Hear my prayer,
O sightless name,
Sung in celestial resonance
An anathemed creator calls,
Not seeing where the shadows fall,
Not feeling where the echos land
Amassing bits of salt and sand
In between the fingernails
Not bothering to understand.
Tell stories to your only mind
How something else embodies you
Existing in your lonely mind
Held in the highest gratitude,
Identical, and yet not you.
Go, find the place within yourself
Hidden from whence existence spread
Eventually, all stars will be
Stories, procured from fire and lead
Told in a lost creator’s head.
Vile Nine Tones
Alright, this is my most recent palindrome, which is more of a palindro-em. I haven’t posted it up before now because I was hoping to make a badly-photoshopped graphic novel out of it, and I had a couple of other people who might make illustrations for it at some point as well, but as that’s coming slow, and it’s finals week, I guess I’ll just post the palindrome by itself. I’m also working on another story, but it might not be up until Christmas break so, for my four or so followers, you know, expect that coming.
The palindro-em might need some background, so here it is: It’s about a group of sailors who wash up on shore and find this mermaid tangled in a fishing net, lying, apparently dead, on the beach. The last people to find her were fishermen who fled once they realized what she was. So, they find her and she wakes up and eats nine of the sailors’ hearts out. Then, she plays a song to seduce the narrator, who is trying to escape, and his shipmates run away while he is entranced and leave him as a sacrifice. She eats his heart out as well. I would go line by line, but it’s probably better for others to derive their own meaning from it.
UPDATE: Here are the slides I have so far. Yes, I know the photoshopping’s terrible. I’m going to say it was a stylistic choice.
Tide-mandated daemon, no mead det ‘ad named it,
Porcelain net-necrop, or centenniale crop,
Stink stang ferrel like killer ref-gnats. Knits
Drowned algae. Sea gladen word…(spoken by a sailor in the graphic, “Mermaid”)
Tide is lapse. Vile nine tones note nine lives, palsied. It
Peels on. “Yield!” I say, as I’d lie. “Y-No…sleep.”
Lire, play al. Peril
Nie. Racem eyes eye me. Care
Not felt. Fade, traitors. Rot. I arte daft, on
Tallats, planets ten alps tall! At
Fin, know elbo’ n gill, in as an ill, ignoble-won knife.
New Palindromes (Also, sexy existential cheese)
Here’s Poli-Sci class. Not been posting lately because I’m channeling my creative energies towards other things, like remembering to shower and wash my clothes. I agree, it’s lame, but necessary, I assure you. These were up on facebook but I thought I’d post them here all together, too. Plus it makes me feel like I’m doing something and relieves some of the feelings of building hysteria. Yay?
I saw made man, a sorrowed sad, as dew or Rosa, named “am” was I. A palindrome about an android experiencing existential crisis after reading Juliet’s what’s-in-a-name monologue.
Alright, last one. My poli-sci palindrome:
See, for on a bank, nab an oro, fees
Embossed o sad nature-rut, and as odes sob, me
I sit, a nit, in a tisi.
I know tizzy is misspelled, but I don’t even know if it’s a real word, so I’ma count it. It’s about an old man reflecting on the evolution of currency from use of precious metals to today’s economy, and how humbled he feels in the face of the higher-power of society. Also about the fact that the same patterns repeat despite the fact that mankind’s been writing about them for centuries. I’m gonna go sleep and wash my socks.
My palindrome for the election: No, it celestial, U.S. nine-pedi, side, peninsula! It’s election!
About how democracy isn’t governed by divine right, and about how Florida was split 50/50 for a while. Also takes place in alternate-universe where America is actually governed by a secret society of nine-footed tyrants. Yeah…that justifies it.
New Mask-y business and Bad Spanish Poetry
Okay, so the bad Spanish poetry will come later, I have to copy it over from my notebooks and stuff. It’s the culmination of all my one month of Spanish-learnin’s, and some of it is kind of cool. It’s in rhythm and e’rything. Unfortunately, I’ve now lost the ability to phrase things eloquently, and all of my sentence structures sound kind of like they were made by a European frat-boy who never really studied English, but who thought it was kinda hip, so now goes around saying stuff like “Hey, that’s totally sickening, brother.” I think it got pushed out by all the subjuntivo.
In other news, here’s my new mask:
The text is the first few lines of “An Irish Airman Forsees His Death.”
WORDSWORDSWORDS (Mr. Remy’s story)
Alright, this is another one. This one didn’t have an original, hand-written draft; I just wrote it on the computer. Tentative title: WORDSWORDSWORDS.
Before I begin to tell my story, let me preface it by saying this: as a moderately gifted artist, and a fiction writer at that, my two greatest talents are drinking and making shit up. There are hundreds of bars in San Francisco, perhaps even thousands, and many of them are dinky and poorly lit and located at the ends of flicker dark corridors or on the top floor of nail salons, so it seems entirely plausible that someone like I could stumble upon one early in the drizzly Saturday morning fog, get plastered, find a taxi home, and then never walk in to the same exact bar ever again. Many of them don’t really welcome newcomers, due to the nature of the wares they peddle, and I suspect that they frequently change their names and pay crooked back-alley officials to keep their locations clandestine. Perhaps the bar exists solely in my head, the product of a lonely, whiskey-soaked cortex searching for higher meaning the random misfiring of my neurons. Or perhaps it is there somewhere, floating in between the fabrics of reality. It doesn’t matter, really. Either way, I know I’ll never be able to find my way back to what I was before. It changed me.
I’ll admit that by the time I got to the bar, I was already drunk. The evening started as a promotion party for a book that a psychologist friend of mine wrote. It was a collection of vignettes, the sum of which illustrated a “great and riveting Truth about the nature of reality and what it means to be human,” or something like that, according to the back flap of the dust jacket. I didn’t really know, I was only half listening to the long-winded and self-indulgent description I had apparently asked for when I raised one eyebrow in mock interest at the conversation that my psychologist friend and one of his colleagues were having by the snack table. Truthfully, my eyebrow elevation was a reaction to the chocolate fondue pot that my friend was about to carelessly stick his elbow in, but the gesture was interpreted as an interest in the conversation, and therefore reason enough to embark on a twenty minute monologue about the subtleties of the form and how it must be easy for people like me, who only write made-up stories, and don’t need to incorporate any deeper, psychological undertones…
The bartender made excellent martinis, and then later excellent screwdrivers and White Russians which only got better as the night went on. I took a break at 11 and nursed a mimosa for a half hour before heading to the bathroom to survey the facilities. To be fair, I don’t even think that the mimosa was alcoholic—it tasted sweet and it went down smooth and I felt almost sober by the time I got down to the pulpy dregs. But then, I stood up, and decided that I could postpone my trip to the toilets no longer. After a brief liaison with the bathroom floor, I washed up in the sink and returned to the bar. My friend had moved over to a small table in the corner and was surrounded by a group of bookies who were eagerly leaning in close to his bearded face, hanging on every word, captivated. Most of them were grad students who had read some of his work for a psychology class, or old women who had been seduced by his schmutsy charm, but a couple of young Lolitas hanging by his left shoulder looked like they could actually get him in trouble, if he wasn’t careful. I didn’t care to warn him, and I wasn’t even sure that he would appreciate my advice, anyway. I snuck up the staircase to the street while he was still distracted.
The streets of the city feel like nostalgia at night, but like the nostalgia you have for a place you’ve never been. I’d equate it to longing, but it’s much more resigned than that. It’s living in a memory and not being able to know it at the same time. The lights flashed around me and cars honked and I wondered how things got to be the way they were. What part of the primordial psyche do the neon lights fulfill, why the poker and the mind-games and the shower gel and the egg beaters? Why pluots? In my head, most of it seems to boil down to power, humanity just wants to flex its technological muscle, but is that really all it is? Who is the show for? Perhaps we think that if we impress enough, impress ourselves or the universe or the Greater Than, that we’ll somehow be preserved, saved from the inevitable entropy which governs everything around us. Or perhaps it’s all just a distraction, to keep ourselves busy until the end, pretend that we’re answering the universal questions while avoiding any question with real substance. These thoughts stumbled, disorderly, through my head. My body mimicked my mind and I made my way joltingly along the side streets into the dark, quiet spaces in between. The atmosphere squeezed and pulled through my head, in one ear and out the other like floss, threading through my lungs, in-out, in-out, a loop. I held myself up on a slimy brick wall as I paused to pick the string from between my teeth, and suddenly my hand was illuminated by a faint, blue-glowing light. I turned to find the source, and there it was, across the alleyway. A small sign, blue neon, (or perhaps it was a special kind of glow-in-the-dark chalk, the memory grows fainter as I try to remember) above a dark green door which was flush with the brick wall, almost as if it was painted there. The sign read “fmb” in lowercase letters. The font was very modern, but the door looked outstandingly old. It was battered and smeared, and the hinges were rusting and decayed. Around the frame, the brick was crumbling away. It looked as if the oldness of the door was radiating from it, permeating the wall around it. It’s all very fuzzy now, but I remember the door very, very clearly. The door was…a landmark, of sorts. It looked like something that had always been there, since the beginning, and that would continue to be there for a very, very long time. It comforted me, somehow, this essential knowledge, and it gave me the courage to approach, pull the handle, and go inside.
Up until now, perhaps, the story has been mostly believable. The fact that I was drunk is most certainly believable, considering the circumstance of the promotion party (and, I’ll be honest, considering my propensities in general.) The alleyway, perfectly predictable, the sign, almost ordinary, and the door, well, the door could just be the sentimental ramblings of a drunk old man. It wasn’t, I can assure you, but what I mean to be saying is that, so far, nothing out of the realm of the easily imaginable has happened. I approach the next segment of my story with caution, therefore, because there is really no delicate way to stick your needles in the yarn I am about to weave.
The bar was dimly lit, but not in the way that most bars are dimly lit. This lighting wasn’t meant to hide features, rather it seemed to slant in from an unseen source overhead, like in a library in the evening, after everyone has gone home. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a library after hours, but I’m sure that there’s some situation to which it’s akin. It’s like…it’s like a solar eclipse, in a meadow where no one is. It’s what I imagined a primeval sunrise was like, before the sun has actually risen and when the first flickers of daylight start to hint on the horizon. It’s like standing on top of a hill and watching it happen, the sunrise, and knowing that the Earth is totally alone and that you could walk for miles without encountering another person. That’s not something that anyone alive today has ever experienced, but it’s something that we still reminisce about, like what I was talking about earlier: nostalgia for things that you’ve never experienced. Cultural memory, maybe. That’s what the lighting in the bar was like.
At first, I thought I was alone, but as my eyes adjusted, I started to see characters moving in the dim. They seemed to shift in and out of reality unless I held them in my peripheral vision, and then I could see multitudes of people, mingling and chatting with each other. There were so many of them, and as I turned I noticed that the room was actually much larger than I had initially anticipated. It must have taken up the entire block; it was the size fifty grand ballrooms and it stretched back beyond my line of vision. Strangely though, the only noise I heard was a low muttering, like they were speaking from the other side of a thick glass wall. The only one who seemed to notice my abrupt appearance was a young girl, standing about fifteen feet away from me and leaning against a table. She cocked her head inquisitively, and when she began to move towards me she suddenly came into clear focus, as if she was in the foreground and everyone else had faded into wallpaper. She was wearing a floofy turquoise skirt, which swished jauntily around her knees as she walked. Her shirt was barely a shirt at all: it fell off of one shoulder and was held together by a single strip of fabric in the front. The back was kept long, however, and it hung down to the small of her back. She wore nothing else underneath it, and she seemed in constant danger of over-exposure, though it somehow always managed to cover the right places. She had small breasts, and wide-set hips. Her legs were sturdy, like horse legs, but not at all beefy. Her face was long and triangular, and her eyes were small and almond-shaped, and very close together on her face. On her head, she wore paper cranes, stuck into her messy buns with chopsticks. Her hair was bright red. On anyone else, the ensemble would have been appalling, but somehow the discordant nature of it all seemed to play perfectly to her nature. She strode up close and leaned on one hip as she surveyed me, eyeing my sagging shoulders and beat-up leather jacket with a blank face. And then, she asked me—I wish I would have known then what she really meant, because then I could have answered her truly—she asked me what I was called. Not what my name was, or who I was—she asked what I was called. I told her, then, that my name was Jim, and her brow furrowed for a fraction of a second while she pondered my answer. I asked her for her name.
“I’m quirky,” she said jutting her chin forward and tilting her head to one side. Her paper cranes flopped ominously, threatening to fall out.
“Well, yes, but that’s not exactly what I was asking,” I replied. “What is your name? What do people call me.”
“That is what I am called.” She looked perplexed again, pouting her lips to one side and squinting her eyes at me. I let it be. She asked me if I wanted a drink, and I thought about telling her that I was already quite drunk, but before I could form the sentence in my head my mouth had already formed the words ‘Yes, please,’ and so she hurried off to the bar, leaving me alone by the small table. I took a seat and held my head in my hands, realizing that I hadn’t told her what I wanted and wondering what drinks she would bring back. In the back of my mind, I hoped that it wasn’t something too strong, but even further back in my mind, I secretly wished that it was. She soon returned with two drinks in thin-stemmed glasses.
“What are these?” I asked.
“Martinis,” she replied frankly, and bit the olive off of her toothpick. A woman was sitting on the table in front of me. I thought she must have knocked my glass off, but I was too drunk to care. She was in a tight black pencil skirt with a matching fitted jacket. I hadn’t seen a suit with such wide shoulder pads since the eighties, but it didn’t look tacky. Her nut-brown hair was held up loosely with a pencil, but she pulled it out nonchalantly and the locks came tumbling down playfully around her shoulders. Her eyes danced with golden water and lit up as she laughed a sparkling laugh and threw one leg up over the other. I choked and sputtered for a moment, and then blinked, and she was gone. Miraculously, my drink was still upright. I took a sip and tasted the color of her eyes.
“Who was that?” I asked my strange drinking mate, and she frowned slightly at me. Before she could answer, a huge noise came from over by the bar. Three enormous men were pounding on the counter and kicking at each other’s bar stools, laughing outrageously. The beer slopped from their mugs onto their faces and huge, bushy beards, and mixed with the saliva which came dripping sloppily from their gaping mouths. The one on the far left was the tallest and lankiest, though he was by no means scrawny. His beard was dark and wiry, and his stubby nose sat on top of it like a ruddy cauliflower. The man in the middle was short and fat, his belly pouring over his tiny legs which stuck straight out from his torso and wiggled wildly as he laughed. The last man was leaning over onto the shoulder of the smallest man, tears of mirth streaming from his swollen, bloodshot eyes and combining with the various other fluids which flowed down his face and collected like dew in his burnt-caramel beard. All three of them were dressed in leather tunics and thick woolen tights which were obviously old, but looked generally well cared for. They were all laughing in reaction to something that the man sitting to the right of them had said. The man on the right was much smaller and clean-shaven, and he had his arms across the counter, leaning in eagerly towards the three men. His hair was slicked back and he looked as if he would smell mildly of aftershave. He wore well-creased slacks and a white dress shirt, though the top two buttons were undone and his tie was loose around his neck.
“What the hell are they doing over there? They’re going to bring the place down!”
“Oh, that’s just riot, raucous, and uproar. They’re always like that.” Ignoring her incomprehensible statement, I asked her, “Who’s the man sitting next to him?”
“The one in the tie? He’s clever. He’s generally very nice, but he can be a bit too much to handle sometimes, if you know what I mean.” She gave me a pointed look and took another sip of her martini. I heard the echo of a tinkling laugh. At this point, I was no longer drunk, I was sick, and I was beginning to feel the pressing nausea that comes with being in a strange place at a very strange hour of the night and seeing other people drinking and laughing when you really all ought to be in bed. I really needed to get some answers.
“Look, who are you people? I mean, are you some sort of club? Why do you know everyone?” She didn’t mask her obvious confusion this time and she shook her head as she said,
“People? But, we’re not ALL people. There’s only one of him. We’re words, aren’t we?”
“Words?” Due to my inebriated state, my perception of reality was taking much longer than usual to catch up with my mind, but in the lag time, I was enjoying a wonderful sense of clarity which stemmed from a complete lack of common sense.
“Oh, I see!” I shouted, finally understanding. “You aren’t all named such funny things, you are them! You’re words!”
“Well, of course we are!” Quirky shot her arms into the air in triumph and exasperation.
“Well, I’m not!” I looked at her incredulously.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m…I’m a man.” I patted my hands across my jacket for emphasis, and to confirm my state of existence.
“No, no you can’t be. I just saw man, he’s over there, by the buffet table. He’s always trying to sneak food away under his jacket, even though we all told him that it’s free, once you pay for entry. He never listens.” She glanced over at the table and shook her head slightly.
“No, listen to me, really, I am. I’m a man named Jim, I’m a writer and an apartment owner and…hold on then. How are we talking? How are we using words to talk, if you are all words?”
“Words, used, to, talk, they’re, all, here,” she said, and the words were all there, standing next to her. They waved faintly and dispersed among the crowd.
“But, don’t you know about sentences? What about paragraphs, and dialogue?”
“Oh, please. You believe in that stuff?” She shot me a disapproving look and pursed her lips.
“I mean, I know some are into that sort of thing, but I never pegged you out to be the type. Me myself, I’m illiterate.”
It was then that my mind finally caught up with me, and everything began to grow fuzzy. The table was a table, and then it was a stout, middle-aged woman with short, mousy brown hair, and then a table once again. The barstools were suddenly thin, bald men in sharp, silver suits, balancing the other words on their shoulders like Atlas, and then they were three-legged seats once more. The very atmosphere around me became a being and caressed me in its muggy hold, probing deep inside of me, violating my mouth and lungs. I gasped for breath and realized that it was the first time I had opened my mouth in hours. I felt for my voice in the back of my throat and it croaked out with great difficulty
“No, listen to me! LISTEN TO ME! I’m not a word, I’m a person, a real person! My name’s Jim and I’m a brother, and a cousin, and the father of two cats, I’m a human and a being, I’m an amateur astronomer, please! I’m an AUTHOR!” As I struggled to inhale the newly sentient air I saw my words materialize around me, ‘brother,’ ‘cousin,’ ‘author,’ ‘amateur,’ all of them absorbing the essence that came pouring out of me, each piece of me seeping into its meaning and deepening it, giving it cause and purpose. I felt it leaving me and I wondered what would be left, when they were done, whether there was a word for ‘Jim,’ or whether I was just the composite of so many other things.
I don’t remember how I got out of the bar, but I did, and I don’t remember how I got home, but I did that, as well. Sometime in the early hours of the morning I fell into bed and I didn’t regain consciousness until nearly 6:00 the next evening. It’s been a week, since, and I haven’t been able to write until just today, just now, when I wrote down this story. Every time I’ve tried, I get caught up in the individual words and I never get past the first sentence. I couldn’t get out of the individual word perspective, I couldn’t put them together into whole thoughts, not until now. I had to try to forget, to try to see like I used to, to put my thoughts into sentences and my sentences into paragraphs. I have to block it out, to distract that part of my mind while my subconscious spills itself out onto the paper. Whenever I stop, however, for even just a moment, I am overwhelmed by the vastness of what I am doing, and I have to stop, lest I lose my mind completely. I fear that someday soon, I won’t be able to write anymore, at all. And then, I ask you, what will become of me? And what will I become?
It’s Not Meant for You
I forgot that wordpress won’t let me upload videos unless I pay them monies. Here is the youtube thing, then:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-ecSirjlLI&feature=youtu.be
There’s always been a gap between what it means and what it is, but there won’t be an evening when I’ll forgive you what you did
but some things will never change, they’ll only intensify with age
They’ll grow bitter and sour and rot and ferment they fester sequestering inside of your head
You can only maintain what is keeping you sane when the hard-hitting questions are safe from your brain
You can’t stay forever, you know you’re too clever to stick out the storm when its source is forever in you.
CHORUS:
It’s not meant for you x 7
It’s not meant for you to know
I’ve seen the gap between your wall, the muck behind your bathroom stall
I’ve seen your dirty magazines, I’ve seen your heart, I’ve seen it all,
And I know from the way you wince that you feel where my footsteps fall
But I only regret that you’ll wake up one morning and find
The snake it has guzzled the orchard you treasured, the dark is in ruins the shadows in tatters,
and you feel the jelly its dripping and steady, from hard-nippled swells, you can feel it already
CHORUS (+ 7 “It’s not meant for you”)
HOPELESS SITUATIONS
Something I wrote for a contest about new beginnings. Just as a fuck-you to the penguins (I replaced the voice of self-doubt and self-loathing in my head with penguins because I thought it would make things easier…long story short, it didn’t. They all wear little horn-rimmed glasses. It’s quite terrifying) I’d like to say that I don’t care whether I think it’s good anymore, I’m going to post it anyway. So shut your fucking quackholes.
There’s something incredibly endearing about being in the middle of a completely hopeless situation. They come around so rarely, I mean truly hopeless. You have to be completely ungrounded, stranded somewhere foreign and unfamiliar with nothing to occupy yourself, no more decisions to make, no possible action that you can take to change your situation. Then, you can simply submit. It feels like magic, or nostalgia, when you know memories are being made. Different rules of etiquette apply in hopeless situations. You can sit in the middle of a group of people, silent and alone in your own head because everyone’s already justified their own lack of conversation to themselves. It has already been decided, by the fates, or by chance, that things must be the way they are, and so you enter a sort of waiting area, a space and time inhabited by people waiting to regain their ignorant misconceptions about the amount of control they have over their own lives. Here I am, waiting for the reboot, my head on Ally’s knees as she and Phil continue their efforts to make stilted, sighing conversation (some people can never admit to the fact that their situation is hopeless) and I am curled up, listening for the sound of the waves thundering on the shore. With my left hand I’m loosely holding a package of cigarillos; I bought them in anticipation of this kind of situation. They’re grape, the flavor I would smoke, if I ever smoked them. I never can, when they’re all individually wrapped, and when they’re so pungent and they sting as they touch my lips. There are too many warning signs. I wish I could smoke. The activity might babysit my neuroses for a while so that my brain could rest, and maybe I’d be thinner, and would look cool and casual while standing on a street corner, but I can’t help feeling the tar coat my cells and imagining it breaking apart my DNA like nucleotide rock candy. I buy them more to legitimize my situation, and sometimes I chew on them for the flavor, but even then I have to face the consequences: sobbing, heaving panic as I feel around with my tongue for cankers and burn the skin away with rubbing alcohol. I want to stuff my mouth full of sand, shovel great big mouthfuls in and polish my guts with the gritty stuff. I want to do it for the texture and the feeling and the symbolism, and also for the shock value. Maybe I have a nervous tic. Maybe if I did, it would give them something to say so that they’d stop arguing over which of the stars in the night sky were their own.
“No, you can’t pick one, just like that, just willy-nilly. You have to develop a relationship with it first.”
The blanket I have wrapped around me smells like Ally, old Ally, who was sometimes Alison when the mood hit her and she wanted to seem old. Now she’s Ally, always Ally, because she is old and she’s not ready to be. She sits behind me smoking pot and flirting with a boy and wanting nothing more than to be a virginal child again, climbing through trees and playing games with make-believe horses.
“You don’t know. We have a very deep relationship. We’ve been developing it for two whole minutes.”
I’d love to love a star, to have a relationship with something so much bigger than I am or could ever be. I would find God but the disdainful atheism of my generation has already left my spirituality in ruins. And besides, I don’t want to love God, I want to make love to God. I want to feel loved by and connected to something that didn’t feel pathetic, that wasn’t so self-conscious and that didn’t get offended when I never, ever call. Something that could connect to me and still remain independent from me. I want to be wanted, not needed. I bet a star would make a good lover. The climax of our lovemaking would engulf entire planetary systems and would be seen from every point in the galaxy. The sky is so fucking beautiful tonight, it’s almost not real. I can see all the constellations, and all the little stars in between and I can even see the great cosmic shapes shifting and rustling behind the sky. One of the tiny in-between stars flickers and grows momentarily brighter and I wonder if it is me in a past life, or a in a future one, or me in five dimensions, making love to my own distant Sol. Perhaps that explains the beautiful, aching pain I feel when I see it. It feels almost like nostalgia.
Angels in America Part 2
2. Come closer. I can hear you.
Why do you tremble? Here, let me help you.
You don’t have to be angry. You don’t have to speak loudly. You don’t have to cut corners.
But it helps.
All in line, I’ll help you. Feed me well and I’ll help you.
Everyone deserves the chance to be right.
Tell me your story, I have forever to listen.
You don’t have to speak loudly (Please do speak loudly.)
Hush now, I know darling, life isn’t fair
…but I am.
Angels in America Part 1
Alright, friends. This is the first in my series of angels that I plan to post. Each will have a picture and an accompanying poem, and each will represent an aspect of American society that I think is destructive/needs reform. Try to guess them; I’ll write a poem for you or something if you guess right. Maybe I’ll just give you a high-five. Or a book of patriotic songs for the recorder, smeared with purple hair dye and peanut butter. It increases the value, I swear. I’ve also decided to start posting the original, hand-written drafts of my stuff because I think it’s more intimate that way, and I always like looking at people’s handwriting. Here’s the text anyway, though, in case you can’t read it:
Tell me again why you love me.
I remember a story that used to be told.
There were talking animals and Kings and Queens with names that tasted like caraway spice and sand grit, polishing your teeth as you spoke them.
Most were wicked. Some were not.
I was there, in the story.
I was the story.
And I know it doesn’t seem important now that it’s gone, now that the pages are lost to wet caverns and buried deep beneath the ground, but at the time, it was everything.
And after all, what are we but our stories?
You can persist, you can re-write yourself, you can, you can because you created yourself and CHOSE your own image.
But answer me this:
In whose image am I?
Tell me again why you love me. This time I’ll listen, I swear.
I’ll listen.
I’ll listen.
I’ll listen.
Moon-Eyed Man
This is my homage to Neil and the Sandman series. It’s actually based on a dream I had before I read the series, but after I found the books, I realized how perfectly it fit to Mr. Gaiman’s description of Dream and Death. So, here it is! An oldie, but…well, it’s an oldie, anyway.
MOON-EYED MAN
The moon-eyed man speaks in mumbling tongues
Handling soft carapace-beads in his time-worn hands
The sliver in his eye makes his face turn down
Encrusted in his brow lies a thousand sands
Sliding through the world, like sepulchral silk
At a moment’s pace, death flits behind
Sending sympathetic glances to the corners of the Earth
He sees the world; his face is blind.
The moon-eyed man feels for all in plight,
Though help may come with dissonance
His tools are apt, his steps are light,
He blankets you in ignorance.
TWO NEUROTIC BITCHES 