an ignorant fucker. Now you are street? What, are you going to punch her in her face? I have fought exactly three people with physical violence in my forty-six years of life. Two men. And my sister.

Simone White (an excerpt from or, on being the other woman)

I didn’t get most of the poems. I am not sure what to make of them. I don’t have the words to describe them. I just couldn’t connect. Maybe I should reread the series again.

Every few months I have to perform an upgrade on Ubuntu. My WordPress droplet usually has about 80 updates that can be applied immediately. The upgrade process is not so bad. I have to power down the server and make a snapshot of the droplet, which takes about five minutes to complete. Two days ago, I did the upgrade and removed unused packages. WordPress’s Site Health gave me 4 errors, including the failure of scheduling post and some caching issues. I ended up restoring an old backup from four days ago. I will not remove unused packages in the future. In any rate, I wish I could enable automatic minor and security updates for Ubuntu so I don’t have to do the updates myself. I did the AutomaticSecurityUpdates, but it didn’t seem to work. If you have any suggestions, please let me know.

I didn’t understand much from this collection. Though I enjoyed “To My Mother’s Father.” McCrae’s writing requires slow reading and re-reading. I tend to just read through them to find something I can share on my blog.