Thursday, April 30, 2009

i found you out

words commonly used by my boy to trick me into thinking i'm asleep and incompetent:

siderodromophobia (si-der-oh-droh-moh-PHO-bee-ah) — fear of trains, railroads, or train travel
frippery (FRIP-i-ree) — 1. pretentious, showy finery. 2. pretentious elegance; ostentation. 3. something trivial or nonessential
cygnet (SIG-nit) — a young swan.
chthonic (THON-ik) — of or relating to the underworld
callipygian (kal-ah-PIJ-ee-en) — having beautifully proportioned buttocks

*** Make sure to check out the "rejected best words" section, where you will find:
leet (slang for "good" or "great," apparently, and idiotic, certainly)

vocabulary is FUN, you flapdoodling clatterfart!!

that dream

I'm climbing a tattered staircase of pale-yellow and white frosting. The angles and spaces expand and contract as I turn and face my surroundings. I am instantly unalone somehow. It's a rigid staircase that resembles my own, but bare of carpet and shoe-prints. A dim, sweet light, as dim and sweet as the sins of the night, joins me as I ascend. From my eyes I sense a large hole to the left of me where a circle of wall should be. I press into it, but it does not admit me. All okay, I continue and feel the top beneath me, making my head a new height reached in this dark room filled with sweet things I cannot yet see. My sweet mind, where have you led me? Dear me, there's a hall to the left, like my home's own. I follow its tiles and poke my arms awake. Colors blend into patterns crooked and plump. There's a wall with a shape of a door with an arch that divides itself into little bricks. I press it, it feels, I enter it whole. I am led by some unknown force down a wide hall of rich color masked in flickering chandelier. There are the portraits on the wall of any castle cliche, moving and guarding my dreaming self with their fixed eyes. A steady pace is inevitible in this place. I am Alice, or something entirely new and independent of her. No, there is no name yet for my phenomena. The smell of incense with no smoke overwhelms me in a place where my dreams are worth fifty cents.

unspoken

There's a cloud in this room, and it smiles for you, but I'm not on the other side.

Monday, April 27, 2009

exploring

I know myself little by little, as when I press against the skin in my arm and move it back and forth, to distinguish the two layers of body. It tooke me years of focus to determine the two are separate parts of me, both the moveable flesh and the rigid, almost unnoticeable bluish innerthing beneath.

what i never have to feel again

He's sweat-clad and screams your name the way I wish I could. He doesn't know what tempest he's just stirred within me, between me and the idea of you.

from february

My writing is slowly going from fiction to non-fiction, though I did dream of Alice in Wonderland last night.

ha...ha..

When I was crazier, I used to always fear every morning that when I opened the door after waking up, the grim reaper would be standing behind it. Fortunately, there never was any demon standing there waiting for me, so I lowered my expectations of one.

unspoken

We say so little because we say only the substantial things, and hold only meaningful conversation. When that isn't enough, we live out the afternoons in sun and touch and the silence of unspoken emotion.

gloria

And when we sing in Latin, so beautifully and so sacredly together, I feel it purge my soul so pristinely because it feels so good to bathe myself in things in which I don't believe but sound so right because I don't understand them anyway.

space mountain

Being placed in the square little front seat could challenge, frighten, and energize. Well, I was in it. I could feel the lift off into darkness and upper space and there I could truly question my being. "What is it to be alive?" my soul would ask, and my conscious would reply with dropping organs and cries of excitement. To have the path before me disappear was to put my faith in a world with which I needed to connect desperately. The quick twists and changing colors around me gave me all the sensations of life and I wanted it all. That sickening and exhilarating feeling of being on the edge of an experience, of being placed at the tip of the earth and being forced to react, it was a feeling so personal as to one on a roller coaster. I wanted to dive, to stop, to shift, to cry, to reach new heights and new heights and safety. I did all that.

in the car

Mom never wanted me to write in the car, but now I'm stuck on a road that will never bring me home. I'm pushing time along with chords and tunes.

expectation.

Oh, to fly and to feel my soul away!
To be only upward bound!
My blue sky would soak me in and say,
"Where have gone all the words you've found?"

dove

Now that I can fly stably high,
I see all as it is,
all as it should be,
as I grow farther and farther,
increasingly detached
from my earth.

Sunday, April 26, 2009

watch it watch it watch it

if you want a refreshing afternoon of pure language that is honest and clear, great character development, and something clearly shakespearean-influenced, i highly highly recommend watching or reading the play "The Illusion," written by pierre corneille.

quote

"Rhodona! if the sage's ask thee why
Thus charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,
Then Beauty is its own excuse for being."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Rhodona: On Being Asked, Whence Is the Flower?

blinking.

for five years you've been
watching me
make a life,
or the essence of one
with you on
both sides of it.
you say you're back again.
I can breathe your essence,
I can taste it and hear it.
but why, I wonder,
can I not feel it?
why are you now
such a stranger
to my perception?

Thursday, April 23, 2009

citrus + smoke

let's play spill the bottle
and drain each other free.
follow the scent of citrus,
the feel of smoke if you want to capture me.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

on hamlet

"It may be replied that if he talked commonplace prose he would reveal his character less vividly. I am not so sure. He would certainly have revealed something less vividly; but would that something be himself? ...And I do not thinkk it true to reply that he would be a different character if he spoke less poetically. This point is often misunderstood. We sometimes speak as if the characters in whose mouths Shakespeare puts great poetry were poets: in the sense that Shakespeare was depicting men of poetical genius... In poetical drama poetry is the medium, not part of the delineated characters."

"I would not cross the room to meet Hamlet. It would never be necessary. He is always where I am."

"Its true hero is man--haunted man--man with his mind on the frontier of two worlds, man unable either quite to reject or quite to admit the supernatural, man struggling to get something done as man has struggled from the beginning, yet incapable of achievement because of his inability to understand either himself or his fellows or the real quality of the universe which has produced him."

C.S. Lewis, Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem?

water

The water falls into my ears and tells my body what to feel. My ears aren't listening this time.
--
These gray days often bring with them a sense of nostalgia for playgrounds and roller coasters, swing-sets dangling in the dripping, empty rain. I smelled a mist of dirty rubber being purged in nature's deepest secrecy. It's a fine mist of laughter gone home for supper, of suns napping early for a jumpstart awakening. That musk is home inside this rainy school building.

daemon

Sullen eye bulge from his yellow-spotted head,
scanning the room for beautiful prey.
Indulgences slip from his tongue;
A secret language all for her.
From her throat, a gurgling, a laugh,
And she has submitted to him.
She scorns her surroundings,
Covers her body with folded arms
And pretenses.
They sing a hollow tune alone,
And dance in nightmarish revlery.
What came of this kingdom,
So fashioned in opulence,
Purity dangling from the branches
In gold and dew?
What came of this beauty,
Man's pristine first-known prize,
The reckless, dove-skinned mother,
when she
First said adieu?

Saturday, April 18, 2009

ascenseur

The floor released beneath him, and he was in neither one world nor another. The ground broke and discovered new levels of low. Buttons glowed with purpose at his touch. He was in control and alone, with a few squares of space supporting his being under him. He felt silence and the humming of the machines that came alive for him. His organs trembled and swayed with the motion of downward speed. He placed his hand on his stomach and enjoyed the sensation. He leaned back onto a black bar, completely at leisure with this collapse of time and knowing. He could, at any second, find himself trapped between two places, if the technology failed him. He could never see another human face or hand again, but this danger intrigued him to push his weight heavily against the floor repeatedly. He put his trust in the machines, fate was in their control as well as in his fingers'. His insides then became very still and he heard a simple bell. He stepped through the open doors, off the elevator, and into the crowded commons of the first floor.

rain


The rain beat on his head, and begged for some place to stay. The hollow can adamently protested, as the harsh knocking forced his head to fall more and more tightly onto his body. He rocked his being to the water's lonely and yearning rhythm. Obesely rectangular, and altogether grayish, he was content with his own company, and dismissed the unwelcome precipitation, which always harrassed him and wished to share the gloomy days with him. Witnessing the scene, and not wanting to interfere, I soothed my senses in the steady dripping of rainfall. I never liked the rain, until I learned to relax myself in its presence, sink in its consistency, bathe my limbs in nature's emotions that weren't always so dissimilar to my own. I became what I felt, even next to glass on which she would beat and play and entice me to come outside and be. I used to be an old grayish garbage can, empty and stubborn and utilitarian and limited by myself. Now I embrace my existence, for every living thing needs the rain to survive and today I felt the rain and thought and felt and sensed and sensed.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

someone who gets it

MsRose1754 (9:08:14 PM): goodnight, sweet prince
ERNZ0A (9:08:25 PM): goodnight madonna

Monday, April 13, 2009

acronym

someone
amaze
me.

brooklyn

the night breathes heavily
and the silent muse perches over me,
eyes closed
the gravel and rubber lullabye
soothes my senses
this urban heart beats with mine
her breath is my own
and we are one

awkward shakespearean-referenced pop song that never really caught on, i guess

do you see it on my lips?
there's a rumble in your hips.
you've got the devil in your pelvis,
and I've got the falling down disease.

vessel

I've built a distant boat for me
and fallen asleep to cacophony
my own voice is my shelter
in its trailing symphony

the seas have been so nice to me
they wave, they wait, they wake for me
and when sin's sirens come my way
my vessel clogs my ears with breeze

and though I've cast off fool and fancy
and have draped my own arms 'round me
there are oceans and oceans of blue
still sweetly summoning me out to sea

old, but applicable

so many questions.
let's leave them
beneath the
heavens and run
forever. I'm yours,
you're mine, and the
rest is for the stars
to ponder.

is it true?

sanity is numb.
happiness is implied.

unspoken

there's a rainbow burning underneath your sanity.
brush away your demons, fall into the cacophony.

great

"Direct your eye right inward, and you'll find
A thousand regions in your mind
Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be
Expert in home-cosmography."

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

summer


citrus + smoke

lace + redeye
lilacs + ceiling fans
oxygen + disbelief
mist +melody

favorite

"Perhaps one should never put one's worship into words."

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

underpants

the colors burst out of the starched belted band,
laughing at its failures of purpose.

her and him

she wears flowers in her tainted hair,
but picks her scalp apart.
she dances in his tainted air,
tries to win his tainted heart.
she wants to give the gift she's got,
and insecurity is so cheap.
(he barely has time for the ones he's bought,
but he still haunts and ruins her sleep.)

worlds

they are worlds
in a conspiring universe
and I, a distant stargazer.
our minds intersect
through stars
and all the notes of their anthems
drone;
adding planets
to a never-ending solar system
that parts us.
they conspire with the sun against me
‘til it’s colder where I stand
for she, in her naivety, has submitted to them.
they conspire with my thoughts against me
‘til my pen confesses their names
for I, in weakness,
have submitted to them.
i am haunted by this nothingness
that connects us—
our own making.
so we make worlds,
hoping lives intersect
to meet our whims;
we strive for recognition,
shunning the Gods who created us.
after all,
we are worlds
and we can be destroyed
as easily
as we were made.

unspoken

I'm trying to see things from your perspective,
but I keep walking into the door.

madame

She regained her composure, as if she forgot there had ever
been any hint of excitement in the room.

a poet

I have loved the moon,
worshipped men
with four-letter names
for their script.
Or, I have like to think I have
been a poet.
I have woken up
to grinds and dregs and tepid
coffee mugs
I have lost my place,
my thoughts have escaped
but I still worship the sun
and put pretty names
to pretty things
Myself, a poet
over coffee at night
when I lose my place.

chalkboard

vague numbers
take their distinct places
stuck to a dark piece
of space.
an alien matter
of flesh and cells
presses and sweeps.
the figures warp and spread,
their dusty ashes
fall to a powdery collection below.
it was beautiful, but
it was wrong.
Beauty erased
is beauty waiting to be.

under the book-light

I wonder where I've left my skin, after haing looked down and seen the gnarled bend in my finger. It didn't hurt a bit, but the shock of discovery, the confusion shook me to the point at which I dropped my book and kept the light, pulling and pressing the little gash and wondering what the blood cells thought and where they were and how they looked. I wonder what edge of massive, cornered furniture clings to my remains and if I'll ever see that part of me again. But certainly that little unnecessary part of me is gone and dead, and I still live and wonder.

night

My hands smell of night, the night so warm and close and inescapable that I absorb the darkness into my head. And now I wonder if you thought of the things I wrote when we embrace. But I don't worry those worries at night. My dreams stiffen me and I'm human again when I wake. All the environment goes to my head in early evening and I soak in thoughts of horizon rather than thoughts of spaces between floor tiles. I cuddle with space and relinquish voice and reason 'til the friends in my mind take me by the shoulders and carry me into night, smiling at our connection, safe night.

Sunday, April 12, 2009

on a bench

The gibberish baby next to me
is scratching words into my skin
I have to get out
before I let him get in
A slant rhyme, a phrase,
a word a day
doesn't fill the schism
between the two "who I ams"

too true

"my brain and tongue just met."

Regina Spektor, Consequence of Sounds

at night

melting into the
chill of the floral sheets,
feet feeling for
new spots of comfort,
they reject where they
have been,
too familiar, too
suffocatingly warm.
they seek in the darkness
for a new
kind of thrill.

Saturday, April 11, 2009

a better version


Only very straightforward people prefer the 1960s. I like the split personality of the 1920s.

ee cummings


the truest sentence you know

"It was wonderful to walk down the long flights of stairs knowing that I'd had good luck working. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.' So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say...Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time I was writing, and it was good and severe discipline.
"It was in that room too that I learned not to think about anything that I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day. That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything, I hoped; learning, I hoped; and I would read so that I would not think about my work and make myself impotent to do it. Going down the stairs when I had worked well, and that needed luck as well as discipline, was a wonderful feeling and I was free then to walk anywhere in Paris."

"'It's good,' she said. 'That's not the question at all. But it is inaccrochable. That means it is like a picture that a painter paints and then he cannot hang it when he has a show and nobody will buy it because they cannot hang it either.'
...
"'But you don't get the point at all,' she said. 'You mustn't write anything that is inaccrochable. There is no point in it. It's wrong and its silly.'"

"Don't you know all writers ever talk about is their troubles?"

Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

sun

Having fallen out of love with you,
They trapped you in a cage of sky
Now you’re clumsy with disease
You stalk and overheat them ‘til
They desecrate your name and make
New false gods of light
But I will drown in you still at dawn;
That hour when you in shadows hide,
When you feel too big for space
For you have followed me thus far
With a gilded star’s intention
Now I will follow you home

unspoken

I woke up to realize
the reprise
is the better version.
Not only did our
melodies entwine,
but there was also
a killer beat.

unspoken

It's so warm in here --
Come inside and
escape your chilly
half-life.
Come live a whole
life with me.

words

"If words be made of breath
And breath of life, I have no life to breathe
What thou hast said to me."

Hamlet, III.iiii (219-221)

anthem

It was because I was tired! My puffed-out lids gave me away to myself in the mirror every morning -- why did I spend endless minutes picking myself into insanity, living in the cushy undergrowth of sweet imagination? I have since fixed my complex of seeing from above the worldmembers and all things. I must see what I am in the cool, sharp, sunny morning. Yes, I am in love with the eight-o'clock, the warmth glows my skin and I feel actual warmth, not some plaything for my mind to warp into dream lifes. I feel a cool wind and do not scorn the changing tides for not being constant, I feel invigorated and new, a baby feeling his way out of the womb and into sun and breeze, crisp air of the true world. Oh, to live! To live high on shaking fingers of sensation and inspiration. Warp into me, world. I have felt you inside me for too long, and you've awaited my long confession. It has come!

an afternoon

If we focus on the distance between the houses on a sunny street by giving our attention to only the mailboxes, we can better see things in perspective. The monstrosity in bricks passes by and our eyes see only the distances between them. I often take my walks home as such, and, once inside, I wander about with a bag of baby carrots to help me see better. My feet unclad slap the wide floors beneath me, and look so aligned, so narrow, so alien to my body. Perhaps I don't see them often enough, or perhaps the idea of them is overly shunned by the population. My body escapes into the funhouse of clothing, and comes out twisted and distorted to make hands and feet. Perhaps they are so different from the environmental factors. When I stomp them on the ground they seem so new to me, so orderly yet still alien. Nonetheless, their tapping coincides with the percussive "dum-tah-tah" of my chewing on fat baby vegetables.

swallowing

I didn't want to hear her swallow. To hear my mother swallow -- that was different. I had become annoyed at all those little things she did, all the odd noises she made while eating, but I had come to the realization that there was nothing I could do to stop them, so I'd try to hum over it, or close my ears when I heard a yawn approaching. I don't think that's too peculiar. But the woman sitting next to me in the theatre was not my mother, and I did not want to hear her filthy movie snacks being digested.

muse

Muse of a moon
Who drowns early sleepers
In light and stillness
Smiling secrets onto their faces
I am in love with your art
I live for your secrets
I make words from your creation

I want to capture
Their damsels and demons,
Hold them in my palms
And bring their mysteries to life
But my pen stops where my heart begins
For though their fantasies fascinate me
I want no part in their worlds

A chirping thing sits beside me;
I am the first one awake at dawn
To realize I am the only one
Still dreaming

unspoken

Eat my brain. Can't beat that wit! My retinas are begging for an explanation.

unspoken

There is a voice scolding me, crying for me to put the pen down and feel. It tells me to write emotions in solitude, not now. Warm dream-hands grab my face and tell me to live and feel and think and thrive. They take my hand and lift it and jolt me from this coma-like trance of distance. You must feel this soft, quick pulse in our embrace. Your hand feels my right knee, and I marvel at its size, as if it is some giant’s fingers reaching down to my frail body and attempting to understand what it is to be human. I suppose that’s how you make me feel after all, as if I am the giant, and I much admire you for that, because no one else has ever allowed me to feel so human before.