Not Writing You A Love Song

This is not a comeback. This is just me stopping by. Real life is taking over, not in a bad way. A poem for you.


I don’t know what love is.

I know fear
Dark, consuming
Gut clenching, sweat drenching
I’ve been frozen to stone with it
Struck dumb
Helpless
This is familiar
Yet different

I know joy
Bright, heady
Smile readying, hope steadying
I’ve been filled to burst with it
Full of laughter
Flying
This is familiar
Yet different

I know grief
Heavy, overwhelming
Heart wrenching, soul rending
I’ve been pulled down low with it
Shed tears
Dying
This is familiar
Yet different

I know peace
Calm, restful
Mind soothing, pulse smoothing
I’ve been suffused by it
Learned to soar
Uplifted
This is familiar
Yet different

Is this what love is?

A Long Time Ago, We Used to Be...

Participants in the same after school activity. Er... I don't think it has quite the same ring to it.

I like you and it makes feel odd. The last time I liked someone it was a thirteen year old boy, smile as slow as molasses as it stretched out over braces. In my own defense, I was 12.

You’re only a little older than me and I always thought I’d want a bigger age difference. Yet, you drew me to you with your poise and intensity.

I don’t know if that spark when I first saw you was recognition of a face I haven’t seen since my high school days or if it was attraction. Maybe attraction came when I saw that pale strip of skin when your shirt rode up that one time. Maybe it was the self deprecating tilt of your smile. Your hands as they spread and clenched to make your point may have played more than a part in capturing my attention.

I don’t know what to do. Your talking about NGOs shouldn’t make my heart flutter. You’re a friend of a friend; I don’t even know how I’ll see you again.

I hate playing games. I don’t do coy and flirtation. Can’t I just come up to you and tell you I like you?

In (?) WeTrust

Trust. It’s an interesting concept. Princeton’s WorldNet says it means to “have confidence or faith in” something. It doesn’t say how much confidence or if that faith is all compassing, or what it is in which we have that confidence and faith. I have faith in you. Some? A lot? Absolute? Faith that you’ll do what? I’m confident that you’ll protect me from physical harm, but that you’ll let my psyche be destroyed. I believe that you'll hurt me if you're able. I have faith that you’ll keep me from danger but only as long as you’re completely safe.

I don’t know that I trust. And yet, I have to trust. We all do. I trust my parents to love and care for me, until they see a part of me they cannot accept. I trust my friends with one of my most important secrets, one that I have not even trusted to this blog, but I don’t trust that they’ll look at me the same way if they read my past journal entries.

Is trust an absolute? Trust, you either have it or you don’t right? How about those little doubts that whisper seductively in the back of your mind, do they negate your trust? We’re human beings, we are by design imperfect fallible creatures. If I trust you implicitly does that make me stupid? Sucker, patsy, chump. There's one of me born every minute.

I waver, I doubt, I fear. My faith, it does flicker. And yet the candle for you is still lit, my vigil for you has not ended. I trust you. I struggle and fight my darker nature, my cynicism and lingering suspicions. I don’t know that I trust you, but I think I do. Try to forgive me this shortcoming, and if you prove unworthy of my trust I shall try to forgive you yours.

Back Again. Er.. Again.

So, Sometimes you have to fall off the face of the earth. I've gone to ground with nary a resurfacing in months. Lots of things happened, significant to me but probably not that interesting. Also forgetting your password and your username is not conductive to good blogging. In short, summers and new beginnings in life, but in small ordinary ways. Sometimes you renew your lease but it's all routine and water under the bridge. So I'm a little less emo, a little more... me. I'm not sure if this blog is now obsolete,but, as always, I post into the void, and the void weighs the worthiness of a response.

So anyway, I thought after such a long absence, better come bearing gifts. Small, but heartfelt.

We were born to be heroes, you and I, that is our fate. We are humanity's last great hope. We are our last attempt at a good thing. We built the world, height upon height, we rose up reaching for the sky. We thought we could leave the mess, the grit and dirt of humanity behind. Reaching out to the clean expanse of sky, dirtying it as we reached. We spread and multiplied, full of ambition and hubris, brushing aside the pain and squalor of the seething masses. Little did we know that from that squalor would rise our downfall. So rose the end of the world, born of pain and misery and fear. So our numbers dwindled down to nothing and we withered away. And so, here we are, you and I, heads raised about to cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war. To defend the fate of a species that has led us down the road to hell, with their good intentions and ambition. Then they left us here, living in the shadows of what they have wrought, mere skeletons now. Left us with hollow husks, laying under this blotted out sun. What a legacy they’ve left us, cadavers, monoliths, useless, a tribute to a pointless race whose outcome has been lost to time. This is what we have chosen to defend, have been chosen to sacrifice our lives for. To preserve humanity, the feeble remains of the seething masses. We’re broken, you and I, the lonely relics of a proud race. We will stand, shoulder to shoulder, back to back, on the frontlines of this battle. We will fight. For our lives, for their lives, for the future, whatever its worth, we will fight. Fight and die and be forgotten. Like those who have brought us to this point. Die for the fleeting wish for existence. Die for the faint hope that we will prevail. Never has a battle been fought for something so insignificant, never has a battle been fought for something so profound. We were born to be heroes, you and I, that is our misfortune.

Good Enough For Me

But appaarantly not for Bobby McGee.


Lasts post’s poem was hint enough.

I’m so far to the left of normal I don’t remember when I left it behind. My dearest sacrifice is of course sleep. Isn’t it interesting how creative sleep disturbance can be in manifesting?

Always a new twist on an old story. A few days where time and again I refuse to wake up, avoid being awake as much as possible. Next, three days on a total of three hours of assorted dozing, trying to get away with as little shut eye as possible.

Eyes burning temper flaring, I am so on edge. Tired but I don’t want to sleep and I don’t know why. Certainly not out of affection for the way the lack of sleep makes me feel.

Angry and resentful and so fucking sad. Me, junk food, Ms. Joplin and Ms. Stone.

I’m craving a book, a good piece of fiction that will hold me hostage. For some reason people’s recommendations keep falling flat. Something that will hold my increasingly fickle attention.

As usual my concentration is shot to hell. I can’t focus and my senses are feeling the strain of my deficiencies. At this point I’m not entirely certain that I am adhering to the rules of grammar and spelling.

Even my vocabulary seems to be cracking under the pressure. It feels like I’m experiencing some kind of aphasia, words that once came easily are dancing teasingly out of reach.

My feet were too dirty so I gave them a lavender soak with the works, bath salts and bath oils, essence and cream.

I think I’m going to bed now even though part of me doesn’t want to give in to reason.

I think Tarantino is only halfway a hack but I hate the arrogance of his pronouncing the Italian cinema dead. What a prick.

Running on Fumes

I have a secret. It’s big bad and tearing me apart. I’ve been living with it for so long and I am so fucking tired of hiding it away. It’s not shame that’s making me hide it; choice was mine I’d shout it from the roof tops. It’s just so powerful; it has the power to ruin everything. I’d rather have it eat away at me than destroy the people I love and the life I’ve built. I wish people wouldn’t give it the power they do. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to live as myself, no lies no pretence no apologies. What would feel like to just let go, stop clenching my teeth and blurt it out. I love my family, love my people, but sometimes I hate them so fucking much. The anger, the resentment, the fear, it just builds and sometimes I feel like I’m going to burst. I have a secret and it’s tearing me apart.


Insomniac by Sylvia Plath

The night is only a sort of carbon paper,
Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars
Letting in the light, peephole after peephole . . .
A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.
Under the eyes of the stars and the moon's rictus
He suffers his desert pillow, sleeplessness
Stretching its fine, irritating sand in all directions.

Over and over the old, granular movie
Exposes embarrassments--the mizzling days
Of childhood and adolescence, sticky with dreams,
Parental faces on tall stalks, alternately stern and tearful,
A garden of buggy rose that made him cry.
His forehead is bumpy as a sack of rocks.
Memories jostle each other for face-room like obsolete film stars.

He is immune to pills: red, purple, blue . . .
How they lit the tedium of the protracted evening!
Those sugary planets whose influence won for him
A life baptized in no-life for a while,
And the sweet, drugged waking of a forgetful baby.
Now the pills are worn-out and silly, like classical gods.
Their poppy-sleepy colors do him no good.

His head is a little interior of grey mirrors.
Each gesture flees immediately down an alley
Of diminishing perspectives, and its significance
Drains like water out the hole at the far end.
He lives without privacy in a lidless room,
The bald slots of his eyes stiffened wide-open
On the incessant heat-lightning flicker of situations.

Nightlong, in the granite yard, invisible cats
Have been howling like women, or damaged instruments.
Already he can feel daylight, his white disease,
Creeping up with her hatful of trivial repetitions.
The city is a map of cheerful twitters now,
And everywhere people, eyes mica-silver and blank,
Are riding to work in rows, as if recently brainwashed.

I'm Just Saying

I hate that I’m 22 and still afraid of growing up. I hate that I still refer to being an adult as growing up. I hate that I have absolutely how to be an adult.

I dislike that it’s very hard for me to end things with a friend I no longer trust and with whom I have a cycle of growing and waning resentment. I dislike the fact that I feel a lot of unresolved and unspecified anxiety. I dislike that I don’t photograph well.

I like that I am probably not a stereotype. I like that I am intellectually curious. I like that I am not narrow minded. I like that I am probably not boring.

I don’t know that I love anything about myself.

Please, no pep talk, just… yeah. I don't need anything positive or supportive, just stating things.

In other news, watching Life on Mars, and enjoying it immensely. A police officer is involved in an accident, and wakes up in 1973. He has no idea what’s going on, no one else seems to think that anything is going on. I admit my favorite parts are the music and the protagonist’s emotional and psychological deterioration.

Also, can you believe that a year has passed since this post?