Somniloquies

Long overdue and horrendously supplied. Possibly a rough draft if it is hated.
For Rex.

---

When first you part those hued
lips, and slit your unknown eyes,
know that the penumbral day will
shift.
Soon, rockets will suspend before
you and glimmers shall dazzle
and sweet sounds will work their way
down your wind pipe.

The trees beyond the window
will bloom for you
today, tomorrow, every day,
for you make them your own
as soon as those tiny, windowed disks
blink and focus.

We are all caked in our bodies
-saturated-
but you, small one,
you will grow and stretch
and slowly find your fingers
and toes, and that,
in some ways, is the true
awakening: the discovery of syllables
and an enticement onto wobbly legs.

Dear, understand that
livers sometimes grow forth
from bodies,
and days pass like flippant memories,
and wars, they break out
like a plague across the country,
but it's all matter-of-fact.
Someday soon, it will all wash away
and dawn-circles will once again find your windowpane.

Somniloquies, dearest.
Warmth and surrender.
Let the ocean take your breath.

What the World Will Look Like When All the Mirrors Leave Us

This feels a little like an ode to orwell, but that comes later.
Thoughts? I feel like this needs to be read out loud, or screamed.
Not sure about the last little stanza; it's not complete, and I just scribbled it out in a fit. This isn't completed, I just need...opinions?
Not sure about the title either; it feels like cheating. I know what I want to say, I just can't.

---

Perhaps we will run our hands over our bare naked bodies to feel the bruises, take swaddling-cloth into our spines, and attempt to cloak the hatred sprouting leaves from our ventricles - oh, the hatred that makes us want to discard all our boots; the boots lashed up to our knees in the thickest leather, unbending. It is a decision we know ourselves isn’t right, but unsettling things make most of us queasy and short-of-breath and just a little road-sick, craving gravel. Some may ask what it is to feel hollow. It is this.

Perhaps we will acid-wash away with all the denim in our genes, white-washed and strung up like fence posts, or hung by the ankles so all the blood rushes to our skulls and we forget that we aren’t fish and can easily swim. Perhaps our bodies will be left only in shadows seen scurrying from board to bed, dresser to table, begging for vitamin C, clinging waxen and achy to picture frames and those last long-forgotten faces. The message machine will ask us, “are your memories unsettling or are you already dead?” And they won’t see, but the faces - oh the acrylic and plaster and over-coats we don so luxuriously - will be peeling themselves away in sickness. The bodies will be filing into the blockade, lacing their masks tighter, taking a staple gun and bullet-proofing their jaws against words. Already, we will have lost so much and not realized.

Imagine, the extraordinary words will go first. Echolalia and soft mouths and bleeding, guttural, MIMSIES IN THE TRASH! Stuffed down the garbage disposal with desolation and flaccid handfuls of boyish hair and anamnesis, clogging - clogging up everything, every little morsel of good and doublegood and doubleplusgood and anything anyone ever thought or wondered or dropped into a street grate and fought to find. The intercom, the people will scream. The intercom. And oceans will eat the city because they are tired of living famished lives lapping up sand and carrion, and they have children to feed as well, and we never leave. Outside is another one of those words that will bleach-spot and mustard-stain itself to inscrutability and leave us wondering where we used to go and why. Sunlight means next-to-nothing if darkness is just the lights turned off or eyes closed. What is left to see beneath the curtain-folds?

We will conceal ourselves perfectly, encased in alabaster cells and wallpaper, never again to use these machines called bodies, perhaps out of vengeance or mirth or simply the human condition.

Body-Snatched

Something I'm experimenting with, and may need some possible help with if any random french speaking person stumbles upon this. My grammar is not what it used to be (or ever was); most of this was written straight from my french-to-english dictionary. I just think it sounds prettier in french.

Corps-lié,
corps arraché,
corps.
Comme il vous plaira de l'appeler,
je ne peux pas disperser mes lèvres;
ne peut pas fermer mes yeux pour trouver ces lueurs
ils sont juste au bord de quelque chose d'autre.
Je veux les capturer il
- entre la tache de rousseur sur ma paupière
et le tourbillon de mon iris -
mais elles flottent, moins tangibles, de moi.

Je ne peux pas décaler ou reprendre
les mécaniciens;
ne peut pas soulever mes épaules
ou exposer mes jambes à au même oxygène
les arbres une fois inhalées
parce qu’il ya des vallées pleines de rivières pleines de poissons
pleins de cailloux dans ma façon,
inondations la mêlée de ma caisse nue
entre gauche et droite
et mes genoux quand je s'éloignais.

Je ressens le besoin de courir jusqu'à ce que les semelles de mes pieds sont endoloris
et ma gorge est congélateur brûlé;
de jeter derrière moi demain
à la recherche de quelque chose une fois, j'ai su faire,
mais je ne sais pas où pour exécuter
sauf jusqu'à.
Et je ne peux pas trouver les escaliers.



And...the english version, for all you native speakers.

Body-bound,
body-snatched,
body.
Whatever you want to call it,
I cannot disperse my lips;
cannot close my eyes to find those glimmers
they say are just on the brink of something else.
I want to capture them there
- between the freckle on my eyelid
and the swirl of my iris -
but they float, less than tangible, from me.

I cannot shift or resume
the mechanics;
cannot lift my shoulders
or expose my legs to the same oxygen
the trees once breathed
because there are valleys full of rivers full of fish
full of pebbles in my way,
flooding the ruckus of my bare body
between left and right
and my knees when I step away.

I feel the need to run until the soles of my feet are sore
and my throat is freezer-burned;
to cast tomorrow behind me
in search of something I once knew how to do,
but I don’t know where to run
except up.
And I can’t find the stairs.

221 B

Something slightly awkward with all the wording and references, but necessary nonetheless. For my sister, because she's obsessed. :) I think brunettes should be called chestnuts from now on.






and she is a chestnut, just like me;
roasting those pale thighs in the sun,
freckles blooming like tulips in a Rorschach,
dearest-Watson smiles sashaying from her
hand-over-laugh lips.
Backwards, bent-double,
together we are leaping over rooftops,
swimming like Dory: down, singing.
I am autumn's atonement,
and she is summer's smile;
a blatant refusal to slick sun-screen
on tan-hungry shoulders.

While the rains sleep,
she sighs and reverse-curls
to my side, covers thrown opposite
into the gap's thirsty, darkened maw:
open-less eyes fluttering in the partiality of
dreams - like a deformity of recollection;
an inability to accept reality as definable
by light.

I am autumn's atonement,
and she is summer's smile;
lifting up on elbows to decipher
the rache scratched inaudibly into
those noctilucent cloud-layers -
pinkish fingernails
tenaciously worn to the quick.
Sometimes, she hides in plain-sight,
hunting amongst the crowd for a
delight; alas, poor Yorick:
skull in the palm of her hand.
She is quaffing coffee
by the cup-full,
patches discarded as poisonously-sweet.

She is a chestnut, just like me,
as we balance on our bellies
watching the surf come in and
the moon rise all full and white
to fill in the ozone-holes leaking
star-matter.
She doodles "peace" on her arms,
and I feel the violin of thought
vibrate in my temples - supplanting.

The Sir was right:
to die is, truly, an art.

Echoing Mimsies

I desperately crave a glimpse of limping muse. :[   Just some leftovers to try to spring myself into creativity. meh. Mimsy as in the nonce word combining both miserable and flimsy; not as in the slang word vagina. :) pretty sure I misused it in the title, but whatever; it's a made-up word. I can misuse it if I want. Enjoy (grumble, grumble...math; grumble, grumble...French-and-Indian War)



Dear wanderlust,
I feel the inchoation
of ten-thousand tongues
sizzle-snapping against my ricocheting arms.
I wind up anti-clockwise,
bowing belly-up, head arching to
see what lays beyond the unseen
and the retrospective-easel of consequence.
15 particles of hair threaten to dangle past
the asymptote - delicate Proclamation Line - and
I think I may finally get it
Mr. Gray; {y does not exactly equal wonderful} and
{x is not always the decimation of tides.}
Sometimes the domain crosses the range,
and there are implications,
exclamations, and interpretations
of truth.
F(x) marks the spot where you will
not find me.

Crickets play hexachords on tinder-tender
hips, chirruping outside my shutter-slit eyes,
and sometimes in the baking heat of nightmare,
I beg them: slower, slower. Make the night
lag a little longer through
daybreak.
I would chime in, but it appears I am musty;
rat-a-tat-tatting on wood-paneling,
squeaking and chipping pieces of aperture
with each skippity-skip-rustle breath.
In the deep of morning, it is a bagpipe that
is resonating in my organs, flutes sounding;
on lazy days, the ivy-vines
can be seen metastasizing upon
the very skin I trapeze.
Does this mean I'm lonely?

Dear carpet-cluster,
I thrust the throttle forward
and fell down because I lost the acceleration
in my knees.
This moment is a horrid one
because I cannot seem to
collapse my backwards-elbows
like a tent, shins shunting into vinyl
bags for storage. Understand, I need every brittle pinion,
because I was born four teeth past telling and
four bones short of strong.
The wind can blast me cerebrum-down
or sunny-side-up and it won't matter,
because fingers have
twinkle-twisted me
asunder.
There isn't any room for
ruminations or ripened spiders
in my bedazzled sleeves.
I am walking icy-hot on coals
of disaster, and my ear-canals are telling me
westward
is where home has blown.

Glassy windows crack open enough for
air to circulate but not to my
delight, as manuscripts are
often unnumbered and torn from my hand
in a tornado of analytical-disintegration.

Between forest-fires and lackadaisical
leaves, I clickity-clack these words onto
the underbellies of trees, scrounging around for
leftovers to nuke and, hopefully,
send me whip-lashing back to originality,
because most of what I have seen
is plain ignorance and rusty inference.
I want something luscious and drenched
in liberties; tempestuous and total.
Does this mean I'm undeserving?

Bathroom Ideas

Wrote this while my friend and I were changing for P.E.
Keep in mind, I do not do her any justice.
--on a side note...I feel slightly useless. I never blog. I just post my shit and logout.--



Balanced on the sink,
there is an instinct:
the instinct of a wounded animal to hide.

Stockings furl gently over timidly
scarred kneecaps (too many nights pretending
not to pray), tuck-and-rolling around
those thighs; thighs with muscles that
run the full length
up,
like a seam: a seam in too-tight jeans.

She stands, tugging her skirt down,
always down in the back, front, right side,
left side because short is not enough fabric
to conceal all
the sensitive spots she thinks she
owns like rainbow wristbands.

There is a vagueness in her movements
that makes you wish for more.

Lonely eyes glimmer green in
passing; eye contact a thing of
fleeting beauty and expression:
always a half-smile hidden on
pavement-lined lips: bitten red.
A loneliness seeps into those steps --
shuffle-shuffle, shuffle-scuff
-- so shallow and innocent.
She does not look at herself in the mirror
unless to paint her face away,
pencil on eyelids.

There is a tenderness in the way
she braids her hair over one shoulder
because there is no one to
do it for her.

Clavicle, and it feels like your hands

nyuh, titles kill me, but here you go. there's a line...a line that I hate, but I can't improve it. :P
ah, the moments of waking.



I sleep
bare-backed and
unbuttoned, wintry thighs
kissed by the chill
of May, sheets coiled in
tea-leaf shapes. Pictures
flutter on the walls, an expenditure
of light, open
windows breathing thumbs
across the bed frame,
my right-sided clavicle.
Somewhere inside
the womb, my hips begin and
ankles end, an obtuse
slant of knees
knocking
on your bedroom
door.

I shift and
sigh.

My socks are what touch
the ground
first, legs over the
edge, shadows in the
leech-light. There comes
a transition
- shower hiss and
silent sway - in
which the wh-wh-whiring
of the ceiling fan
is the closest I come
to the sun.

we should be old by now

His soles are in the sidewalk
and I have trouble breathing such
tendencies; such inclinations to
dance, even as the violets collapse
beneath the incling
-incline
--fjeld rocket-launching into the
air: seclusion arisen.
God, his cigarettes are bread crumbs
on the ground; oh, the tendrils,
tendrils of pity
and worry
and sickness winding
beneath those shoulder blades, striding,
two jackets to keep the cold out.

I make both of us sick
and there's coffee in the cracks
in the sidewalk in the ground,
plants rising with baited breath
to scour the sky blueless.
Pollution tastes so pure
when all you see is destruction,
and oil spills are just rainbows
unless it's in your backyard and
there's a spark in your arthritic arm
and it drops.
Firelight is in our eyes tonight,
salted green, waving windless.
And oh all the smoke(?)
it makes me sick to be so near;
nearly there.

My thoughts are on the pages
on the table on the brink
of destruction because nothing
is beautiful unless there are
folds,
creases,
envelopes with letters
and kisses and tattered
flowers clinging to roots.
I cannot breathe the smell
of perennials and daffodils,
but there is amazement in
the way they tangle so
perfectly, utterly.
He mingles with the sounds of thunder,
butterflies underfoot going crunchcrunchcrunch:
a plague of broken wings and
oh, the last ones on the planet are yours.
Fold them tender.

His footprints are in the tremolos now;
all the borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe,
fingers snapping: vorpal sword,
piercing words, going snicker-snack in the
dimly falling filaments.
Such inconsistencies,
and I have trouble breathing;
all these molecules in the air.
Such fucking clean air
I have trouble asphyxiating.
Oh, Callooh! Callay!
Where is the pollution?

In capturing the rainbow,

April is over, and I'm sad to hear.



sometimes the sky slips
landward -- tiptoe tumbling, heels
over head, cartwheel-careening -- into
murky-bottom depths; forest-greens
and ravaged gravel roads; skimming
its knees on the elliptical infinities
of porch-swings, pavement, potholes.
{The oceans of decaying sea-flowers;
a threshold of nebulous dreams gone sour,
incarcerated and sunken [dismally
drowned] like aubades
and star-fish;
entranced, disillusioned, segment-twisted
beneath ripples,
rejuvenated cloud-tendrils aching for
elevation and annexation/alleviation.}

Upon conquering,
sometimes the sky trickles
earthward -- treetop stretching, splatter
bursting over the zenith, dawn
yawning pale-crimson and azul --
onto downward spiral puddles:
{oil spill whimpers glossing the
surface; tapering,
tainting, tantalizing, turulich,
turchini, tala: tautological.}
The sky sits on the platform;
the window-weeping edge;
balanced on the beat of
a drum,
toes testing the tepid waters
of ubiquity [lingering humanity.]
Softly, softly,
coughing, it sighs between
breaths and breadths and wing-widths
-- the seconds separating dappled eyelash
kisses upon cheeks -- as
April turns to May,
and daylight crescendos
into day.

In the Name of Flippancy

wrote this a week ago, after a certain occurence.
That one line, yes, that one...the funny guy said that.



This is how it starts.

Spring
and the butterflies don't know what to do
with all that nectar.
Springtime
and the mountains are in bloom
like they shouldn't be:
Edelweiss, Edelweiss
snowy apparitions in the velvet-vomitting
sky.
Spring
and the children are dancing,
chanting, howling to the blue moon
and the parochial stars;
"wrinkle, wrinkle [iron out the scars.]"

This is when it starts [to end.]

In sleep,
the people dream that atmosphere
is actually ocean and constellations are
schools of fish -- shimmering, sashaying,
shooting.
In wonder,
the world falls in to slumber
murky as a grotto: dismal dreams
and parting thunder.
In Tahoe,
there is winter, and there is July,
and somewhere in between
the flowers bloom, seed,
and die;
transitions are a risky business
- earth into sky, tautology into taciturn,
water into wine.

This is when it ends.

Winter and wind-turbines;
women and weeping;
whispers and watsonia.
Wrinkles in a water-scope.
Oh, what a lovely paradox.

As a Result, Because, Although, Despite

This was inspired, once again (in a small way) by the lovely Wislawa Szymborska who apparently died February 1st this year...and I didn't know. I am ashamed to call myself a lover of her poetry. -head hanging-
You will see references to Peter Pan and babies and William Blake's well-known poem "TIGER, tiger, burning bright." This is ironic, because I detest that poem for reasons only I know. Enjoy. (It's too frickin' looooong)




My closet-clutter clings to the walls bare-boned, knobble-kneed, coat-hangers hanging like a warning sign of something painful: nails in the ceiling, shoes dangling.
It clings --
-not as a marsupial [wide-eared Koala; jumping Joey] suckles the pocket; the way an opossum digs in close for the roller coaster ride, prehensile tails flailing for gravity.
-not as if it were a dirty, pigmented ovulation lashed to my soft v-shaped cocoon; cramped-up, anchored by detrimental blood flow: inconsistent coagulations without regulations.

No, my house lives in quixotic, quivery trepidation that one day soon I will push up from the ground hard, shove my pleasurables and necessities-of-living into one black garbage-bag, and stride into the lancing-glare, a coffee-to-go in hand. My shadow will be the only one who looks back, missing the warmth and comfort of darkness; of hiding in drawers until daybreak, being sewn tight [taut] back onto my heels with needle and thread, tested for durability. Out on the streets, existence is mandatory until day's end, and even then, I will wrap it around my shoulders to keep warm when vultures peck at my bones.

One by one, slowly by slower, objects and affectionates are losing their weight (in my heart) and evaporating out of sight and sound. [The house! The house! Floorboards burning bright! Books seeping through the foundations and guitars disappearing into dissonance.] The closet is closing with a clatter, boxes buried beneath baggy clothing, pencils seeping into the cracks, unsharpened. Memories are stuffed into the sleeves of envelopes and overcoats, grasped by the wall's children and then hidden away to keep for later, when the stupor breaks like the sweat of destruction and I weep for what I have deleted into dis-/anti-/non-existence.

Oh, the house! The bed is dipping lower than usual, groveling on its knees for me not to leave like the spring breeze; the desk drawers are locking like land, like lips, unwilling to relinquish their treasures to my nuclear [winter] fingers. Apparently fallout inflicts the greatest danger on papers; portfolios languishing in radio-activity. (Swab it down, swab it down! Burn it all to the ground!)

Piece by piece, article by particle, my pointless possessions and trifles are carted away in birthday-present surprises, going-away nonchalantes, and letters to the wasteland: home. I can't remember when, but somewhere between I-don't-know-what-I-want-to-be-when-I-grow-up and I-can't-remember-who-I-was-when-I-was-younger, I let life pick-pocket me of my understanding of worth, and gave up on things. If a heavy backpack to drag your feet and a roof to smother you is what constitutes a life - a culmination of things through countless years of want - then I will gladly shrug it from my shoulders and sell it for a shadow that doesn't leave me [in the dark.]

They explained the warning signs in psychology class [precursors to something painful]: nooses in the ceiling, bodies dangling. The shunting-around of belongings is apparently an obvious/major indicator; the dissolution of everything that chains ties you to the earth.

House! Oh, house! Windows burning bright! I do not wish to end my life! For sure, sometimes I wish to leave it -- some days I pack a bag just to feel the tingle in my heels; snap closed my guitar-case just to test the weight of music on my arms, to see how far I could carry it in a moment of dubious need.

Oh closet! Give up my bits and bobbins! Hiding them will not keep me from waking and departing if I so desperately wish to. Things can be replaced, left behind, locked in a safe to keep them sheltered from "safety." If you wish to restrain me - prevent me - then by all means, closet, hang my shoes up high and drown my keepsakes in the monotonously-mundane, but nothing will ever truly stop me.

I have a wandering soul sole. Twist and trample my neck and I will stand, clawing my way up; steal my socks and I will trudge along, wincing all the way; misplace my scribbles and attempts at storytelling and I will simply rewrite, bleeding anew.

Oh closet that clings to such clutterous-memories! I may be a foal; just born, wet and soft-boned. But I will flop-flip-trip-stumble my legs under me. I will flee from what tantalizes and tries to break me.

Non Omnis Moriar

Who the hell is John?! I don't even know a John!



John, I fear I have forgotten how to
lift myself over the rail,
or possibly I am losing
the ocean inside my ear canal.


Last night, as the fever gathered,
I wrapped myself in Leaves of Grass
- closed myself deep into the cracks
to avoid the feeling -
and watched Venus revolving
around drifting meteors.
[Oh, Whitman, what is the grass?
A scented gift of so many uttering tongues?
Perhaps the hieroglyphic of humanity and the morrow;
the uncut, green bandage of graves?]
Seedless, I sway, and
it makes me feel so hopeless
ly-hopeful, so cut off and complacent, that
I take enjoyment from watching rockets
blast holes in the sun.
Nothing ever lasts long, anyway.

Achromatic, I paint out the pain.
I want to write short things - concise, easy things -
but I don't seem capable.
I find inspiration in too many
things at once, and I am so frustrated with
my quavering eyes [causing ripples that eradicate the world.]
I just want to
scribble out plotless, unintelligent things without
necessity - curled in the cove,
in the dark,
in the gate between hemispheres:
delving.

Windless, I stay shoulder to
shoulder, unbowing, misleading.
I'm tired - sick to death - of people lip-reading the
rough drafts I will never send;
opening empty envelopes with crumbling
flower-stems, and seeking
symbolism. There is nothing there!

Everybody wants to know when/why I am.
I'm a writer so I must be a genre, a novel,
a period placed just out of touch.
But I am not Edwin Denby or Szymborska
or Whitman. I am not a notebook filled
with "existentialist" poetry; a pocket book of
verse, scarred by annotations.
If I remember correctly,
I am me - a fucking human being -
not a copy.
At least, that's how I used to be.

Heedless, I sway with leaves in hand.
{Wislawa, do your people's poets write in mittens?
La Pologne? Isn't it terribly cold there?}
Needlessly, I break off a strand, breathe
it in, not bothering to read into it.
[What is the grass, Mr. Whitman?
Is it a song of myself, or of
yourself? Or is it everyone everywhere
all at once?]


John, I fear I have lost
the ocean inside the shell,
or possibly I am forgetting how to
lift myself over the rail [and fall.]

Someone Told Me, Long Ago

Place your hands against the window,
lips too, and breathe -
       open the floodgates, insufflate, respire;
       chest expanding like a hot-air balloon, lifting
       you off the ground, head spinning.
Perhaps you will feel the water-vapor condensing
and see the chill dewing-up
before you see it clouding the surface;
before you feel it ice-cold against your cheek
sending creeping-vines up your body:
      Winter's dainty fingers. Jack's frosty paintings:
      trembling letters and shivering words dripping into
      disappearance, cold as liquid nitrogen.
For a moment, allow yourself to feel alive
and here, because it is fleeting. Hold on until there's
nothing left but breathlessness.
Can you feel its pane?
      -Cool as the underside of a pillow,
      insubstantial as early-morning ideas:
      the ghosts of thoughts, unprotected, unedited.
Lay your head back, go on,
and just let your body be involuntary for a while.

Kiss the glass, and wonder:
does the window keep us in,
or the world out?

John

This....is fiction and nonfiction.
{I'm so sick of people always pitying those with problems, like handicaps; yes, empathy and compassion are fine, they're necessary and wanted. But, honestly, in the end, everyone just wants it to be fair; everyone wants a chance to do something themselves. Fighting and losing makes us fight.}


I raced a crippled boy today,
out in the sun,
bet him ten green bottle-caps his legs
weren't dead, had simply forgotten the thrill
of flight: the fight.
And out in hotter-than-hell heat,
he dumped his safety brakes
and I dumped my sneakers,
and together we hit the pavement running;
hindered by wheelchairs and blistering feet.

For thirty-seven seconds we were equals;
two people strung up in a too-loose noose of hope,
released by an opportunity.
It was three blocks of screaming, screeching,
agonized agony for both of us,
and I'm sure my feet will never feel again;
just like his legs, suspended before him.

The whole neighborhood came out to watch,
lawn chairs and lemonade and all,
and I flat-out ignored them.
Their anger washed over me,
but I simply said "Your legs aren't dead, John. Nothing is ever truly dead,
just sleeping -- soundlessly."
All that disbelieving-rage beaded up like sweat
and erupted through the crowd,
but we ran
and ran, laughing and wincing the whole way.

I crossed the finish line first: three feet ahead,
and they all yelled and booed,
but that crippled boy? He just rolled up and beamed.
"Maybe next time," he said, smiling.

Maybe next time.


{John, I happen to agree.}

600968888

I ask you: Can you combobulate, or is it always the anti-?



It could have happened.
Nearby. Farby?
Under that red umbrella that
bled onto your shoulders in the rain
[oh, what a trifle -- said in chagrin.]
Dear, it matters not here or
between the pages of that unread novel
under your laundry pile, underfoot,
tainted with mustard stains and lip-gloss (darling,
I don't wear any, but I could if you want me to.
Do you prefer strawberry kisses to peppermint?)
It matters not how strait the gate…
Ten o'clock, 17 seconds before the let down
- shut down - face down -- hiding, lying:
lies that articulate the truth.

It could have happened.
Should've, would've,
as you bunny-ear tied those tennis shoes;
tongue-tied [nonono, Darren, not with me.
Mouth wash is best used in excess,
because, oh boy, we need to extinguish that
cesspool of a salivary-gland.]
It matters not.
~They Might Be Giants:
(a) view with a grain of sand.
It will not be defined,
and, therefore,
is and shall not.

Dear, am I cynical enough,
or need I be more confounding - conniving - confusing?
Connoisseur of conjuncture.
I am anagrammically correct - aim; incorrectly anagrammed -
and full of the laughters to be: giggles, chuckles, chortles;
addled, adenoidal, adherent to sound.
(Un-discombobulate that, silly boy.)
Do not fear, dear.
It's a lot harder than it looks to ad-lib like this;
cynicisms sashaying off my lips. Add the fact that
math is my anti-specialty, and we have ourselves
a humdrum conundrum -- say that 5 times fast.
I'd say you should stick it in your pipe and smoke it,
but, together, we already have too many bad habits.
So stick it in your bum-freezer [oh, don't look at me like
that, darlin', it's a coat.]

The point is that it could have happened.
And it did, but also didn't.
The point is that there is none and also are,
and my fingers know the stakes of such a high wager;
talking nonsense to total strangers, anagrams be damned.
No one hears the numbers any more, darlin',
and that's why the white man always wins the war:
no one challenges the belonging!
Assimilation's the word [bird]:
integration and segregation come hand-in-hand,
though you can't let them drink from the same water fountain.
Trust me, it's already happened and, therefore,
will never and will again.
Uh-oh! Eustace, we have a problem; not a Hubble,
but a whole lot o' rubble.
Fuck! I need a T-chart, pronto.

Don't look at me like that, darlin'.
It all makes sense if you know the definition,
and if you know,
you'll know there is no definition.
70 times over - over-used - used-to-flavor:
limits - limitations - limitlessness.
A chicken knows the walls of its shell
like a beggar knows its cell
[food and sleep are the best bargaining chips:
don't forget the candlesticks, Valjean.]
"If you're hiding in the dark, no one's gonna find ya,"
and it definitely could have happened
nearby and farby.
I'd tell you, but I'd have to kill you.
If I spoke then it would be words,
and words are defining as hell,
and definitions mean limitations,
and, oh boy, this has no limits:
like evil.

I use numbers instead of words
because the computer understands me
and I'm inebriated by insanity.
Barack and Mr. Mitten - bar fights - barometers -
bar codes: numbersnumbersnumbers in our arms
because names are useless and limitless things limited.
Aim at 600968888 -- that's me. What's your dehumanization,
and has it happened yet?

If you have to ask,
you will never know.

on breaking your neck.

I hurt myself, but now I'm [mostly] better. I can get up now, which is nice, since lying in bed and staring at the ceiling is NOT very much fun, let me tell you. I attempted to write this while lying down, but writing it very difficult when you can't sit up or raise your arms over your head, so, mostly, I just repeated it over and over in my head to memorize it for later. It didn't work. I forgot most of it. So here's my other version.

Don't worry. I like to make things seem much worse than they are. I'm a wimp like that. But, really, it's a scary thing not being able to move. You don't realize how much you rely upon movement to live until...you can't. I thought I was paralyzed.



I rolled over
and snapped:
clean,
like a candy-cane.
--Right in the crook;
in that tender,
delicate
place,
held together [dangling uselessly]
by thin strips of
plastic.

If I was
plastic,
I would not break
so easily.
I would crinkle and
crease: fold.
Oh, please believe me:
I am not so
    weak;
vulnerable and
sweet
as they say.

I woke up
as my body
fell asleep down:
sleepily.
Like a tulip
against the elements,
I forgot to close
up
and zip shut
my faults [lips, legs,
eyes plastered with
moon-shine.]
I caught too much
water in the spa
ces between blinks,
and the rain?
It broke me.

My head lays[broken]
demented,
catawampus,
catatonic,
and my body is somewhere
down
there [at least, I hope so]:
petrified; plastic limbs
boneless, joint-less.
But I can wiggle my toes.
Oh god,
I can wiggle my toes,
and believe me,
     that means I'm alive.


I may be alive,
but that soft,
tender
place at the
base
of my skull
cracked
[like the tip of
my last fucking reed]
and now all I can do
is try not to
black-
out,
because my shoulders
feel much too
fragile
to support
gravity
and my head is
lulling about
unsustainably.


I don't know
how to feel more
useless.

Appoggiatura

I wrote the first sentence about a month ago, while sitting in the car at the beach. Finally got around to finishing it. Hmm...I'm moderately pleased. At least I finally found a use for my immense musical vocabulary.



Writing -
not a creation
but a translation.
Emotions made tangible -- legitimized.
Music manipulated into syllables; staff and key signatures
stretched in line breaks and semicolons; melodies thrumming
like fingers on a typewriter: 16th note runs, breath ^, marks,
and tri-pl-et quarters.


Whisper sharps and flats [accidentals] like poetic-license; throw pens down
in anger and slash out entire phrases: repeat(s). Return to the beginning and twist
the laws, because limitations were made to be tested.
Speak l e g a t o s
and staccatos through double-reed lips [slender, smooth sentences curling around
mouthpieces, churning beneath your fingers, convoluting and spiraling into fragments.
Choppy bits of fever.]
The spaces between ledger lines are all that's needed to
fill the silence between enharmonic screams;
a sigh of air; a rich naissance of sound [oaken]:
bass clef, bold; baritone, bisbigliando.


As a writer,
you are a mere support; a composer.
In essence [at heart] a rhythmic bass-line
tying the music together, omniscient, overseeing:
10 measures and the sounds take over - take flight -
take their own road, and all that's left to do is keep up.
You are an appoggiatura:
a flick of the fingers, an eighth-note abbreviated;
graceful, then gone.
But your writing is a symphony;
a sonata, lulling late at night;
sometimes just a melodic line [2 measures, 8 notes]
that makes me shiver like all those tremolos dotting my waist.


Part your aperture lips against mine;
Bb fingers brushing my cheek: two-fingered caesura.
Take me to the Coda and let's diminish to a niente.
Make me forget I'm out of tune.

Encephalo-

Choose your ending, go ahead. Perhaps -clastic, or maybe -pathy?
Some days are bad days, and sometimes people can't seem to accept that I speak through my writing;
that communication has always been slightly difficult for me anyways; and sometimes even simply putting things into words is difficult enough to land me flat on my back.



Shadows cascade through the open window;
steely fingers of moonlight slipping across the floor,
reaching under furniture and stealing scraps
of daylight leftover from noon.
Dust covers everything like filter paper,
smelling stagnant and viscously-thick; hanging
like cobwebs in the air: a colloid suspended in water.
Every couple minutes,
the roof makes a noise like rain,
and the clouds snap apart like Lincoln-Logs.

I sit in bed, the blankets furled around me
like stalwart arms, and try to hold it all in.
Light is beckoning outside my door
and, somewhere, a cat is scratching and yowling
to be let in from the cold,
but I can't uncurl. I am fetal again, my limbs boneless
and malleable, plastered to this body that only has a heart
(that's it.)
Drums are beating in my ears still; the sound of trumpet fanfares
cracking like puberty snaps vocal-c(h)ords, and trombones;
oh, those trombones sliding: all those glissandi;
music like inner tubes filling [water dripping onto pudding.]

Ghosts are rattling the closet doors now,
but I'm too apathetic to be afraid.
All I can feel is the yoop;
the hiss and strangle: gurgle, gasp
of sobbing [your lungs leaking.]
My mind is breaking because all these sentences
need to be written so they can leave. So I can bury them
in a mass grave like all those oh-so-terrible/horrible/horrendous casualties;
so I can forget about all these "brilliant" things I have to say
because they just can't be put into words, okay? There are some things
not even you could say.

And the mo(u)rning train trundles by,
making the silverware tremble in its drawer;
the weather worsening like a forte-piano -- sudden crescendo;
like a hurricane opening its eye to survey the damage and grinning
[mouth full of houses.]
Snow flurries beg me to dance,
but I can't uncurl. I am fetal again, living on a lifeline
of graphite and will (oh-so-badly malnourished)
and I have to hold it all in.
I stare at the planes of my hands and know:
oh dear, I have to contain this.

Oh god, I can't contain this.

Nameless Thing

Something similar (but not really) to Day In and Day Out. Written on the same napkin.
I'm not sure I like how this turned out, but considering that it started out as a run-on sentence that took up two whole pages, I'd say it's an improvement, at least.


I've sat at this café so long that the waitress is starting to wonder
who this strange person is at table six who puts creamer in her
coffee and then forgets to stir it every time.
[She knows when it's time for a refill because that last sip
comes with a wince and a snarking-back of cold coffee-grinds.]
The cook's been out twice to catch a glimpse of this mysterious customer
who only orders condiments and utensils, and writes
synonyms for "synonym" in the window haze,
watching the I's cry.

I lean my chin in my hand and watch the world;
listen to the click of heels on linoleum,
the slamming shut of windows and descending-swish of blinds.
It's all just so mundane.
I wish to hear the music again; the metaphors and anecdotes:
babble translating to verse.

The man at the table next to me knits;
the muscles in his arms throbbing to the drone and jumble
of dishwashers and air-conditioners.
Music notes lay buried in his fingertips,
inked into his flesh, most likely, during a bout of alcoholism.
I wonder if he even knows what they mean,
or if he simply wrote FACE on his knuckles for the irony.

A family sits at the middle booth, and I can tell by the body language
that the husband is having an affair (probably with a pretty, young blonde)
and the wife knows but will never say, and the oldest daughter is anorexic
but only the carrot sticks know (and they're slowly being consumed: boiled and tasteless).
And the little boy? He's rambling about skipping-stones and redwood trees this big around,
and sea lion caves without end - full of crab shells -
but no one's listening and it makes me so sad
watching, because they are one child short and nobody notices.

"There is a child missing!" I want to scream. A little girl: stolen by sneaker-waves.
But I just sit there, swirling Tabasco around in its bottle,
and pretend that I can't notice that hole in the fabric:
a little girl missing, buried in a dark lonely hole,
remembered only by the flowers rotting next to her tombstone
because pictures of Easter-egg hunts and Fourth of Julys are just too painful
and moving on is so much easier than lingering.

My hands are shaking and the waitress is wondering
if she should call Officer Bailey or cut off my coffee,
and the rain outside is making all of us wish we could curl up
in a gulley somewhere and swim down the hillside
because it's all just so mundane.
I'm organizing the jams and jellies by the shape of the container
and the number of unpronounceable ingredients,
and trying not to see (with insight) that there are holes in everything.

But everyone can see it:
the empty feeling in the mother's womb (longing to cradle that baby until it's safe again),
the father's vacant arms (wishing for one more chance: one more opportunity to
fly that toddler under the covers, tuck her in tight),
the sister's shrinking stomach (wanting to be less than substance, smaller even
than that sister sleeping in the earth, locket in her hand.)
What's saddest, is that the little boy is too young.
He won't sense what's missing until later,
when home videos are suddenly stopped-short or fast-forwarded,
and postcards resurface, signed by one too many children.
And then it will be too late; the ground will have forgotten the
fingers of the shovel, and moss will sleep in the hollows of her name.

"There is something missing", I want to whisper as I watch the world,
but no one's listening and it's really just too mundane.
No one else sees the fractal spiraling like a double helix: reeling, unwinding;
the holes in the fabric of reality:
tiny perforations where children should be (laughs and smiles missing
like baby-teeth) making the sky tremble with night;
pin-pricks with anti-gravity leaking through
like the negatives of stars.

In a Trice

Trice means "very quickly" or "in a moment". Does that mean that my title is really: "In a In a Moment"? Because that's just...tautological.
I read the dictionary on Monday when I was supposed to be working on my State Writing Test.
I wrote this in Chemistry today when everyone else was taking a test but I wasn't because I'm not that smart. :)  I seem to have become very philosophical recently.


Moments-
time: tick-tock, tick-tock;
windscreen wipers flick-click, flick-clicking
to the tempo of bouncing feet;
water-droplets running off sunroofs - seconds
lost, forsaken, sold for pennies and left on
street corners for bums and duffers to pluck
like dandelions. Scattered like wishes in a well;
one thousand tiny prayers (lips kissing copper, words whispered:
"please…just please") left to drown
and tarnish like so many other symbols of hope
- the Lady Liberty cries: long, dark rust-streams permeating
because of all of this hatred and nobody caring.
What about the people with nothing?!

Moments-
time: wasted because oh, you're only seventeen.
What if I told you
you die at eighteen? Would life suddenly seem worthwhile?
You'd most likely sell it; barter off a year
for one last fling, one final hoo-ha before the inevitable end.
Well listen to the drumbeats, little man! They're not chasing;
they're following. Time doesn't ebb and flow
like the tides; it is uncontrollable. It is you that
fades in and out of existence, one foot poised on the doorstep.
Sit still, stay, for god's sake: listen!
Pause, and watch as life passes you by,
because it will be more beautiful in that instant (a single, tangible moment)
than anything you have ever seen before.
Why is life so much more precious when
it is ending?

Word of Mouth

I wrote this at two in the morning at my sister's house. Yeah. :D


That boy had a face like a bar fight;
purple and blue fist-depressions in his cheekbones,
slits in his lips like lines in a tree;
cuts like notches in a stick:
counting down time left, time wasted,
and all the times he's woken up with a murderous headache.
There's something sticky on his chin [probably gin]
where a beard should be,
but he's much too young, much too innocent
to have one,
even though he spends his nights "out-on-the-town",
pretending he's tough and mysterious and handsome,
buying lap dances with money reserved for booze.
You can see him begging on the street for a sip of something [anything]
at the first break of twilight,
groveling in front of complete strangers, face full of blood and mud,
because, oh look, his hands are quaking with seismic activity
and he's sinking like the Titanic (head-first into the gutter.)
Ain't withdrawal a bitch?

Once upon a time,
he started this as a way of searching,
though he forgot what it was he was looking for
after that first morning he woke up
with his chin on the toilet and drool dangling:
green and smelling of prostitute.
Now he just goes for the familiarity;
the numbing of everything as the world undulates
like a roller coaster falling off its tracks,
the flash-flicker of feeling deep in his loins
as a girl winks from across the room.
"Hey, hooooooney. Fancy meetin' you here."
There's a bruise above his left eye,
two permanent dark circles:
a five-fingered tattoo of shame.
Rejection painted black-and-blue across his cheek.

He watches the universe flit past without him, as he sits:
perched on his stool in the corner, hunkered down over
his last cup of scotch. If you kissed him, he would taste like bitterness, and
rancid mouthwash, and hogwash. When he's hammered, he's on the ground, girl,
so you better hail a cab, or just leave him;
he won't remember you anyways.

A shadow passes over his eyes sometimes,
when he's halfway through his third drink
and the buzz of conversation is morphing to
the slow purl of a river;
faces rippling pale and blue.
He's washed up and singing his little chantey,
an arm around Buttercup or perhaps Daisy,
and he catches a glimpse of his face
all bloodied and notched like a burn-victim.

In the reflection of a shot glass,
he watches his life flee from him
like car headlights flitting over a window:
blink, and you just might catch a glimmer
behind your eyelashes.

Think About It.

I'm being ruthless with my writing again;
slitting open lines like tissues and transplanting
them onto paper plates,
cradling nouns gingerly in my palm
as if they were someone's heart or kidneys
(hot and still [dimly] pumping).
I'm a writer, not a surgeon:
I may not be able to clear ventricles and
remove tumors,
but I can preserve the people I love in the pages
of my notebook, press words like decaying flowers between
my palms.
I may not be a surgeon, but I can save people.

They called me a pretentious bitch;
a nerd without even the common courteously to
wear glasses (so I can at least look intelligent.)
Apparently, formulating an atypical lexicon and
utilizing a dictionary makes you a freak.
They hate that I know the difference between breath and breathe
off the top of my head (one is a verb and the other is a noun, idiots.)

I'm sitting in a lawn chair watching the rain pour
beyond the edge of my shelter;
drawing a shivering hand through my hair
and breathing out a hot breath of steam into the air.
With my sticky red pen, I make another incision in the paper;
angrily crossing out whole sections, and scribbling out adjectives,
because no one nowadays wants to read all those extra words
that I love so dearly.
I am only a writer after all.

I'm just a freakish little girl who once
read the dictionary cover-to-cover,
and speaks like an english teacher: spinning similes
around her pinkie finger.
I'm just a pretentious bitch
who says things like "the banality of evil"
and "the timbre of your instrument is aesthetically-pleasing";
who straddles the line between
reality and insanity like a funambulist,
because sometimes she forgets how to spell judgement (judgment),
but can easily define hypertrophy cardiomyopathy
because she wrote a fucking poem about it.
I am just a writer
who uses manifold words to convey
acute things.
I write with obscure references
and carry a thesaurus in my back pocket,
but I've realized that I just don't care.

I'm hanging upside down from my roof
to get a different perspective on the ground
and all the cerebrospinal fluid is rushing to my head;
tomorrow I will teach myself to write with my right hand
so I can be ambidextrous (and write twice as fast),
and I don't care if that's weird.
It's who I am,
and I don't care about your floccinaucinihilipilification
(yes, I can use that in a sentence and in relation to you),
because you consider words to be weightless
in a world where language is the focal point of
existence.

everything is under control

Disclaimer: please ignore all bad-language, references to drinking and/or smoking, and any other such unfavorable content. I could/would edit it, but I'm seriously so tired right now. I really need REM sleep tonight, so here it is raw and real. It's all about being alive, bros. Go with the flow.
--I do not and never will smoke cigarettes. My mind was going a mile a minute, so I went with it, and this is what came out of it. Deal with it. The only true part of this is probably the thing about the socks (my guitar picks love them)...and the banana-seat, because, come on, those things were the bomb.

4/9/12


He makes me want to smoke clove cigarettes
[daintily], with one pinky sticking out,
like I'm drinking tea out of a cup and saucer
{and maybe I am.}
You can't drink a cappuccino
without something sweet,
and, oh man, do I crave that sweetness;
a potent last sip of chai (the final tart swallow)
when all the extract is at the bottom.
It reminds me of licorice wrapped in printer paper;
of chain-smoking words;
of the times when I was innocent and curious
and didn't know that even simply breathing could kill you.
Every second, we move closer to our eventual demise, they tell
me with gleeful [masochistic] eyes;
every minute, 108 people die.
Somehow, this fails to make me feel better.

I'm going stir-crazy
waiting for some light to appear.
Nothing romantic,
just enough to write by;
to exist by.
All I need is something that leaves a mark,
and nothing else;
by now, I'm used to messy chirography [misspelled because
where the fuck is my dictionary?] and use-
less line bre
aks that mean
absolutely nothing in the great scheme of things
(except that I can't see worth a damn
by flashlight…light?)

In the darkness,
I fumble for my guitar
and try to tune it by ear, though it matters not.
A [sharp] G string makes me remember the
feel of buttons pushing through holes
and the smell of laundry detergent.
Once, I washed all of our clothing together,
and now all my jeans pockets are the
color of his favorite socks
(rainbow, without polka dots.)
All my guitar picks hid when he left; buried
themselves deep in his socks, snuggly warm,
and I secretly hope that they impaled him.

I think I got addicted to the idea of
addiction, and now I have to spike my caffeine
with nicotine just to feel alive and jittery and dangerous.
Inhalations burn like acid and anecdotes;
tar bubbling, blooming in my lungs,
seeping up my esophagus as I cough and
hack up earl gray [laced with bourbon] into the shower.
At least I have an excuse now to forget
I can't drive;
to ponder
the purpose of a poem (if it has one)
out in the early morning haze, wearing only
a night gown and my skin;
to believe against all doubt that candles
are flickering in the walls, when it is just
my eyelids drooping [closed.]
A reason to be as ridiculous as possible,
because they already think I'm crazy or insane
(I never do anything the right way.)

He makes me want to tear my shirt
from my torso, and bare my collarbones to the harsh
light; grip them like I'm going along for a ride on his
handlebars again, like when we were twelve and having
a banana-seat meant you were king of the jungle-jim.
But it's all just a ruse -- a lie:
together, we've hit the iron railing and are jolting forward,
but it is only me, (un)balanced precariously
as his human shield, that crashes into the brick wall
and leaves a water mark on the concrete.

I want to chain smoke with him, out behind the east locker rooms
[warily], with one hand on my backbone
(the only thing structurally-sound I trust now),
but I'm not even sure what that means, and, really,
my alveoli are virgins; if they tasted tobacco
it would likely kill them right then and there.

He makes me want to run
full-tilt, flat-out: sprint,
so the air rushing in will be oh-so-much-more
precious than the air rushing out.
I want to smoke a damn cigarette
so I know what it feels like to taste fate
and fuck with death.

So I can lie [awake],
wondering why I only cry with the lights on;
why I only like him when I'm alone.

The Truth Is Quite Pointless

Last night, I suffered a mental explosion.

I drank ten times too much coffee (about 5-6 cups, which actually isn't much considering how much I USUALLY drink at my dad's house on weekends i.e. 2 pots per day, but apparently it was too much for yesterday) and then I spent the entirety of my sleepy-time:
staring into space, talking to myself in english, french, and spanish, singing to myself, laughing hysterically, having caffeine-induced/too-much-energy-concentrated-in-one-body-with-no-way-to-expell-it-peacefully-at-3-in-the-morning seizures, talking to my imaginary imaginary-friends (yeah, I pretend to have pretend friends because it makes me feel like I have friends), humming, pondering the presidential candidacy, listening to the rain (it wasn't raining apparently), and mostly writing poetry that I thought would change the world with it's brilliancy and feeling empathy for question marks (they're just exclamation marks with bad backs, guys.)

With my madre sleeping down the hall, I couldn't turn my light because every time I tried to write something, she'd yell at me to turn it off because she thought I'd had it on ALL NIGHT, when in reality I had JUST TURNED IT ON, but whatever. So I couldn't turn my light on, but every time I laid down, this "amazing" "inspirational" "brilliantly insightful" poem would pop into my head, and I just HAD to write it, otherwise I'd forget.

So, first, I tried to just write it in the dark...in the PITCH dark...with a blunt wooden pencil I found under my bed...in a little itty-pitty notebook that is impossible to write in on a good day....at 2-3 in the morning. Yeah, you know that thing you do when you can't see your writing, so you just keep writing words on top of words on top of words...I did that. Then I tried to beat the system by leaving extra-big spaces between words, but then I had to use 10x the amount of baby-pages, and my handwriting was indecipherable anyways.

So, next, I decided to be a JENIUS, and sneaky-sneak into the living room where I had recently placed my little fake candles on the coffee table for when we had a power-outage. Then I sneaky-sneaked back in to my room, turned them on, and lined them up along the edge of my notebook so I could write by "candle" light. The only problem with this was that the fake candles also fake flicker, so by 5 o'clock, my eyes were seeing colors and everything was hazy.

And so, I began to scribble furiously throughout the night, wide awake, crazy with craziness, and overjoyed because "oh man, in the morning when I wake up this is going to be the best thing anyone has ever written and it's going to change lives and make everyone love me and I'm gonna be the coolest person and I'm just so insightful and awesome" and then, when I got up in the morning and reread it...well...you'll see.

Here is the first of 7-8 poems I started/wrote last night. Most of them have to do with sleeping, coffee, and manipulating language in disgusting ways. Sorry. my palette is dwindling.


Fifteen pages and still:
nothing.
I tried to find a synonym
for writer's block,
but apparently my pencil is
out of batteries
and so is my brain.

Words are churning out
ten definitions per second
and I'm so tired
I fell asleep with my head
at the wrong end of the bed,
but every time I close my eyes
there it is:
wordsverbswords.
I play word dissociation
like other people count sheep:
   flippers, flappers, flabbergast,
   gastric-bypass.
Nonchalance never did much for me,
and I think I may need medication for this
because I'm writing on the floors now
and it's carpet
(it won't last.)

It's 2:37 and I've decided
that maybe it's too late for me,
and I'm reduced to this fate
of sifting through underwear drawers
and bundling letters together with
elastic bands.

Seven hours and four pencils,
and what do I have to show
for myself?
Sixteen pages of:
nothing.
156 wasted words.
And it's not because I
can't write, no.
I'm not blocked
or verbally incapacitated.
I just have nothing at all to say;
no reason to type this out like
a pretty little manuscript;
no purpose whatsoever for my writing,
and that's probably a crime
punishable by death
in several countries,
but it's true: I don't know
what the hell I'm doing right now.

I put periods where. I want to, and

dump paragraphs right smack in the middle,
because they're tired of always
being at the beginning and the end.
[The

y
really
are

.]

And it makes me cry sometimes,
because no one cares
whether mIddLe leTtErs want to be
caPitAliZed.
And, let me tell yOu;
they DO.
      I wish we could just forgets
      grammar and structures,
      and made the language happy
      for once.


Seventeen pages and how many brain cells?
And I have absolutely
nothing at all to say:
nothing.

Day In and Day Out

This one...I don't even know what happened. Somehow I got from coffee to the 2011 Japanese earthquake, and back. Wrote this on a napkin...part one of possibly more similar ones, since this was concocted from only the first line.
Tell me how you are,
and if this makes any sense at all.
[I'm rather proud of it!]



4/6/12

I'm sitting in a café
drinking coffee like it's whiskey
and learning Japanese from the tourists
behind me.
Their accents remind me of a bowl of soy noodles:
long, thin, delicate syllables
rolling into each other;
just onelongstringofsound.
I lean back and listen,
and something in me wants to laugh
at those terracing moras [ante-penultimate, phonetic]
until I decipher the words:

    meltdowns, and Richter scales, and empty boots floating to western shores.
      It's amazing how beautiful death can be when spoken in different tongues;
      how magnificent magnitudes of destruction become
      when wrapped up in seaweed casings of Kanji and Katakana.

As I sit and stare out the window
at the pounding rain,
the world seems to unfurl
like a fortune.
All the power-lines buzz
  and
     shift
        vertical
as reflected in the oil-spill puddles;
distorted and distilled by raindrops falling like
ink from a quill.
All the people
(all those bodies)
warp and turn into caricatures--
characters;
each and every backbone a delicate line
fluttering down the page,
arms and legs and hair flowing and flickering out:
as beautiful as the written word
seeping through sheets of paper.

In the end, I realize that
we are all just language;
just sounds waiting to be uttered,
to be brought into a mouth
and turned over, tasted on the tongue,
given a breath of life:
gushing outwards,
limbs unfolding at the creases
like the delicate wings of paper-cranes.

    (Wear your fingerprints down
    hanging 1000 from the star-dappled sky,
    and the spirits dangling in lanterns outside
    your window will grant you one wish.
Whisper it
with paper-cut lips.)

Say your saving grace in
any language,
and I will scribble it in English
on the back of your napkin;
all the words torn
and running.
   Running
like whiskey spilled on your jeans
as I sit and sip my coffee.

Moisture and Steam

This one is out of order, and not very great, but oh well. Yay for showers and haikus (and the result of combining them.)


4/4/12

I wrote a little
haiku as I stretched in the
shower last night.

The walls were much too
bare and the shampoo wrote like
the ocean, scribbled

like dew (bubbling, blue.)
Words transformed, but as moisture
gathered in the cups

of my collarbones
(haphazard drizzles flowing,
dripping, flowing) I

heard something in the
echo of emptiness that
told me to breathe deep.

I swallowed a gulp
of steam and finally found
how to clear my head

when it's too full of
scribbles and crea/ses and trash-
can artwork. My fingertips

painted [felt] bruises
beneath my arms, pressing bone-
deep-green in my sides.

Water rushed over
my eyes and seconds flooded
by, and when I could

see [clearly] once more,
the shampoo was running like
pen, and all the words

were missing their--

Convince Yourself

I know I haven't posted for a while, but I'm not cheating, I swear! I may not have "finished" 7 poems by today, but I have started one every day, and I think that counts. Now I'm just going through and editing them each day so that they make logical sense. :)

When I started this....it was shorter.


4/5/12

It is the breaking of bonds:
two bodies peaking at the chest,
volatile, volcanic,
not so much sharing
as simply in the same space;
wayward arms grappling, legs flailing.
It is a pulsation of--
a remembrance and want of--
freedom:
pulling apart so hard
and ricocheting backwards.
    Footloose, spread-eagled,
    tumbling head-over-heels.
Acrobatic.

[If it were underwater, it would be a dance.
It would make the fireflies cry
that they could not be there;
could only see it (blearily) through apposition eyes,
everything convex, glittering like cobwebs:
diffracted rainbows obscuring the (re)solution.]

It is all engraved in a shudder:
a shiver, a tiny tremor
deep in the braided chords
of her espalda;
quavering like the bowels
of the farthest caverns,
stalactites vibrating with timbre.
As she buckles forward,
those rubies bulge down her seam,
those Rosetta stones divulging secrets
in long dead languages [languages never invented]
to anyone with fingers tender enough
to decode.

He is trying to restart,
to bind the laces of his sternum closed,
but it is a rabbit heart beneath the buckles,
that he coddles in the cockles
of his breast-bone.
A rabbit heart: beating so hard, so fast;
sure to rip apart.
Soon, all too soon, it will split along
its hare-line fractures like an egg,
like the tepid waters beneath his feet:
scattering with ripples and breakers.

All the animals thought it was a tsunami,
an after-effect more treacherous
than the snap:
the crack and explosion following
a severing of something.
An earthly [r]evolution that outgrew its limits;
continents and crusts splintering where
foundations weren't welded tight enough.
They all brought out their water wings
and breathed in through gillyweed lungs,
but it isn't...

It is not a collision between boundaries,
it is the subduction of things;
a dipping and crawling:
shifting.
It is a breaking of bonds:
two bodies separating at the chest,
sinews snapping like the delicate roots of trees;
thick and earthly, unrelenting,
unlacing.

It is a realization of--
an acceptance and
(in some ways) want of--



the end.



------
Some words are used incorrectly on purpose i.e. hare-line fractures....rabbit, come on.
And espalda just sounds much more elegant than spine or back.
Tectonic plates, anyone?

The Pockets of My Jeans Are Full of Sand

Hello.





Yesterday, my mother and I went on a voyage (across land) to the beach and I sang songs that made dogs in Alaska cry. ABBA is fun, and I think I may have dislocated my brain head-banging to Knowing Me, Knowing You and possibly even broken a string on my air guitar while improvising the chorus to several jingles from a. Goo Goo Dolls (come on, Iris....totally awesome), b. Owl City (that one had some piano improv. which is way more dangerous because of all those keys and all that non-space in a car), and c. Elton John (B-B-BENNY AND THE JETS!!! also...even after 17 years of life, I still picture two lions frollicking through the forest when I hear Can You Feel the Love Tonight.) All in all, a very nice trip, despite the rain and the flooding and the giant lake outside my hotelroom that may or may not steal my car in the middle of the night while we are both sleeping. O.O

Anyways, we went to the beach today. Well, we sat on a log, huddled together on a raincoat for approximately half an hour until it commensed raining cows and meese (cats and dogs are way overated, and, let's face it: goose -- geese, moose -- ?) Then we sat in the car, staring out at the ocean with mournful eyes for a long time. We visited the Devil's Churn, aka: made a dash for the nearest bathroom, then leaned over the fence to gaze at the foaming/thrashing water below (well, Mom did. I zipped my jacket up over my face and huddled against her shoulder, trying not to blow away.)

Not a very productive day in the sense of visiting things, but it was highly enjoyable and relaxing and I WROTE SOMETHING NEW!!! :D It's about rocks and dead people and baleen (because I put my hand in one of those "Test Your Sense of Touch" boxes and touched one [I thought it was a toothbrush.])The sky drooled all over my notebook, and I am sad, but I managed to translate most of the blobs into sentences.

OOH! Another thing that happened today: We went to a restaurant for dinner, and I wrote all over my napkin, and the waitress though I was insane because of the writing all over my napkin and the fact that I dissected my sandwich and removed the mayonaise and because I thought the bathroom was creepy (you had to be there....it really was!) Don't know if I will turn the B.O.N. thing into anything literate, since it was mostly a stream of consciousness....but anyhoo....that's about it for me.

April is Poetry Writing Month, so as a challenge I am going to try to write a poem every day (nothing wonderful or long probably, but it's a way to get the creative gears grinding.) I may post them daily on here as a way to make sure I don't cheat (which I probably will anyways....) and if people are interested in reading/joining in.


So, this is the part where you read what I wrote while I was getting punched in the face by the wind; you know, the part you look forward to through my entire post and the silence between posts (sorry 'bout that.) I know, you're super excited to read it, but here's a little background:

1.apparently, I really love the word cadavers. It's creepy, I know, but it feels nice as it rolls over your tongue.
2.whales do not breathe through baleen. Baleen is for eating. I know this. You (hopefully) know this. I am not stupid, I promise. I just thought it made a really pretty phrase.
3.oysters have to be wounded (hurt) in order to make a pearl. This makes me unbelievably sad, yet it's so poetic and so beautiful. It's like in the Host; how they must sacrifice their own lives in order to reproduce and be "Mothers" It's tragic and lovely.
4.Question: what is your view on uncapitalized titles? I'm a hypocrit.




The rocks bask in an ocean of cadavers
-ten million comrades pummeled and ground
through a devil's churn:
white-hot waves crashing, bruising.

Beaten and blasted,
they are tiny grains of sand
caught in an oyster's snare.
       Oysters chewing, chipping,
       crying mother-of-pearl:
damaged beyond reparation,
healing despite expectation,
creating beauty out of bloody
aragonite-crystallization.


There are moments when I wish
I could be something so small,
yet so limitless:
a starfish at rock-bottom, able to rejuvenate appendages,
the lucky piece of wood given a second chance:
captured by the tide and polished smooth by the overflow,
a meager sand-dollar, worthless buried beneath the beach,
priceless in the clutch of a child: a jackpot placed in a pail.

Why must I be made of brittle bones?
--a calcium child drinking milk by the gallon,
lifting weights and severing muscles in order to become strong.
Why can't my arms be tentacles,
my legs flippers, and my torso cartilage?
Maybe then I would be able to adapt;
to drift instead of sink,
to scuba-dive with whales
breathing through baleen,
and twist myself into a sea cavern
when the rain breaks the ocean's surface.
Why can't I be as infinitesimal
and unbreakable as an organism
swallowed by sea urchins
and reborn as oxygen?


The clouds stitch shut the sun
as I travel to the place
where sky and ocean
meet in the middle;
the earth frothing beneath.
I lay flat on my back on a bed
of salt and crab shells [rattling like keratin and muscles],
rocks: useless, worthless, like bloated bodies piled in trenches
--cadavers,
sand: ground-up body parts floating over from Japan and Haiti
and just around the river-bend
--corpses, ready for dissection.
I lay, letting the ocean lick my ankles,
and watch the stratosphere ripple as droplets defy gravity,
caught in a cross-wind, falling at ₄₅ degree angles.

I think about how lonely it would be
if all the trees tore free in the flood
and the ground gave up the fight.
What if grass refused to grow
where humans set foot,
and flowers only bloomed when someone was there
to watch?
I think about what the world would look like
if all the water left us.

                                  --oh what a mournful sound.


I tuck blue sky into the pockets
of my skin to keep for a sunny day
when I can no longer remember the pressure
of a storm building up in the folds of my skull,
when the scent of rain fades from the inside
of my wrist and the crease of my elbow.
When my eyes start being my enemies,
and they show me waterfalls instead of rivers,
natural disasters instead of anomalies:
sunspots and fissures in the mantle [dividing tectonic plates.]

I ask you:

What if rocks were porous?

Haikus Are the Hobos of Poetry Who Went to Neverland and Never Grew Up

So...it's been a while, lovelies. And I still don't have much to talk about. Life is good, mostly. Life is going well, I guess I should say, but ssssssh...I'm not all that bad.
Here's a little short story for y'all:

I got my blood sucked out by a ginger.

Yeeeeah...that's pretty much it. I got blood drawn the other day and the lady was really nice [and ginger.]

Well, this morning one of my best buddies [with a cape] and honorary-sister [with a cape] is leaving -insert crying sounds- and she's not going to be back for A MONTH! (and a half.) I'm so sad, and so is my sis. D:
But work is work, and money is necessary...so off she went to drive 48 hours straight with a trailer full of farm animals and a truck full of farm-animal-rangler(s)/people-who-work-there. yeeeeeah. Anyways, we had to get up uber early to take her to work [5:30 is an ungodly hour and I think we should banish it from being technically morning because it definitely is not bright or warm or late enough in the day] and me being me (and my bed being an armchair) I didn't sleep very well, so I was up all night pretty much and then I physically got up at 4:30 -insert crying sounds- and...........wait for it...........I WROTE HAIKUS.

I know, I know, amazing right? mmhmm. I think so. Especially since I HATE HAIKUS AND I HATE BEING UP EARLY AND I HATE HAIKUS....and did I mention that I'm not a morning person and I didn't have any coffee (until later) and I hate haikus?

so yeah, I'm pretty sure what I did to my haikus is illegal or something, but whatever, all it says is that haikus must have 17 syllables, 3 lines consisting of the form 5-7-5, so that's what y'all are getting! There are things like comparing opposites within them and making similes to do with the seasons, but those aren't required so I did the bare-minimum (bear-minimum? bare-mini-mom? mini-bear-mom? mum-mini-bear?)

but yeah, I get very verbose, so one haiku wasn't enough so I strung a bunch of them together to make one hybrid poem made up of poor, under-appreciated (by me), growth-stunted-ed-ed haikus. :)

The first is called: So, blue
this is the one I wrote at 4:30 [struggling to type in the pitch-dark with bleary eyes and a crazy whirl-wind mind. sssh. lights are too easy.] I like it because it's my first ever legit haiku-majigger, and also because it starts and ends with the same two words (so, blue) but it also doesn't have to. :O I realized I could make this happen when I was halfway through, so that's why it kind of went the direction it went.

So, blue:

windows look out on
tourniquet clouds the color of rain-
-bows laced through sneakers.

          I'm so damn poe-
       -tic(k) goes the clock, and they can
          all hear my typing.

It is sick, so sad-
-(istic), but my bloodshot eyes love
the seascapes found in

     [haikus] are a form
   I've always seen as banzai
         trees, twisted to skies



[[so blue]] <---see?!?!?



So, yeah, that was so much fun that I wrote some more when I got home [around 9:30 I wrote these, so they were a little more thought-through.]


body:

I want to fold my
self in half, perfectly:
bending at the break.

-feel sunlight on those
crevices and crannies in
my anatomy,

touch eternity
with phalanges chilled by spring,
and pick the locks in

all those daisy chains
that tether me to chair legs
so I must stand still,

immobile: weak in
my core - something counting down
to absolution -

trapped: strong in spite of
(because of) those iron rods
buried in my shins.

          I am braced for the
      Apocalypse of my soul:
          The subtle _{let down.}

I want to drift a-
-way, way far away, to lands
gray and beautiful.

Please, let me crease this
spine down the middle, femurs
shattering. <sub>Seal my

            body

tight shut with resin
and turpentine: liquefied
vermilion-wax.


[[Stamp me with a ring:
something ornate and lovely.
--Never open me--]]

.</sub>

Heels Over Head [Floundering In Flight]

Once again words are nonexistent, and I find myself boring holes in my skull so you can be spooned onto wax paper and baked into something beautiful. I am using you as a backdrop for my feelings, and entwining your filaments and fibers into my canvas. I am painting myself out and applying you in sunshine yellows and butterfly blues. I am blotting out the words of newspapers and cutting apart poetry; grafting bits of Warren, trimming the tail ends of stories, and stealing similes like candy [from a baby.] I am creating a mash-up of everything I wish I had said, and dripping globs of you over the top like glue. I am making a horrendous masterpiece of literature, and it is nothing more than a gluttonous ball of paper mache.

I told you I’d write you, but I seem to have mistaken myself for an artist. I am an imitation of Jess’s and Kai’s and Henry’s. I am a mongrel, an inbred mutt, a patchwork cat stitched from so many sources that there’s nothing left that was once me. I only started [this] to add some character to the white blank page of my existence, and now, lucky me, it has taken hold of my emptiness and manifested into a cancer. In the holes riddled by my idiocy, it has sprouted leaves and branches and thorns, and in the bowels of my stomach, where nothing can touch it, the cancer has fermented into tumors that give my formless mass definition.

Darling, I am trying to mold you into something magnificent, but it gets harder as the days pass and my intelligence dwindles. It is difficult for me, please understand that. I am not a Picasso or an Einstein. Every thought I’ve ever had has been someone else’s first. So what do I do with originality?

Truth is, you are too much for me, and I wish it wasn’t so. I wish I did not have to blend you with parts of me to get it right, or twist a metaphor into your hair to give you substance. I wish I could simply write and have it be more than satisfactory.

You are so much more than train tracks and brown eyes and phoenixes. You have loved, you have cried, you have dwindled and fought back. I wish I could trace the tremors of your hands on a canvas [all your own.] I wish I could scratch your screams into the walls in your swirly, calligraphic handwriting so people could comprehend every aspect that is lost in translation. [Even now, the scriiiiiiitch of my fingernails on chalkboards does not sum up your cacophony of melding minds.] 


                  You are leaving me. I can feel it in my bones as they crack and realign.
                                            You are cranky and ready to fly.
             You are spreading those arms and chasing your shadow, and I am stumbling along behind,
                                dragging my inadequacies like lead weights.
                                                  I know you are afraid, but fly, darling, fly.
           And I will be content to write your wings and your feathers and your magnificence from afar.



Sometimes I get sad, because I am only one person in the great scheme of things. There are so many sunrises to see, so many words to scribe, and so many fields to lay in, gazing at the stars. There are so many hours wasted on nothing, and I have so much to do.

The characters in my head are getting rowdy; they want love and affection and nourishment and growth through being written, but I cannot convey their facets, and it aggrivates us all. So many of them have only mere faces or voices or names; some don't even have that. Some are just a whisper in my cerebrum.

Inspired by my lovely sister http://jennasaurroar.blogspot.com/, I will list them all for your amusement and their delight at recognition.

In no particular order:

Emma (I wrote her death)
Peter Randals
Jenny (she has become several people, all different, but all volleying for this one name. I do not have the heart to say no, or to say yes. This name is important to me, though it is not spelled correctly.)
*Jazmie
+Zacharias John Zillebeke
+Zoey Zillebeke
+Zanne Zillebeke
Emma Forrester - yes, another Emma and another Forrester...
Vela Wray
"Spider"
Calyx Zabini - my chess player
____ - my most recent charrie; she is so loud, so wonderful. She too has a huge amount of story in her, if only I could do her justice. She liked the name Jenny for a while, but she still does not have a name to this date; in some deep dark part of me, I think I'm afraid to name her, because usually when I name them they start to die inside me, like the faucet has been turned off, and they can no longer grow; like they've been locked in a cage, and their bones are beginning to contort and bend, falling off like dead leaves.
____ - the musician. He loves the above girl. (This is so weird and confusing to me...it makes me feel a little psychotic.) I'm trying to write their story [to no avail.]
Fern - she is a name, and a single sentence scribbled on my chemistry homework. Another child that I have taken under my wing to protect.

Jenny - (probably one of my more complex characters...she has a novel's worth of story just dying to bleed onto paper, if only I could figure out how to write it. You will understand my problem when I explain this: she has Dissociative Identity Disorder; these are her alters, all with complex stories all their own, all with a voice that will not be encompassed by one.)
                      Shayna, Deuteronomy (Deuter), Garth, Hal, Lyla Lois, *Ophelia, Bailey, Cody, Avengalin/Hope (twins), Joji, *Zero (Z), Sir Kim (Forrester Martin).

so yeah, there are others but honestly, I can't remember them right now. Most of them are side characters, all with side stories, but none very dear to me, honestly. For some of the above listed, I've created whole family trees, and for every member of the family I have created a name and story and description and life. I'm INSANE.
I feel like I should just let them go sometimes, to allow them to fly away to someone else who can actually WRITE them. but alas....I love them too deeply. They've helped me through some rough times and some bored times. Through their creation I've grown as a person and a writer.



Darling, I wonder: who will write you when I have wasted all my lies? Who will coddle your wounds and reset your bones? Who will chase sunbeams with you in the dead of winter, or leap through the snow, allowing you to catch snowflakes on your tongue?
                       Who will love you, when I have fallen far behind?




*
--Jazmie was one of the first characters I remember creating; I'd almost forgotten about her. Wow. :) She plays guitar.

--Ophelia is my crazy, zoned-out, schizophrenic love. She is very fun to write, because, like most mentally-disturbed people, she sees the truth others do not and speaks it in riddles. (must admit that she is greatly influenced by the character of Drescilla(Drew)[I know, spelled wrong] on the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. :) She is adorable and odd.

--Zero. He was mostly created as a name for a fragment [a feeling or such object that has not manifested into a real alter, but symbolizes a part of the abuse suffered and comes forth in certain situations], but he morphed into this complex, gentle, lovely little boy and I do not have the heart to write him out or write him, because of what he has suffered. I do not like inflicting pain on them, and I must in order to tell Jenny's story. I kind of want to write him his own separate story, but I'm not sure how.

+
--the gingers. :) Their family (both the Zillebekes[paternal] and the Burkes[maternal] have a family tree devoted to them. It's sad, I know.

Growing Up Means Giving Up What Once Made You Believe

I have a debate tomorrow on whether fire was the most important symbol in Lord of the Flies. My friend and I are on the con side, which is just as well because I do not believe fire is the best one. Piggy's glasses are! haha! We are definitely going to pummel the opposing side with our awesomeness and high intellect. I'm writing my opening-speech right now...it has to be four minutes long but I don't think it should be. I think it should be as long as necessary to convey my point, and then I should be able to end it and get FULL POINTS!!! yeeeeah!

so, because of that, and my inherent laziness, I will leave you with another proestry piece I wrote today [when I wasn't working on my speech.] Background: When I was younger I loved star-gazing, but I have always been terrified of space (go figure...) The thought of being stuck up there in a space-craft or ejected into nothingness continues to haunt me forever, but I still love the stars and, above all, the moon. [Though not as much as I used to] It's a piece about that, and also, the fact that growing up SUCKS and I wish I didn't have to become so sensible.

The Great Beyond

The moon overtook me, darlings.


I used to pray on stars. I used to twirl beneath clouds, palms up, tap-dancing to the cadence of raindrops on rooftops, and only look up. I used to circle bonfires, arms waving about my head, my hair catching the firelight and turning auburn, singing with my eyes full of flame. My heart used to be alive.

They always told me the moon was magnificent, treacherous like the bodies it controlled, but endlessly forgiving. Luna, beautiful Luna, show me the man on the moon. All I ever see are craters and icecaps and flags unmoving in the atmosphere.

I was once a creature in the deep, made of lithe limbs and coiled-chrome muscles. I jack-in-the-boxed from chests, leapt from closets, and somersaulted off couches, bruising but never breaking. I growled at dogs and slunk through shadows. I was rabid and ferocious, but I was also scared. I was a child creeping with baited breath over floorboards that creaked, lying uneasy in the gloom as the house personified and the walls growled back. I howled at the moon to see if martians answered, and counted shooting stars like candy. I digested the heavens, eyes full of galaxies, even though my heart told my head to be afraid; that only emptiness and asphyxiation waited in the great beyond.

My parents taught me to walk and write and string laces through shoes, but I, alone, learned how to gaze at stars. As a child I was full of wishes; I blew on dandelions and plucked clover and lit candles for the dead, but, much as I feared the darkness, nothing promised more than those mysterious, burning celestial bodies. I engraved the paths of comets in my irises, traced constellations on my kneecaps, and discovered nebulas in Rorschach. I counted the twinkles of the stars and chased the moon - living my life in phases; waxing and waning, and eventually turning invisible to most of the world.

I found my life-line in Orion's belt, and discovered the curve of my back-bone in his starlit bow.

I was wide-eyed and wonderful, but one day, I simply stopped looking up.

I stopped wondering why raindrops always fell and never rose, and why salt on wood turned the flames green. I stopped chasing the ends of rainbows, and stopped wishing on candle-smoke. One day, I howled at the moon, and she did not respond. I waved but she did not smile back. Instead, she brought the rain and hail and waves crashing down on me, and I no longer asked for the man on the moon. All I ever saw was a wolf staring down at me; a magnificent shape carved from rock and asteroids and icecaps. I began to see the stars as balls of gas instead of smiling, burning beings, and the clouds' silver lining turned to smog.


I used to pray on stars. I used to brave the darkness for a glimpse of the moon, and taste the treacherous waves, searching for messages of her love and salty-sweet promises. I used to dance and sing and wish [wish with a conviction that proved I believed, completely.] My heart used to be alive. But one day the moon overtook me, and I diminished.


I used to pray on stars as if they could truly, truly hear me. It is only now, surrounded by dew-grass angels, mud sucking at my knees, and fingers buried in the turf, that I realize.

The stars I pray on have been dead for a thousand years. They could no more smile down on me nor dance, than live and be loved.