billy

in the plastic white bottom of an ice-cream container
i pull parts of you from cold vanilla-bean sludge:
an arm here, a leg there
two slick brown palms cradling
the small hard sweet fruit from
the great tobacco-colored orange tree on the Reservation;
raising ten wiggling fingers to make amends
with the sky in its own language.

26 december

Rain has liquidated the frivolous pink frosting of Christmas tinsel into icy wet drips from windowsills; fresh shocks of lightning split the sky pink and orange and silver, swiveling liquidly and frighteningly like the slick hard inside of a clam. The black trees stand abashedly spindly, filtering the grey non-light into small houndstooth patterns on the porches: we still have not mailed out our Christmas cards.

Always the same heavy sky, the same oppressively gunmetal-grey shards of air pressing into my skin. banality banality banality. the days melt into each other and slide greasily away in one after another bloody egg-yolk sunrise. has it only been two days since i so happily (and dementedly) effervesced? scrambling the sun for breakfast and never looking twice--? which leads me to believe: i cannot simultaneously be pensive and be happy. says sylvia plath: "I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between."

There must be some sort of balance; some sort of superimposing myself over layers and layers of life, like translucent baklava. i am neither taylor swift nor sylvia plath nor patsy cline nor fully alyssa duck-- who are you, silly girl, to be so many people at once? (again, to quote SP: "a passionate, fragmentary girl"?)

on buoyancy

I ache and i ache towards your peaches-and-cream, white-lace-fairy-tale philosophy of being, but: Every Good Boy Does not do Fine, nor every good girl; mainly because of the world being so festering and swollen from having been wrapped up in chicken wire for all these years.

You foolish girl! So devastatingly untranslatable and novel-- you are like a hiccup in a downpour! Unable to be Great but Refusing to be Small. You think that you will scamper from sizzle to sizzle, sleeping always where the sun is shining; while he grows stagnant mold and rots in his banality. You think that you will not be domesticated by the great white button-down of Fate-- you think it will not iron your slacks and glaze your clear sharp eyes with complacency-- that you will not succumb--

Not foolish, perhaps; perhaps buoyant. Perhaps intoxicated by the first few drops of life's syrup; perhaps alarmed that i will be like the first few lines of a half-remembered children's song, a vague gurgle of effervescence tickling the edge of a memory-- so transient.

So very small.

merry christmas! :)

+

For to us a child is born, to us a son is given: and the government shall be on his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.
-Isaiah 9:6

כי ילד ילד לנו בן נתן לנו ותהי המשרה על שכמו ויקרא שמו פלא
יועץ אל גבור אביעד שר שלום׃

May the Joy of God fill you today as we celebrate our glorious and unnatural vindication.

Shalom! :)

24 december

how one forgets how warm and wonderful it is, the slippery softness of papery clean flesh on flesh. how one forgets that synthesis of brain and bone--!

We sit proverbially, the warm-eyed and red-nosed, in the warm neccessity of too-little-room and too-many-hands; the beautifully effervescent young-people that small children gape at with wide eyes in restaurants. The waitress is gloomy, the clean round tips of two new cigarettes poking wearily from the lining of her apron-pocket; the blonde boy next to me orders "water, with ice".

In the lucid plural blackness of downtown-- lights ping their unintelligible morse code, like frivolous sequins all red and blue and peach and green in the black lining of a sensible man's coat. i am a soap bubble, a sudsily new-baby pink and gloriously impermeable soap bubble, my feet slapping loudest against the greenly grey concrete. if this is life, half-heard, half-seen, half-smelled, "let me never go blind, or get shut off from the agony of learning, the horrible pain of trying to understand"; let me never cease to rip and to slash and to live. life is a blood-orange tangerine whose peel i rip off hungrily, hungrily. if it is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing"-- we are idiots, every one of us; nine beautiful luxurious idiots. how much better it is to be happy than wise! and how feverishly, feverishly happy.

"a moment of silence," declares Frank, by the river-- the blameless benevolence of the plain pocked moon reflects blue-black scales on the lascivious skin of the water. we lay crookedly, the hard white polyps of concrete on the curve of my back, watching the wicks of the stars float by. lying face-up-- each star virginally clinquant, sewn like a button into the worn black wool of the sky. constellations crinkle groggily overhead, spattered in pink-and-orange paroxysms of clean cold embroidery thread; a blurred maternal diety baking me into its crisp virginal pound-cake of soapy cleanness and freedom.

And i am here, and now, and this is my insignificant reality: to be bludgeoned to sleep by too-many-bodies in the warm fleshy backseat of a silver Honda, serenaded by the porous ruffle of beautiful voices through which seeps the anesthetic sweetness of Sufjan Stevens. if this is life.... Lord, if this is life.

23 december

OH, the impregnable stench of the festering dream! ("...does it crust and sugar over, like a syrupy sweet?.... or does it explode?") i want eight lives to live, all quick and clean and hard and vivacious: i am given one, that i stare at like a stranger's soiled baby and do not live it, cannot live it. i have sixteen years of pipe dreams and misattributed quotations that amass to a critical mound of nothing. My pens dry up and my arms grow fat. What does one do?

You grab hungrily, greedily-- disgustingly-- ripe fat fingers finding nothing but nothing and air. You, so ready to fling yourself at the world, at its slick smooth surface, to trapeze endlessly under the white erotic sun of fairies and gods and smooth flesh; flinging and flinging and flinging till bruises bubble bluely to the surface, and blithely never knowing where you are flung.

Lord, you fling so hard, your bones are soft and black, charred pulpy like slender bloody plums. You scrub yourself raw with newsprint and Elle and the Modernists so that your skin shrugs fashionably thinly accross the proud stoop of your worldly-wise shoulders. You ripe green fool, trading your slick taut green-apple skin for the brown-bloody sophistocate burnt-baked-cinnamon sludge. You have so deified yourself, all coalescing and effervescing and even YOU could not erase you if you tried. You, overdressed, siezing the day, strangling it....

the second annual "don't listen to crap" christmas playlist

1. Don't Go Breaking My Heart (Elton John & Kiki Dee)
2. My Only Offer (Mates of State)
3. Moi, Je Joue (Brigitte Bardot)
4. Merry Happy (Kate Nash)
5. Raindrops (Regina Spektor)
6. Love Is Only A Feeling (The Darkness)
7. Can't Keep It In (Cat Stevens)
8. The Voice (Celtic Woman)
9. I'm Looking Through You (The Beatles)
10. I'm Gonna Be (The Proclaimers)
11. Irresistable You (Bobby Darin)
12. Goodnight & Go (Imogen Heap)
13. We're At The Top Of The World (Juliana Theory)
14. Portions For Foxes (Rilo Kiley)

merry christmas! :)

violet

The wind bounces oddly- coldly- outside the raw pane glass in the hospital windows, whipping the rain-impregnated clouds into a dolorous sort of cream. On the sidewalk five stories below marches the duck-like ceremony of pedestrians, the waddle and cramp at each intersection; fat raindrops fizzling wetly past the window to land on so many carefully constructed strands of hair; so many faceless citizens of Humanity relegated in my existence to one small square of concrete. I press my face to the cold glass and shiver at their insignificance.

But here-- the cacophonous chirp of swinging drip bags and IV machines, the slick burgundy vinyl of so many chemotherapy recliners-- is my insignificant reality, the life that I touch and breathe and sneeze for so many hours every day. I run a smooth finger over the bruise-colored flesh of my sister's inner elbow, scrubbed a numbly violet color from too much blood and too many needles. I smile fiercely because I am stained too many shades of this violet.

The bird-like Bulgarian woman arranges herself next to me; she has learned to smile fiercely as well. Her smile is vigorous, almost frenetic, showing her pink gums and all her teeth, stained a vague dried-syrup yellow color from too many Russian cigarettes. It is a fighting smile.

The woman stretches out her left arm languidly, like a sunning cat, tracing the thick and virulent swoops and swirls of violet blooming like erratic wallpaper patterns across her inner elbow. She does not whimper when needle meets skin.

We stare down the sidewalk, silently hypnotized by the frantic ruffle of Humanity. If they knew how small they were, scuttling like frightened insects across concrete and pavement, stomping for a moment across the page of one and another crooked human conscious; if they knew how little their bustle really mattered in this stale-aired crucible of death and medication. How apathetic their small white faces- as if every wobbly second were not made of glass; sharply cracked and ready to shatter. As if life were a cheap pralines-and-cream Mother-Goose fairy tale, not a one-way game of Solitaire with death and eternity. If they knew our appraisal of life! If they knew the world in our shades of darkly bruised violet.

Fumbling with three blue plastic buttons, the woman pulls from her bag a scraggly grey book of poems. "The first, of my, in English language," she explains, her voice musty, thickly Eastern European. She rustles through crumpled yellow pages, bringing a finger to rest on a heavily underlined passage. Delicately thrusting a thick white finger toward the silent flurry of pseudo-life below, she softly recites: "This is how the world ends: not with a bang, but a whimper."

detached

i see through blinds
to strangely well-lit places after dark.
i smell the heady tint of musk:
hear the smack and cluck of voices
in their prime.

what better thing than to lie, wildly virginal,
on this small slice of ravaged earth
and touch with one's own fingers
the smoothness of the sky?

each string of cloud sings my blueberries-and-cream
lullaby;
each tree stands rabid sentinel of my cleanness.

how one squints to see icicles melt from the windows;
how one longs, like a fool, for the forest--
for the sleek black velour behind the trees.

on living (well)

hello; virulent world (that sees so much of me). how girthsome, how self-important you look! realize, that for all your cacophonous grandeur, you are only a small bland spoonful of many single hearts and many, many clods of dirt. yet you are mine. i may pound you with small angry fists, or subsequently sing violently my love for you; but i will not sit silently with two open palms. oh, there will be life; there will be blood.

20 december

today the pomegranate-sun does not spill maternally over row after row of grey hills, her sleeping soldiers; she sits yellow and soggy, a putrid bile color, heaving her sweaty anonymous girth to sponge grey hills in grey.

today is very dull and very emptied and unstable, like a great stark bed without pillows or sheets. no great swoop of light streaks across the celing from chinks in the doorway; all the world sits stagnant in a noxious mist of army grey. what will fill this bottle which has been drunk?

on loving (well)

do you know what i do? i stare at the same people everyday, and we make conventional little smiles and vaguely friendly noises at each other, but we do not know each other, and we do not really love each other. or perhaps we do know each other, and this is why we do not love each other. no, i see the small underclassman boy that i smiled at every day during the musical, a precocious and empty smile that meant nothing at all; i see him bite his lip vigorously in the parking lot, fat drips of rain drooping and spattering all along the thin line of his shoulders, struggling, and i stand woodenly under the metal awning, straw-filled, pulling the tips of my windbreaker farther along the edges of my fingers, and i do not help. i think that i cannot love anything else but my soft and impregnable self.

but i do, really. somewhere flecking it all is an impenetrable love of every person, every thing. it's only that i am singularly adept at lumping all of humanity into one fleshy and quite lovable parcel; but it is quite different to wrench out of oneself a love for any particular individual. i find myself sunning in my loving a staggering assortment of facelessness, forgetting that my Humanity is made of many many singular beating hearts. singular, particular beating hearts, for whom i must wrench something out of my strawberry-and-cream, narcissistic self to love them with.

on a hospital parking lot

something wet, little flecks between rain and snow, land in straws of lace against the green pipe-cleaner convolutions of the hospital-parking-lot tree. "I don't like that shirt," says mother suddenly, "it looks like an undergarment." I shake my head sharply: she does not understand that today i am Sofia Coppola; tomorrow i may be Regina Spektor or Alexis Bledel. i think but do not say: no, mother: i must slide through the shells of the people i like in a precocious attempt to define myself.

on sylvia plath

As a consolation prize for my utter lack of comprehension in the vague and mysterious world of Physics, i meandered yesterday into the benign familiarity of Barnes & Noble (such beautiful acres fermenting in, sweating with solicitious black-letter syntax), and purchased The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, all 732 glorious pages.

i very much wish that Sylvia Plath had not committed suicide. i am reading sentence after syrupy sentence and i am thinking, "i have wondered those same wonders; i have ached those same aches; i have dreamed those same dreams". i think that she has crawled up inside my skull, typewriter-tapping softly and sleeping poetically between fiber and unused fiber. i very much wish that she had instead been shot by a demented lover, or been broken into many small pieces in some sort of nature-related incident, for to exclaim: "Sylvia Plath just really gets life; she just really gets it, i think" is inevitably followed by the blank stare of apathetic nonunderstanding, or the occasional flicker of recognition, say, didn't she write poetry? commit suicide? and the queer, concerned looks that follow "yes, yes she did; she blew up her own head in a gas oven." but i love the lifely Plath, the solitary and "reasonably attractive" mirror of mine, the silver-gilded Plath whose existance bubbled forth and whose dreams had not yet died.

...

"Come here," he said. "I'll whisper something: I like you, but not too much. I don't want to like anybody too much." Then it hit me and i just blurted, "I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them."
-The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

There is so much hurt in this game of searching for a mate, or testing, trying. And you realize suddenly that you forgot it was a game, and turn away in tears.
-Sylvia Plath

Here, I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh.
-Sylvia Plath

Not to be sentimental, as I sound, but why the hell are we conditioned into the smooth strawberry-and-cream Mother-Goose-world, Alice-in-Wonderland fable, only to be broken on the wheel as we grow older and become aware of ourselves as individuals with a dull responsibility in life?
-Sylvia Plath

I am what i feel and think and do. I want to express my being as fully as I can because I somewhere picked up the idea that I could justify my being alive that way.
-Sylvia Plath

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.
-Sylvia Plath

...You wonder if you've got what it takes to keep building up obstacle courses for your self, and to keep leaping through them, sprained ankle or not. Again the refrain, what have you for your eighteen years? ... and so you say, what the hell? Who cares? But you care, and somehow you don't want to live just one life, which could be typed, which could be tossed off as a thumbnail sketch- "she was the sort of girl..." And end in 25 words or less. You want to live as many lives as you can...
-Sylvia Plath

(all from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)

19 december

i want to raise my voice authoritatively, from its squeal, and say: "no, i am naturally, i am a novelty; i am Hebrew, i am not Caucasian; my eyes are Hazel, they are not Brown; i eat kosherly and read Sylvia Plath; i am still new-bloomed and i am still relevant." (and you, you all turn down your ostentatious head!) but really i am only one out of several hundred prefolded white paper napkins; i am a singularly bland shade of nude lipstick. i brush my teeth of this spectacularity nonsense: i matriculate.

18 december

i think that if i were anything i would be orange sherbert. orange-flavored, or perhaps peach. sherbert must be one of the greatest inventions of man--singular, slipping gelatinously down one's throat like syrupy lightening, perching its sharply snowy feet up and down like a small bird along so many meters of nervous system.

i very much hope i should never cease to be novel. i think that if i began to congeal, i should stir so frantically to rearrange myself until once again i was that cuttingly peculiar sort of pet. otherwise, half the world would look elsewhere, and i would feel so maddeningly dull.

(i cringe to taste that hypocrisy crystallizing all over my skin)

15 december

you feel as bland as a stack of pecans--

or walnuts, perhaps, stalking awkwardly (ten minutes late) into the cardboard-cutout high school poetry reading-- catching in the warm copper light of so many floor lamps and so many warmskinned bodies. balancing, as you are, on one hip two trays of froth-white sugar cookies, nonpareils curled up precociously like so many chromatic ticks.

And around he turns, commenting in a friendly and noncommital way on your lateness, and your boon, and you creak out some painfully dull catch-phrase like, that's right, or, you bet! and see, you can't faites attentionne for more than an instant! see, he has turned towards that limp-faced poet (the vaguely yellow light spilling out beautifully over his white shoulders, like burnt syrup; like teeth stained by too many cigarettes), toward the lifeless teabag of unfortunate high school poetry.

So you cleanly arrange yourself three rows back, tracing perennial patterns with your eyes on the back of his pralines-and-cream hair; you miserably diffident acquaintance, you dull grey stack of walnuts.

if i were a bubble i'd pop

if i were a bubble i'd pop
where fingers reach, bony, from sand to peel
foam from froth, froth from foam
and where skin meets the batter of wasps

tips of trees puncture the sky--
screams sting-- between our knees,
where no small thing sings of our oneliness

where are you, Christmas?

I think i can hear its heart beating, stifled under 600 pounds of monotonously festive tinsel and post-consumer wrapping paper. Listen--can you hear it singing, reduced to semi-tones underneath the smooth jazz bubbling from consumer-infested department stores?

Christmas-- that delectably frost-bitten time of year when brotherly love and contagious empathy smother political dissonance with solicitude and generosity; when Wal-Mart greeters are fatally trampled by an amicable mob in its frantic attempt to attain this season's Tickle Me Elmo.

Ah, Christmas.

How have we created from what should be sacred such an autotheistic festival of ourselves? What should be a celebration of our weakness-- our need of a savior-- has become a monument to our narcissism. Soft and low are the cries of "O Come All Ye Faithful"; more urgently is sung the jaunty tale of an ethnically diverse reindeer and his clique of shallow silver-hooved friends. America does not want a Savior. America wants to be the Prefect of its own party; dead wasted, partially numb and covered in twelve feet of gold tinsel.

Raucously, ridiculously, the birthday celebration of the King of Israel has been mutilated in honor of an overweight man (with an irrationally buoyant team of mythical creatures) who satisfies the short-lived material desires of children who are more likely to be encouraged in their "child-like faith" in Frosty the Snowman than the priceless, martyred gift of their Creator.

If you don't listen closely, you might miss the heartbeat singing quietly under the scrappage: the heartbeat of a premature and inconsequential Jewish baby, a heart that never stops beating. Your heart beats because His did. Are you listening?

crumbs of wisdom

I'd far rather be happy than right any day.
-Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

I do not think it worth while to wait for enjoyment until there is some real opportunity for it.
-Jane Austen

Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind.
-Aristotle

We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is.
-Madeline L'Engle

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
-Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.
-Sylvia Plath

Of course, no man is entirely in his right mind at any time.
-Mark Twain

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
-Sylvia Plath

Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.
-Mark Twain

Nothing important is completely explicable.
-Madeline L'Engle

Can we only love
Something created in our own imaginations?
Are we all in fact unloving and unloveable?
Then one is alone, and if one is alone
Then lover and beloved are equally unreal
And the dreamer is no more real than his dreams.
-T.S Eliot

You are beautiful, but you are empty.... No one could die for you.
-Antoine de Saint Exupery

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am.
-Sylvia Plath

As for me, I am watercolor.
I wash off.
-Anne Sexton

To have lived at all is to have scars.
-John Steinbeck

Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings.
-Jane Austen

There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.
-George Orwell

One thing I truly knew — knew it in the pit of my stomach, in the centre of my bones, knew it from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, knew it deep in my empty chest — was how love gave someone the power to break you.
-Stephenie Meyer

Men have forgotten this truth," said the fox. "But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed."
-Antoine de Saint Exupery

Grief can take care of itself, but to get full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.
-Mark Twain

Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant, filled with odd waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like.
-Lemony Snicket

It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universeis also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to timeare merely the products of a deranged imagination.
-Douglas Adams

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.
-Sylvia Plath

"And so the lion fell in love with the lamb..." he murmured.
"What a stupid lamb," I sighed.
"What a sick, masochistic lion."
-Stephenie Meyer, Twilight

He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.
-Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Love can change a person the way a parent can change a baby - awkwardly, and often with a great deal of mess.
-Lemony Snicket

"[his face hinted at] ardent sympathy, as though he would love all things if only nature would let him forget their defects."
-P. Pullman

i felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel moving dully along in the midst of the surrounding hullaballoo.
-Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

This planet has a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
-Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

We die to each other daily.
What we know of other people
Is only our memory of the moments
During which we knew them. And they have changed since then.
-T.S Eliot

Life is a comedy to those who think, but this truth is not singular: life is a tragedy to those who feel.
-Jane Austen

My life is my message.
-Mahatma Ghandi

Ruptured

Dull rain lit like ash on the windowsill. A dolorous roll of baritone thunder murmured something urgent and unintelligible into the ear of a girl sprawled quite indecently over blanket and sheets, wrapping herself around the glorious few seconds between sleeping and waking. The pale blue walls of the apartment sharpened into focus, reflecting the grey day forming outside. The girl rolled onto her side, allowing the still-damp strands of her hair to swing softly down the back of her neck. The ceiling fan swung calmly round, rustling her bangs, sending grey twilight children flickering merrily onto the glossy grey walls. She lay placidly on the wrinkled white sheets, opening her eyes just as the illuminated numbers on her clock morphed to an angry red 6:30 AM. A menacing buzz clanged loudly in the chambers of her head. With a bare arm she reached for the snooze, dully sighing as her hand limply met the black plastic.

Just then-- a cacophonous crack startled her from her cottony haze into the damp reality of the early morning apartment. She gripped the bedpost, a thick panic swelling in her throat as her eyes adjusted to the white wooden crib on the far side of the room. A bare nail stood sheepishly empty against the stark, slick wall; a heavy wooden picture frame lay conspicuously sprawled in three splintered pieces against the cherry hardwood.

A sleepy murmur ruffled through the quiet, and the pink ribbons on the side of the crib began to rumple and sway with the waking of the baby's tiny new fingers. With an inclement release of air the girl felt the paralysis dissolve from her limbs, and she moved quickly through the damp February air to lean against the wall beside the crib.

How small the baby's face was! How each fold of skin crinkled into itself, the cloudy blue eyes looking with sage intensity into her mother's. They were blue like the rocks near her grandmother's house in Cape Cod, right before a storm; they were the exact color of her father's when he was tired or moody.

John. His eyes tickled the back of her mind in the color of the blue-grey smog sticking to the apartment window; they stared solemnly at her from the puckered face of this small child.

The girl moved to the window, collecting under her fingernail a wide ribbon of the white paint peeling from the windowsill. His face grew fuzzy now; a damp mold had begun to grow on his memory. She squeezed from her mind a picture of the last day: he sat there, in the green kitchen chair-- just so-- his feet propped on the seat of the blue chair, business section of the newspaper in hand, the white oval sticker from a piece of fruit hanging from the front of his lapel. He was there for a moment in painful clarity-- tufts of raucous brown hair sticking precariously from his soft white scalp-- and just as quickly he was gone.

He was becoming blurry-- browning at the edges; growing a film. But the receptionist was very lucid. She couldn't have been over eighteen, the ambitious little tramp, with her smooth white face and her jade-green carpetbag, running appraising cold-green eyes over the eight-month belly of the professor's wife and smiling smugly to herself with those cherry-tinted lips. Virginia. What a wretched name. The girl tightened her grip on the windowsill, the grey rain-mist sending chills of paper-thin lightening down her spine. Virginia. How he had adored her.

The girl unclamped her hand from the window, shutting out with a little rattle the ruffle of car horns and the moody black sky. She hadn't had the spirit to remove his chair from the table-- the black coffee mug with the three little chips on the lip still sat, just so-- the wicker basket filled with business charters and the red-and-green arrows of stock market reports. The black stump of an empty cigarette still sat crumpled by his placemat, cold.

He had wilted. He had no spirit for the world of ironed grey suits and chipped ceramic coffee cups; for domestic housewives in white cotton aprons and the petulant wails of fragile and unwanted children. He did not want bran with his coffee and eggs; he wanted fire.

The girl's feet thumped dully against the floor as she moved toward the three broken shards of the picture frame that sprawled beside the crib. She picked up each separately, carefully; storing the first two on a shelf beneath the windowsill. She painstakingly cradled the third, but it slipped from her hands, hitting the hardwood with a wild crack; shattering into innumerable splintered fragments. The girl bit her lip, shell-shocked, until it drew blood. The baby began to cry.

"No", he had said, when she tried to hand him her coat. He stood starkly in the doorway, the beautiful lines of his forehead creased into a well-rehearsed mask of white pottery. Ugly pottery. No sobs ripped her, her body did not wrench, nor her teeth rattle feverishly; her eyelids did not swell with water. She sat white-faced in the green kitchen chair, wisps of sleep-matted hair falling to her face; a slight tremor rippling through the hand resting on her belly. She had handed him her coat.

"It's cold out there," she said levelly. His eyes met hers with a sort of desperate bitterness as he turned to the door.

"Tomorrow will be colder."

do you know who you are? this is who i am.

i think that discovering yourself is something that everyone should do.

i also think that everyone should have a mission statement. here's mine:

To love God and love His children; to serve God by serving His children; to live blessed in the joy and peace of the Father while working as a healthy limb of the body of Christ to spread His sunshine to my brothers and sisters on Earth.

i am a junkie/sucker for:
ingrid michealson; scrapbook paper; buttons; Twilight; foreign languages; classically beautiful boys; cultures; scarves; Anthropologie; reading; regina spektor; notebooks; colorful sharpies; carmex; musical theater; facebook; Free People; the Bible; wholesomeness; Christian boys; daisies; singing; syntax; poetry; tulips; linen; handwriting; colorful pantyhose; diction; cardigans; ballet; postcards; harps; historical fiction; The North Face; vampire weekend; ribbon, Chacos; Hello Kitty; hygeine; loving people; teaching; texting; baby names; band-aids; children; wool; apples; FiberOne granola bars; hymns; organic-ism; shiny shoes; Special K; sunshine; hair barrettes; embroidery thread.

things that disconcert and/or anger me:
abortion; hyperstereotyping; too much faux fur; the national deficit; pork; abuse of language; too much makeup; apathy; dyed-blonde but naturally black hair; mayonnaise; vanity; velour; lipstick; unfriendly churches; mindless rap music; hyperhypocritical Christians; macaroni and cheese; cheesy Christmas movies; heels; too-tight pants; ambitious bikini-wearers; liquid foundation; maneaters; superselfishness; frustration; precalculus; sinus infections; running; unfulfilled affection; goat cheese; stray animals; uncomfortable shoes.

i like to keep the "like" list much longer than the "dislike" list. i've found this leads to a much more enjoyable existance.

"it's funny how you find you enjoy your life when you're happy to be alive."
-relient k

i want to live deliberately. i want to suck all the syrup out of life. i want everything i do to be an act of goodness, and an act of love; i want the rest of the world to realize the joy of grasping how long and wide and deep is the love of Christ our Savior. i want to be His little ray of sunshine in a world made dark by our own pollution. i want it to be as happy as i am.

i think this is beautiful:

"whatever's in front of me, help me to sing 'Hallelujah'."
-bethany dillon

this is who i am. do you know who you are?

soli deo gloria!

(the first half)

A dirty sort of sunlight seeped through the stained white blinds of the office building, diluted by the harsh yellow glow of flourescent lighting. A small girl sat inconspicuously in the corner, arranged quite uncomfortably in a black metal folding-chair, her feet quietly tapping with the rhythm of the typewriter against the blackish-burgundy carpet. She sat anxiously, in turn playing with her fingers and tracing small cartoon animals on the wall with her fingertips. The yellow-green wallpaper had begun to unfurl at the bottom, the dusty strips curling and shriveling like brown winter leaves. Her eyes took in the cat-eyeglasses of the receptionist, black and silver and turning up at the top in a merry sort of sliver; the plastic picture frames from which stared out the lumberjack-looking husband, the four exceptionally plain-faced children, the unhappily crowded family reunion. The receptionist stopped typing and the girl looked away.

Her breath quickened and caught. She swallowed painful amounts of air in a quick attempt to regain composure. The receptionist deliberately cleared her throat, scraping her chair against its plastic mat and conspicuously removing to the far corner of the room. He stood silent in the doorway, the tinkling of the door's bell sounding silly and out of place against his strong outline. She started at his feet, memorizing every inch of his body; the wear marks at the tips of his asphalt-stained work boots, the timbre and texture of his leather jacket, every crinkle and crease in his plaid flannel shirt. He smelled like deep musk and too many cigarettes. She could not look at his face.

With thick fingers he fumbled with two moth-eaten white woolen gloves, stuffing them quickly into his pockets. She studied his hands- hands that for ten years had written Christmas postcard after Christmas postcard, each from a different state, marking them with stamps of quail and birch trees and Frank Sinatra. Hands that wrote large but very neatly- with thick little blobs of ink at the end of each line. They were large hands, stained and rough and cold.


(....now someone in the writing class will write the second half! :])

encore, dissention

let me bury this coal
in the warm innocence of
stark white hands,
my breath returning to me warm
against the spicy-scented
flannel of your shirt.

let it be cupped in your hands.
let it evaporate like so much steam,
like so many leaves after the final storm
of autumn.

let it burn in those fraudulent suns
that are irreconcilable differences and
flourescent lighting.
let my face be hidden from
the painful throb of abstract violence
in the immutable scratch of your hair.

success

The Swiss are a clever lot. The Swiss with their chocolate, with their watches, with their four national languages- with their famous neutrality and abundance of boarding schools- have life figured out in a way that Americans with their stocks and bonds and sugarfree frappacinos cannot master. Standing stout, obscure, landlocked by cloud-scraping mountains and clean Romansch air, Switzerland is the happiest country in the world.

A very wise person- a Buddhist philosopher, actually- once said that a country's success should be determined not in terms of Gross National Revenue but Gross National Happiness. I think that this is one of the most ridiculously legitimate statements to ever leave man's mouth. It kind of shocks one into realizing how strangely the past centurees of advancing humanity have clothed and clouded things that as humans we intrinsically know (and makes one wonder what other salient truths will be surfaced by cow-worshipping monks of the Hindu Kush).

My father, a well-off engineer with a pension and medical benefits, drove this peg of truth into my skull. One day he shook his balding black head and declared that he would never work until he died. He said:

"What a miserable end that would be; what a miserable end to a miserable existance."

And I sat and I sat and I wondered how this tired old man could truly be a glorious example of American prosperity. This red-blooded, tax-paying, Conservative, Presbyterian, tired, old, successful man. Successful and unhappy. From rags to riches; the clear-headed immigrant; the Semite, grown overweight and bitter; four cars and a marraigeable daughter; wealthy and miserable, the American dream.

Success?

Perhaps we have a thing or two to learn from the Swiss.

post-Gershwin melancholy

The wind-chilled fibers of the car seat prickle my back like sea anemone; like hair folicles shocked straight by goosebumps; something which should be warm, but has turned frigid and spiritless. Your small white hands are folded cleanly like two linen napkins, but I see the way your fingertips clutch the inside of your palm. My hands clench and unclench around the soft edge of the seat. The two of us sit all looming and silent like after a funeral, like something has died, but we can't quite put our finger on what it is. Behind the warm gauze of the subwoofers lulls a stagnant silence.

Three dozen teenagers in tap shoes and stage make-up invade the calm conscience of the asphalt parking lot like plain-clothes police officers, cradling alternate identities in their chest. The last of the audience has gone, marking the lot with a dully empty echo; with gaudy strips of streamers trailing the black hardtop; with the waxy shells of empty gum wrappers and yellow paper candy boxes.

The sky is not black like velvet or like skin, but like funeral garments. The trees wave their branches like melodramatic aunts in mourning, I think, and I gaze angrily at them because they do not really care.

I feel like the leaves, which I know to be all salmon and yellow and rust-colored, but now look like tired newspaper-cutouts, hanging limply and silently in the charcoal-tinted haze of early morning. Above our heads a streetlamp bulb fizzles and flickers, struggling for a moment, and exhausts. The outline of a printed program, propped wearily against the cold metal of the railing, crackles with the light and turns black.

The time flashes out all green and flourescent from the dashboard but the numbers are all slurred together like an unintelligable accent. The moon has hatched far above our heads, its mottled dimples smiling on a scene split by a sound sense of vacancy.

A tight ache sets into my scalp, protesting four hours housing several dozen bobby pins. I fear that if I remove them, the rest of the world will unravel with the cold pin-curls of my hair.

realignment

I had seen

the veil on the face of the sun
the smoke in the stain of the sky

I had heard the crunch of
bone in the crust of the earth

(the earth moved quick
but i stood static still)

I had not tasted
the words that unravel the sky

beading mercuriously on your lips like blood

I did not know that esteem could be wrinkled by time
I did not know that skin could crinkle like silk

invisible children

right now i see the sky--
you're staring down the barrel of a soldier's gun.
i push my allies aside--
you cry because you haven't one.

you cry for assistance,
but you cannot make a sound.
i look to Heaven to help you
but all i see is the ground.

i raise my hands to hold you, but
they're filled with something else:
i cannot really love you
if i'm tangled in myself.

but our father holds your hand
through every damp and lonely night
that's spent in the dark
because those like me ignore your plight.

the same sky gives us air,
but this breath could be your last.
if only our pride had not dried up our love:
what happened to the rest?

i promise Christ i'll love the ones
He loves like He loves me.
so why is it i can't see past the
fruit of Adam's tree?

when we could wrap you in our arms,
we sentence you to die.
your life is fading quickly....
we close our eyes.

i raise my heart in offering
but each beat is a song of filth.
how can i love my Father
if i only love myself?

i'm sorry, child, you must depend
on calloused souls like me.
your cries grow stronger, but we say,
"all i can do is breathe."

you raise your small hands
from a mottled dark life
in a desperate cry for help.
you moved us, but instead we slept.

forgive me.

wake up, drowsy Christians! you are sleeping through the War!

Christians around the world are being persecuted for their faith while we sit on our laurels and complain about how little God has blessed us. We are blessed beyond all measure... we are drowning in His love. God loves our brothers and sisters as much as He loves us, and He expects us to help them. We should be encouraging and loving them while they sit lonely in cold, dank prison cells for the simple crime of loving our Father.

Do something.

www.prisoneralert.com

This link provides information about imprisoned Christians around the world. Pick one and write them an encouraging letter! The least we can do is let them know that they are loved and valued, and that their work is not in vain.

Spread the word.

virgin musing

your face is hoarse and
dully hot, the swan-song of august
finding inch after inch of my
skin.

i feel your lips
like two halves of a dried raisin
but softer

your scent swelling,
bubbling through me to rest in the backs
of my eyelids.

an unfamiliar taste sticks in my mouth like liquor would,
bald and dangerous.

(i think that my mouth must be full of
gravel)

the virgin musing:
i am alarmed to note that
no tremor marked my spine;
the heavens did not unravel

i'm a harpist playing second fiddle
to a heady casanova,
discovering unpublished oceans
and burning the map.

incongruities

perhaps one day we,
staring through a sky bruised purple by
pollution,
will remark how unfitting it is
that top-down on
this charred black pavement
we do not feel like kings.

desiderium

i want to read
the trees until the leaves fall,
pages of a book half-read.
i want to suckle all the sugar
from the sky-
every inch of the earth
in my fists-
to sing to the sky,
"PORTANTES!"

a brief introduction to the most important thing

The first thing you should know about Christianity is that until you really get to know God, until you are completely tangled up in Him, he does not feel very glorious or relevant. He feels very old and very stale. He looks like a faucet that used to be germane and glossy, but now is dull and cloudy with grease, rusty and covered in scratches.

This is one of those revelations that smacked me in the face after several years of pretending to have fallen in love with a savior who I knew about as well as I know Ghandi or Bill Clinton. I cannot love a God who is old and fat and greasy, a 5000 year old has-been. Why should I embrace in a God what I reject in a human? How can you love a God you don't even like?

Until you experience God- not Christianity, but God- you cannot love Him. Until he wraps the proverbial threads of his affection around you, until you begin to grasp "how long and deep and wide is the love of Christ", you will hear sermon after sermon that echoes emptily; you will sing praise song after praise song and feel nothing.

This is why some people have trouble wanting to do "what is right". Who wants to give up the safe comforts of sin in order to please a God that we don't even like? Sin is fun. If it were dull and stagnant, no one would want to sin. It is deeply ingrained into our nature.

Love changes people. The only thing that can deaden the desire to sin is love.

love is

love is a many splintered thing.
it raises white and battered wings
to carve its name on every stone:
the signature of one well-flown.

it seeps accross the ochre plains-
each iris mountain touched by rain-
it soaks each town of little fame-
each lupine tribe without a name-

it sutures and it tears apart
the lining of each human heart-

for the jews in their eden

anger not unlike the throb of an artery
eats its way up and down the knots of my
spine.
eleven million tombstones sing
something haunting
in a language that i do not speak quite yet.
disconsolate, i demand of the skies,
"why did you have to stop living?"

CFY survival music

don't listen to crap!
piquet through the remainder of October with
harmonious-dischords approved music. : )
enjoy!

Be Ok : ingrid michaelson

Ottoman : vampire weekend

Gotta Have You : the weepies

You Are What You Love : jenny lewis & the watson twins

1234 : feist

Apres Moi : regina spektor

Such Great Heights : the postal service

O Valencia : the decemberists

Portions for Foxes : rilo kiley

New Soul : Yael Naim

fall

I cannot bring myself to use the word "autumn". I just don't like it. It reminds me of tired brown grass and apple cider, which i also don't like. It's that staple "autumn" beverage that brings to mind rosy-cheeked children sipping warm beverages on one of those rusty hay-rides that really only leave you grumpy and itchy and with a nose full of dust.

I don't like "autumn", but i do love fall. I love the cool tint of the air, like the sky has been dipped in wax. I love the way the leaves sing love songs over the tips of the braches before crumpling complacently into themselves and drifting to the ground. I love the cool way the floor meets my feet in the morning, the way the shower melts onto my forehead with its steady little drips. Yes, although autumn is stagnant, like bad jazz, fall is glorious.

november

Last year i missed fall completely. Just as the leaves began to be singed with traces of purple and orange the tidal wave of Musical Season swallowed me up, pulling me underground into its ebb and its flow. I didn't see sunlight for days. I was like a mole, running frantically through tunnels and tunnels and never befriending the day. By the time I emerged, the leaves had turned from green to burnt black crusts of things crinkled on the pavement, shriveling into themselves like stale, forgotten words.

This year i will stare fall in the face and dare it to try sneaking past me. This year i will also not fall in love with a ladykiller. (They are so ripe and juicy, but when you bite into them there are always seeds.) Musical Season is the time of year when everybody falls in love with each other. Our lungs are filled with so much sweat and hairspray that we become, without fail, madly amorous and mildly delusional. This year i will fall in love with a tall, wholesome blonde.

By the end of that special circle of purgatory which is Dress Rehearsal Week you will have strong feelings for every member of the cast. You will either adore them or abhor them. This is because you will spend every waking (and sometimes sleeping) moment of your life with them for three full weeks. You will know their dietary habits, the flavor of their laundary detergent, and whether or not they drive I-27 like it is the Indianapolis 500. You will know the tenor of their snoring and how ungodly they look in a leotard. You will cry in their shoulders and sleep in their laps.

Then the final drum slaps the final beat of the accompaniment, and the stage trembles with the timbre of seventy-five wails of joy. And in those seconds you feel as though your heart is going to burst, every inch of your body salted and marinated by the sleek sweetness of other's sweat. This is one of those moments that you should tell your grandchildren about, something inside you whispers. But no matter how hard you slurp you can't really drink it in.

But by then the trees are bare, discarding the last from their branches like old letters. By then the sky has drawn up into itself and sighs coldly, and all we can do is glance shyly at one another accross the tired dark grass through sleep-revived eyes and remember. This year i will remember them. I will search them accross the damp grey lawn and lie my head in their laps, the cold deciduous leaves melting sweetly on my skin like cough drops... like memories.

just another love poem

mistaken love is no calmly aging river.
that love is knotted and ugly and stark.
it is the dam where all that mud and grit and
fish crap has coagulated into a hard wall,
choking and clogging the water.

it is like a starving man who dreams about food and
wakes up feeling very raw and very empty.
it's like that, only it's every inch of you that aches.

that love is not the tulle of carbonation
that seeps through bones like so much Perrier.
No,

it is a dream that cannot be dismantled.

it is unrequited barrenness,
for all they say of love is true:
but mostly it is stagnant,
it is feeling very still and very alone.

here's to the belief that childhood should not be a period of endentured servitude

lets trade this en garde for touché or shalom
for some things we can not understand,
as you've never lived as a 16-year-old girl
nor i an embittered old man.

winter

carefully wrapping up december
like a package of old cinnamon,
storing it on a shelf to ferment,
january peeks through the doorframe
and taps at the wrapping
to see what's inside.

you are such a beautiful contradiction that, suddenly, i am able to sing Embraceable You with a fervor

you are unadulterated latin
rain untouched by acid.

a pond which has not yet become stagnant

bobbing his nods under lilypads
and baby ducks.

you are the new summer's strawberries,
ripe and untasted

the soft down of blonde that i watch from the
wings.

the hand that i have not thrown from my heart
belongs to one who cannot see it

philosophy of poetry

poetry is deliberate suffocation of the intangible. it is taking the world, piece by piece, and squeezing it until something beautiful comes out. it is clasping the good and the pain and the facets of existance, with vigor, and turning it over to look at it from the other side.

sometimes it is like a virus, industrious, eating its way out of you. always ravenous at the most inopportune times. sometimes one is deriving the quotient of

october is august's allargando
allegro? molto ritardando?
(no, it isn't, it is decrescendo)

or, perhaps, one is on the verge of discovering the fundamental basis on which


and there it is, hungry, whining and pawing at the door.

one day i sat down with the SAT dictionary that my mother had brought home from the dentist's office and i read and i read and i read through all those beautiful cavernous five syllable words and their various conjugations. and in plum-colored sharpie on the back of an index card i wrote what is probably the most unintelligable poem to be drafted by mankind, and i read it over and over again, the words melting melodiously in my mouth like some fantastic form of intraoral ballet. that's when i fell in love.

poetry is catharsis, and poetry is an exploration of all that is, a set of camera lenses through which one can view the world in green, in purple, in yellow, in Czech or Italian or in Hebrew, in teacher and banker and pharmacist. it is the marraige of language and philosophy, a relationship that is in turn joyful and enraged and burdened and stagnant. poetry is, perhaps, ourselves turned inside out; the documentation of every word we're too afraid to say. the authors' stamp at the bottom, my name, shedding my protection from the world. from you. a blatant signature, sprawled and deliberate in plum-colored sharpie.

october

i think that october
is august's decrescendo

the air tense with winter's vibrato

we all, in a fever,
crumple in our shells with our
feet straight up,
struggling insects on cold
linoleum

bargaining with the sky
for a few more weeks of life

this year
we did not "fall"
but plopped
straight on our bottoms.

poems on a tuesday

today being one of those days
when you finger the rosary beads and they flick off the string
like height-drunkened baby birds,
shooting accross the kitchen and onto the tiles
with laborious little click, click, clicks

when the edge of your scarf boils with the syrup,
congesting the room with the smell of molten wool

today being one of those days
when, ten years tardy,
the whole world shrivels in your grasp
and weeps

you fold your white hands like a pair
of small linen napkins and stare straight ahead of you
without so much as an "oh."

sacrifice

burning black with blood
the sky looks down on me
and hides his face.

i pile high in the front yard
raw memories, fractured
corpses of relationships

i heap them one on top of another.

smoke soaks the air like a wet sponge,

musky,

thick with the stench of empty gum wrappers
and charred humanity.

i lit that match.

the red sea slaps at my feet,
branding them with blood

she sits in her sadness

and licks the salt from her lips.
clenches her fingers into two tiny fists.

let me never love again,
she howls

and she begs the Lord not to hear.

eighth period physics

the physics classroom is like
a root canal

my brain chokes on mouthfuls of
cotton.

SCALAR: magnitude only
-distance; speed
(directionless)

the minute hand lopes onward with difficulty

we have gambled away our
futures on the clock's slow progress,
a debilitated rabbit.

the back of your head looks
soft, Mr. Crawford,
like something a robin would nest in.
you should have been a Puritan.

today i am as large and looming,
dispatching very quickly to my blurry vision
of nowhere.
the unspecified point in quadrant three, that's me.
perfectly scalar.

almost an island

dank sets into your limbs
like deafness,
sedentary.

your arms lock across your chest,
a boulder, a barricade,
a levy of sandbags against a colony of words.

they forage, they breakfast, they break bread
their children speak Yiddish; smoke curls from their chimneys

mutinous, they befriend the cerebral

and with a quake, your dry lips part.

you are almost an island,
but you are a woman.

conversion

sliced open for the world to see,
the rest of what was hidden lies unlatched.
hatched.

their hooded eyes sever.
no longer mortal

branded now as you are by the star of david

boring holes in your diaphragm,
convoluting your abdomen with its
six severe tips

your fingernails digging little half-moons in your palms,
missing only the star

post-party nonsense

grinning,
your curry-colored curls
standing proud
against the pale of the sky
like something an osprey
would nest in.
you drink in the world
and you choke.
you understand:
"if my sister spends all night
batting eyelashes at
other people's dates,
i think i'm going home."

prayers for today

Lord,
i have a chronic love for your children
and $127 stuffed in an unmarked envelope
behind my dresser.
use me.




Abba,
help me to love him in his lies and in his shame
because he deserves your mercy
more than i do.

children of Abraham [love in the time of war]

we may walk the aisle of a concentration camp
instead of St. Basil’s like we wanted to
but Moscow or Auschwitz doesn’t matter
as long as i spend my life with you.

It may be short, but we will fight:
our fabled blood runs deep.
we’ll hold each other tightly in this
slaughterhouse for sheep.

“may the children of this union
walk out of here alive”:
i’d be content with that, even if
we both have to die.

but either way, they’ll show their face
and find themselves so strong.
they’ll learn to love their “fatal wrong”
they’ll always fear is flawed.

i hope they’ll fight for what they are
and what is right to do,
and they find someone to love them
half as much as i love you.

our wedding bells may mix with rings
of atom bombs and tears
but i would never trade that moment
for a thousand peaceful years.

so rise, you child of Abraham!
lift up your weary head!
for if they kill our bodies,
our spirits live instead.

and when you’re in that chamber filled
with gas like molten jade,
recount that love is tangible;
my love will never fade.

they cannot take what they can’t see:
love can’t be touched or shot.
inside this hell, hear wedding bells
until we meet with God.

symphonic running

the sky, cracked,
split with a hammer
down the middle
like peices of a skull,
bleeding blue blood

the cllllickwhirr whistle of
nearby construction work
sounding eerily celtic

against my heart's cacophonous
thud, thud,

my feet, syncopated,
thunk dejectedly
against the great bubble-gum-tape
ribbon of pavement
like heavy drops of water

landing always, mutinously,
one in front of the other.

press # now for a broken spirit. for an awkward apology, press the * key. to speak with a representative, please hold for several more years.

hint:
you must speak to be heard

some days do you feel like

a blade of grass stretching your
insignificant self towards the
whir of the sky?
past the weak heads of the weeds
and the wilting?
forever pruned by some great celestial
lawnmower?

you cannot seem to grasp that no amount of tap dancing can repair these holes you have hammered into everyone you love

bubbling up like a thick stream of gravel
for the first time,
anger.
my eyes slithering grotesquely into narrowed slits,
for the first time,
anger.
snapping and whimpering in turn, like a wounded animal.
sore.
anger,
a savage fish-hook grabbing blindly at me,
catching in places and ripping out chunks.
you, my foundation,
my concrete, my sidewalk,
point your nose to the clouds like a bayonet with an acid harumph.

sitting cross-legged in that waxy-faced battle stance,
shoulders shallow,
watching with great slivered cat-eyes,
you are like Henry VIII. like Saladin.

i raise round eyes, mottled, dark.
an enemy that loves you might be the most formidable.
my sheep-eyes are soft
(i am a rather formidable enemy.)

your lips curve so sharply
in some sort of satisfaction
that i am made of glass.

your fingers spread wide on the pounce.
with an irrevocable crack,
the inevitable shatter.
when you break me it stabs right back into you.

sore thumbs.
what else have we been taught?

you suckle your fingers, ripe with pieces of
me.
you're blinded by blood that you've smeared on some altar
to something you've deadened
but felt should be strong.

i am whispering something vital
through claw-cracked lips.

listen,
or

you'll be facing an army with nothing to fight with,
and you'll always have broken glass in your thumb.

georgiana

indefatiguable,
you baptized the cat and
used all twenty-seven of my
smartly packaged antiseptic towelettes.

wide-eyed,
your baby brother watched you twirl
archly through mum's violets with a soft fluid
whoosh.

rosy, flushed,
you snapped your femur into
three or four pieces,
a red and white jigsaw puzzle
of mangled warm blood,

your cherub's face cracked and
tarnished with a wail.
the throb of your pulse the small flutter of
a bird's wing under my heavy thumb,

the sky flushing purple like watercolor,
the world all topsy-turvy like when
those fat-free popsicles turned out to have
23 grams of sugar.

sinus infection

leaden,
tilting precariously atop my neck,
like a sleepy glob of clay,
like a balloon inflated with
2,999 bottles of DayQuil.
it lets droop tired eyelids
over tired, defeated eyes.

sulkily, metering palpitations,
the raucous throb of
the 2,999 NyQuil-saturated fishes
swimming mercilessly through my veins.
up, down,

thrusting up goosebumps like
the opposite of bubble wrap.
the head drops-
infected,
sneer the sinuses

sisters in Baltistan

die for the other.
sip that fate calmly between slurps of
acrid tea.
here you peck at it
like a bird full of rice
and spit my nonsense back
in my face.

i love you because

of your heart's fine white stitching,
vivacity foaming up behind
satin-sheen eyes

of your voice,
like the soft slippered footfall of steps on stairs

like falling face-first into a mattress

of the smudge here, this branding,
the sunburn of loving:

crisped like a well-done pastry,
sprawling feet-first toward the sun.

you are such a glorious enigma that you choke the singer and stump the poet

you are paper-thin lightning
a sweet liquid baritone

the fluid pinging of a harp.

you are the sweet-smelling juice dribbling
down children's chins from the pulp of a skinned

peach.

you are as fragile as a marizipan Eros
whose warmth i cradle in the curve of my spine

the great Greek confection staring
with affably lung-numbing eyes from the backs
of my eyelids.

your armor is clean and undented.

no, no, no, no
you can't handle me.

walking with that naturally vigorous semitic subtlety accross an eastern-european parking lot, eyes locked, the grey-faced lady giving birth

right there on the pavement,

rrrrip, riiip, rippp,

bloody wailing from identical lungs.

one sweat-stained forehead becoming

two.

what i remember best

is
your ghost in all corners of the world,
slurping life through a straw and standing on chairs,
your grin wide as Nevada, engulfing the sky.
what i remember worst is the reason.

driving at six PM along an unmarked highway at the end of nowhere

you, deprecated,
your hands tucked like little fidgety starfish
under your stubby bare legs,
humming something irrelevant against
the low whir of the car, rubbery,
the thousand naked bees mating furiously in the engine.
the little pinpricks of salmon in the evening's blue;
our eyes burning holes into the freeway.
through cataracts, still seeing:
we, unidentified.

quaint (rant)

when i grow up i want to have a cat.
and a dog.
and maybe a bunny.

i want to have a quaint little house,
and maybe a quaint little husband.
and then we will need a quaint big house,
for quaint me and my quaint husband
and the four-to-six quaint quaintly well-behaved children.

maybe i'll be a missionary.
maybe i'll be the missionary English teacher to little orphans in South Africa
or Thailand or Cambodia or India or Romania or Peru.

and then my four-to-six quaint well-behaved children will learn
Swahili and Thai and French and Hindi and Moldovan and Spanish.

how quaint we would be!

we would come home to visit Grandma with her wide hugs and her chocolate chip pancakes(although we would have no home; we would be strangers, always and only strangers)
and people would say, my, how well-behaved they are! how quaint!
and we would rattle off idioms in Swahili and Thai and French and Hindi and Moldovan and Spanish like smug-faced little simultaneous interpereters and people would say,
how quaint!

quaint us with our languages, with our cats and dogs and maybe a
bunny. quaint us with our four-to-six well-behaved children.

quaint me with my maybe-fashion-magazine-internships and my
maybe-record-contracts and my maybe-international-business-classes and my
maybe-third-world-discipleship.

me. yes, me.

how quaint.

this is the table

where you kicked my knee out of its socket.
this is the table where we wrote that sonnet,
(the one that took flight and then failed so miserably.)
this is the table where, two years ago,
that boy with the reddish hair stole my pencil.
i hope he knows, that skunk, that bandit,
that delinquent stealer of writing utensils,
that he ruined our writing careers
and quite possibly is responsible for these two botched-up lives.

my mother

is an indomitable soldier.
she is the steady pulse of the IV
cementing moment after moment as life
drips on.
my mother is the closest to heaven,
she is the light at the end of the battle.

poem starters

the deeper meaning, sprawled from wall to wall-

the Valencia pavement, all picked and polished (like an overused bathing suit)-

the disgruntled sister.

the outgrown sweater.

"the french," she spat, "are one translucent eyeball"-

the forgotten labor of forgiveness, burnt like silver to sand-

the dusty crunch of gravel under flattened feet-

the scrap of fabric fluttering like an injured moth from the picture window-

the light refracted, in its sedentary effervescence, watching-

the brisk retreat, yet slowly growing stagnant-

the scent rising, tatsing deliciously of home-

the rest. all the rest-

the lime-scented tragedy of loving and being told, "no."

good evening, miss polly baker

i know you had a feeling like
burning gravel in your stomach
when you turned your plastic smile
on me and squeaked,
Congratulations!

zillie

the world was clean and cold,
ripe with the scent of sanitized linoleum
and the hopeless old.
the nursing home squatted, its own wobbly ecosystem,
its brick legs tucked indian-style
under the neat rows of white gardenias.
round wrinkled faces sat propped
limply in wheelchairs like debilitated rag dolls;
blank, nameless, empty.
"maria, mi querida,"
wails senora guerra,
always sweating, always plump-faced,
always cheered.
"yes," i say,
says ten-year-old-me with the conditional identity.
(for i am not maria and i am nobody's querida.)

"sun-day," my grandmother announces blandly,
obediently,
but there is no recognition in her eyes.
she is twenty-three, unmarried, beautiful.
i am Ruslana, the dark-eyed banker's wife.
"yes," i say,
says ten-year-old-me with the conditional identity.
(but i am not Ruslana and i am not Czechoslovakian.)

these grey walls are her israel.
the symphonic whir of the air conditioning is the throaty laughter
of the commanders on the naval ships at bay.
it is nineteen forty-one and Aunt Frances is having a baby.

"zillie, zillie, zillie," charlie moans, his eyes wide with,
haunted with, twenty years of ghosts.
for twenty years zillah has slammed that door on that
four-door camaro,
on the crumpled faces of charlie and those two
snaggle-toothed children.
he drowns always,
his ears swishing with that liquid
slam, slam, slam.

slam. this is what it is to have lived.
his eyes dilate. i fear he is more alive than anyone.
more alive than i am.
"i'm not zillie," i whisper,
and i shrink inside myself.

my sister

should have red hair.
she is a Mexican jumping bean,
dancing up, up like
a springy exclamation mark,
like peppermint toothpaste,

like the word flambé.
she snaps her fingers at life like
a hiccup in the rain
and sings the same same song
as the alarm clock in the morning.

birth

five days after my fourth birthday an underpaid
leggy blonde babysitter arrived on the doorstep.
she smacked sugary gum and drank dr. pepper
and was not bilingual.
no father's fussiness.
no mother's caution.
promptly locating the landline,
dialing her boyfriend, and leaving me
alone in the living room with my infantile dr. seuss.

the banned beckoned.
lizzie russell with her scabby knees and full-fat peanut butter
poked her head through the window,
grinning all toothless and vapid, six years old.
i opened the door and stole carefully outside.

admittedly, marco polo on the rocks was
not the best idea we've ever had.

my first consequence hit me like a deflated balloon,
lapping waves smacking and sucking at
my indignant nerve endings.
something black and sticky seeping
through my size two trousers.
leaving them dark-stained and blood-soaked
over the shattered skin of my raw knee.

pain like that was illegal. unlawful.
i suckled the second wave, letting the sweetness
slowly settle in my stomach.
wickedness did not arrive grandly or with fanfare,
it was covert and stealthy,
the rip of a knee,
babysitter's horribly inconvenienced grimace,
the stuttering slap of the screen porch door.
some vital thing has cracked in my embryonic sac
and i have let the world in.

you are

emotionless, the smooth ticking
in God's great brass stitches,
holding the world together.
knotted feebly
in great loose threads, beautifully,
without tangles.
unhappy speaking, delicious,
the several luscious seconds
between bread and tea.

shivering, like the herniated. like the cold.
touchable. readable.
under my parka, humming alien lullabies
like some homesick foreigner watching
the silver glint of spare change and cows eyes,
the perfect stranger, seeking no home.

aubade, II

maybe you're sleeping now,
your soft suede eyeballs rolled safely
like some bassinet inside your forehead,
closing their soft unlaquered lashes
against the swell, ebb, roar of
your hearts untempered ocean,
swelling proud and diaphanous,
the swirling stride like a pattern in marble.

where are you now; are you breathing?
what could you possibly be doing without me?

and i think how you are like a strawberry
of unimpeached beauty whose flesh one rolls about
on the tongue with eyes closed tight,
heart clicking quickly like thunder, a rail-car in a storm;

whom one devours slowly and without caution;
only really registering the beauty of the thing
once one has seen it completely destroyed.

english

we speak it thickly in the South
dewy, drowsy drawl
like pudding lolling along
against the hard grain of a well-gnawed cheek.
they speak it snappy in the Nawth
their tongues tap dancing about
like some maniacal Broadway darling.

south carolina solitaire

at one point in your life you will realize that
the world will not fall apart in your absence.
i was sixteen, staring at the racks of Calvin Klein
sundresses and realizing that i could no longer
close my fingers around my upper arm.
inharmonious bursts of air conditioning swirled
like sandstorms, fluttering the price tags on two pairs
of slick Marc Jacobs flats.
and that's when i realized that life is like
an exceptionally difficult game of solitaire
which one must play against oneself, and may not restart,
and cannot win.
the cards which i had been given were strange & unrecognizable,
and i was burning them.
i was setting them on fire to keep warm the one i loved.
i stared, something saccharine flitting behind the floor
like frightened fish.
and i bent towards the linoleum, and i bit my tongue hard,
and i put out that fire.

mid-june, in south carolina

some malevolent, angry squid lacerates me
with ember-tipped tentacles and refuses to let go.
a small hurricane threatens three quarters of my heart
and that doldrum-red dream ballooning and rattling around
inside my chest cavity is barking to be let outside.
today, the day the sun got so hungry
that it sat ourside my door and wailed.

the charcoal-flavored panacea that is falling quickly and violently out of love

it was late spring, when the crepe myrtles
must be watered daily and my tulips have died.
spring, when the lolling bodies of fat earthworms
replace those dried and shriveled corpses
of earthworms long forgotten;
when the doe-eyed females bloom out of their wool,
veiled in that thin coating of spider-lace lust.

we lay, smudged-lipped, ears to the ground
to listen for the growl of that train, that future.
the sweet, musky smell of the earth before a storm,
the somber scent rising from heavily impregnated clouds,
the dry soil opening its mouth like baby birds
for lack of something vital. it saturates.

my hands are wet with something like water, like blood,
your teeth show through those pufferfish lips
like clean white rows of childrens oxfords.
the sun smiles down sheepishly,
the air roughly blooming against my pores,
like the inside of a loaf of bread.
the sun kicks up skinny legs
like a dark-skinned pin-up girl, and sips its tea,
and kicks sand in my face.

your eyebrows furrow like some overgrown centipede.
we are all blue-and-black, bruise colored,
like the inside of a lobster. must you evaporate,
curdled milk between my fingers?
sweet, sticky? morphing and sticking and slipping
like Cinderella's slippers out of my palms.

you lay at my feet,
no violent spattering of crimson
which is not ink and is not blood;
but rather the haunting,
the forever- caressing ghost of one who is and is not there.

rumbling along its tracks like a renegade bride
it shoots past me and into your arms.
and i am a-l-i-v-e without you.
oh, unexpected tragedy! the world shrieks!
i am inconsistant, i am indomitable.
i am dangerous.
no pretty face can hold me down!
the dewy wool air rubs like sandpaper on my body,
sloughing like salt,
and i am clean.

27 hours after my destruction

we fell apart like an overbaked casserole,
like cheap sneakers.
we fell apart like an angel falls apart,
suddenly and with such lustre
we were ejected from the heavens.
we fell apart like split ends,
the overused notebook, the yoga mat.
quickly and cleanly,
so that no amount of lip balm
can glue us back together.

twenty-four hours after my destruction

the world is waxing, firing my bones
inside some arid furnace where they'll char
like ash leftover from a potters kiln,
peppering the pavement,
quickly swept away.
the world drops down and slides into its shell.
the sky is damp:
i ache, i ache, i ache.

the world is sharp, a stapled envelope
with no one's name and no one's address known.
i stuff myself inside.
so cramped and dark:
i ache, i ache, i ache.
the world is wide. i stretch
my arms to hold it but it crumples.
forced descent:
i ache, i ache, i ache.

the world is firm. it squeezes me like clay
it pokes me into strange, uncertain shapes
like paperclip dolls spread out on the floor
for Not One Soul to touch or throw away.
i shiver in this ancient unsolved maze.
the slow decay:
i ache, i ache, i ache.

contain me, release me

Lord, oh Lord!
whose clever mind birthed Adam & Eve
birthed symphonies
birthed tangerines.
Lord, oh Lord!
do rescue me.
i've found myself in love's bare hands
no garden-gloves to stave off thorns.
Lord, oh Lord!
its getting warm.
i've found that shiver on my spine
that blessed lesion in my mind
(his face like sun my eyelids bless)
oh Lord! do rescue me.
I pray for your great quiet wrath
that smote the smitten Hebrew girls
to snatch from me this priceless pearl
which i dare not release.
this ground is soft as snow: i'll sink!
oh Lord, do rescue me!
with hands that cannot cup his face
with lips that cannot part to speak
his name, i curse this sweet release.
oh Lord, do rescue me!

june

june is not sober
the cinnamon shock.
june is the sugar rush
drug of choice
the spanish moss
and harmless lance-edged
sands suckling my toes
like vodka.
intoxicating.
june is feverish
the hot gulp of tea
after two minutes of peppermint
toothpaste and listerine.
june is effervescent
the champagne hangover
the arms of the vapid lovers
or the newly thin.
june is that fervor
the unexpected orbital.
june is the salt-scratch at my eyes
(licking at my insides like
an oversize and very friendly terrier).
june is the courtyard
but june has no home.

sunburn

salt-stained and shivering,
the sun scorched playground
of several thousand
viscious Viking warriors,
pickaxes slicing, gnashing of teeth.
i swat them away like flies
investigating gangrene flesh.
whipped raw by wind and sky,
fire-chapped by some godforsaken
love affair between pallor and bronze
that no chapstick on earth could balm.
molting now, no snake-eyed temptress
but solemn priestess of aloe
slathered in chastity and vows of reclusion.
sister, russet-skinned goddess of light
cannot feel love for those blotched white ruins,
those monuments of earth, of skin
rising like stone casings from defeated kingdoms,
but in a kinder moment sends rain,
green globs of ice to blanket
wartorn winters with snow.

prince caspian

i saw Prince Caspian last night. that's probably the best movie i've seen in a long time; everyone needs to go see it. besides having (of course) a good storyline and almost exclusively extremely attractive male leads (minus the evil uncle), the christian parallels are subtle, yet obvious if you're looking for them. but they certainly don't push anything down anyone's throat.

i am madly in love with skandar keynes (edmund). personally, i adored him in the first movie while everyone else was gushing over william moseley (peter); the former was met with raised eyebrows while the latter was always met with raves and lightheadedness. i proved myself in the second movie, however. one english year did awfully a lot to make him acceptable for swooning over, and that is exactly what i did whenever he was on the screen: swoon. but i wasn't the only one this time, several of my formerly unbeleiving friends joined the Dark Side and left the rest to contemplate Peter's perfections. but oh! how could i forget the title character? Prince Caspian won the hearts of both sides of the debate; no one could dissent his beauty. in the final scene when he, hair blowing in the gentle Narnian breeze, Regina Spektor singing in the background, stepped out in his royal clothing: every girl in the theater shrieked, "he is so gorgeous!". i have a feeling we'll be seeing more of him in the united states, as beauty seems to dictate the success of many male leads.

of course, the movie would stand on its own, even without the ravishing beauty of edmund, peter and caspian. the effects blew me away, and the intensity of the battle seats saw us cringed down in our seats, clutching the railing. it's one to see twice-three times-four times!- and buy on DVD (even for me, the girl who only owns three.) how many stars is it possible to give a movie? there is no age limit or demographic for this movie. guys will love the battle scenes; girls will love the subtle, added-in romance between Caspian and Susan, the eldest Pevensie girl. i have only three words to summarize my raving over this film: go see it.

we're on different sides of the telescope

we're on different sides of the telescope
ignoring the sky and absorbing some dark
euphoric X-Rays from the other's single eye.
mine is paint splattered and fragmented
hazel.
yours structured, paint-by-number
kelly green.
your head tilting, framed by some halo of
artificial foliage.
seperated. we are kept safe by dark holes
shot in some paper wall between us.
by mindless incantations like Buddhist monks
or the times-tables.
our lead filled fingertips cannot collide.
they spark at touching.
your heart is sweet,
dark and waxy like sun-melted 230 calorie
chocolate.
you might understand me if i say we've
bonded covalently.
we're free-minded and incongruous
seated at opposite sides of
the proverbial turning tables.
maybe the glass wall will evaporate
if you dare to touch me.

summer aubade

the prefects, the lazy white dewdrops sun languidly
on sherbert-green leaves of an apple tree.
madamoiselle soliel smiles sheepishly her dappled smile
departing. she cups in the palm of her
hand a drooping skyline,
miniature cities of crooked plastic people and
bolts of ash-saturated sky-cloth.
i drink it down like fire-born liquor and
slosh it around in the pit of my stomach.
hair curls at the roots.
patchwork-quilt bark peels and smoothens, an aged
and defeated army.
the heady smell of wintergreen pine needles
dances its fragile ballet through my arteries.
i hold it carefully in my clumsy palm,
breakable like a soap-bubble baby.
no tulip or violet's pockets carry despair
or subway passes, only seeds.
no yellow rose has hopes or dreams to shatter.
with stems crushed in my fingers
i am no Realist.
with your scalloped thorns in my thumbs
i am Alive.

dear Mother,

without sudafed given to
unclog my nose,
and a small-car sized fortune on
novels and clothes;
without polka-dot bandaids
for scrapes on my knees
i'd be helpless.
(and rather more inclined to sneeze.)
from the moment i ripped myself
from your poor womb
you've been right on my tail
with your optical zoom.
from school and church services
to play practice and prom,
you've never been Rhonda,
but "Alyssa Duck's mom."
you'll mouth me the words from the
crowd when i sing.
(maybe that will show people
your own identity...)
the future is waiting,
not unlike the past.
we'll wear Pink Flamingos
and adopt 19 year old cats.
and when i get married, you'll
babysit my kids
and buy tupperware for us
with color-coded lids.
we'll always keep with us that
good old Duck Humor
(it runs in our blood like disease.
like a tumor.)
and no storm or crowbar will
tear us apart,
unless we're run over by
Beth Watkins' car.
we'll live for our God, but we'll live
our lives our way,
gawking at wrecks
and snakes in the Scott's driveway.
some days you'll be tired, and
some days i'll be grumpy;
but i'm still your baby,
and you'll always be Mummy. : )

dear Mendeleev,

oh! for some cat-eyed korean
with glossy blue-black hair
to unravel these knotted
ropes before me.
aqueous? precipitate?
you, aluminum, with your 2+ charge
might mate with friendly twin
chlorines.
but love is fickle,
and you choose the silver nitrate.
oh! for you, blessed Korean,
to translate these garbled syllables
and symbols into intelligible language,
i would give up every bite of Pocky
and pledge to drive Toyotas
for the rest of my days.
these redox equations swim before me,
sad-faced,
mocking their apathy and my misfortune.
chemistry, that two-tongued monster
that holds captive all reason
between its razor-sharp lips.
Mendeleev, i have let you down.

samson

tongue clicks once, twice
scalene scales and slithering eyes
she bites.
russet colored blown-glass skin
stabs when splintered.
dangerous games
in the fiery snake-vixen's eyes.
she'll hold you in her watery gaze
till your head throbs with your chest
the stagnant tick, ticking
like the biological clock of a barren woman.
she is Gaia, shushing Siren.
aphrodite with shoulders sliding.
tongue slick with anesthetic
she strikes.
black bile-filled fangs into unprepared
white flesh..
you stick straight like a fruitfly in a
spiderweb, strangling on saccharine
ruby-red cough syrup promises.
samson couldn't break those silk spiders' strands.
water-eyes turn amber,
you can't
bring those columns down.

baby lust

deciduous leaves and an empty
bag of french onion potato chips.
nest-ready,
only that nauseating smell
found on everything processed
and human-related.
who planted these prickly trees?
foster hollys.
if god had made a place that squirrels
would never dare to climb,
would never think of raiding,
this would be it.
isn't it lovely, my fair robin,
with the silky-smooth feathers
and half-inch eyelashes?
she flies away.
tulips unravel their pink-and-yellow
petals in mock sympathy,
glossy blue baby announcements in the
mailbox of a barren woman.
twins again!
wrong, wrong, wrong.
my fair robin, perched so delicately
on the railing, head cocked
to one side. i puff out my chest
and you fly away again.
humans on the porch, giggling
like banshees, systematically
reproducing.
lovingly patting the protruding parasite
in her belly.
shriek at them!
flap your bright blue wings in their
sickeningly saccharine faces!
claw at their eyes!
they with their carbon emissions
and french onion potato chips
so unfortunately cradling what your
itty-bitty bird hormones so crave,
that irreplaceable original which
robin-egg-blue crayons so unfittingly
try to recreate.
disgruntled. flap up into your foster holly
and snap irritably at the big-eyed
babies on the porch.
mother robin in the cherry tree next door
clicks her tongue at you in
disapprobation,
looking for love in all the wrong
places.

the strangest surrogate pleasure

the strangest surrogate pleasure
in treetops and on concrete blocks
of a public school playground.
your eyes wide;
dilated from sunshine or lidocaine,
like children or insects
when frightened or startled.
you've grown since september.
your peach-fuzz face and arms
cherry-red sunburnt,
patted affectionately by the tiny
low-income-housing Hispanic children
laughing, clambering on your
sweat-sticky back.
the bright blue air intoxicates on
sunny days like this in May.
we could almost beleive ourselves
to be perfectly happy.

ariella

ariella, you're yellow
in Moscow with mum.
you're seven. you fidget.
your legs are quite numb
in the pews of St. Basil's.
your head nods in sleep.
you're innocent now from
blonde head to small feet.

ariella, you're green
in Manhatten. The sky is
all weathered and battered,
as blue as your eye is.
you sit on the steps of the high
school and swoon.
you've peace, but you know
you'll be gone from here soon.

ariella, you're silver
in Avignon. Habits
form silently, tracing the backs
of our eyelids.
the country is russet, your letters
blank pages.
you can't stay forever, so
you try to erase it.

ariella, you're violet
in Stockholm with Aunt.
you're twenty-two. you want
to stay, but you can't.
the swedish boys haunt you.
they tear you to pieces.
you giggle when they take
a swipe at your breeches.

ariella, with Nonna
in Lugano. you're red.
the church bells ring out
sixteen tolls for the dead.
your conscience fades quick
with terra-cotta tiles.
will you tarnish your memories?
can you bear now to smile?

ariella, you're blue now
in Boston alone.
there's a boy on your loveseat
who's answered your phone.
you've grown up and grown
out. can you feel
your face?
dirt's smeared on your collar.
what's one more damned space?

ariella, you're white now.
the boat still is docking.
you stand on the shore in your
white linen stockings.
you smile as Tel Aviv sand
eats at your feet.
in the place where you started,
you've finally found home.

carnage

love is not battlefield.
its a rush of blood
like nothing you've ever
read in bible studies
or English textbooks.
you never realize that
it eats your heart out;
never feeling as though
anything occurs,
distant drops of poison
frogs that seem vague and
harmless until they begin
to tear at your throat.

she will realize

perhaps today, perhaps tomorrow
she will realize.
perhaps yesterday.
you thought of it this morning.
your fingers trace your forehead's creases
warm, yellow, velvet creases.
don't startle her.
perhaps she will sleep one night
with love-glazed eyes
and the morning will bring
unsatisfied bliss.
she stares straight ahead.
black, black eyelashes
blacker, blacker eyes.
her fists clench in heartache
or exasperation and you remember
that sometimes when your boat
docks in dry sand
and her head tilts satiricially
or in adoration
you must be content only to remember
that you love her,
and that is enough.

give me leave to love you

i feign not to walk beside you,
only let me kiss your footprints.
i seek not to grasp your fingers,
only let me worship them.
when one is drunk with blind devotion,
one does not demand promotion.
only let me clutch emotion!
only let me break my heart.
i think not to make your heart race,
only take mine at your feet.
only let me watch you softly.
i think not your eyes to meet.
i dare not to wish myself yours,
only know i'm at your will.
heaven knows you're far too worthy!
heaven knows you're its most fair.
heaven knows its dark-haired daughter
pines without hope of repair.
heaven sees your gentle nature!
heaven sees your perfect smile!
i dare not ask affection of you,
only give me leave to love you.

eighteenth century

head hurts like after you cry
feels like it should rain outside
but there's sun outside your mind.
imprudent maybe, but inescapable.
it's gonna turn either worse or wonderful.
that's how it goes.
for safety reasons you might want to go
away somewhere i won't be there.
hertfordshire, gracechurch street
they don't mean anything anymore.
walk through dirt-shuffled air
three miles to what used to be there.
i'm not some pride-driven emma
woodhouse, no fire in my soul.
i'm just some jane bennet looking for
someone to make me whole.
i'm not giving up, letting go of these
hands keeping me alive here in the cold.
i'm still looking for that flawed
other half of me i've been told will come.
insolence in the park you see
lack of love, lack of impropriety
beneficial to all but we.
lackluster lights in the famed scene
is there love in the eighteenth century?
it's always you and its always me.
you're not some love-blinded henry crawford
with too much to give.
you're just some upright edmund bertram
who knows how to live.

sonnet #6

Ride we now upon this narrow pavement
which winds between the joyous and the dead,
which claps its fists in warning drums of thunder
like monuments that shake their stony heads.
A warning cry, a shrill black song of fear
flamed from the road when our hearts realized
the hidden knowledge ringing in our ears:
"Couldst thou prescribe a solvent for mine eyes?"
Your hands so pale that grip the steering wheel
are shedding innocence and dripping blood.
Agape, the charred bystanders watch you heal,
as clean gore cleanses smudged. Redeeming flood!
Above the road's dull roar our voice we'll raise
and drown out opposition to our praise.

sonnet #5 1/2

shall i compare thee to the moon at night?
for both are pallid, pale and prone to wane;
and really, neither shines so very bright.
i would that you were quite as far away!
the sky is black now, dark as your intents,
but much less dull and rather better masked.
what insolence! you think my heart's for rent!
that i would sell, and then regret the task!
shall i, as well, compare thee to the day?
i could respond with something sharp and clever
of "how you're more inclined to fade and fray", but
i do fear your fragile heart to sever.
the stars are more prepared for nightly dance,
in silver lines arranged for morbid wars;
fervent armies stronger than your heart's stance:
how both wish to eclipse all signs of morn!
i could compare thee to the dawn's bright face,
but it would only end in your disgrace.

love in the time of war (children of Abraham)

we may walk the aisle of a concentration camp
instead of St. Basil's like we wanted to
but Moscow or Auschwitz doesn't matter
as long as i spend my life with you.
It may be short, but we will fight:
our fabled blood runs deep.
we'll hold each other tightly in this
slaughterhouse for sheep.
"may the children of this union
walk out of here alive"
i'd be content with that, even if we
both have to die.
but either way, they'll show their face
and prove themselves so strong.
they'll learn to love their "fatal wrong"
they'll always fear is flawed.
i hope they'll fight for what they are
and what is right to do,
and they find someone to love them
half as much as i love you.
our wedding bells may mix with rings
of atom bombs and tears
but i would never trade that moment
for a thousand peaceful years.
i write you this because i fear
it may not be too long
until the screaming of the gas rooms
drowns out my lovestruck song,
but i beleive that some day
we can all stand side-by-side
and the anthem of the nations
will suffocate vain pride.
so rise, you child of Abraham!
lift up your weary head!
for if they kill our bodies,
our spirits live instead.
and when you're in that chamber filled
with gas like molten jade,
recount that love is tangible;
my love will never fade.
they cannot take what they can't see:
love can't be touched or shot.
inside this hell, hear wedding bells
until we meet with God.

the end of that song is death

you have conveniently ignored the gaudy unread danger signs
i have so tactfully placed in the outskirts of your peripheral vision
to protect you, to save you.
do not think i will allow you to be destroyed.
somewhere there is a memory binding me to you
dormant and half-forgotten in the inner recesses of your mind
sleeping with third-grade arithmetic and world capitals.
find it, keep it, unfold it.
do not try to forget me, to be lulled into a false sense of security
as if i were a wanton maiden,
as if my flaws were a cold spell to be endured and overcome.
i am a Siren,
and the cold sweet song pouring forth from my salt-saturated lips
is only the more desirable as you know it will destroy you.
i am only the more despisable because i know i will destroy you,
and i love you.
do not touch these murky waters with your much worshipped feet!
i will tempt you; i will smile at you through my eyes
and devour you a thousand times in my cruel imagination
before the monster in my blood will rip you into pieces,
and with a crooked smile on your face you will accept the consequence
of our sweet, ill fated love.
do not stash away these photographs!
those fraying, yellowed warnings!
it is only your beautiful, lifeless body that will ever touch mine.
your face is eager in the moonlight, your hands gripping the railing
and my teeth flash out a meager final warning
as our throats are filled with the song of the sea,
and your feet dip into the dusky tide.
and you know i will destroy you.
"thus, the lion fell in love with the lamb"