Saturday, February 18, 2012

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.
Seal my

            body

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



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


.

Saturday, February 4, 2012

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.