I'm breaking through
I'm bending spoons
I'm keeping flowers in full bloom
I'm looking for answers from the great beyond -REM, The Great Beyond

http://seeiteverywhere.blogspot.com/

Here we go. This is the blog of drafts produced by K. Lorrain Graham. Finally, I see poetry, some fine lines and interpretations. The "disjunction" if you will, is all over the place and borders on the overwhelming. You see, take any intelligent young woman and tell her to talk and this is what you might get. The sense of "everygirl/ubergirl" is written on the subway walls ala the Song of Silence and there are lines amongst the detritus that the poet herself must love and I do too:

It's important to not believe in a lamp burning for you or anyone in a window somewhere.

...for instance and this special knowledge:

Can not seeing you be our date?

Unfortunately, there is still a sense that the poet is still just trying on clothes:

I said "I'm going to dress up
like Elvis soon," and everyone
laughed kindly.

...or doodling in her personal diary:

Our relationship was about how to be
like frites and pureed potatoes. Enharmonic,
"like British food," she said.

But there is really something to say about a poet with a sense of humor:

I am the father of Kung Fu. I can't believe it. The conditions are ideal.

That line just blasts out of there but all the same, it is an old joke by now...Kung Fu....is this dream or masterpiece? Not sure really but finally, I have found the bare reality of K. Lorraine Graham as she masquerades as this thing or that thing and this hope of all intelligent young women to be high maintenance and appreciated for it at the same time. Afterall, not many young and beautiful women know what Mastic is:

I ask if they have any mastic. Mastic, she says, is an Arabic thing. I say yes, I know, I want to use it in pudding, and you have a sign that says "Yes! We have MASTIC!"

.....Yes, we have no bananas, we have no bananas today! Couldn't resist that one but here's the deal. Mastic when chewed is delightful but turns rock hard in about a half hour. Spit it out before you hit the wall, my best advice.

K. Lorraine Graham reading a nice love letter to an ex. Not sure about how this ought to matter to others as in readers or listeners because it is average, expected stuff from the jilted or amicably jilted folks in the world. I guess you might imagine that it covers the conversations that still roam in the head of a person who used to identify with another person with whom they were "in love" or at least, attracted to. The giggling parts...well. Okay. We can forgive that but at the same time we can say, put on the big girl pants now. There's Buddha in there and Je-Lo, basically I guess...a feminist travelogue and I have to wonder, What would Rachel Corrie say if she could say it? Would it sound like this? There's conflict about work (yet again) in there and I'm faced once again with how distrurbing it must be to be a young woman now, or a young person for that matter. But as a mature adult, I know that already, everyone does but that doesn't make it fodder for a whole poem let alone a career. There is way too much self in this and not what I'd call "the personal" and to call it a prose poem is a bit of a stretch. I'd call it a piece of a memoir albeit, parts of the memoir that are best left in the artist's head who, because of their expertise in the field of writing (whatever that is) knows that things have to be interesting to the reader and their own thoughts have to be disguised using the generally accepted tools of place, time and character. These things are actually quite mundane and I imagine the audience to be hoping here for something, anything at all. Throw me a bone they are saying. Why are you going on like this? "When you were about six or seven," starts a line and boy, am I sick of other people's childhoods when in fact mine was so grand. Ahem. Don't we all feel that way but this isn't to say that Ms. Graham has any understanding of the Universal except to say that it isn't common to find a girl who speaks Chinese but why doesn't she use some here? I would. I most definitely would but then again, that would put Ms. Graham in the ranks of Ezra and that is presumptuous isn't it? Throw me at least a Haiku here. "There's really nothing else to say," goes the poet.....okay. Then end it already. I hear your audience whispering and fidgeting in their seats and I don't hear the spontaneous Wow that is heard in the midst of truly wonderful readings. I'm checking the progress bar now and see that you still have at least four minutes more of monologue i.e. letter to the long lost lover that by now we have all forgotten about but truly know why this relationship ended. This is childish stuff and not the kind that we find charming even though we love kids and know poets who help children and themselves to healthy portions of that juvenalia wish I was there and look at what they see kind of beauty. Naive. Childish. Two different things entirely you know. And finally....we get to something hopefully worth the projected seven minutes it will take to finish off (and there must be a timer on somewhere). Oh no! She explains herself before starting! No. Never. Please don't do that. It's a California poem and we get some deep philosophical meanderings....from See It Everywhere.....and we're talking Tofu burgers now or perfume that smells like Tofu because it must be California and no laughs...not a single witty thing is tossed in there. Ay Caramba. Ay Caramba is a word that means I give up, the rest of the seven minutes can go on without me.

The Gypsy Tells Him All About It

looks deep into his eyes
across the short table
his palm outstretched
the candle flickers
to establish the cadence
as is the usual,

she will leave soon
there will be ten others
until she settles on just one.

Your lukewarm praise
the way you missed
everything is in there
but I cannot tell you how
I know this, cannot reveal
the secrets of my art.

As you look back
won't you wonder
about the questions
re-investigate the solutions?

Don't worry, she will check
in on you once in a while
to know if you are dead
because we all go on living
regardless of the temperature.

I used to think
I would like it here,
would get out more
but found the indoors
pleasing to me,
brought rocks and seeds
into the house, admired
the sand from all the shoes
that entered and left,
and told fortunes.