Arachne

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.