It’s very fashionable right now to donate money to Haiti, but please be careful where you donate; anywhere money flows, there will be unethical people trying to take a cut, and even legitimate organizations can be astoundingly poorly managed. Charity Navigator seems to be a good place to check things out first; they don’t have the resources to check every charity, but they rate most of the big players. Personally, my Haiti-bound donation went to Doctors Without Borders.

On a lighter note, I’ve been spending a lot of time wandering RedBubble lately. My friend Caitlin introduced me to it back in August, when I bought a print of her “Tokyo” project, and I keep coming back, usually just to explore. They have a great talent pool, and their print quality is fantastic if you feel the urge to buy something. One of my favorite recent finds is JenniferB. Really, I think the best way for me to introduce her is to shut up and let two of her poems speak for themselves:

1. I Want To Fuck You With Words
2. To be continued…

Some of her writing is a bit morbidly uncomfortable, but I think it’s still worth reading.

In site-related news, I’ve commissioned Ten-Chan to illustrate one of the Elves stories I finished back at the end of 2008. She says she should be finished soon, and I’ll post it appropriately as soon as I can.

Introduction: I’m not very good at poetry. It isn’t my medium; meter and rhyme don’t come naturally to me. Even more than my other writing, poetry feels like something given to me rather than something I create; at best I’m a transcriptionist for something lurking in my dreams. Even then I’m not very good at it, but it’s a profoundly moving experience, something magical and almost divine.

In the evening of Halloween 2004, I broke three months of writer’s block. I can tell you this day exactly because I spent the day with a girl named Teri, and for the next two months I gave her credit for every word that came. It was beautiful; I woke up almost every day with something new, something wonderful, some new and interesting turn of phrase to consider. The best part was the poetry, dozens of pages every week, scrawled in that fuzzy half-awareness between slumber and first light.

I believed it was all from her, and I wanted very badly to know her better.

Ultimately that didn’t work out. We haven’t spoken in years.

She is not the girl I dreamed, and I am not a kind of boy she understands. I burned most of it, trying to find a suitable goodbye to my fantasy. Some of it survived on my old website, but for quite a while I wasn’t sure if I should move it here. I’m proud of it, in my own small way, but it’s also a little badge of shame; it’s a testament of delusion as much as any skill.

Ultimately I think it’s better to be truthful. I’ve picked a few memories to share with you; the rest I’ll leave behind.

I’m reaching out, past the fuzzy edge of the world, to pull the dreams out of the ether, give them flesh. Maybe if I let her pour through my hands and onto the page, I can be happy, even when I know she isn’t mine. It’s not working very well. It’s starting to break up already, and I only remember pieces, fragments, slipping over my mind like some high-speed Hollywood preview, slick and formless and marvelously exciting.

I think I know I’m dreaming;
It’s too good to be real,
But somehow I’m enchanted
By how she makes me feel.

It’s less a premonition,
More a trust in fate,
*next two lines illegible*

Tell me now,
You wondrous girl,
What you think of me.
Stain not today
Those precious lips
With the filthy kiss of lies.

How do you forget a girl,
One part angel, one part Muse,
Who brought back to you a talent
You always feared you’d lose?