The Font Poem I Wrote Live on Twitter Answering My Own Question

I want a Twilight font that drips blood and snaps in two when deleted.
I want a Romantic poetry font that has birds in it and damp chunks of moss.
I want an Art Deco font in which I will type in blue terra cotta tile.
I want a Lascaux Cave font comprised of berries, blood
and the sounds of wild animals outside the cave.
I want a Marcel Marceau font that says nothing and still makes the reader weep.
I want a Beethoven font that no one can hear and
a Chagall font that flies, painted red, above the page.
A Sartre font in which when I write I love you it doesn’t mean you are in a cage.
I want a zen font that vanishes in the wind.
I want a Camus font that carries no meaning.
I want a Malthus font with a bug in its mouth.
Design for me a Darwinian font. Let the words eat each other.
And then eat the page.
An Edith Piaf font that sings for the Resistance.
A Billie Holiday font that prints only in blue.
A Lao Tzu font. It is made of water, fire, some dirt and a soft breeze.
A Simone de Beauvoir font that men and women will forever read differently.
I want a Ghandi font that carries the salt from the ocean
so the people may have salt.
I want a Martin Luther King Jr. font. All the letters are different colors!
And a Vaclav Havel font that never makes any sense.
And still becomes the president of fonts.
A Marie Antoinette font! (the letters at first are decorative, then only partly there)
I want a Winnie-the-Pooh font that wanders off into the woods.
And I want a Van Gogh font that makes my words worth a million dollars
though they come from a poor place,
a small room with a chair and a broom
and a window filled with sun.
Who can make a Sartre font I can’t get out of?
A Kerouac font that breaks open a sentence like a firecracker?
A Picasso font that is cruel but people will love it anyway?
A Dali font that drips down the page?
A Duchamp font that looks like any other but it is by Duchamp.

A Riot in the Heart: My Six Months on Match.com

Yes, I did it.

I am a 42 year old single mother with a Masters degree in Poetry and I went on Match.com. I'm also a Taurus, which I add because they ask that on Match. I also add it because I am about as earth-bound and stubborn and unchangeable as they come. And I never thought I'd turn to the Machine for a date. But I did.

In hindsight, I did it well.
In hindsight, I ran it like a well-prepared high school science student.

But when I recall certain moments, I have to face to truth. There is no such thing as dating from a purely rational perspective. I got sucked into it. At times, the machine ran my life. At other times, the men it "brought to my door" got to me, for better and worse. Hundreds of them have written to me. I didn't always write back. Thousands were paraded before me above little boxes that let me check "yes," "no," "maybe." I sent them in droves into the no-pile, mostly because they weren't wearing shirts, or because they provided photos of their car or because they lived an hour away in Tennessee. I can recall the faces as I write these: all these men among the 7 million men on match.com. I can't quite bring myself to burst into a girl version of Julio Iglesias paean to all the girls he loved before. I didn't love them, any of them. I saw their pictures, and I imagined (it's kind of impossible not to) what kind of a person they were. If they said, "I'm looking for a good woman," I got an idea.

With some, I corresponded on and off for the entire time. They never asked me out. I never suggested they do so. We just occasionally wrote to one another. They were the sleepers. They were almost my friends.

I went out on more dates than I care to count.
By the end, I walked away from dates the way I walk out of movie theaters, sometimes moved or shaken, often wondering why.

I got enormous crushes on men who may or not have deserved it. I learned it was so much about me and my own projections, and I took a little break. I wanted to be thrown. I wanted to experience the "riot in the heart" that Gwyneth Paltrow's character speaks of in Shakespeare in Love. After a time, I realized that maybe the really nice turf salesman in _______ maybe doesn't really search for the same thing. He wants a girlfriend he can relate to. Not a literary dynamo, a woman who finished college. I learned I had enough imagination in me to turn a guy just struggling to make it through dinner before his shyness caused him to break into sweat appear as an answer to my prayers.

What my prayers were: a relationship where I could curl up with a man I love and feel his arms around me at the end of a day, a relationship where we could prepare a meal together and peacefully devour it, and then do the dishes, read some books, tuck my child into bed with a story before we ourselves turned in.

Something this quiet and safe and yet still with the riot in the heart. Was it possible to have both? Was it possible from a date or two to have any idea whether person #572 was the one for me?