some_stars | (no subject)

So I'm lying in bed being depressed, and a line of poetry starts repeating in my head--"poetry makes nothing happen: it survives," from "In Memory of W.B. Yeats," no link bc I'm on the phone because see above re bed. So I lean over and get the phone, google it, read it, feel better and worse in the way consuming emotional art makes me feel when I'm like this. And then I look at the whole poem, which I have loved for fifteen years, since I dragged my Norton anthology to summer camp at age 14, and something clicks for me for the first time about the progression of the three sections, the tightening meter and shift in diction, it doesn't matter but the point is I was lying there counting syllables and THAT is when the gross seagull sobbing suddenly ambushed me. Not when I was reading the words or having feelings about ideas. Because of meter. I am the most ridiculous human.

I am also 29, I guess, and seriously reconsidering my decision to lift my longstanding moratorium on birthday wishes and/or acknowledgement because today it doesn't feel at all like my life is on track or going anywhere. But whatever, maybe some sort of sympathetic magic will occur and by finally acknowledging my actual age I'll start feeling like an adult instead of a 19 year old in a grownup's skin suit with a decade of mysteriously lost time.