My favorite poets: Lord Byron and John Keats. Just thought I'd announce that. Watching the Presidential Debate right now. Bush is a stuttering idiot. Mind you, I also think Kerry has a lot of bullshit up his sleeve, but at least he can speak. Where are all the good men of this country? I was digging through some of my poetry earlier and found a patriotic one I wrote for English last year. Goes something like this: "Your Influence Is Still Upon Me" Your influence is still upon me, lingering on my lips And From time to time I drink your words, swallowing down in sips. By chance I know the righted way by watching you once wrong And might I falter after you, I shall not stray for long. Your influence is still upon me, dirt upon my hands And From time to time I wash them off, wary where Duty lands. In learning I may follow you and practice mastered skill And should I follow after you, I follow at my will. Your influence is still upon me, drifting through my Dreams And Night and Day I pass Them by, observing unchanged themes. Through dreaming I then know you well and know myself the more And when I cease to think and be, They’ll know Them all the more. And moving away from politics towards poetry, I'm finally working on a collection of poems to publish--how, I don't really know, but I'm proud of my recent efforts to write so much and so easily. It's painful for a writer to not be able to be with words. You feel like a fish stuck on land, flapping around to feel right again, begging for a flow and nothing's there. Thank you, muse, for bringing words back to me. That blue notebook has been shadowing me for days. My crazy dreams still haunt me. Last night I dreampt that Brittany was stalking me and today I learned that she is memorizing the phone numbers of everyone in band. Everyone I talked to was more than weirded out by it; I guess someone bet her $20 to memorize it all by a certain date. Crazy. Physics sucks. Bakalakaler and I tested our rocket and, once again, the nose cone failed to deploy--we managed to get 20 seconds of take-off and free-fall with a pleasnt "THRUMP!" at landing and from the earth, the rocket smiled a crooked nose and lay dizzy on the green. Wow, sorry, really in a poetic mood. At any rate, I leave you now with one last poem that really can't be read twice to be understood. I wrote it and I'm still analysing its meaning. "Why does she wait?" Dismally she sits and waits in winters' slumber, herself awake and dreary, wide-eyed and dull, silent and listening. To what she listens to is breathed in the soft whispers of the new years' eve, silent prayers and pleas marked and tallied, counted by the stars; one wish granted, one star falls. The morning lacks to move her, a likeness not yet in her, a desire not yet inside her. Slumber does not yet take her. A pale light does then find her, a sitting spot on a soiled rug, the ends with tassels and intricate design; the needle of the mind and threads of inspiration locked in knots, unwilling, un-finding, unable to be undone. But what does she wait for? While the cold winter rays fall and spill slowly over icy deaths of dreamers yet to rise, in the hollow caves of lovers' home where they surrender their hearts and lives, or in the bows of rocking cradles where the restless dreamers stir, why does she sit and wait so still, while the gray days melt to a blue-shaded blur? What has taken her? Eyes so set upon a wanton fate, feet stripped and naked before an unlocked gate, she sits and she sits, oh why does she wait? Carrie