Just for a minute...
Pain sprouts tenfold, in the form of blue fire weaving into a red-orange, and slides up the contours of my body. I begin to see an ocean of sunlight - it claws at the dust and sets me ablaze, a tsunami of stars grazing upon my lips, the metallic taste of blood, the sinking of teeth. It rushes forth. I gulp it down. I almost falter. The waves hum into a reluctant stop, foam bidding farewell under my toes, after quite a while. And the choking of tears / the worship of love / caresses my cheek / before I wake up.
I caught you, and I thought you were the most beautiful, of reminiscence and of prophecies, and I dreamed, exalted, to think I could eschew the present - and myself. I thought you neither the lion nor the lamb, but the wind shushing me up against my indifference and my arrogance, washing anew in circulations, and making me care when maybe you don't.
And sometimes I wish all of us couldn't utter a word, shan't speak, shan't sing, and just watch behind a web of shard glass the way we all exaggerate and act as a messy hyperbole. And isn't it embarrassing! to replace the ellipses with more of them; the chalk dust is waiting under my feet, shuffling, carrying on, under their feet, under everybody else's soles; I am speechless
and mute
and my lips are
stitched close
.
It was a Monday - or a Tuesday... or just a day - and your hands were all like ice, frosted metacarpal bones, deadly ridges, shivers and lightning, but enough like a revolutionary wave of heat to my delight. Your heart and your lungs subjugated mine, a wistfulness chattering somewhere in between, but it was of my own volition that I succumbed to your pulse and got lost in it. And it was chaste - the timing and the movement - and I am curling into your cadence and the incandescent stars in your voice, breathing upon planes of revelations, mercy at hand with ravage in mind. Clumps of magma are smoking around me, falling apart into rain, and the smell of burnt trees wafts in the air, and I realize all these are me.
Monday, January 28, 2013
Friday, January 18, 2013
Gray Umbrellas
Weariness, clouded but thundering like the gloomy day across town, hung on lints on her shoulders, a sniffing set in place with the rhythmic tap of heels in the driveway, calculating the distances, and breaking off into a slow walk, umbrella open in hand. The letter, smooth and rough under her hands, crumpled against the wind, and her lips liked the kiss of weather, but it wanted more the kiss of rest.
It was morning, and she had dreamed all night. But this was a different kind of dreaming, lest she forget how to gather her wool; she had felt the world around her in glances of the moon, and a slumbering monsoon, and dreamed with her eye open. Consolidating the day after that with augurs, she had pushed the worries of the back of her mind further into the corner, and instead sang her sorrow with a couple of handwritten missives and calligraphy. Then she walked a little quicker, rapid breaths unwanted but aware by her chest, and cursed for she forgot her phone in the haste reverie. Though she didn't stop, and continued petting her letters like they were altogether the furriest dog.
One consolation for today, Monday, was not that she had skipped class, for it was never truly a consolation to her, but was that the ground was wet and the sky was fraught with the omen of more rainfall. She liked the town wet and less crowded, and umbrellas and raincoats in splashes of drearily whispering colors, the smell of silent rain infiltrating her and enrapturing her in a call, as if she belonged in the arms of clouds adhering to climate and weather, as if her love were but a drop of singular water in the gutter. She felt like her walk by the garden was harmless and just... just perfectly innocuous, like the rainy days were her sunny days, flowers blooming by every second in her peripheral vision. The papers in her hands trembled, antsy, in her hands, and maybe this was the reason why she had dreamed in hopes of escaping - to eschew the rules of life's game and distance.
She had written to someone who would understand, hopefully, once again what she was going through. It was a long story, beginning somewhere sunnier and dryer, and fell into sagas she hid back in her heart. Maybe someday it shall be blunt against everyone's faces, but it wasn't in that moment, so she shrunk in the Doomsdaylike palette of the outside world and furled her hands onto the hem of her coat, trying to think of something else.
Another skip of the heartbeat when she almost slipped on the pavement. Raindrops endeavored to mollify the lines of anguish in her face, to no avail, and just a serious swipe of the back of her hand, white and cold.
A juddering palpitation hitched up her throat; leaves scattered on the road, the wind swirled around her bun, and the hairs on her nape stood. Her brow had dampened with sweat, almost inconspicuously, and paranoia made her eyes glance left and right. The air suddenly tasted stiff, and she swore she had just seen a glimmer of sunshine in the midst of the austere death by the following corner.
....
It was morning, and she had dreamed all night. But this was a different kind of dreaming, lest she forget how to gather her wool; she had felt the world around her in glances of the moon, and a slumbering monsoon, and dreamed with her eye open. Consolidating the day after that with augurs, she had pushed the worries of the back of her mind further into the corner, and instead sang her sorrow with a couple of handwritten missives and calligraphy. Then she walked a little quicker, rapid breaths unwanted but aware by her chest, and cursed for she forgot her phone in the haste reverie. Though she didn't stop, and continued petting her letters like they were altogether the furriest dog.
One consolation for today, Monday, was not that she had skipped class, for it was never truly a consolation to her, but was that the ground was wet and the sky was fraught with the omen of more rainfall. She liked the town wet and less crowded, and umbrellas and raincoats in splashes of drearily whispering colors, the smell of silent rain infiltrating her and enrapturing her in a call, as if she belonged in the arms of clouds adhering to climate and weather, as if her love were but a drop of singular water in the gutter. She felt like her walk by the garden was harmless and just... just perfectly innocuous, like the rainy days were her sunny days, flowers blooming by every second in her peripheral vision. The papers in her hands trembled, antsy, in her hands, and maybe this was the reason why she had dreamed in hopes of escaping - to eschew the rules of life's game and distance.
She had written to someone who would understand, hopefully, once again what she was going through. It was a long story, beginning somewhere sunnier and dryer, and fell into sagas she hid back in her heart. Maybe someday it shall be blunt against everyone's faces, but it wasn't in that moment, so she shrunk in the Doomsdaylike palette of the outside world and furled her hands onto the hem of her coat, trying to think of something else.
Another skip of the heartbeat when she almost slipped on the pavement. Raindrops endeavored to mollify the lines of anguish in her face, to no avail, and just a serious swipe of the back of her hand, white and cold.
A juddering palpitation hitched up her throat; leaves scattered on the road, the wind swirled around her bun, and the hairs on her nape stood. Her brow had dampened with sweat, almost inconspicuously, and paranoia made her eyes glance left and right. The air suddenly tasted stiff, and she swore she had just seen a glimmer of sunshine in the midst of the austere death by the following corner.
....
Saturday, January 12, 2013
It is an Art
He stalks steadily in the city, as flakes swirl in abundant showers. There is a slight fault in the silence that he quickly brushes off, trudging quietly on wet ground, shielding interest and effectively breathing in the collective subterfuge. One of many. Blending in with a composed expression, he meanders around bodies of warm and cold, keeping his hands to himself and holding on to that slip of light - that slip of heaven and promise folded in blissfully hushed tones. Phone booths are occupied, conversation is concise, and he seems to be doing good, but not good enough. He tries.
He sifts through gangs of people, leafing through them and pursing his lips, stoic blue eyes shining ever so lightly. The city blinks in pale colors. Skyscrapers tower intimidatingly, cars languidly maneuver and pass by, and a laugh or a snicker or a sigh may be heard from time to time. A gale of giggles bursts like jack-in-the-box at one point, and his eyes flicker to a blur of bright red faces to the nearest lamppost, seeing the light emanate in slow blinks. He starts to fasten his pace in bigger steps and avoid as much eyes he would like to evade, and he can still feel the sliver of light in the palm of his hand, curling around his frigid fingers, dancing on the tips. A pall stretches and hunches over the chit-chat of the streets, blowing in shorts of breath, shuddering across glass cases, and reaching in the corners of a funnily ordinary morning.
He, in fact, likes the mundane routine of it - the lack of excitement, the slackness of everyone around him, the tour of people as a river flowing through the city - because the reality of it just beckons for the hidden truth, so there's exponentially more potential things to do, no doubt. More excitement for him, all right. And the snow keeps falling perfectly on his hoodie and his shoes, concealing him in the absence of colors even more. He has stopped moving around and is standing by the door of a motel when the wind spares a kiss on his cheeks, and it's time to postpone on everyone's parade.
Darkness immerses everyone in an embrace. It isn't as comforting. Instead, it hovers and clothes in tides of murmurs, like the whole presentation of dark is esoteric. Because it might as well be and it might tend to be. A foliage of twinkling stars replace the clouds of snow, and he can feel the struggle and panic of everyone, so he sends a melody out into the dark city. With one hand, he colors a page with reveries of circus visits and weekend picnics, blending the pleasures with inks of dancing in the rain and slumber parties. The dark wavers a little so he leans back against the motel's dry facade. Then, with the other hand, he drums a little beat on his heart, and in a moment dark is life - not death - when his laugh trickles over his lips and falls into splashes of consequences. The hollow feeling of the darkness is now gone, replaced by a sense of something there that circles everyone in happy introductions. A friend in the gloom of the process of secrets.
The storm is almost shaking off. He looks up at the stars. In a quick flourish of a hand, a star jumps off from its cubicle, shooting off in insane directions like how an elephant reacts to the mere presence of a mingling mouse. He offers his hand up to the black ceiling, and catches the tiny little thing before it shoots off into an eternal distance he himself couldn't risk speeding up to. The interstice between the stars - as he has been taught - is an internal thing when it comes to doing the job of keeping reality closer to fantasy, but he enjoys the zap of a star against the boundaries of dark rooms, and of dark imagination, so he finds a star in lieu of developing one. It twinkles readily on the palm of his hand before funneling down into a gleam in the eye, and he allows himself a smile of content among all this.
He passes a beatific dream across the walls, tightening his fingers around the clasps of veins. With the star transmitted into both his hands, he heaves the power of numbness into the impervious brick walls of the dark, and soon he hears everyone's strained sounds of panic dwindle into momentary confusion, then dizziness. The darkness is blanching. With a twist, a manageable rectangle of the wall turns into a door, and he rummages in a typhoon of supplies to get what he needs. Brandishing a drenched clump of ruined letters from the halcyon days... or years, he uses up a bit more effort to close the door and seal it again.
He does, and before the remaining waves of the dark empty into a speck in space, he clashes with a couple of do-it-yourself stars and draws a thin veil over the brimming majority of them. The sky of stars transforms into still flakes in a beat. And all the letters - they fly out of his hands in paper airplanes and plaster over the dark. They all manage to cover everything up, some excessively toppling over others, but that's okay.
With a hand's run across space, reality is completely risen once again, and the numbness and the panic are nowhere to be found. But the boy is not in our presence anymore; he has gone off to follow up on imperative deadlines.
Only people in the city are recorded this day, but with more music, kissing snow, and love and family letters read over steaming cups. The phone booths are no longer occupied because people now have what they were once missing.
The flakes fall more sluggishly through the air in artful spirals.
He sifts through gangs of people, leafing through them and pursing his lips, stoic blue eyes shining ever so lightly. The city blinks in pale colors. Skyscrapers tower intimidatingly, cars languidly maneuver and pass by, and a laugh or a snicker or a sigh may be heard from time to time. A gale of giggles bursts like jack-in-the-box at one point, and his eyes flicker to a blur of bright red faces to the nearest lamppost, seeing the light emanate in slow blinks. He starts to fasten his pace in bigger steps and avoid as much eyes he would like to evade, and he can still feel the sliver of light in the palm of his hand, curling around his frigid fingers, dancing on the tips. A pall stretches and hunches over the chit-chat of the streets, blowing in shorts of breath, shuddering across glass cases, and reaching in the corners of a funnily ordinary morning.
He, in fact, likes the mundane routine of it - the lack of excitement, the slackness of everyone around him, the tour of people as a river flowing through the city - because the reality of it just beckons for the hidden truth, so there's exponentially more potential things to do, no doubt. More excitement for him, all right. And the snow keeps falling perfectly on his hoodie and his shoes, concealing him in the absence of colors even more. He has stopped moving around and is standing by the door of a motel when the wind spares a kiss on his cheeks, and it's time to postpone on everyone's parade.
Darkness immerses everyone in an embrace. It isn't as comforting. Instead, it hovers and clothes in tides of murmurs, like the whole presentation of dark is esoteric. Because it might as well be and it might tend to be. A foliage of twinkling stars replace the clouds of snow, and he can feel the struggle and panic of everyone, so he sends a melody out into the dark city. With one hand, he colors a page with reveries of circus visits and weekend picnics, blending the pleasures with inks of dancing in the rain and slumber parties. The dark wavers a little so he leans back against the motel's dry facade. Then, with the other hand, he drums a little beat on his heart, and in a moment dark is life - not death - when his laugh trickles over his lips and falls into splashes of consequences. The hollow feeling of the darkness is now gone, replaced by a sense of something there that circles everyone in happy introductions. A friend in the gloom of the process of secrets.
The storm is almost shaking off. He looks up at the stars. In a quick flourish of a hand, a star jumps off from its cubicle, shooting off in insane directions like how an elephant reacts to the mere presence of a mingling mouse. He offers his hand up to the black ceiling, and catches the tiny little thing before it shoots off into an eternal distance he himself couldn't risk speeding up to. The interstice between the stars - as he has been taught - is an internal thing when it comes to doing the job of keeping reality closer to fantasy, but he enjoys the zap of a star against the boundaries of dark rooms, and of dark imagination, so he finds a star in lieu of developing one. It twinkles readily on the palm of his hand before funneling down into a gleam in the eye, and he allows himself a smile of content among all this.
He passes a beatific dream across the walls, tightening his fingers around the clasps of veins. With the star transmitted into both his hands, he heaves the power of numbness into the impervious brick walls of the dark, and soon he hears everyone's strained sounds of panic dwindle into momentary confusion, then dizziness. The darkness is blanching. With a twist, a manageable rectangle of the wall turns into a door, and he rummages in a typhoon of supplies to get what he needs. Brandishing a drenched clump of ruined letters from the halcyon days... or years, he uses up a bit more effort to close the door and seal it again.
He does, and before the remaining waves of the dark empty into a speck in space, he clashes with a couple of do-it-yourself stars and draws a thin veil over the brimming majority of them. The sky of stars transforms into still flakes in a beat. And all the letters - they fly out of his hands in paper airplanes and plaster over the dark. They all manage to cover everything up, some excessively toppling over others, but that's okay.
With a hand's run across space, reality is completely risen once again, and the numbness and the panic are nowhere to be found. But the boy is not in our presence anymore; he has gone off to follow up on imperative deadlines.
Only people in the city are recorded this day, but with more music, kissing snow, and love and family letters read over steaming cups. The phone booths are no longer occupied because people now have what they were once missing.
The flakes fall more sluggishly through the air in artful spirals.
Friday, January 11, 2013
Elusive and Irrational
A colossal amount of foam down my throat, and the sandpaper scratch of sand in the chimneys of my lungs. A crash of luminescence, and a seasick smile with anchor tips. The screech of midnight ripples through salty sea water, and the keys to an adept pianist's piano, the almost soothing tumble of blood in my ears, the right moment. A blur of tight colors, like azure and the color of the dark, brash and churlish but prudish and pursed in amount, a sigh and a shout and a duck into the hallway of humanity.
A peephole to peer into, and bevies of clouds awash with buoyant stars. A clap of thunder and the smite of lightning, hearing me throughout my lonely tirades. The dominant influence of tides and time. Acquiescing my instinct, sleeping like a madman, boring holes of thought in actions. A hacking, and a burning, and a kinship - a clandestine exploration and a destructive miracle in the swings and sways of loving and missing and realization and profound misery as deep as physical punctures. Maligning the stars, the moon, the sun, you, me, and I squint so I could almost hold on to strands of fluid flame. A pint of madness, an accusing finger, and a march to a conclusion. A prologue to the world, the mind, an accolade to the gods.
This is the promise of the sea. And this is the promise of Life.
A peephole to peer into, and bevies of clouds awash with buoyant stars. A clap of thunder and the smite of lightning, hearing me throughout my lonely tirades. The dominant influence of tides and time. Acquiescing my instinct, sleeping like a madman, boring holes of thought in actions. A hacking, and a burning, and a kinship - a clandestine exploration and a destructive miracle in the swings and sways of loving and missing and realization and profound misery as deep as physical punctures. Maligning the stars, the moon, the sun, you, me, and I squint so I could almost hold on to strands of fluid flame. A pint of madness, an accusing finger, and a march to a conclusion. A prologue to the world, the mind, an accolade to the gods.
This is the promise of the sea. And this is the promise of Life.
Monday, January 7, 2013
Catatonic Bites
(In The Dark)
Roaming around the stewing seconds of midnight's feverishly loquacious hum, I venture out into the dark abyss of what is called the pantry, then shut it a tad too loudly with my knees and search for that bowl of barbecue-flavored french fries I adopted over from Midge's sister's birthday party. The microwave won't start this time but I still proceed to carry the fries over to my mess of a room, and almost slide (and gasp in surprise) in front of a Persian kitten due to its adorable size and untimely apperance before my bedroom door. My room is a box of tossed colors. I dress my cocoon of a bed with one of the two blankets I just got from the laundry this morning and burrow my shoulders in a recess of plush pillows and wool blankets, my nose fairly runny and the night strolling with the autumn chill pressing against my windowpane.
Then the midnight really sinks in, gregarious and hospitable in my heart, and I am not even halfway done with Toy Story 2 when the walls begin to close in, in a slow manner as I sniff my way to sleep. I faintly remember the scratch of my blanket's coarse patches against my right cheek, and my breath dipping into drones of anticipating snoring.
I dream of an ardor, cracking and creaking like a fireplace in a heart, ramshackle and barely visible but there. A nerve of agitation hangs unsteadily in swift swings atop this heart. An unconscious and tenuous sigh makes its way out of me, out into the dark, falling in the sweetness of pancake syrup, chafing and biting on my feet like five o'clock shadow. And in my dream I am innocuously sitting directly before the fireplace, my cheeks feeling aglow in my hands. A foliage of lackadaisical stars and dancing curtains obscures a kind of pain in a dreamy half-sleep, and the autumn outside morphs into an inclement weather - a tumult of white winter documentaries - like a promise sealed in favorable transformation. I struggle to find solace yet consciousness in a snug, partite chronicle.
A keenly exquisite pang of pain reverberates in the leaping fire. It is marginally extinguished as it playfully hops and flies around my head, dulling into twinges of childhood memories in my ears, and successfully tuning the dream to a vision of myself dozing off. The heart looks quite pensive, when I think of it, but in a way catatonic (not seen through the eyes, but the dream, and the slowly beating heart). There comes a myriad of bites of shedding dark in the light of my dream, rowing oars forgetting how to row, and a pair of svelte dancers falling to their knees and throats. My hands shift to shoo the silhouettes of nightmarish semblances away, deep back into the origami dream structure, but when I shudder awake the bites aren't immediately found throughout my arms and legs. They are deeply set in my heart that I did not know was also especially intoxicated with the dousing of warmth and the heralding of cold.
I myself feel (and am) disgruntled. My eyes adjust to golden rays of sunlight in the morning, and my movie, snack, and cat are not in my room. I stretch and stir in blankets of freezing temperature, my stomach, my memory, my lungs, and my comfort empty then vanishing altogether. I stare blearily at the ceiling for a good twenty minutes, then another ten at the floor with trepidation, because the cracks and creaks of the broken fireplace are now in the creacks and gaping maws of the floor.
Or what may be underneath it.
Wednesday, January 2, 2013
Light and Blood
har·le·quin
There is a stark juxtaposition. It mingles coquettishly. It drums as soft as a heartbeat in filtering sunlight, the morning a steady stir on shadowed sheets and pillows. First and foremost, there is light - almost like the color of doves alongside a church at noon, almost like the nauseous whirr of hospital gowns. But it is dawn, a moody, ghoulish dawn, and light is scarce and muddled with edges of suffocating dark in a harlequin's smile.
It is like a daze, a daydream, and a high-pitched laugh running through fields of rice, conjured up with the defying help of a handful of affairs of escapism - the humming and droning of a radio. The harlequin's hair is spunky and fiery in a sleepy amber light that topples over ridges of encyclopedias and cosmetics rolling over each other in drizzles of paper cutouts. Powder is tinted on cheeks and ears of wavering red in time. The harlequin likes the spasmic route of cream and roses and cows over the moon in the little attention she strikes her cheekbones with. Her countenance is then briefly masqueraded, albeit only awhile as there is still a couple of hours before she stations herself.
Our harlequin's breath is tinged with nearly indistinguishable lines of coy and demure desires. It hangs patiently on an impish smile, before given permission to cascade over her lengthy reflection in a sigh that ventures with bits of soul. She nips at her cherry lip and shades her eyelids with smoke, rising up from her chair in juddering beats. She is made of light, her fingertips lined with butter from popcorn and laminated photographs in photo albums.
Her shoulders are overly taut under the sunrise's soft gaze. She awkwardly shuffles her feet across the floor to check on her smile again, but it's a hundred blinks and breaths too late. Light and blood and sandpaper and lunch boxes and inner monologues are never the best components of a clown's potpourri, or at least of her performance's potpourri. And strawberries are self-served on ceramic dishes, but our harlequin is parched for light and blood only. She is left to ruminate about these in the timeless stillness of her room, quite an interim between breathing and doing, before she is given the choice to choose between (1) performing and (2) being.
[hahr-luh-kwin, -kin]
noun
1.
( often initial capital letter ) a comic character in commedia dell'arte and the harlequinade, usually masked, dressed in multicolored, diamond-patterned tights, and carrying a wooden sword or magic wand.
There is a stark juxtaposition. It mingles coquettishly. It drums as soft as a heartbeat in filtering sunlight, the morning a steady stir on shadowed sheets and pillows. First and foremost, there is light - almost like the color of doves alongside a church at noon, almost like the nauseous whirr of hospital gowns. But it is dawn, a moody, ghoulish dawn, and light is scarce and muddled with edges of suffocating dark in a harlequin's smile.
It is like a daze, a daydream, and a high-pitched laugh running through fields of rice, conjured up with the defying help of a handful of affairs of escapism - the humming and droning of a radio. The harlequin's hair is spunky and fiery in a sleepy amber light that topples over ridges of encyclopedias and cosmetics rolling over each other in drizzles of paper cutouts. Powder is tinted on cheeks and ears of wavering red in time. The harlequin likes the spasmic route of cream and roses and cows over the moon in the little attention she strikes her cheekbones with. Her countenance is then briefly masqueraded, albeit only awhile as there is still a couple of hours before she stations herself.
Our harlequin's breath is tinged with nearly indistinguishable lines of coy and demure desires. It hangs patiently on an impish smile, before given permission to cascade over her lengthy reflection in a sigh that ventures with bits of soul. She nips at her cherry lip and shades her eyelids with smoke, rising up from her chair in juddering beats. She is made of light, her fingertips lined with butter from popcorn and laminated photographs in photo albums.
Her shoulders are overly taut under the sunrise's soft gaze. She awkwardly shuffles her feet across the floor to check on her smile again, but it's a hundred blinks and breaths too late. Light and blood and sandpaper and lunch boxes and inner monologues are never the best components of a clown's potpourri, or at least of her performance's potpourri. And strawberries are self-served on ceramic dishes, but our harlequin is parched for light and blood only. She is left to ruminate about these in the timeless stillness of her room, quite an interim between breathing and doing, before she is given the choice to choose between (1) performing and (2) being.
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