Monday, December 26, 2011
But as I grow older, I'm starting to realize. My adult self has lost the capacity to love nearly as much as my childhood self could do. I used to listen to all the beautiful notes that my beating heart played for me. Now, just muffles of ecstasy.
And if not for that little bird that keeps me company. The mild denizen of my faceted mind who knocks on its walls and echoes over and over that "Silence is where life hides the truth". If it weren't for those constant reminders, I'd be pulled into the same river of apathy that I swore I hated so much.
The rests and the pauses were what kept Ravel and Debussy up at night, drunk and thinking and writing the path out of hell onto five black lines before they lost the directions.
And though we are not a French Impressionists, the rests and pauses are yours and mine
They keep us banked here, away from the river and under the twinkling night stars.
They keep me dreaming and they keep me aware.
That I love you.
Thursday, December 8, 2011
Monday, December 5, 2011
a firey beacon cut through the fog
and filled my head with pixy dust.
i swear I still was dreaming
when i saw you in that redeeming sky
when i woke up that morning to your skin smiling back at me
when we kissed
and now everything is more real
it all tastes and smells and feels
like it's been roused from hibernation
and the memories of each other like smelling salts,
and a touch of caffeine in our veins
we are slumberless beings
swimming through the nirvana that spans the eternity within us.
and as you lay here beside me
after you'd thrown out your garbage
i pondered the thoughts you must have had
to keep such things around.
and if i would one day be one of them.
But you reassured me with your warmth and your words
that the gem growing inside of you
was only ever touched by those who cared enough to see it.
And That, I could live with.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
It was the risk of death that sustained his new reason for living. And if he could just fend off the hounds of cynicism for one more day, maybe the angel of hope would come to visit him. And maybe just once he could look out at faces he didn't know and be okay with their blankness. And the stories that lay directly behind would never be told, but maybe they were a flame not meant for him.
All her stories. The ones she once experienced and led him through the same. They had once been her own fires, but now ash. No warmth in them save the thought itself. It was their masochism taking hold again, using thoughts as heat ventriloquism. No, they had to fight it and learn to make their own fire. To remember that they had arms and hands and they could do more with them than just crawl up together and feed each other decadent fancies. They could make the cold go away if they tried to.
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Friday, November 25, 2011
Orange, white, red. The colors strewn onto metal and brick. Blank as if they were gray. As if they were painted and stationary. The screens, the window. They were one in the same. She was merging into a world that didn't exist and becoming numb to the real one. But neither could offer what she wanted. That spark that sets her off into who she is. She waited and waited and it didn't come.
"Why are you waiting?" she asked.
"Why are you still like this? You have the spark. Why can't You release it?"
A ruminant tirade under the quilt. Echoes off drywall and the hum of cars. She was suffering the unbearable weight of breathing without a reason and speaking without sound. Cowards choose suicide. The brave ones don't have this kind of problem.
She chose mindfulness. The kind that wraps you in the present and never lets go. That kind that dismantles Rosaries and Gelcaps and AK-47s. The kind that finds simplicity in all life's happenings.
And the gray became the crystalline beams of a rainbow. The hum became intricate parts of a whole. Her feet and hands could move, and all she had to do was tell them to. Even in ugliness, beauty was at some point created. The trick was to discover its hiding places.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Back then, we would count our days together: Seven, Thirty, Three-Hundred and Sixty-Five. And Before we could stop to think, we had become the safe parts of each others' minds that slow down our growing up. You and I. we were Us.
But then you grew out of me, and into the city. And I could feel it in the shortness of your breaths and the quickness of your eyes. How your veins were flooded with carbon, and your skin shrouded with whatever heat it could gather. You were becoming more of a line than a point, a blurred stream of your routines spread thin across the minutes. You were racing to become all of yourself in an impossible time.
I remember missing you in those pendulum swings. You were unfathomably quick, I'll commend you for that. Quicker than life. Quicker than me. But then one day, you stopped ticking and my world stopped moving. And then the doctors started counting down: One-Sixty, One-Twenty, Eighty, Fifty, Thirty, Twenty, Ten.
And so I simply stopped feeling.
That's how you left me. Do you remember? I guess it's silly to think that you would remember such things.
But anyway, I hope you're doing better now. You deserve it.
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Would that our threads run stale
and boring day begets boring night.
how we fail to reset our head-clocks
til the time is expressed as a blurred sumi-e
You know how boldly our growth revealed
that the sun's angles were waning and waxing.
No longer, were they the snapshots of an eternal reality
that we knew as children
We are twenty-somethings on paper
and nothings, really, on TV.
We are trying too hard to be who we are.
And yet, still not enough.
I know so very little of you
because I know so very little of me.
when I looked up at Selene keeping her quiet vigil on the earth
marking the hours and minutes til rise
of Amaterasu's jubilant fire.
playing hell's games, I turned myself over
to her cold echoed gamma rays,
the siren calling to bring her warmth.
But should I give her the last match in my book.
I would have no more to give
no backup plan, no safety nets.
So I didn't.
we didn't. I didn't.
And I keep repeating it to myself,
and turning it over,
hoping I'll learn to accept it.
Sunday, October 30, 2011
Monday, October 24, 2011
Friday, October 21, 2011
Monday, October 17, 2011
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Sunday, October 9, 2011
throws out my faux discretions
and somehow finds such lines and stanzas
a list of bold transgressions.
in words without a fever at all
but full of reason and rhythm and rhyme
of course i'm speaking of yours
not mine.
at times they miss the time they spent
in the queue that never moved.
For action would mean desperation.
or worse, a love disproved.
because, you see,
i am prose, and you are poetry
i fall between your meters and metes
unable to fit your soliloquy
and at the bottom, there is beauty that these syllables do make
when they are free to flow as they will.
Monday, October 3, 2011
Sunday, October 2, 2011
The city howled at the moon as she sat there feeling lifeless, the harsh brightness of the screen drawing her into a whirlwind of thoughts. The kind of thoughts that were never true, but she still perpetuated as a cruel way to lie to herself. She imagined that she had been forgotten by the ones who still understood her. It's not so hard to do when you're depressed, wondering why your friends aren't trying to find you in the same maze they've become lost and alone in. The thoughts become poisons so thick you can feel them crawling into your brain and staining it all a blurred sort of darkness until you've become blind with it. She welcomed them in, knowing they would hurt her. She wanted them to.
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Taking this out of my book, so i figured i'd immortalize it as a short story
“Rena. Can you play me a song?”
”Sure. What do you want to hear?”
”Play me what you’re feeling right now. Not the feelings of some old composer guy. I want to hear exactly what you're feeling right now.”
”Okay.”
I slowly walked over to the piano and sat down, taking in its scent, the same as any good piano. That scent always calms me, reminds me of my childhood. I laid my fingers on the keys and closed my eyes, and let the feelings flow out as they came.
The first key was an F, my favorite. It blossomed and swelled like winds before a storm, and sent the heat of our lives away, leaving the cool, sweet, rain; cool as the September night. My fingers fluttered up and down scales, changing direction every now and then. I ended on a long note and focused on it like the last sigh of an era. It sank into me and slowly peeled away more layers. The next layer was desperate and cold and I let it brush the keys. The sound felt dry and black, like walking through a forest, recently burned, dying embers still snapping and hissing. It was the quiet screams of the dead. A thousand restless souls within my own, with power overwhelming enough to stop me. My fingers moved away from the keyboard, but the agony kept going.
”I’m sorry, David.” I said, barely together. “I can’t go on.”
”Hey hey. Don’t cry. I’m sorry I asked you to do this.”
He came over and sat next to me on the bench.
“It’s just…I feel like I can really understand you when you play. And you’ve played more than enough for me to understand how you feel. I’m sorry, Rena. Let’s just go to bed.”
”Okay…”
We moved upstairs to my room and I quickly got in bed. David turned off the light this time and came to sit beside me. My tears had evaporated by now, and I started thinking to myself: David is still here. I shouldn’t waste this time crying, I should make every minute with him the greatest minute, because these will be the moments I’ll always remember when he’s away.
Before he left me, David brushed his fingers through my hair.
"Rena. Someday, when I get back. The three of us will break away from all of this and be free."
"Free...I'd love that."
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Friday, September 16, 2011
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Friday, September 9, 2011
"David...", I whispered longingly, hanging on to the first teardrop as the Pacific pulled it away. I lost.
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Monday, September 5, 2011
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
"it's just...when i'm with you, I become so insignificant. I feel like just this massive pile of disgusting that can't escape the knowledge of its identity. You leave your words at the doorstep of my psychotic imagination and he pushes them around until they get lost in my bloodstream and singe every inch until i'm made of burns on the inside. And I know you don't mean to do it. You're not that type of person."
"Well, I must be some awful person in your eyes if that's how you feel."
"No, it's just-", a sigh,"I never know what it is that you're thinking. And that makes this whole trust thing difficult."
"I'm ...sorry you feel that way."
"What does that even mean?"
"Well what do you want me to say? I'm sorry for being a cold-hearted bitch, okay?"
"That's not what I'm saying."
"But that's what you mean isn't it? I can't do a thing about how you interpret me. I told you before, I'm not an emtional person. You know me. You have for more than a year now. Everything I think and feel, you've known about. If that's not enough for you, then why are you still with me?"
That question is never the start of anything good. Things may end better off, and maybe a breakup is the right thing to do. But it's never good. This is the question where you start considering what it's like to be single again and suddenly you recall all of the lopsided memories you have. 'You were lonely? No way. It was too much fun to be lonely. And what is this mess I've gotten into and can I call it off just like that? Is it really that easy?'
It takes a sane mind to realize that time is a soil where good memories grow and bad ones lie dormant. That it really is that easy to walk away, but it's a long and painful walk home. You don't want it to end here, not with this question.
But unfortunately there is no good response to this question, therefore I can't end the story properly.
The End.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Cracks become Crevasses
Saturday, August 6, 2011
You can tell he's from the 60s. Playing just like my dad used to play. With every string singing about the sun of greenwich village or the dry night air of Barcelona. And you couldnt tell which he'd lived in all his life.
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Friday, June 24, 2011
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Friday, May 13, 2011
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Sunday, April 24, 2011
And then she did it.
She believed in every major religion, but only until she found something that bothered her about it. She lived on the edges of the earth, surviving on what she could find only to do it again somewhere else. She'd even learned all the ways to tell a fortune, but her favorite one was reading palms.
She told me that a hand was a person's journal. That stories both past and future could be told from it. And that even if I looked closely, I'd never know the traits of a hand's owner. Only the kind of person they were.
"The hand is not a place for prejudice.
In the palm, there is no woman or man, poor or rich
there is only an endless spring of human expression."
But then she told me that her life had still felt unfulfilled and ended her story with, "So here we are", like she'd taken me on a weekend trip to her parents' house. I searched for the usual words, but they were empty words. Words not worth the weight of her story. Had she seen me as I'd felt, i'd have been no more than a speck of salt that escaped onto the table. Did she think I could actually fill the void that the entire sum of Earth failed to?
"I'm glad we did this. I haven't really talked to someone familiar in ages. It's been a pretty lonely set of years to tell you the truth. You think the strangers you meet will be all the company you need, but that's not true at all. You feel so small when you're floating with the wind."
And I realized. That she too felt like a salt crystal. That there was a limit to how superhuman a superhero could be.
Everybody needs somebody. It was really that simple.