Freedom Two

Dying is much like birthing

There's still blood and excrement

Sometimes

And often I have to squeeze myself

Toward freedom again

I want to be part of a whole

When the man tells us

He just wants to send us to God

We scream and call him things

Things are cut and again

We might be fed through tubes

So often, too,

No one can hear us when we scream.

Freedom

I come from the womb

That fleshy place of warmth and pounding heart

I came from a place of life

Fed through a tube, connected by limbs of string and sinew

Yet wanting, wanting to be alone

Kicking my way free, screaming that silent in liquid scream of drowning

I wanted to be a separate entity

I bulged outward like a tumor

And erupted in a sea of blood and urine

When the doctor cut me free though,

I screamed again, and it echoed

Painfully through the remainder

Of this my solitary life 

Melding

It's always a strange thing, how stories seem to resonate with one another when you read them in succession.  I wonder sometimes if this represents the interrelatedness of everything or if my brain isn't always trying to make such connections.  I like to tie a red string to the first text I ever read and weave it through all experiences until I'm done reading forever.  Does this happen to other people?

Today I am overwhelmed by the man I sat next to on the train in Tokyo.  I think it was on the trip to the trash island to fix something on my visa at the embassy.  The old man who was Japanese and spoke English with a German accent.  He said he was stationed there during the war.  We didn't go into more detail about those particulars.

I think I wrote about it, but I can't find the story.  I would have put it here, I think, but it doesn't show when I search.

He wore a grey bowler hat. He wore an old suit.  His shoes were scuffed.

I read about the cat temple in Asakusa and want to return.  All those lovely cats, fat and smoothed through grooming.  Why weren't they fixed though?

I read about panopticons and think of the path of least surveillance.  How are we to avoid being captured by the all seeing I?

I read about pills and wonder about the aesthetics of the many pills I take each day.  Do they make my insides rainbowed?

Everything feels so connected always.  I'm going to learn that by thanking others, I acknowledge myself.

Smelling of smoke

Smoke is a lovely word.  There's really nothing much that isn't wonderful about it, aesthetically.  It looms and sweeps and swirls.  You inhale and exhale.  Just such pretty language surrounding it, isn't there?

Bonfire party last night.  I didn't realize how many folks in my program smoke.  I honestly don't mind it in the short term, it is only the smell in the hallway that sits from my neighbor smoking that bothers me. Standing next to a smoker, I just want to anti-anxiety myself via the second hand smoke.

Smoke from the bonfire, smoke from cigarettes, smoke from the pot at the next fire over.  All of it is clinging to me today.  My hair smells magnificent-- I feel like a cocktail waitress in the 20's.

I woke up with a sore throat though.  Who can say that it wasn't from the cold?

I've got the feeling I'm wanting to fall in love again.

Instead, I'm going to snuggle with my cats, who didn't recognize me in my Brigitte Bardot hair and make up.

Lots of love.

Think Diary. Diary diary diary.

I keep hearing diarrhea when I repeat "diary" in my brain.  Ok, no poetry.  Or maybe.  Anyway, let's talk about what has gone down since I last posted.  Yeah! (fist in air a la Breakfast Club)

Sitting here in my workout clothes, I really need to go to the gym and shouldn't be procrastinating.  Time is tricky.  So, I am meeting G to see movie at 2:20-ish about 5 mins away.  Leaving the apartment at 2:10 then.  Okay!  I need at least an hour to get ready (shower, dry hair, make ups...) which means I must be home by 1:10.  I lose about half an hour commuting both ways to gym (fifteen minute drive), which means, if I leave here now-ish, I should have about a half hour to work out and ten minutes to stretch.  Let's do the fake math.  12:55 I must leave the gym.  I may leave apartment at 12:00, get at gym by 12:15.  Whoa.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is how my brain works in everyday life.

Going to see Cloud Atlas and critique the crap out of it.  I've read the book, so feel prepared.  Going to look at the race-bending and sexy geisha sex kitten image of Sonmi.  Also, making Tom Hanks play Zachry, who I think is meant to be a teenager...  and making him curse a lot?  I don't remember that in the book... anyway...

Poor G got in a bad bike accident last night, so we moved movie seeing to today.  Yikes!  People with beautiful faces should not be hit by pavement- tsk tsk, concrete surface.

I'll probably post something about the movie, but I have to leave in a few minutes if I want to keep my fancy gym schedule O.o

¡Ciao!

Autobio

It seems like I need to start writing slightly autobiographical or at least realist fiction-y pieces.  Seriously.  Maybe poetry all alone doesn't work for readings very well.  But I can't think what to write about...

The problem is I want to get more involved with readings, like doing So Say We All events or actually submitting to This American Life.  I went to SSWA VAMP event last night to hear my friend H read a poetic prose piece.  It was an amazing event- really high quality readings, and H's poem was super well performed and sexy.

But how can I sustain a piece for long enough to make it a performance? Just reading various poems in an unconnected manner seems very boring.

Anyway, so I am trying to think of something autobio-esque to write about.  But they all seem slow- like talking to a man in Tokyo who learned English during WWII.  Or maybe a ghost story.  I just feel like I don't have anything interesting to talk about....

Anyway, I'm going to try to do daily diary type posts here again because I did a really nice job while in Japan and seem to steal material from there a lot.  Then something will present itself.

Good plan?

Garden

It is the sound.  You can hear the garden-ness on the breeze. Stagnant, they are merely plants.

But no, it touches everything.  The smell of dirt and growth- that lavender or rose that someone  will try to bottle and spray on herself- "can't you tell I am woman? I smell of the womanly garden?" She asks. I place a sprig of rosemary in my car and the air conditioning makes if feel like a very contained garden in motion.

You should want to eat a garden.  Even if it is a flower garden, the growth is most edible.  T hunger to be beautiful by consuming the buds.  The aesthetic minded murderess will poison her lover with oleander. 

I like the butterfly, but I want the ladybugs.  Ladybugs offer luck, butterflies just the frivolous pretty of a debutante.  Ladybugs are useful and red. Marketers say red makes one feel hunger- thematically, ladybugs are more sensible.

There must be a way to walk. I've never thought of this before, but if y are incapable of traveling through a garden without falling over, are you really in the garden?  The rock gardens in Kyoto.  But the monks can enter, and they do- changing the sand designs and rock placement at regular increments. And nature, of course.  Fish can enter the seabed garden at will.  

Can someone possess a marijuana garden? Or does its cropness or illegality ruin it as a garden? But who could say the plant isn't lovely?  More, consider the greenhouse of an abandoned home.  The plants slowly go to seed, they rot an awful stench but a stench of an effort for survival.  Shouldn't that be enough?  Ants creep in, and then the spiders enter looking for warmth. A beehive is built in the corner.  When they die, it happens at once.  The realtor has the whole structure torn down at once- "we can make a lovely outdoor party space here." 

Soft plants are particularly pleasant. Running fingers down the bud or leaf that feels like animal coat. What came first, the cat or the cat tail?  We see our nature in the desire to pull leaves and flowers- I want to rip the whit flower sprig from the sky and capture it in a vase.  I have no idea where the desire to pull leaves comes form, but its there.  Perhaps a strange nostalgia for the petal picking of a girlish romance.  

We wanted in the rock garden.  We leaned over the edge when the monks were away, but th had stretched the barrier enough to omit us.

I am not a visual person.  I'm not sure why.  I stand in front of paintings and think of them and look and look and read the description and watch other people look and listen to audio tours and look and look and look.  But I can rarely feel anything from this looking.  Gardens are far more than looking.  

In the art museum, I will get in trouble for touching or smelling the piece.  In the garden, such practice is encouraged.

center of the universe

The Center of the Universe

Amanda Martin Sandino

Write a piece assembled from class/presentation notes.

i.

minor key and Debussy-esque

a lesser movement of the Arabesque

where it crescendos into slight cacophony

(but just a piano in the darkness)

the metallic ball. holes many protruding

bifurcated, it feels a great violence

has befallen this projector of the stars

perhaps great violence is what

we must come to

in order to project the sky

ii.

i could live here

reclined

with quiet company

and a moony voice

above.

it occurs to me

i’ve never slept beneath

a naked sky.

i’ll sleep now and dream

i am living

iii.

roofs are meant to be global

skies dark, music playing

time is only one dimension

but space is many

iv.

Nix, the Goddess of the Sunset

We can Simulate a Sunset

All the Known Universe

v.

globular steampunk tortured device

spinning powered by a tesla coil

cgi lightninging in the lobby

vi.

a view of Alexandria via camera obscura

Ptolemy sits with an ancient pre-telescope

In the background, our serapeum burns

vii.

galileo’s sideways study

the scientist was young, thin

voyeuristically

visual consumption

of the hubble telescope

motion sickness

viii.

there is hope here

planets die all the time

earths are dying

all the time

we are not alone

in our ruin,

only alone,

in our cause

ix.

are you afraid of dark matters?

“dark energy” feels maudlin

poets rarely have the opportunity

to name scientific discoveries

x.

we will one day

live on an earth

made Martian

cold world

ocean spaces

signs of was-life

for droids to visit

but none to mourn.

Why are we here?

The energy draws upon us and draws us at its will.  This is my will, but also your will.  You understand, these mean the same thing.

It feels simple to distinguish between the two, and my hereness to your thereness.  But this is an illusion of the misunderstanding that is horizontal time.

I want you to be happy so that I am happy.

But we are the physical manifestation of a goddess with DID.  We are like Tara's one self killing her other selves but without the normal center.  The center is hallow.  There is no spirit.

I want to believe that your success is my success.  That you are my child because you have been my child in some time that is now, but my brain, our brain, can only sometimes understand it.  Maybe it is enough that the sea grass gets it, and thus it sways.  But this is using poetry to escape reality.

We want to be in the shared consciousness of sleep.  We can feel the draw and wish it were more productive in the waking and thus dominating world.  We are not the dream man- Friday is not the fuck wagon.

I want to be happy.  I know that love is somewhere in these endeavors.  I feast upon that energy and try not to feel the hollowness that is our center.  Let it fill with chi.  Let the me wash away.

Shakespeare

So, a very long while ago I decided that I ought to, at some point before dying, finish reading all of the Shakespeare plays. But there are quite a few, and it's difficult to keep track of them all. So I'll put a counter on here. They are quick reads if you are comfortable with the lingo of the times, so I should probably try to read one a week to get them done (I just read Othello in two days, so it's quite doable). Anyway, I'll put a counter up at some point, but for now: here is the list (from Open Source Shakespeare)!

COMEDIES All's Well That Ends Well As You Like It (S) Comedy of Errors (R) Love's Labour's Lost Measure for Measure Merchant of Venice (R, S) Merry Wives of Windsor Midsummer Night's Dream (R,S) Much Ado about Nothing (S) Taming of the Shrew (S) Tempest (R) Twelfth Night (R, S) Two Gentlemen of Verona Winter's Tale

HISTORIES Cymbeline Henry IV, Part I Henry IV, Part II Henry V (R, S) Henry VI, Part I Henry VI, Part II Henry VI, Part III Henry VIII King John Pericles Richard II Richard III (S)

TRAGEDIES Antony and Cleopatra Coriolanus Hamlet (R) Julius Caesar (R) King Lear (R) Macbeth (R, S) Othello (R) Romeo and Juliet (R, S) Timon of Athens Titus Andronicus Troilus and Cressida

How to read the little letters in parenthesis: R= Read S= Seen it on the stage or as a film. As You Like It is a bit of a fib, but I'm seeing it next week so time shall make it true!

GRE Silly-ness

It's actually spelled "silliness" but doesn't that look weird? Anyway. It is really hard to come up with the names of random people you want to cite as examples for the GRE. I mean the perfect examples. I wanted to bring up a particular conceptual poet and her work on FLARF, but I could not remember her name or the title of the work (I got to, "I think it's Vanessa something..."-- I was actually thinking of Vanessa Place's "what does that say about me" poem). Anyway, I couldn't come up with the name so, instead, I cited myself. I actually do have a published FLARF piece. And, I know that the graders of the writer portion can't see your name. So why not? It was a lot more amusing at the time... Anyway, it's nice to be able to mock the wickedness of the ETS machine in some way. And thank goodness it's over! (again...)

God of Small Things

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It took me a while to really work out how to talk about this book. This is definitely a piece that demands meditation. The title itself is enough to give one pause for months before continuing.

The God of Small Things speaks to the importance of small things. Roy is speaking more from an Eastern philosophical perspective than the Don't Sweat the Small Stuff type antimeditation that's become so popular in the U.S. The small things in life are the most essential.

Throughout the book, Roy refers to things as small, and I have to remind myself to take note of them. On page 121:

Something lay buried in the ground. Under grass. Under twenty-three years of June rain.
A small forgotten thing.
Nothing that the world would miss.
A child's plastic wristwatch with the time painted on it.
Ten to two, it said.

It is so easy to read over such things and let them go as overdetail or the unnecessarily mundane. But Roy has made note of the small things, and so we wait for this wristwatch to reappear, as it ever-so-hauntingly will.

The Orangedrink Lemondrink Man is so casual about his introduction of child Estha to sexuality. "Now if you'll kindly hold this for me," he says (74), and, the way Roy writes it is just as small as that wristwatch.

The carelessness of Ammu's statement, "When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less" (107). Impatient mothers say such things, but the scene knells through God of Small Things and had such a realness. A reminder of those tiny things our parents said, which they didn't mean, but we clung to so painfully as children. A moment of pause to think, "How easily I can hurt someone else."

The effect of these words would not leave me for the entirety of the book, looming over each word, and they continue to affect me still.

And the Air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. The big Things lurk unsaid Inside. (136)

They introduce themselves. A monk once told me of the importance of folding one's clothing before stepping into the bath.

Moments of sad truth, and some sort of reality forms via this meditation-- there is something beautiful in doing the terrible:
"Let's leave one alive so that it can be lonely," Sophie Mol suggested. Rahel ignored her and killed them all. (177)

The chapter, "The God of Small Things" is pure action, and most of it minute in detail. Love mixes in with the details of nature, even "vomit-green" is made to be beautiful.

Instinctively they stuck to the Small Things. The Big Things ever lurked inside. They knew there was nowhere for them to go. They had no future. So they stuck to the Small Things. (320)

There's nothing really to say about this book. If you haven't, read it, and read every word slowly. Love is in the tiniest of details. Tragedy springs from a small escape. Sex will lose its name.

The Inspector asked his question. Estha’s mouth said Yes.
Childhood tiptoed out.
Silence slid in like a bolt.
Someone switched off the light and Velutha disappeared. (303)

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Goodreads Reviews

There'll suddenly be a bunch showing up here, as I'm meant to be doing reviews of all I read and will catch up on Goodreads soon, and there's a fancy feature on there to copy and past the review into your blog. I really should send the previous sentence to purgatory for sheer dumbness, but I'll let it sit. <3

Jimmy Corrigan review

Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth is possibly the saddest book I have ever read. Pretty much go off of the assumption that if anything good happens to Jimmy, it will eventually be reversed over the course of the book.

Chris Ware's comic follows sad sack, middle-aged, agonizingly normal Jimmy Corrigan as he goes through his day unappreciated, lonely, and bored. The piece begins with Jimmy receiving a letter from his biological father trying to get in contact with Jimmy for the first time in their lives. The story then follows Jimmy as he heads off to meet his father, grandfather, and half-sister. Along the way, we view the variety of dreams going on in Jimmy's far less ordinary imagination, including robots, superheroes, sexual encounters, etc. We learn that only in his dreams is Jimmy the "smartest kid on earth."

Alongside this continuous narrative, we get flashbacks to the youth of Jimmy's grandfather, whose story is equally if not even more depressing. Jimmy's grandad is a sad, lonely little boy who tries to make friends at school via acting like the cool kids. Essentially, this means ditching his Italian friend, following his crush, the red-headed girl, in her juvenile rambunctiousness, and trying like mad to attend the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. As he fails to succeed in making a single friend, Jimmy's grandad lives in increasing poverty with JImmy's great-grandfather, an abusive and angry man.

If that weren't enough sadness, there's also suicides, surprising other deaths, the oppressive nature of Jimmy's mother's clinging loneliness, racism, and rape. Also, a lot of snow, just in case we didn't get the fact that this book is one hell of a sad experience.

In addition to its melancholic storyline, there are some pretty solid square and rectangle-based panels to display the art of the book, which is highly reminiscent of 30's/40's Detective Comics serials. The colors vary greatly between Jimmy's daydreams with traditional primary colors of the superhero genre, the present gray-based life of Jimmy, and the brown hues of Jimmy's grandad's life. Throughout these, the font also changes, with a particularly difficult to read cursive for the flashbacks of Jimmy's grandfather.

Granted, the book is speaking a great deal to the imaginary nature of the superhero genre. Ordinary superheroes, such as the one pictured early in this comic, are more likely to comic suicide by jumping off of a building than to go sailing into the sky. The actual Clark Kent lived a life of quiet desperation, merely dreaming himself a Superman alter ego that never made it to the real world. Real people don't have a Fortress of Solitude or Batcave and infinite time and resources to go out saving people. Jimmy wants to help people, but he is too busy living his sad life.

Be prepared to feel punched in the soul when reading this comic. But read it nonetheless.

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Review from Goodreads: Underground

Underground by Haruki Murakami
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Underground is half of Murakami's attempt to deal with the sense of alienation he explains experiencing upon viewing catastrophes that hit Japan whilst he was living outside of his homeland. While his story collection, after the quake, deals with the events surrounding the 1995 Kobe earthquake, Underground acted as an attempt for the author to come to terms with the 1995 sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway.

Murakami's Underground, one of only two nonfiction books published by the author thus far, is composed almost entirely of edited interview transcripts. The book is divided into many sections, delineating between survivors and former/current members of Aum Shinrikyo (Aleph), the group responsible for the attacks. The book is further broken down to include where survivors experienced the attack (which trains, what direction, what line, etc.) and overviews of the day's events. There are additionally three passages in which Murakami speaks to his own motivations and hesitancies in completing these interviews.

One of the explanations Murakami muses as a cause of the attacks is the alienation of youths in urban Tokyo. In the interview section with Aum members, he highlights that many of the interviewees and persons involved with the sarin attack were ostracized in school or otherwise found themselves unable to enter social environments. He describes the apathy that accompanies this separation, yet only after readers have spent 250 pages reading interviews with victims of the attack.

It is this effect that makes Underground such an important read. For when we begin to read about this lack of empathy, we may have already noticed the lack of feeling eventually accompanying our readings of the survivor interviews. The stories of the sarin attack become mundane and repetitive, yet just as soon as we make it past, we are made to realize that in losing our empathy for the survivors we have been made to feel some degree of empathy for the perpetrators.

It is a difficult piece if only for this reason alone, but an extremely significant intervention in the apathy epidemic of the modern age.

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Descent of Alette review

The Descent of Alette by Alice Notley

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In her introduction, Notley explains the quotation marks as both intended to slow the reader down and to distance herself from the character of Alette as storyteller versus protagonist.  Yet, this punctuation has a tertiary effect of “air quoting” the text enclosed, suggesting a degree of irony (and sometimes thinly veiled innuendo) in presumably unintended locations.  Incidentally, the reader may find herself laughing at points that would otherwise be, well, depressing.  Example: “Yes, these woods are” “full of beings,” “primal beings.”  Does Notley mean to say that there are actual primal beings in the forest or “primal beings,” possibly alluding to toddlers or mothers-in-law?

Yet it is perhaps this ambiguity that helps one bear out the otherwise exhausting persistent presence of quotation marks.  The Descent of Alette is a text driven by the ambiguous.

Early in the work, Alette comes across a young veteran who falls asleep on the train.  This soldier speaks in his sleep, saying, “’I need a dolor” “a few more dolors.”’  The use of the word “dolor” may simply be the pronunciation of “dollar” with a seeming Latin@ accent, yet may instead or additionally be the word “dolor,” meaning pain, in Spanish.  The narrator consistently makes use of the word “disappeared” to refer to the manner in which people leave the scene.  In the context of a place beneath the ground ruled by a male tyrant, the entire piece suggests a Latin or South American nation domineered by a vicious ruler who “disappears” his political opponents and leads his people to die in war, either civil or abroad.

As with all aspects of the text, no explanation or background is given.  It is this openness to multiple interpretations and symbolism that makes The Descent of Alette an epic, an almost biblical text.  Even Joseph Campbell’s monomyth can be applied to the text, the journey originating in a call to adventure (to kill the tyrant) and concluding with the death of the tyrant and return to the upper world.

Notley’s work may be intended as a comment upon the monomyth and the patriarchal nature of the hero’s journey.  In fact, The Descent of Alette seems to act as a response to Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey and the need to focus more on female heroes and their journeys both in traditional literature and the need to write more of such tales in the contemporary age.

Alette’s journey is just as confusing and steeped in metaphor as Odysseus’.  Even more importantly, the tale doesn’t tell of men going to wars with men, but Alette’s work to destroy a wicked, male tyrant, who may even represent a death of the monomyth’s misogynistic nature.  The male-based hero’s journey may appear as entwined with literature as the tyrant’s body is interlaced with the subway system and upper world, but in the same manner it can be destroyed and the world, epic literature, lives on.  In destroying the monomyth, Notley has freed the literary epic from its male-dominated origin story, and allowed women’s to rightfully take their place as the protagonists of the hero-based myth.

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Sidetracked?

Well, I've been sidetracked from the Fiasco project.  I've got it started, but I think I'm going to change my rules.  Honestly, some of my favorite movies have boring elements that I didn't realize until now.  I keep hoping there'll be some more interesting relationships, but I've mostly just got two interesting ones:

1. Knife thrower/ target
2. Private detective/ actor with role as private detective

Oh!  I also had these two:

1. Would-be-murderer/ intended victim
2. Crime boss/ wet works man

I can't think of any community-based relationships.  Maybe I'll just focus on extreme examples.  Then I'll have super out there things (although potentially fanfic) with:

1. Time traveller/ Queen Victoria
2. Greatest wizard evuh/ king who wants to kill all magic people
3. Guide to the afterlife/ recently deceased person
4. Fairy guide/ hero of destiny
5. Doggy goddess/ village drunk who takes credit for all the goddess does
6. Last person on earth/ dying radio

Anyway, I'm working on it.  But then I had a dream about doing a time traveller mystery short story with a romance twist, so I might do that first.  Whenever the time appears...

It's a Fiasco!... writing game?

I do love writing games (without whimsy, wherefore would we write?).  Anyway, watching the folks at Tabletop play Fiasco made me want to write a small-plan-gone-wrong-esque thing with some mean ass characters.  If you haven't seen it, please do enjoy the imbedded vids below, and especially note the amazingness of Bonnie.


Anyway, I love the way the roll of dice affects what story will be told. It's lovely, isn't it?  Taking the tricky bits of coming up with plot away from the whole ordeal of story making.  ... Well, you know what I mean.  Sometimes, just coming up with a plot is death (though Chris Baty tells me it's "no problem.").  I think it would be amazing just to write out these guys' Fiasco storyline, but I bet some other geek's already on it- that's how we roll in geekland?

I'm going to first try it just by plugging in some "ends in disastuh!" type films' (that I actually like...) info, then roll and start plotting.  Will update when there is... more to update?

This blog post kinda has terrible writing in it. In case you didn't notice.

meta...

Cricketing

It is one of those days where I feel I should sink into the earth.  Not necessarily a bad thing, this emotion propels me forward on the pavement with the notion that my feet are being touched by strange vining hands.

Yawning in public and covering the mouth.  Wearing a large sweater though it is warm outside.  Feeling suddenly quite old and marveling at parking structures.  Secluding oneself in a corner and typing.  Wanting paper but knowing it would feel corpse-like in this day.

It sounds depressing, but it isn't.  It is merely exhausting.  I want to sleep but be enveloped in doing so.  I want intense warmth, I want to feel feverish in this heat.  The language sounds sexual but the experience is not.

I can assume this experience comes of having strange dreams.  But I am unable to connect today and have such a desire to return home and sleep.

For now, I imagine and drift away from conversations.  Today, it will suffice.

The Fire

The Fire

A man said to me, “my head is on fire.”
I took it to mean he had a fever
or that his mind was so full of ideas
he had to depend on such metaphors.

But no, the man’s head was on fire
and the fire burned with such splendor
I understood him to be bragging,
for which, I feel, he had every right.

He had piled those many sticks
upon his metal, maybe gold, crown
the embers biting into his brain,
the fire itself shooting up, his hair.

Despite this, he is calm, noble,
he wears a lovely pendant regally
and stands so very straight
as his waxen neck melts away.


 -- anyway, I have no idea where this came from...

Note in my phone

What does it mean?

The note says:

170
Dream-
Men- shop with steps- cant die?


It is from 69 days ago. Anyway, I'm guessing it was a dream I had. I have no idea what 170 means. How do you shop with steps? Is that like voting with your feet? And what does that have to do with immortality?

Obviously am philosophical genius and do not know it nor understand it in my more coherent hours.

Planets

Needs a new title.. Anyway- both this and the previous two are adaptations of friends' stories. :)


Planets

His eyes were luminous planets behind his glasses.
When his eyes blinked, there was an eclipse.
They shone, Venus on a clear moon night.

They swirled, they drove, and the atmosphere
atmospheric pressure, no, gravitational pull
we were planets in rotation, dance of death rotation

The old ones say, you should've known
but the moon really was a mistress
named for gods, don't you see?

She ran after him, she chased him and he fled
in his rotation, he fled, but Venus
was a woman and is a woman, and bleeds

I am ready for love, I am ready for love
but there is no sound in space, no atmospheric
pressure, only black tangles and Mars who was man

We're flawless, no, not even the moon, though, no
but we aren't human. Anymore, just truths
I can't kiss you here. There is no sound in space.

Biding his time, we bide our time, ovular time
and translations of actions in this soundless space
Venus is so bright and Mars glows red tonight

Planets may be the most beautiful people
(not people) in the world (not world)
but they are also the most doomed

God of fear, personification of terror,
her little planets circle her, moons are imperfect,
there is no sound in space, and love but not in love.

Heart of stone, body of stone, all matter
last man, it matters, dance and circle and will
eventually collide. So they say.

A keeper of tales is not the same as a prophet
who reads these motions and silence in space
who reads these harsh prophecies
and smaller rotations.

Poems, a few

Two attempts at the same poem:


Mirror Girls

There’s a truth
to some of those rumors.
The truth to it is—we really
are a freak. Freakesque
if you will, we are
utterly unique, is
unique in our one-
ness but the fact
or truth, if you
will, of it is that we are,
we is, or I am, far
far more freakesque
than they’d like you
to know. If you all knew
the truth, the fact, if
you will, of my life, is
this, it is this: when we
look at our sisters we
do not glance at each
other. You see it now
don’t you? The honest
to god truth is when
we stand back and back
and back and at a perfect
angle so that it looks
as though a mirror is
traveling back and
back and back to show
us repeated but add a
mirror to that and you’ll
see that we are repeated
infinitely. I am repeated
infinitely and split into
three parts that carry on
back and back and so on
at an angle, so that the
mirror is always
available for I am
the vainest girl
in history. One
wasn’t enough,
so you’ll all
get, all you’ll get
is three of
me.


 
Dime a Dozen

Pinning up my blackbird hair
bobby pins purchased at CVS
for fifty cents a bundle
along with the dye, which
sprays on and washes out
of our long, blonde curls.

Fake lashes, long, to accent
an assumed youth preserved
in each of our faces, making it
one face. Drawing us out
and in to be alike. We pinken
our cheeks in the apples.

Carefully equipaged, our
bosoms are taped painfully
tight. We train ourselves to
speak as one, to finish each
other’s sentences, high and pre-
pubescent from doll-sweet lips.