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.
Sunday, December 30, 2012
Crisscrossing Vehicles
I don't think I can really ink myself into words the way an author prints his characters from his blood, gives them eccentricities and flaws of their own, and they spring out from prose like gorgeous butterflies and flowers. I just feel too nonplussed and alien too often, as if the air tastes too disparate on my taste buds, or the room I choose to ensconce myself in is home but not. I try to reach out for more words that could concisely articulate the way I am and become, but I can't, and there are always other people's words that do concoct me into being. And I feel too much like a machine. If I could thread my tears into sentences, I would, and I would sleep on them - a collected ocean of bewilderment and pain I hope not to drown in - because what I am beams through my pores but I am lost at sail with little to treat myself to.
I itch at myself like an irritating denouement that claws at the classy lass in the front row. My set is crazy and intriguingly perplexing and, actually, downright scary because nobody wants shows splayed out messy.
Emotions are pendulously reaching out in pantomime and non-pantomime masks and gloves, eerily mysterious. An actor runs pell-mell into her lover, but alas the curtians draw and the clock strikes the audience's heart with brash care. The lights flicker erroneously and people murmur in bemusement. Accusations of an erratically disappointing end runs through the night. And by the morrow, critics have published the unbelievable truth in their critiques.
The lass gasps in her vermilion blush, and things like these are embarrassingly unsatisfying and unwanted as she stalks away with only the imprint of a disgusting end in her head, and papers of blue ink tumble recklessly into the streets. To think she expected a grander end!
And to think she was so rapt in her seat! She had taken notes that glided fluently and mellifluously out till somebody struck the wrong chord, and now the news flies unlike her fresh reports that are left to dry negligently in the summer sun. People either choose to read the newspaper articles apathetically, as if stopping by only to read the first line with only a pint of interest, or confusingly.
The latter is a majority that sits on a sun-drenched table, and has been planning to take a night to watch the drama or has already ridden through the drama in some other town. These people let themselves gasp in the billowing steam of their coffee mugs. They care, even if not too much. They are famished and voracious for at least a more thorough and reasonable explanation for this mishap. They crave bouts of reasons from the production's personage - the actors, the director, anybody.
Here is my mistake. Take notice - I myself am not a denouement. I am still here, fourteen, earthly, and breathing, and prone to illness and accidents and naivette and whatever a teenager my age can catch, and will still be prone to obtaining when a teenager no more. I am not a show and I am not for show. People don't pay entrance fees to see me, and people don't write about me in rooms like I try to. I do not perform for them. But I am human, and I believe I consist of universes that hold stories I can't imagine, and I try to pour them out as soon as possible although I know this isn't the end. If I think there is an end, the end is not what I think it seems. It is a beginning.
So I release these feelings and curiosities out. Oh, I try my best. Let's say the process of wringing them out is over for a while. I publish, because I want my future self to know that these are how her fourteen self feels. These are all in text, but to me they aren't just text, or language, or vocabulary. This problematic flow of thoughts are coalesced from furor and envy and anxiety, and the aspring part of me crawls in this fetal position, and it is always too late for me to know that what is eating me up is myself.
Two of those paragraphs end in italicized words. And this is the comparison, or the similarity rather: I, myself, can be anybody. I can just be the memory of a face, a stranger, to you. You, who I am presuming is not related to me by blood, can detach yourself from my frustration and my garbling of my own actions. But I, a soul that dreams, am glued to this mind and the protocol of mundane life, unless something or someone changes it drastically as to twist it (which, I know, is highly improbable). I am stapled to multiplying series of connection and waking up and falling asleep and traversing through school. And as I write, here, in the strokes of time, I am my own audience. I regard you and I know you are part of everything and anything you choose to be part of; hey, you're reading this right now! But I am that stern part of the audience that is open but unmistakenly strict in the criticizing of the art of expressing oneself. I tense upon my own scrutinizing look.
I am the aspiring character in my blood (although it may just be a penchant and a penchant only), and the part that carries these cells? The critic. The entirety of this entry may as well just have been fueled by my bursting frustration for myself. I analyze myself too much, maybe, but that is what carries this whole parade throughout the streets of this blog. When an engine coughs out its last breath and the parade screeches terribly into the disarray of a stop, that is when I stop.
But the show must go on, right?
I itch at myself like an irritating denouement that claws at the classy lass in the front row. My set is crazy and intriguingly perplexing and, actually, downright scary because nobody wants shows splayed out messy.
Emotions are pendulously reaching out in pantomime and non-pantomime masks and gloves, eerily mysterious. An actor runs pell-mell into her lover, but alas the curtians draw and the clock strikes the audience's heart with brash care. The lights flicker erroneously and people murmur in bemusement. Accusations of an erratically disappointing end runs through the night. And by the morrow, critics have published the unbelievable truth in their critiques.
The lass gasps in her vermilion blush, and things like these are embarrassingly unsatisfying and unwanted as she stalks away with only the imprint of a disgusting end in her head, and papers of blue ink tumble recklessly into the streets. To think she expected a grander end!
And to think she was so rapt in her seat! She had taken notes that glided fluently and mellifluously out till somebody struck the wrong chord, and now the news flies unlike her fresh reports that are left to dry negligently in the summer sun. People either choose to read the newspaper articles apathetically, as if stopping by only to read the first line with only a pint of interest, or confusingly.
The latter is a majority that sits on a sun-drenched table, and has been planning to take a night to watch the drama or has already ridden through the drama in some other town. These people let themselves gasp in the billowing steam of their coffee mugs. They care, even if not too much. They are famished and voracious for at least a more thorough and reasonable explanation for this mishap. They crave bouts of reasons from the production's personage - the actors, the director, anybody.
Here is my mistake. Take notice - I myself am not a denouement. I am still here, fourteen, earthly, and breathing, and prone to illness and accidents and naivette and whatever a teenager my age can catch, and will still be prone to obtaining when a teenager no more. I am not a show and I am not for show. People don't pay entrance fees to see me, and people don't write about me in rooms like I try to. I do not perform for them. But I am human, and I believe I consist of universes that hold stories I can't imagine, and I try to pour them out as soon as possible although I know this isn't the end. If I think there is an end, the end is not what I think it seems. It is a beginning.
So I release these feelings and curiosities out. Oh, I try my best. Let's say the process of wringing them out is over for a while. I publish, because I want my future self to know that these are how her fourteen self feels. These are all in text, but to me they aren't just text, or language, or vocabulary. This problematic flow of thoughts are coalesced from furor and envy and anxiety, and the aspring part of me crawls in this fetal position, and it is always too late for me to know that what is eating me up is myself.
Two of those paragraphs end in italicized words. And this is the comparison, or the similarity rather: I, myself, can be anybody. I can just be the memory of a face, a stranger, to you. You, who I am presuming is not related to me by blood, can detach yourself from my frustration and my garbling of my own actions. But I, a soul that dreams, am glued to this mind and the protocol of mundane life, unless something or someone changes it drastically as to twist it (which, I know, is highly improbable). I am stapled to multiplying series of connection and waking up and falling asleep and traversing through school. And as I write, here, in the strokes of time, I am my own audience. I regard you and I know you are part of everything and anything you choose to be part of; hey, you're reading this right now! But I am that stern part of the audience that is open but unmistakenly strict in the criticizing of the art of expressing oneself. I tense upon my own scrutinizing look.
I am the aspiring character in my blood (although it may just be a penchant and a penchant only), and the part that carries these cells? The critic. The entirety of this entry may as well just have been fueled by my bursting frustration for myself. I analyze myself too much, maybe, but that is what carries this whole parade throughout the streets of this blog. When an engine coughs out its last breath and the parade screeches terribly into the disarray of a stop, that is when I stop.
But the show must go on, right?
Thursday, December 27, 2012
Affairs and Fevers
She rises up from the waves of her sheets with mist running from the windowsill and her backbone and neck treated badly, thus she misplaces herself first as she accidentally knocks over a few books when she trips forward. Looking down, after barely catching a crisp bestseller and J.D. Salinger, she fishes another book off from the carpet and deposits it back on its respective shelf along with the other two. Stretching her arms, she returns to proceeding to the bathroom, then to the kitchen where she shakes up coffee for herself, and for herself only.
Later she proudly dons her favorite pair of sneakers - the ones with traces of pristine white and laces of sunshine yellow. Like the wannabe stylist she is, she dolls herself up with a cardigan of red and white spots, choosing a scarf of light pink to conceal her rosy neck. She feels rather—this she won't convey to you over a loaf of any kind of bread—ancient, with a band of fake gold twisted around a wrist, a dangling clock laced around her neck, and the tattoo of her heart shimmering against her fabric, coffee pumping like a fever in her veins and the outside frost already dancing across her lips. She feels ancient, because this dormitory is cluttered with mummies—she knows it—and her sketchbook is ancient as she hefts it into her adroit hands, fables pressed and shaded into spirals and jaws. Ancient, ancient, ancient.
She wants to smell like roses before she does pancakes, so she meanders down the corridor, through the quiet campus, and through the front doors of her college and skulks stealthily around blocks and into her parents' garden. She doesn't knock on the door of her parents' house because they would still surely be soundly asleep, and she owns a key to their garden, imparted to her with trust. She enjoys the lilies and petunias for a few minutes, blindly touching them as if she could feel their color, then she passes by lovelier flowers and crouches before the roses, tempted to touch their thorns... but she doesn't. Stalking down a path and locking herself out the garden, she stares at the house awhile and takes glimpses back at the flowers, then leaves, hunching a little like a shadow in an alley.
The brilliance of the morning touches her. Her cheeks are hot and her heart is enamored with the wintry sunrise, the horizon fleetingly showing off pleasant hues of entwined purple and orange. Her breath meeting library glass doors spreads out as she enters to join in trysts of exasperated love and formidable dragons, her feet barreling her forward into a world of mystifying battles and benign mistletoe appearances (much to her chagrin). She dips her aching toes into the throes of stories, and in the middle of a delicious afternoon she signs herself up for deliberately written adventure and tantalizingly giddy romance. The clock in her heart is ticking by. She excuses herself from her friend, the librarian, and whisks herself into the skittish streets of New York, bearing a cup of chocolate on the way to art class.
Her thoughts are shrouded with unabated dragon fire, dashing around the seams of her sanity, which she has checked are not so grim with an okay disposition. She sits atop the cusp of a menagerie of puerile thoughts, illustrious words and elegant illustrations sighing in the wind and washing into her ears. And as magical and dizzying as it sounds, she wishes there were more so their number could pass the count of her sun-ups and sun-downs, her childhood acquaintances, and her pet bird feathers combined.
Prim as she is, she bends crookedly, and her smile is halfway perfunctory, the curls and lines of it being trailed with ragged accuracy and mischief. She has days of runny noses and days of sobbing that twist into dry, deserted pages and haphazardly tossed away assignments, but her tousled hair from the jungle of her plain bed is a halo drizzling upon her figure, and the roars, howls, and all there is in wildlife heaped in her windpipe are not useless at all. She is chiseled to become the warrior she is, just you wait. When you look at the clock and you gather it is midnight, a Rubicon, a incipient ultimatum, will shrivel up around her, and she'll no longer have to ready herself for the next round in the ring.
Because then she'll be the triumphant queen, looming over you, her hands—feeling mind-bogglingly too close and human—a guide and a touch of knowing, the glimmer in her frosty eyes a message and a tinkle of jest. Saying. Canting, in the same way she tilts her chin up. Painstakingly testing. Always trying. To render,
,
,
,
Fight.
Later she proudly dons her favorite pair of sneakers - the ones with traces of pristine white and laces of sunshine yellow. Like the wannabe stylist she is, she dolls herself up with a cardigan of red and white spots, choosing a scarf of light pink to conceal her rosy neck. She feels rather—this she won't convey to you over a loaf of any kind of bread—ancient, with a band of fake gold twisted around a wrist, a dangling clock laced around her neck, and the tattoo of her heart shimmering against her fabric, coffee pumping like a fever in her veins and the outside frost already dancing across her lips. She feels ancient, because this dormitory is cluttered with mummies—she knows it—and her sketchbook is ancient as she hefts it into her adroit hands, fables pressed and shaded into spirals and jaws. Ancient, ancient, ancient.
She wants to smell like roses before she does pancakes, so she meanders down the corridor, through the quiet campus, and through the front doors of her college and skulks stealthily around blocks and into her parents' garden. She doesn't knock on the door of her parents' house because they would still surely be soundly asleep, and she owns a key to their garden, imparted to her with trust. She enjoys the lilies and petunias for a few minutes, blindly touching them as if she could feel their color, then she passes by lovelier flowers and crouches before the roses, tempted to touch their thorns... but she doesn't. Stalking down a path and locking herself out the garden, she stares at the house awhile and takes glimpses back at the flowers, then leaves, hunching a little like a shadow in an alley.
The brilliance of the morning touches her. Her cheeks are hot and her heart is enamored with the wintry sunrise, the horizon fleetingly showing off pleasant hues of entwined purple and orange. Her breath meeting library glass doors spreads out as she enters to join in trysts of exasperated love and formidable dragons, her feet barreling her forward into a world of mystifying battles and benign mistletoe appearances (much to her chagrin). She dips her aching toes into the throes of stories, and in the middle of a delicious afternoon she signs herself up for deliberately written adventure and tantalizingly giddy romance. The clock in her heart is ticking by. She excuses herself from her friend, the librarian, and whisks herself into the skittish streets of New York, bearing a cup of chocolate on the way to art class.
Her thoughts are shrouded with unabated dragon fire, dashing around the seams of her sanity, which she has checked are not so grim with an okay disposition. She sits atop the cusp of a menagerie of puerile thoughts, illustrious words and elegant illustrations sighing in the wind and washing into her ears. And as magical and dizzying as it sounds, she wishes there were more so their number could pass the count of her sun-ups and sun-downs, her childhood acquaintances, and her pet bird feathers combined.
Prim as she is, she bends crookedly, and her smile is halfway perfunctory, the curls and lines of it being trailed with ragged accuracy and mischief. She has days of runny noses and days of sobbing that twist into dry, deserted pages and haphazardly tossed away assignments, but her tousled hair from the jungle of her plain bed is a halo drizzling upon her figure, and the roars, howls, and all there is in wildlife heaped in her windpipe are not useless at all. She is chiseled to become the warrior she is, just you wait. When you look at the clock and you gather it is midnight, a Rubicon, a incipient ultimatum, will shrivel up around her, and she'll no longer have to ready herself for the next round in the ring.
Because then she'll be the triumphant queen, looming over you, her hands—feeling mind-bogglingly too close and human—a guide and a touch of knowing, the glimmer in her frosty eyes a message and a tinkle of jest. Saying. Canting, in the same way she tilts her chin up. Painstakingly testing. Always trying. To render,
,
,
,
Fight.
Sunday, December 23, 2012
One Solstice
Macabre sloshes of black and red, imbued with the sting of chlorine, crust the constellations on my fingers with death finely. This is the mirage I envelope through the mail, under the pretense of a cop. I sleuth easily through summer heat, sliding through windows with autumn leaves hanging on to me, graying through winter solstice. I flourish in tendrils of dreams and the hasty flutter of hands. I hoard a graveyard of past misery, and my name printed fresh in the obituary sometimes vexes me.
I sleep upon pinpricks of elusive hurt, but the fictitious touch of hot and unabashed skin against flushed ice makes it bearable by the hour. I skid, often utterly unintentional, in between monochromatic strokes of the taste of rain and night. I tend to scratch at the spines of chatoyant light, sighing out, shrieking out, prisms of need. But there goes the beckoning shadow of a once tangible sun—it slaps me at the back of my head and shovels me into the recesses of my mind. Exclusive, only to the sprites that have chosen to abandon ship. And I hear the resounding laughter of demons in my heart, where all my farewell letters always end up, shrinking, tucking, shivering, dissolving, into disease.
There is the sound of cracking wood, roasting in the fire, working up my heart. I'm in a site of warmth. There is a beauty that knocks on the doors of my atria. My breath falls like the first snowflake, crisp and hellish and kissable, and I tally the times I've ever felt like this.
I sleep upon pinpricks of elusive hurt, but the fictitious touch of hot and unabashed skin against flushed ice makes it bearable by the hour. I skid, often utterly unintentional, in between monochromatic strokes of the taste of rain and night. I tend to scratch at the spines of chatoyant light, sighing out, shrieking out, prisms of need. But there goes the beckoning shadow of a once tangible sun—it slaps me at the back of my head and shovels me into the recesses of my mind. Exclusive, only to the sprites that have chosen to abandon ship. And I hear the resounding laughter of demons in my heart, where all my farewell letters always end up, shrinking, tucking, shivering, dissolving, into disease.
There is the sound of cracking wood, roasting in the fire, working up my heart. I'm in a site of warmth. There is a beauty that knocks on the doors of my atria. My breath falls like the first snowflake, crisp and hellish and kissable, and I tally the times I've ever felt like this.
Thursday, December 20, 2012
Inked Identification
This is her domain.
Masqueraded by snowflakes in her eyes and gray earmuffs, she could see nothing but the wonder entailed in scripture and hear nothing but the wind chimes and the friends hanging from letters. Tiny, impish friends waving along, hopping off a point to a crushing page number. They tear at her soul, and no one really sees this as she taps her boots silently, madly, in precise rhythm. Her hanging breath tells the story of a blizzard. She sits as the quintessence of a good conversationalist—pure smiles, inquisitive replies, silence that acknowledges, a nice amount of gesticulation, warm body language, a teaspoon of idiosyncrasy.
And when she pouts almost inconspicuously, it drives strangers crazy.
She likes tête-à-tête hellos and how are yous, tries to linger on cliffhanger farewells. She is permissible to air and to playgrounds and to parties, yet she chooses to live with and to live because of her friends of houses and castles and fairies and spaceships. Freckles frame her eyes, and there shines mirth, beauty immeasurable and deep. Her voice, and even her mute entrance, fractures the moment, and isn't she shocking? The long gone tyranny of self-inflicted cruelty is a tiny bit silhouetted around the outline of her body, but it is, she says aplomb, gone—it is only a wry illusion that makes it happen.
And she lives on pliantly in your head.
Masqueraded by snowflakes in her eyes and gray earmuffs, she could see nothing but the wonder entailed in scripture and hear nothing but the wind chimes and the friends hanging from letters. Tiny, impish friends waving along, hopping off a point to a crushing page number. They tear at her soul, and no one really sees this as she taps her boots silently, madly, in precise rhythm. Her hanging breath tells the story of a blizzard. She sits as the quintessence of a good conversationalist—pure smiles, inquisitive replies, silence that acknowledges, a nice amount of gesticulation, warm body language, a teaspoon of idiosyncrasy.
And when she pouts almost inconspicuously, it drives strangers crazy.
She likes tête-à-tête hellos and how are yous, tries to linger on cliffhanger farewells. She is permissible to air and to playgrounds and to parties, yet she chooses to live with and to live because of her friends of houses and castles and fairies and spaceships. Freckles frame her eyes, and there shines mirth, beauty immeasurable and deep. Her voice, and even her mute entrance, fractures the moment, and isn't she shocking? The long gone tyranny of self-inflicted cruelty is a tiny bit silhouetted around the outline of her body, but it is, she says aplomb, gone—it is only a wry illusion that makes it happen.
And she lives on pliantly in your head.
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