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But I need new pants

It’s time to go buy pants again.

The weather is getting cold, 
here in mid-October,
in Pennsylvania.

My mom, Miss Nancy,
cannot find them in her drawers,
or closets,
or anywhere, 
though she only has 
drawers and a closet, anymore.

At times she’s sure they lost them
in the laundry,
or that someone came in and took them,
I guess desperate for some
lightly worn black pants,
but that same person
seems to have taken Miss Nancy’s cash
and Bingo money
which she keeps in a cute cat zippered bag,
nickels, dimes, quarters and 
poker chips for Bingo Royal,
where everyone puts in a quarter or chip
and the winner takes the pot. 

It seems a lot like gambling, to me,
but I want Miss Nancy to play,
to spend more time with people,
so I always say,
“You’ve got to play, Mom. 
You can win something for me,”
Walmart chocolate wafers or
Nutty Bars or
Snack size Reeses that seem to be 
the big ones, but never are.

But I can see what’s stolen
from you, Miss Nancy, 
Mom,
from your small room,
but you don’t seem to know it’s gone,
but I do,
searching drawers and closets 
trying to find that something
that makes you you.

This poem, “But I need new pants” is the poem this week featured on my Substack, “Sorry to Bother You”.

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These poems are a way to express the challenges and joys of caretaking for my mom, Miss Nancy.

I retired from teaching four years ago so that I could better help my mom out as she experiences memory loss. This a luxury, truly, and is not something most people can do. Not at 55 especially.

This poem is the third poem with which I am experimenting with reading out loud and recording myself. So far, I am excited about the videos I’ve produced. They are effective ways to share the poem’s nuances, to offer an interpretation to my readers.

For these three poems, I have written them knowing that I wanted to speak them. Starting in that space changes the nature of the way I write, getting me to think about the sound of the poem along with what it might feel like to read it.

In each of the poems I’ve had a moment of being lighthearted. In the first poem, it was a line where I wondered out loud why I had to pull down my pants for a cortisone shot when I was nine.

In the second poem, it was the aside “C’mon, really?” spoken to the reader after using the word “shuttlecock”.

And in this poem it happens a couple of times, one where I say that the person who is supposedly stealing my mom’s pants must be “desperate for some lightly worn black pants” and two where I say that the Reese’s are the snack size, not the large ones.

For right now, I think I need those moments. So much of reading a poem is being comfortable in your skin. Feeling like this is something one might actually say.

At least that is the way it is for me.

Something I noticed, that lends itself to this insight, is that I can read any poem if I use what I call a “funny voice”, where I feign an accent or change the pitch of my voice, or simply parody what I think a refined voice might sound like.

If you search “poetry read aloud” on YouTube, the easiest place to find it, you might note that a lot of the top videos are tagged #motivation and have a professional reader, often an actor, with a deep voice, reading the poem which is appearing overlayed on a video of some sort.

And they add music. Calming, peaceful music.

This poem read by Cillian Murphy is a great example of this and has over one million views.

Searching “spoken word poetry” offers videos of poetry readings with a microphone in front of an audience. Rudy Fransisco here is pretty great.

So that is more or less what I’m doing here–looking at my audience, reading my poem out loud without obviously reading my poem at the same time.

But I am reading the poem as I speak. I’ve set up my computer with a second monitor so that I can see the words as I speak. I practice quite a bit beforehand, thinking through the points of emphasis, where I might pause, where I should speak slower.

After several takes I find one I like and then I process the video in Adobe Premiere Pro, making it monochrome, trimming the start and end, adding fades and captions.

It is a slow process right now but one I want to get better at, and know that I will get better at as I do more. Better not just at the production details, but the craft of writing poems like these, of reading poems that I can’t figure out how to read.

I’m going to post one, the first one I did, on Instagram and see how it fares. I have no idea. I guess I doubt that poetry read this way is not, maybe, enough to pause your swiping and watch and also I doubt myself, that I have produced something that warrants a full minute and thirty second view.

What I recognize, though, as I do these, is that I crave an audience. An audience of one is probably enough, but an audience of one hundred is better, gives me a chance to reach the person who needs to hear my poem, to whom it might offer light and insight.

Here’s the poem formatted with Adobe Jenson Pro: