Best Sophy Poems
In searching for her he’s found a philosophy
to balance his soul in the presence of Sophy.
The scales of existence measures his sufferings,
from his shoulders, she’s taken off the weight of desires.
His spirit is soaring above the ordinariness.
The lightness rules over the human hopelessness.
Penetrating into the Universe is the man.
The truth is a languor for him till the end.
(translated from Russian)
Yale student radio (wybcx) is playing throughout the suite. I’m working on chemistry problems but when a song I don’t know is good enough to catch my attention, I add it to one of my gazillion Spotify playlists - God, I love the Internet.
One of our roommates, Sophy, is from California. She’s brilliant and friendly but almost never leaves her room, which she keeps hot and airless. If I’m in there for more than two minutes I have to start peeling off layers of clothing, one by one. She didn’t seem this odd last semester. We take turns, mediating between Sophy and the living, picking up her meals and packages, like vampire assistants.
Then there’s a nice but nerdy guy named Andy, who Anna’s adopted. He’s sitting on our deep, red, four cushion corduroy couch, crafting an essay on his laptop. He’s a divinity student who I rely on to answer my deeper religious questions.
“Do you think Jesus went around telling people his mother is a virgin?,” I’d asked.
“Jesus had brothers,” he answered, “Have you ever read the bible?” He asks.
“My bible is Seventeen magazine.” I say, hand to heart.
“Listen to this!” Andy says - a peremptory order to the room - as he begins reading from his paper. “Disruptivist writers who no longer strive for agency, circumventing narrative in order to resemble the fiction construct, risk losing what Robbe-Grillet called the “intelligibility of the world” and themselves illustrate the exhaustion of forms.” Andy paused. “What do you think?” He asked the room.
No-one says anything. No-one ever understands what Andy’s talking about.
Anna and Sunny are studying and sunbathing in the common room like they’re on some kind of permanent holiday. They occupy two generous rectangles of sunlight streaming in through the closed picture windows.
They’re laying on yoga mats, almost shoulder to shoulder, wearing bikinis and Wayfarer Ray-Bans. It’s 12° degrees outside but there’s an oil heater with a fan blowing across it that provides them with a sun-like warmth.
Welcome to higher learning 2022
The night was rainy, hot and humid. It was the kind of night that populates steamy, black and white, noir movies where someone is murdered. The stars seemed reduced to sloshing behind moldy gray clouds, as damp and listless as seaweed in the surf.
“Let’s go see a movie,” Sophy suggested, as she brought up the Fandango website on the 70” smart TV. This quickly drew a brouhaha of excited interest.
“Ooo!, Bullet Train,” Anna said. “Elvis!” Lisa gushed.
“Where the Crawdads sing!” Sunny gasped.
“Super pets!” Leong declared, pointing - producing groans all around - THAT was a no-go.
“Maverick!” I said. “I could do that,” Sunny agreed, “he’s crazy, but I’m a Cruise fan.” she added.
In the end we decided to do a movie marathon with “Maverick” that night and “Elvis”, “Bullet Train” and “Where the Crawdads sing,” on Sunday.
As we ordered our treats at the theater concession stand, a tall, skinny, spotted, teenage boy attempted to flirt with Lisa. He smiled at her as confidently as a lizard, but sagged, like a shirt whose coat hanger was removed, when she pointedly ignored him.
We’re in the common room, Lisa and I. It’s Friday afternoon, about 2 - It’s partly-sunny and 45°f. outside. We’ve claimed the two squares of temporary rectangular sunlight like the Spanish conquistadors of old once claimed everything.
I’m just drowsing, I had a test this morning, I got up at 3:30am to study for it and although I’m confident I did ok, I find myself rehashing it when I close my eyes. So I’m determinedly not closing my eyes - much. Lisa has a book open and she’s working on a chemistry problem set (called a pset) assigned as homework.
Looking out and up, there’s only one, lonely, cumulonimbus cloud in the sky. It's there, as if placed - a piece of art - the rest of the sky remaining defiantly blank. At first glance, it resembled a man, hanging by his neck, blowing in the wind under a giant mushroom gallows - but he soon detached and floated away like a tattered kite.
Lisa starts asking a question, without looking up from her book. “Ok, so when hydrogen acts as a metal instead of a nonmetal..”
“Please don’t make me think,” I whisper in a tired monotone, “I’m unprepared.”
“Ugh.” Lisa, grunted. She absorbed her disappointment quietly, without taking offense.
We’re like two disparate species coexisting in the same landscape: the chemistry-tested and the soon-to-be-tested - neither diminished the other but we’re separate.
Leong and Anna come in together, breaking off to their rooms to shed bookbags and coats but soon they’re filling the room with restless energy. “Has anyone heard from Sophy?” Leong asks. Sophy failed a rapid test yesterday morning and was hewn from the population like a cancer on the student body - and swooped off to isolation housing. “Yeah, I took her some stuff this morning,” I report, “She seems ok.”
People are dropping to covid like flies. None of us are invincible, we roommates watch each other - as if any one of us could go full-on-zombie at any moment - not unlike I imagine dinner at the Trumps these days - everyone looking around, nonchalantly, wondering who’ll flip first - but here, if you cough, you’ll start a panic.
It’s 6:15pm. Peter, Anna, Sophy and I are studying in the common room of our suite.
“We need to get serious,” Peter whispered, but there was no subject in the declaration, so I was left confused and uncommitted, “about getting serious,” he clarified.
“I’m not sure I can get serious about a guy who doesn’t separate whites and darks in the laundry,” I say, gently.
“No,” he said, shaking his head in brief vibration, “we need to get serious about DINNER.”
“Oh!” I said, maybe a little too relieved.
“Ha!” He chortled, “YOU overthink everything!” He said, nodding his head up and down to prove it was true. “And speaking of laundry,” he continued, seeing me start to open my mouth, “the other night YOU asked me if your pastel purple panties should go with the whites or darks - so I must be an EXPERT!”
I laughed at the idea of his laundry expertise, sailing in from out of the purple like that, it was haywire. “Well,” I said, becoming introspective, “I didn’t know you’d hold onto that question like a grudge,” I said, in quiet, wounded accusation, “from now ON, maybe you should stay as far away from my panties as possible.”
“What are you two grousing about NOW?” Anna asked, looking up from her computer. “You guys are like an old married couple.”
“True THAT.” Sophie said, like a judge right before knocking her gavel to finalize a ruling.
“We weren’t arguing!” I said, looking around confusedly. I looked at Peter, who was smiling broadly, “Were we?”
“Nope,” he said, wrapping his arm around me in a bearhug, “we were flirting.”
NonViolent Communication practice
is rooted in non-violent
healthy relationship empowerment philosophy
Unaffiliated with
pathological disempowerment theology
of personal SuperGod's punishing injustice,
blame,
shame,
birth into guilty
sinful
despiritualized
dissociative EarthNature.
CoPassionate co- and eco-relational metaphysics
depicts a speakable universe
for sharing loving resilient communications
resonantly positive
meaningful
vocational
natural/spiritual epistemology,
theory of deductive/inductive knowability
Through experiential pedagogy
of deep learning-listening experience
within either or both theological and ecological settings
hoping for divine and/or humane vocational cooperative communications
With interdependently positive social-economic-political
health/wealth co-relations
through integral
holistic original Earth GeoMetric
NonZero SourceZone
of Yang enlightening revolutions
transubstantiating deep dark Yintegral powers
of non-violently resilient
reverse temporal interrelationship.
NonViolent nondualistic philo/theo-sophy
is rooted in deep learned compassion
multiculturally and polyculturally cooperative
socio-economic co-investing transactions,
co-operating practice
of non-violently ego/eco
inside/outside
self/other-passioning communication
In a verbal left-hemisphere dominant
humane/divine
ego/eco-logical
individualistic/communicantistic universe
Of nonverbal right-hemisphere unitarian
eco/theologically integral
therapeutically impassioned EarthJustice
speaking cooperatively out and in
secular/sacred vocations
synergetic avocations
empowering evocations
enlightening invocations
passionately communing EarthPeace.
My roommates and I congregated in our suite's great room and we’ll head out for dinner soon.
“Have you ever eaten dog food?” Leong asked Anna.
“No,” Anna answered, “it smells like chicken - it’s got chicken in it”
“OOO!” Leong pounces, “Busted!!”
“What?!” Anna reacts.
“How would you know that then?” Leong asks, doubtfully.
“My mom told me!” Anna cries, in self-defense. “She’s a vegetarian too.”
“Your mom told you.” Leong said, like a prosecutor raising an eyebrow for the jury.
“I just took my last English class,” I report, pony-tailing my hair, “my teacher told me - privately - that my writing destroys.”
“Nice,” Lisa says.
“Yeah,” I say, smiling and grooming with pride, “I thought that was a ballin’ complement and I’ve been riding that high.”
“No doubt,” Anna says and nods.
“My English professor..” Leong says, exasperated, “is driving me crazy,” I’ve written three final papers so far and she’s rejected them ALL.”
“Huh?” I gasp, “Show me one!” I demand, wiggling gimmie-fingers at her laptop.
“Here’s a question,” Lisa asks the room, “What would you change about your childhood?”
“I would have never grown up.” Sophy said.
“When I was in third grade, in the UK, a girl in my elementary school, was murdered,” I reveal.
“What?!” Anna says.
“Oh, my GOD!” Lisa gasps.
“Spill” Leong demands.
“Her name was Kennedy,” I begin, “She was in another class, I didn’t know her but I started to imagine that I’d known her. I’d think of her playing on the swings in a yellow dress, in daydreams and in nightmares.
“I can see that,” Leong said.
“I was flummoxed, at the time, how a family could lose a little girl and a president.” I added.
Anna looked confused.
“I was in third grade,” I replied,” what did I know?
“Go ON,” Lisa prompts.
“We heard that she was walking home and got snatched,” I continued.
“Jesus,” Lisa said, shaking her head.
“Although I never walked home, I was careful not to be snatched for a while,” I summarized.
“I bet,” Anna agreed.
“That’s what I’d change,” I said, “Poor Kennedy.”
“People suck,” Lisa pronounced, and there was general agreement to *that*.
It’s a Saturday afternoon worth waiting for. It’s 52°f and the sky is clear except for a scattering of popcorn clouds. I’m eating lunch with Sophy, Lisa, Anna (my roommates) and Peter (a friend) at one of the two residential dining halls that have the best pizza (yeah, you KNOW who you are).
We’re touching base before we scatter, shrapnel like, for the night. I’ll be hemmed-up by circumstance and in my most diligent work-mode. I have a presentation due Monday.
Sophy says, reading from at her laptop, “Research suggests that cat owners are seen as better looking and have more sex.”
“I have two cats,” I say, “at home.” I preen in my double-catness.
“I’m a cat owner!” Anna announces.
“My cat DIED.” Lisa reveals sadly.
“THAT cat did its JOB,” Sophy pronounced saliently, as if proof for the study.
“I grew up in a cat house,” Peter says.
“Ooo! YOU must have learned a LOT!” I say, batting my eyes seductively.
“Maybe we should get a cat HERE!” Sophy suggests.
“To cement our status!” Anna laughs.
The pizza was really good.
we had a cat named Fluffy
who always acted arrogant and stuffy
one day it was said
she was found dead
those tooth marks aren’t mine dear Sophy