Distillusioned

west wind rising into my sleep

2010-04-28T23:15:00.000-07:00

dreamt today you took
my baby away
and i couldn't hear
my screaming
over the scrawl
of static in my head.

my subconscious
trying to negate
a negative from a
nonexistence.

my mascara
doesn't flake anymore
because i don't,
either. it's a time
for sticking to things.

the lack of flake-ability
just means it's
harder to wash off.

pick and pull at pretense.
the stray hair
here or there.

till the day
you're out of lashes.
your eyes open wide.

mouth in an o,
a silent scream no.

no, not my max.

it's a dream
without facts.

it's glam black,
but not waterproof.

and there's raindrops
splayed on my roof
between the grumble

of thunder,
of thunderful thunder.

can't do anything creative lately...

2009-09-26T16:45:00.000-07:00

Bit of Dreaming

2009-08-06T10:59:00.001-07:00

I remember being impressed at how clean the prayer fountain was, compared to the state of order in the rest of the house. Someone must be very attentive. Not a single wilting bloom littered the water, the bottom pool was clear. I collected a few of the tall, dark purple lily blossoms from the planters surrounding the fountain. Brushed away a web or two off the plants I gathered them from. I held the flower up to the light, the tiny veins of it caught between me and the rays of the sunset streaming in through the dingy glass. The ribbing of the blossom was meticulous, an alternating pattern of long, even grooves up the sides, clear to the long pointed lip. It was a gorgeous flower, a perfect purple cup. The long yellow stamen only barely reaching past the brim. I collected three and returned to the fountain.

The fountain itself was a large structure, larger than I expected to find when he led me back to the humid, glass room. Rectangular, deep, the central pool was dark, covered in slow ripples from the constant recycling of water. It stood higher than my waist, about three and a half feet tall, four feet from me to the other side, and six or seven feet for the length of it. Six statues stood in the pool, heads bowed, staring expectantly at their open hands as the water passed through their curved fingers. One on each corner, and two in the middle of each of the two longest sides. The water overflowed from the deep center, cascading over each tall side of the pool into the second shallow pool that made up the base of it. A foot tall, and a foot wider on each side, it was less a pool and more a large lower lip.

There were small water lilies growing in both sections of the fountain. Magenta, that deep pink color, pointed and many-petaled with soft white centers tucked away inside. The lilies in the middle of the fountain floated patiently, bobbing with the slow flow of water, while the lilies in the bottom pool were consistent and eager, crowding each other against the edges to avoid the long splash of falling streams, a little more frenzied in their rush for avoidance, than their solemn counterparts in the pool above.

He had left the room for a moment, I wasn't sure his reason, but I didn't seem to mind. I carefully placed my deep purple blossoms, into the open hands of the corner statue nearest me. Her blank stone eyes stared past them, as if they weren't there, neither acknowledging nor appreciating the small gift. The water running through her hands pushed the lilies up against her parted fingers, which greedily held them from falling into the lower pool, but which were also still open enough as if to say: More. I am not satisfied.

Suddenly, three blossoms did not seem enough for the prayers that we needed, and I collected three more for each statue in turn, and even deposited three each in the deep water of the central pool and managed to fit three in the midst of the crowding lilies at the foot pool.

He finally returned as I was cleaning the cobwebs and dead petals out of the flower pots that looked significantly stragglier now that I robbed them of so many of the proud purple blooms. In apology and gratitude for their abundance, I had wanted to make them a bit more presentable, and was in the midst of contemplating heading off in search for a good thick cleaning rag and some spray to scrub the layers of wet grime and dust of the panes of glass. A fountain like this one deserved a setting as dignified as itself, and currently it looked out of place in what might as well have been a little-used greenhouse shed in the back of some old English manor long bereft of both tenants and gardener.

Quietly, he came to my side, tugging my shirt to get my attention, and I turned to him as his eyes strayed to the fountain and he counted the measure of my devotion in the number of blooms. He looked amused and even a little condescendingly at the blossoms. They were of little significance for so great and dire a cause, and I couldn't help but feel briefly that he thought my pious efforts little more than childish fancy and long years of habit.

But then, he looked back at me, devotedly. All traces of amusement and complacency gone, clutched my hand tight in his, and we left the room.

pieces

2009-07-27T11:03:00.000-07:00

the long wash

fingers, ours, bridge

the long gap of space,

of sighs.

at the end

of this button-press

i almost feel yours,

your fingertips,

against mine.

a simple thing, among

many we ache for.

a world away from you.

and we have waded

a world of waiting

completely around and

back to waiting again.

but i do it, gladly

with hope and love,

longing. i would crawl

if i had no arms, no

legs to crawl with, i would

find a way to move

across the between

to get to you.

if it took eternity,

i would endure it

just to have you, your face

the last thing in my

eyes before they

closed. the salt

of your name, your kiss

the last taste on my lips

before time washed away

every flavor.

your hand, your fingers,

your fingertips in mine

as the great dark of never

swept us both away.

bittersweet

we know the distance

of a long evening.

the sharp way forever

bites and kisses

at the same time.

its familiar eye-sting.

how seconds stumble

so slowly and hours

whisk past before

they're caught tight.

the way easy

gets harder.

the times hard

is so easy.

how whole feels

half, and the universe

of a heart can hang

on tiny words:

i'm coming

to you.

soon.

morning exercises

2009-02-04T09:36:00.000-08:00

8 46
His smile was so soft and fine:
except the occasional
sharp corner,

a spike of savour.

Teeth: pinch tight,
somewhere between

each smooth, flat
tongue press.

84 1
The leaves are falling, falling as if from far off,
how many miles is
a few months ago?

Relapse:
snowburied and
twelve again.

Necessity looks
back a lot on

that autumn I
used to be
twenty-four.

No longer chloro-
phylled, I watch her
blow away in the
reams of brown oak

and red maple
paper.

35 1
She is a martyr. And when crashing down
she does it with...
flair.

a style, a certain
grace.

blanketed in
deep red satin,
you see,

she's far away.

she always wanted
to be

marooned.

26 8
...but why are you not here?
Nevermind.

I'll answer my own
question, and finger

that green button. tugaway
strings, flick

a few pens.

The weight of
thought trembles,

either balance thrown
off by even

a tiny button. And I,

I pinch it
between fingertips,
its shell is smooth,

but it's hard
and is refusing

to bend.

79 6
urge them on to completion and chase

the length away
down the slow slope
of my pale arm.

i tug away miles
and tap out my fingertips.

behold, Pacific, i
breach you; i

bridge your deep
blue.

sea, gods, your
poured length of
parting is
nothing.

i overarch the tug
of each whirl and
eddy. each current,
undertow, riptide.

you won't put pressure
on me, there will be
no bending.

this is steel resolve, this
is me daring you
to defy me, insignificant
ocean.

i have wept twice your
measure in heartblood
and tears.

and burned equal
into steam with
the fire

behind these eyes.

by E.E. Cummings

2009-01-30T08:01:00.001-08:00

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

somewhere i have never travelled

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands

building the broken things...

2009-01-13T21:31:00.000-08:00

"All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you."

I run you through my mind all the time, it's my favorite thing to do. My subconscious trying to fit you into a comparison with past experiences, for which there are none. A fact for which I am extremely grateful. And then my mind lingers, tracing the old edges of those experiences, taking small notes of why and how they can't hold you, why you don't fit into them.

I've been reading poetry lately, so much poetry. It's what I do when I get so emotionally full that I can't write my own. Or rather, can't write my own that doesn't come out sounding like a cheesy country song. I'm so used to writing from my wounded places, of distilling the hurt and heartache into the tiniest of lines so I can tell it without it hurting whoever reads it. Writing from places that are whole, well, that will be something new; will take some getting used to.

Anyway, while I was reading this week - Rilke, because he's my favorite when I'm not in a Sylvia mood - I found a few quotes of his that fit my feelings and observations. The one up above, for example. Oh, I cannot beging to express how I feel gathered and lifted up in all of this. I don't feel like someone's pulling me by one arm into the sky while I have to cling to the heavy, hurting things.

"Believe that with your feelings and your work you are taking part in the greatest; the more strongly you cultivate this belief, the more will reality and the world go forth from it."

With you, I am not uprooted. My branches aren't breaking and snapping because my stubborn roots insist in winding hard into the rocky, grubby, lifeless, rotten soil they've held onto for so long. No, you have wrapped firm hands around the base of my trunk, dug careful around my roots. You have transplanted me with more care and concern than I ever knew possible in another human being, into soft brown soil, the likes of which rival Eden's. That Gertrude Jekyll would have coveted, despite all of her perfect gardens.

The sure strength of warm hands moves effortless, delicate through my bare and broken branches. Salving and binding the splintered remains of too-rough twisting. These loose and languid ends, so long blown in the wind, beating against my trunk, my half-whole boughs... are slow and surely pieced back together again. You test the spring in my still-green reaching, and instead of walling me in crutches, foreign things to prop myself up on, you measure the surety of me and prop my broken pieces up with myself. The delicate detailing of your attentions show me the image of my wholeness, of the goal and blossom at the other side of this work.

That is how it's different, why you don't fit into any before: you aren't a half, looking for me to prop you up, or to prop me up. You don't struggle on one leg, ambling for the cane or crutch of me, giving me purpose only in making you stronger in your weakness, in your incompleteness. I haven't come to you for the meagre meal of redemption in being something you need. I am here because you are whole and because you want me. And because your wanting me makes me long to be whole, makes me begin to be whole.

I didn't want to bring you this broken thing. I didn't want to move on from the messes of my past into another facade of insisting that all of me was okay. You know this, you were there when I resisted, when I almost ran away. You know the hard parts, the dark corners, we have covered that ground. You don't just know that I am broken, you know the things that made me brittle enough to break in the first place. I have moved hands with yours, to peel away the masks and the voices that for so long I have trembled and cried behind. I have welcomed you entirely. You see the unfinished, the long-locked, the broken and burnt rooms. You also see the parts of me worth keeping, the places that can be bright and shining. You see the work and the worth of me, and insist that you want it, you want it all. And I have put the key into your strong hands, folded your fingers over it, watched you hold it tight, like a great treasure, and I have been moved. Through the glimpses of your eyes that you have shared with me, I have seen a worth and a dream in myself that I had long lost... or never had. Until now.

You open my eyes. You cradle my face.

I love you.

"For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation."

Two for Tiger

2009-01-12T10:11:00.000-08:00

then he said Behold

and i look, see
the glance
of light bend
in new eyes.

his smile reflects
mine, expands;

edges rush,
wall me in
protective warmth

and bright
beaming.

as arms widen over the water; Love

reaches me,
widens the small
hole of old
love's hurting.

though distance
gnaws edges,
sets familiar
aching,

i draw deep from
the well of
contentment.

a blue
soothe.

your beckon,
Love, fills

my whole.

234 061 764 597

2008-12-05T22:05:00.000-08:00

the two-framed globe that spun into a score

mother sees

crouch, crumbling
a compass spun
in on itself,
a dashed dream, the
not-image of
an age ago's
imagining.

i see

stuck indecision,
the tiptoe nosetip
skirting of edges,
the ache for what
cannot be given,
what selfish things
i must keep to myself.

mother sees

me birth on
a page the things
i don't bare
to her who
birthed me.

i see.

a process in the weather of the heart

ventrickle
aiourghtta

some cardiovascular
conundrumming,
heartstartsharpbeat.

and, from his fork, a dog among the fairies

tastes better than
a donkey.

who'd eat that kind
of jackass shit anyway?

chump munching,
slurp gulp.

bless this if-food
we're about to par-
take.

amen,
pass the biscuits.

or better yet -
cake.

Do not brother me, nor, as you climb

make sure to point out
the hand-holds you,
in your wisdom and
fancy reaching, were so
gracious to find.

please, rush up
and tell me all the
ways i never

followed you right.
you the daughter,
the firstborn,

and i the blacksheep
teenage boy. i'll
trade you bodies or
her opinion of you.

i'll trade you
whatever just to
pass from
this view.

products from today's round of the random writing game

2008-12-04T22:01:00.000-08:00

pale, the recent snow

sticks soft on
stillgreen grass
blades too warm

to hold.

it melts
in a filigree instant.

so wet, small.

slip down
the thin shaft,

to warmer earth
and sink
in its deep,

deep brown.

locks; they said

no.
and i hang rusty
against your fence,

past use and scrawled
in this oxidized
neglect.

shaking is not
the key.

you keep
shaking

me.

leathery, unlikely

breakthrough, black wings
beneath rippled shoulder
blades; breathe
blue burnt air, a
singe of smoke
in the twilight and you
unfurl. flap unfettered.

pull with pleading
his pliant frame, pull him
from the graveyard growth
of the grey ground and
wheel a wended way to

these broad branches;
i can be a better bough,
tall, taut and green.
so long i have groped
bare into night sky,
trauma trembled
in looseleaf, in
all the leaving.

you are free, the river films with lilies

you, sun,
encourage them.

they hide each
whirl and eddy.

they hide your
bright gold face,

no longer drawn
by the cobalt reflection
of pooled mirrors.

fool, forget;

sprawl your
coronal arcs
over true cyan,
you could unveil
their holes,
each pomp of
cloud.

but, oh,
we see.

you see,

narcissus
loved the river,
too.

bottom lip

2008-10-27T10:10:00.000-07:00

can't sit still
today is grey and i
could find a few reasons
for my fidgeting.

shake like red leaves,
cold streams through
windows and i'm
fully dressed but still
chill. still shiver.

wrapped in a
glittered haze of
aftershock, or morning
afterglow.

you've been
unexpected. a bright
break in the autumn
monotony. forked like
blue lightning between
piled thunderloft days.

apologies for the
lack of rhyme, if i'm
being too vague.
but today i'm draped

in vaguery, like a smock.
i feel elusive, ethereal -
smoky along my inside
edges. untied and
distracted.

not a thing to
hold on to.

rough edge

2008-10-25T01:38:00.000-07:00

dark corners, like
the grit of profanity
on my tongue.

run my hands over
rough edges,
rub myself against them,

feel how they grate me.

just want to fulfill
desires, doesn't matter
what they are.

need a nickel?
i'll give you a nickel.

this is real:
that fantastical
rush.

your mind makes
what it wants of me
in empty spaces
left to fill in.

a dirty mad-lib.
whatever story
you feel like reading.

strip me down, i am
a half-blank page.

armed with a pen,
you scrawl all over me.

you know what to write
in the white noise

make me feel like
i accomplish
something.

satisfaction,
you read what you've
written across my face:

the mirror of
my achievement.

feel you up in
places you love
to be felt.

shadow-hands over
hard whiteness.
your scars,
your trembling skin.

a face you half-see
and forget.

it's could that
tastes good, it's
could that makes

you run your tongue
over places I bite
you, makes you wish I
would bite you again.

I write you, I will
be what you need,

i can't touch you.

i make you
touch yourself.

What I've Been Listening To Lately...

2008-10-24T23:31:00.000-07:00

Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip - "Look for the Woman"

The Kills - "Cheap & Cheerful"

The Veils - "Calliope!"

Quinn Walker - "Save Your Love For Me"

Basia Bulat - "In The Night"

Bon Iver - "Skinny Love"

Frightened Rabbit - "The Twist"

Decayedence

2008-10-08T10:27:00.001-07:00

From grey
rains five-
fingered embers.

A cold
smokeless burning.

Cremated,
summer scatters
herself on
wet wind;

blankets New
England
in her ashes.

entitled

2008-09-22T10:02:00.000-07:00

a passing afternoon here
i dreamt i was
an architect of the new year.

it's
just pretend.

shine a light
into dust.
are you alright?

so skinny love stay
in the shade.

only four winds
know how you
are my joy.

say yes,
desire:
the past and
pending.

i will wait
on an angel.

on your way, can you
black out the reason
gravity rides
everything?

once i'm
around the block
it's okay to think
about ending

the good times
kill me, make me
notice tiny vessels,

the neverending math
equation
between bars.

waterdamage

2008-09-21T16:27:00.000-07:00

welled-up in bones,

need cries down
the length of my arms,
catches the desk, then
floor.

even my tears are
running away from me.

good riddance.

i'll evict them all,
lousy tenants, useless
mess.

witnesses wrought
from unworded

distress.

joshishappy

2008-09-14T21:12:00.000-07:00

here i am lines to
you in the dark, in the
long ways i can't sleep
and we loll over little
things we wouldn't share
with other people, the
people we know.

but i share with you and
don't mind if you see the
weak parts, the wrinkles the
darksides of me.

this is less poetry and more
like prose but i can't write
a good thing in a way
everyone knows and it
makes sense to me so i guess
you won't mind that i
unload the runoff of my brain
in some poetic kind of
ramble, of ranting of,
dare i say, rhyme? i haven't
found matching wordsounds in
a long time.

i have to stop because it
falls over each part and when
i notice that i'm rhyming, i feel
obligated to keep it up and
then i lapse into dr. seuss.

because he inspired me when i
was little and wanted to write
and draw and have everyone know
me and everyone read me to
each other at night under
blankets and sheets and now i just
seem to write for myself and
even then, i don't always understand

half the things that come out.
these days i only get more
questions than i give myself
answers. but you, you quiet the
hum and let me distract myself
with a laugh or more than
a laugh, with
a friend.

don't disturb the gilmour

2008-09-10T15:29:00.000-07:00

i could stand
to render this
apathy in twain.

chilled chel
on the half-
shell.

it's autumn, i'm
sucking bottom.

even the rusted oak
leaves look better
than me

and i love them be
cause it makes
me miserable.

again, in the mornings
i'm back to

alone -

gray squirrels and back
wood birds, now white
noise behind windows -

i cry when i'm
coming.

broken out broken
up and the only things
i can muster up
belief in are

the fact that
living choiceless is
the most efficient mode of
failure;

that even the truest
friends are never true.

i believe in the sounds
that escape during
sleep, that

disappointment is
the only reality.

that every man wishes he
were an island,
that his dreams were

as solid as fishes.

i believe i should have
killed this teenage boy,
instead of letting him

move in.

dreamfish packed
tight, i walk on
water every year.

all i find,
the same old fear:

wish i were here.

the very never not

2008-09-07T14:58:00.000-07:00

sequence your moments
in the interior rhetoric
of bars,

your pauper desire
too much.

luggage,
it punishes the shorings
over this
knot of page.

entirely reasonable.

describe how you objectify
each battle
and delight.

observe ceilings,
for they mean stops
in the elimination of order.

a definitive symbol
is harder on little things,
on the very never not.

preference:
thus literal,
flayed thus.

it has
eliminated or
broken me,

i'm here too,
all the more early.

taking palms: one just
on your incapable base...
too impolite, the ways
of this movement.

it's
toes to the line;
those voices in my

spirit on each page.

worth doing half-assed

2008-09-04T13:39:00.000-07:00

you elude my fingers,
rather, you make them dodge
hit and miss keys,

it takes you to take
me back you make
me write, you
make me.

right.

you make chlorophyll
seem trivial and
q-tips significant.

hexagram?

heck's-o-gramme.

god, you're delicious
i want to lick my fingers
when i'm done with you,
wipe them on my jeans.
you throw me, and you
know it, know me.

you called me on it,
my bastard coating;
bastard batter:

pushover people-pleaser personality.

you get me to write
about you instead of me.
no one does that,
you know.

left ventrickle?

more.
i want the way your
spelling tingles
around my nostrils,
the back of my tongue.

you, uh, muse me.
you don't disturb
the Gilmour.

if you give me five
dollars i'll sing
you s'more.

2008-07-08T13:08:00.000-07:00

i can pick feather scraps
off the cover
for indefinite amounts of time,
irritated by the way
they fleck the navy blue,
the way they make
the bed look dirty.

i got blinds today,
i
can write with the light on
and not feel like strangers
are staring in
through my windows at night.

i can
stop being so self-conscious
when i'm alone.
at least about
the things people can see.

there's no hiding
from myself
the self-
conscious irritation
of all my inner
inconsistencies.

all the featherbits
i nitpick on the
inside.

2008-06-13T13:06:00.000-07:00

Shallow indigo veins marble
the translucence of my forearm -
along the underbelly of it - where
it lays flat and real against
the peeled-off paint of my
borrowed desk.

And I have decided to type
this because it's been nearly
three months since I sat down
in our hunter
green recliner here to will
my way through a poem.

Except, last time, I was in the
Toyota Sienna; the minivan
filled with soccer balls and empty
granola bar wrappers. I was to wait
for Claudia; she was inside the gentle
decay of the wooden, white
Presbyterian church in Greenwich...romping
with her fellow Jack Rabbits
through the un-air-conditioned gym.
I had meant to catch up on my sleep, but
found a pocket notebook and a pen.

So postponed my spring
siesta to bleed my ache for mountains
over the page as I plumbed
a depth of sky behind the nadir
of a gimped steeple
and its treetop transcendence.

songs by someone else

2008-01-11T12:50:00.000-08:00

pack up my suitcase
-life, i'll

head for
a tunnel at the end
of the light. filing
prayers
into the evening, i slip

a three-dollar bill
into the garter of
my faith and smack her as
she sashays back
behind a curtain.

my aussie boy's got
skinny ankles, bony hands but
lovely shoulders.
and i like that, in a man.

do you know exactly
what the sunset looks
like? you're lucky

you haven't
burned out your eyes.

mine are reliquary, above
this diadem frown. i

gotta get a new
bell to ring,
a new thought each time
i tear off my jeans.

i'm a dealer of holes -

it's the easiest way;
god doesn't always have the best
god damn plans,
does he?

2008-01-03T13:14:00.000-08:00

i am making myself type this piece in notepad,
mainly because I can give myself little rules to follow
like: try and type out your lines clear to the border
of the window, instead of hitting enter every time you
have a pause in your thoughts.

sometimes i can even convince myself
to obey them, for a little while.

i am convex; everyone
expects me to bend
under duress.

i can't write this week, so i
have been drawing things. curtains, flowers
stars, paisley, faces i

forgot that i knew how
to draw and let it
slide so much away from me
the past couple of years.

like picking up a soft-boiled egg
off a marble countertop with
your elbow.

i talked to jonathan
this morning, he always
gets me to write, gets me to think
like an artist again makes
me pay attention to my
words.

i still can't write yet, but
i at least thought
a few good things.

I used to think I was pretty good with
music, and lately I'm
like, I dunno if I have any
sort of taste.

I like what emotionally appeals
to me in certain states...

doesn't make it good.

meh.

I hate the word meh,
and that's how I'm feeling at the moment.

at the same time, it's trivial.
like I don't really
feel meh. It's

just a surface thing.
surface emotions, nothing

penetrates anymore.

I got rid of all the fluff
and it's just this weak, mournful
sort of dragging...something.

i need to go draw. at least
when i'm drawing i can tell
myself that it's good, that people
can tell what i'm drawing. that

i can tell
what i'm

drawing.

chelsea he said i

2007-12-12T08:40:00.000-08:00

chelsea he said i
said yes? and he
said will you

marry me and

i - i took a second
to make sure
my heart was going
to keep beating and

to make sure i
hadn't crazy-spiked or

tripped on some
thing in my little

brother's brownies that
wasn't flour or more
than sugar. and then

i, i whispered y-es and
giggled so violently that
my legs wouldn't hold
still and kicked the covers

off and he, i

heard him crying and
wanted to see the rest
of my world pooling

in the pearls that
slipped from his
eyelids, wanted to

lick them off his
concave, rockstar cheek
and love him until
he didn't need to

cry again.

in laps(e)

2007-12-07T09:40:00.000-08:00

adam's up at 2:30
to talk to me after rhedyn's
alcohol-free birthday party;

the lion's pride
kept him from
chewing fat off
downed wildebeest.

he loped home and we
chat about whether or not
we would (or had guts to) play
carole king's "anyone at all"
as a bridal waltz,
if we say we picked it
to make our mothers cry (not
because it means something
to us.)

he hasn't even
proposed yet, he talks
about our kids
as though they wait for
us to pick them up
from a friend's house,
from soccer practice,
after-school biology homework make-up.

i talked too; i
thought i had dumped him
in october.

last night i meandered
over to the sports park
behind the high school.

the weather filmnoise
grey, pre-rain.

in the halo 3 hoodie
he sent me, i sat
at a more-than-warped
picnic table, beside
hunter-vest orange
garbage bins, hefty bagged
and chained.

i watched the same
old man, white and folded,
in a red tracksuit
lap the asphalt course

over, and
over.

This One has been Screened

2007-12-05T10:17:00.000-08:00

Neuron branches
in yellow ochre, burnt sienna,
burn the stasis of their growing
through the windowtint glazed
behind the half-wall
of my grey cubicle.

This is (again) a subtle-sunned
Novemb - er, no, December day;
I am sunstared, ponderous
still of the effect
those rays have on the box elder tree,
and vice versa.

Frozen lightplay. Even leafless,
in the maple I glimpse
the wind elbow through
tightweave limbs, the way
I'd squeeze Play-doh

balls - neon pink -
through open windowscreens when
(five, and)
Mom wasn't keeping her cautiouseye
at the ends of my hands.

The screen a filter, an
instant, impacted but only slightly
bent or displaced.

The Play-doh departed in
stringpieces, magenta noodles.

Crumbles of itself stuck behind.

Latelies. As in, today.

2007-12-04T09:58:00.000-08:00

(improv)
i glare at the
glint of wintersunshine
between brown, wet leaves

not to glare intentionally,
but because
it hurts my eyes, and
i want to
still look anyway.

i wonder

if i am looking
at the sunshine or the leaves
on those bonebare carbon trees.

and, dependent on which,
do i appreciate the one only
for how it shows the other?

i love it, need it
twice.

find me your definition
hidden
in the thing you're

defining.

headpoem dumping
catch clips the
nonsense flutters
between ears, behind
eyes and
below hair, not

a lack of seriousness,
it is non sense because i can't
identify it with

five things.

the way Jeff Buckley
will sing
and not say a word, the way
his guitar sounds like
three guitars

or not even a
guitar at all.

i can be eight octaves, i
can covers things come
before.

sushi day, yes. new
place no more
brown avocado, no

waitresses who know
my name, who glare
when i don't

tip the usual, tip
big money.

i am, after all
just a student.

today the sun is out
and the leaves on the trees
are still dead.

are still useless.
still hang.

they spurn and bathe
in a meal
they wouldn't have refused
if the were still

green, were still
too new to know

better.

makes me think of
that punk who told

finchy she was
childish,
these new kids

who make moon a mockery
of cliched and
fetid metaphor, of

unfeeling feelings.

of OMG i r not a gud typer!!!1!!11!one!

i get more dubious
every autumn; my upper lip
curls quicker,

i find more less things
than i did,
i belittle belittling things,
not even with a word, but
a glance, a skimmed

click, delete.

reading and age
make me pretentious.
make me pretend

i know what
all this adult fuckup
means.

taking (wood)stock

2007-11-30T22:53:00.001-08:00

the undersides of my leaves
hyper-veined but
less red.
less autumnal.

a beautiful ache
of a compliment,
worded in your
no-other way.

i smear its
traces to the
corners of my mouth,
flash rocks.

Frost's robin, i
project. a thought that
his bird is so
ideal a comparison, but

no; is there nothing
more alive and more stoic
all at the same time
in his pieces?

forget the robin, i'll be
that woodpile, left in
the middle of nowhere
in the middle of incomplete.

held fast by neglect,

by the questions
i feed the hungry
mouths of your
eyes.

Zen and the Art of Breaking

2007-11-30T08:57:00.000-08:00

i teeter here
on the verybrink of
this page;
my throat
choked with a possible
mouthful of
yesses/yeses/yes's

i can't even
spell it right.

beautiful, you are.
a sweet trajectory of
agony and battle.
and i
wish i could lick
your rough edges,
wish i

had a tongue,

a face
to feel your hair
on my face,
brushing
across a cheek
in the dark.

you remind me of
everything like
nothing in my favorite
poets.
you are

a favorite.

i am
too meagre, incapable
to express
the effect of your awestriking,
so i bright i

could hardly see.

the weight of your body
seems effortless to a
steady set of hands.
i can trace
it all

with my pen.

i picture
my snowflakes
in your hair, settling
gorgeous, ornamental,

an alluring contrast but

too transient,
filigreed

not
what you need.

reddy

2007-11-29T10:42:00.000-08:00

i am wrapped
in a red hoodie
that doesn't belong to me.

a red scratch on my
knuckle from
some unattented
injury.

the sky is grey
today
i feel

runaway.

tired of the scour
through my underneathing.

i just want spaces
for stillness

and breathing.

Waver/Wuthering

2007-11-21T08:12:00.000-08:00

The more I read Wuthering Heights, the more I like Heathcliff. The more I relate to him, empathize, sympathize, despise, recognize. I dunno, it's one of those books that draws you because all the characters are repulsive somehow. At least, they are to me. Who knew you could write a story like that? Perhaps that's the draw of it. What makes it literature. Initially, you despise them all. Sequentially, you associate aspects of the self with the loathing, and you end up hating the fact that you like them so much because you feel like you shouldn't, but you can't help it.

Even ugly people have a fascination with mirrors, I suppose.

So, I like Heathcliff. I adhor him.

I've been listening to instrumental music more than anything else lately. Plateau music. I love that idea, the plateau. Jonathan gave me an image to go with the feeling, and I've taken it and run. It's where I am, most of the time, I think. The plateau is how I orient myself. It's a corner plateau. I climb there, and sit with my back against the walls, and survey the landscape below me, like David in his palace.

A time-share condo for the plateau. It's a fantastic idea. We all use it.

Strings, ends of things, you can sit and unravel them, or wind them tighter. Why do I think in pictures? It's how I think. I don't think in words, words aren't colored enough and when I have the picture the words just come. I don't need to think them.

Wuthering Heights, instrumental electronica-type indie stuff that I dig up from interweb corners. What else have I been stuck on this week? I kicked Adam out of my spaces for 4 weeks, it was an ultimatum I gave both of us. That's been odd. I feel like I set myself drifting toward something without anything to drift on but myself. What did Jack do? Lash together sea turtles and ride them in toward the island? Pah. Who wants the island. I like the drifting. I like the lack of control in my drifting. I can be immobile and things will still move me.

It's not true, though. I cling to other things. Stupid things, really. Facebook, for one. Not worth the time and effort I put into it. WoW? The same thing. It's a stupid computer game, and I only started playing it for Adam, but I got sucked in. It's like heroin, only worse for you. You laugh, but it's true. You pour time, energy and money into something completely unreal, you feel accomplishment for sitting on your ass hours at a time and ignoring life around you.

But I love video games. I love the way they pull me from my reality. The life around me is something I often prefer to escape, and video games and music are my only moral options, as far as vices go, and even then, they're not moral. They can be, but they're not. I don't do the drugs that I want to...what're those Neutral Milk Hotel lyrics?

"And the first one tore a picture of a dead and hanging man who was kissing foreign fishes that flew right out from his hand and when I put my arms around him, felt the blushing blood run through my cheeks and an airiness surrounded when his tongue began to speak, he said,'Oh boy, you are so pretty - enough to wrap tight in rice paper, string.' And when I finally kissed him the whole world began to ring, lost like a bell that's tipping over, with two cracks along both sides. And I knew the world was over, so I took a look outside and watched the fires that were reaching up to the weathervane and the tops of trees and the waiting scene and the Sunday dream were all waiting here for me. Deli markets, with their flower stands and the pretty girls and the burning men hanging out on the hooks next to the window displays. And I took out my tongue, tried to move from my place. I crossed the bridge and I crossed the mountains, threw a nickel in the fountain to save my soul from all these troubled times and all the drugs that I don't have the guts to take to soothe my mind, so I'm always sober, always aching. Always heading for mass suicide, occult figurines. And wasted gas station attendants, attending to their job and a nice drive in the country, find a nice cliff to drop off. Oh when this life just gets so grating, all the grittiness of life, but don't take those pills your boyfriend gave you, you're too wonderful to die. And the last one tore a picture from the pornographic page, but all the pleasure points attacking all the looks of love were staged. And it's a lie that you've been given that just hurts you every day, so why should I lie here naked when it's just too far away from anything we could call love? Any love worth living for? So I'll sleep out in the gutter, you can sleep here on the floor. And when I wake up in the morning, I won't forget to lock the door, 'cuz with a match that's mean and some gasoline you won't see me anymore."

The italicized part is what I meant, but I had to present it in context. Someday I'll have a host site or something where I can store all sorts of my music and then you'll get the music too.

I can always find a song to fit. Just can't write them myself, and I read lyrics like that and feel like I'll never do anything half as creative, pull anything near as fantastic and abstract and all-emcompassing out of my bag of tricks.

I'm searching the cracks in the walls to remember that the girls in the middle are always the first to fall off for the dregs in the crowd.

Who wants to pull things out of tricks anyway?

Hole

2007-11-16T10:22:00.000-08:00

It was, after all, a stupid accident. We’d been playing racquetball in P.E., my sophomore year of high school at Mountain View, and I’d gotten myself hit in the eye with the ball. Who hasn’t had that happen to them? I think racquetball is the only sport where one can be looking straight at the ball and it simultaneously hits them in the back of the head.

I was wearing my contacts that day – gas permeable, a.k.a. hard, contacts, since they were cheaper than the soft ones – and my contact had slipped and cut my eye with the force of the racquetball, it hemorrhaged under the conjunctiva. Mom checked me out of school and we went to see the ophthalmologist, who said I’d be fine, the hemorrhaging didn’t look bad at all, and it would clear up on its own in a few days.

That was how it started.

Fast-forward two years. Senior year of high school. Band Tour.

We were going to San Francisco. Originally, I hadn’t planned on attending. School trips were always expensive because we never earned enough at fund raisers. I couldn’t afford to go because I didn’t have a job. (Or, rather, school was my job, my parents insisted.) I felt bad hitting my parents up for five hundred-something dollars, and told Mr. Bowman, the band director, that I wasn’t going.

It turns out, however, that Mr. Bowman did the begging for me. He’d served his mission in Taiwan, the same as my parents and knew both of them. They needed more students to go, or there wouldn’t be enough to cover the trip. My brother Jonathan, two years younger than me and a sophomore, was also in band. Mom and Dad agreed to pay for both of us to go. I was thrilled.

We bussed all over San Francisco, from Fisherman’s Wharf, to Alcatraz (okay, we ferried to Alcatraz), to the Golden Gate Bridge, from the Winchester Mansion to Ghirardelli Square. It was exciting and busy and I learned that I actually could spend more than the hour of class with those people and still stay sane.

Our second-to-last day by the bay we were slated to spend at the Great America theme park. And spend it we did. My friends and rode every rollercoaster they had, most of them more than once. The last one we went on, Stealth, was terrifying and exhilarating.

Stealth was actually the world’s first “flying” roller coaster. Riders board the coaster standing up as they’re harnessed in – straps across shoulders, chest, legs, almost like a skydiving harness – the coaster then starts to move up the giant hill. Suddenly, you’re on your back, looking up at the sky, thinking “this is dumb, I can’t see anything.” It climbs higher. You think surely you’re going to drop any second, but it doesn’t, it goes even higher. It stops, and instead of dropping, it turns. Turns and drops. And you are hanging in your straps, headed toward the ground like so many Supermen. If you can reclaim your mind from the paralyzing terror of having nothing solid between you and the ground, you throw your arms out in front of you and stick with the Superman idea, going around loops, corkscrews, and drops. It stops and you’re standing again, lucky that there’s like a built-in seat and you’re still harnessed, because your knees are weak and you’re trying to process what just happened. You blink.

I blinked.

Something was wrong with my contact. My eyes were too dry – or were they too watery? I blinked again, thinking my contact was suctioned onto my eye, which happened on occasion. We got off the coaster and I hurried to the nearest restroom, desperate to take my contact out and rinse it off and put it back in right. Stupid amusement parks and their gross bathrooms with impossibly long lines. It was fifteen minutes before I got to a sink, barely registering my gratitude for drains that wouldn’t lose my contact in case it slipped in the stream of water. I popped my contact out – it wasn’t suctioned on after all – and blinked while I rinsed it off. Augh! I had taken out the wrong one, the weird look was still there. I put it back in and took the other one out. Nope. Maybe it was the first eye. Maybe I’d just been wearing my contacts too long and my eyes were protesting. Maybe I hadn’t gotten enough sleep last night and my eyes were just tired – not an absurd hypothesis, when one’s spending the night with 5 other girls in the same hotel room.

It’s hard to describe the difference in my sight. I’m an artist. I’ve always been someone who observes things. Pebbles in asphalt. The veins on the undersides of leaves. The difference between crimson and vermillion and just plain red. It was like my sight was suddenly a camera lens. Hyper-focused, or not focused enough. The edges of things were different. The lines, contours of things, weren’t lined and contoured right. I was annoyed.

My friend Seth and I realized that we were going to be late for the awards ceremony they were having in one of the pavilions. We rushed to meet the other band members and have dinner. It was a boring affair, silly plaques for every band who participated in the festival so we’d have something to mark the occasion. To commemorate hours of practice on songs we wouldn’t remember a year from now that we didn’t really play all that well either.

I wanted to get back to the hotel. I wanted to take my contacts out and put on my glasses. I wanted to go to sleep and see if things would line up right in the morning. I maintained a futile blinking vigil until we got off the bus at the Residence Inn; by then I was irritated and genuinely tired. I’d been quiet and distant the whole evening and my friends noticed something was wrong, but were too caught up in the excitement of the day and of the tour in general for it to register, and they left me alone.

Up in our room, after Jenny and Cammi had finished using the bathroom, I took my contacts out and washed my face. I blinked at the mirror. It still wasn’t right. I covered my left eye. I stared down my reflection; she looked back at me concerned, holding her hand up to her face. She slid her hand to the other eye, the shadow of her arm crossing over the Alcatraz Penitentiary Swim Team t-shirt she was wearing for pajamas. I looked at the lettering on her shirt, the edges of the letters there and yet, not there. The contour of her arm, there and not there. Her hand fell and she glanced at me, a mixture of fear and uncertainty in her hazel eyes that, also, were there and not there. Lined and contoured in an out-of-focus sort of focus. I pitied her. I was her.

I put my glasses on, knowing - against crippled wish - that they’d do no good. Sleep was the only recourse I had left to find an answer in, here on the edge of things. I fell to the mattress on the floor and woke up early the next morning, forgetting for a moment that anything was wrong, until I’d gone into the bathroom and noticed my contact case on the counter. I put them away in my bag.

We had another performance that day. Somewhere a bit up the coast from the main hubbub of the city, in the hills. It was green; I can’t remember the name of the place. It was like a concert hall in the middle of some botanical gardens. It had rained and everything was wet. Glistening. The added glare off the raindrops, instead of filling me with that familiar ache of something beautiful, annoyed me because they made were blurring the lines of things even more.

As we clamored out of the buses to go assemble our instruments, stretch our legs, and wander around the gardens until it was our turn to play, I heard familiar voices and turned to look. My parents were there, with my brother Joseph (the baby at the time) in the stroller.

Mom and Dad had decided to surprise us and fly out with the baby to come hear us play and to have their own mini-vacation, leaving our two sisters with the neighbors. In the excitement of having them suddenly there, I was distracted from the annoyance of my sight. My friends and I hauled the baby Joseph around, joked with Dad.

The problem with my eye settled to the background until we were sitting under the bright lights of the stage. My bass clarinet was glinting, the flutes in front of us twinkling silver and fast, the saxophones to the left glared gold just as the trumpets on the right did. I was anxious and discontent. I kept shifting in my seat, turning to avoid the glare. I pulled out our sheets of music and groaned inwardly. The black and white of the lines and the dots on the page – so many lines – made whatever was wrong with my eye start screaming. I couldn’t look at the lines.

Mr. Bowman raised the baton and I tried to play, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t look at the music. I fingered blindly, not playing a note. Which didn’t really matter, anyway. I was only a bass clarinet. The unsung limbo of the band world. Every symphonic band is supposed to have one, and yet no one ever notices them. Even when they play, because they mostly just follow the tuba or baritone sax parts. Steve, my cohort in said limbo, looked askance at me, raising an eyebrow in question. I shook my head slightly and turned the page for him. I closed my eyes.

The next day, Mom and Dad took me and Jenny to go tour the Winchester mansion and I told them about my eye. Mom was worried and Dad said they’d schedule me an eye appointment when they got home so that I could go see Dr. Donaldson (the ophthalmologist from my racquetball injury) as soon as the band got back to good ol’ Utah Valley.

As we finished the last two days of concerts, I noticed my eyes getting worse. Instead of the lines of things being out of focus and not out of focus, I now noticed in the center of my field of vision in my left eye a round area of distortion. The best way I have been able to describe it is with comparisons to that old Windows screen saver, where the 3D ball or lens bounces around your screen, twisting and distorting the image on the screen as it goes. However, in my eye, the ball was stationary. And right smack in the middle.

I tried to have fun with my friends, to ignore what was happening to my eye and just have a good time. There was nothing I could do to fix it without the doctor, so I might as well enjoy myself. That’s what I kept telling myself, anyway. Inside, I was distraught. I was ignoring things as a way to cope with them. If I didn’t think about it, it wasn’t really happening. God knew me. God knew that my art, my perception of things, was a pivotal center of my existence. He knew that I’d always said I’d rather be deaf than have anything happen to my eyes.

Upon arrival in Utah, and after a visit to Dr. Donaldson, we learned that things were not well with my left eye. Apparently the racquetball injury had done far more damage than originally suspected – not only had my conjunctiva been damaged, but the impact of the ball had somehow caused a scar on my retina. And, as luck would insist on having it, the blood vessels in the scar had hemorrhaged on that exhilarating roller coaster ride and detached my retina from the back of my eye. Dr. Donaldson decided to pass me on to a retinologist.

Dr. John Carver is one of the best retinologists in Utah. Lucky for me, he was ten-minute drive from our house.

I would spend a lot of the next four months in Dr. Carver’s office as we learned that I had a fun condition called cardio neo-vascularization – meaning my body randomly generates new blood vessels, especially around scarred areas, which is why the blood vessels in my eye had ruptured at the scar.

He watched carefully as I sat with his assistant and had my first fluoroscene angiogram, which consists of being injected with the medical equivalent of highlighter ink to make your blood vessels easier to see and then having them hold your eye open while they shoot bright pictures of the inside of it.

John Carver was the first and only person to inject a needle not only in my eye socket (twice), but into my eyeball as well. A procedure I was completely awake and cognizant for. It’s not as bad as people make it out to be as kids. I can think of worse things to stick at the end of “cross my heart, hope to die” chants now that I’ve had the needle in my eye. A sensation akin to squishing a particularly large-abdomened spider in a Kleenex – that slight resistance and then easy pop…

Dr. Carver was the one who burned the hole in the back of my eye to cauterize the blood vessels and stop them from hemorrhaging and detaching more of the retina, when after a month we couldn’t get them to stop. I had cortisone injections behind my eye, which hurt like Hades for a week as I got to march around school with an eye patch and feel like my eye was being pushed out of my head from the inside from all the extra pressure.

Three months into a then-regular cycle of visit – diagnose – treat – wait – visit – diagnose new problems – treat – wait, we were at our wits’ end as to what was causing the new hemorrhaging every few weeks and I made some off-hand comment about how nice it was being excused from P.E. and it’d be great to be excused from the rest of my classes, especially band. It was Dr. Carver who looked at me and asked what instrument I played. Dr. Carver who discovered that it was blowing my clarinet that was causing the pressure than kept re-rupturing the blood vessels; that had exacerbated the original hemorrhaging from that first night on the roller coaster. Dr. Carver who told me that if I’d stopped playing that stupid limbo-of-the-band-world instrument after I’d gotten off the roller coaster, I wouldn’t have the huge blind spot in the middle of my eye that I have now.

That was when I got angry. That was when I started to blame God. I had been living right. I had been living better than I had any of my other troubled teenage years, saying my prayers, reading my scriptures, participating in seminary, helping with the family, serving as the laurel class president and as a stake youth counselor. I had done everything I was asked, was finally living in faith, strong in the gospel, and God had made me – me the artist, the girl who walked staring at the sky, who picked up rocks on the road to look at them closer – blind.

My faith wavered. It still wavers.

I still have the blind spot in my left eye. I can read out of my left eye now, with my peripheral vision if the font is large enough. I still have the same prescription for my left eye in my glasses that I had when I was 16 because every time we’ve tried to update it, the test isn’t ever right. I still have a strange sense of lost-focus. Of lines and the shapes of things being right and not-right. Of my right eye compensating for the hole in my left.

I still wonder why it had to happen; still wonder what I was supposed to learn from it all.

I read about Monet, who had cataracts; of Degas who was partially blind in one eye, and I hope. I read up on the latest technology for people with macular degeneration, which is the closest medical problem in relation to my own condition.

I keep going. I still have the rest of my sight.

I still appreciate the tiny things, perhaps even more now. The undersides of leaves. The Douglas firs on the side of Y Mountain that you can see from the freeway. The way the edges of pebbles in asphalt glint in the light, especially after it rains.

2007-11-08T19:27:00.000-08:00

I feel like spewing whatever's in my head tonight, avoiding cautious hyperbole. I enjoy being hyperbolic. It makes life ridiculously bigger, like the balloon Garfield in a parade instead of the chaff of some blown dandelion clock wafting on the wind.

No old guys at work today forgot their passwords. Do you know what I did? I played Scrabulous on Facebook for three hours (I think I'm losing all thirteen of the games I am playing) and then spun my novel a whole new direction: back into myself. Maybe the whole NaNoWriMo thing was a stupid idea in the first place. I'm stuck right now in a mental location where "stupid idea" is as expressive as I get.

Then I read the stuff Jonathan writes when he's not even trying and come to the conclusion that I will never sound original. Maybe the prose is just not my idea medium. Poetry isn't either. I feel mediocre at everything these days and wish that I could find a place where I can adequately express myself.

I still haven't finished the art I promised him, I keep starting over. Maybe I should take the half-done abandonments and turn it into a collage, but it would look as crap and disparate as I am feeling and wouldn't do for anyone's wall, let alone a friend's.

I've been drowning myself in Pink Floyd today. It's what I do when I feel like life is inexplicably dull and, even if it weren't, I'd be incapable of expressing myself or taking advantage of it.
It's been a day for Animals. Pigs on the Wing, part two. What is it that Waters sings in the dark and bluesiness of Gilmour's guitar? You know that I care what happens to you, and I know that you care for me too. So I don't feel alone, or the weight of the stone, now that I've found somewhere to bury my bone. And any fool knows that a dog needs a home, and shelter from pigs on the wing...

So, come. Bury your bones in my. Listen to me singing. Or just listen to me. I wish I were inaudible, or selectively audible, anyway. Can I pick the people who will hear?

I want to hear you. In other places I want to be the things that you need. In this place, I'm not and never will be. Here, I can only draw you in and then disappoint.

Am I in love with distance? I adore the idealism, the intangibility, the potential for perfection.

Instead of the reality of failure.

I wish I were John Campbell

2007-10-30T12:39:00.000-07:00

Because he is in Mexico and he is funny. And he drew this.

He draws Pictures for Sad Children, and posts at Goodbye, Foom, his livejournal.

Improv IV

2007-10-22T20:48:00.000-07:00

it, me nailed in her like steel, her
i belong to her, i
splinter in her skin and
when she moves, she

feels me. it's
unnatural, her
face is pained

but

all i am trying to do
is settle comfortably,

to fit in.

i have managed this peripheral still.
i live, fruitful
on the edges of myself.

a mushroom circle,
a reef of coral.

see me so colorful,
productive at circumference.

i can
maintain myself uncentered,
can't i?

maybe there is
nothing in my grey areas
worth keeping

after all.

like andromeda. no one telephones.
a mother's ideals
set me here.

naked on the edge of the sea, between
a rock and
a hard wave.

no calls, no visitors.

your bottled messages
shatter at my feet
in the breakers.

your words
waterlogged, become
another part

of what beats me,
what washes me,

what keeps me
awake,
alone

and chained.

flamed with rush horror and their thin
mouths in tiny, synchronized o.

immediate, my hush.

moan arched in the back of my
throat, hooking itself along the wall
of my larynx;

and still, the need
to speak,
to reassure

i wasn't doing
what they found me

doing.

going. she is never here. o innocence, your bathinet
fairy, i am,
here to pull
your teeth, and
replace them with

tiny favours.

ten cent pieces for
chunks of yourself.

i will take them
when you're asleep,
unguarded;

leave before you wake

before you realize
the trade isn't fair.

sleep, baby,
sleep.

there are other
souls to
keep.

Improv III

2007-10-22T14:52:00.000-07:00

soul in its set; you see, it's done with speed
this is the tearing, your
cyberspill gush of long-distance
love

between the lies are
things i haven't told you. there is
enough of these to say

we aren't working.

been listening to modest mouse
all day.
"we were dead before
the ship even sank".

i saw this two months ago,
i have been patient, penitent and
persistent
in hanging on for the sake
of you, of propping you up
while you worked

to finish more
important things than me. you'll
say you would do

anything for me. you said it
this morning and oh, i

would too.

i just can't

love you.

love you more than
less than this.

it's time for us
to build nothing
out of something.

it is time
for sleepwalking for

things to be said.

for separation, for so long. but still his face assaults
it might dice your heart
a little, to hear me
say that when you called
on Saturday night i
could only go through the motions.

i get in a crackhabit of boys.

and even when i know
it's time to let go,
i don't let go.
because they
tell me to stay.

her legs...i have not always lived like this
i felt her
heartbeating
under my palm

i felt my edges
blur, slip hotly
down my legs

radiating from
my ears when
she pulled my hair.

the fat men
watched, too
drunk to take

pictures.

he had to have his way. as down
i spun into
being for him the
things he needed me
to be for him.

i have always done this,
lived for

a wrap around them, too
slippery
for anything

but me to hold on.

openly, as though we two held equal shares
for a while. now
shut, i cannot
be myself to you.

i am in the process
of recovering my

peaces.

This is a distraction.

2007-10-17T10:28:00.001-07:00

I had a whole bunch of stuff written here and it disappeared when a bumped a stupid key trying to put some pointless post-it notes back on the printer after they fell down.

I was talking about how I am trying not to annoy people in the little things. About how it's dark outside today, the tops of the trees blowing, the air cold enough to feel like air again. It looks like it's going to rain any second but it probably won't. Or it will.

I want to go for a walk, but I wore the wrong shoes and I also want to take a nap just as badly.

Twenty-five more minutes.

Talk to me. Tell me things in little sentences.

Write back to me, you jerk. I'm sorry I broke your heart all those years ago. You wanted a van and ten kids. I didn't want to think about someone else. I wasn't ready. I am now. I am putting myself on this limb, ready to change, for you to catch me. I am letting go of what I held on to for so long. Don't let me fall into nothing. I have been there for too long before.

My iPod just died. I was listening to Owen Ashworth again.

(The post-its just fell, but I shall learn from my mistake and not attempt to replace them.)

I had a dream the other night that I adopted a Japanese orphan baby. We were refugees, running through things. I woke up crying. Not because I was scared, but because when I woke up, I didn't have the baby anymore.

These things happen when you get older. They happen even when you don't expect them to. When you tell yourself you don't want things.

I want. Oh, I want.

My old roommate is engaged to some guy she's been dating for 3 or 4 weeks. Apparently they just know. I went with her yesterday, to look for engagement settings for the diamond she inherited from her mother, who got it from her mother-in-law. She found the perfect ring. Because that's more important than the perfect man.

I don't want a perfect man. I want mine with holes. I want cracks and scars in him, to make him interesting, to run my tongue along the edges. I want him here, is all. Here and willing to want someone else with holes and scars. Lick my edges.

Had bad sushi for lunch yesterday. I am over it, the whole sushi thing. Too many episodes with dubious avocado and unfresh eel. Was up at 2 am puking it all out.

I can hold so many other things in. But avocado escapes me.

And I have new work to do. I don't want to do it.

I want to go sleepwalking.

2007-10-17T09:34:00.000-07:00

we are a stemmed chalice,
sacred cups,
our rite of passage.

i have been you;
have come for you
like it has moved mountains.

and they march
toward me, glacier, fir-
bearing shoulders
of rock, of solitude
foundation and
imposability.

oh mountain,

mountain, could mohammed
wish you had waited
and

not have it blasphemy?

not have you hovering
at his door.

More improvisions...

2007-10-15T10:31:00.000-07:00

and the wire vines melt with the unchanged changes
i have spent the morning with you
at arms' length again.

the sun through the blinds
striped my skin,
and i saw me
in two lights, for a moment

the way i feel
when i am in lines
to you, and in body,
in person,
in this chair.

it's exactly a week, now.
the countdown is in the corners.

i tiptoed around you today.
you sensed me sneaking and if i
had been more veritable, we would
have talked it out

today.

i love you more
than i give myself
credit for.

i lie you more

to give you
things to fall back on

next monday, when
i let you

go.

it's a love, a consideration
holding on to keep you
from having other regrets.

or is it me,
being selfish?

wanting to be the only thing.
the only one wrong.

the only one.

soul in its set; you see, it's done with speed
i have been the tree,
letting them leave,
falling off in leaves

tiny dead pieces that
once clung to me, never realizing
we were apart

until it became me, stripped,
naked in the wind, nothing
wrapped around me.

this time, it's not done
being fall, and you still
in my branches.

i am retreating
into my roots.

the whole tree
will have to come down.

and disasters. i do not mean you. no, you, love.
i mean me.
speed and distaster.
the empassioned
violent beginnings of things.

will you realize
that i love you
even when i say
i don't love you.

pardon while i don
my cliches.

my heart breaks
at my breaking yours.

i knit us
too close together,
you see. it was quick, with
needles and i

never think the small
mistakes
will matter in
the midst of things.

but at the end, i am
malcontent, disappointed
in the things

i've done.

These won't be good, they're all improv...I just can't help myself and have to write.

2007-10-09T08:44:00.000-07:00

my body stretching like a tear
it crawls to you, in the dark,
in cities you never knew were fighting.

i avoid the places
in which i loved you.

i am mustering
up the silent
words i need to walk
through rain.

i am seeing you
like shot-riddled corpses, week-
old at the side
of my oft-traveled roads.

like death, you are;
the first
time it shook me.

you will die at my
hand, but we
are both casualties.

it is already (always)
an ugly word.

always nights i feel the ocean
i see
my literalism, there is
literally,
a world between us.

i have drowned
in the distance

where you have never known me.

on crutches, waiting to be roused
my truth (i will be true)
is gurneyed at
the side of sterile hallways.

it was in the way
of nurses rushing to
your pain, your proof
of insurance.

i will facilitate
your happiness
in patience, in
lieu of patients.

it sprawled across that sprawling acreage
spread-eagle you lay
in the fields where
i lie.

i watched you clutch your blank
don't make me
remember myself
of the shot I begged
from you which

was not yours to give.

we are toy guns; we
are dramatic, are perfect
for what we are playing.

of breakers meet and disconnect, foam through bracelets
your generosity overwhelms, I
crash against it.
falling apart
through the little
things you give me.

i hear the bone dice
it rolls a six. a seven.
no more fives, monkey.

six again, the seven
is pulling my hand.

my hand is
pulling apart
at the fingers.

we will make of them
more dice, they
will click on concrete,
beneath enamel grimacing:

yellow, full
of holes.

harden against his hand. he's bored -
because i am bored. we
push these buttons.

a clitoral ctrl-alt-delete.

you are resetting, but i,
i just want to
turn it

off.

Today I got up on time...

2007-10-03T09:57:00.000-07:00

First day in a week or something, I can't remember. Been falling asleep so late I can't get up in the mornings.

I got up. I had breakfast. I never have breakfast. Sleep is always worth more than food. At least, in the mornings.

Can't sleep lately, have a hard time with it. Acting asleep is no big deal, but it's always one of those tortured half-sleep things. Paranoia with sharing a room, I guess. And the one night this week I do actually fall completely asleep, my sister informs me that I sleeptalk. Excellent. Like I need my dreams advertised to the family when I have no idea I'm doing it.

Which equals more paranoia, which equals less sleep, which equals more irritation at little things, little people.

I am writing this because I was meant to be writing to a friend's email, and my gmail has gone nuts on me and keeps trying to refresh in the middle of things and I kept losing everything I was typing. I hate computers as much as I love them sometimes.

Today, I have decided to listen to whatever's on my iPod nano in alphabetical order by song title. I don't know why, I was just obsessing that way. Right now, it's playing "London Still" by the Waifs, which Adam sent to me. I like this song, it fits in little spaces today. (Apparently little is the word of the day.)

Wonder if you can pick up my
Accent on the phone
When I call across the country
When I call across the world
I...see you in my kitchen
I can picture you now
As you toast to your small town
When you drink the happy hour
I’m in London still
I’m in London still
I'm in London still

I took the tube over to Camden
To wander around
I bought some funky records
With that old Motown sound
And I miss you like my left arm
That's been lost in a war
Today I dream of home and not of London anymore
I'm in London still
I'm in London still
Yeah I'm in London still

You know it’s okay
I’m kinda happy here for now
I...think I've finally grown up
And got myself a lover now
And if I ever come home
And I, I think I will
I hope you're gonna wanna hang at my place on Sunday still
Oh yeah I hope you will
Cause I'm in London still

You know we got it sorted, yeah
We really got it down
To a fine art on Sunday
In a sleepy Sunday town
I wonder what I'm missing
I think of songs I've never heard
I'm dreaming of your voices
And I'm dreaming of your herb
I'm in London still
I'm in London still
I'm in London still

Oh I'm in London still
la-la-la-la-la London still
I'm in London

He misses me like the left arm he never had. A phantom third nipple? How would that hurt? It's what I feel like I should be. In his world, I want to be a tiny thing, I want to be...whatever that word that starts with an "a" is that means an organ that's not necessary for survival, like an appendix or a tailbone.

I don't want him to need me anymore. It's how I fall out of love. When I don't love being needed anymore, because that's what I fall in love with in the first place...the things that need me. Being needed makes me feel bigger, better than I am. I am the saviour, the anchor, the hand up in the dark. I make them brighter, clean them up a bit? It gets that way at first. They need me to feel good about themselves. I am a champion ego-fondler.

Because I see everyone as better than me.

That's why I let them love me, I guess. Why I love them back. If they love me, such an impossible, flattering thing, the least I can do is be what they need, love them back. My love is a thank you, it's an obligation.

I always get tired of my obligations. If you know me, you know this. My playlist is shot-riddled with songs he has sent me, beating guilt into my ears for keeping him like this, for staying when I'm screaming at myself to go.

I don't want to hurt him. The hurt is inevitable, and I delay. I was - still am - always crap at finishing things. Rilke once said:

It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything.

And I love beginnings. I am always beginning, I'm good at it. The finish is what I dread, what I avoid, what I never get around to. I wonder if I love beginnings because they're violent. I wonder if, really, I'm just an angry, bitter person after all.

What kind of sicko pulls guys in and holds them there for 6 months just to let go and drift away? What kind of perversion am I, being everything they need, an ideal, never really there and then gone? Do I kill the rest of the women after me with the things I say I am?

I can be the warm thing you lay on in the dark. But...and I told him this in the first poem I ever wrote for him, before we were a we...

custodian

we've peered
through each other's
windows.

candlelit matching.
the same

trinkets of
self-absolution

adorn both mantlepieces.
the kitchens stew

meals
for one -

not us.

we cook for people
who aren't home.
we interact through
invisibility -

wonder why
nothing pauses, looks
back,
focuses on us.

us: the benevolent

presence,
nightbreaths,
but not anything

they can cling to.
our relationships:

janitorial.

we maintain,
upkeep,
locking doors as

we leave in grey hours so

morning can find
us
asleep, behind other

walls.

It's 3 am, love. And I am slipping out from underneath the covers.

I am listening to Keith Jarrett as I type this

2007-10-02T09:32:00.000-07:00

Another corner, another box for me on the edge of things. I was tired of editing it all, of not being able to post, of posting when I didn't give a shit and then having it come around to bite me in the ass while I was sitting unaware a week later...when I was back to giving a shit.

I should stop swearing. It's not ladylike, and it's allegedly going to be another piece of the puzzle of the picture of my own bobsled to hell.

"Hell" doesn't count if you're talking about the place, anyway.

I love that Keith grunts or cries out while he plays. Maybe it's someone in the audience, but I like it better if I think that it's Keith. I owe Hippie Craque for sending it my way. It's the perfect music, really. Something I needed. Something that I can write to.

It was short today, quiet. I was unreciprocal. My significan other'd stayed up late for me, wanted to chat. I didn't. I haven't all week. But I do anyway, because I don't want to hurt him.

I am back to the same familiar place. Holding hands because it's familiar, not because it's comfortable. Because he wants to, not because I am actively participating. I am back to thinking I am doing him a favour by staying, by not saying how I feel, by putting myself in the silences and hoping that he'll notice and leave before I have to say anything.

It gets to a point, you know, where you realize that you love someone wholly, completely, inexcplicably profoundly as a friend. And the more and longer you keep them as a lover, the longer you keep them, the easier it is to see what they really mean to you.

He was the right thing - once. Was the one. Once. Now he's not, he or I have done some sort of moving on, and it feel different. It doesn't feel right anymore. I have carried on this lie long enough, and I should leave now, before I get there and have to leave after everything more.

The vagueness is intentional. I am only as clear as I can make myself understand. It has to be abstract.

Because I can't just look at the thing in my hands and say, honestly, I am bored and I do not want him anymore. I am over him and I am trying to untie and let go, without him noticing that I'm leaving, because I am tired of feeling nothing just to make him feel good. But I don't want him to feel bad.

Enough. I cannot do this today.

I am the truth of what I feel. To myself. In my dark corners.

Everywhere else, it's a fake feeling. And the faces you see aren't me. No one sees this face. No one's been here enough to peel back the layers and understand.

These words are an exorcism. I distill myself in poetry until you have me complete and enigmatic enough that I no longer need to be here. And when that is done, like Sylvia, like Emily, I will run to the quick and eager dark. Heed the call of some need to discover if I can still be, without all the masks and the voices.

I wrote that once, elsewhere. Elsewhen, even.

But I am back to a place where it fits. I am back inside, cowering. I crave this shell, the hidden places for things where I am...just am. Where I can feel and say what it feels like, can look like it feels like, and no one has names or faces or knows enough to point and judge me.

No one even knows I'm here.

This is a Wordspace

2007-10-01T21:34:00.000-07:00

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin
of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions
of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look
through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in
books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

- Walt Whitman

2006-09-05T19:22:00.000-07:00

Did you hear the one about...

End of Autumn
Rainer Maria Rilke

I have seen for some time
how everything is changing.
Something rises and acts
and kills and causes grief.

From one time to the next
all the gardens now are not the same;
from the yellowing to the
golden slow decay;
how long that path has been.

Now I stand amid emptiness
and gaze down all avenues.
Almost to the distant oceans
I can see the solemn ponderous
relentlessly denying sky.

I feel a kinship with the lemon peach tree in the backyard; its fruit harvested early, the leaves dirty gold and sloughing off too fast to catch and savour. Too soon for it to collect itself and don some other girding. This past week the wind changed direction and the tree and I have been rendered bare and reaching toward the sky. At our feet lay the million tiny reminders of what we were, and how things had been. Paralyzed in straining upward, someone else must rake up our pieces, or the ground collect and eat them - our past and little lives.

My roots plunge hungrily through the dark underneathing, a search for some meaning in the decay of former selves to feed and progress, to eat in the months of cold and hesitant sunlight. I shiver, exposed, at the touch of the breeze, and ask myself why I could not have kept my green and guarded growth. I ask myself what I could have done to stay whole. I ask the nothingness about change and why it has stripped me naked and set me before the elements. It was not me. Nothing I did has put me where I am now. Each leaf had let go, and the harsh wind swept me of what needed me no longer. Or rather, I am only rid of something I never actually had. The leaves exist in themselves, it seems. Still, I shiver. Still, I reach. Bitter, the growth of a new skin comes only after the long, cold thrash of darkness, of being numb. Soon, my sap will freeze in my veins; my brittle outward self suddenly second to what I am in the earth below that bears, supports, and warms me.

I don't know your face no more. Or feel the touch that I adored. I don't know your face no more. It's just the place I'm looking for. We might as well be strangers in another town, we might as well be living in another world. We might as well...We might as well...We might as well... I don't know your thoughts these days, we're strangers in an empty space. I don't understand your heart; it's easier to be apart. We might as well be strangers in another town. We might as well be living in another time. We might as well... we might as well... we might as well be strangers, for all I know of you now. For all I know.

It's so easy, you see, to imagine yourself sitting in the pieces of things and wondering what you could have done to keep it from breaking. The hard part is realizing that there was no thing to begin with. The breaking of something, I can take. It's when what you were holding so carefully in your hands is suddenly gone. When you look at the spaces it was and realize that it never was. You held it, you touched, smelt, and loved it, and then someone comes and tells you that it never existed. That you couldn't have held it and loved it, because it was never...there. Or anywhere. It's easier to have something broken. It's easier to have something lost. It's the empty that kills you. It's the empty that drains the blood from out the holes that you believed were full.

I used to think that truth was something stark, something stoic...steadfast, immovable. That truth was like a pillar, or a foundation. Then it hits you, and you find that truth is more like a bullet train, or a mack truck. At least, that's what it feels like. But it is a pillar, it is a foundation. It is some vast, stark immovable thing. You realize it was there the whole time, and that it didn't hit you...you hit it. And not only do you hurt immensely, you feel a prize idiot for not seeing it there the whole time.

Well it's a lonely road that you have chosen; morning comes and you don't want to know me anymore. And it's a long time since your heart was frozen...morning comes and you don't want to know me anymore. For a moment your eyes open and you know all the things I ever wanted you to know. I don't know you, and I don't want to - till the moment your eyes open, and you know that it's a lonely place that you have run to. Morning comes, and you don't want to know me anymore. And it's a lonely end that you will come to...morning comes. And you don't want to know me anymore. For a moment, your eyes open, and you know all the things I ever wanted you to know. I don't know you, and I don't want to. Till the moment your eyes open, and you know.

The problem is, I was so damn close to hitting the nail...but I was still that crucial bit off, and when the hammer bounced, and pegged my thumb, I was completely surprised. And I cursed my thumb, I cursed the hammer. I didn't curse the fact that the nail was in the wrong place, the wrong wall, the wrong house... you set yourself up for these things, you know. When you're just so cocksure that you're right. That you've interpreted the wrench in your gut perfectly. I got the picture right. I was just looking from the wrong angle. It's never happened, before. Not like this...I mean, sure I've been cheated on. That is a grief that I know, and am acquainted with. That is a failure that I can accept. I expected the disappointment of a broken thing. I never could have guessed the agony of everything - everything - rendered non-existent, and myself rendered cheap and dirty.

It's one thing to be cheated on, it's another thing entirely to find that you have been the tool of his infidelities. It's just what you feel like, too. A tool. And then, oh agony, you blame your goddamn self for it. You cram the hurt into your mouth and suck on it hard, hoping it will stop...that you can erase the hurting too. I have been a lot of things...I've been a fabrication, a bitch, an invalid, a helpmeet, a better half, an evil half, a whole bunch of halves, a student, a drop-out, a lover, a hater, a rebel with and without a cause, a geek, a dork, an intellectual, a poet, a sister, a daughter, a friend, an enemy.

I'd never been an unwitting mistress. It's a new taste.

Do you know what it tastes like? It's foul. The putrid aftertaste of food-poisoning vomit when you've eaten at a second-rate Chinese hole-in-the-wall restaurant, and then - to go a step further - the only thing you have to clean that taste out of your mouth is feces. You feel like drinking bleach, or Pine-Sol™, or having someone scrub your soul out with Comet™ and a toothbrush. And you didn't even make the mess.

The worst of it comes when your empathy makes no exceptions for the situation. When he calls you crying, wanting pity and a warm embrace and every fiber of your heart is screaming to give it back, to stop his hurting. Because you yourself are so accustomed to hurting; you know it. And that it's no big deal if you hurt, you just don't want anyone else to. And then you ache not only for yourself, but for him. While you're force-fed shovelfuls of reality, empathy washes it down with pint after pint of a blind pity for the captor, the villain, the beast, the lie. And then you fight not only the pain, you have to fight yourself. You have to fight the nurturing aspect of yourself that only wants to fix and help and love. The parts of yourself that still love him, because they feel sorry for him, because they know him well enough to understand the why of things.

You realize that in the moment you feel the weakest, the worst, the most wretched, you have to be strong. You have to finally - finally - take a stand for yourself. And swear you won't let it hurt you more. That you won't cave. That you'll do something for yourself, because you respect yourself the way he didn't. That you honor yourself, the way he didn't. That you have faith in yourself...the way he didn't. That you love yourself. The way he didn't.

Then you are left alone, in quiet and aching, and your imagination wanders to what-ifs. And you fight it away from them for as long as possible, but they come in barrages, and your walls have already been broken. What if this had been the last year I had or have, and six months of it were stolen from me? What if I had known about it all along, and the truth wasn't a surprise...would I still have traded the fucking love of my life for the fucker of my life? I wondered about Dan. I wondered about what could have been, with the kinks ironed out, if I hadn't been so distracted by what seemed so genuine at the time. And I let myself be angry and sad - in the middle of the night, when I could be angry and sad no one would know....

So many what-ifs. So many hard, sticky places you can't let yourself sink into. You have to keep moving. You have to pick out the things that you learned and can be grateful for.

Do you know that line that Muzzy says to Millie, in "Thoroughly Modern Millie" starring Julie Andrews? It's a ridiculous movie, really, but over and over I've been thinking about the line...where she's talking about her deceased billionaire husband, and how she found out he was a billionaire. He'd given her this giant emerald brooch, but she'd thought it was green glass. And she loved it, because she loved him. One night she let her friend borrow it, and her friend happened to be dating a jeweler, who was aghast at the size of the emerald, and told her what it was. When Muzzy found out, she was heartsick. She didn't want her husband to go to jail, because she'd thought he'd stolen it. She took it to him and told him to take it back. That's when he told her he was a millionaire and not a thief. Then Muzzy says to Millie, "Now, Millie dear, I prefer emeralds, I really do...but we could have made it on green glass."

We could have made it on green glass...just don't tell me that it's an emerald, when it's not.

It was a lesson I needed, about honesty, about the crucial aspects of truth and integrity.

And in that moment I realized something... I need to apologize.

Andy, I'm sorry. From the bottom of my heart, I am sorry for what I put you through, and I can only hope that you'll forgive me, and that we can be friends. Because I miss being friends, and I hate to think of what my anger and my misunderstanding has done to what was one of the best friendships of my life. I'm so sorry. For everything.

Experience is a bitch of a teacher, but it doesn't mean you won't learn things. It's a hell of a method...the test first, and then the lesson.

But it sticks, and you remember it.

God, do you remember it.

2006-08-29T19:21:00.000-07:00

moveon

only some dumb idiot
the song keeps

saying -

one of my ifthings
a thing you should

know.

i held myself
this time, shielded myself
from thunderloft inklings.

it was a wanting
i lost and dug for
in you.

ignoring everything
easyflung aside.

i am not as stupid as

i am.

putup so tolerant
with your shenanigans.

nowisee:
the line between
tolerance and ignorance -

some dumb stupidity.

you ate my heart
all frozinside.

oh, i have given you
the billionaire benefit
of my pennypiece doubts.

i wordguessed
before they'll ever fallfrom
your lips.

i carefulcollect them
from the floor;

cautious of their weight to all things,

and measured them against
quietugs and heartwords.

how manynights
have we lived? between
the days you belong to

anyonebutme.

what do i know?

have i held you down
to somedifferent understanding?

no lastender lie.

i've swept too many of those
unexamined
into my forgiveness
and brushedoff hands.

perhaps you've calloused me
strongenough in myself

to leave you.

this is not runaway,
this is

moveon.

there is a difference.

2006-08-28T19:19:00.000-07:00

Also, something I found at work today...

a helpful message from an old British Telephone Directory:

2006-08-28T19:18:00.000-07:00

Eh up, cock? It's Monday. And the mother of all Mondays to top it off.

I have divulged my last, great, hyperpersonal secret to the one person (perhaps two) who will abuse their new profound(ly dangerous) knowledge to the fullest extent possible.

Perhaps I am as stupid as I occasionally convey myself to be.

At any rate, I don't see any functional walking in my future. Someday, perhaps, I will share this story with you.

Today, though, I will share the story of:

Melanie the Freakish Bosoms Girl™ and Special Hugs in the Elevator

I was at the office a few weeks ago, heading down to a meeting on the ground floor of our building. I get into the elevator with Matt and Nikki, coworkers of mine. There's this other girl in the elevator. Melanie. Melanie is...she's one of those special people who...is special, and...has a sweet spirit. She also has like, size QQQ bosoms. And she is not a small person. She's married to another coworker of ours, Damon. Who is a VERY NOT small person.

And she felt like sharing important things with me, right? Right.

So I'm standing in the elevator and feeling kind of awkward. The doors close and suddenly she looks and me and goes, "I'm soo happy!" I pretended I didn't hear her, because I don't do well in social situations, let alone awkward elevator social situations. I'm also hoping to God that neither Matt nor Nikki decide they are curious, and fall for the bait.

Melanie pokes me and says again, "I'm soooo happy!" I smile grimace politely and nod my head. "Oh really, Mel? That's good. Why are you so happy?" I say in a nice, polite way.

You'll never guess what she said. It was the craziest thing ever, and I totally almost exploded trying to hold in my laugther until I could get a decent distance away to not seem terribly rude. She giggles - her voluptuous endowments heaving in a Richter 7 fashion - and says to me:

...

...

"I was talking to my husband this morning, and he said that when we get home from work we get to special hug.

...

...

...

Maybe even twice."

THE END

In other news, I wrote a poem, but it's prosey and WAY too understandable, so I'm not sharing it, because it's not time. And no, it's not posted on my blogspot blog, so don't go scrounging for it elsewhere.

I'll post it eventually.

Maybe even twice.

I'm soooo making a t-shirt that says, "I need a Special Hug."

2006-08-24T19:17:00.000-07:00

Gah. Work is killing me out of my mind. Dunno how that works, exactly, but that's the sentence that's sticking. And by "killing" I mean "boring." Just, you know, FYI.

So, I've been writing all morning. Writing writing writing...like I do....

I meant to write a story about Melanie the FreakishBosomsGirl and Special Hugs in the Elevator...but that will have to wait until I can do it justice.

Meanwhile, it's standard fare for me, composition-wise:

lonely wanted to write
a letter.

so write me, he says,
or nearly says.

she shakes her head

she just wants to sign
something sincerely. her
bedsheet 3am habits only
between her and what's scribbled.

meanwhile he signs them naked,

he signs them with his hands.
he signs them from greatness,
from latin america, from heroes and
the congo and something about coffee.

he writes she is awesome he writes
she is better

than boxers, than georgia peaches.
he had one once. he likes them.

she writes red she's on
fire she carves
words out of veins

catch her this dragon.

come put out

these flames.

lesstaken's inviting allure

a firecrew can't
unquench anything
left beneath smoulder.

i'd touch that scruff. i'd kiss
that shoulder.

on corners, from his mouth,
hang her edges of reason.
and something pink says shineon
beauti-
ful treason.

fasten your sheetbelts
for the crash of your pride.

when she waves
back at him
after each homerun

slide.

I was mostly just rhyming stuff and...stuff...I dunno. It's interesting to write stuff while pretending to be something else.

2006-08-23T19:17:00.000-07:00

One for Andrea...

Shoefly

watch her build hopings on new shoes
and pig-wings
with buckles and heels she adds
more to her peels.

some plastic some leather to hold her
together.

it's a bow or a strap she needs, to
spring the trap of the days she
sashays through a hazy old maze.

a platform, a slipper and then
he will sip her.

from hiptip to the floor,

stiletto me more
point-toed,
divalicious, morethanpumps ambitious.

it's how she lets steve
madden beneath her sleeves, as if manolo
blahniks can counter the
tock-ticks - compensating
real hugs with new fly boots and uggs.

from her toes to her shins she'll flaunt
shoefashion whims.

and in no man-made upper, she sits

lonely

at supper.

2006-08-22T19:16:00.000-07:00

desperation cuts the dangled string
you've swung for too long, and now
lights out, life's shout

all around you - the infinite

niceties, tiny things, keeping you
tethered to a place that bleeds. you

have fallen silently, so silently

onto new-deaf ears. the
migranity, insanity, depravity in
all this inner pain

shot-riddled any last semblance of caring;
burned the eyeholes of my concern into

ash, empty charcoal sockets.
no one hears the screams in my eyes.

kill the silence, they are saying

silently. i do.

careless and evergreen
he fingers her bending,
stretches this bow;
awes the tautness
upon which he'll be strung.
repeated and endless
are the marks of his choosing.

he will break her
as she bends over
backwards for him,
all the while it looks
as though he cries
on her shoulder.

how will some green pliancy
remain if she's sapped,
how will he love
what he has
and has broken?

together, building
some easy-broken thing.
no matter - as long
as it's together.

at least they can't be
alone anymore - she says.

he is still cowering
some dark corner -
the storm sill raging
outside the trees
scream at his hiding,
snap in the wind,
branch the sudden distance
between him
and her closet-self.

2006-08-18T19:16:00.000-07:00

Rhymey stuff I found cleaning out old notebooks last night:

trapped, blood-bound consistency -
life some vague conspiracy.
always the fates combine against
some trebled farce, religious angst.

seedy teenage melodrama:
recovery by blunt head-trauma.

wound inside these ramblings
the truth of how i feel for things:
no emo lack of understanding,
or hypocritical grand-standing -

something faded in the night,
gone before i caught its light.

eerie haunts the hole it made,
and i peel shade away from shade
to frank pursue some dark, some gloaming...

some seed of thought toward which i'm homing.

dank designs of dark deception:
pillage, plunder past perfection,
rape my reason ripe-reflected -
leave me hollow, blind, dejected.
sucked dry, i rattle in my shell.
it echoes empty: full of hell.

2006-08-14T19:15:00.000-07:00

nice ash
she's cold and screams
with burnt eye sockets and a Brach's™ caramel

on the end of her tongue.

licked and smoothe, a
small black number eats

the edges of shoulders, the backs
of her calves.

ain't it a pretty bitch?

a life of lost-loves and
too much mouthing.

got to get away, run
to the edges of this too-close horizon.
off the edges, rather,

and she swims.

you feel her heels when they grind
gravel to sand and sand to clay,

stuck in her sashaying.

she feeds you something flippant
something not quite tasty.

and you like it, you want more
of the way it bites you.

she's a white-striped angel with
a grubby halo and bloody hands.

wielding headphones and a pen
like satan brandishes his pitchfork.
and your mouth is so busy hanging open

that you won't tingle at the way
you're left stung. she's a biter,

she's a fork-tongued fangful

and the crimsonlips licked leave you
dry and hard.

you want to leave her
sipped and sapped,
the jagged edges of her sheets

rendering meagre the contours of Europe.

2006-08-11T19:14:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite writers/people, George MacDonald once said, "To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved."

Naturally.

So, I'm trusted, I am. I know this. But stuff still feels off.

Somewhere along the line, there's a lack of trust, and I find myself guilty by association. I don't want to talk about it anymore. I just want time to think. And that also means writing it out. Making sense of it to myself.

Walter Anderson said, "We're never so vulnerable than when we trust someone - but paradoxically, if we cannot trust, we can never find true love or joy."

If you can't tell, I've been pondering trust a lot. I shall continue in this vein.

The key is to get to know people, and trust them to be who they are. Instead, we trust people to be who we want them to be - and when they're not, we cry.

Do you know what Marie Curie said? "Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained."

Do you know that? Do you believe it?

Golda Meir said, "Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you would be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny little sparks of possibility into flames of achievement."

Do you trust yourself? It comes down to this. If you don't trust yourself, how can I ever hope to trust you?

But I do. God, I trust you so freaking much it scares the shit out of me. There's no other way to say it. Do I trust her? No, honestly, I don't trust her, but I don't let my mistrust of her taint you. I trust you to be who you are, and to know who you are, and what you want and what matters to you. You say that's me. And so I operate in our relationship according to and upon the foundations of that trust.

I said it last night. You trust me, but do you have faith in me?

There is a difference.

This annoys you. This whole conversation annoys you, but it's something that I have to say, if only to myself.

The Irish say that when mistrust comes in, love goes out.

I don't want that to happen. I don't want anything to happen. I want us to keep on going, but I can't operate under some sort of ultimatum, whether it's spoken or not, expected or implied.

I trust myself to know what I want, and who I am, and the things that are important to me. I say that's you. Can you operate according to those foundations of trust? Do you trust that I trust myself?

I don't want to stop talking to him. He's fun to talk to, and he's a great guy. He makes me laugh. But he's not you, and I don't even think of him in any way, shape or form, in the perspective of "that" frame of possibility.

I don't understand why you don't trust him. I wish I could.

I don't understand why I don't flip out every time you hang out with her. When you spend most of the night being with her and having deep, meaningful discussions with her in person. I wish I did.

I just...I don't know. I hate seeing you like this. I hate the fact that suddenly I feel guilty about just wanting to be friends with a person. I feel guilty for talking to him, when all we talk about is stuff like boats and dogs and music and how his brother stepped through his guitar and broke it.

I am not Star. I am not Amber. I am not any of the other girls you've dated. I'm me. And I want our relationship and your trust and your expectations of what this is to be based only on that fact.

I wish I could let you inside of my head to see the thoughts and feelings and everything that I have been so carefully winding about all of this. It gets hard to explain.

So now, I'm left with making a decision. And I find myself pondering the nuances of interaction. We can't talk, but can we text? Or is there no phone allowed? If there's no phone allowed, can we email? Can I talk to him if he calls me, and I promise not to call him? Do you want me to log all of our conversations and then tell you about them later so that you get some sort of moderator preview over any interaction with him?

Does that seem as stupid to you as it does to me? I keep feeling like your answer to that question would be "no."

I don't get it. I don't get...you and it. I don't get how suddenly me trying to be involved in your life on another level has blown into the biggest argument we've ever had.

I want us to be open, literal, frank, blunt, painfully here. Does that make sense? I don't want to tiptoe around your feelings. Not when it comes to such petty things like who I can or can't talk to. And then I feel like a jerk for saying that. And I feel like a grade-A crap girlfriend for "going against your wishes."

Sure, it's a bit endearing to see you so selfish about me. But you'd flip out if I did the same thing to you. What if I told you I didn't want you talking to her anymore? Or seeing her? Or hanging out with her or chatting with her, or playing video games with her? What if I said that I wanted you to call me every time you and her do anything together so that I can just sit on the phone and listen, and know what's happening?

Fuck that, you'd say. Because it's ridiculous. Because it's insane. And I come to that conclusion with my awareness of your history with her. I would say full knowledge, but I don't have a full knowledge, and it's not really my place to. That's between you and her.

Like I say, I trust you so much it scares the shit out of me. Normally I would go crazy about any boyfriend hanging out so much with his ex. But I don't, because I trust you. And I trust me. And I have faith in us.

Do you have faith in us?

2006-08-09T19:14:00.000-07:00

So, I was home sick yesterday with a rather sore throat. It was a pretty crappy day, actually. Between fits of coughing, cherry popsicles, and movies too cheesy for their own good, I spent most of the time crying over unimportant things, and then getting mad at myself for it. And mad at other people too. For being mad at me.

Somedays I don't understand.

I wrote a huge poem, too. Y'know...sitting in your room, being sick, writing 14 page poems, like you do...It was awesome.

"What, like a hot dog?"
"Like ten billion hot dogs, sir."

(Eddie is always helpful when life needs some perspective.)

I like making new friends. I like being able to get to know people, to dig them up and discover things and interact and laugh and share and joke and explore. I like to be obnoxious with people, or whisper things in the dark. I like a sense of similitude in the incidents of stranger-danger.

I didn't bring the notebook with me, because I figured typing out a 14-page poem would be a trifle more conspicuous than I usually can afford being at work. Perhaps if I can scrounge up a couple bucks to refill the scooter tank, then I will saunter down to the university library later, and type it up there. There are some lines I remember, because they worked so well in my head:

she's a girl back from danger.
crops her dark hair short
so that less of her has to frown
when someone gets hurt.

...

the smell of coffee is geography.
he drinks his coffee and his dreams.

...

how did Samson pull down the temple
standing eyeless, saying: 'let me die with the Philistines.'

did he pull the pillars in like a last love,
or push them away from him
to be alone in his dying?

...

Narcissus was so much in love with himself.
only a fool doesn't realize
he loved the river too.

I was proud of it. For its rawness, I think. "Mistakes are spectacular and / simple as life, as death / as the arithemetic books / of small children." that bit was in there, too.

I don't want this to go fast. I don't want to look back and wonder about the way I went. But am I going anyway? What is going? What is wanting things? I don't know. Something about moments.

Something about letting the unimportant things slip away.

And I was slipping.

2006-08-07T19:13:00.000-07:00

Sigh. Yeah.

So...originally I had planned on writing about Su and Dan's momentous Saturday wedding affair, but I am far too emotionally spent for that today, and I'll have to save that for a day comprised of far more psychic fortitude or something.

But I'll type up some poems to share:

for jed, turning 31

on the wind you snatch whispers
of what may have passed you by;
collected: pockets and fistfuls of crisp leaves -
of proof you could have blown away.

days you stand, in doubt of
the fact that you are standing;
you stand as rocks stand -

step by step you leave yourself,
waiting for something which is not rain.

a drop from the beautiful shoulder
of an indifferent evening.

certain only
that today nothing will be decided.

the gaze is everything in this blind room.

past what you hear in a shell, the roar,
there is almost no sound...only the redundant stir.

the beach is still; the sea
cleansed of its superfluous life.

there are some things you
cannot do with hands.

what light burned the stoic in your skin?

always the mountains are moved in your soul:
you: the calm, the glassy surface;
unseen movements in the deep.

the darkness lifts, imagine, in your lifetime.

eternity in every room, encircled by a name.

for you

teach me the song
that chokes my throat.

i try to become you
because you are going to die
and all my life here
would cease to be mine.

night's ring placed
solemnly on my finger.

we have, like everyone
the miracle of every day
dripping from the roofs.

things glisten over the treetops.
there you are: where the sun
fits like a halo
complimenting your image.

i think the future is another thing:
a verb tense in motion,
a searching movement toward light.

i'm on this line.
in this deep trajectory of agony and battle.

with my hands
i open, close, leave,
obeying the heart that orders.

when you have nothing,
give me a corner of your mouth.

i can see joy overtaking the fear
in my eyes which
amazement opened in one
great, bright leap: this cry, laughter

that i love and ponder.

we caught a glimpse of the dreams
that vanish with every dawn,
the gold-crowned dreams that set
their glittering gifts
beside the newborn child.

a weight of thoughtstones.

the uneven balance
of dreamountains. we still
live in another world,
perhaps the interval.

calm blooms spectacular into the night air
through disjointed stones and the
riddled heart

at the instant you appear

like a sea of blood from a splinter.

the tiger

I.

oh help me
untangle.

if i turn it low enough
i could be left distracted.
and not quite waiting
forever.

the weight of thought
holds my hands
away from the dial.

i want the white-noise
tortured between stations
and not your constant replay.

i can't keep singing everybody's song.

it's breaking everybody's heart.

or just mine - as big
as everybody.

as big as the silences
where you don't think of her.

II.

your face in windows
outside forever.

nobody dreamed you'd save the world.

just me.
and i feel you clawing
out of my wounded place

and i am not ready
for this careful apathy
to shatter.

the march is over.

the great destroyer - she
passes through you like a knife.

oh, take me with you.
sometimes your voice is not

enough.

III.

soften your lips
to the rise of your stomach.

her long, filthy fingers
keep jamming words down my throat.

nothing to steal, we've got
nothing to love, because

oh, we're so innocent
on the edge of...

the ocean repeating -
receding into the sun

at last bleeding into
the edges.

to live is to illuminate

let go of August's lowest murmur.
it is in the dark foliage of sleep.

at the window i might catch
the still dying of the light.

a life of burning hands is never easy -
the taste of blood
does not lead to a crown of flame.

it is the composition of my suffering
that tidal breezes always bring
over black sheets of water.

to live is to illuminate
the blindness of the wall.

the soul's work is unlearning,
quenched, or crumbling to dark.

a little boy climbs the stairs
as autumn hangs by a thread.

i'm not bitter, i tell him - never
in my shadow did
luminous things die,
so young and obscured.

2006-08-04T19:13:00.000-07:00

My friend Seth thinks I need to find a new job where I'll be happy. No wait - he thinks I need to decide on a career path, instead of being in perpetual limbo. Those were his words. Then he gave me several suggestions: trucking or the mafia. Or selling porn on the internet.

Seth has three jobs. He works as a chef for a catering business, at an opthamologist's office, and as a graveyard shift counselor for troubled teens.

Actually, what he said was if I stopped being so cynical and pessimistic, I might settle nicely into a normal job and NOT hate it.

This frustrates me, apparently everyone I know thinks I hate what I do.

Andrea and my brother were talking about this the other day, she told me. Well, actually they were talking about my blog. And my brother was like, she just needs to find a job where she can blog all the time, then she'd be happy. And then he quickly edited himself, and said something along the lines of: "but then she'd have to blog, and that would make her hate it. I mean, look at her illustration major. She loved art, loved drawing, decided to do it for school. Suddenly she hates it because she has to draw all the time."

Gosh. Be iffy on choosing a major and people think you're indecisive and troubled and don't know what you want.

I didn't want to continue my illustration major because art was something I loved. IS something I love. Somehow, I knew in my gut that if I tried to do it as a career, I would hate it. I would never draw for fun anymore. I would run screaming if people came at me with a sketchbook.

Doesn't anyone understand that? I didn't want to cheapen my completely pristine love of art by commercializing it. I want to "do art" for the sake of art itself, and not for a bottom line or an angry boss or a demanding client, because then it suddenly loses its inherent nature of being art. It's not art anymore, it's a product. Something in me regards my talent in that area as precious, and turning it into a product...cheapens it. And because art is, by it's nature and mine, intrinsically a part of me and who I am, and therefore I feel cheapened. I feel like I'm turning this gift that I have into something...superficial, insubstantial.

Can this make sense to you?

I suppose it's a self-imposed theory that I apply to everything and - can I tell you? - that I don't mind at all doing some menial thing for a menial job. Because the thing is menial itself, I have no problem with it being cheapened by the fact that I'm doing it because I've been told I have to. For someone else. For money. It's something that I'm not attached to, and therefore I have no problem whoring it to the masses.

Maybe that's it. It's just my anti-corporate attitude that needs adjustment. I'm not anti-corporate, though. I don't throw bricks through the Walmart windows, or leave their carts upside-down all over the McDonald's parking lot. I understand that people need things, and that money helps with that and that if we didn't have some sort of capitalist economic system in place most people would be worse off, in theory, because people are selfish slimeballs.

I don't hate people either. Let me clarify. I hate people in groups. I hate people en masse. I hate people as a "society," or as a faction, or as a "community." I love people as a family. I love people wonderfully as individuals, for their inherent uniqueness - nay, divinity - as a person, as a perspective, as a sentient being. I love people. One at a time. I hate people as a "public consciousness."

A group is as smart as it's dumbest member. (This is true.) And there are some awfully dumb people out there. Additionally, many dumb people are unusually loud and vehement about their imbecility.

I dunno. Maybe I am cynical. Maybe it's because I know too many people who treat other people like crap and it's skewed my world-paradigm.

I want to write. I know that for sure. I want to write because words are...words are all-encompassing. Words are like people. And I don't mind selling people to people. I like words because they operate in a structure or outside a structure, and you can make them as conformist or as individual as you want them to be, because either way they have to be filtered through you and in that process of filtering they become yours. I can share words with people. Millions of people can use the words that I use, but none of them will string them up exactly the same way that I do.

But you know how I feel about words.

I've been reading Lenin lately. I don't know why. Someone once gave me a copy of his writings a long time ago, I think it was my World Studies teacher in 9th grade, Mr. Willey. He's one of my heroes. He, if anyone, would be the reason if I ever become a teacher.

Anyway, Lenin... Interesting character, that one. I enjoy reading Lenin because it's fascinating to watch the way he stumbles into truth.

"Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle," he says.

I love that. You will be miserable if and when you have nothing to fight for. In the midst of all his cries for political (don't worry, I use that term lightly) revolution, he says so many things that can impact your state of being, if you'll excuse the pun.

I dunno. Read Lenin. Ponder individuality. Don't be miserable. Fight for the things you love, and love things that are right and good.

All the great ones were writers in some form or another anyway...

2006-08-03T19:12:00.000-07:00

Also, a new one written about my dream last night (warning: it's very long):

Drawn Out

There were orcs and wargs
and elves with looks of terror
as they were slaughtered.

And two orcs
haggled over how to split
a head off of shoulders,
but while they argued
one of the wargs
bit the head clean off
and neither orc was looking...

And I laughed.

There were axes,
and dwarfs with threats
that didn't match
the way they looked.

And a dwarf
leaned on his axe
and told the orc
that he'd kill every
orc woman and child
and leave them in the tent
for the orc to see
when he came home from battle.

And I didn't know
if I was an orc, or a dwarf, or an elf...

And no one fought me
because I was watching,
and they don't attack
if you're only watching.

And something
about the whole thing
was wrong.

Mom couldn't find a table
to fit the whole family,
and something was happeneing
to the kids by the water,
and suddenly
we were all at home.

Then he came over
and I wasn't sure what to do.

I let him sit in the office
but it looked like the living room
and he was on the couch.

I sat on the arm of the couch.
And I read something he wrote
about how we never talked
but that there was
so much communication
in all our silence...

And he liked it.

And he wanted to be here.

I left to put my pajamas on,
and mom was calling,
so I went upstairs again
but he wasn't there.
But he was still there.

And I looked outside.

There was a llama with a harness
where his car should be.

And I remember
thinking at first
that he had ridden the llama
but the part of me -
which couldn't accept that -
insisted his car
was somewhere else nearby,
and the llama
was just a decoy.

And I shut the door.

I never talked to mom directly.
She was on the phone,
in the kitchen.

I went back down to my room,
and he was standing in the middle of the floor
looking confused,

looking torn.

And before I could talk
he said he didn't know
how he felt

about a girl who could draw
seals like that out of her head.

And I turned to see
what he was looking at.

I had a Wall of Make-Believe
(it was labelled as such...)
and it was full of my drawings -
all the drawings I had done
without a reference picture.

One-hundred percent imagination.

And I remember thinking, "Seals?!"

And I looked agian -
and there were pictures
of seals on books,
and doors,
and gates,
and boxes,
and that made sense to me.

But he wasn't looking at those.

There was another seal picture -
small,
in pencil.

A family of seals
on an ice floe,
floating in the middle
of a vast, frozen sea.
A mama seal,
a daddy seal,
and baby seals -
all so close together.
And they were happy.

I liked the picture.
I liked that it had come out of my head.

And it made sense to me, too.

Then mom was calling down
that he and I could play downstairs,
and that he didn't have to go home yet.

As I looked at my pictures -
and my room so familiar, but
not at all like the room I have
when I'm awake -

He sat at my computer,
and listened to my music.
But the songs kept skipping,
and he soon gave up.

He wandered over to my art table
and found my stack
of unfinished self-portraits.

And something in me was anxious.

He looked at each of them,
and picked out his favorites.

I stood next to him.

He looked back up at my wall,
and told me I should draw some sagebrush,
and to look at the pictures from another angle.

And then he turned back
to my portraits in his hands -
and he said
none of them looked right.

And I thought it was because
none of them were finished.

But suddenly he took some paper,
and sat down beside me,

and said, "Please let me spoon
this out of you."

I shifted nervously
as he began to draw.

And he stared at me persistent,
and sincerely,
and he drew.

And he was getting it right
the way I could never get it right,

and something was lifted
that hung between us
and I was quiet,

and I was scared.

He was capturing me,
closer, closer,
and I was

more nervous,
more scared,
than I had ever been.

And I had to open my eyes
before he was finished.
Before my heart was broken,

because surely, surely
it was going to break
for how right he was getting me.

I woke up,
and sat up in bed.

It was only four o' clock,
and I couldn't sleep.

So I had to write this all down.

2006-08-02T19:12:00.000-07:00

So, I was looking through my other blog on a different site (no, it's not the s2) and I decided to aggregate my rhyming poems into a post. So...these aren't new. If you care.

old rhymes...

(untitled)

eager for some awed perception;
the fallen toss her glimpsed perfection.
earnest sharing 'midst the stumbled
makes pride seem that much more humbled.

give to me no half, no fraction
soul self-devouring at each interaction.
some buried, crumbled, bleeding "we"
resents the fact she is not me.

i gather silence billow-clouded
to still the dark in which i'm shrouded,
and lament your lost attentions -
selfish, screaming interventions...

can i leave again completely?
i build a goodbye just as neatly.
hollow laughter - crass, affected,
leaves heart sincerely quite dejected.

i finger the smiles in your collection
at night, within my felt-rejection.
yet another road unwinding,
leaves me bound in light too blinding.

kind of like dan's

intangible the way
night trickles into day.
in each i wind my wanting,
the hours so thought-haunting.
new carving, new unearthing,
insights my spirit's birthing,
and i finger the things unworded
with which my soul is girded.

Quadriped

Variegated resignation
gnaws my sodden consternation.
snarling teeth tear vegetation,
tendons, skin...no hesitation.

The deepest writhe of his eschewing
distills some dew in lack of doing.
Airy linger scents of brewing,
o'er the picturescent viewing.

Eager races a stone distance
marbled by one's legs' resistance.
Are we always shackled to existence?
Perplexing, our plodding persistence.

Wearied, worn, and ground to tatters,
a heart no longer holds what matters...
Beneath it, proof in bloody spatters:
the wretched refuse when hope shatters.

So e'er long I weave forlorning
in threads and fibers for adorning
the teeming shores of plea and mourning,
though - between strands - myself I'm scorning.

So, in confusion, I will end
a poem written for a friend.
And pour heart-words I've never penned
o'er a confession I'll never send.

Initiating...

Impulses quicken and inspire.
Love-thoughts through the dark transpire.
Observation without the senses
vanquishes my staunch defenses.
Each denial veils a curtain
draped upon my being certain,
and this pillow of lash-leaked longing
nestles fragile heart amid the thronging
lilt and tempo of desire's marches.
Over difference, my hope arches
through mist of doubt and rain of tears -
the glimpses of it span my fears.

Erubescent

Winding crimson ventricles
entangled heart, like tentacles.
Tight-wound wrapping,
blood-bound trapping.
Throb so hollow with each beat.
No room in this empty seat.

I have a heart but it can't hold you,
full of empty - hard to show you.
not that I expect your empathy;
some long-truncated symphony
of vague, cynical disbelief
is convinced I fabricate my grief.

So I continue bruised and aimless
weaving words heartful and shameless,
in hope that one less-hard of hearing
can peel my fruit of all its fearing
and find in me some sweet enticement,
so all these bitter years were well-spent.

Carve me from these thorns and shell -
flung heavenward from out this hell.

Confessions...

I can't keep this well-worn hiding
from your sight, and thus your chiding...
I kept the words you gave to me;
I hear but can't speak honestly,
at least, when it comes down to you.
There's part of me you won't see through.

It's not some vague flamboyant lie,
just want of you that I deny.
In all the closeness which you rain
I burn in distant throes of pain.
And though your nearness sets me grieving,
I'd bleed to death to feel you leaving.
I'm struggling for that middle way -
to love like friend and hold today
as precious in its now and instant -
and not weave hopes tomorrow-distant.

Sometimes my girlish heart escapes me
to skiprun wild through fields of maybe.
But at each return from its jaunting
the problem of you grows more daunting.
And I write in questions' dark
illumined with platonic spark.

The problem with your kindred spirit
is you see mine so well I fear it,
and sooner or later time will show
the bits of you that in me glow.

Abode

Footsteps echo down my halls,
his voice reverberates off walls,
and I just realized it's too late
to go outside and lock the gate.
He's slipped past my cautious guard
and didn't linger in the yard...
he's found my dwelling and he'll stay,
each room is full of my dismay
at the ease in which he entered.
My poor heart's no longer centered
on a staunch, firm disavowel
to bury love with earth and trowel.
I moved on, I didn't know
that love, though buried, still can grow...
now hesitant, I watch it bloom
from each no-longer silent room.

(untitled)

My heart holds a pang, wish -
it's burning in anguish -
a clutched indecision
tied to pain and derision.
I can't retreat now,
no feet if I knew how.

I'm drowned in desire,
your heart I require -

no, I want all.
I want completely.
I can build half,
and helpmeet, so neatly.

A Bit for Bobb

Line by line
in metered rhyme
he'll point out sparks
lit in soft dark;

shine unexpected words
from hiding,
he'll phosphoresce
silent confiding.

The beam shone
from his angle of thought,
illuminates
your small dark spots.

In light they find
a different feeling.
It takes a friend,
this self-revealing.

The Lane

Listless beckons some horizon;
some long future we've set eyes on.

Trampled, trembling - easy bruises
at each look of yours she loses.

Is there some unworded knowing
we both walk one way of going?

Or is your wordless disapproval
daily wishing her removal?

Silence: the reason that she lingers -
with tremble in her voice and fingers.

Speak your judgement: yes or no.
One: she'll stay. The other? Go.

Rambling Rhyme with No Real Pretense

My portrait was destroyed by fire.
Fate ne'er reacting - watched the pyre.
And behind long locks of hair
I caught her eyes in glassy stare.
Something in them wasn't living,
she knew neither take nor giving...
winding thread in glorious uninterest.
Deaf to each pleading request.
Carelessly she wields her shears,
bored with Death and all our tears.
Nothing new heard in man's cries...
no pity left behind her eyes.
Callous a thing, contrite in boredom
tied to Time in reckless whoredom.
And with each flaxen cord she'll weave
tapestries, and ignore wants to leave.
So detached, she'll builds in truth
the stories from the world's lost youth...
so lifelike, real, are her creations -
the histories of men and nations.
See them writhe in screams and tears?
There's no way to hear; Fate has no ears.
And thus we understand her apathy:
were we deaf too, we'd be like she.
There'd be no pity, no compassion...
man grows callous - after her fashion.

symbionic

tentacled heart-anemone
starved. to gather endlessly:
grope at all the swim-by *WiSh*es.
sleep - still empty - with fishes.

2006-08-01T19:10:00.000-07:00

News...news...news....

I've cut the hair. Not just the hair - all of them. Stupid salon lady left the top too long though. It's just too long to spike it. I might just trim it myself. With my mother's special machete.

*ANNOYING!*

Other news - saw "Lady in the Water" yesterday.

*WEIRD!*

Not good weird - just weird. And Mr. M Night Shamaniwannalayu gave himself a major role. As a writer who instigates a revolution with his political commentary book "The Cookbook." Sounds like what you anticipated on the trailer, doesn't it?

It wasn't scary, it was like a lopsided fairytale that revels in its own ideal of its seeming brilliance. This is as lame as Unbreakable, only that one had Samuel L. to redeem it slightly.

Not that I don't like Paul Giamatti, he's one of my favorite actors. He's great. Good on him, but seriously...

*WEIRD STILL!*

Go out and buy "V for Vendetta" instead. It's gonna be on DVD. Special Edition. I'm getting it.

more than happy

2006-07-27T19:08:00.000-07:00

i am:
yes, please!

in the spaces between
your lines and hung

on the rings of your
laughter

the feather breathing you
slowspin
tickle to my ear

i have done
some fair derivation,
darling

and you are all that is right with me
and i need you
and i claim you.

i knew it would be this spiral
the morning i picked up
your voice.

i muse the thing
we've been building.

it's a good us,
a great one.

you are the other
half of all my sentences,

the inhale of my ex-
hailing,

something warm
like
infectious calf-heat

ERRR -

hot chocolate
in

my canteen.

A cuh-razay dream...

2006-07-25T19:07:00.000-07:00

I haven't much time today, since work has cracked down on our web-browsing, and I don't want to lose this job until I actually land a new one to run to.

However, I want to tell you all the best thing you'll hear this week:

I'se doin' grand. Had a totally crazy ass dream Sunday night. Are you ready for this? You might not be...

So, my family decides to go on vacation, right? Dad says we're all going to Alaska, in the Suburban.

We get to Alaska and there's this huge stampede of buffalo that chase the car all the way to Alaska's Northern border, up by the Arctic. So, we're stranded in the middle of nowhere, freezing cold at the end of Alaska and no one knows what to do.

My phone's the only one that gets reception, and so I call Andrea, thinking she will save us. She answers the phone and she's all whispery, "I can't talk right now, I'm over at Jed's house and we're having a deep and meaningful conversation." And I'm all, "Okay, I totally understand, we're freezing to death, but call me back when you're done and let me know how it goes."

Suddenly, we notice this abandoned warehouse to the side of the road that we somehow missed. We go inside and there's a bunch of boxes and stuff and a water spigot on one wall, and a gasline on the other wall. We decide we need to start a fire with the gas line.

Sooo....we open up one of the boxes and lo and behold, we find a crapload of crystal champagne glasses. Dad gets this "brilliant" idea. We line the champagne glasses up from the water spigot to the gas line and fill all the glasses with water so we can run our finger along the edge of the first glass and make it do that singy-noise thing. This will, in turn, send sonic waves through all the other glasses. The sonic waves build up sonic momentum or whatever, and catch the gas on fire.

This is the plan, and it takes forever and we all whine about it, but it works.

But the fact that it worked sucks, because, little do we know that the Alaskan Mafia has a border patrol that runs the northern border line.

Did I mention they drive Hostess trucks? Because they totally do.

Anyway, they see the smoke from our gas fire and notice our Suburban sitting on the side of the rode with a bunch of holes in it from the buffalo horns. The Alaskan Mafia storms the warehouse and takes us all hostage, throwing us in the back of their Hostess trucks. We all start yelling and blaming each other. Everyone eventually falls silent and we ride that way for a long time.

Eventually, the truck stops and the back door is thrown open. It seems we have stopped in some swamp town in the middle of the Florida Everglades by this obscure hole-in-the-wall Chinese Restaurant slash Thai Brothel.

Apparently, there's a huge Southern Baptist convention going on out front of this restaurant/brothel because there's a whole bunch of Southern Baptists congregated in the parking lot by tents, which in turn are congregated by 5 or 6 Greyhound buses that have be painted red with "Jesus Saves" all white and in the Coca-Cola font.

The Alaskan Mafia herd us into the restaurant at gunpoint and tell us not to try anything funny.

I start getting upset at Mom and Dad, because I'm convinced they're going to try to talk to the waiter or waitress in Chinese and tell them we've been kidnapped, and the Mafia will shoot us all. They're both like, we have to, it's our only chance, and I'm all, "No! You'll get us all killed! Don't talk Chinese to anyone!"

We all sit down at the bar, and the waitress puts plates of food in front of us, only it's not Chinese food by a long shot. It's okra and cornbread and fried chicken.

I get angry at her because it's not Chinese food, and we'd come in expecting Chinese food. She starts yelling at me that the mafia guy who dropped us off told her to feed us whatever they had, and they'd just finished catering the Southern Baptist convention, and had a bunch of leftovers. So we eat our cornbread and grump quietly to ourselves over the fact that it's not lo mein.

Meanwhile, the Thai prostitutes come into the restaurant in their skimpy silk robes and start trying to fondle my Dad and brother, and they're all "You want massage? You want massage?" And my brother waves his fork at them menacingly, and stands up on his stool yelling, "GET AWAY FROM ME YOU STUPID WHORES! HARLOTS! HARLOTS!"

And then they start asking ALL of us if we want massages, so we run out into the parking lot to escape the Thai Prostitutes that work at the Chinese restaurant that serves down-home Southern cooking.

There's a group of Asian businessmen out in the parking lot, on the other side from the Southern Baptist convention, and my Dad knows most of them. They start talking. The sun goes down and one of the businessmen is all, "Now that the sun has set, we must watch out for the snakes."

My brother leans against the nearest tree and all of the sudden there are cobras and rattlesnakes everywhere and on top of that, the prostitutes have discovered where we scurried away to, so we all run screaming back to the nearest Hostess truck trying to avoid being bitten by snakes and whores and my brother's brandishing his chopstick and screaming about snakes and harlots and how he hopes they all die in a fire.

...and then Andrea called me and I woke up thinking FINALLY, she's done talking to Jed and can save us! And I realize I'm in bed and not being pursued by venomous snakes and Asian sluts.

And I smiled, because I was safe.

Great dream, huh? I should totally make it into a movie.

2006-07-19T19:06:00.000-07:00

toeing (week 57)

in parendicular
perpallels

a set of sixes,
or else, three pairs.

it tells you haphazardly,
what you can find
down the street.

oh, i know what it means.

at least, i know
what someone told me
it means.

which isn't quite the same.

shocking,
in retrospect the irony,
the humor of

shoes telling you
where to get a fix.

there's no toeing
no line.

you fall up,
haphazard into
a net that can't save you,
some wires

keep you undone,
in disconnect.

looking closer,
there is no weaving.

a cuh-razy cartoon

2006-07-18T19:04:00.001-07:00

2006-07-18T19:04:00.000-07:00

He told me
sometimes I had made him cry.

He said I was the best conversation,
entirely unprovoked.

I don't want to write,
because I've been wanting to write of him.

I find myself in a kind of solitude,
where he is waiting for me.

I relearn a lingering
in once-familiar rooms.

There are some friends for solitudes;
some faces you only find in the dark.

2006-07-17T19:03:00.000-07:00

sorted out

the pirate radio told us
what was going

down.

i listened to Jarvis and then,
pushed you out of my head.

elbowed you through
all my back doors.
keep on moving.

can't you see if i could be
anything i want to be
i would be you -

in a mirthless moment
find myself in your head
instead and peel back
the layers of thought you

wrap
wrapt me
in.

a treacherous game,
this hide-and-seek.

do you know the right
adverb?

it's not

simultaneously.

2006-07-17T19:02:00.000-07:00

Soooo...if I get the chance to get on the computer at home today, I drew a comic strip in church yesterday (that was decidedly not churchy) because I was bored, and because Seth told me to, which I will scan and post up here, because I think it's delightfully tasteful and well-drawn.

But I shan't spoil the surprise until then.

Andrea's dog Princess died. Along with her childhood, and the hope that Jed will ever marry her.

Stupid Jed, I wish she'd just tell him. It's been three damn years, it's not her fault he's a little lot thick.

Sigh.

We made Su's bridal shower invitations. You have never seen anything so vomitatiously Victorian and over-the-top IN YOUR LIFE.

I'd wager.

I make a mean tom ka gai, I have discovered.

Somedays, even my lucky rocketship underpants don't seem to help.

Next week I get the house to meself while the fam goes up to stay in a condo at Bear Lake for vacation, because I said that the best vacation for me would not involve screaming children and lots of water. Last time I was Bear Lake I nearly drowned anyway. (Seeing as I was three...)

Besides, I have to be home, because I'm hosting Su's damn tea party at my freaking house.

And it's cheaper than paying to kennel the dog for a week.

That's about it. Chels is officially emotionally empty. As you shall see by my comic, if I get to scan and show it to you. I have... da mad draw0r sk1llz.

I hate Mondays, Garfield.

2006-07-14T19:00:00.000-07:00

One wound up punch of intuition lays flat my whole take on us. You're the girl on the wing of a barnstormer, the tidal rabbit who came of age before her time. We could have been so goodnatured if I'd relented when you insisted, but we've been backed against nature's walls far too long.

You felt abandoned by me, I recall the sunshine as you were melting, and though the comedy softens the fall they still hear us with their ears to the wall. I sold all my evil motives, no icicles stuck in my hide. I'm through with riddles, I know we're little...just help me feel warm inside. Before we take this ride and let it slide into the cracks where fall and winter collide.

I surrender all my gall in a song of modern love. Remeber you're the one who summoned me above any other kind. We could have been so good-natured if you'd relented when I insisted we take a week off, let the garden grow by itself and let the gluttons fill themselves with all the worst of the gory nineties. And though the comedy softens the fall, we still fall short.

You felt abandoned by me, I recall the sunshine as you were melting, and though the comedy softens the fall, they still hear us with their ears to the wall...

I like that line a lot. The sunshine as you were melting. The comedy softening the fall...hilarious, the tragic ways we trod. Too funny, the millions of times we are fooled, and fooled again. Is it ever real? One wound-up punch of intuition. Sometimes that's all it takes. Sometimes it's more than enough, as each little jab and poke does the job acutely enough.

I'm not paranoid. Not really. I just...know things? They fall: in the spaces between words, on the eyelids of each downcast look. How stupid, stupid to ignore them. That small, familiar twist in the gut from background voices. And then? Another year, the doctor says. Another problem. You can't leave, you have to stay. For months, you stay. Aching just to leave, to see. To be hurt again, more. I hate my wording. I can't wind it tight enough in prose, but the poetry is so hollow these days. I force myself to write them about feelings I force myself to have, and they come out...forced.

Suddenly I come out feeling unattached - detached - and restless. Compelled toward moving. My brother reminds me there's no progression in comfort.

Growth is hard, uncomfortable. And I hate it. I am tired of growing. I am tired of so much. Of this...waiting for you, for this impossible reassurance of things.

Oh, the little parts of me break so finely along miniscule lines. I watch them weaving across my arms and up my back, slow-spread spiderwebs of blood and understanding. Resolve. Girl inform me, all my senses warn me your clever eye could easily disguise some backwards purpose. Do you harbour sighs, or spit in my eye?

The blocks I'm building with have numbed my senses. I am fumbling in the dark, for some warm thing to hold on to, and it keeps moving further and further away from me.

And none of this, even, makes sense. It's just me, some self-important meandering enigma that wastes your time with the words that I try so desperately to make mean things.

Doted on like seeds planted in rows, the untied shoelaces of your life nurtured all year then pressed in a book or displayed in bad taste on the table. Problems arise, and you fan the fire while there's a wild pack of dogs loose in your house tonight. Cut from bad cloth, or soiled like socks, add it up and basically people never change.

They just talk...and make plans in the dark, or make haste with ideas that can't help but creep good people out. As you talk to me too much you're assuming we don't always want what's right. Did I strike the right set of chords? You're annoyed.

The goal is to ignite you then move on. You feel ill at ease, you've got no squeeze. And the wisecracks won't make you more stable. You've learned your lines to scale and to time. Why must I remind you now I'm only less able? Cut from bad cloth, or soiled like socks, we're ordinary people we can't help but to change as we walk, and make plans in the dark, or make haste with the boy who can't help but creep good people out. As you talk to me too much, you're assuming we don't always want what's right.

Two fallen saplings in an open field. Snow padding gently on an empty bench. And old woman's jewelry lying unadorned. Cold nesting robins allied for the first time. I know when you hear these sappy lines you'll roll your eyes and say, "nice try."

It's short today. I feel quiet and stand-offish. I keep trying to write, and it keeps coming out all the same.

desperate,
four-day affair.

you know nothing of
your rivals.

a dozen blind struggles
to make him search
the cracks in the walls
and remember.

you hoarded
the keys to this life,

the gold-plated things
you have marvelled.

some celibate lies,
you're always the first
to fall off
for the dregs in the crowd.

Old friends are coming home. Seth and I made sushi and played Battlefront II for 5 hours last night. It was the most fun I've had in...years? Perhaps.

I keep finding realization around dark corners, like the crucial aspects of things that I miss when they aren't...here. I need it.

I need more close to me.

2006-07-13T18:59:00.001-07:00

You say the hill's too steep to climb. Climbing. You say you'd like to see me try. Climbing. You pick the place and I'll choose the time, and I'll climb the hill in my own way. Just wait a while for the right day. And as I rise above the treeline and the clouds, I look down, hearing the sound of the things you said today.

Fearlessly, the idiot faced the crowd. Smiling. Merciless, the magistrate turns 'round. Frowning.
And who's the fool who wears the crown? Go down in your own way. And every day is the right day. And as you rise above the fearlines in his brow, you go down, hear the sound of the faces in the crowd.

Do I feel fearless? I've been wondering this week, weaving thought around the subtle difference between a lack of fear and the overwhelming presence of apathy. I think that I have the latter, mostly. And in the apathy, I lost my fear. Or, rather, I can't feel it. I don't care to.

My emotional body has been numbed, and I'm not sure why. I had such a rushed past month of overwhelming emotion, striving, I think, for a semblance of some good thing in all the crap that kept hitting me, and something in me broke. Or closed. Or decided that the occasional good thing wasn't worth all of the garbage...it's easier to feel nothing than to work so hard trying to feel good. Or at least, better.

Especially when it doesn't come.

Don't ask me to leave you and turn back. I will go where you go and live where you live. your people will be my people, and your God will be my God.

Do you know what else I've been pondering? Loyalty. Not in the smarmy, buy-a-bumper-sticker-for-my-country, sports-fan-enthusiasm, go-my-alma-mater kind of way. I mean loyalty in...love. But not like that. Not love-love, but..compassion? It goes beyond that. Not charity, not goodwill, not concern. It's...loyalty that I have a problem with. Goethe once said, "He who does not feel his friends to be the world to him, does not deserve that the world should hear of him." And I do, girl howdy, I do. And none of them seem to understand the depth of what I can give, what I do give.

I cannot help it. If it's asked, I will give it. But oh, the agony of spending so much of life giving away yourself with such unwilled, yet hapless, abandon, and then to wonder why it never seems returned to you in quite equal measure.

There are just some of us who, inexplicably, have this gargantuanly proportioned capacity to give and love and be. I don't know why, I don't know how. I can't hope to explain it clear enough for you to understand. (But then, understanding is such a irregular, immeasurable thing.)

I don't know. The more I think about my unconscious willingness to exasperate myself with such violent loyalty to the people I care about who number in spades, the more I wonder if it's me trying so desperately to give people something to need me for, because I wonder, to myself in darker moments, if I'm worth having. If I give people any semblance of value, when I see so little of it inside of me. I can love you, it's the one thing that I know how to give. I have to love you, because it's easier to emanate love outward, than try and find the small space inside of me that's not willing to hold any part of it for me.

If you need me for it, then you will keep me here. And I like to be kept. It's the one thing that I want, really. People who will just keep me.

This is the story of your red right ankle and how it came to meet your leg. And how the muscle, bone, and sinews tangled, and how the skin was softly shed. And how it whispered “Oh, adhere to me, for we are bound by symmetry and whatever differences our lives have been we together make a limb.”

This is the story of your red right ankle.

This is the story of your gypsy uncle you never knew ‘cause he was dead, and how his face was carved and rift with wrinkles in the picture in your head. And remember how you found the key to his hide-out in the Pyrenees? But you wanted to keep his secret safe, so you threw the key away. This is the story of your gypsy uncle.

This is the story of the boys who loved you, who love you now and loved you then. And some were sweet, some were cold and snuffed you, and some just laid around in bed. Some had crumbled you straight to your knees; did it cruel, did it tenderly. Some had crawled their way into your heart to rend your ventricles apart. This is the story of the boys who loved you.

This is the story of your red right ankle.

I think that's the hardest thing that I've had to deal with lately, as far as the whole Su-Dan marriage fiasco goes. Dan was my best friend, for the first time I had given myself, my friendship, my concern, everything completely, wholly, genuinely. And then had to watch it all cast aside. He knew that if anything happened with him and her, that we could never be the same kind of friends, and he did it anyway.

And that, most of all, has been the hard bit to swallow, that me - real, sincere, seriously vulnerable me - was worth so little to him. It's like being flayed open with a knife that you gave them. I handed him all of my insecurity, and he used it to peel me open, and show my fears and doubt back to me in a way that has, for all intents and purposes, nearly crippled me with a loss of..confidence? No, mostly just a loss at the desire to be so open again. I have to retreat into hiding, and wait for my skin to grow back.

But then, I seem to go through this every time.

And that is what I mean. All this giving, this loving people. It's work.

Oh, how it's work.

Shut out, pimpled and angry, I quietly tied all my guts into knots. I gave up trying to make them, figured it'd take them too long to look up. Besides, it was undeniably clear to me. I don't know why. When every other part of life seemed locked behind shutters, I knew what worthless dregs we all are then.

Lucked out, found my favorite records lying in wait at the Birmingham mall. The songs that I heard, the occasional book were the only fun that I ever took, and I thought I would make it myself. Yeah, the trick is just making yourself. But when they're parking their cars on your chest, you still have a view of the summer sky to make it hurt twice, when your restless body caves to its whim and suddenly struggles to take flight.

Three-thousand miles northeast I left all my friends at the morning bus stop, shaking their heads, "What kind of life d'you dream of? You're allergic to love..." "Yes, I know, but I must say in my own defense it's been undeniably dear, I don't know why."

When every other part of life seemed locked behind shutters, I knew the worthless dregs we are, the selfless loving saints we are, the melting, sliding dice we've always been...

I mean, come on, the best laid plans of mice aft gang aglae...

2006-07-13T18:59:00.000-07:00

Rocking By

Intentions cradled, then
drained in some autumnal
colour-losing.
Sapped in windchill.

It peels the watercolour layers
from the washes of my soul.

In small hands I collect them:
pockets and fistfuls of dead leaves,
of proof
I could have blown away.

Neverending:
the tidy ebb
of seasonal shadowing
in the mirrors
(earth)
of my mind.

It tries to colour you,
awash in tears
and change.

Small Breaks

Here is gone
and I collect remember
in the coat-pockets of my time.

I will cherish
my disillusionment
equally as much.

Such a bitten truth
in destruction.

Such refresh,
such newness
in breaking.

Through the cracks
of here
I saw a possibility.

How can I leave it whole?

Now shatters
on the compulsion of
the future.

To You, with Awe and Constellation

I put us so tiny
in the scope of all abstraction,
hoping to tell
this little thing
with the orbits of greatness.

To weigh its consequence
against the spheres
of a half-full understanding.

I know what I mean.
I know what I say.

How incomplete,
your heartless attention to what
I'm building.

In the dark alone,
on a squeaky bed,
I peel the orbs of creation

from the spaces in my soul.

2006-07-10T18:58:00.000-07:00

"Johnny's always running around trying to find certainty, he needs all the world to confirm that he ain't lonely. Mary counts walls, knows he tires easily.

Johnny thinks the world would be right, if it would buy truth from him. Mary says he changes his mind more than a woman, but she made her bet even when the chance was slim.

Johnny says he's willing to learn - when he decides he's a fool. Johnny says he'll live anywhere - when he earns time to. Mary combs her hair, says she should be used to it. Mary always hedges her bets. She never knows what to think - she says he still acts like he's being discovered.

Scared that he'll get caught without a second thought. Johnny thinks he's wasting his breath trying to talk sense to her. Mary says he's lacking a real sense of proportion. So she combs her hair, says he tires easily.

Johnny's always running around trying to find certainty. He needs all the world to confirm that he ain't lonely. Mary counts walls."

Odd, sometimes, the way you slip without knowing it, then wake up and find the hollowness in your voice that wasn't there before. The echoes of untruth in the background of the words you spend so much time building.

For a while, you feel something. And then you convince yourself to maintain the feeling and the something slips away, and then suddenly you feel nothing, but the convincing, and the doing, and the saying is such a habit that you can't stop. And the something, when you look at it now, isn't the same something that you saw worth building a feeling around. Because now it's not something idealized, washed with some rose-coloured paradigm of hope and dreaming. It's something real. Something that can be broken, that dulls in the harsh light of truth and circumstance.

Perhaps it's the same thing. But the somethings are not the same, and the somethings are what you tied your feelings to.

"I was just bony hands, as cold as a winter pole. You held a warm stone out, new flowing blood to hold. Oh what a contrast you were, to the brutes in the halls - my timid young fingers held a decent animal. Over the ramparts you tossed the scent of your skin and some foreign flowers tied a brick, sweet as a song. The years have been short, but the days were long.

Cool of a temperate breeze from dark skies to wet grass. We fell in a field, it seems, a thousand summers passed. When our kite lines first crossed, we tied them into knots. To finally fly apart, we had to cut them off. Since then, it's been a book that you read in reverse, so you understand less as the pages turn. Or a movie so crass, and awkwardly cast, that even I could be the star.

...Over the ramparts you tossed the scent of your skin and some foreign flowers tied to a brick, sweet as a song. The years have been short, but the days go slowly by, two loose kites falling from the sky drawn to the ground, and an end to flight."

How do you find and label the time when you realize that you can't keep doing the things you've been doing? How can you identify the moment when it's not for anymore doing, but done. That you finished whatever chapter of your life you've been writing and building and breaking and manipulating and playing with so fascinated and sure. How does the unsure creep in?

Maybe I let it. Maybe with the wavering, the uncertainty, I left a door open, and it just came. And then, instead of kicking it out, I listen to it. And what it says makes so much sense in the dark,and in the corner, and sometimes in the lightest part of the middle of the room.

"Cough and twitch from the news on your face and some foreign candle burning in your eyes. Held to the past, too aware fo the pending chill as the dawn breaks and finds us up for sale. Enter the fog, another low road descending away from the cold lust, your house, and summertime. Blind to the last cursed affair, pistols and countless lies. A trail of white blood betrays the reckless route your craft is running. Feed till the sun turns into wood, dousing an ancient torch, loiter the whole day through and lose yourself in lines dissecting love. Your name on my cast and my notes on your stay offer me little but doting on a crime. We've turned every stone, and for all our inventions, in matters of love loss, we've no recourse at all."

How long have I been doting? Losing myself in lines trying to explain it and me to myself? To rationalize away all of the small things nipping at my heels? I cannot continue running with bleeding ankles. I cannot continue this road more-traveled.

Where is my yellow wood? Where is my diverging?

2006-07-05T18:56:00.000-07:00

"Our despair is domesticated and gives us peace. Only hope remains. Wild hopes, their screams shatter the night and rip up the day." - Yehuda Amichai

Shattered nights. I've been building piles of crumbling emotion around the shattered nights I've been wading through. Shattered by hope, it's an interesting idea. How often the compilation of big dreams becomes the weight we break our backs to carry.

I have been thinking. A lot of thinking...about...things. Can I explain it? Can you hope to understand, and...if you did...would it really matter? Would any of it really matter to you, and make a difference?

They flutter behind you, your possible pasts...some bright-eyed and crazy, some frightened and lost...She stood in the doorway, the ghost of a smile haunting her face like a cheap hotel sign. Her cold eyes imploring the men in their macks for the gold in their bags, or the knives in their backs.

I've always loved that line, the imagery and way it's worded: "The ghost of a smile haunting her face like a cheap hotel sign." Can't you see it? It's a perfect image. A sad...image. It's a good simile. Normally I don't like similes. Don't ask me why.

Somedays my life is a pile of disjointed quotes whose interplay and relationships only make sense to, well, me.

Oh, it's been tempting. So tempting this past week. But I will let it waver and settle in the amber of uncertainty until it becomes tepid and hard, and I can chip it out and throw it away. Or against something, watch it, too, shatter. Explosions into a thousand shards of each thing I tuck away with a doubt and a whimper. Some days I am amber-full, like an old tree, hoarding the pieces of things caught in my slow-to-change way. Maybe some day I'll find them again, and hold them up to the light, seeing them in a different way that the one they've settled in so comfortably now.

"Clarity is of no importance because nobody listens and nobody knows what you mean no matter what you mean, nor how clearly you mean what you mean. But if you have vitality enough of knowing enough of what you mean, somebody and sometime and sometimes a great many will have to realize that you know what you mean and so they will agree that you mean what you know, what you know you mean, which is as near as anybody can come to understanding anyone." - Gertrude Stein

I struggle in the quagmire of wishing it all knew what I meant. What I know. Of knowing what I wish it all means. Of meaning what I wished it all knew. It only winds tighter the further up and further in you go.

What do I mean? It breaks so easily along the weakest lines of things. When you move enough times in, over, across, beyond, through some things, you only weaken them. And they will fall apart. It's not that you intended its breaking. It's that you loved it so much it could only ever be broken.

"A reassuring platitude: "I love you" became the constantly-handled coinage of a relationship daily devaluing itself."

I wrote that once, in a poem. I don't know why it keeps coming to the front of my mind. Swimming somewhere in all the doubt and the ether.

My room is finished. The walls are painted, the furniture is back. It's gold as gold as gold as gold. With a red dash here and there. The new bamboo blinds are hung, and hanging. The light breaks through them into a plethora of filigrees and falls across the bed that finally has a frame and isn't on the floor anymore.

In my rush to get to work this morning to log out of msn messenger, which I realized I hadn't logged out of on Monday, I left my cell phone sitting by my bed. It hasn't been used much lately, and I suppose it was just...something made suddenly forgettable.

I brought my music, but the batteries are dead.

I had a five-hour conversation Monday night with someone I don't know. It was fun, I had forgotten how enjoyable it can be, discovering a person, some new perspective that breathes and sees and owns a life. Something that at least for now is not at all a part of yourself, of the world that you've built around you.

I take comfort in little new things, when the old ones have found their place and there's room for something else in the compartments of my attention.

My gamer pride was stabbed, gutted, and devoured in the flash of blinding light this past week...

I am not as good as I think I am when I'm alone.

Which, I suppose, has far more implication in every other aspect of my life than I give it credit for.

Perhaps that's a meaning I don't know yet. But it's wedged itself in rather uncomfortably. And I will stare at it, annoyed, until I can learn to understand it, and accept the fact that it's there.

Perhaps that has been my problem all along.

Don't ask me why I write these things. It's something I have to get out, put down. Sometimes it makes the sorting of answers easier, and sometimes it only gives me new questions.

"While you were hanging yourself on someone else's words, dying to believe in what you heard, I was staring straight into the shining sun."

At least the Floyd will never leave me.

Odd, the-off weeks when the lightning of change forks its way through your soul and leaves you singed and electric. That's how I feel.

I feel like I keep clawing my way through distractions, because it's easier than staring at truth in all its bared-teeth and snarling glory. How bright and hollow the grimaces of our dreams can be when you meet them unexpected around a dark corner.

2006-06-05T18:55:00.000-07:00

This will not make much sense (and having no paragraphs helps that):

It was such an odd dream. I can only remember it in snippets. Dylan following me home one day, me completely unaware...In no town I've ever been in. I had stolen two axes from a firetruck at a crash scene because some crazed insurance saleman had purposely ran into one of his clients for some reason or another, and I THINK Dylan had been hanging around watching the scene, and happened to see me. He kept calling me, and I pretended to ignore him, just to see if it would irritate him. I ran (the axes gone now, no idea where) to this brick townhouse, in the front door. The main floor of it was some sort of art gallery, and my apartment/room was in the basement, where I kept all these statue things I was working on. The game was to hide from him, so I ran down the back stairs into my apartment, and locked the door. There was something I didn't want him to see...I didn't want him to see me the way I was...which was odd, because I don't remember anything being different at all. There were lilacs growing in a corner of the room, and it was messy, because of all my projects. Anyway, he suddenly comes in the back door of the apartment and knocks over all these statues that I had just finished arranging...OH! And there were suddenly these two creepy ex girlfriends of his there in the basement, and they were all yelling at me, and shoving my stuff around while I was trying to fix the ruffle on the hem of one of the statues that had been broken, and he took my hand and was like, "let's get out of here" and we ran upstairs and suddenly all of my friends from church were there in the gallery, and there was this weird party going on, and he was still holding my hand. A bunch of my old friends from high school were there too...old boyfriends, and Dylan and I went from table to table, talking to them, introducing them all, and I was happy, and everyone kept saying how happy I was, and David Bowie was performing a small cafe-esque type of concert on a tiny stage at the back of the room, and even HE noticed, and decided to take pictures of us. And Dylan kept pulling faces and making me laugh, and he never let go of my hand. We were talking to my old boyfriend Dave, and playing a game or something, and he was like, yeah, but he's not as hot as I am, and I was like, whatever! And I made Dylan take off his shirt to prove it. And I was right. We left Dave and Collin, I think it was, and walked around...and he gave me a piggyback ride and we went outside and there was like, glitter in the air or something, because everything was sparkly, and it was late sunset and we were in a park and everything was green and orange and purple and red and glittery and we laid down on the grass and watched the sun spin away from us as the world threw itself into the stars.

And I know none of that made much sense. But it does to me, because I can still see the images in my head. It was a cool dream. I woke up happy, if not a little weirded out.

So yes. That was the most eventful thing that happened to me this weekend. Other than painting half of my room and then sleeping in it with the door shut and no ventilation, which I think contributed to the oddness of the dream. I wrote some poetry, but I don't have it with me, so I can't share it. I will post it later.

Meanwhile, I'm at work, pretending I don't hate my job and humming along to my rather loud music.

2006-05-30T18:54:00.000-07:00

Bored at work...poetizing:

Tibial

Concussed and twisty
In mindstrand filigrees;

It goes like this, in bonespeak:
A marrow to calcium eke.

Earthshatter wind trumpet
Wound recumbant

Against the sweat of
Each irresolve.

Disillusionment fingered wrought
Tumblethoughts,

Clickclattering in my handsight
Like marbles, frozen bits of light.

Eager, eager in skinwhispers;
Breath the satiate of an occasional fester.

Where is my poette? The process of my Keats?
I glue the twowords, a new project: retreat.

I yearn for some Shelleied, metric humming,
A pourous abandonment in my Cummings.

Murmurflesh garbles, devours them meward:
So secret in stumblepen; anxious to be heard.

2006-05-30T18:53:00.000-07:00

In other news, random Chels quote from class today:

So, the question was: What gives you the right to write poetry? How do you start a poem? What do you have to say that is more interesting than the process of the paper's creation?

Nothing does, really. I write because I have to. In my life, only two things are imperative: to breathe, and to write. T.S. Eliot once said that "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things."

I can't remember who said it, but one of my favorite poetry quotes says something along these lines:"A poet is someone who, in a lifetime of standing in out in thunderstorms, manages to get struck by lightning seven or eight times."

At the end of the day, I don't know what gives me the right to write poetry. I do know, however, that the desire to write it, for me, is insatiable. I am continuously compelled into some form of verbally constructing my life, my keen feelings, my moments of glory and agony, into something solid. Something I can wrap my mind around, and feel pour out of me onto the page. For me, in so many ways, writing poetry is a kind of exorcism. Of coping. Of reaction. Of catching the smoke of subconscious thought in my fingertips. It's gold-panning for the occasional eternal ideas that so often in life lie just beneath the surface of things.

If I cannot tell me to you in some distilled and simple way, how will you ever hope to know me?

Yawn. Today is my last day of my stint as a temporary full-time employee. It's been three months, and I can tell you right now, I'm wholeheartedly sick of it. Sure, the money's great, but when you have no time for anything but your job, you realize how much life must blow for your dad, or your other friends who seem to work ALL THE TIME. It's been impossible for anyone to play with me, and I miss my friends. Hooray for having the afternoons and evenings back to myself. At least temporarily. I think it's time for Chelly Bean, here, to find herself a new job.

Go figure it happens the same week I finally get the last of my music collection downloaded to my iTunes. (Can we say junkie? I'm currently at 84.6 straight days of music, capacity-wise.)

Number B) Huzzah for invisionfree getting me extra credit in school. I set up a forum for my class, and everyone's so impressed at my tech skills. rolleyes.gif At least spending roughly all of 2004 online wasn't a complete waste of my life... >_<

Rhino is hiring currently, and I like the idea of working retail at a game store, however, I'd prefer to be accepted at Gamerz Edge (poser name, I know) which is a local gamers "mom n' pop" if you will. I mean, since I lost the ability to hang out at the D&D shelf in Media Play when they went out of business...I figure I'll take the next best thing. I dunno. I should check out the old record store and see if they need some summer help again. That was the best job. Nothing like an employee discount for a music addict to get an adequate fix and still afford to pay the phone bill.

Yawn. 2 more hours. Then I can go home and play Fable. I can make it!

2006-05-30T18:52:00.000-07:00

Weekend Update:

Ummm....let's see. I didn't write anything new. Though there was a lot of revising old poetry. I'm trying to put together a manuscript for a book which I've apprehensively entitled "Mercurial." It'll be mostly comprised of my favorite pieces from the batch I wrote during a rather emotionally telling previous relationship. It's at least the most complete body of work that I have, because it's a time period with a definitive beginning, middle and end. I'm working on it with my poetry comp. professor, who has been an invaluable resource as far as that goes. She stretches me with my work. A lot. It's great.

Went up to Grandma's yesterday, and helped put in a sprinkling system. Girl howdy, with all the yardwork I've been doing these days, you should see my guns. I'm ripped - and better - tan. Woohoo! However, I'm totally aching, because I got to be the trench-digger. I should have been in the army. Or a migrant worker. (I think I'm going to hell. It's my Utah-native elitist white republican fear-of-diversity upbringing. (Are you Hispanic or Illiterate? Oh wait...) <--- SEE?!?!? I can't help it. ERRR I could, but choose not too. I mean, why quit if you have a good excuse? laughing.gif)

Anyway, yes. That's it for now. Not much else...oh, one thing cool - we went up to the Logan Cemetary to leave flowers for my two Grandpas and Grandma, and my 4 uncles and aunt and everything. It was really cool. I was talking to Grandma (the one who's still alive) about what it was like to lose 5 babies to stillbirth. And she was talking about the amazing lessons it taught her and as she barely finished talking, some guy about 50 feet away, who I hadn't noticed, started playing "Scotland the Brave" on his bagpipes. It was awesome, because my Mom's family spent 5 years living in Scotland while my Grandpa built churches. I have decided that the bagpipes is one of my very favorite sounds in the world, and I REALLY want to learn how to play them.

Last item of business: X3

I hated it. It made me want to punch people. And I spent the whole movie with my friends telling me to stop crying and yelling at the screen, because the actors couldn't hear me. I you have any sort of affection for the real X-men stories, don't see it. It's not worth the money. Sigh.

2006-05-24T18:51:00.000-07:00

flameworthy

i throw you
to the ground.
on fire;

burn your image
in singed carpet.

forever

on the floor
i find you

spilt.

frantic apathy
mines the doubt
of your intentions,

proof

of its product
in all your

good things.

incomplexity

cower your brand
against my lining;

recoiled,
i tense again -

spring.

always i extend
into neverstraight

lines.

eager
your misconception
curls

within helltaut steel.

the spiny
irresolve

in my bending.

2006-05-23T18:50:00.000-07:00

Okay, we shall see if I can amble out a decent rantish blogging of sorts in the next...er...eight minutes of my break time alotted.

First up: New poems from last night.

Supped

bare is my end
of this oak table,
dreideltip patience
hovering
for the assault
of your dishes.

what was once-set,
now digested,
not a place
of your concerning.

a long-clotted stain
by the lathed leg
retreates
into shadow as sunset
sidles along
the cottoncrease
of an oxblood curtain.

neither its - nor fixture -
light reflects
faithfully
in my downcast eyes.

some speaking
of courses,
so coarsely.

Licked

you coarse sugar dwindled,
shrank at my tonguetip.
to dissolve these sweet things
i drown you, awash in saliva -
in the acid of all my tasting.

Alright, that's done.

Um, I don't have much to say. Today is better. However, I'm broke and need gas for the scooter. Yes - I'm so broke that I don't even have the three dollars required to fill my tank. Plus I have to run home before class and print off some homework, which I have yet to do still. But which I'll probably do once I get back to work.

And for my notorious SPF, I would just like to say, you have not been a jerk. I have been rather jerkish. Not just to you, but to every aspect of my life in general. And I know it's not PMS, because that was two weeks ago.

I think I'm being devoured by my writer, and when she roars into such prominence, I withdraw and lash out. For that, I am sorry.

It is hard. So much hardness, so many rocks I seem to notice in all the wide open paths. I had forgotten the difficulty of these things in longs months of misty nostalgia. In regret, and disappointment.

It is worth it. But it is a hard thing.

My problem is that I seem to do so well at running when things get hard. And I don't want to run, but it just seems to happen.

Hold me, even when I say I don't want you to. I need you so much, to keep me here. To help me see.

2006-05-22T18:50:00.000-07:00

Sigh.

It's one of those days, you know. Been one of those weeks, actually. The sense of settling into contentment with some aspect or other of your life that really, you shouldn't be content with. At least, not content with leaving it as it is, instead of elbowing it into some semblance of progression.

I spent the weekend baking cookies for sad friends, beating Republic Commando for the umpteenth time. Scrubbing a bathroom that my sister had supposedly cleaned all last month, but sure didn't seem that way.

Then yesterday, I had to give an impromptu Sunday school lesson, because I thought that we split lessons by odd/even numbers, but apparently it's split on the every-other-Sunday basis. So... last week's lesson was an even number, which is what I usually teach, and it was Mother's day, so no one was in the singles' ward, because we all went to church with our families. And I just figured that I got to skip a week, which was fine by me, but it turns out I was wrong.

And what was I supposed to teach about? Judges. From the Old Testament. However, apparently I'm a marvelous teacher because the lesson turned out fabulous, and I am a genius. No, not really. Well, I just felt like I was standing up front babbling, and wondering to myself why I was talking, and confessing to any number of heinous stories from my past... but at the end of the lesson, this guy, Irving, who doesn't come to Sunday school much, came up to the front while I was erasing the board and he gave me a hug and said that he was so glad that I taught today and that I had said some things that he really needed to hear.

Can I just tell you how satisfying it is, as a teacher, to find out that what you're doing actually touches people? I love my calling. I love teaching Gospel Doctrine, even though we're covering the Old Testament this year, and it's usually a bugger to help people understand or motivate them to read. However, not only am I an exceptional teacher, I happen to be a master chef, and for all intents and purposes, I could get them to memorize War & Peace for my cookies if I wanted to. So who says that God doesn't utilize ALL of our talents? Hah.

So, at least the spiritual aspects of my life are doing spiffy. They'd probably do better if I could curb my swearing, but at least I don't swear when I'm teaching. And I've done a good job the past couple of weeks of keeping the words in my head, instead of streaming out of my mouth. Which means I'm pretty much screaming obscenities constantly in my brain, but at least no one can hear them.

This past week really sucked. I mean, honestly, it did. And I don't really know why, because it wasn't like some great, traumatic crap happened. I think it was just a whole jumble of little grievances that by Saturday turned out to be one big hairy Ball o' Grief. Do you ever feel like you have so much you'd like to talk about, but you don't know how to word it, or who to tell it to? That's how I feel. I feel all... knotty inside. And I can't untangle it because I don't have long enough fingernails, or a fork handy, and all the people who keep trying to help me are just making the knot tighter and bigger and more frustrating.

I feel like I'm missing some crucial person in my life at the moment... the problem with that being the fact I don't know who the hell it is.

There's a hole in my bucket, dear Liza. A hole.

2006-05-17T18:49:00.000-07:00

Okay, so in Poetry Composition today my verbiage was torn apart and I was told that focusing on abstractions only says that I waver with the absolute horror that I'm going to be misunderstood.

It was an interesting class. We workshopped my poem "flush." I was told that an image can give you all that you need for a poem. And that in this particular instance, my responsibility is to the snail. She made me write that down and underline it. And she screamed, "STOP!" and waved her arms violently when I went to explain that it was about confessing - ...and she said that I could hint, but I was never allowed to tell. Because your reader will NEVER understand you the way you want to be understood, which is why the aim of poetry is to convey the reader to the reader, and not the artist to the reader. (Which I happen to have said before...) I dunno. It was a poem I had submitted because I knew it needed a lot of work.

So, that said, here's the original, and then where I'm at with it so far:

flush

a snail discovered
midst repose
in its shell.

truth doesn't let
sad, small things
posess their dreams.

each moment
of soft hopes snatched
by that rush of tide,

and broken:
thrust upon
reality's shoals.

the waves
will never care.

birds peck at, eat
the remains of what
they cannot understand.

flush 2.0

a snail discovered
midst repose
in its shell,

curls so unassuming
between cobble and
cobble and
cobble.

it shivers
in the descent-gallop
of a careless wave.

snatched asleep;
how clear, but silent
an eggshell fortress
succumbs

to the unwhim
of water and insistent
rock.

after wet retreating -
on sunburnt stones -

birds peck at, eat
the remains of what
they cannot understand.

Which do you think works better? Why?

2006-04-28T18:44:00.000-07:00

Pt. I (The Latest) Hard Things

Okay, so what really frustrates me is that because neither of them can relate to me completely, they'll totally misread anything I do. Anything I did. And I want to punch them. In the face. Until they're not alive anymore. I loathe the way they'll fondle their damn egos with the thought that I even care like that.

That is the most frustrating thing. A misinterpretation of sincerity into some grotesque parody of my intentions.

Oh well, if anything, they deserve each other. The more I've gotten to know them, the more I've realized that they don't have friends, they have toys. People are good, as long as they're usable. Once they don't know what to do with you anymore, you're made to walk the figurative plank at knifepoint.

It's all just....so painfully funny. Watching them insist time and time again that real, genuine feelings matter sooooo much, and they turn around and EVERYTHING they do screams the opposite.

It's disgusting to me, to watch these things, these people, these one-time friends dissolve themselves into something so shallow. However, it's a morbidly fascinating kind of disgusting...to watch them using each other. Because that's what it is. That's all it will be. Is it wrong to hope he knocks her up so they both get a faceful of reality? Because I do. In the maliciousness of my occasionally angry constantly-broken heart.

They like each other because they're dangerous, that's all. Eventually their interactions will dissolve into resentment and loathing, and I will sit quietly in the dark and resent the fact that I'm usually right and never listened to.

She's like fire. Like a raging prairie fire, and I am one of the many things she's burned. And just like fire, it's her everyone rushes to, to control, to put out. And I am left behind. I feel so...tossed aside. Even my friends, my real friends, my BEST girlfriend - has spent more time at her side than mine in all of this. Supporting her. And...I resent it. It breaks my heart. I can't stop crying about it.

Said best friend dragged me to lunch with her today, and suprise-surprise, Su and Dan are there too. I hate the way they all act like nothing has happened. Like my feelings, because I don't like to make them so readily available appearance-wise, must not mean anything. That because Chelsea always has to joke about everything, if we joke about all of it, then we can have a good laugh while she's bleeding to death under the table.

In all of it, I think I resent Dan the most, but I'm taking out my frustration on Su, because she's the one who weasels her way into every relationship, every friendship, every interaction between people. I hate Dan for the way every girl is the same to him. I hate him for making me feel so easily replaced. I feel cheap. I feel, betrayed. I feel so unspeakably mad at myself for the way I was suckered into thinking all his schmoozy talk actually meant something at the end of the day. That his fluffy ideals actually played some small part in his actions and real life. I hate the way I finally trusted someone, and he took the opening (the state of willing open-ness that he had no IDEA how long it took me to achieve) I gave him, and flayed me alive with it.

Can I explain? I have no words for this hurting. I have watched unanaesthatized as my worst fear was gouged into me. Cut me to pieces. To finally give all of me, just me, completely open and honest to someone who I was sure, was SURE would appreciate it. Who would love me as a friend, and finally understand. But he didn't. Doesn't. And I have been so wrong.

It's not that I love him - I don't. Not like that. Not the way that everyone is assuming I do. That somehow I feel so upset because Su has "stolen" him away from me. It's not that at all. I resent Su because she was how Dan proved to me that he was nothing I thought he was. That neither of them were the friends I thought they were.

The hard thing is knowing and caring more than they do. Is knowing that for all of my love, support, understanding, and genuine concern, I get the teaspoonful, while gallon after gallon is poured out on the people who don't know it enough to appreciate what it is. What they have. It's a lack of desire for understanding, that makes me break so completely the relationship in my hands. I was willing to be there for you, but you will not use me.
This is the only thing I require.

"Tomorrow is a new day, with no mistakes in it." - Anne

The hardest part is trying to find the courage, the faith, to pick up each re-shattered piece and begin again.

Pt. II SPF

awake

in the stillness
i can hear your breathing
secure, unrestricted
devotedly you.

i myself, can't sleep so i
am listening to jeff buckley
singing: if you knew
how i missed you, you
would not stay away,
away...

awake.
awake, awake.
a wake of memory
is where i winter now;

in the quiet, without
you and with you.
but you weren't here for then.

you can't see the charred
pain tied to these -
each, eerie similarities,
moments.

i try so delicate hard
to untangle you from the
barbed wire he grew here.

if you knew
how i loved you, you
would not understand.

if you knew
how easy i love you, you
would know
how hard i have to forget.

________________

love, new
love, love
again

is tangled hair
meeting old brush;

painful working.

the notes of laughter
hang fragile
in the air you don't breathe.

i break
in the same moment
i slide

ever closer to
the promise -

or draw -

of that portion
of your Eden.

Pt. IV Nova's Heart

Supernovas and white dwarf implosions...
This past week was weird. The weekend was hard. My good friend at an old poetry site who I've known for like, 4-5 years, her baby boy, Nova (Donovan), died Thursday (April 6) afternoon.

It was hard, in a way I didn't expect it to be. I hadn't been at the site for about 6 months, and wasn't really up to date on what was going on with everyone, and suddenly I'm back there and first thing I hear is that Erin's baby's really, really sick. It broke my heart.

He was 4 months old and 4 days old...and in the most theoretically improbable way, he touched countless lives. It's times like this when I feel very ungrateful, that I resent myself for taking for granted so often the amazing calm, comfort, and reassurance that I get from my faith. I can't imagine the pain, the aching, the impossible grief that would swallow me whole if I lost a child without the security of my knowledge that I'd see them again. My heart it breaking for Erin and her family.

And yet, even in their loss, I am amazed at her strength. At her calm...Erin has always been one of my favorite people. One of my poetic heroes.

Sometimes God likes to remind us that our own problems are trivial, and that life - any life - has a reach, and a power, beyond our understanding.

white dwarf implosion and the supernova

can you feel
the rings of saturn
on your fingers?

the impositious reaching
of a life
built from strung-together
nebulae.

stars hang
in a spring's bleeding
veils.

the coronal aura of
your very existence.

in that family's universe
you were integral,

you were a world.

in a sunset's
dying blush,

we feel the warm breath
of your dissolving
on our skin.

"Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our greatest fear is that we are powerful beyond comprehension." - Nelson Mandela

More musings on the Supernova...

In passing,
nightlight thoughts
transpire...

on wind your
every breath -
like fire -

scourge the mundane
from my veins

i let small things
again
take the reins.

naked, the peeling
of each new day
vies for attention
across the emptiness.

soft breath, little brother,
where are you
on the wind that brings you
so white and luminescent
to Him.

a delicate unbalancing,
whips of why still burn their sting
across the lips of hope mid-song -
its cast-off heartbeat rhythm strong.
each muse relatable, and praised.
new growth sprung in fields late-razed.

Pt. V The Poems about Myself

symbionic

tentacled heart-anenome
starved to gather endlessly
grope at all the swim-by *WiSh*es
sleep - still empty - with fishes.

Abysmalion...

razor edge
of petal

bloomed:
so incomplete,
so unassumed.

deeper gouge
the silent yearning;

whispers whither
it with burning.

fire stoked
of dying embers;

how easy - quick -
the heart remembers

a lash of silver,
glint of flame,

to kill the thing
behind the name.

Rewound

misaddled
entropy,
and the sting
of each word
spoke softer;

many are
those silences
left unsaid.

rewound:
to where i
wrap
up the starting
again.

the early week
of my second life,
i found a niche
refillable.

i had never seen
one of those
before.

green-ivied
grew the door
away from this.

too late,
i was. behind:
the only thing,
these small hands.

i lived:
a place where
i was young,
and each new
unsaid silence

fell like gnats
into the buzzing
of my heavy-
lidded ear.

what me-
andered exploits
you spread
across my skinning,

something held
my box-puppy heart
from slipping
to its pre-assembled
state.

obstinants
would not let me
see whatever
did
that cradling.

Pt VI. Conclusion

I currently resent all toilet paper in public restrooms. I've been spoiled by the plushness of Charmin™.

Pt. VII Favorite Random Poem that Currently Means Something To Me

the red wheelbarrow
by william carlos williams

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

-=The La End=-

2006-03-28T18:44:00.000-08:00

to ____, after a year

i forget how comfortable,
and familiar
your rooms are.

i was stung
by the hovering happiness.

bit by the me
who still haunts your corners.

i buried her in june.
i buried her in suddenly embracing,
encouraging -
the wealth that she hid.

in her death -
and more, your death -
i found myself.
and didn't know what
to do with it.

oh, the severed pain
the amputated aching
of all that you are
and were
and still seem to me.

i wish that you could see
the profound,
the trivial
quiet
screaming
barbed and silken
ways you're still wound
in my days.

i have traveled
from the door of your room
around a world,
a lifetime,
and find myself
at your door again.

in my past month
of silent detachment
i settle to the spring cleaning
of soul, of self.

oh, do you
realize for what
it was
it was everything?
my heart was my own
until you took it
so smartly, tender
and intent.

i gave you what i could.
at the time it was some
spectacular
lunch-trade acquisition,
deal.

through old windows,
long-washed
in a season of tears,
i see the days clearer.

though it's misunderstood,
i call you my first -
and so-far-only.

you: the axis,
the fulcrum of my past,
my growing.

my life in measures,
before and after
the coda of you.

2006-03-27T18:43:00.000-08:00

It's not really wanting alone time, per se. I mean, the last thing I want to be is alone, which is why this week is hitting me so hard in the first place. It's more of a...I just want to be away from the people who don't fully understand and appreciate me. I don't want to spend time with people who are going to hang out with me and then be so glad they get to run off and do other things with other people who are more important to them.

I dunno. I'm just feeling so bitchy lately, and I feel bitchy because I feel needy, and I feel needy because I feel lonely, and I feel lonely because I am. Ha. Something along those lines...only with far more stuff in the spaces between the periods and the next words. I was cleaning my room this weekend, and I found the old letters that i'd thought I'd lost in the bottom of my desk drawer, and being a girl, I had to do the stupid thing and go back and read them all. And it...walking through all of their old rooms in your heart...the places you lock away and vow you'll never go back to...I walked through them and it ached, tore at me. And it wasn't what was there that did it. It was what once was there.

In the empty spaces between things I read my laughter, and my happiness. Our laughter and happiness, and I sobbed. I was mad at myself. Rereading the stupid things I said and did. I was mad at the person who I was a year ago. I resented her for not seeing what she had, and where she was, for being so self-centered and fake and at the same time being so painfully genuine. I look back now, from a perspective that's been polished and cleared by tears and trials, and I see it for what it was. And part of it for what it could have been. I gave myself to him in the most literal figurative way possible. I cut my heart out and gave it to him, and for a while he held it. For a while he wanted it, and it meant something to him. And I had to take it back, because I saw that both he and it were strained, and that it was my fault, and I thought if I could take it all back and put it all back and patch up the holes, that things would be just as they were.

I was wrong, and I've spent a year reading my mistakes between each stitch of regret, forgiveness, and release. Each seam in the sewing up of an old life to give it a place in this new one. And it's hard, because I didn't know what to do with him then, and I still don't know what to do with him now. He just is. This disjointed part of myself that never quite fit, and that probably never will quite fit...but it's a part that I wanted - and a part that I still want - with me.

Sometimes it's funny how a thing as beautiful as memory can sting you. The burn, the lump in the throat, when you see an old movie, hear an old song. A joke and you laugh, because he would have laughed. Because he would have rolled his eyes. Because he would have seen it with his eyes shining. And I don't get to see it. I don't get to hear it. I don't get to be a part of that as the me I am now. It was with the me who I once was. Who I once tried so hard to be. I don't mourn the loss of her. Or the loss of him. I mourn the loss of something that never was, and what never could be. The loss of redoing something because you think you know what you would have done. What you should have done. The loss of being able to go back and make the now something different. Make it something better, brighter, cleaner...new. The loss of rediscovery. The loss of a friendship, a friend; an opportunity to approach a once-inextricable part of my life with a shiny new sincere comfort in myself.

It's just something that I have to do. I have to go through the rooms. A spring-cleaning of the heart, if you will. I have to take down the pictures and hold them and see them and wonder. I have to dust the shelves, and pull down the books and leaf through them. The memories. The poetry. The conversations. To re-taste, to smell again, to once more finger something I cherished. Something that was an invualuable treasure to me.

I know it probably doesn't make sense, and that you probably don't understand. It's hard for me to understand it myself. But I have to do it. And I have to sit up at night and write about it. To lay awake at three in the morning on a Saturday and remember what I used to do. It's a re-feeling that purges. That purifies. In a way, my going back each time is the way that I have to destroy it enough to let it go. If I return enough, it will lose its novelty. It will lose its meaning. It's value. And when I no longer have to go back, because it means nothing to me, then I can let it go. Familiarity breeds contempt...I must make myself once again familiar with my ghosts, so I resent them enough to no longer cry when they leave me.

2006-03-21T18:42:00.000-08:00

Anyway, updates, updates...that aren't poetry. Looks like I'm going to do the cut and paste from email conversations thing again, because I haven't been keeping track of the psychoticness of the past couple of weeks....

"Wierd, I've been having the same kind of conclusions about my own love-life these days. --- This bozo can gather the wierdos of course ---, but when it comes to collecting me a nice, decent, funny, sincere guy, I totally fall of my face. EVERY DAMN TIME. It's getting really old. And I try to be unassuming, I try to be laid back and fun and occasionally flirty, but...I dunno. I hate myself somedays, and that's really hard to deal with - especially lately for some reason. It's like...the line between loving who I am inside - being comfortable and happy with that, and the downward spiral of chronic misery and loathing and abhorrence of outside me. It's like, sure my personality is in one whole piece now, but the outside me doesn't feel like it fits the inside me, and I try so hard to take care of it, but I just can't. I'm doing something wrong and screwing up stuff, and I have no idea what goes wrong, and I have no clue of how to fix it, and sometimes I feel bad for myself and wonder if ___ was my only chance at that, and that somehow, in someway, it was ME who screwed the whole thing up, and that if somewhere along the road I hadn't turned or did turn, or paid better attention, we'd still be together and he wouldn't be an asshole and I wouldn't be some...whatever the hell sad thing I am."

"Yeah... ... ... Stargirl puts me in a weird mood too. I read it every once in a while when I get into a mood of self-resentment, the sense of a need to conform. I've been feeling the pressure to kind of change myself the past few weeks. Felt like I've failed at something I didn't understand enough to ever have succeeded. Felt like being myself wasn't good enough, and that it's time for me to move into a new phase of some other mask of personality, and I've been resenting that feeling, because I know it's not the truth, and it's not something I need to do.

It's interesting to me (in an observation-type of interesting) that you got angry this morning about that. I've been having some serious rage issues with life and myself and whatever this past week. So much anger that I couldn't have a serious discussion with anyone without yelling at them. I've felt so off. So resentful at myself for the way I've been dealing with people. Thursday night, after a huge fight with my parents, I had a totally panic/anxiety attack and spent the rest of the night sobbing and clawing at my wrists with my fingernails in the dark because I couldn't sleep and wanted to get out. Get out, leave, no more. Friday morning was desperate, and awful. I felt sick and disgusted with myself. The weekend was a whirl of friendly concern and self-detachment...that empty feeling you mentioned. If it's any consolation I can somewhat relate.

Ugh. I'm sorry to kind of twist everything to my perspective. I feel like I do that a lot. Listen to someone and understand, and then wind up just talking about myself. I try not to do it, but it's like...I can only understand things through my own paradigm of experience, and I present the experiences to people to show them that in some small way I can relate...I dunno. I get mad at myself about that. About being too selfish. About projecting myself onto things, experiences, people. I dunno. I guess I'm trying to say that I'm sorry if I treat you like an emotional pack-mule. smile.gif I don't feel like one. It's nice to know that there's someone who I can just kind of...express myself to without thought of being judged or misunderstood or...yeah. So, don't worry about unloading to me. It's nice to feel like someone trusts you enough to just...tell you things. And thank you for being someone who I can just talk to. It means so much to me.

With the Jed, Andrea, Adam, and Su crap...I dunno. It's just getting really old lately. Su really just doesn't know what to do to get out of herself and live ...so she whores herself out emotionally onto whatever the closest thing to Jed is. The reasons for that are many and complex. Su likes Jed because Andrea loves him. And she has a weird kind of respect and pity for Andrea. She wants to be Andrea, and she's glad she isn't...all at the same time. If Andrea thinks Jed is amazing, he must be. And he is. If Su could get Jed to love her, it would mean she was better than Andrea, and she desperately wants to be better than people. It's why she was trying to get you to ask her out. If I thought you were amazing, you must be. If she could get you to put the moves on her, she would be better than me. She's done that to all of her friends. But Jed didn't want her. Jed didn't respond. So she felt worse about herself, and worse, in her eyes, she felt like Andrea was better than her. So she picked up the next thing that moved, that paid her attention...which happened to be John. She wanted to play with someone. She wanted to reassure herself that she was better than Andrea. That she could take a man, twirl him around a finger, and not even have it matter. She plays with John...and it makes me sick. She likes Adam because he's dangerous, because he, himself, is a player. Because playing with Adam lets her be at Jed's house, be around Jed. Where she can observe the kind of man who can resist her wiles. And it just makes her like him and resent him more. But Su didn't take into account that she can still get played with. She likes to pretend that the things people say to her don't matter...but they do. They do desperately. And so she plays pretend. She plays spy. She plays the independent aloof ingenue. She plays like she doesn't care. She plays the game like there's no stakes, when really she's put everything she feels she has on the table. Andrea and I realize that. It's why, after all the backstabbing she's done, we still let her be around. We still coddle her. We involve her and reassure her and let her prop herself up with our failures. She's the kind of person who can only feel good if she feels like she's at least not as pathetic as the people around her. Which, perhaps, only speaks to my and Andrea's own insecurities. About our willingness to admit that we are somewhat pathetic. That we willingly let ourselves be the sad lower bar people raise their standards from. It gets hard. It's hard to convince Su that she's brilliant and smart and beautiful so that she doesn't do something desperate like slash Jed's tires so that she can come rescue him. Stab him to death so she can nurse him to health at the side of his hospital bed. She destroys things so she can try and fix them to feel productive. And they always end up being her friends, and she never follows through on being capable enough to fix her messes. We fix them for her. We feel sorry for her. Currently, Su's the troubled, unstable teenager of our eclectic group. Andrea is the insecure one with the longing she won't admit to, sacrificing herself to the needs and whims of those who mean so much to her. Jed's the seemingly indifferent hearttthrob who's too afraid of commitment to just take the thing that he needs, the thing that would take care of him. Meanwhile, I'm playing the mother at her wit's end. The headless hen trying still to guard her chicks.

It's getting old. The games get old. The lack of sincerity and genuine communication gets old. The babying, the overlooking, the constant forgiving and conceding get old. I'm tired of it. And it's worn on me so much the past few weeks that I feel myself slipping. I did slip. The past week was one giant slip that I'd been heading to for a long while. Helping so much that you don't realize you need help too, and everything collapses around you and all you can do is sit with your head in your hands and cry.

It's been a hard week. A hard past few weeks. Hard at work, and hard at home, and hard with friends. I feel like I have no escape place. Nowhere I can go and not have to care about things that aren't real that I don't understand. I feel like I'm maneuvering through stalemate after stalemate. I want a new game. Or I just want the game to end. The pain gets old. The hurting is so old. So unbearable some days. Friday night I wanted to just go out and get blind, slobbering drunk to the point of numbness and then wander out on the highway. I've been so mad at my family, at my friends, at my job, at myself...it was nearly worth it. I'm glad I just decided to sleep all weekend instead. I just feel like my ability to shake it off has run out. And I'm scared for the next wave to hit."

Friend: --ah but there it is again... now you've left and i can feel myself getting angry again, because you're not here as my blood vassal. i'm such a vampire it's sick. it's like i only like people for their vitality and my dream is an eternal marriage of a male parasite to the female wholeness that i need and detest for my dependance on it. i'm so sick. i make myself sick like this when i'm alone... what a fucked up kid.
Me: - It's not sick. And neither are you. But I understand. Who doesn't want that? Who doesn't want a pillar of strength, a tall, dark, green, living tree to prop ourselves up on, to wind and grow around? I dunno. I wish I were a vampire. I'm more of the over-enthusiastic blood donor who winds up bleeding myself dry trying to help other people. Fat lot of good it does when you're so bled dry that you're dead. I do that. I take on these "projects" under my wing and give them transfusion after transfusion and then leave them co-dependent and me rasping my last death-rattle thinking I've done them any kind of good. I wish I could even it out. That's the thing I'm in the process of researching at the moment. Finding that balance between helping quench thirst and keeping your own cup full.

Friend:odd how perceptive i can be when i feel like shit... same goes for you, sista, but i retract the use of the s-word in your case... you're perceptive when your... cranky. =P
Me:- Ha! No, that's funny. Because in the shower today, I was standing there and realizing how much I just felt like shit these days. And I said it. I was like, "I feel like shit." And it was weird...I dunno... because I had to say it. I had to accept verbally that it's what I was dealing with. And that, hey, feeling like shit happens. And if you realize it, then you can, I dunno. Deal with it better. I DO feel like shit...but for me, it's become a burrowing thing. I don't want people other than me to deal with it. I don't want to try and express it to people, because I can't word it right, and I don't understand it well enough myself to explain it even to me. I've moved back further into a few chambers of my nautilus shell, and just want to be alone. Duke it out in my head. Even when there's no one to benefit from it, I sit in a room and bleed myself. Watch it pool on the floor and wonder at how such a thing seems to help everyone but me. I bleed and I don't die. I sit there cold and grey, suddenly not caring anymore. Overcome by the most exhausting sort of apathy. And in the cold and grey and the apathy of my reason and my consciousness, waves of emotion throw me against the walls of my chambers, hurl me to the floor. Beat me on the hardness of my own safe places. I can't control them, I don't want them. They just come. And I do nothing. I let them throw and use me. And then they go. And I cry because I don't know what else to do.

Maybe someday I'll realize that it was all one big thing of pain these past few years, and the good things are still to come. It's just...in the moment you feel like nothing will ever be worth it. And that's the hole that I've dug myself into for now.

2006-03-03T18:41:00.000-08:00

Mleh. Updates, updates. I need to update all of my little online journals...

These poems are from the recent batch that I wound up writing about someone - who once upon a time meant the world to me - because I was feeling lonely and when I feel lonely, my thoughts seem to revert to him and I can't write anything until I get him back out of my head. So...yeah. They're all untitled but they're all separate poems. Just a common theme...

fingering my disillusionment
like still-warm sheets
the empty morning after,
i press my lips to your name;
the taste of you
still ringing in my ears.

i dismantle
this eager pleasing,
like i'll rearrange the kitchen
once he's finally moved away.

in my unguarded mind,
i was yours.
whispered to you beneath
those many, many
waves of sleep. my own.

given piece by piece
in pieces to the wind,
addressed to you -
swept so unceremoniously,
and scattered.

i won't be retrieving.

each tear for you
returned to sender.

migratory direction.

the yellow ochre core of
oh, desire.

burnished gold,
a taint of dried blood.

i've found the colour
of refusal,
breaking,
her pieces beneath rugs,
shady shoebox letters;

why so many things
fall apart
at the creases.

promises to self
in faded print,
erased by the ignorant years.

my time
always on your side.

my side
the one you disapproved,

the one you painted in
callous,
callow,
hollow laughter.

your colours never
wash away in tears.

your tearing the only thing
to rebuild.

i gnaw this
papier mache heart
to stop the hurting.

we laughed -
we talked about...
well, everything.

and i wanted it,
i loved it.

he loved me,
and i smiled.

we talked, confided
and the world
fell away.

in whispers,
contented silence,

i learned
to let them love me.

i wound your moments
in the afterward,
around ponderous fingers.

a desire to lay you
scriven on this page -
wholly bare,
barely whole;

were i disentangled enough
to objectify
each meaning, glance -

to extract some
less-raw symbol.

i've never been so literal,
so flayed.

instead, it's this
purged you -
riven from me -
smeared somewhat
undelicately
here...

uneras-
able the traces
of this ectomy,

it's you, in my
blood on each page.

i can laugh at you now.
i can be angry,
and not blind.

i see truth
without exceptions.

the window i chose
to catch your light through,
to look out of...

we broke it.
i stand with bleeding fingers
in shards of glass
and laugh

at how i couldn't
see it coming.

2006-02-17T18:40:00.000-08:00

Weird mood lately...Chel's in hidey-neutral-mellow mode today. Bored, detached, unmoved, resenting the blah non-adventure uninspiredness of the world around her...

There are days when I want so much new, something new, shiny, moving, transcendent, fly-away, breathtaken, beholden, cherishable...something feet-sweeping. And it doesn't come, and doesn't come, and I melt and distill in the bottom of this shell...I feel like writing, and it comes, but it feels same-old. It feels second-hand. It feels...not so fresh...

How do we find the things we never know we've lost? I asked my friend that yesterday, and he wrote a poem in response:

the things we don't know that we've lost
you find them with sincerity, gravity, benevolence
they wait outside security, forethought and malevolence
they present themselves
from diving delves
and steal away to waiting empty shelves
you find them without knowing

...you find them without knowing...How do you find the place/time/space/emotion where you don't know? I could walk that in circles for a month of Sundays...

It got me thinking... ... ... and I wrote:

Knots

the no in the knowing
to know some no known.
you knew you'd neglected
that never-be-shown.

so no is the new way
of never, of knows.
of tweaking the action
to forsee the shows...

the music not twisted,
the picture-knot scene -
to know the not knowing
of knowledge between.

I spend my whole life with the question of where my next inspiration will come from always at the forefront of my subconscious. Inspiration is my motivating factor. It's the force that moves me. I dunno.

I really liked my poem, though. I haven't had one so flowy and well-strung just come out of me effortlessly like that in a long, long time.

2006-02-09T18:40:00.000-08:00

And these are some that me and my friend Dan coauthored.

A Chance Sky

Unknown to ground beneath my trodden feet
I was continued by that cloud,
blanketed by misty sheet...
creased and curtained, shredded shroud.
Restless or gray?
so far to say...
to watch the way it floats
I have to call it both.
Continued - trying to forget in the horizon,
which always receded:
all the subtle wisps of cloud
the winds of change I wish I needed.
Can one trust a wistless submission?
A cloud can't move of its own volition.

Tilted

stumbled on him as he sat
at a quicksand pond
tracing his bare toes in the silt

watched her lay her body flat
from behind the fernleaf frond
her beauty on it's back to stilt

sigh to scream, to sweat from matte;
sediment covers bare-skin bond
in inching moments, caution unbuilt.

Transcented

We merely knew
it wasn't human nature
to love
only what returns love.

A reclamation of potential,
and the acknowledgement
of something more
than just compassion.

And by the same mystery
we knew
it was divine seed
growing in us.

Unveiled

sipped once-known dew,
to fall into
the world we find -
in kindred kind,
in place divined -
is only once in childhood.

With it where the world stood
betrothed to such ephemery
the rest is merely memory
and wherewith it was wrought
is held as tiny as a thought

a place we knew beyond recollection,
in certain flashes we glimpse perfection.

Long Ways Home...

Held aloft in wanderlust
just nowhere, home where 'no' is just
creation's source,
the death of beauty.

Where home is just the way the light
turns in her hair,
how so many tangents set the same path.

Two voices speak to me:
one your voice,
the other the actions in your hands.

I cannot discern my yearning
between the one, and the other.

Absorbed in hard solidity
none stop to see or pity thee,
except the occasional me,
who would wrench out your divinity
and feed you your potentiality...
could I but keep a semblance of what is pure
from all this burning.

In the land of unmaking,
the glamour of death unwound -
two mouths are silent:
one in awe of destruction
both in being kissed.

It's rarely seen,
what lies in nothing except between.

-untitled-

You
are all that's wrong
with my life.
And I need you.
And I claim you.

You will have to crawl on all fours,
through the burning
to reach the bleeding.
the other side of the wound
that I am embodied in

And I
I'm all that was right
with your life
you need me
and you'll have nothing
nothing to do with me

2006-02-08T18:39:00.000-08:00

(untitled)

dangerously visionary,
illimitably winding progression
about your feet.

a mindful of spirit
keeps moving higher.

a jacob's-ladder of
celestially propagated
transcendence.

validation of propelling oneself -
somehow
it falls up.

a stumble
and the soul's flung
deep heavenward.

something lit
flickers between the bars.

the world is caged,
not you.
catch the right box-thinking.

(untitled)

have you ever
loved something so much
you want to break it?

i do and have.

like, waking
baby siblings
to see them cry,
because they're more
alive that way.

squeeze love
just tight enough
that it doesn't
cry yet.

i want to feel it
rendered almost-broken
at my hand,
if only for their understanding.

it's not a real love
if it's not painful -
i like the fire
because of the burning,
not the light.

because at least,
in this moment i see fine -
it's the feeling
that i've missed.

Trees in the Dark

Did you see the branches?
Bare, groping at the night,
the sky.

Did you hear them breathing?
That call to be needed.

The air surrounded,
silhouetted,
caressed them -
and still they shivered,
so dark and incompletely.

The taste of spring
more fickle than spring itself.

Did you see the way
their empty longing,
their overwhelming, crowded lonely
kept them so cold?

I watched them tap me,
beckoning for the ear
that hears their wizened whisperings.

The almost-rain
so much less bearable
than each acrid drought.

paperwings

have you put on
your bright, new paper wings?
got the glue for your head?
the tape for the broken wing?
i don't mind,
as long as i can't fly.

go put on
those bright, new dancing shoes.
here's news for your head -
you need tape for that broken wing.
i don't mind,
as long as i'm with you.

you're long gone,
on bright blue paper wings.
it went to your head,
you never taped the broken wing...
i don't mind,
as long as i die too.

(untitled)

i lost happiness
in your vast, stretching sky.

all those homes are lined up so straight...
but on the inside they're not that way.
they've closed all the windows and locked all the doors.
from sadness to sunshine, i'm yours.

lately i've been feeling
like you'll never know
if you don't mark the way back
the further you go.

i'm the bright star
that fell behind
the mountain of feeling you are.

a dream

there was no long reclining;

an inclination toward shrillness
and repetitive side-cast glances
at the fleshy underbelly
of an obsession i'd labeled invincible.

i dreamt it mingled
at friends, so nonchalantly.
i changed, and they
saw my too-loud hiding.

he was stained and many-fingered.
he wouldn't let me go.
i weaseled some touching,
to revel and detach in all the warmth.

he came too close -
and i withdrew,
drew in.

i couldn't deny this impending
unleash of a hurt i've yet to know.
a sudden pique in curiosity,
a deformed bent
toward self-evaluation of strength,

of tasting the flames
to know how to describe the burning.

i wanted it not for a pleasure,
but as experience that also
had passed through
the mould of my perception.

i had to know it,
so i could set it aside
and cease its relentless eating.

i watched him gnaw my shoelaces
and trembled to hold,
to still - distill - him.
in all his potency,
he was still not strong enough for me.

i bruised him:
hugged his wriggling,
and wound up with
a knuckle in his soft spot.
he moaned,
and played with his shirt.

i had to keep turning,
to hoard my distraction
in a magpie's nest
of feigned ignorance and trivia.

too close - he kept
moving in too close -
and i couldn't de-veil.

i couldn't give him the words
already packed,
tangled on the tip of my tongue.

oh, how
i wanted to.

but the room was full
and he crawled,
already so overwhelmed.

i cried and he was too
busy laughing to see
how i buried it
in inflated transparency...
they were a decoy.

a mask for the blood-price
he exacted so unawares.

my glimmering was shot-crippled,
and fox-eaten too soon.

(untitled)

escaping in music
and sleep.

i drown so carefully
in everything else.

your clutches
sink me more.

each truth,
confession,
another stone
in my pockets.

another struggled blinking
at the harsh white
of shifting watery sunlight.

in this other world,
even death is real.

(untitled)

will you click easily into place?
or is there much forcing,
more edges to be trimmed,
and neither of us happy
with an imperfect fit?

(untitled)

sidled up to a streetlamp,
i watch the nearby meter
run out of time.

maybe there was a time -
some coagulation of moments
we might have built with.

for now, i ponder
with lampshade eyes
the seconds we spent...

contrasting what i
wanted to see,
to feel...
with what was
actually
seen and felt.

you brushed past me
in the rain,
in the dark.

and in that blink,
your warmth was familiar.

it also burned me.

(untitled)

exhumed the ghost,
the slivered dangling
which wrapped my fingertips.

it was treasure,
silk victorian lace,
silver-stranded -
delicately filigreed.

moving to dote on it
the next morning -
in true light,
i cradled cobwebs
with these hands.

(untitled)

burn the midnight,
ache the very bones -
and gut my wrenching.

your chill ran bloody,
i curdled screams
on the floor.

razed hair -
that docile, pretend growing
i sweep callously away.

on moving,
it's the backs i'll look at
to give soul
in all my numbing.

there's that occasional...
life...
better sorry
than safe.

it's not a tame lying.

(untitled)

how do i break
so silently,
so shrugged and apologetic?

it almost fascinates me.

friends with
needled hands
and threaded teeth

eye my laughing
and shake their heads.

i laugh to shrug off,
to veil the tears
that singe my eyes,
my throat -

the careless cremation
of whored hopes.

i will disentangle
these optimisms.

idealism
is for pop stars
and smarmy country songs.

that doesn't mean
i won't call the pieces mine.

flush

a snail discovered
midst repose
in its shell.

truth doesn't let
sad, small things
possess their dreams.

each moment
of soft hopes snatched
by that rush of tide,

and broken:
thrust upon
reality's shoals.

the waves
will never care.

birds peck at, eat
the remains of what
they cannot understand.

(untitled)

as delicately as an eyelid,
my only real belonging
tears along perforated, memorized lines.

blood-stained walls close it
to collect the relics of this cleaving.

every reincarnation
devalues the sanctity of the me,
the life, before.

tiny vessels rearrange
the color of this time.

numb, but not new -
pain sears its tattered edges.

i will spare erubescent sincerity
its new sieve;
pouring it instead

into my pillow,
and complacent distractions.

2006-02-07T18:38:00.000-08:00

So....Today....Today is.....Today is the greatest da-a-a-ay.....

-= ANNNND *cut Smashing Pumpkins* =-

Today is Tuesday. Tuesdays come before Wednesday, usually. And Wednesday, for me, is the hardest day of the week. Wednesday is the day when my mind, of its own free will and choice, automatically jumps the proverbial gutter and heads straight for the cesspool. Translation: on Wednesday, everything is crass innuendo. "Somebody's tipping my bowl!" = stupid laughter. Sudden Onset Wednesdayitis or SOW for short, is currently the bane of my existence. "Hey, Chels! I like your hat!" gets the response: "Oooh...hey, hey, thanks for that. I like YOUR hat too! *wink wink, nudge nudge*" It's really rather annoying. SOW is a disease that's rapidly sweeping the nation. An epidemic, if you will.

And apparently the only cure is stupid movies, infecting someone you know, and hanging out with the others who have been quarantined.

All in all....SOW is far more trouble than its worth, but if you ever need inside jokes, share it with a friend.

Mlehhhhhh....

Sometimes my whole week is a Wednesday.

2006-01-27T18:36:00.000-08:00

In other news...let's see. Not much to tell from Chel these days. Still working. Going back to school this spring, and then I'm transferring out to Hawaii this fall, if all goes well and according to plan.

Woof. Hawaii...that'll be the furthest away from home I've ever been. But I'ma learn to surf, and find me a Tongan. Or I'll run away and get shipwrecked on some desert island, because I've always wanted that to happen.

Anyway, I picked up a book yester day at Borders that I had been meaning to read for a long time, and I read pretty much from the time I got home, around 2 in the afternoon, to the time when I fell asleep unknowingly, and woke up with my lamp still on and my candles still burning and my face stuck to my book at 4 am.

Something about the whole idea of the book keeps winding around my heart and sqeezing it rather uncomfortably in all of my sensitive, insecure places.

The book is about love. It's about love that spans anomaly, time, and absences; it spans infertility; huge age differences that weave back and forth uncontrollably.

If I tell you the title you'll laugh that I'm so affected by it, because it seems such a ludicrous premise for something that has shaken me. But it made me ponder things...mostly that empty half that sits beside me day in and day out. That gnawing sense of one's incompletion.

I don't know why I keep finding these things to draw my mind back and back and back to that same hurting place. The book has been one instigator among many that have bitten into me this week and don't seem to want to let go. I don't even understand it, and the more I think about why it seems to hurt and explain all at the same time, the more I just feel confused and want to cry.

There's no way to express it. I can't draw how I feel...I tried. I can't write it out, I've tried that over and over. I can't drown it in music, and when I try, it only emphasizes the...pain. The unbreakable heartbreaking. The something. It's nothing in the here and now that hurts. It's...maybe it's my own terror that I'll never have someone to call me their own...but it's more than that. Deeper...somehow. Inexpressible. That I dangle too close to that chance, it wavers in front of me the slightest breath a dangerous thing that would disperse the misty cloud of possibility, and it will be I who break my heart, my chances. I keep having dreams where I'm destroying the things that make me happy...but it's unwilling, it's blindfolded...

I don't understand them. I want to be able to fight for something that for all I know isn't even there, and I feel like I am fighting for it. But it's hard.

Mleh. Chel feels lonely this week. Stupid...things.

Song of the Week: April 8th by Neutral Milk Hotel

2005-12-21T18:35:00.000-08:00

Afterthoughts

Is it true you kill your own expectations?
Raising the bar
after she's already jumped it?

Don't idealize the race,
don't make a life
out of embellishing a pedestal
till no one can stand on it.
Why would you want her on one anyway?

Don't keep her there.
Keep her in your hand.

For all the loving -
love has found you wrong, I see.
I think.

You have to want her
as more than just
a place to keep yourself.

I wish I could find for you
the piece that you are missing,
that thing to complete your heart...

But I can't.
You continue -
and I, I can only watch
and be.

Longer

In all our late distance,
there are moments I catch you closer -
some burning shovelful
is flung into my face.

Can't you feel the changing?

On the wind I snatch
whispers of what's passed me by.

I seem to collect them.

I have pockets and and fistfuls of dead leaves.
Of proof I could have blown away.

So we'll sit,
and talk in patches.
Some awkward detachment
unties our little knots
with brittle fingers.

Can't you stop the slipping away?

Or do even I
mean that little to you?

I would call,
if I heard you listening.p

(untitled)

I would beg you
to stop me from digging this hole.
I am hurting,
and want to bury it -
but this is not the way.
Remind me why I know you,
like no one else.
Remind me why
it counts so little.
Am I distant?
You didn't pull me closer.
Am I different?
Perhaps.
I couldn't be enough,
I had to change.
I'm sorry if I let you down.
I'm sorry if I left you down.
Leave something like a tear
the next time you find yourself
in places where I lie.

GAH! I LIKE HIM AND IT'S MAKING ME NUTS!

Well, not really nuts. I don't want nuts, made or otherwise. But still. There's this guy, who I, well....like. A lot, and it's making me stupid and dumb and very tentative and stand-offish because I am SOOOOO convinced that he doesn't. like. me. Because, number A: I. Scare. People. Mleh.

So, yes, in lieu of not being able to put that in a poem and have it seem remotely poetic, I had to explode for a moment there. Thank you.

Poem Translation:

Boys are dumb,
because I am dumb.

I hate their silence,
because I am silent and so unsure.

All this liking
makes me a scream,
a writhe,
a sad batch of love songs
from headphones in a dark corner.

There's nothing to say
that we would work,
and in all my hinting,
I catch no hint.

Perhaps he's waiting for me to say it,
that he sits there knowing,
and somewhat amused.

Like him laughing at me
is going to loosen my lips.

I hate that I crave and loathe his laughter,
the difference between with and at.

Someone hide me
from my hiding,
and find me a place more warm and dry.

Turn off the music.
Take of the headphones...

Find me in the light.

2005-12-20T18:34:00.000-08:00

More poemtries...

Putting Off

So you catch the glimpse
of my dark corners,
the doubt and fear
that would eat me
if I had no lights.

Does it scare you?
Are you suddenly
unsure of me,
and my new breed of quiet?

In all the hope and wishing,
somedays it's just too much,
and there is lost in me
some forlorn resolve,
and I am bitter.

Bitter to taste, and
be thought of.

The world around me
spins in bright colors,
some fascinating glow...
and I will paint it.

But it is not part of me.
Not today.

I curl up
on the corner of my bed
in a dark lit,
half-spun room.

Where trying to sleep
is the key to forget,
and music drowns
all the tears away.

Stalks and Bonds...

I disentangled myself
from the cunning, tentacled malignancy
that wound recumbant on my sanity.

Some malcontent found boredom
and eagerly they bred,
to create an unfathomable restlessness.

Dragging narcoleptic emotions
I embarked on the reparition
of this corpulent disaster
that had petrified my moving on.

I was left to loiter
amidst pedantic delusions of adequacy.

It was an imperative discovering -
I learned nostalgia for progression
and the burn of past effort gave me
a recognition, a thawing of my feet.

Discrepancies between was and will
lay scattered in botched reconcilliation
with once well-founded mulling-over. Breaks.

I garbled in acknowledgement of wrongs,
the heraldic sound of my own admittance;

the irridescent pang of possibility
lay jagged on the forks and winds ahead.

I would kindle a fire that stings me -
lambasted with inspiration and drive,
motivation needles its way out of my skin.

Opalescent: decision's mark was pressed to my lips,
paranoia exorcized,
its gaping wound soothed of queries
and salubrious doubt -

its umbilical ties to all fear.
Victory,
hides beneath the first inch onward.

Insighed

What grimness swallowed?
Its processes eaten through
the trembled inner walls of me.
Marauding as some better thing;
ran rampant in the electric spirals of my mind.
beholden to the glare of imposed shackling.
Was there some tryst in the shadows
that I mistook as a deeper thing?
The unabashed way I let it sink me.
Imps and demons parley for my soul.
It was illodged in my eager trust.
Now I find a rush for departing,
the impositious need of flight.

Weeps Wild

Razed enigma,
empty stares.
Saturated vessels,
the verification blooms.
Blood weeps wild starvation.
Silence haunting the hoarded eyes.
Eager misconceptions,
the mastication of ideals
irks my brooding.

The Lonli

Always this constant gnaw -
a cage for some trapped, starved thing.
It eats my bars and fights pointless
to die empty;
always conscious of the lock on the outside,
of the morbid oggling from eager-eyed spectres:
haunting their humanity so self-important
from the corners of their bodies...
consumed in their tininess
by the convincing of wretched importants.
Is there not a full to fill me?
No softness, whole-half
that will slip piece by piece
between bars,
to cradle aching dark.

Initially...

instead she fades so
loosely into shadow,
outside the biting cold, the dark:
verify her slipping,
each moment counted in the
downward spiral of glorious flake,
drawn dark and so soundproof.
a poison seeps out some vein,
no anti-venom for what
lingering way rejection irrigates my inner webbing.
overdid the underdoing, never
told him the way
the lights - reflected - so trembled in my eyes.

(untitled, written yesterday)

Variegated resignation
gnaws my sodden consternation.
snarling teeth tear vegetation,
tendons, skin...no hesitation.
The deepest writhe of his eschewing
distills some dew in lack of doing.
Airy linger scents of brewing,
o'er the picturescent viewing.
Eager races a stone distance
marbled by one's legs' resistance.
Are we always shackled to existence?
Perplexing, our plodding persistence.
Wearied, worn, and ground to tatters
a heart no longer holds what matters...
beneath it proof in bloody spatters:
the wretched refuse when hope shatters.
So e'er long I weave forlorning
in threads and fibers for adorning
the teeming shores of plea and mourning.
Yet between strands myself I'm scorning.
And in confusion I will end
a poem written for a friend,
and pour heart-words I've never penned
o'er a confession I'll never send.

Blanks Stretches of White

Vile frozen flaky whiteness
icily slides down my throat,
and deadens some inner me.
Gnaws me wholly,
lifts me to the place where
you can see you are
finally free, liberated.
So you go.
Flit off to that glimmer in the dark,
that glint of something in your eye.
I age before I'm old.
It wrinkles at all you love.
A depth of me I know you love.
You love me when I'm ignorant,
when I need you.

Sickly sleet, it freezes me in slow spiderwebs.
Left dry...you leave me dry.
You left me barely whole. Wholly bare.
It all comes down, down to one line.
A stone freezes to watch you.
As it often is: it's all you love.
The deeper in I go, you love.
You love me when I'm ignorant.

So here, I'm going. I'm digging me deeper.
Here I dig me,
buried in the snow.
Buried by the me you love.

Sweetly Shattered

I wandered in your noticing,
doubt is huddled, no one leaves.
It's clear to me, so obvious,
the way you'll carve her
into so many pieces.
You shatter her so sweetly,
so sweetly,
she is shattered.

Catch my fall in veins,
pain stays, some secure sleeping.
It's clear to me, so obvious
you could be carving her to pieces.

And I watch me sweetly shattered.
shattered sweetly,
so completely.

Signals

Pondering your pointed comments.
Thought slipped to the subject of shame -
and it made me laugh, how you said
sometimes it's better not to stay
if you surely feel nothing,
it's better, for you, this way.
You say.
Have you found the place you can't breathe?
It's that last word...
and I watch you understand.

We're here,
at the final signal.
Here we are,
at the last thing to say.

The light fed our inner flame,
the sunset hues
winding so tightly in the trees,
found us at opposite ends,
and our points were different...
we deferred.
Who knew why?
I can't escape myself,
there's no way you can just fall away.
It's the place where you feel nothing.
Your eyes scream to me
the final signal.

Fallen

If you lose,
wound in the tangled web
woven of your lust,
and the binding
of your own desire
...grace-distant.

If you call him,
the music will wake you.
Your eyelids rebel
in the blinding light.
Something burns all the sun again.

What use is life around here?
Things are so dangerous
on your own.

Something good,
dies early.
Dies before the second song.

But when you fall,
you slide from grace.
The beautiful things dim
In the half-light of your
folded faliling
Away from grace...
What beauty to discover.

2005-12-03T18:33:00.000-08:00

I have suddenly exhausted my poetic steam, and the veritable train of inspiration I had barreling in me has hissed its last and come to a standstill. The people got off and wandered away, and I am sitting here trying to pretend it's still going....trying to pretend that there's nothing outside worth looking at. I have to write. I have to. If I can't write, then the boredom dissolves into mists of despair, and I have nothing to cling to. I have no anchor to keep me grounded if I wander away in that cloud. If the cloud wanders me away.

Odd dreams lately. I cannot escape them, I cannot always remember them perfectly, but my waking is filled with some dark, desperate memory from the nights before. I feel haunted by my subconscious and it's rather disconcerting.

It's the baby that threw me off. I keep getting lost in unfamiliar places...or familiar places that are suddenly old, decrepit. I panic, and wish, and often I can't make a noise, or I don't make a noise because I know there's no one there to hear it. I wander dark hallways and half-lit stairwells....searching for something, and after a while I notice that I've been cradling something in my arms. This small boy-child. It clings to me, as I rush faster, and faster through the house, unable to find the thing that I'm searching for. The thing that seems to be screaming my name in the silence, pleading with me to find it. The baby whimpers, and clutches me so tight around the neck that I'm gasping for breath. I fall. Down some dark pit....like a stairwell that's suddenly not a stairwell, and I step, but there's no step, and I fall. I land and make no noise. I land and don't remember that I was falling. I look for the baby, and there's no baby there anymore. A figure steps out of the darkness into the shaft of grey light sifting through the broken floorboards above us. He reaches for my hand...and I take it. Surprised that he wants to help, that he willingly touches me. I feel like I shouldn't be touched...even if I want to be. My hair hangs shroudingly over my eyes, which I have averted. I'm always averting my eyes, stealing glances sideways at his feet. He sweeps my hair out of my face with a warm hand and asks me to come with him into the dark. I refuse, half-heartedly. There's some reason, some pull that is keeping me in the grey light. It's become familiar, and I know it well. Something comforts me in the way it twists, in the way I can see the dust moving in it. Thunder in the distance. Cold creeps in, and a baby cries in the dark. He asks me to come with him again. It's the crucial moment. A second of wavering on the knife-blade of decision and all will come crashing down around me. I want the grey light. I want the baby in the dark. I want him to hold my hand. I feel pulled in so many directions, and I curl up on the floor and cry. He shakes me gently. I tell him to let me go. That I want him to let me go, and he says "He needs you." And I can't tell if it's him who needs me, or the baby who needs me, or both. I cram my fists into my eyesockets and rock back and forth, wanting the darkness to be over. Cold rainwater, murky, hard, pours through the floor above. I'm quickly drowning in a puddle, but I realize that the puddle was there before the rain came. That I've drowned in a tepid collection of my tears. He is gone. The baby is not crying. My loneliness breaks me, and I am full of regret. The grey light is gone. Something eats me in the dark.

2005-08-31T09:18:00.000-07:00

I don't know what my subconscious mulled over last night, but it sure as heck wasn't anything about longing. I had a dream that I was traipsing around odd parts of England with the guy who played Chaucer in "A Knight's Tale" and Dame Judy Dench. I was staying at her house, and she had a whole horde of delightful British sports cars, but I never got the chance to drive any of them, because they were being guarded by a creepy man in an orange and teal polyester jumpsuit. Then, she wanted me to bake cookies, and I started to, but wound up making curry instead. Then that Chaucer guy made me wander around the gardens with him, and we had loads of fun ambling through hedges and talking about British stuff (it's a good thing I can't remember what any of that entailed, as I'm sure it was completely wrong and utterly embarassing.) Then I wandered back inside and was forced to endure a rather awkward tea party with a group of rather strange people who I didn't know.

Sometimes I scare myself.

I baked a peach pie last night, because I felt like it, and we have a whole bunch of peaches that have suddenly and violently ripened. We're up to our necks in summer fruit and don't know what to do with it, and for some reason the chef in me automatically thinks "PASTRY!!" Last year it was jam. We still have tons of Grandma Della's Peach-Cherry Jell-o Jam from last summer. But it's really, really good, so I'm not complaining.

I want to go back to school. Everyone is suddenly back in school, and I'm all sorts of jealous. I decided I had better get serious about saving money for it, instead of saying I'm saving money and failing miserably. I should apply for a Pell grant. I think I'd actually get something this time, since I claimed myself on my taxes last year. Last time they said my expected family contribution was $14,000 and wouldn't listen when I tried to explain that, no, they didn't understand, I'm supposed to pay for school BY MYSELF, and I - me - am nigh unto bankrupt. It was discouraging.

I have no clue what I'd major in though. I wanted to do English education, but I really can't handle today's teenagers. So I'm thinking journalism...but that's so cliche. I don't know what I'd do. I'm open for suggestions.

I wonder if I could get a degree in "Undeclared."

2005-08-24T09:12:00.000-07:00

Today work is boooooring. I have nothing to do. I was trying to find a good online radio station, but none of the ones I usually visit are playing anything interesting right now, and I forgot to bring my own music.

I wish I were going back to school, so that I had something to do besides work and listen to music. But alas and alack, I need money for that sort of thing, and I be mostly broke these days.

Yawn.

Been really tired lately, feeling like something's wrong health-wise again. Physically, not mentally. I wonder if I'll forever waver between one side and the other. Gah. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. I hate this feeling like an invalid. I just want to climb out of my body and find a new one.

2005-08-22T09:05:00.000-07:00

You want poetry? Oh, I'll give you some poetry...

*cracks knuckles.

Here's a few of my somewhat recent favorites...I can't believe I'm posting these here. But you asked for it.

your nows and instants

i've been pondering Julian Barbour,
which i wouldn't have done
without your impact.

my wended way into quantum theory
would have been a brisk stroll
instead of this lingering exploration.

my thoughts alight on change;
on time composed
of the projection
of our perception upon space.

upon a life
as a line of instances.

of how choice affects outcome,
of an object in motion that changes its course
by on conscious choice to affect direction.

i find myself fascinated:
by the endlessness of the particular,
by an instant's breathless quantity,
by the possibility of infinite perception,
by the impact of conscious object
upon conscious object.

change is the measure of time,
he says.

and i linger at the side of my road
to watch your instant
expand into the infinity of my motion.

of my course forever altered,
because you moved me.

and even as i fling myself
into another instant of change,
light spreads through dimensions
tracking each of my missed paths.

the ripples of this impact
stir the paths of other instants;
and because i can only perceive
my own dimension of instance,
i am cluttered with regret.

the echo of possible paths
calls to me from space not yet lit.

craving

i paint memories i never had
into your wide wet-open eyes,
and pluck delight
from your gaping mouth
like feather off white hens.

each twist and snap
of eager deceit
brings your prickled flesh
closer to my malignant solitude.

my hollow mouth
gusts warm invitation

to you.
to taste

and become my hunger.
become part of this emptiness.

(untitled)

careful, i burn you
in glistening beads;
carve your silhouette
into the prow of this emptiness.

emptiness which defines,
directs me.

ever eager, i dismantle
the components of once-joy
into the building blocks
of an agony to tantalize,
to whet me

for the next wave,
next notch out of my masthead...

surging to its fall
and the rush of a wet hand
to pull down my compassion.

eyelid

i brushed you
away to change
my sheets.

sleep will now
keep my fingertips
from dawdling

in the hollow
you made.

i made
this lie i bed in.

2005-08-16T09:03:00.000-07:00

I went to the doctor yesterday. Without my mother and paying my own way, for the first time ever. It was a very liberating, independent experience. Well, the going and paying were, the actual visit was kind of traumatizing.

I took my best friend Andrea with me, because she has been the one person I've been the closest to and confided in the most these past few weeks, and because she's not like my mother and doesn't interrupt me in the middle of trying to explain things, and she's not like my mother in the way that she tells me to stop lying to the doctor and to just suck it up and get over my head issues.

See, my mother doesn't realize that you can't just tell someone like that to suck it up. You would't tell someone in the middle of a heart attack to stop faking, suck it up, get over it, just ignore it. Would you? My mother might. I know HER mother would.

Anyway, basically my doctor said he wasn't going to diagnose me, because I have a good mix of issues, and that I need to see a psychiatrist. So I will. And I will pay for it myself. He also made me take a couple of fun tests, put me back on a double dose of prozac, told me to never go off of my medications again EVER without consulting him first, and then he told Andrea that I'm not allowed to be alone, and that perhaps it would be best for about a week for me to not be at home. And to get to a psychiatrist ASAP.

So, for the rest of the week I am now living at my friend Sue's house, which is like a sepulchre compared to mine. There's no noise, ever. And it's a huge house. Sue's the youngest and her parents are both very reclusive. I can sit and read a book and not get jumped on, yelled at, or made to go do something productive. It's so nice.

I got home later than I planned to pack, and the family was eating dinner, and they wanted to know where I had went, so I told them that I went to the doctor, and that Andrea took me out to dinner.

I didn't tell them why I went to the doctor, or why I went to the doctor by myself, because I can't handle another criticizing lecture about my mental health, and because they wouldn't let me go to Sue's house.

So, I sat out on the front porch with my bags waiting for my ride, and my dad came out to get something from his car, and said, "So, what is this, some kind of protest?" and I said no, I was just going to Sue's for a week. "Do her parents know?" "Yes, she and her mother invited me." "And you're going for the week?" "Yes, on a doctor-sanctioned holiday." "Doctor-sanctioned? What doctor?"
"Dr. Allan." "It would have been nice to have some dialogue about this."

And that was that. I left. I did tell my sister why I was going though, because she's the only one who asked me. So I guess if my parents want an answer, then they can ask her. She'll probably even tell them of her own free will. Hopefully.

Meanwhile, I have some quiet time, and I have spammed the OOC, so now there's not much else to do around here. Mornings are so quiet. But I have access to a computer now, and I might be around sometime later this afternoon, because Sue works full time, and it will be a few hours before she gets home every evening. I think I am going to read a lot. And stare out the window a lot. It rained last night, we had the window open, and it started blowing the door at 2 o' clock this morning. I love the smell of rain. Sue said I was moaning a lot in my sleep. I'm surprised I slept at all, but I did, and it was nice. I haven't really slept that well in a long time.

2005-08-15T09:00:00.000-07:00

Ah, what a weekend. No rain, lots of clouds. At least there were clouds. All the sunshine was depressing me.

Spent most of my day yesterday crying or sleeping. This no medication thing is just not working for me, I can't function by myself on that one. And that depresses me even more, because I hate to admit that I can't handle things. You know, that whole I'm an independent, forward thinking person who doesn't need any thing or any one kind of facade that I like to pretend I have.

As I live at home, in a van by the river off government cheese.

How sadly and apprehensively we fall, face first into reality.

I wrote a poem about that once, too.

"I want to run to the edge of the world/and fling myself off the cliffs of reality."

I do, in a way. I feel so stuck lately, and every way I turn to move, I find a wall of my own constructing. Have I really dug myself into this pit? Do I still have the shovel? I wish I could dig some footholes.

Maybe someday I will. Maybe I'm just comfy in my little hole.

Do you know what it is, that feeling, where you stop caring because you care so much? Where you're forever running away because you don't know how to stop? Like your whole life is just constant swerving because you have no brakes?

The thing about running away, is no matter how far and how hard and how fast you run, you're always stuck with yourself.

Andrea wants a filter between her brain and her mouth. I want a filter between my brain and my brain.

I'm going on a quiet holiday to my friend Sue's house for a fortnight. To get some quiet, and some alone. And we shall watch Jeeves & Wooster, and we will have Chinese tea parties. And I am going to write a play.

The thing is, Sue's house is a block away from mine. So don't worry. I'll still be around here.

2005-08-12T08:58:00.000-07:00

Today, my friend's old boyfriend is getting married. She is ecstatic that she is not the bride. She reminded me of that about 80 times while at work today.

I think she's in denial, and is coping somehow. Tonight her and I, and another friend are going to the London Market up in Salt Lake to have tea and crumpets, because that usually makes things all better.

My heart is sad today. It has stopped its banshee screaming for the moment, and it is sad and hurty. And I don't like it.

Also, I feel like puking. Number A: I woke up too late today to have breakfast before work. Number B: I forgot to eat dinner last night, because I had to go babysitting at 6. Number C: (this is, indeed, the most traumatic of the three) The office here smells of lingering citrus Goo-Gone, which is, by far, one of the most sickening smells on the face of this planet. I cannot breathe, it's that bad. I keep gagging. Eurgh.

So, lately, in my spare time, I've been pondering lucrative business ideas. I have a new weight-loss technique that I need to have patented. Voodoo Aerobics™. The idea there is that you sell voodoo doll kits to extremely lazy people, who make a voodoo doll of themself, and then, while they sit around the telly, stuffing their faces with crisps, they can make the doll do jumping jacks and such.

Well, kids, that's all I have today. I'm feeling too surreal, hyper and sarcastic to post further.

Except I have to say that Fridays at work make me sad, because I know that I have to wait until Monday to see you all again, and that I'll miss all the weekend fun. I hate only being around while I work in the mornings. No one posts stuff, and I feel lonely. Ah well, go figure. I should be used to that feeling by now.

2005-08-10T08:57:00.000-07:00

Not much news. Went off my brain meds about three weeks ago. The consequences are really kicking in lately, and I can't stand it. I wish I had my own insurance.

Can't write lately. Can't think. It's all this painful haze... that I ignore with a fake smile and a hollow laugh.

I can't keep up the hollow laughing. Because I can hear me laughing at myself inside again, and that scares me. And hurts.

Damn the poet. I need to get her out of me. I have to get her out of me.