The little bird is smartly dressed
And impresses me with the phrasing of his tune.
"Perdoooodeee Perdoooodee Perdoooo!"
He is saying you ought to go to the university of Purdue
And study botany,
For there you will meet the man of your dreams,
And your dreams will all come true.
The doubt comes instantaneously.
Perdue is much too good for me,
And I am too old to go and study plants and trees,
And what good will it do me now,
To find some beau 30 years my junior?

But maybe I am unaware that somewhere out there
Someone my age has heard the word of the prophetic bird,
And is right now considering the possibilities,
Some unlikely probability that the woman of his dreams
Is hearing the message too,
And will meet to join dreams with him
At the University of Purdue.

-jenn

When you play banjo at the county fair
And you've shaved your legs and done your hair
And you're playin your heart out
And some fool just walks by
Eatin on a fried stick
Of butter
You know
You gotta find yourself
Another way
To say hello

Dobar dan is Bosnian
But if ya say that here
Someone will try and help ya turn your dobro on
And Shen they do
You'll know
You gotta find a better way to say hello

Guten tag
Buenos Dias
Bonjour my friend
As you can see it's
Not that hard to find another way

Well it never fails when I
Play this thang
Some feller takes it upon himself
To come up and tell me
That he gives guitar lessons
I don't know
I got a find a better way to say hello

-jenn

To me, communication between people who want to be friends is like this:
We agree to play nice.
We go to the tennis court
And throw a ball over the net to one another.
The object is to volley,
To throw it so it can be caught,
And catch it and throw it back in a timely and considerate manner.
It's for fun.
But it helps us get better at something.
Maybe the something is life.
Maybe it's just to get better at communication.

You made your choice
To continue to throw the ball over my head and over the back wall of the court,
So then you expect me to run after it every time
And bring it back and continue on with you as if that were ok.

I get to make my choice, too.
I will leave the ball where it is and go home and eat my soup.

The ball's in your court now.
Play with yourself.

Bye-bye now.

-jenn

They said Mama Cass was fat,
And Karen Carpender took ipecac
To make herself throw up so she'd stay thin.
A hateful pack of fraternity brats
Voted Janis Joplin the University of Texas' ugliest man in 1962.
But ask not what you can do for your women,
But please, what can women do for you?

This world still kills the prophets.
Marley, Hendrix, Mercury,
Hate and jealousy in the face of love,
In the face of true,
Gary Coleman, Kurt Cobain,
Any Winehouse, Marilyn,
George Michael, Marvin Gaye,
Prince, Judy Garland,
All died in pain.
No one truly understood.
No one knew how to help or what to do,
But let's not ask what you can do for your people,
But only what people can do for you.

-jenn

It's 1985 and linguistics professor emeritus is teaching us
About the Great Vowel Shift
And other things that made English
Our language that it is today.
We read along as he recites
The Lord's Prayer in Old English
And as he demonstrates how to pronounce Chaucer's Tales properly.

He suddenly breaks off in a diatribe
About anorexia nervosa, and how it killed Karen Carpenter.
And then he stops, looks directly into the camera of my lens
And says, "Why Karen? Why?
We loved you just as you were
And didn't care, whatever your weight was----
A voice of an angel, gone!"

And then I realized, he wasn't a genius, or a great learned sage,
He was just another old man
Who didn't understand anything
About the pressure to be thin in the 1980's.

-jenn

I went to the doctor.
I had permanent chills.
My hair was standing up on end.
"You've been listening to Chicago again,
Haven't you?" He chided me.
"Only 6 2 4, Feeling Stronger Everyday,
And, I'm a Mannnnnnnnn.

My doctor simply shook his head.
"By this time next year
You'll be dead," he admonished,
"If you don't stop it."

Well, does anyone really know what time it is?

Does anybody really care?

-jenn

She's over there hoeing and raking and grubbing her lawn,
And I'm here in mine,
Grubbin this song half ta death.
We 're both tryin ta make something beautiful grow
Right out in the flower beds beside our front doors.

And if she wears pants, I wear a dress.
She's wearing coveralls today,
And I'm like this: a long skirt and boots,
A delicate hat that blows like petals in the breeze.
She and I are always two sides
Of the very same coin.

Her dad died and mine"s alive.
The estate is settled now
And she uses hers to take care of herself,
And I'm a bum,
But I'm free to roam,
And the world takes care of me.

-jenn

I got nothing.

When we all come in
To report our dealins for de week
And gadsby's bloated like a
Two beaked pelican
About all the sales he made in his mind,
And Junior, talkin out his behind,
His lips jutted out, shoulders shrugged,
His palms out open, like the day he was mugged,
He claims he's got victims too.
The fish are all bitin on the worms he threw,
And the sales manager,
He's got you now,
And
I've
Got
Nothin.



Vinnie is tellin some tall tales
About his success with some big fat whales.
You'd think he's from Texas
The way he spews,
And even Block, who can barely talk,
Manages to sputter about his capers,
Full deposits and 5% papers,
And then the sales manager comes to me,
And I put my hands down on both my knees
And stare right through his hollow eyes.
He's got to realize.
He's got you,
And
I've
Got
Nothin.

-jenn

I sleep on my belly.
I burrow in and pull the covers up.
Peace comes on me,
And I can rest,
Contemplate anything,
Even death.

And Ive come to think that when I die,
I'd like to be buried like I sleep,
On my belly, face down,
So the world can kiss my ass goodbye.

-jenn

I leave the crumpled receipt on the floor.
Something the cats drug up
From out of the waste paper basket,
I can't bring myself to throw it away again.
Maybe I leave it because the cats like it
And have made a toy out of it.
Maybe I identify with it.

Maybe I hope that when I wash up
On some strange shore in the afterlife,
That even some stranger cat might find me interesting
Or useful,
Pick me out of the trash,
And when it's done with me,
And I'm lying there forsook,
That maybe the Great Janitor of the cosmos
Will just let me be
And give this two-time loser
A third second chance.

-jenn

I throw my ideas away like clutter from my countertop.
Finally disgusted and in a rage,
It all goes in the garbage pail,
The good, along with the bad.
Why do other people pile their things
Up on top of mine?
Why does everything mingle and become ruined
Like apples still in a grocery bag?
I had my things here in an orderly fashion,
And now chaos has happened.

It doesn't help me to understand
The 2nd law of thermodynamics right now,

Not when all I want is a little time
To plant my ideas and see if they could grow into dreams.

-jenn

I'm just a cat toy whose string has broken.
Now I lie here on the floor.
I can't do anything anymore.

I thought it would be fun,
That I could run,
And would be free forevermore.
But now I
Lie here on the floor
Ruined.
I can't do anything anymore.

-jenn

Fear is a thing you bat around, yourself,
Like a cat playing with a pencil,
And the minute you quit propelling your fear to go,
It will lie harmless like any inanimate object.

Fear can lie dormant there on the floor for centuries,
Until some fool comes along and picks it up again,
Draws some two-dimensional thing with it
On a single piece of paper,
Then, Viola!
The entire world is terrified again.

-jenn

I dipped the sponge of my soul
Into the cold freshwater of cleanness,
And as I wrung it to bring it to my face,
Cleanness fell everywhere across the earth like rain.
I dab water on my forehead,
Down my neck, between my breasts,
And down unto my abdomen.
I am healed from all pain
And doubt,
And understand the ways of gods and men
And women.

And now the wind of my spirit blows
Through the orbs and hollowed out places,
And music falls down upon the earth
Like the percussive sound of hail,
And understanding reigns upon the four corners of the earth
And the four corners of the sky.

-jenn

Skinny people are above reproach!
You can't make fun of them.
You can fat shame, if you like.
Skinny shame doesn't work.
No one can be shamed for skinniness,
Or for being young.

"The youth is wasted on the young,"
The mother horse whinnies to her foal,
Who, thin and wiry, prances about,
The wind blowing its shiny new black mane.
The dance of the dark horse is in vain.
Emptiness.
"Vanity," quoth the preacher mare,
With her colt bearing hips
And her large healthy frame,
"All is really vanity."

-jenn

Music has balls
You can sing something you would never say
Music don't care
Bout nothing but the truth
Music can take your harsh reality
That nobody can understand
Ameliorate it
And yet move people to groove with it
And let them take it
And each one according to his or her own level of ability
Sing it for themselves
And begin to comprehend
Empathy

And that is a very good thang

-jenn

He'd just raped a man in an orange jump suit,
And said I had the pleasure of being next.
Like a true gentleman, he opened the bathroom door for me.
I clutched my purse and shot my eyes around.
This is what happens when lawlessness abounds,
When the inmates overrun the prison.

Trapped and doomed, I thought about my life,
How I'd never really taken the chance to live.
There was one small window overhead,
And then, I remembered, I had a knife in my purse.
I got it out and put on a sultry pout.

Men like him don't want a woman to please them.
All they want is one good reason
Why you remind them of someone who did them wrong,
So they can beat and kill and rape like they've wanted to
All along.

He came in the room already hard.
He moved in to grab me, but my knee took him off guard.
One upward jab with the knife
Took fear away,
And the next stab left his heart in fatal disarray.
Let him consider the woman who hurt him now
In his dying moments,
And the woman who had to clean his plow.

I used his body as a stepping stool,
Climbed up and over,
Out of the pool of blood and out the window.
The cronies he had down there to be his look outs
Helped me down and let me walk off,
Not knowing I'd just killed their boss.

I'm alive because an educated guess
Informed me, that I, as a member of the weaker sex,
Might sometime find myself in grave situations of inequality,
Far surpassing equal wage or glass ceiling,
And I would do well to
Level the playing field.


This is what happens when lawlessness abounds,
When the inmates overrun the prison and begin to run the asylum.

-jenn

When I die,
I think my soul
May seek out
Some lonely place,
Like the North Pole,
And I may sit there
All alone
For a very long time.

Maybe there I can contemplate
Why misunderstanding,
Jealousy, and hate
Pervade the human state,
Or maybe I can just forget
All the people I wish I'd never met
And rest in peace,
Albeit, in the cold.

-jenn

My TrueLove and I can sit
In silence in the mornings,
Sip on cinnamon coffee
And nibble on our toast,
And hours can pass on smiles
And bright eyed faces
Without a meanness
Or a clever joke.
And we don't know what day it is,
And little do we care,
Until some relative calls with bad news,
Then tells us "April Fools'."

Leave it to the children,
And leave it to the Gods,
And leave it to the relatives
To make fools of us all,
But as for me and TrueLove,
Our dreams are undisturbed,
And when by chance we have sweet time,
A sacred day is born.

-jenn

If I fall in love with Mozart,
And You get in the way,
All the passion that I have
May blow your heart away.

But if I fall in love with you
And You're not here to see,
Tiny drops of minuet
Will have their way with me.

I don't know what happened to the time,
Or how love can get so crosswise.
Maybe the least that we can try,
One dance, neath the stars,
While Mozart plays.

-jenn