nasty

Her cold hard breath crumbled through
the crematorium.
"The skies," they cried, "the skies."
But there are no skies underwater;
wet and ashy with the acid waves
battering over you.

***
....more to come?

***

Okay, so I'm back at school now and unfortunately I don't think I'll be able to write/post as much for a bit so don't hate me. Luckily, I'm taking a class on the history of witchcraft so I'm hoping for some good inspiration. Wooooooo dark and scary things!

really?

we saw the bubbles and they were us --
we couldn't touch each other for fear
of crushing one another and
we couldn't hardly ever know each other.
and we were everything we saw.

***

and you took the role of the man,
and i, that of the woman --
and i remembered what it was like
to live in the thin arms of halflovers,
how time and i went by like ghosts as i pushed
myself in, tried to feel the locking snap
of transforming into a new species, living
without my spine and fingers, being another
man's waist pockets so he can keep me
where he needs me most.

skin and hair turning white in the dark light,
in the cool arms of his underground bedroom.
palely would i follow in a white dress with
my own mouth sewn up on his and
my eyes so open, vividly processing
my path, memory shot, and good because
i will never be back.

worlds, revisted.

okay, so if you go back to the very first month of this blog, when it was a mere teet-suckin babe, you'll see some kind of awful piece called "worlds." i had a pretty big idea for it, but, like most of my ideas, it was buried in lack of articulation. i saw it today and decided to re-make it with a little more color and excitement. it may still suck, but hey here it is (with a little more hormonal attitude, i might add). tell me what you think? p.s. i'll probably end up renaming it.

Worlds

there's a rainbow burning underneath your sanity
brush away your demons, fall into the cacophony
feel your dried-up fingers brushing the space between us
because you are all worlds in a conspiring universe

I am your distant stargazer breathing shallow
You can hear my feathered thoughts through dust
And all the notes of these anthems drone;
Adding planets to the never-ending solar system
That makes us strangers to one another, so far away

They float in gassy circles, each up against the next
Conspiring with the sun against me until,
Until it’s colder where I stand on the pilgrim earth
Because the naïve sun submitted to a whim

And she births worlds and worlds and they know
My sacred sinning thoughts, can see my bones from above
There is a certain nothingness that connects us;
A certain nothingness that is of our own making

You are mere pits of universes that crash into one another
And call it life intersecting, life, dirty life blooming and blending
But you are only worlds;
And you can be destroyed as easily as you were made.

the house

There were fingerprints on the orchids
And a blonde bushy set of trees just beyond
the screen door
The cat smelled of nicotine and coffee
Yes, we microwaved coffee
to ease us back into this life
And stirred it to keep ourselves moving
We put all our hate into
The leaflets we called books,
Fixed and pulsing hard on the shelves
We sat around and thought about what we could make,
Terrified because we were insane
The yellow lines couldn't hold our words anymore
So we made them smaller, quicker
The trees quivered when the gods came!
They came and we could hear them
Banging throughout the house
Dancing and shuffling,
And we were so afraid because we were crazy
And they would know it
We clung to each other
And smoked each other's foul breath
And beat upon our pockets
to kill time. And then it was dead.

what i did

I broke into you the other day
to replace something
Any excuse to get into you
I touched
I felt the weight of your eyes
(Lighter than I remembered)
I felt your skin on the inside
You laughed
As day made a show of itself outside you
As the clouds bumped along on thin skin
I could feel you watching them
I wanted to claw at your heart,
to fix its deaf and dumb
But it only smiled and gurgled
I drizzled out through your fingertips,
Under your nails
And it was night
I tried to sleep beside you
But you didn't recognize what I was
And your sleepy voice didn't try to ask
I slipped under your door into
A field full of night
And swerved home
Don't you ever wonder what I took?

sweet dreams.

my favorite :)

i could write us down in a couple of words over coffee--

The day I picked you up off the side of the road
Like a wounded animal;
Your spots and fur mangled and red,
Your heartbeat sickeningly slow
And something detached then,
The soul in you came out through the eyes
You breathed in my name,
You touched me and I bled;
But it was only your blood dissolving through me.

currently reading

so i'm in the middle of 1984 right now and it's pretty much everything i've been looking for. i didn't expect the prose to be so amazing, but i guess i should have expected it since i fell in love with orwell's essay on writing, "Politics and the English Language." this is one of those books i want to keep reading forever; straightforward but meaningful. and knowing my reading pace, it probably will take forever. okay i'm done with the nerd rant... to the majority of the universe that has already read this book years and years ago, i sort of apologize.

anyone else got some orwell lovin'?

i don't know what i'm saying anymore

I am ancient.
I am as of yet unsolved.
And I am ever so slowly in self-destruct
Until you hear that fatal click.

I like my space to go in evil ways
But it is not all my fault.
I will filter through your finger tips
Like a mist, A forming shadow.
And you'll breathe in me time.

Shiver through me,
You old men who find sex appeal
In a color wheel,
And feel the weight of my young breath.
Go through me like an
Old diluted song.
Stay, be my friend for a minute
Then escape to your
Lonely homely world.
I was raised for rudeness' sake,
And need a brand new hand to take.
Take me down to the undergrowth
And discover me
Like you did when time was young.

panic.

Warmly vanishing like the ribbon on your wrist
Unraveling, fading in every direction, caught and twisted
Sold to the tides, you might say; a slave to the skies

And you’ve probed me so many times about
That lingering feeling, I don’t know / I don’t know.
My body is a living purgatory of eating and waiting

It is what I cannot transcend.

need to feel.

Remember me in diamonds when the sun rises
Suffocate me; wake me from the yellow stinking fog
Release me to the wet, salty night
I know there are others at my door
In need of you and the orange
Flowers you press coolly into our palms
But rid me of this breath for a whim
Shiver through me in the blackblue night

A burning desert reduced to pools of mudslime;
A moon bathing my pepper skin in soft flames
Cubed rocks, iron locks, a garbage heap warning,
"Soul under construction. Do not enter."

i really like this.

[from Hospital Drive: A Journal of Words and Images at the University of Virginia School of Medicine]

Birthday Eight

I find her when I fall, a bike accident one week

Before my eighth birthday. The sun is neon;

We are exactly the same age.

I am America, nearly dead on a curb. She is England,
Travels by way of mud-plugged mushrooms.

Says she’s given up looking for a rabbit.

Alice has taken to healing, watches the world as it blends.

Maybe it’s all building, a hospital. The doctor tells me

I’ve ruptured my spleen.

She sits on the end of my bed that rises with a switch.

I hang from tubes and needles, still a girl no less.

Not imagined, but real.

Not blonde, but brunette. Not British, but broken.

My IV leaks—makes weather, comes water. It rains

For eight days, fresh wet road

Outside a frame of window. Sun again, sky rips in half.

Alice is ripped from a book. We talk about poetry.

Nobody knows what it is.

I trust everything: the cure, the doctor, all sharp things

That make me better, make me new. Alice asks, but Lisa,

What does the spleen really do?

Not sure, but I know how it feels when it bursts, spilling

Over other organs with blood. We talk about living.

Sometimes cells mount words,

Come before. I can’t be a poet with a broken body,

But they keep coming back, swirling around us,

Saying strange things—

England glows green. The moon is clisping.

Strawberry grass grows up to the stars.

You need a new word, she says, for what you do.

Call it epiphany, call it a lime, a religion. It isn’t words,

It isn’t life. It’s something else.

Can’t you see what you’re doing, looking into a big cliché—

Forests of trees without leaves, a bitter afternoon, your body

Sucked of blood, narrowing for clarity?

-Lisa Markowitz

on a pillow.

our dreams are
controlled by a
narcoleptic freud who
sifts through our
secrets with dirty palms,
pushes through the
fibrous strings of thought
and presses his thumbs
down on our dusty
subconscious.

he does his work like a
sick ghost, dizzily
roaming in and out
of the minds of
hollow strangers.

a mother buries her
woven hands under the
dirt in a sort of prayer,
asking not to be next,
for her bones not to show.