Airplane / About Me Sonnet.

1. Hi, my name is Craig. I’m flying on a plane from SFO to LAX. We’re about mid flight and the sun is setting off to my right and what that looks like from here is a thick magic-marker-blue line right at the horizon, with some pink above that and the Sierras beneath.

2. Brat has been on me for a while to write something for the website, but I have a singular interest and I have trouble pronouncing it. 

3. For example. I’ve never been happy with description in poetry. Give me the solidity of Creeley’s “woods of small trees” over anything by Mark Doty. Or just a kiss, and an unwrapping. And Wittgenstein’s unutterable.

4. Lately I’ve been thinking about the masculine, and what it means to be a man. I think this was in part prompted by the move to San Francisco. Sitting behind me, there’s a man talking to a stranger’s child, and without getting into specifics what I would like to say is that the man seems to be seeking validation from the child. Someone told me the only real men in San Francisco are gay men. 

5. Sudden turbulence. Must’ve hit a rock.

6. Lately I’ve noticed that I’ve gotten into the bad habit of tacking on “I think” or “maybe” to the ends of notes that I write at work.

7. Crazy!

8. There’s this carwash near the university in Berkeley that’s kind of fascinating.  I was sitting across from it, in the park, watching and it’s this big circus. Cars are parked and strewn about in every which direction, blocking each other-in and shit, and yet everybody seems to know what they’re doing, including the customers, who participate and point to things that need to be buffed out. My car is filthy but I would have no idea how to get my car cleaned there, even after watching. Now think about how many jiffy lubes you see these days. 

9. I remember spending afternoons as a kid in the warehouse of my father’s business, driving the forklift in circles or dirtying my hands on the oiled bearings of a nail gun, and how I'd touch the calendars and the pin-ups. Smudge smudge smudge. 

10. When was the last time someone told you to grow up?

11. I’m part of a tribe of people who, aboard airplanes, just sit. And wait. Sometimes to cross time zones you first have to travel through boredom, and you get right into the autumn-smelly birth pastures of creativity and self-delusion. This is why anyone can write when they are a guest in the home of a friend. 

12. I repeat my name is Craig. I am feeling a little weightlessness in my feet as we make our descent and I am thinking about a woman. 

13. Now here’s the part of the sonnet where the heroic couplet might be, and I don’t know what to do with that. I have a master of fine arts degree in poetry but this is my first sonnet and I am new here.

14. I am going to sit here until everyone else exits the plane and then I'm going to get up and I'm going to walk the aisle like I've got nowhere to be because it's true. There's that little bocadillo of night you get as you exit onto the jetbridge and it's going to be fantastic.