Poem for Saturday, Soldiers of the Empire, C&O Canal

poem I wrote sitting across the table from you
By Kevin Varrone

if I had two nickels to rub together
I would rub them together

like a kid rubs sticks together
until friction made combustion

and they burned
a hole in my pocket

into which I would put my hand
and then my arm

and eventually my whole self--
I would fold myself

into the hole in my pocket and disappear
into the pocket of myself, or at least my pants

but before I did
like some ancient star

I'd grab your hand

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I had a busy Friday. Adam is looking into internships and needed to get his passport renewed, which has to be done in person for a child who's now over 16, so we went to the post office for that. Then, since Paul can't get around without a crutch, we went to Giant and did the family food shopping for next week. And then I came home to finish and post a review of "Soldiers of the Empire", one of the slashiest Klingon episodes ever. We had dinner with my parents -- Greek food, which was awesome -- after retrieving Adam from laser tag where he'd gone with a friend.

Since I have both kids home for a few more days and since I let them watch The Wolf of Wall Street, one of the most amoral films I've ever seen, I tried to make up for it by getting them to see 12 Years a Slave which is back in theaters nationwide this weekend. Like The Killing Fields, this is a movie I'm sure I'll never watch again -- it's extremely upsetting and the violence is very intimate, up close, not as in a war movie happening to lots of anonymous people but happening to characters we've been made to care about. The acting is phenomenal -- Chiwetel Ejiofor deserves every award this season.

Adam is going running along the canal tomorrow with the track team, so here are some photos from when we went to hike there in December: