I thought I would post something clever on Facebook for my birthday. Like some poignant or pithy phrase or text from some poem to talk about this experience of drowning in the Facebook auto-reminder birthday love.

Picked up Adrienne Rich and flipped it open and found:

Raise it up there and it will
loom, the gaunt original thing
gristle and membrane of your life

The page begins like that which I thought was a prescient start. The middle of the page is a bit more meandering off topic, then at the end we get back:

but you have to raise it up there, you
have a brutal thing to do.

But then I think, oh, that's too sad, that's not chipper or upbeat or thankful enough.

So I google Adrienne Rich birthday and a bunch of sites come up but then this odd Google site with "Birthday Poems" that some person "asked everyone to pick a poem they especially enjoy, print it or write it out somehow, and post it anywhere they would like, preferably outdoors!" It's a precious idea. Just precious. And nice somehow. And on there I find a load of poems including first this lovely fragment (or whole poem?) by Anne Carson:

"What is time made of?"
is a question that had
long exercised Geryon.
Everywhere he went he
asked people.
Time is an abstraction--
just a meaning that we
impose upon motion.

But then this ending to a poem by Julian T Brolaski felt better as a way of speaking to my emotions:

spun aground like a human candle
on the 4th of july

under the guise of cupid
thinking myself a very gay dawg indeed

I love this Birthday Poems site.  I think myself a very gay dawg indeed today. Xo.

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