hide your weakness.

i’m such a grain of salt that it’s difficult to feel sweet again.

no, i’m not entirely bitter to the taste, because you seem to like me well enough, but it’s a sort of inward sensation.
that sensation of oh i’m making myself sick to the stomach oh i’m a dry kind oh -
everything i feel or smell is brownish, kind of sickly, not so stimulating.
i want to wear a fine pastel something, but i don’t know if that would do it.
my food gets cold, drops to the floor, i don’t even seem to remember many things anymore.
i hate to live divided, wish my mind were a whole.
i wish i could write poetry like a real person instead of seeing it as an infection,
something to keep under the skin and cause to distort itself rather than get it checked out.

are things from the brain meant to be so easily misunderstood?

romantic at its best.

I am an island and you are my seas. I am solitary and never alone. I am distant but held together by you. I’ve forgotten time but never faith. I live by the moon for when she shines I know it is to bring you back to me. Back from your days of mingling with the waters of the world. Come to me then and sweep your silent kisses over my lonely shores. Come and go to come again. Pulse your waves though these waiting sands. How I wish I knew how to break the silence of nature, to tell you the secrets at the core of my being. But it lies deeply under you, rooted down into the floors of your seas as in a womb. And I know there will be the day I break that silence, can talk freely to you of these tropical secrets as the birds do when they come and go and leave forever. I can break it the way your waves break over me now. I have faith that they will never fade, never leave me dry and stranded with my own self.

why i'm not a good astronomy student.

i'm watching the water dry around my hands. the moisture on my skin tickles as seasons define themselves. the students are faltering. we don't know the difference between walking and wandering anymore. what do you do when you've cut yourself away?
you're so direct, i need your control as a happiness. it's when you're not here that i realize i'm no scientist. i have no logical conclusions for the way this is. we are the philosophy of universes, silk with pleasure. it would take 80 moons melted down to make one Earth. i'm tired of making myself your satellite. it's a quiet sea without your silent curving body.

bildungsroman.

i want to be a formalist
of this life--
i want to read it
as a book
without reading into it.

i want to follow the growth
of these characters
and never know
myself.

*****

this crimson hand
is all too inviting.

ready to go back to school.

every time i touch this blinding light i expect some message.
there's a point when something triggers and your soul is in love and it floods you with warmth in a winter second.

*****

i can now say i know the meaning of bored to tears.
i feel exposed and untrue.

*****

it's so hard to be where i am and feel the uncomfort trying to make a life for myself when all i want is to share it with you. every second of it. it's hard because it's a crutch for me, but you don't even need one. exposed, you are beautiful. and me, i am a universe of silent seas.

*****

maybe i haven't really found the others yet who believe God is just a large purple turtle or two sitting in a dimly-lit room rolling me and just me around a box called earth, back and forth as if i were a pinball falling in cracks and holes then rising rising up and almost touching the glass. 1. thank God i am not a christian. 2. what now, if i have figured it out? 3. maybe it would be funnier or at least more inspiring if i didn't think it were literally this way...

*****

i think you whispered my name. no one else has ever done that before.

*****

i feel very okay with myself and completely stable and secure:
-when it rains.
-in new york city.
-when travelling (car/plane/train)
and when all are combined, even more so.

classic bobby frost.

"I heard at one time there that you had died
And then I heard you hadn't
Which was true?
Its me all right and yet I really died
My death was by the doctors certified
Now don't be tiresome. Tell me something new.
That's an old story -- risen from the dead
Like Lazarus.
That wasn't what I said
I simply say I died yet this is me.

Pinch you and I will find you solid flesh
Or is it spirit you pretend to be
A ghost perhaps or transmigrating soul..."

"The greatest thing of all is of course to get the hang of life.
...School is but a part of this -- I don't say how large a part. Apprenticeship perhaps a larger part...
We have to bear in mind that school never would have needed to exist but for the invention of letters and numbers...
When I say you have learned to read assume that by the end of high school you have got where you can be trusted to read on alone. You can be left to see to it that everything you do has a proper admixture of reading Letters and numbers...
And if not -- if you haven't taken these means to hear the chances are (this will happen:) you will be back at school (again) in your forties or fifties for some adult education.

I can just hear the colloquy that would ensue.
'What are you back here for?' 'My name's Adult
I went to school when young without result.'

'You don't want culture what you need's a cult.'

And very close to the mark in my opinion. Books failed with you. Either they never touched you at all or they made a book fool out of you. You didn't learn to read and you are back to another try at it.
Teachers have had more directly to do with you than they will ever have again even if you go to college. In college you would be thrown with them but less as your instructors and disciplinarians than as your examples to emulate in thought and expression. There will be only two kind of you from now on, the self made in college and the self made out of college.
A final word about what it is to have learned have it put it into your head to read."

--from The Notebooks of Robert Frost

silent ramblings.

we sat around and spoke of our worst enemies. and of this life. and i dug my head into the deep curve of your body like it were a nest and i were home. home for the stars and the sun. and i thought of all the things i could do and of all the things i could never have to do again if all our what-ifs became what now?s. and we spoke of what inspires us as my fingers melted across the silent surface of your curving back, as they dipped and swam gently through calm water. of all the things i could go to now, of all the proactive things that create futures of happiness, i think a memory will do. i don't need any philosophy today, nor any history or revolution. if only i could feed off memory, it is so vivid and as sensual as food itself. if only the sun set later so that i could remember. so that i could forget. so that i would not have to worry myself with the silent option -- stay put, go back, or move forward? and as vivid as it seems, when i touch it i am terrified it will wake as an animal from a fretful sleep. the dreamer in me will not win this time, not over the romantic. and now i know what it means to be a member of this community of universe. i want to feel the realness of experience, not the certainty of make-believe.

more quotes.

"If you wished to see the sky from the towpath you had to look up. Had to lift your head, crane your neck. On their own, your eyes did not naturally discover the sky."

"Nobody wants a heavy-hearted girl for Christ sake."

"History has no existence. All that exists are individuals, and of these, only individual moments as broken off from on another as shattered vertebrae. These words he hand-printed, gripping a pencil clumsily in his stiffening fingers. He had so many thoughts! In the cemetery his head was invaded by hornet-thoughts he could not control.
Clumsily he wrote down these thoughts. He wondered if they were his. He stared at them, and pondered them, then crumpled the paper in his hand and tossed it into the stove."

"...how flimsy, how vulnerable, how merely words were the great works of philosophy! How merely words the dream of mankind for a god!"

"No erotic event exists in isolation, to be experienced merely once, and forgotten. The erotic exists solely in memory: recalled, re-imagined, re-lived, and re-lived in a ceaseless present."

"He was a man of secrets, like one of those fires that smolder underground for weeks, months, years... Tignor was a big battered-face moon in the night sky, you saw only the brightly lighted part, glaring like a coin, but you knew that there was another, dark and secret side. The two sides of the pockmarked moon were simultaneous yet you wanted to think, like a child, that there was only the light."

"Even as a small child he was shrewd enough to know It's like she and I have died. And now nothing can hurt us."

"The compulsion to be happy only complicates life."

"As your life isn't a real life any longer only something you do with your time."

"She knew what music cues signaled even when she wasn't watching the screen. It gave you a confused sense of what to expect in life. For in life there is no music, you have no cues. Most things happen in silence. You live your life forward and remember only backward. Nothing is relived, only just remembered and that incompletely. And life isn't simple like a movie story, there is too much to remember.
'And all that you forget, it's gone as if it has never been. Instead of crying you might as well laugh.'
And Hazel laughed, a thin anxious girl's laugh that ceased as abruptly as it began."

"The deepest truth of the American soul is that it is shallow as a comic strip is shallow..."

"Like most women she wished to exaggerate the significance of small deaths."

"The attention of strangers was blinding, like stage lights. Except on stage you have no need to stare into the lights, you turn your attention onto the beautiful white-and-black keyboard stretching in front of you."

"There is no purpose to history as to evolution, there is no goal or progress.  Evolution is the term given to what is... History is an invention of books. In biological anthropology we note that the wish to perceive 'meaning' is one trait of our species among many. But that does not posit 'meaning' in the world. If history did exist it is a great river/cesspool into which countless small streams & tributaries flow. In one direction. Unlike sewage it cannot back up. It cannot be 'tested' --'demonstrated.' It simply is. If the individual streams dry up, the river disappears. There is no 'river-destiny.' There are merely accidents in time. The scientist notes that without sentiment or regret.
Maybe I will send you these ravings, my tenacious American cousin.
I'm drunk enough, in a festive mood!"

--The Gravedigger's Daughter, by Joyce Carol Oates.

restless.

need to find an agent. oh wait, i'm on chapter three.

working in the bistro.

The bottles are filled with

dancing witches whose green

glow is caught swirling under

a stubborn cork.

When every dinner party

becomes extinct,

only dark magic will pop those lids.

***

we're stretching our bodies and

imagining the sun,

but what does all that mean?

whose arms are cradling us,

eternity's or now's?

or maybe our mothers's?

***

This dancing party was made of

lights and dreamers.

The dancers are possessed, not

who they were in the womb.

...

you can't dock the question "how are you?" forever.

anything.

These gloves have seen our fingerprints,

know our crimes,

are aware of our guilt.

These empty costumes know who

we've been,

have swallowed our bodies whole.

Your empty tube of lipstick

yearns to be something else,

now that it has known your face.

Your empty skin

paces round a crowded room,

wishing it knew life

other than

a closet of other skins.

shakespearean magnets are fun.

jake barnes.

"I figured that all out once, and for six months I never slept with the electric light off. That was another bright idea. To hell with women, anyway. To hell with you, Brett Ashley.

Women made such swell friends. Awfully swell. In the first place, you had to be in love with a woman to have a basis of friendship. I had been having Brett for a friend. I had not been thinking about her side of it. I had been getting something for nothing. That only delayed the presentation of the bill. The bill always came. That was one of the swell things you could count on.

I thought I had paid for everything. Not like the woman pays and pays and pays. No idea of retribution or punishment. Just exchange of values. You gave up something and got something else. Or you worked for something. You paid some way for everything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time. Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money. Enjoying living was learning to get your money's worth and knowing when you had it. You could get your money's worth. The world was a good place to buy in. It seemed like a fine philosophy. In five years, I thought, it will seem just as silly as all the other fine philosophies I've had.

Perhaps that wasn't true, though. Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about." (p. 152)

"I got up and went to the balcony and looked out at the dancing in the square. The world was not wheeling any more. It was just very clear and bright, and inclined to blur at the edges. I washed, brushed my hair. I looked strange to myself in the glass, and went down-stairs to the dining-room." (p. 228)

"That seemed to handle it. That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back. And sign the wire with love. That was it all right. I went in to lunch." (p. 243)

--Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

waiting.

there's something in waiting

that makes our teeth grow outward and our flesh begin to tickle.

it makes us dig and search and pick.

and in the end we forget about waiting and realize that

we lost ourselves to it.

so we turn a page though our eyes have not yet caught up.

there is no focus then,

we continue blindly

and wait for our vision to come back

so that we can find the plotting demons on our skin

who wish to tickle our hairs and bones,

knowing we can't scratch back.

faith in senses.

The man was wearing a brown jacket and blue jeans. He wore white sneakers and a thin helmet. He stood straight still, as if gathering his final earthly thoughts. The man was neither smiling nor frowning for he was focusing so intently on what was before him that he did not feel a thing. There may not have been anyone else in the plane with him or there may have been a whole crew. Either way all I could see looking in was him standing there, one foot on the solid ground of the airplane, and the other dangled in sky. The sky wasn't blue up there. It was clear. And the ground was not green. Of course, we were not very high up, but we were still reasonably high to feel afraid. Around us was the foreground, colors that did not make anything but were more vivid and clear than we were. I was up there running tests in the clear, imperceptible air, tests on my body. My pilot steered the helicopter in every direction to see how still I could stay in the face of every possible gravitational force. The pressure against my head stopped when I saw this man. Do I know if he jumped or not? And to where and from what? I can't say that I do.

PUBLISHED.

The poem "reading." from september will be published in Teen Ink magazine. Yay!

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