Sentience

It’s honey flavored and summer inspired. I’m in love like young kids fall in love: hard, fast, stupid. Pour another drink. Mark it on the calendar. I swear the change in seasons will bring me out and about and my freckles will darken and give birth to little freckle babies, and my hair will get back its golden touch and I will laugh, laugh, laugh for days without pause, (except to say, “oh, it hurts to laugh, its starting to hurt!”)
And that is how it will go, trapped up here in the mountains. Or near the mountains, by the mountains, a short drive from the mountains. Where the snow is stubborn and melts slowly, drizzling down hills, puddling in holes. The sun is the biggest tease in my life and I sleep with the fan on because the sound is soothing. Year round its gentle hum is heard, and in the dead of winter, it makes me creep extra deep under the blanket, fighting goose bumps, while rhythmic fingers search for warmth, until success, success, success! It is found.

These are the common things in my life: a jar full of orange and yellow shells, an open box of sewing pins, a hamper of unfolded clothes, the desire for call and reply. Where are the stars tonight, and what of theories and dreams? What are your common things and when you dream, what dreams are messing up your hair?

I drew my lips red and then left them open to possibilities.

Bloody Nose

I had a dream last night in which I considered the morning, afternoon and night of a bullet as it traveled on the way to its destination.

And it felt as if something small, aquatic was swimming in my eye. My left eye to be exact and no rubbing or blinking of it would exhaust or stop it.

I have this image of you. In it you are outside smoking. Your brow is furrowed from the light and the angle of the sun causes the veins in your forearms to seem mountainous, significant. You speak between the motions of smoking. A few measured words then a drag and hold, smoke circling within your lungs; followed by the exhale and a few more words rise up with the smoke, just as winding, they meander up and away. The cigarette is flicked and you study your fingers’ movement as the ashes fall. The red burn left is a sign.
And I am thinking of the shadowed veins, wondering if they lead to treasure or if they are hard to the touch. Tiny mountains, swollen rivers, risen paths. And there is no cigarette in my hand to buy me time. The only smoke that circles in my lungs has circled within your body first. And as you flick the cigarette I study your fingers’ movement and I am aware, the red burn remaining, is a sign.

I had a dream last night that butterflies started to stream into the room and land in my hair. They covered my head and shoulders, all shapes, colors and sizes, and began to mate. “Stay still,” others informed me, “be careful and let them do what they are doing.” And I could barely feel their flutter against my forehead, on my neck. Some couples landed on my forearms, tiny and connected they made their butterfly love and I watched, and I sat still and let them.

Bullfrogs

My growling aching limbs remind me of the days of crouching in the duck weed and muck searching for the biggest bullfrog in the pond. Careful footsteps through the water so the horrific squeak of a squished frog would never creep out, or the snapping turtle wouldn't catch our toes in her jaws and eat them like saltines.
I never knew how important a mosquito was or when the wrong time was to squish it. She is just feeding a family, just trying to survive. She's trying to feed the frogs, feed the ducks and the lily pads. And I thought it was funny to mush her on my arm.
And I'm trying to survive, but dinner tonight was air and Sunny D mixed with mythical animals who make their homes in little red and white spheres of light. Goldfish danced in my hair and flopped back into the tiny pool of sheets nearby.
Something inside is breaking like eggs cracked on heads, dripping through tresses of hair and down my neck. Taking a shower means letting it win. Letting go of the largest bullfrog in the pond, now in the bucket, looking at me with the wide eyes I adorn every day.

Tip #3 - 50 words

If you're having trouble coming up with something, or you just want to try to challenge yourself, here's something you can do: Write a narrative in exactly 50 words. It must have a beginning, middle and end (whatever that means to you). It must be EXACTLY fifty words.

Of course, you can feel free to fool around with this, but the challenge is in the specifics above.

(Recommended by MaKeR)

Boon Epilogue

Dragged down by my personal puma
By the scar I received from no one.

Leaving the murk, let the mud cake and crack in the sun.
Welcome returns make ears ring with the bells.

ugh

remember the ocean where there are waves and seasalts crusty under your skin - if you float long enough you'll feel the barnacles grow and soon you'll become gray and white and maybe baleen. shrimp dance. cuttlefish dance.

remember the ocean: overwhelming enormity - like the sky but deeper.

response to kenneth anger

they've got masks on, you know. painted like little china dolls dancing around like we care. they've got guns and flowers, kind of like guns n' roses but not the same at all. they were there before guns n' roses, if you want to play the originality game.

there's a little person in a blue forest walking through a fountain and her dress gets wet and the critics say gee, doesn't that fountain look big compared to that little person? and we say, gee, what a beautiful fountain.

warhol was a star-struck little boy but we're supposed to worship him. blasphemy to the art world, maybe, but god we have too many warhols around here. i want to see edie's art, see past the glossy edgy and understand what it is to be the face of a movement. andy's got the name, she's got the face, now all we need is authenticity.

you think you know what's coming but you never do. it's that sweet taste of a reward taken away, the last drop at the bottom of a honey stick. you're supposed to ooh and ahh and appreciate. if it evokes emotion it's working, right? that's what they say at least.

90 lbs of Dead Skin

They are crawling up and out of me, dark little figures with round hands and feet. Deep grins and darker giggles, I see them now, circling and centering over some little particular. They join hands, as well as hand-less oddities can join, and dance around it, as if it were a sacral fire. And their little bodies are in the way of me seeing it, they move too quickly for me to make it out between their forms. And the song they sing gets faster, faster, as I try to will them to slow, and then they are no long individuals, but a black ring circling, growing in width until they are now a black dot, blotting out the point of interest, the thought I was looking to find, the word on the tip of my tongue, the story I wanted to tell. What terrible little creatures.

Salt

He missed his one claim to fame. Wives really will hold you down. And I have to schlump certain people into certain categories so others will know, just what I mean. And what terrible things did these terrible people do to have their names become descriptors for other transgressors. “You know, he’s a real Zach Shields.” And suddenly, it clear, we all know, we can all agree.
Not that I’m a saint. Not that you don’t scowl and hiss when I’m mentioned, when he sings that song or sends that look. Women will tear each other apart, and I just rather fight from afar.
I was trying to break myself down into shapes and hide behind a solid layer of black, brown, pink, gold. My freckles are making a comeback, new sun, new season is calling them out and I’m exotic, animal like, a pattern where others are smooth, one endless color. The North Star has moved its location to my left cheek, find your constellations from that spot on.
He missed his claim to fame and I am glad for it, I rejoice in his small nature and small words and banished situation. I imagine him, cowering in deserts, naked and crying. How sad, how simple, how pathetic. And if I told you, he truly deserved this fate, could you guess to what he had done?

Guess.

I Rather Be Making New Family Traditions Than Mouthing A Stranger Who Called Me Pretty At A Mini-Golf Course

I like girls in ties. She said and she had to pause and re-emphasis when he only shook his head, slightly yes and didn't lift to meet her gaze. She held the like out this time, and put her hand on his knee. I like girls in ties.

She expected it, damn near demanded it, when she placed her left hand on his thigh, he'd say, "hey beautiful." And her world would calm again. She was dramatic, a child, her voice closed down way in her throat and she spoke like she didn't know any better to laugh when she felt like laughing and to cry whenever the feeling took her. She covered his face with her tears and they made soup.

Working quietly together, she knew what he was doing without looking up or asking. She could count on him to do his part as quickly as she did hers. So much so, that she found she only remembered half of recipes. She'd forget to chop the onion before sauteing the greens,or to mix the oil with the flour. How many cups of water she needed. Those were his bits to remember, to do. And she was happy to share.

It seems that simple life isn't made to accommodate crowns, and I can't seem to find a single appropriate place to put mine, besides on my head. My sister keeps asking if I've worn my crown during sex yet. Says, it would have been first on her list if it was hers. Would wear it every time she did it, if she had one. But my head its messy, and the crown is pointy and jeweled. I'm unsure how he'd feel, to see it reflecting colors, in a nest of my hair.

I'm happy to think of marriage. It doesn't seem grand or all ending. Just natural. Just certain. Just something. A why not. A no brainer. A good excuse to change my passport and take a vacation. The only way the PeaceCorps will accept us. A way to end the accidental slips of "husband" that on occasion, escape. Outside the land of rationale, it slows down. No rush. No hurry. I mean, we've got a lifetime, right?
I've got a career to start and seeds to sow. And let's face it, the guy who served the coffee might need a pick me up of his own.
Bored with intrigue, it stops. A joke. An echo to something less. And they don't leave out a single thing on these models, rogue nosehairs, praying for the invention of the tweezers. Frozen flies no longer buzzing but still as pesty.

The point: I'm always cold. He keeps me warm. I can't make soup without him.

hiatus: end; brothers

i will spend a year writing about brothers. i will spend one year writing about notions of the filial, and conceptions and brothers as apples and oranges. we will look at the surface of the ocean from beneath, and the viability of brothers there.

so I guess here it is

ya, so things about me have changed. prolly forever, and completely. Im not really a different person, just different in attitude. im more the person I want to be more than the person i think I am. and frankly I cant complain. I've been learning to let things be the way they be, since its an awful large universe, and I have no control over the things that bear down on us. Im entirely too optimistic of a person.

I cant really remember where I was going with this originally, though my thoughts are currently geared towards the interactions that await me upon going home. Am I going to be this cocky when I visit everyone? what if no one reacts to my return the way I imagine them to? Will my newfound feelings be something I can only feel in Europe?

I dont want a repeat of last year, and I dont know sometimes if I truely have control over things like that. Anthony keeps telling me when we're flying through crystals and hanging with people who dont speak American that "I am Me". He is wise beyond his years. This is the same dude who warns his stoner friends that a cop just passed by, so be careful pulling out of the drive through of mcdonalds. Anyway.
I am me. I control everything about me and I presume, my immediate surroundings. i can sort of control my physical health. I can override any automatic messeges my brain is telling my body. I dont need to puke. I wont catch a cold sitting here on a cold park bench without a jacket. I can see perfectly in the pitch blackness of the darkroom. It doesnt matter what people here think about me, because if I choose, I never have to contact them again, and their thoughts and interactions with me will mean nothing.

But to be nicer, I am me.
I didnt believe that last year,
I hope everyone is prepared.

And because I am me,
I wont have a repeat of last year.

After reading the works of Chuck, I hope I better understand the human condition, the desire to suffer. And I hope I've transcended that.

Cheers to all of you.
All of you who choose to read this.
To everyone trying to figure things out.

hiatus

one week. then we're back.

(xoxo Maker and MattyQ)

zoom zoom zoom.

Without

Within my words, I have found the most private and stimulating parts of myself. My words are the secrets that creep under the skin and I give them like kisses that I must sneak in, so no one knows how truly devilish I am. My words have been my greatest sins, my most important whispers. They are the only things that come with truth and passion, when all other things are lacking, when all other courage is gone.
I have often been fingered as a sexual figure, one with intrigue and mischief in constant supply, noted only in the corner of my crooked grin, when passing in person.
In correspondences, I have spoken in suggestive and provocative manners, only to seem timid in the flesh. Lacking in the lips, that which many have imagined pouring out, a verbal intercourse, teasing to the strength and aptitude with which I may have proceeded to please, the areas that become affected by the movement of blood.
But these words are an experiment, a course of curiosity that means nothing outside the proof of theories.
People have played the game of words against me, with varying success. Fluctuations for satisfaction and new levels of intrigue, stress the relationship constantly. I have kept years to the pages with some without physical resolution, while other interactions on the page have turned into complete affairs, in the most dramatic and sinister of senses. Failing and succeeding at this art has separated me completely. The writer remains poised beneath the daily activities and loves that I keep. I do not make room for her observations or passing fancies. She does not speak, where I bluntly can, and what I find is that her voice lies within my inability to keep secrets. To keep safe. The writer within me is a criminal who teases endlessly to be caught while remaining elusive to capture. She wants to be inspired to sin. She is fragile to judgment and encouraged by praise.
Separate, she misses other writers like lovers. She mourns their leavings again and again and thrashes her words for their inability to keep others close. In place of kisses and warm embraces, she misses response and experiences phantom sensations associated with the loss of a limb. She attempts to return to worlds of thoughts and desires that were built up between writer and writer. The brave escapes they attempted to make from reality and all its menial tendencies, stick in her throat and complicate the meaning on the page.
And she smiles with subtle amusement within me. She throws out line and hook and prays for a catch big enough to satiate her. And my words have been my biggest sins. My most important whispers…

I have not reached the point. It is a conversation, not a monologue, and so I struggle. I beg for reply. There must be pressure behind a touch, in order for it to be felt.

And I Will Be An Orchard...

It’s come to my attention that my immediate world has circled into another time of death and aging. The hospitals are holding loved ones, dates for wakes and funerals are being set. Plans are changed and black shirts and pants are taken out. Respect is being paid, silences allotted, bouquets of white and yellow with green leaves, are being put together, each flower given its own day to die, once the stem is cut, the lifeline severed. And I think, maybe there won’t be flowers at my funeral, but saplings. Their thin branches will be the seemingly sparse beginning of my ending. The procession of mourners will come with dirty jeans and shovels, to a plot of land, noted as fertile but neglected. They will dig holes and plant trees, spreading a handful of ashes along the roots before burying this all too important structure beneath the ground. Rows and rows of gnarled branches on comatose fruit trees will emerge. And I will be an orchard, waiting for harvest. I will grow until the time when families come to pry through my branches. They’ll lift round cheeked children up on their shoulders to reach the prettiest fruit high in the tree. Come autumn, the smell of aging cider will fill the air, when there are too many apples to pick, and the majority fall to the ground without a hand to catch them. And I will be an orchard…

Coming Up For Air...

I get up every morning at the mercy of my internal clock and the light streaming in through my shade-less windows. I’ve finally reached the age, where this won’t keep me in bed all day and I start to toss and stretch around seven thirty. When I was younger, I had my mum make me special curtains that didn’t allow any light in, giving my room a cave-like interior. Now I’ve gotten rid of curtains altogether, happy to feel sun on my face. I sleep on my stomach with my arms curled up under my chest. My shoulders ache when I wake up. I work them out in the day, and they support my upper body all night.
Mother says I’m bony, as she hugs me and rubs my shoulder blades. The chubby condition of my younger years has found its way to my stomach, hips, and thighs which has given me the form of a woman. Upper body is breasts and ribcage, scars and freckles. I’ve got tiny fingers and a long neck. My stomach is circular and on good days, compact, soft, cradled by wide hips that can support it and the weight of offspring. My legs are short, thick and strong, muscular and padded. I can feel all my muscles, vibrating softly this morning, dull and slow in their actions. I find myself, knees to my chest, rocking to the gurgling of my stomach. And there is still no sun, the rain interrupts tiny rivers on the road, as winter robins scurry around for any bug or worm that may have found its way to the surface. Coming up for air…

vision quest: severance, threshold, return (incorporation)

Is it heavy handed
for me to tell you that
I'm standing on a path
in a graveyard repeating
to myself the question:
where am I going?
where am I going?
An answer is obvious,
dust to dust.
I am standing in a graveyard.
My mortality is reflected
in the polished sheen
of a headstone - I can
count vague features
of my face between
the letters (embossed?)
Behind me, the path dis-
appears beneath a fresh
layer of snow. Ahead
a branch has fallen.
It is all brown and grey.
at least it is
warm. The snow is
receding from the
washsmooth bases
of stones. There
are birds. But I
am standing on a path.
In a graveyard. Asking
where I am going.

Back to school.
And after?
To a meeting, to get
some food, homework.
After that?
Finish out the year.
Mexico. The summer
vacation.
What about after school?
Masters program.
Where?
I don't know.
Then?
Teaching.
Where?
I don't know.

I'm looking for
knuckles and fingers
coming trhough the
dirt. The names
on the stone have
been obliterated by
lichen and age. Is
that all that was
left of them? Now
they are gone?

Where did they go?
Natural decomposition.
Bacteria and fungis turning
into detritus. The bones
(abraised?) away by the
movements of the soil
and footsteps above.
Where did their hearts go?
I don't know.
Heaven?
What's that?
Where will you go?
Firmament of atomic
structure, and
energy vibrations.
Where did your father go?
Heaven.
What's that?
A place I don't need
to worry about.
Where are you going?
I'm taking one step.
And after that?
I'm taking another step.

--

I never had the heart to tell you it never came the month before red thinly poured out of me, you along with it. It disturbed me, and I shut the door, locked it, and tried to throw out the key. I cried for what seeped out of me. The salty bitterness that was everything I feared and hoped for at nineteen. I covered up the stain, pretended it didn't exist once you left. All the while remembering you were the only one I wanted to fuck so hard, the only set of blue eyes to not tangle my hair.
What ifs come to mind every time I'm aggravated. I just end up hitting you.
And sometimes I wish my insides had fallen out that night and that I let you hold me.

I'm Cotton Candy Happy

You're taking shots like its classy to fall on the floor. And copper tabletops don't mean nothing no more. Piles of post-its, like a neon autumn, bring money and spring sings, he's just where we want him...
I put my hair up and make my own lunch while you age. Your last years model and he's a discount shopper. Match made in, only your mother would print that...

My smile just seems to get wider and wider.

the color

So there's anger and he's red and there's sadness and he's blue but what is disappointment? What is the color of being let down and kicked in the stomach? The color of oh, right, maybe it was all just the novelty of it.

hey boy

hey boy, look at you, what happened to you. you've got these cynical eyes and this voice i don't recognize.

maybe it's been you all along and i've just been pretending that you can be everything the world isn't.

hey cynical-eyes, hey you boy, look at the world and tell me it's everything you hoped for.

Just Glitter in the Mailbox

Its downward dog, unshaved armpits, song on repeat, avoid deadlines, lie in obvious ways, cover up bruises, flour stuck under your nails, cinnamon scented house, day.

Lips peel like lead paint. Just as poisonous, just as deadly. Retracting all the things I said like kisses wont make it into diaries overseas. And one is just loving the next, whos loving the next, whos loving the next. No sex, no reverberation, no contemplation, just heartstrings used to the tune of, end it all for you. Kill them all for you. I'd totally forgot you, until now.

We feather out the misdeeds and wear them like shiny skin, fake nails, long eyelashes. And the blondes all cluck like hens. Staring at their roots, the blonds all cluck like hens.

She wasn't wearing much. And me, straight stick stiff and still, stare.

They were comics from the past. Etches of things never meant for me. Fingers traced for me. Nothing there for me.

churchbell rings in the distance. Condom dried out, yellowed, clings to the side of the trashcan. Fifteen blank pages tell me I'm running out of time.

But I can't focus on the "what if"s when I'm in the "here & now."

And I really showed them who's the prettiest princess of all.