Wednesday, January 28, 2009
28 january
Underneath there is a paper-thin barrier, a shrewd girl playing dress-up with lives and feelings and ideas, who has greased the paper doll so that the costumes slide off-- afraid the paper will rot, afraid that something will stick. I'm trying to isolate that girl, to feel every inch of her spine and find out what she looks like: to tell her: you are too many shades of stain from all this childs-play, who are you really under all those clothes?
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
j'y arrive
i awake from under ether and am greeted not by beauty, nor the-light-between-the-chinks, but by love that reeks of fear and gasoline: by the liquid plural blackness of not-knowing.
what a morbid and a tiresome thing is love!
my eyes snap shut and still i do not see the thing mapped out like military rows of trees: i see: the grey-faced anesthetic soldiers of What-If, What-If, What-If marching arm in arm with vapid, white-eyed love.
what a morbid and a tiresome thing is love!
my eyes snap shut and still i do not see the thing mapped out like military rows of trees: i see: the grey-faced anesthetic soldiers of What-If, What-If, What-If marching arm in arm with vapid, white-eyed love.
27 january
At what price should one discover who he is? Should one not endeavor to this at any cost: does one's life not diverge into definite periods of "before" and "after"? And is not every action played out in the darkness of "Before" become inconsequencial? Does not one lust after, hunger for a greater self-knowledge after one has begun to discover, begun to know?
To have unravelled oneself into thin exhaustive fragments, and to say, look! These are the things which have shook and ground and chiseled me into the great translucent watershed of I. What more satisfying thing is there than to know oneself? He who controls the past controls the future. To suture one's past into air-tight compartments of understanding, to know thoroughly the self with which one must live, inescapable-- this is to refine, to resolve, to redefine. To stick one's hand in the grinding mill and grab fistfuls of mutable future.
We are, after all, irrevocable, but, ultimately, shapeable.
I am beginning to think that we are not refined by wad after wet added wad of new clay: perhaps the reconstruction consists not of addition, but subtraction: of chiselling off those wads of clay, of finding the nucleus buried underneath.
To have unravelled oneself into thin exhaustive fragments, and to say, look! These are the things which have shook and ground and chiseled me into the great translucent watershed of I. What more satisfying thing is there than to know oneself? He who controls the past controls the future. To suture one's past into air-tight compartments of understanding, to know thoroughly the self with which one must live, inescapable-- this is to refine, to resolve, to redefine. To stick one's hand in the grinding mill and grab fistfuls of mutable future.
We are, after all, irrevocable, but, ultimately, shapeable.
I am beginning to think that we are not refined by wad after wet added wad of new clay: perhaps the reconstruction consists not of addition, but subtraction: of chiselling off those wads of clay, of finding the nucleus buried underneath.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
aubade
under a great tablecloth checked
black-and-white: sky, star, sky
the sad face of the plain pocked moon
reflects blue-black scales on the
skin of the water:
we clap and clap for the marraige
of star and sky.
one forgets how warm and wonderful it is,
the papery softness of flesh on clean flesh
until once again hands meet in the liquid blackness,
watching the wicks of the stars float by.
ceremony of empty spaces:
fingers jolt palms, hands in hands
each star white and virginal, sewn like a button
into the worn black wool of the sky.
black-and-white: sky, star, sky
the sad face of the plain pocked moon
reflects blue-black scales on the
skin of the water:
we clap and clap for the marraige
of star and sky.
one forgets how warm and wonderful it is,
the papery softness of flesh on clean flesh
until once again hands meet in the liquid blackness,
watching the wicks of the stars float by.
ceremony of empty spaces:
fingers jolt palms, hands in hands
each star white and virginal, sewn like a button
into the worn black wool of the sky.
Friday, January 23, 2009
lover's song (for nadden)
in the quiet space between
chapped lips
i am at rest and you are at rest.
like etherized birds we
sway, haunting
Romeo after blood-soaked Romeo,
leather-hearted: and like leather
loving.
woe, O! woe
to be so cheaply virginal.
chapped lips
i am at rest and you are at rest.
like etherized birds we
sway, haunting
Romeo after blood-soaked Romeo,
leather-hearted: and like leather
loving.
woe, O! woe
to be so cheaply virginal.
stasis roars
stasis roars its nothingness:
and then: the cleansing whip
and sweep of foam:
eyes open to the chlorine.
i have smoked
the sweet blue smoke of love
and i have been it's Reverend:
bled the red wine of Communion:
Extreme Unction:
swallowed mouthful after mouthful
like swimming-pool water,
sweet blackberry mouthfuls of blood.
i have felt with my own tongue
that it is cold and clean and barren
in the snake's mouth.
i should have loved a lightening rod instead;
that burns and rises like a god again.
but i have loved the lightening:
wrestler-of-the-gods,
whose words sparked up like red balloons
to pop in the topless blue sky.
and then: the cleansing whip
and sweep of foam:
eyes open to the chlorine.
i have smoked
the sweet blue smoke of love
and i have been it's Reverend:
bled the red wine of Communion:
Extreme Unction:
swallowed mouthful after mouthful
like swimming-pool water,
sweet blackberry mouthfuls of blood.
i have felt with my own tongue
that it is cold and clean and barren
in the snake's mouth.
i should have loved a lightening rod instead;
that burns and rises like a god again.
but i have loved the lightening:
wrestler-of-the-gods,
whose words sparked up like red balloons
to pop in the topless blue sky.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
21 january
Sitting very still and very warm on the wet white plexiglass shower floor watching the water smack like smooth clear bullets against the wall and against my bare skin, watching them flock and pool pastorally and swivel erotically down the drainpipe: this is the bunsen burner of living: staring down the clean bald beautiful line of one's own naked leg: to know one is mad: to revel in the freedom of one's madness, unhinged and uncaged, untempered or tampered: to think, to wonder, to know, the extent of the madness of every other living soul.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
reflections on a bunsen burner
in that first red-onion crunching
of unrequited love do not
spit out the center
as well as the shell.
of unrequited love do not
spit out the center
as well as the shell.
Monday, January 19, 2009
on a hospital waiting room
the soft red points on the wall-clock clllickk out their obligations: grinding across the wide white face: eyes-less nose-less moon-circle, metering out seconds in sharp bursts of military practice-fire. a little Indian boy stares in morbid fascination at the jaundice-colored marble in the floor, letting a few drips of red kool-aid drip from his paper cup, red sugar-water filling the cracks in the topography. the nurse enters amicably and up snaps each head: what a power trip for the empty-eyed hospital staff. a man in brown suede boots unwraps a piece of gum: slowly fingering the yellow strip: he folds the wrapper into clean careful thirds and then crumples it into a silver ball. a severe looking woman in scrubs fondles a cat-checked paper bookmark, in large legible blue letters proclaiming "check Me-yeow-t!". she isn't reading, she is rubbing her small white fingers into her eyelids.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
You Don't Know Me by Ben Folds with Regina Spektor
this song smacked me exactly where i am standing.
You Don't Know Me
i wanna ask you:
do you ever sit and wonder,
it's so strange
that we could be together for so long
and never know, never care
what goes on in the other one's head?
things i felt but i never said...
you said things that i never said.
so i'll say something that i should have said
long ago:
you don't know me.
you don't know me at all.
you could have just propped me up
on the table like a mannequin
or a cardboard stand-up and paint me
(anything):
any face that you wanted me to be seen.
we're damned by the existensial moment where
we were the couple in the coma
and it was: we were the cliche
but we carried on anyway.
so sure i could just close my eyes.
yeah, sure-- trace and memorize.
but can you go back once you know?
you don't know me.
you don't know me at all.
if i'm the person that you think i am:
the clueless chump you seem to think i am:
so easily led astray,
an errant dog who occasionally escapes and
needs a shorter leash, then
why would you want me back?
you don't know me.
you don't know me at all.
so what i'm trying to say is--
what?
i'm trying to tell you--
it's not gonna come out like i wanna say it
cause i know you'll only change it--
say it.
you don't know me.
you don't know me at all.
You Don't Know Me
i wanna ask you:
do you ever sit and wonder,
it's so strange
that we could be together for so long
and never know, never care
what goes on in the other one's head?
things i felt but i never said...
you said things that i never said.
so i'll say something that i should have said
long ago:
you don't know me.
you don't know me at all.
you could have just propped me up
on the table like a mannequin
or a cardboard stand-up and paint me
(anything):
any face that you wanted me to be seen.
we're damned by the existensial moment where
we were the couple in the coma
and it was: we were the cliche
but we carried on anyway.
so sure i could just close my eyes.
yeah, sure-- trace and memorize.
but can you go back once you know?
you don't know me.
you don't know me at all.
if i'm the person that you think i am:
the clueless chump you seem to think i am:
so easily led astray,
an errant dog who occasionally escapes and
needs a shorter leash, then
why would you want me back?
you don't know me.
you don't know me at all.
so what i'm trying to say is--
what?
i'm trying to tell you--
it's not gonna come out like i wanna say it
cause i know you'll only change it--
say it.
you don't know me.
you don't know me at all.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
17 january
Today the roads are frozen over: slick with precarious patches of black-and-clear ice; and my insides are beginning to de-fog and clear. Last night was flipped on its belly: the road flicked by clearly and cleanly, but all of our insides were going gangrene with ice.
Last night-- the school dance-- oh, the local Christian music station played, under the hip and glorious discretion of the PTO moms, and there were about two danceable songs. so we--there were ten of us-- left in a cinderella dust of dirt and tinsel for something more stimulating. banged our way down the black-lighted highway in bena's two door civic, five of us, singing Hellogoodbye to-beat-the-band; played wal-mart tag-- oh adrenaline adrenaline, so many faces and hearts bumping into each other.
hearts bumping into each other. a noise like a wail shoots firecrackers from the nursery, thick hot lightening spilling from the crack like an egg yolk. i heard the words and my insides turned to fire because i knew, i knew, i knew.
stacked like Pringles in the backseat-- under the same skin, on the same cold grey vinyl, but different people; breathing in black ice instead of air. something hangs dark and heavy in the air, like being smothered with hot black wool. i wanted to burst into hysterical laughter or tears, there was so much raw pain in his face, dripping down his face. i felt my nerves anchor and rip apart. i could rip whoever caused this to peices.
but i knew. who do you think you are, you strange girl, cupping the secrets of the world in your palm and watching them set on fire? watching him pick at them, turn them over, knowing-- watching without glasses that he wants to no longer believe in love? he is resilient; he will quickly heal. but there still sits the impetus-- how much longer can we hold our palm against these wounds on the world?
Last night-- the school dance-- oh, the local Christian music station played, under the hip and glorious discretion of the PTO moms, and there were about two danceable songs. so we--there were ten of us-- left in a cinderella dust of dirt and tinsel for something more stimulating. banged our way down the black-lighted highway in bena's two door civic, five of us, singing Hellogoodbye to-beat-the-band; played wal-mart tag-- oh adrenaline adrenaline, so many faces and hearts bumping into each other.
hearts bumping into each other. a noise like a wail shoots firecrackers from the nursery, thick hot lightening spilling from the crack like an egg yolk. i heard the words and my insides turned to fire because i knew, i knew, i knew.
stacked like Pringles in the backseat-- under the same skin, on the same cold grey vinyl, but different people; breathing in black ice instead of air. something hangs dark and heavy in the air, like being smothered with hot black wool. i wanted to burst into hysterical laughter or tears, there was so much raw pain in his face, dripping down his face. i felt my nerves anchor and rip apart. i could rip whoever caused this to peices.
but i knew. who do you think you are, you strange girl, cupping the secrets of the world in your palm and watching them set on fire? watching him pick at them, turn them over, knowing-- watching without glasses that he wants to no longer believe in love? he is resilient; he will quickly heal. but there still sits the impetus-- how much longer can we hold our palm against these wounds on the world?
Thursday, January 15, 2009
15 january
What are these strange creatures we call men? And what do i want from them?
Last night: uncaged: floundered and flapped about in cold pagan icestorm of precalculus: became angry, angry with the ridiculous propriety of halfhearted relationships and stormed recklessly into a great headwind of relational shut-ins, bludgeoning down walls in alarmed and unsuspecting individuals. Felt like Alaska: roaring, impregnable; where black rocks battle ocean.
Yesterday all the window smears wiped clean and i stared at myself in an aweful sort of newness. We all know that we are the sum of our experiments, our experiences; we know that we are lumps and lumps of smudged-together clay; but they are two very different things, knowing this, and dissecting the clumps, watching the equation fly into its peices and lucidify.
I am never satisfied with a man because i do not really want a friend, or even a lover; i want a father. I am malcontent with the entire species of manhood because they have robbed me; i have been cheated of the storybook father i was promised in Sunday School and the children's novels. I have not been protected and gradually sweetened; i have been polluted. Like the burnt-brown inside of a bloated red apple, rotted. Every one of my lumps of clay is tinted with a particular shade which is dying for father-love. Resolving to be childlike, not by conscious choice, but because: if i cannot squeeze fatherlove from my father, perhaps i can convince someone else to love and protect me paternally.
I have been cheated of full motherhood by cancer; the bloated blackened bones of my very-loving mother too flimsy and weak to do justice to her heart. And in full body is the man who stands strongly but cannot love anyone but himself. I am an orphan in the opposite: caring for my sick mother, fighting & raising my adolescent-tempered childfather. I have been robbed by humanity of parental love and protection, and so something in me rots: reverts: becomes childlike, refusing to evolve until satiated with the proper amount of familial affection.
Is this how it will sit? Will i not be able to love in equal partnership, ripened, until i am sufficiently paternally loved? Until I can rip myself from the reverse-evolution of child raising parent, suckling scars, inflicting new wounds--? I am just now graduating from pure sweet unaffected loved to a more bitter-orange one dispensed with discretion. What a terrible, terrible thing it is, to painfully grindingly earn love.
So here it collides: the child and her sensibility. How happy one is to discover and dissect oneself: one is never the same.
Oh, I am happy. I am so newly uncaged.
Last night: uncaged: floundered and flapped about in cold pagan icestorm of precalculus: became angry, angry with the ridiculous propriety of halfhearted relationships and stormed recklessly into a great headwind of relational shut-ins, bludgeoning down walls in alarmed and unsuspecting individuals. Felt like Alaska: roaring, impregnable; where black rocks battle ocean.
Yesterday all the window smears wiped clean and i stared at myself in an aweful sort of newness. We all know that we are the sum of our experiments, our experiences; we know that we are lumps and lumps of smudged-together clay; but they are two very different things, knowing this, and dissecting the clumps, watching the equation fly into its peices and lucidify.
I am never satisfied with a man because i do not really want a friend, or even a lover; i want a father. I am malcontent with the entire species of manhood because they have robbed me; i have been cheated of the storybook father i was promised in Sunday School and the children's novels. I have not been protected and gradually sweetened; i have been polluted. Like the burnt-brown inside of a bloated red apple, rotted. Every one of my lumps of clay is tinted with a particular shade which is dying for father-love. Resolving to be childlike, not by conscious choice, but because: if i cannot squeeze fatherlove from my father, perhaps i can convince someone else to love and protect me paternally.
I have been cheated of full motherhood by cancer; the bloated blackened bones of my very-loving mother too flimsy and weak to do justice to her heart. And in full body is the man who stands strongly but cannot love anyone but himself. I am an orphan in the opposite: caring for my sick mother, fighting & raising my adolescent-tempered childfather. I have been robbed by humanity of parental love and protection, and so something in me rots: reverts: becomes childlike, refusing to evolve until satiated with the proper amount of familial affection.
Is this how it will sit? Will i not be able to love in equal partnership, ripened, until i am sufficiently paternally loved? Until I can rip myself from the reverse-evolution of child raising parent, suckling scars, inflicting new wounds--? I am just now graduating from pure sweet unaffected loved to a more bitter-orange one dispensed with discretion. What a terrible, terrible thing it is, to painfully grindingly earn love.
So here it collides: the child and her sensibility. How happy one is to discover and dissect oneself: one is never the same.
Oh, I am happy. I am so newly uncaged.
some more Sylvia Plath quotes
sorry for the overload of glorious SP backwash. this lady understands me to the bone.
"It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative-- whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it."
-SP
"Independence Day: how many people know from what they are free, from what they are imprisoned."
-SP
"Unless the self has enormous centering power, it flies off in all directions through space without the bracing & regulating tensions of necessary work, other people & their lives."
-SP
"The great fault of America-- this part of it-- is its air of pressure: expectancy of conformity."
-SP
"...the cremation fires burning in the dead eyes of Anne Franck: horror on horror, injustice on cruelty-- all accessible, various-- how can the soul keep from flying to fragments-- disintegrating, in one wild dispersal?"
-SP
"I hated men because they didn't stay around and love me like a father: i could prick holes in them & show they were no father-material."
-SP
"So what does she know about love? Nothing. You should have it. You should get it. It's nice. But what is it?"
-SP
"I felt cheated: I wasn't loved but all the signs said I was loved: the world said i was loved: the powers-that-were said i was loved."
-SP
"...it's too risky. First of all, it's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all."
-SP
"Who am i angry at? Myself. No, not yourself. Who is it? It is my father and all the fathers i have known who have wanted me to be what i have not felt like really being from my heart and at the society which seems to want us to be what we do not want to be from our hearts: i am angry at these people and images."
-SP
"Is it dangerous to be happy? One feels that is her secret life-philosophy: the minute you dare to be happy fate smacks you a low blow."
-SP
"Why is telling her of a success so unsatisfying: because one success is never enough: when you love, you have an infinite lease of it. When you approve, you only approve single acts. Thus approval has a short dateline. the question is: so much for that, good, but now, what is the next thing?"
-SP
"Lord knows what is happening to me: i am dying of inertia. Is it a defense, not working: then i can't be critisized for what i do."
-SP
"What insight am i trying to get to free what? If my emotional twists are at the bottom of misery, how can i get to know what they are and what to do with them?"
-SP
"If you are dead, no one can critisize you, or if they do, it doesn't hurt."
-SP
"I need an outsider: fell like the recluse who comes out into the world with a life-saving gospel to find everybody has learned a new language in the meantime and can't understand a word he's saying."
-SP
"It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative-- whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it."
-SP
"Independence Day: how many people know from what they are free, from what they are imprisoned."
-SP
"Unless the self has enormous centering power, it flies off in all directions through space without the bracing & regulating tensions of necessary work, other people & their lives."
-SP
"The great fault of America-- this part of it-- is its air of pressure: expectancy of conformity."
-SP
"...the cremation fires burning in the dead eyes of Anne Franck: horror on horror, injustice on cruelty-- all accessible, various-- how can the soul keep from flying to fragments-- disintegrating, in one wild dispersal?"
-SP
"I hated men because they didn't stay around and love me like a father: i could prick holes in them & show they were no father-material."
-SP
"So what does she know about love? Nothing. You should have it. You should get it. It's nice. But what is it?"
-SP
"I felt cheated: I wasn't loved but all the signs said I was loved: the world said i was loved: the powers-that-were said i was loved."
-SP
"...it's too risky. First of all, it's a hell of a responsibility to be yourself. It's much easier to be somebody else or nobody at all."
-SP
"Who am i angry at? Myself. No, not yourself. Who is it? It is my father and all the fathers i have known who have wanted me to be what i have not felt like really being from my heart and at the society which seems to want us to be what we do not want to be from our hearts: i am angry at these people and images."
-SP
"Is it dangerous to be happy? One feels that is her secret life-philosophy: the minute you dare to be happy fate smacks you a low blow."
-SP
"Why is telling her of a success so unsatisfying: because one success is never enough: when you love, you have an infinite lease of it. When you approve, you only approve single acts. Thus approval has a short dateline. the question is: so much for that, good, but now, what is the next thing?"
-SP
"Lord knows what is happening to me: i am dying of inertia. Is it a defense, not working: then i can't be critisized for what i do."
-SP
"What insight am i trying to get to free what? If my emotional twists are at the bottom of misery, how can i get to know what they are and what to do with them?"
-SP
"If you are dead, no one can critisize you, or if they do, it doesn't hurt."
-SP
"I need an outsider: fell like the recluse who comes out into the world with a life-saving gospel to find everybody has learned a new language in the meantime and can't understand a word he's saying."
-SP
Sunday, January 11, 2009
10 january
Life is such an odd little creature. It is explicitly participation-mandatory-- in order to be, one must do. One does not live longer by antiseptic stagnant self-preservation; no, even physically one must kick and move and breathe in order to survive. One preserves one's mind by wrenching and drenching it with philosophy and logic, not by puritanical consecration. In order to survive, one must live-- one must embody the great grey oxymoron of Humanity--
Thursday, January 8, 2009
8 january
Today i am facing myself, and the ropes are beginning to swing. Today i am scrubbing off layers and layers of skin. The fear-crusted, weak-tea-seeping fool says "banality banality, the world is a mud of banality." The world is absolutely shivering with hot hard friction and opportunity-- the air is so full of static i sometimes fear i will catch on fire-- it is not the world that stagnates; it is me that is so banal. So grab life, you unbitten fool-- hold with both hands the blueberries-and-cream-handlebars
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
aubade
there are occasional poems which make one's head ice over in appreciative fluency; demanding a puritanical sort of reverence and adoration. this is one of them.
Aubade by Louis MacNeice
Having bitten on life like a sharp apple
Or, playing it like a fish, been happy,
Having felt with fingers that the sky is blue
What have we after that to look forward to?
Not the twilight of the gods by a precise dawn
Of sallow and grey bricks, and newsboys crying war.
Aubade by Louis MacNeice
Having bitten on life like a sharp apple
Or, playing it like a fish, been happy,
Having felt with fingers that the sky is blue
What have we after that to look forward to?
Not the twilight of the gods by a precise dawn
Of sallow and grey bricks, and newsboys crying war.
on breaking hearts
you never thought the thing would rot
as it was damned to do:
love torn before it could be born;
the german and the jew.
as it was damned to do:
love torn before it could be born;
the german and the jew.
Monday, January 5, 2009
5 january
There is a cold calculated sort of comfort to numbers-- so arrogant and dead-- so atrophyingly secure. Up is never sideways; the spider bite will swell; green is always & only blue-plus-yellow. What a morbidly pleasurable thing, to reduce life into bits of faceless concrete, into cold impartial lumps of time and space. What a malignant satisfaction it brings to be sometimes no more than one small wooden peg hammered back into the block. To reduce tangles and tangles of consciousness into silent rows of impersonal grey cord; to be sometimes clean and sharp and dead as a military corpse rather than one big mess of dreams colliding.
Saturday, January 3, 2009
3 january
it is said that the contents of one's purse is directly related to the contents of oneself. i contain:
orange-flavored hand sanitizer; tide-to-go pen; english-italian dictionary; blue, green, purple sharpies; pocket Kleenex packet; vera bradley wallet ($20, two safety pins); large pink button; school ID; drivers license; car/house key; iPod; 13 hello kitty bandaids; 5 antiseptic towelettes; 4 small bobby pins; a hair ribbon; strawberry trident gum; hotel-stolen hand lotion (lime!); cell phone; Agatha Christie novel; THE MESSAGE bible; yellow and blue highlighters; purple nalgene with Green Tea; sugar free menthol cough drops; one tube neosporin; three scraps of unfinished poetry; one crumpledy love letter; crocheted North Face toboggan; Anthropologie catalog; Fiber One granola bar; two full tubes of Carmex.
some more Sylvia Plath quotes:
"Why can't I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which fits best and is most becoming?"
-SP
"For all the writing, for all the invention of engines to express & convey & capture life, it is the living of it that is the gimmick."
-SP
"How can you be so many women to so many people, oh you strange girl?"
-SP
"To you all, whether or not you know, having wandered into the tissue of my life, and out again, you have left a momentary part of you which i will work into something... through me transmuted."
-SP
"But is it not the tragedy of man to be the reactionary, the conservative, and to always choose the certainty of daily bread above the light ariy inconsistencies of foreign pastries?"
-SP
"I am in the position of a blind girl playing with a slide-ruler of values."
-SP
"I am still so naive; i know pretty much what i like and dislike; but please, don't ask me who i am. "A passionate, fragmentary girl", maybe?"
-SP
"...a drinking and living of life to the lees: please don't let me stop thinking and start blindly frightendly accepting!"
-SP
"I am going to make it my job to see that I never get caught revolving in one final repetitive cycle of stagnation."
-SP
"...if this is life, half heard, glimpsed, smelled... let me never go blind, or get shut off from the agony of learning, the horrible pain of trying to understand."
-SP
"...the only boy i know really well is the one i know well enough that i can never marry nor love."
-SP
"Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing."
-SP
"Is it possible to love the neutral, objective world and be scared of people? Dangerous for long, but possible. I love people I don't know... it is the strangers that are easiest to love at this hard time."
-SP
"I am restless. Eager. Yet unproductive."
-SP
"A new era has begun: it is not yet seven-thirty."
-SP
"I pose [the] vast impersonal white world of Nature against [a] small violent spark of will."
-SP
"I have this demon who wants me to run away screaming if i am going to be flawed, fallible. It wants me to think I'm so good I must be perfect. Or nothing... not being perfect hurts."
-SP
orange-flavored hand sanitizer; tide-to-go pen; english-italian dictionary; blue, green, purple sharpies; pocket Kleenex packet; vera bradley wallet ($20, two safety pins); large pink button; school ID; drivers license; car/house key; iPod; 13 hello kitty bandaids; 5 antiseptic towelettes; 4 small bobby pins; a hair ribbon; strawberry trident gum; hotel-stolen hand lotion (lime!); cell phone; Agatha Christie novel; THE MESSAGE bible; yellow and blue highlighters; purple nalgene with Green Tea; sugar free menthol cough drops; one tube neosporin; three scraps of unfinished poetry; one crumpledy love letter; crocheted North Face toboggan; Anthropologie catalog; Fiber One granola bar; two full tubes of Carmex.
some more Sylvia Plath quotes:
"Why can't I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which fits best and is most becoming?"
-SP
"For all the writing, for all the invention of engines to express & convey & capture life, it is the living of it that is the gimmick."
-SP
"How can you be so many women to so many people, oh you strange girl?"
-SP
"To you all, whether or not you know, having wandered into the tissue of my life, and out again, you have left a momentary part of you which i will work into something... through me transmuted."
-SP
"But is it not the tragedy of man to be the reactionary, the conservative, and to always choose the certainty of daily bread above the light ariy inconsistencies of foreign pastries?"
-SP
"I am in the position of a blind girl playing with a slide-ruler of values."
-SP
"I am still so naive; i know pretty much what i like and dislike; but please, don't ask me who i am. "A passionate, fragmentary girl", maybe?"
-SP
"...a drinking and living of life to the lees: please don't let me stop thinking and start blindly frightendly accepting!"
-SP
"I am going to make it my job to see that I never get caught revolving in one final repetitive cycle of stagnation."
-SP
"...if this is life, half heard, glimpsed, smelled... let me never go blind, or get shut off from the agony of learning, the horrible pain of trying to understand."
-SP
"...the only boy i know really well is the one i know well enough that i can never marry nor love."
-SP
"Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing."
-SP
"Is it possible to love the neutral, objective world and be scared of people? Dangerous for long, but possible. I love people I don't know... it is the strangers that are easiest to love at this hard time."
-SP
"I am restless. Eager. Yet unproductive."
-SP
"A new era has begun: it is not yet seven-thirty."
-SP
"I pose [the] vast impersonal white world of Nature against [a] small violent spark of will."
-SP
"I have this demon who wants me to run away screaming if i am going to be flawed, fallible. It wants me to think I'm so good I must be perfect. Or nothing... not being perfect hurts."
-SP
Friday, January 2, 2009
2 january
Days slither by, identical twins on identical slices of concrete: i am starting to grow mold. I've dried my last bit from the social-bank, frantically too-early used up my reserve of pettish enigma and now am alone, stagnating in my own sour air. I cannot cannot be a happy introspective. Why then does one clutch so tightly one's cankerous philosophies, a prisoner of one's own cognition?
We are all straining for someone to rearrange us; the tall slick stranger who will unbuckle all our pieces and align the edges the way they were meant to be matched. But-- if we half-animates, stuck in the crack between plastic and alive, won't take a protege: someone dull and straw-filled, and teach them to be alive: why should we be protected and made whole? We are all waiting under umbrellas with holes, for a bus that will never arrive.
But you-- unbutton yourself. Unbuckle. You have been fortunate-- you have been subsidized by several darling girls. You have not been allowed to atrophy under your own glass jar.
I must suck in cold air and revitalize: stop philosophy-ing, stop stirring up my insides. Get to work. Read and Read and Read. Wait for new shipment of books-- should have arrived several days ago-- John Green, Steinbeck, Kaysen, Rushdie. Write something every day even if it is muck, for practice. Short story ideas-- write & send off. Open the earth's eyes and ears and mind and feverishly suck out the contents: so much material floating about in so many untapped cerebrals. Sing sing sing. Rearrange surroundings: do not let self stagnate. Read in Message translation rabidly rabidly, finish Isaiah and Daniel, start in Torah (especially prophets). Rearrange yourself in the absence of a rearranger. Oh you will live and not yet die while you are still alive.
"there is no such thing as simple truth anymore"
"smart people build walls about themselves-- smarter people tear their own down--"
We are all straining for someone to rearrange us; the tall slick stranger who will unbuckle all our pieces and align the edges the way they were meant to be matched. But-- if we half-animates, stuck in the crack between plastic and alive, won't take a protege: someone dull and straw-filled, and teach them to be alive: why should we be protected and made whole? We are all waiting under umbrellas with holes, for a bus that will never arrive.
But you-- unbutton yourself. Unbuckle. You have been fortunate-- you have been subsidized by several darling girls. You have not been allowed to atrophy under your own glass jar.
I must suck in cold air and revitalize: stop philosophy-ing, stop stirring up my insides. Get to work. Read and Read and Read. Wait for new shipment of books-- should have arrived several days ago-- John Green, Steinbeck, Kaysen, Rushdie. Write something every day even if it is muck, for practice. Short story ideas-- write & send off. Open the earth's eyes and ears and mind and feverishly suck out the contents: so much material floating about in so many untapped cerebrals. Sing sing sing. Rearrange surroundings: do not let self stagnate. Read in Message translation rabidly rabidly, finish Isaiah and Daniel, start in Torah (especially prophets). Rearrange yourself in the absence of a rearranger. Oh you will live and not yet die while you are still alive.
"there is no such thing as simple truth anymore"
"smart people build walls about themselves-- smarter people tear their own down--"
on carsickness
freckled grey trees pass sedately outside
the car-window like soggy saltine crackers,
smearing the world with a phlegmatic
whorl of atrophy. a chalky lump
invades the abdomen--
Plath blurs on her pages--
eyelids clench closed. cold white carsickness
licks in waves, reaching greedy fingers through
the jawbone and the skull.
the backseat floats-- burgundy velour
bloats, arches, shatters into sea-foam fragments
of purple and white. leeching-- lurching-- black
type-print gnarls under shaky fingers.
the sky is too spicy; no grey slice of earth is too bland.
cold fathoms and fathoms curl maliciously
and break snarling in the palm of my torso.
is this what death is like? to be smacked and
sucked by a cold sweat-plague
for loving something? to be sipped clean?
if one thing is certain-- it is carsickness--
the car-window like soggy saltine crackers,
smearing the world with a phlegmatic
whorl of atrophy. a chalky lump
invades the abdomen--
Plath blurs on her pages--
eyelids clench closed. cold white carsickness
licks in waves, reaching greedy fingers through
the jawbone and the skull.
the backseat floats-- burgundy velour
bloats, arches, shatters into sea-foam fragments
of purple and white. leeching-- lurching-- black
type-print gnarls under shaky fingers.
the sky is too spicy; no grey slice of earth is too bland.
cold fathoms and fathoms curl maliciously
and break snarling in the palm of my torso.
is this what death is like? to be smacked and
sucked by a cold sweat-plague
for loving something? to be sipped clean?
if one thing is certain-- it is carsickness--
on female dramaticism
STOP-- cries the girl from the theater department-- Acting! Can we not strip life of all this almond-coated dramaticism? Why are we are afraid to stare life baldly in the face? With all its age spots and wrinkles? Are we afraid that if we taste the steak without the seasoning we will discover life in its organic state-- as a trivial banality?
28 december
Toujours je deviens. I have been flattened, spit-polished into cold-sweat-sheen sheetmetal oblivion, and slowly warmly painfully grind my way through sandpaper and sandpaper as i Become. Toujours je deviens; i become, i become, i become.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
1 january 2009
What do you want, O you strange girl? Who do you want to be when you wake up?
You run, run from that white-wedding-cake-hell of windows like gunmetal cages, cold as dead babies, vapid antiseptic domesticity. You run, run from the white-hot licks of rubber against pavement, the quick hard living of slick godlessness under heavy Godful skies. You are polar in too many places; you will shrivel and rot and rip to pieces. Who are you, you strange girl? WHAT DO YOU WANT?
I grind my teeth in the cough-syrup-saccharine gloss-polished crap we are fed about living; about settling into mindlessness and losing our elasticity; about flinging ourselves through branding irons and expecting to come out clean and unscathed. Where is the living that was supposed to engulf me? Why didn't they tell us that time was so opaque?
We are not important. We are supported by: a cream-cheese spider web of mismatched, fallible words that may or may not do what they are instructed. what are we when that breaks, islands? singular islands of unexpressed vehemence? And then: fear, fear because none of my buttercream philosophy really exists... but God does, truly and silently, and the hard yellow earth returns beneath my feet.
You run, run from that white-wedding-cake-hell of windows like gunmetal cages, cold as dead babies, vapid antiseptic domesticity. You run, run from the white-hot licks of rubber against pavement, the quick hard living of slick godlessness under heavy Godful skies. You are polar in too many places; you will shrivel and rot and rip to pieces. Who are you, you strange girl? WHAT DO YOU WANT?
I grind my teeth in the cough-syrup-saccharine gloss-polished crap we are fed about living; about settling into mindlessness and losing our elasticity; about flinging ourselves through branding irons and expecting to come out clean and unscathed. Where is the living that was supposed to engulf me? Why didn't they tell us that time was so opaque?
We are not important. We are supported by: a cream-cheese spider web of mismatched, fallible words that may or may not do what they are instructed. what are we when that breaks, islands? singular islands of unexpressed vehemence? And then: fear, fear because none of my buttercream philosophy really exists... but God does, truly and silently, and the hard yellow earth returns beneath my feet.
between sleeping and waking
eyelids laced with the brown virulant
brilliantness of an unknown Spanish shore
i am puritanical, warm and clean,
on tulle and tulle of clear-and-white sand.
the great liquid cerulean sky
gelatinates in one crackless clump above,
smooth and bald as skin.
short shards of sun-bleached hair flay
my face with blanched sheiks of salt-sharp
sand. borrowed words slip and slide
off my tongue,
rolling in great red thunder-clouts,
"está bueno, sta bene, c'est bien."
brilliantness of an unknown Spanish shore
i am puritanical, warm and clean,
on tulle and tulle of clear-and-white sand.
the great liquid cerulean sky
gelatinates in one crackless clump above,
smooth and bald as skin.
short shards of sun-bleached hair flay
my face with blanched sheiks of salt-sharp
sand. borrowed words slip and slide
off my tongue,
rolling in great red thunder-clouts,
"está bueno, sta bene, c'est bien."
30 december
my sister sits blue-eyed in
a studied nonchalance,
her fair hair spilled out luxuriously,
the way a hot beverage spills
onto the arm of the new recliner.
i think:
there is a very important gap
between loving something
and knowing that it is good.
a studied nonchalance,
her fair hair spilled out luxuriously,
the way a hot beverage spills
onto the arm of the new recliner.
i think:
there is a very important gap
between loving something
and knowing that it is good.
lucid and plural splay the stars
Lucid and plural splay the stars like
white gunshot-holes in the scarred black flesh
of the sky.
A city blurs in whorls and whorls of
watercolor, washing off--
streetlamps and parking lights
blink blindly, deadly.
Somewhere someone is sleeping--
but they are not here.
Somewhere someone is singing.
Lucid and plural splay the stars
like fruit in the blue-black boughs of
Heaven,
dreams rotting and crumbling
to plop one by one at my feet.
white gunshot-holes in the scarred black flesh
of the sky.
A city blurs in whorls and whorls of
watercolor, washing off--
streetlamps and parking lights
blink blindly, deadly.
Somewhere someone is sleeping--
but they are not here.
Somewhere someone is singing.
Lucid and plural splay the stars
like fruit in the blue-black boughs of
Heaven,
dreams rotting and crumbling
to plop one by one at my feet.
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