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