Danielle Dennis: Poetry & Prose

Disembark

2012-01-25T13:15:00.001-08:00

She left me silently in the morning
and only once she was really gone
did I wake up. Maybe I knew she was
there all along, hiding for her grand reveal,
hoping to make the two of us
swell with our pride as we stood
patiently by the gate.

But she could hear what you
were thinking, my lover, so she
waded away from me unwillingly
with hopes we would find her again.
I hope I find her, too – that I will
one day take her into my arms
and thank her for leaving me so that
I never had to choose to say goodbye.

She could hear
what you were thinking, my lover,
but as she slipped away, I lost
the part of you within me, I lost
the sense of completion behind
your stone cold eyes, I lost
the beautiful feeling that you could
one day love me, I lost
that gold horizon, the chance
I’d ever love myself.

Moon-tides

2011-08-13T19:49:00.001-07:00

It was on this day that your Lord had made
that I reclaimed my tender mystery. My destiny
shook beneath me, settled itself between
each of your folds, shattering against the shore
as a collective sigh, one wave. And to think
you thought you were something
without me. To think
of a lover’s stroll along the coast
without the clamoring voice that I gave you,
of the angry release you inflict upon the earth
until I strip your high tide away.

I do it all with a whisper, what you attempt
in Triton’s scream. To dance our waltz
you chase the curvature of my hip,
navigate each intricate step through
desperate fingers in my hair. You take pride
in this slavery, swell with joy as the corners
of my mouth soften, a smile to break
the barrier between earth and sky –

my permission that molds us to one. So
with clasped hands, intertwined, with the hunger
of fiends – your sea foam illumed by my Luna’s light,
my moon, ever brighter, because it’s touched you.

But be wary, my seamen, when the smile fades,
when the moon woman wanes, retreats to her sky.
Be wary when I fade for your new stillness
will haunt you, left alone to your devices, nothing
in my wake.

Le Premier

2011-05-21T02:32:00.001-07:00

in the iron, we are clad
we were won by something mad
that drinks fools empty. in the earth
in the fire, in the wind, that
sweet, sweet water
we are still what we once were. in the

moments that I find you,
when I sink, dissolve inside you
i am breathing for
your name. but my wind
it cannot reach inside the part
of you that preaches
false desire

i can pick us up as ghosts
who left their entrails in the hallway
where i met you. i’ll show
the heart of every haunting
the beating of the drum
pounds soft inside you. but when

i crawl back in your bed, hold
your head between my hands
i’ll know i’m holding something less
than the man who reached inside me
grabbed my lungs and eyes to blind me
and ripped my air straight from
my chest. if you see me

softly ringing the bell that sculpts each
wasted second in your memory
get on your knees, say your hail mary’s
pray that i’ll still be here standing
in the ruins of our love. that love

erupted life inside me, built a fortress
from thin air, put the poetry in the words
that i once spoke, and as I stand
here stone in stone weezing heart
and broken bone i can’t help but think
that you might be the one.

The Lover of a Ghost

2011-01-08T14:31:00.000-08:00

I’m the lover of a ghost swallowed
by Arachne’s famished aspirations,

by her beguiling professions, her
ever-soft asphyxiation
her sweet gossamer grip, the shackles
seeking love requited. I have

heard his faded testimony, I have seen
him take the choke. I fell upon him
with my midnight veil, and in the center
stood my eye— waxing, approaching full

bleeding out my soul’s conviction.
And in my lightness shone his chains—
his spider’s art, her labyrinth web
and spoke the moon to a dying man,
“I promise to help you live.”

He begged for me to wane, he pushed me
through the velvet night. He almost loved
Arachne’s bites and chains, sweet throbs
of fruitless guarantee.

Yet I’m the lover of a ghost who spins
his own web of indecision, I’m the lover
of a man who can save anyone but
himself.

Landing

2010-12-05T15:51:00.001-08:00

I came to you many miles above the world,
caved into your touch, shuddering in the wonder
of merging with another, of the nuances of fate—
flying intertwined for a reason.

Miles above the world, your heart beat
as you watched me. I could feel it through
your chest, pressed against you in our seats
molding to your body more and more
with every sigh, wishing that we never had
our separate destinations.

We weren’t ready for the divergence. To pass
through the barrier between earth and sky,
to touch firm ground, marked dark with borders
and names, the ground where you were known
as one distinct life and I was known to be
distinctly, painfully another.

You’d later haunt me with your softness.
I remembered you while in the grip of another,
tossing my body exactly where he wanted it,
pushing and pulling for his selfish release.

I thought of you, of the way you loved how I blush,
of the way I eased into you and you eased
back into me, of the satisfaction it brought you
to gently bring me higher. In your lips,
I briefly tasted what’s as bitter as is sweet—
recognition beyond my bare body in a bed,
awareness of how little my silhouette really says.

I crave you, the way your eyes drank me in.
I crave the tinge of fear in your voice
that reminds me I am loveable, I crave your
endless questions that remind me
you can hurt. I know I could’ve touched you
with the same care you touched me, I know
how much I could’ve given you
in the fewest precious hours.

But you stopped the fight we once believed in
for us, for the coming together in whatever
way we could. I understand it, all your caution,
our one heartbreaking difference:

I wanted you, to escape my lonely for a while,
and you don’t want me so your lonely never comes.

Forgotten, Awake

2010-11-02T00:19:00.001-07:00

I fell through the world and landed
in a poorly lit dream, where androgynous
shadows dared I sort them from the rest
through my kaleidoscope eyes, with
bated breath. This is where
I found you, in a world
where the negative spaces do
the talking and all the figures
with no mouths smirk in the dark—
knowing I am blind behind
vanity’s pleading eyes, knowing
that the beauty had a youthful beast.
This is where I found you and
this is where you’ll stay, once I
grow up, grow away from this
self-loathing sin and begin to
be forgotten, begin to
fall awake.

A Kiss For a Kingdom

2010-11-02T00:18:00.001-07:00

I can never know the art
of loving you when
I keep molding all love
into art. I bleed
on these pages until
my pulse whimpers
and stops, until my heart
will kill for each little
breath it lost when
I spilled on your lap
this red ink.

I’ll keep writing, I’ll keep carving
in bitter fool’s blood.
It keeps me alive
in my desperate hunt
to haunt you, reminds me
of all I’m willing to give
to sculpt you into
what I need you to be,
to somehow create
my own divine control.

And it all starts again
(with this same paper and pen) —
I take the kiss that you give me
and weave our new kingdom,
I take all this self-loathing
and give it your name.

Glass Messiah

2010-10-11T08:40:00.001-07:00

I have a crown of thorns twisted in my side, its
bleeding and festering
and somehow healing me from
the inside out, wrapping
its arms around each
muscle and vein, stretching
and squeezing until
I stop. I stop
fighting back, stop asking you to
make me holy again, stop
begging you to give
me a reason to pull
this tiara out of me, wash
it with some holy water and
wear it on my head
like the messiah
I was meant to be.
I stop bathing my own
feet, kissing my own
footsteps, weeping
in my own untimely death and all
because I’m not as satisfied
as Jesus was to be
naked and forsaken.
I can’t pretend to love myself
well enough for you
to love me, too. So please
leave me on a dirt road,
make sure I’m shoeless.
Break both my legs
and say, “walk.” Break me
beyond recognition,
enjoy the clamor of
shatter. Fuck me up
so badly that I have no
choice but to start
from the ground up.
Douse me in self-loathing,
wrap me in the ugly truths,
believe that I shouldn’t
be believed in.
Because I’ll never make myself
into anything until
I’m absolutely nothing
to you.

A Nautical Room

2010-09-06T12:39:00.002-07:00

Your sweet breath swells
into mine, fills a sail
softly undulating as if
the winds of the world
waned away. You blow

heavy on my back when
the sound of your
discomfort fills the room;
you slip into
my sheets and watch
them billow above us,
giving half-satisfying
direction towards a
horizon lost. So we

sail on, buck up,
tie our shoes and wait
while sea water slaps
against the hardwood floor
and the breathless coastal fog
hovers above our bed. So we

wait for the instant when
I can make you better, wait
for when ecstasy isn’t
a curse, wait for
the moment when you can
finally love me, wait
for the day
I raise mast by myself.

Untitled (prose piece)

2010-08-28T22:13:00.000-07:00

The moon swayed against her bare back every time the wind pushed with enough vigor to weave her body left. Its light hugged the swell of her breast, swiveled down her side unevenly. For a moment, she was fully exposed in the paleness. Then the wind would rise up again and the broken pendulum would shift left like before, swallowing her body in darkness. She eluded both the dark and the light, unable to balance herself on the grass below her naked form. So she swung back and forth, left to center, dodging the shadows for the light before involuntarily swinging back into the black again.

She was used to this inconsistency; the artist in her could sense it from simple moments like this one. Everything became a metaphor once she acknowledged her thirst for one. She wanted to believe that her inability to stay still was somewhat uncontrollable, like the way the beads of a kaleidoscope fall with the slightest movement, like the wind that eased her sideways. So she spent a good part of her evenings on the grassy hill behind her house, rising and falling with each breath, swinging left to right inside of the evening's unpredictable beat.

This is the woman I fell in love with. A woman who defined herself by the world surrounding her, a woman who eased her way into the universe as precisely and delicately as I eased my way into her mind, into her open body. This woman was poetry that flowed in the perfect places-- her hips melodically dipped into her waist and rose up again, billowing into the fullness of her chest. Her eyes were the punch line that killed, that broke the immaculate curvature I knew so well. Sometimes, I'd find myself lost in her softness, wrapped in the overwhelming effect of such subtlety. I'd watch her write in bed, following her lips and her hair and her spine and her fingers until she'd catch me staring and stare right back, breaking her general sense of tenderness with something staccato and poignant. Her eyes reminded me that she had meaning; she had a distinct and riveting pulse. She existed beyond me; she existed beyond herself.

And then she fell in love with me in return. She let herself succumb to the warmth between us and melt, molding inside of my every breath. She abandoned each curve that she loved, slapped her arms lifelessly around my ribs, dropped the look in her eye that once kept me hungry. All of a sudden, her pulse walked in step with mine.

I was lost—slithering away from her on a buttery track that she had kneaded with her own hands. Each touch became a more and more obsessive attempt for completion; she searched my body with her fingers, frantically seeking any trace of herself in my skin. And as she slept, in her only gentle moments free of desperation, I realized that she had cascaded into the most beautiful loss of self that I had ever seen.

Syncopation

2010-06-18T19:39:00.001-07:00

I told you to put your head there
on my chest
as we lay in our bed.

I wanted you to hear my heart beat
and seamlessly float into
its rhythm,
our rhythm
of delicate sways and boundless ease
with no name and face
and age, no
latitude and longitude.

I wanted your heart
to not be alone for a while,
to follow.

As you sleep, I collect
your snores and sighs
in a jar under our bed. I swallow them
like water, gulping you in
until morning, when
you insist to once again
become plottable.

We split, we multiply.
Into all of our moments
without one another, into all of our
feigned strengths,
embellished and worn,
adding distinct recognition
to each syllable of our names,
differentiating.

I climb into this bed—
our bed—
and watch the demarcation.
I watch you lean into
my body and consume
the smell of my skin, I feel
your palms stretch
underneath me, their
desperate hunger
for completion.

We have diverged and we
have merged, monogamous
in a moment, synonymous
in an experience.

I hate myself for loving
how you love me
whatever way you can.

To Drink

2010-05-10T15:37:00.001-07:00

The stains it left on my body leech
the artistry out of me, chafe
at my skin from the inside, brand
my face with a number, leave me
here for dead. And while

suspended between life and
the chance to live without you, I
ricochet between your palms
with no life at all. There’s
nothing here to excavate, no breath.

No lips, no lies, no justification
for the way these words rise up
to my chest and stop when
you give me a few foreign tears
to swallow. “Rub your throat,
baby, gulp down your pride
and let the breath and the heartbeat
drown with them.”

So I drink you in with half-assed prayers.

I drink for the way the house sounds
when the sound of your unease
floats away. I drink for the smell
of your skin in the morning
before you have the chance to
come clean. I drink when
you need me to, when I can feel
your cries swell up in my lungs
and escape my body in sighs—

I drink until I can’t drink any longer.

I Want To Howl

2010-04-21T23:34:00.001-07:00

I want to howl—
to wake you from your half-masted sleep
and force your white flag up or down.

I want to peel away the sky
and find an unwritten metaphor
for everything I could never explain,
and then maybe re-carve all
the lines on my face so that
you could help chisel them away.

But I’m tinged red
from the numbers on the clock,
binding me to the sadness I never feel
from the look on your faces
when there’s nothing left to say.
I’m bound to the familiarity a child feels
while clinging to her new mother’s skin,
and to all of the sickening sweetness
that chains me to vacantly belonging.

I have never felt bound to you.

I want to howl to the moon and the earth
and the stars
and I want them all to howl back at me

because one idle moment and I’m
howling at the sea,
wishing it had worked
to keep us from the shore.

Invisible Blood

2010-03-08T23:04:00.001-08:00

I was never fully satisfied, chasing you
on heels that weren’t yet broken,
dodging the defenselessness you allowed me to feel
like it was a bullet soaked in a plague.

But this Achilles found her weakness
when something in her ankles snapped
and she surrendered to the ground
apologetically.
I clung to you in spite of myself,
a tendril clasped for dear life
around the stoic woman
who found so much warmth to give
when needed in another’s darkness.

You work only by the moonlight,
working only with your hands:
silently, I watch you wrap your fingers
around my limbs
like an irrepressible vine,
attend to my reservations
like they belong to your own blood.

Blood—
an indelible tie of which
we can never be fully conscious;
the endless space we make in our womb
where ends don’t ever have to meet.

I’m on this earth to share the bonds
that warm my aching body,
here in skin and bones to watch
all of these bones break,
absorbing all the life you have to give
so that I may one day
give it back to you.

Witching Hour

2010-02-17T07:17:00.001-08:00

In September, he found his witching hour,
while the rest of the house was asleep
and I was the only one left
to switch out the records for him—

To sing “teenage wasteland” with him,
to top off his rum for him,
to light his cigars.

In September, it was cool outside
but his body stayed warm.
I sat in the cold with him,
rocked in the wind with him,
my eyes following the furious sway
of his body with him.

But he wasn’t furious with me.

Baba o’Riley excited my father.
“Doesn’t this get your blood going, honey?
“Don’t you just need to hit something?”

I watched him dance with it,
the heavyweight bag flying seamlessly
between his drunken fists.
I watched him with frozen veins,
with all the need in the world
to sit still, to never hit anything
like he could.

He took his last swaggered punch
and I jumped to break his fall—
clinging to hands that know
my blood all too well;
haunted by a breath
that once kissed me goodnight.

A Benevolent Ghost

2010-02-17T07:16:00.001-08:00

You’re haunting me.

You, like everyone else
Like the astronaut
Who called on the girl next to me
When my hand was held higher.
Like the man in the movie
Who helped Charlie blast his way
Through the ceiling in a glass elevator
But would never, ever help me.

You’re haunting me like a plague,
Swallowing me like sour beer,
Licking me up from between your fingers
to help clean your newest scrapes.
What is it about blood that’s so
God damn satisfying to you?

You’re haunting me like
You have nothing better to do,
No one better to love,
No other way to sleep at night--
Thinking I’ll understand
If you would just wait till morning.

You’re haunting me:
Like a wicked poltergeist,
Like all the loving mothers I’ve ever met,
Like all the sweetest moments
That we may never have.

You’re a ghost that I’ve only ever seen before
when it’s chained inside of myself.

My Eleventh Hour

2009-12-31T12:50:00.000-08:00

I caught my own breath in my hands
and took the time to breathe it back in--
sweet and satisfied, stale and strangled,
spangled with lavender and sour milk
and what it means to be nationless.

Tell me you smell something different.

Tell me I'm bound to what I give
but never to what I am given;
that I can choose when the balloon pops,
when my corpse falls earthbound;
that the rushed and eager touches
I collect under my bed
can be quilted into
a sickening new height of love.

I can't remember who told me
that I wasn't young anymore.
It might've been the stout cashier woman
who proclaimed me a thief when I
slid a Snickers bar into my pocket.
It might've been my Playboy Mommy:
she warned me of the sins in my blood,
of her own obsession
with a woman's power to unveil.
Or maybe God told me on the day
when he made me suddenly
wretchedly
unequivocally alone.

On this ancient earth, I'm rarely glad to seem young--
until I'm tangled in sheets
and limbs I can't get out of,
until the simplest mechanisms of
a beating heart lose their intrigue
in my stoic desperation for blood.

Tell me you smell something different on my breath;
Tell me I can choose to be boundless.

Turbulence

2009-11-15T00:01:00.000-08:00

This is more of a ranty, confusing piece of random than anything else....

I was reborn in a storm— power out, phone lines tied; the weather too shitty to step outside for much needed air but this house had a roof so it was alright. They had a great survival pack for this type of thing: cans of beans, a bottle of wine and matches—many little matches that lit many little candles around the house that cast many little shadows on the family photos that lined the walls. My father said to her, “you know, honey, we’re running out of time.” So she sat on the floor and she spread her legs and she pushed for a minute until I finally gave in and came back to her.
For a second she thought they’d soon get the power back in their empty house. When I was reintroduced to this world, she says that I illuminated the living room for a moment— bringing an instant of light to the darkest corners of what was once a mortuary. They are the ones who chose to stay in the house where they once prepared their dead, not me. So I collapsed under the phantoms they insisted on avoiding— that I saw in their faces, shrouding me like loose skin until I was nothing more than their writhing baby on a hardwood floor. A baby with arthritis and crow’s feet.
But I learned how to crawl and I learned how to walk and I even now know what it means to run— even if only in the dark, down the hallways of my home. But out there— in a world where everyone else is chained to some greater good or their self-induced bad—that is where I insist to be chained to everything. Give me all the scriptures of the world and I’ll pick a few and scrapbook a mantra. Hand me a single dollar bill and give me a dare—I promise I can do more evil without even spending it than you think I can. Outside of that house, the haven from the storm, the midwife’s reluctant office, the place I once grew up— where they once put makeup on stone faces and still sleep in caskets, just in case—outside is where I run much too fast.

Untitled: suggestions?

2009-11-08T17:52:00.001-08:00

He was never mine, even after the seasons melted into one another and his favorite photograph of New York’s highway 95 tarnished at the edges. He took me there once; he showed me why he left. I thought it was beautiful while we stood on that overpass, fingers interlaced into the chain link fence. We stood atop the grandest Christmas tree in the world, our porcelain faces radiating in the yielding darkness with our wings suspended behind us. We could have flown over that railing and headfirst into emancipated bewilderment but instead, we just glowed. I wanted to laugh as toy trucks zoomed beneath our feet, their momentum gently rocking the traffic lights, our gracefully dangling ornaments.
In my admiration for such a place, I nearly missed the looming apprehension sprawled across that angelic face of his. We weren’t in the city because I wanted to see the pretty lights beam at me and I wanted to beam back. Ethan made me get in the car and I headed north as he slept in the back seat with that photo evenly placed between his palms, draped in some sort of serenity that I only ever saw when he was unconscious. I drove three hundred miles with him like that, careful to turn and break with great care so we could maintain the first silence we’d shared in recent weeks that couldn’t be sliced with a sharp enough blade.
As I approached our exit, I reached behind and grabbed his leg, shaking firmly to wake him. “What way?”
“What way gets us across the Hudson from lower Manhattan?” he groggily questioned.
“You’re the one who lived here. You wanted to show me this.”
He suppressed his belligerence with a low grumble, that sound he always made when he didn’t want to give me an answer. The closer to when he’d woken up, the lower his octave and the higher my dissatisfaction. Somewhere between four and five PM on a Monday, Wednesday or Thursday, it was always tolerable to hear him groan like that. I’d pour the remaining capsules into my hand and count them in pairs, and he’d grumble again. It didn’t matter if he danced in circles around too many Prozacs or how many hours of sleep he’d gotten the night before.
It was the nights when I knew exactly how long he’d slept when I closed my eyes and suffered through that incomprehensible mumble. Fucking inertia. We went from a hundred and ten in a residential to zero; we were endorphins and synapses firing blanks from muskets. I never would have wanted a little cabinet for me, a reliable change of clothes at his place for my morning drive home, regardless of what I usually came dressed in. Although I didn’t know much, I knew a name, a face and a folder of psychological records—enough to take all appeal out of smelling like his natural scent and somehow adapting it for my own.
I often made coffee while he slept since he was somehow unfazed by the sunbeams crawling inside from every unprotected doorway or window. He didn’t have a single grain of sugar in his entire apartment, and that actually mattered to me then. I stood ten feet from his bedside and took a quiet moment to admire his shoulder blade illuminated from the horizontal slivers of light emanating through the blinds. Once again irritated with my sugarless coffee, I then I woke him.
That’s when the grumble came, when I flew over the dashboard and through the window and onto the street. I even skidded a few times, and I still have the road rash on my hands to stand for it. Fucking inertia.
“Ethan, this isn’t okay.” Grumble. “I don’t think we should do this anymore.”
“Oh hell, should we do this. I trust you ‘cause of it.” He coughed while sliding closer to the right side of his bed, having strayed from that familiar territory sometime in the early morning hours. He slid farther from me.
“Why though? You talked to me fine.” Grumble. “Why does it change anything? I don’t want this.”
“Yes you do.”
“I don’t, though.” Another grumble. “I really don’t. I don’t want to be the shrink who can’t help anybody, so she does this.”
“I hate that word.” He muttered with the majority of his mouth still pressed against his pillow and slightly open, his eyes closed. After a few moments of silence, he opened them again with unbelievable speed, the lens open and ready to capture the instance of weakness he knew I would have. With a blink, he clicked, and I was caught on film as raw as I ever come.
I pressed my shoulders together behind, adding a little more dignified strain in my collarbones. “Psychologist, fine. But I’m not-- I’m the shrink who can’t help anybody so she fucks.”
He’d grumble, and I’d pick up my keys from his nightstand and walk towards the door.

I then soon discovered that Ethan made effort an unmade bed and bleached socks. There were more Vicodin prescriptions in his glove compartment than on the shelves of the pharmacy that gave them to him, yet their plastic seals were all unbroken. He swallowed one aspirin a day that almost took the sharpest of the edge off in his shoulder, usually right after he combed his hair, one hundred exact strokes each morning.
Yet those unopened pills started two weeks after I did. I was a better psychologist in the early stages than I’d been my whole career and he never spoke a single word to me once we left my office. I became him at night; he resonated through my insides and pulsed through my veins and out again, as syncopated feeling and thinking and believing. The code was quite predictable: fast was anxious, violent was angry, deliberate was inquisitive for passion. I began to know him in those weeks right before the real pills. Ten years of spherical coffee talk and elongated silences, and I finally knew him.

“Is there anything you can tell me about where we’re going? How to get there’s a start.” I anxiously rubbed my thumb along the inside seam of the steering wheel.
“I only vaguely know where we are right now.”
“That doesn’t mean I know this city; you do. I just want to get there so we can grab a bite up here before we head back.” I hesitated. “Can’t do that unless we get there.”
“It’s really not that exciting, and food can wait,” he said, audibly shifting his weight in the back seat.
“I’m hungry.”
He coughed. “So am I.”
“Where the hell do I go?” I snapped. To know Ethan, I figured, was to gain real understanding of your own patience.
“Right in 2 lights, I think.”
“And then?”
“I’ve got to see it,” he said with a hint of irritation in his voice. “I can’t see it from here.” He paused. “At the speed you’re going, I’m surprised you’re charging me by hour instead of by mile.”
“Who says I’m charging you? I think of this as a courtesy thing.”
“I always assume you’re charging unless we’re at my place,” he said dryly. I heard a faint shuffling from the back seat as he sat upright.
It took me a moment to tame the heat rising up into my chest, so I let his words settle before nearly whispering, “that makes me feel like more of a whore than it should.”
“That’s not what I was getting at at all.” His voice lightly quivered. “At all.”
“The point is,” my fingers clenched, “that this is a courtesy thing.”
I could feel his eyes burning through the back of my head, through my hair and into my brain, as if staring at me as intensely as he always did would somehow make my mind more easily legible. “Are we friends? Really?”
“You’re my client.”
“Am I some kind of lo-“
“No.”
“Lover?”
“No.” Silence. “Where to?”
He gave me an intersection to plug into my GPS and then retreated back into his sullen disquietude. The psychologist told me that I just filled him with an overwhelming sense of emptiness that you can only feel when losing something you never had to begin with. The lover told me that he just abandoned the game, the fruitless chase because the mouse finally ran into that hole in the wall and the cat was left in the open with filthy paws.
We eventually got to that overpass, and I truly did love the view from up there for a while. It liberated me, the warm and intensified light that shone upon the green exit sign and somehow found my face: white, pure and not the least bit menacing. I stood atop the greatest of all edifices, and I alone was illuminated for whoever bothered to look up at me. It was him and me, alone, atop the grandest Christmas tree in the world, but for all I cared, it was me alone who radiated.
He broke my captivation: “I don’t like it here.”
“I think it’s quite beautiful, actually,” I stated, seconds before jolting back into full-fledged consciousness, etching the outline of the manila folder in my office with his name on it into the forefront of my mind. “You don’t. Why?”
Grumble. “I don’t want to be here.”
“Then why are we?”
He leaned forward into the chain link fence, pushing all his weight against the rusted iron while gripping the threads with everything he had. His eyes danced in their desperate attempt to follow each passing car, darting from one to the next until he finally fixated on the fast lane. As each car brightly flew underneath us, Ethan involuntarily blinked, jolted by such an imposition ruining all the black.
He smirked: “why not?” His knuckles grew paler.
I watched him for a few minutes. That face said it all, now that I know why he clung onto that fence like he did. It was the best of times to observe him, while his upper lip retreated further and further underneath his top teeth with every moment we spent there in silence. I could feel him in that surreal way again; I could feel his pulse rising to catch up with the speed of his eyes, still chasing after whatever they could below us. His eyes were losing.

“You know how every kid is scared of roller coasters for a while?” he asked. “I fucking loved ‘em. I wanted to design them or build them for a while, I loved ‘em that much.” He looked at me for a split second and with my nod, he focused on the cars again. “Everyone can scream on them and that’s what’s supposed to happen. And if you’re the one not screaming, no one gives a shit because they’re too busy enjoying the ride. No one’s gonna look at you like you’re crazy because no one’s looking at you at all.”
“You don’t like to be looked at?”
“I’m alright with it now.” His grip loosened on the chain link fence. Car after car weaved in and out of the dotted white lines and he kept chasing them. “My parents used to look at me too much because they knew I’d just stop for a minute or two and they wanted to wait it out with me. But sometimes I’d drool and that’s when other people would look. A few times I shook, but just a tiny bit. Everyone hears ‘seizures’ and they think of these crazy convulsions. I never had those but I had a ton of seizures.
“And I could almost feel them coming, I swear I could. It’s this split second of anticipation that’s almost scarier than the thing itself. I don’t know if I just didn’t have enough time or if I didn’t have the balls, but I hated myself for not shouting or something, letting people know what was going to come. That’s so much of what’s weird about them—you can’t prepare yourself to lose all control. It might’ve been relieving that way. It wouldn’t have plagued me… but that’s another thing, how people seemed to think that they could catch it or something. They’d get unnerved when I randomly went still. They acted like it was so traumatizing for them to not know exactly what to expect out of me, even my teachers did. If I could’ve warned them, then it wouldn’t have been a damn plague for any of us.
“But I grew out of them. All kids do when its absence epilepsy. But I was always scared of that feeling. It’s nauseating. I don’t wanna feel that ever aga—“
“Ethan, get down.”
He had slowly ascended up the fence and when I finally noticed it, he already had one leg over the railing. He swung his other one around and fully faced the freeway, ten feet above me on the chain link fence. He was the one with all the potential in the world to radiate, now a dejected porcelain angel with all the Yuletide lights fighting for him. They make porcelain look paler.
“Do you know what it’s like?” he paused, stealing a huge breath of cold life from the city, “to feel insane? I tried,” he began, “to be nobody else’s problem anymore. But I swore I felt that feeling while I was driving on this overpass and I hadn’t felt it for over twenty years. But I’m telling you that it happened and I would’ve had one, I swear to God. It’s nauseating, it makes me want to die… I didn’t want to have them anymore and I didn’t know what to do and there was a car in front of me and I didn’t want anything to happen to him and— it seemed right to drive off.”
The angel cried.
“Marissa,” he began, softly tilting his jaw towards me. “Marissa, there’s a cross down there for them. Amy Sanford, thirty-four, and Michael Sanford, three. I walked out with a shitty shoulder.” Digging his heels deeper into two holes within the fence, he held on to it a little tighter.
“Give me one good reason to get down.”
The psychologist told me that it was my job and moral duty to save any patient from his or herself. The lover didn’t speak because she knew that she was never much of a lover at all. For the first time, he was listening to me:
“Of all of the people in this world, you chose me to be here to watch you die. Get off the fence. You have living to do.”
I drove home alone.

Arachne

2009-10-17T19:54:00.001-07:00

Your first mistake was to smile at me:

I remembered how to spin again,
darting in and around
and through,
weaving the softness in your eye
into infertile veils
of love
that the wind will carry with it.

But you never knew
that Itsy Bitsy can't cough water
when she's spitting out blood--
that she weaves and she weaves
with no fingers left to prick.
So I spin and I spread
and I learn to live thin--
I asphyxiate you in gold
and I am sorry.

Run from Arachne--
She spins on eight broken legs
if you only
almost
love her.

Old Habits Die Hard

2009-08-22T00:46:00.001-07:00

I eat and I sleep so I can eventually
spin:
My arms to span east and west
To their corners of some sea,

my legs to launch heart and mind to heaven
and the Souls of my feet far in hell.

And the rotation begins,
I do time in suspension

all the time I gave up
So as to pollinate you.

So I spin and I spread
and I learn to live thin

Since loving you isn’t enough and
you’re so good at hating me first.

This is my body, given up for you.
(and I don’t think I know your name)

Green Means Go

2009-07-18T16:40:00.001-07:00

I never wanted to care when the light turns red. I always have that choice that I never seem to take, when I drive and drive and I pull another slim outta the glove compartment and I drive some more, puffing away and watching the smoke rise and then I see the light. It is yellow, smirking at me like I have no balls and it knows it no matter how many stogs I smoke and lines I blow.

"Betcha can't run right on through me."

I smirk back but that doesn't do shit to wipe the taunting yellow glow off that face. I push down harder and harder to go faster and faster and breathe softer until the recessant pounding against the walls of my skull is nothing but the soft beats of a heart that I instantaneously believe has beat faster before. I'm alive to say it.

My heart starts going pretty crazy just thinking about all of it while stopped at the red with one hand firmly dedicated to the wheel. I watch some guy in an F150 as he takes an extra long drag and I think, "that smoke sure is pretty."

That yellow sure did want me.
That last shot of blow did feel damn good.
That fucker did have really good hands.

Nostalgia won't have the time to hit once the light hands me some fresh excuses.

Green means go.

Gold Dust

2009-07-18T16:35:00.000-07:00

It makes the pocketwatch far from
My pocket
Tick against my thigh
At the type of speed
My heartbeat misses. It's like
The rain can't be wrong today
If it's dropping gold for me
From the hands of a man
Birthed in foreign fields--
Expelled from a womb
That still tells her wives' tales
In terms of pasos and siestas.
It's "adios" to that
For the man
Who now loans me the dollar
So I forget how to nap--
Forget how to eat in a world
Taking it too easy
In a world
That won't stop moving
In a world
Bound to a clock
From some world
That can't tell when time's up.
I choose to roll in gold dust
In a world
Where I can't be golden.

A Biography

2009-06-24T03:43:00.001-07:00

It feels so good to be cold again.

But this is more of a lukewarm,
And yet it still makes me smile--
A little less than last time
And even less than the time before that--
All in reminiscence of my first
Aspen winter.

I was a September baby
And you can't ever let me forget it.
I tasted a morsel of summer
In the
Lukewarm
Rays of a dwindling solace
Until that something of a dreamer
In me
From you
Saw something simultaenously
Frozen and aflame.

Everything licked me at once
And I was smothered
In such "abrasive"
That I can't have all to myself like you can.
They changed me with their sticky tongues,
The moon and
The sky and
The coastline and
The mountains and
The look on your face when your heart was breaking
All over again
While you sang to me
The words you once wrote.

Its all encapsulated,
The things that changed me--
All of it encapsulated but
Me.

I got through one hell of a winter
With the promise of living again
In the heat

But on lukewarm nights
When the sky doens't cradle me
Like it used to,
I hear your voice and

I desperately miss the shiver.

The Beauty of Hidden Moonshine

2009-06-06T23:03:00.001-07:00

A lady in the sky tonight is telling me that I am meant to be this convoluted. I buzz towards her, captivated by the idea of licking the remnants of her from between my fingers. I reach out into the night, gingerly at first, whispering, "I know you don't wanna come out, sister honey, but I bet you taste so sweet."

I can hear the moon smirk at me but no one else can. They see her sitting pretty behind the cold front of steel gray masses that makes her seem cold, too. She's warm and I can feel it, but not when she smirks in that way that only I can sense, penetrating my blood and bone. The moon wants to make me feel crazy, and she knows I'm crazy just for her and her alone.

I come out here every foggy night, no matter what I have going on behind the closed curtains. I couldn't care less when the sky is perfect-- I'd rather be draped in the limbs of a very imperfect lover, or even sprawled on my bed alone and bare as one big unworthy and utterly predictable mess. There's something about my sister that drives me to her side like a worker bee to raw pollen. I could make something beautiful out of her, I assure myself, as I reach out farther and farther to the silent clamor of no avail.

Sometimes, I hear her in my dreams, when the night breathes her in and her vapor awakens all senses. Her voice lathers me in buttermilk:

"You can be art, too, if you keep your chin as high as your heart."

Death Row is a State of Mind

2009-05-25T10:37:00.001-07:00

The day I decided that I was no longer living for you, I started my slow descent to the bottom of the Dead Sea. Buoyant force doesn’t do shit when the atmosphere feels as heavy on your head as it actually is. All this pounding in my ears and implosion on my skull makes “light as air” simply not good enough; I want it to be lighter. I want a long drive at its best with somebody who has nothing to talk about, a Yuletide most celebrated without plastic garlands along each banister—but I crave casual conversation all too much now, and Christmas just can’t be Christmas without halls decked in holly.

You have come to show me that death row is a state of mind, a sense that cannot be shaken by that feeling you’re supposed to get when he holds you, or when your little boy paints a pretty picture and tells you to keep it. I’m the one of the two of us who sees beyond the plank, searching for heaven out of a seven-forty-seven window and finding solace in the wiser words of foolish men. You’re the one with September nights that have morphed into witching hours, blankly tapping the heavyweight bag twice with your left fist, soon after swinging around with the right.

And the truly amazing thing is that I can watch you without sensing each blow now. I’ve got a heaven and a hell to find and a way to find them: through midday moons and gasoline, red-tailed cardinals and dogwood.

The truly amazing thing is that you’re the only one with sore fists while I can finally see every star as the Northern star.

Bonne Hiver, the third chapter

2009-05-01T21:29:00.000-07:00

I wrote this to be a personal narrative for a creative writing class-- the only problem is that it's too personal and not quite a narrative. Here's an... esoteric memoir, if you will.

___________________________________________________

My name rolled off her tongue like honey. With her, the four letters that constitute who I am didn’t have to puncture the sweet still of silence lingering between us. Her tongue twisted the word just enough that it eased between her teeth and lips and into the emaciated air, her breath flowing freely to me from across our desks. The quiet was interrupted by something far too beautiful to consider a burden: the softness she expelled from her lips became my mantra; it rang to me in that transient moment and rings to me still.

“Dani,” she said, her voice slightly quivering, “tell me everything.”

And I did. I shakily recalled the worst moments of my life, choking in my attempt to exhale each syllable and string them together in a way that might make sense of my desperation. I told her what I knew of that sickness she had studied, the one so ancient and cross that no crucifix could ever fix it quite enough. I told her that I was happy and healthy and free, all while my heartstrings stretched and eventually shredded under the mere thought of return into open empty arms. After minutes of the most honest communication I can remember having with another, I made a point to assure her that I was just fine—plain old fine, one big step ahead of it all.

Yet, she still asked the question: “Are you afraid?”

I hesitated, and then my eyes climbed from my feet up to her face, and then inside of their counterpart within her own: “Yes, I think I am.”

I tattooed it to the inside of my mind, the way she looked at me after I was finally revealed. That stare targeted my eyes and spread like wildfire, the synapses between my every thought and bone firing signals left and right until my toes were alight. I fueled her somehow, resonated to something inside of her that I know someone else riled up a time or two. Her eyes held no questions of whether or not that moment was the one in which she should expand herself to some greater purpose; she knew it, her certainty emanating through the most convincing of charcoal irises from beneath a velveteen layer of tears. I could sense that I was being analyzed to every intricate detail of my makeup, for eyes like that discover scrolls of scripture, witness the crumbling of our modern Egyptian Alexandrias and always feast upon the simplest mechanisms of a beating heart.

It is in that stare that I fell in love with being loved.

April Ramblings

2009-04-18T23:44:00.000-07:00

Here are two short "creative rants" that I have written within the last week.

No Direction Home (April 11th, 2009)

I worry about you so unbelievably much, but that stoic face tells me that I have better things to spend my time worrying about. It’s not as concrete as you’d like to think I believe it is—the chiseled nods of approval, the eyes carved out of limestone. I am lying against your shoulder like I am because I like it here and because the empty exasperation in your sighs breaks my heart every time they escape you. I know you—you don’t write because it’s cute. You don’t inharmoniously sway to “Like a Rolling Stone” with tears in your eyes out of some glorious life revelation that comes to new light within the subtle twisted twine between Dylan’s barely-there notes. I see it.

and I can’t do a fucking thing about it.

Writer's Block (April 15th, 2009)

I guess the worst time to write is when you need to write the most: the words that mold together to form the fibers of one’s very being pound against an empty skull, the old contents now vaporized when met with the ceaseless heat emanating from an angry heart. It is then that I want my passion and intellect in some sort of equilibrium. In these moments when I cannot escape my painfully visceral state, my right wing fruitlessly grapples at the air surrounding it, beating tirelessly for the purpose of justifying all those things it can feel until all it can feel is plain old tired. The left wing mechanically rises and falls the same distance every time, always to an identical time table. It cannot sense how fervently its partner works to lift me higher and higher, into some state of revelation that one can only pray will eventually become mediocre art. The left wing has a job to do: it stretches as far as it can away from my body and beats on until it is driven into the cold, cold ground.

Cocoon

2009-03-30T23:12:00.000-07:00

I dealt with my cocoon:
Birthed from the ancient alabaster columns
Of a long lost civilization;
Draped under a star-spangled banner
In a poppy field;
Encompassed by city lights
In every which direction—
Bound by the size of the bills
In my neighbor’s stuffed pockets
And chained,
At the end of every day,
Under a blank name and face.

Yet such a cocoon served me well,
Kept my arms from spanning wide enough
To tug too hard at my heartstrings.
I was situated just right
So that I could pluck them,
To itch that scratch—
Scratch that itch that was fed
Every time I had nothing
To cradle
Or be cradled by.

“Play for me soon,” they cried,
And I would. I’d play anything
To hear the slightest of empty sighs
Escape them,
To feel the faintest skip
Of a heartbeat or two
Disrupt the gentle sway of the room
We stood in.

The transience once fueled me.
It asked to persevere;
It wanted the single instance in time
When a specific note I played
Was a little prettier than the rest
To sit quietly at the bottom
Of an underground box,
Awaiting revival—
A time when my blank name and face
Became beautiful
While I tried my best to explain
The ugliest things
I have ever seen.

I used to deal with my cocoon—
When the claps drove me past the poppies
And the frayed flags on every
All-American wrap-around porch.
I dealt with my cocoon
Until the ugliest things
I had ever seen
Had nothing to say to me anymore.

Duchess Falling

2009-03-29T20:52:00.000-07:00

I can’t sleep when the bed sheet fights
Its way back to your side
And you’re not even there
To pull it over you again--
But that cannot keep me
From tiring of the tireless nights
You grant me,
Or the dazed days when I want
Nothing more than to know
Who you are,
Or the dawns that make me smile
With the golden rising orb
You love to hate and
Hate to depend on--
Setting at dusk
When your prideful moon rises;
When I can watch, breaking,
Knowing you will never be
The duchess to rise
When all else goes black,
Or the woman to stand straight
Just because she wants to,
Since you’re no woman to thrive
As a transient nomad,
But the only one I know
Who tells me she can
While laying cradled
In stronger arms.

Gift

2009-02-25T01:17:00.000-08:00

I would have, and would still
Give anything to catch you.
I would fold the sky into my palm
And place it in your pocket;
I would chase the sun
All the way to the sands
To be the one to hear your heart
Palpitate
To the sound of the sea breathing.

I would dance for you,
I would change for you;
I would weep in the glory of
Giving the tiniest star your name
And flying you there,
Where it won’t seem so tiny anymore.

I cannot move earth
And heaven:
The Great Ceiling is boundless
With not an edge to fold inside itself;
The sea holds in her hands the
Bewilderment
You cannot yet face;
The tiniest star might just be
Not
Quite
Tiny enough.
I'd leave more on your doorstep
Than a heart and a head
If I was more than that myself.

Please, as you wander now,
Often watching me wander,
Seeing every bright streetlight
As the newfound Northern Star—

Know that
I will still dance for you,
I will always change for you.

Whenever you wander,
Maybe watching me wander,
Remember that I can always
Write for you.

Bonne Hiver, the second chapter

2009-02-02T22:58:00.000-08:00

I look at you now and hope with all my being that you’ll remember me, even when you get distracted and could easily forget to.

My stomach couldn’t quite find the energy to churn while I sat next to you, arm pressed against arm. It should have, given the circumstances. It was unbearably difficult for me to comprehend that you actually followed me into the dark just to be given the chance to pull me out again. Yet, we listened and we learned. You looked at me every once in a while, scanning my face for any signs of unease that I could have told you didn’t exist. I was, after all, with you, arm pressed against arm like we were. I could smell something in you that I finally could breathe in with my eyes closed, taking in nothing but the glory of experiencing who you are.

I wish you knew how much it means to me, how glorifying it is to be able to look you in the eye and claim that I know you. You don’t like making decisions. You prefer to cross your right leg over your left. You hate yourself for your fervent love of dependence. You like to write notes on your left hand. You work very hard to suppress your cynicism every day. You’ve had the same haircut since high school. You love debatably more deeply than anyone I know, but you don’t express it unless you genuinely trust someone and even then, you make it difficult to decode.

In many ways, it is safe to say that I know you. I want you to want to know me. I pray every day that you sat next to me that night for some greater reason, that you felt so inclined to walk me through the fire only partially because the fire once burned you.

I want you to love me. I promise I will love you, that I will make you feel useful and appreciated. I promise I won’t have to use words to tell you. I will just let myself grow overwhelmed in your presence and you will feel it somewhere in the corners of your consciousness, and that in itself will be enough.

I want you to know what it feels like to be needed. I want you to need.

I look at you now and hope with all my being that you’ll remember me, even when you get distracted and could easily forget to.

An Ironclad Life

2009-01-17T12:30:00.000-08:00

I once could laugh at the worst moment
Of a porcelain life,
When sourgrass stung
The scrapes on my ankles
And I was free to seek
A siren’s song.
I could tilt back, aglow,
Spinning in this chair of mine,
While laughing at the sound
Of laughter
Until the porcelain cracked
And made webs out of me,
And soon, a porcelain life was shattered.

I tried to laugh at the worst moment
Of a copper life,
When I savored the
Deepest of solitude
and dreamt of drinking in
The years deferred.
But I would curl up, ashamed,
In this same chair of mine
While sighing at the sound of laughter
Until the copper corroded
And made rust out of me,
Leaving you to find
My silent grievance:

I cannot laugh,
I cannot sigh
While leading an ironclad life.

The Day I Saw Star Clusters

2009-01-17T12:29:00.000-08:00

Once,
I skimmed both ends of the world
With brazen fingertips
And somehow reveled in knowing that
I could never grip both sides,
Nor get the chance to
Flip the earth in midair and call
Heads or tails.

Yet somebody whispered in my ear today
That there’s a Soviet flag on the moon
Where ours is supposed to be,
That cathedral bells will swing at noon
Because a timer told them to,
That the look on your face when you laugh
Hides a person more empty than those
You laugh with.

I could have seen star clusters in the daylight
While underneath my roof, under layers of linen and lace.
I could have rolled that globe between my fingers,
Personified life and death,
Made a heartbeat and a steady breath
Finally within grasp.

I firmly held the earth between my hands today,
And held less between my palms
Than I had in either of my pockets.
I’ll learn to let the earth fall free from my hands today,
And remember life chose me, after all.

The first of typewriter ramblings

2009-01-17T12:28:00.000-08:00

TO BREATHE THE FIRST LIFE
,one step two step
;maybe, just maybe a spoken word
of seesaws and trombones
(is it just me, or do they shrink
?/grow)
the pacifier between your lips --
a dress size every year
;then the stop.

i can count the stains now
#one beer two beers
TO LAUGH AT THE WORST
MOMENT
of a (porcelain) life
;i try,
;i tried

i see no maybes
.infinitely.
"quotations dont matter,"
"i don't matter,"
That
.infinitely.
matters.

i try,
i tried
TO LAUGH AT THE WORST
MOMENT
of a (copper) life
;rust lingers
where you can only feel
the -green-
where the -green- only matters.
Rust
.infinitely.
matters.

i cannot decay
before sinew hands && hollow
bones

i try
; i tried
to live an(iron) l i f e
.

"To be a poet is a condition, not a profession."

2009-01-17T12:26:00.000-08:00

Lately, I've realized that I've become a person whose constant exterior battles have outweighed what I consider to be the most important battle one will ever fight. I have lost the overbearing need to chafe away at my thoughts and values until I am left with a raw form of self wholly fit to criticize and reflect upon. I have lost the sense of urgency in my chase to improve and more fully understand what I have found to be "me" and I've come to realize that it is solely due to my lack of writing lately.

Therefore, I feel like it is more important than anything else to restablish both my appreciation for literature and my own application of this expansion of the written word into my own writings. The following quotes have truly sculpted my reliance on poetry and prose, or at least clarified my assertions of it. I'm not quite a "poet" yet (although I pretend to be one), but these quotes revive all faith I have in becoming one. I'm only posting this on Facebook and Blogspot to remind myself that I CAN'T BACK DOWN and downplay writing's significance in my life, especially now that I've publicly declared it. Also, I know there are so many of you who understand the introspective power of literature and need the reminder as much as I do, or who might need the push to see beyond the intellectual and into the emotional.

_________________________________________________

Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition.
- Eli Khamarov

"I've been know to say, 'Oh yes, I do want to be in love. And yes I do want to be a loving, loving person. And yes I do want to be the mother of many children.' But at the same time, there is part of me that says 'I am also Lillian Hellman and I want to write the great novel of all time.' I want to go on the beach with my silent typewriter and I don't want anybody to bother me... because I want to enhance this planet. I came here for a reason. I didn't come here to be a mother. I didn't come here to be a nun. And I did not come here to be a cleaning lady. I came here to be a poet."
- Stevie Nicks, 1983

"Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings with form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves."
- T.S. Eliot

"Poetry is all which gets lost in translation."
- Robert Frost

"A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music... and then people crowd about the poet and say to him: 'Sing for us soon again;' that is as much as to say, 'may new sufferings torment your soul.'"
-Soren Kierkegaard

"We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race and the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for."
- Dead Poet's Society

A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof.
- Rene Char

Bonne Hiver, the first chapter

2009-01-17T12:23:00.001-08:00

I want to bask in
A beautiful winter beside you.
Walking with our minds
Interlaced
Like his and her
Fingertips brushing
In their first contact,
Blushing
in some type of
Reverie
Even the greatest of loves
Never knew.

And you,
You're like a
Beautiful Wisconsin winter all
Over again
As I step inside from your doorstep
and regain feeling
In those fingertips.

Because I saw you as
Black ice
from the moment I met you
and God,
How I want to misstep and
Sweepingly glide
Across such a magnificent terrain.
Maybe I'll get lucky and
Slide across a crack, and
We'll plunge headfirst into
Liquidated darkness
Where its impossible to discern
Why such a beautiful person
Froze over in the first place.

If you let me in,
I might
Swim towards the surface and
Amidst the shiver
And the fear,
Bask in the chance
To see the light emanating
Under the wake
To see through the same eyes
You do.

Coffee Talk

2009-01-17T12:18:00.000-08:00

I looked her in the eye that evening and spoke some of the only truly honest words she'd ever hear out of me. This time, there was no intricate detail I'd thrown aside and no implication curved out of the corners of my mouth. I was ten times smaller than her for that instant. I slowly crumbled into the remnants of blueberry scone that had fallen from her lips moments before. She didn't notice it then, like I doubt she noticed me all over again. She wasn't staring at a body across the table anymore, but a soul: save of expanding lungs and that void in my right eyebrow, of scars.

The words had escaped me: "I am not a strong enough person to throw my cards in and settle for a polite handshake and coffee talk for the rest of my life."

Oh, and of course she told me that I was wrong, and that I was the strongest person she knew. Of course she jabbed at my ribs and reminded me that I can hold my breath until every last molecule of oxygen inside me has been robbed of all its worth. She brushed her fingertips along the scar underneath that faulty eyebrow and quietly requested to hear the story behind it again. She remembered hearing about glass, she whispered. There were so many things I wanted to whisper back.

I left her at that table and frankly, I wanted to believe that I'd made some huge mistake and being a survivalist really was the ultimate test of self-empowerment. It wasn't a matter of weakness, I told myself, if I continuously held that lighter to my face, or even just kept fighting like the senseless warrior I had became. I, after all, am a survivalist.

She'd know strength if she would stop looking for it in every action I take, or lack thereof.

I'd know strength if justice meant nothing and happiness meant everything.

My Soul Resides in a Haunted House

2008-09-13T10:19:00.001-07:00

It’s so effortlessly poetic,
The disillusioned city lights
Screaming something vital at me.
I guess I let the sirens seem cynical
While I laid, half dressed, against my
Creaking bedroom wall, closed my eyes
And just listened.

I could smell the cobwebs burning,
First along the ceiling,
Soon to my nightstand.
I had creaked my door open.
Your heart pounded butane
Through flimsy veins,
Admiring Arachne’s work
In every corner of my mind,
Every crack in the windowsill.
And then, in all your glory,
You ignited.

I suppose it really is just that easy
To watch years of ignorance disintegrate.
With every pale strand
Charred black from end to end,
I yearned to hear the bumps in the night
And creaking and cobwebs and chaos
To give my soul a tangible reason
to feel haunted.

Now, I sit in dead silence,
Blowing voids in the smoke,
Ringlets in the fog.
Me, in the silence,
With ghosts that don’t know where the door is.

Internal Conflict on a Mountaintop

2008-07-09T00:24:00.001-07:00

I reminded myself today what I live for.

I live for myself, and also for You. "You" are the silhouette of an oak tree in the distance in front of a cloudless sunset. You are the moon waning and waxing and waning once more, rising sometimes at midnight and others at midday. You are the frightful exhilaration one feels when standing at dangerously high altitudes, save of oxygen, and somehow not even caring in the presence of beauty of the snowcapped mountains in all directions. They stand so real and surreal that the familiar, yet hugely exemplified reaction on my tongue nearly implodes my taste buds although my mouth hangs open and empty.

Where did "You" go? Did I lose You in the fight to focus only on the colors behind the dark, yet breathtaking oak? Did I hide from the beauty in the wane of the moon while embracing the wax, or from the abnormality of it's rare rising in the midday while hoping for the world to mysteriously change, and stop changing?

If I stood on those mountains now, would I struggle desperately for air and in my moments of near-death weakness, fail to realize I have consequently seen heaven?

The myriad of differences between being long-lived versus living.

2008-06-25T21:41:00.000-07:00

The day has come years too early; the one where one walks along a sidewalk of a crowded street and sees an eighty-year-old woman walking to the same beat, with the same fallen shoulders, with the same look of constant apprehension that he or she has oneself.

I discovered today that I walk from destination to destination completely reliant on this woman's cane.

I discovered today that I cannot smile without feeling my cheeks stiffen.

I discovered today that I have been robbed of years and years. While those who have lived as long as I begin to stiffen in their fingers and knees, I will have already began stirring in my grave.

The never-ending parent saga

2008-06-19T22:56:00.000-07:00

I may never know if the circumstances truly called for a second chance or not, but it seems to me that they have never deserved it.

We argued today. Well, it was more of me being yelled at for once. Usually I do my part in the fighting, I'll admit, but today was different. My sister wanted to go see Sex and the City and I was really, really tired. I told her I'd go but if she was willing to go another time, I'd prefer it. So she went and told my mom that I refused to go and my mom flipped out.

Basically, my parents locked me in their bedroom and yelled at me. Their list of complaints for the evening: I am the most self-centered person they've ever met. My life is so perfect and my family is so great that I have no room to complain about anything (yes, these words actually came out of my mom's mouth). I asked to leave and my dad told me that if I did, my head would meet the wall. He then continued to tell me that I am the sole cause of all of our family's problems. Financial, emotional, blah blah blah. All of it.

Usually, I fight back. Usually, I will raise my voice back at them, stand up for myself. Tonight was the first time in three years where for all of the literally ten minutes I got yelled at, I covered my face with my hands and just waited it out.

I am sick of taking the blame for things that aren't my fault. I am smart enough to know when I push the line or when I truly deserve the grief they give me. I know when to back down, succumb to their ideas, even when I disagree. I know when I'm in the wrong and I usually take accountability for my part, although I never do so without pointing out their fault in a situation too. Tonight, I didn't say anything. I couldn't say anything. Tonight, I realized that I am a completely different person from three years ago, but they haven't changed. There are many reasons for why this is... but nevertheless, I cannot handle it.

I just... don't know what to do. I can't handle this. I can't handle any of it, and I especially can't handle it alone like I have been.

Bittersweet Things End Bitter

2008-05-18T22:22:00.000-07:00

It has come.
The moth to the streetlight,
The poison in my gin.

I'm sick of waking up every morning
With a paperback romance novel
On my bedstand
and the warm body it promised
Would always stick around for morning coffee
Gone without a raincheck.

I've taken too many perfect pearls
Out of their oysters
Just to feel them crack in between my
Grinding teeth,
Never to be made into something beautiful.

These wings smoldering in the limelight,
The glory of that burning sensation is gone.
It has come.

My Own Dark Love Song

2008-05-11T17:47:00.000-07:00

I wrote this the day that my horse had a serious surgical procedure. It's written poorly but I'll never change a word of this anyway-- it's so raw that, eight months later, it rips my heart out of my chest just as violently as the day of his surgery.

___________________________________________

There's nothing quite like seeing all your happiness fall in between the crevices and gaps of your life.

I really hate seeing you with needles in your back. I hate seeing every muscle between your ribs spasm uncontrollably and the way you kick out in protest when I even touch you.

Yet when you're drugged; I hold your head for you. I am, as usual, in awe of your effortless perfection. You are currently a little scraggly around the outer edges of your lips, but that's still my favorite place to kiss you. The hairs on your forelock meet in a clockwise spiral with a little bald spot in the middle. Your eyes are light brown, your pupils slightly glazed over.

You are very kissable here, in this sacred soft spot between your left ear and the beginning of your mane. It is always warm and soft there. It never changes. I want to barracade myself inside it, inside of what you have given me just by existing.

I whispered to you today. I whispered my fears of losing you, but more importantly, my fears of willingly letting you go. I whispered prayers that you'd realize how important you are to me, how much I can love you if you just didn't feel this pain anymore. I whispered prayers that you would listen. I whispered prayers that you could even hear.

Sometimes, I swear you can understand every word I speak and every move I make. I can predict you. I can communicate with you. I feed off your resillience and struggle in your indifference.

I love you more than anything in the world, but what am I? I have given up caring, for you and your sweet eyes look at me and I feel like I can go another moment knowing I am acknowledged by something so much greater than myself.

And then you break.

What if I should decide that I don't want you there in my life?

It's a decision, not a choice. A decision is carefully measured, thoroughly contemplated and eventually, one "decides" depending on what hurts the least and what can let one continue his or her pristine life with the least amount of effort as possible. A choice is reckless and one "chooses" depending on what elates the soul the most.

I choose you. I choose the bills, the heartache, the lack of progression, the risk and the disappointment.

But I live in a world of decisions.

Please heal. If not for me, then for yourself.
Just keep thinking, in complete ignorance, that I will never give up on you.

Eyes for Miles

2008-05-11T17:45:00.000-07:00

You have Mona Lisa eyes.

I've been told that, too, but more when I was a child. Mommy would dress me like a character out of Dr. Zhivago and my sister and I would bask in the soft clicking and camera flashes. By the time we could string sentences together, we could rotate our heads to catch our jaws and noses at their better angles.

My sister, however, never caught the Mona Lisa eyes like I did. I won my prizes and acclaim, but also the ability to mystify anyone within five seconds of making eye contact.

They told me that my Mona Lisa eyes never seemed to end, that I had eyes for miles.

You, too, have such mastery hidden within the confines of the normal set of lashes. Wash your face! I break in seeing the dark circles around your eyes, etched into your skin a little more deeply with every oblivious assertion you make. Take off this mask adorned in pearls and splotches of color! No magentas or teals shine more brightly than the deep cream of your skin and the flushed pink of your cheekbones. Nevertheless, I can still see your irises beyond the Venician artistry you hold so proudly... and I want inside them.

Yet, I must remind myself that you are only as good as your worst moment in time, the worst self you have ever projected to shatter through the pristine looking glass I see you through.

You may have eyes for miles, but what road can one follow if the power is out and no one is home?

To Follow

2008-05-11T17:42:00.000-07:00

I’ve known both the purity of a starlit desert night
And the comfort found in an illuminated city street.
I have lain on sands with my palms touching
Bits of dried sage brush,
My chest expanding and deflating
Rhythmically to the slow beat
Of the wilderness.
A velvet coverlet encompasses it all
From horizon to horizon,
But I somehow breathe more freely
Under this dark blanket,
Where I will never fear to inhale
As much air as possible
With every breath.
Yet, I now stand in a barren city.
As I walk, I feel nothing
But the vast nothingness within this road,
Nothing but my heels clicking against the concrete.
Do not call me to the sidewalk,
For I choose to sit on the yellow lines
In the middle of the road,
For this unsettling fog looms around each streetlight,
Glowing pale
And orange,
Like the ground below is smoldering.
While I may be from a place of
Expensive coffee cups and car horns,
I will never be guided
By smoke-surrounded lamps
Inevitably leading to the fire.
In the desert,
When you are the ice-capped mountains
And the tipis
And the sunrise
And the Sioux,
We see every star as the Northern star.

The Immaculate Narcissist and her Mudslide Brown Walls

2008-05-11T17:39:00.000-07:00

I eventually did uncover something so much more, and for that I am extremely grateful.

_____________________________________________________

My stomach churns every second I spend in this room. The ceiling is too low for my taste and the walls were recently repainted, although the previous murky brown is still noticable underneath the white, leaving it a bland shade of beige only seen on color swatches and hospital walls. One can walk into this specific room with no previous knowledge of it whatsoever, smell the turpentine clinging to the carpet and feel an urge to know what type of person would paint a perfectly average room mudslide brown.

I know her. Its the same woman who later splashed the walls with the current color. "I change with the tides," she boastfully claims, "and it just happens that white primer depicts renewal and I am not ready to give the perfection of such situational chastity away any time soon."

So here I sit, in a crimson chair, at a wooden desk with these blinding white walls. One cannot remember why he or she wastes time here when there's honestly nothing to decipher. There's interesting posters sprawled on the walls to read, sure- if you find relative interest and artistic merit in having "truths" placed in your hands.

But I, begrudgingly quiet throughout even the most intriguing of conversations that take place in that room, stare absentmindedly at those walls. All I can think of is that appalling paint job from so long ago and whether or not I will ever have the chance to scrape this surface and uncover something less surreal than this seemingly "immaculate" narcissist.

A Con Artist

2008-05-11T17:29:00.000-07:00

You and I, we have played this game before,
This same game of chess
In early Central Park.
You know the statistics as well
As we can possibly understand the moons
But you play with Southern charm
and a bishop or knight in deep pockets.

Time halts mercilessly
While you fabricate yourself
In a deep, deliberate drawl.
You reach inside your coat
Casually, without
hesitation, and
You cannot speak in the silence.

In this, you somehow tell me
I am beautiful,
In the milisecond you look at me
as though I breathe the air you do,
In this, you make me
cry in your facade, derived from
this
bittersweet
juncture of existences.

I ignore the black pieces you placed atop the board
until you call checkmate
on my white king.

Synapses

2008-05-11T16:36:00.000-07:00

Page two hundred ninety of your
Political masterpiece speaks of
Your "sneering indifference".
I can't play the part that rings
For impartiality,
For I am from Jordan
and bask in the buoyancy abounding
from the Dead Sea.
I sail here because more than
a pinch of salt is needed to lift me.
I am moved by winds and rains
And grains of sand are able to
Burn mySweltering fingertips
To the point where the
Intricate ridges
Are no longer seen.
As you shift to page two ninety one,
I close my eyes and hear the soft clicks
Of your vintage typewriter
And weep.
For to know physics is to know
how slowly you are sinking
To the freshwater floor,
That your hand can blister from heat
And you will stay hovered over the flame.
To know you is to know
You will never understand
What it means to feel.