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?

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.

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.

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.

The Beret Boy

The boy in front of you wears the brightest pair of owlish eyes. The quiver on his lower lip doesn't stop and his cheeks are pale with cold. His fingernails are sliced with fresh biting marks, the tension in his shoulders and the crease on his forehead laced with anxiety. The stammers falling from his red lips are remnants of a shipwreck washing ashore. His short screams (that only you can hear) are teeming with the melodrama of a violin, and the dust under his lids can't be blinked away. The corners of his mouth's gruesome shape—of hopelessness and the repetition and awaiting of a hundred yawns—are hurting. His eyes, as they peek around the ghostly room, are in a glinting sheen that reflects that rather sad blinking of a neon sword. His stomach grumbles and everyone else's eyes are indignant and judgmental as they turn to his crinkling forehead and his trembling pillars of legs that have been strictly instructed to stand straight. He closes his owlish eyes for one second, feeling embarrassment tickling up his pale throat, and he's still and he's just a small boy.

You hand him your coat. He peers up at you—a shy, curious inquiry swaying in his young shoulders—so instead of dropping the furry coat in the bowl of his uncurled hands, you spare a prompt sway yourself and carefully hover the coat over his shoulders and draw them there. He drops his hands and gives a half-flinch before you do, and after you set the coat he peers up at you more. A small 'o' shapes itself on his lips, and it's a change, like a mumble in a nap, like iridescent colors on a banally dull sketchbook page. You think you feel a barely there 'Hallelujah.' His nose then begins to color itself a cherry, and his lips set into a crumby line again, but his eyes blink more than usual and he shifts his feet across the stony space he's let himself have. Good.

Then people in the same room are murmuring—it's a clucking of a tongue, it's a nightmarish scream-whisper, it's a code, another language maybe. Your shirt is poor, ragged and sleeveless, and you bet the temperature is tumbling down deathly. You touch the wall with a breath, then a palm, and even the room feels glacial and feeble, but it is never bendable and always impenetrable. You shiver and you almost hiss because you mustn't shiver that great. You bow your head—your beret almost tips out of place on your speeding head—and it's hopeless! This place is ridden with wisps of nightmares. Gruesome. Dirty. Tight. Nothing here is palatable. Your spirits plummet, you can feel them.

These are your first few months, and already you've been kicked into the grayest jail like a rat. Every elder looks up only to receive food and water. When they do, you see vestiges of childish hope kissed on their coal-smeared features. You really try not to remember their faces. They work voraciously for anything edible, to quench their thirst, to kidnap their hunger. Their lips are stick-thin and their malnourished bones jut at every joint. Their fingers are nimble and experienced, picking at the crevices of the walls and the gaps between their teeth. You've tried to speak. They had replied with either grouchy silence or churlish monosyllables, so you attempt no more. Any utterance of any kind is hushed to the lowest volume, because everyone is afraid of the shadows and their henchmen.

The boy is sleeping. (You find this to be true because his head lulls down softly and his shoulders aren't too tense anymore.) He's almost got it this time—dozing off ramrod straight, just hanging there—but he fails and you barely catch him in the space you have. His appointments with sleep are scarce. It shouldn't be like that, with any child, really. He shudders awake, dimples that are rare and that aren't so traceable showing up in a hazy 'mmm.' He's alert soon enough. You don't lay a hand on him once again, but in his weary eyes you see hope he doesn't know how to feel.

It's funny, how the young—troubled or safe—can fill you with hills and hills of saving hope and wisdom.

'& every breath we drew was Hallelujah.'

Swingset Matchbox

I recoil at the thought of life being bound by a glass of transparent fragility—easy to twist and crush in between your fingers, easy to see the beams dwindle in brilliance. It's like this nightmare you try to struggle out of when sunlight is calling, but you can't, because apparently your head is a kamikaze pilot.

And it's bringing you down with it.

You see patches of undulating green, but the surface is hard and solid. You thought that you'd die again, one more time, and maybe you did. But here comes the bloody aftermath where everything is cool and hot and you're concisely underneath the iron. Every step is futile because you can't seem to catch the feeling with comfort and relief that maybe the worst has passed. Yet you still try and you sit silently, with only the creaks of a rusty swingset and your own sobs wrecking the whole ghost parade. Your hair is tangled in a frizz and the place is empty. You know you look horrible, but it's okay. Nobody's watching just now.

"What do I do?" you think as the air is buzzing with the dark. Only Christmas lights from afar and the unseen moon are generously giving the place light. You feel pent-up. You feel like you were dropped off here, prepared to get in touch with elementary friends in a kindergarten powwow, but your arms are vacant without anyone to greet with a hug.

Then there is the swing, cold and dusty with memories tonight, and you feel something oncoming. Oh there just go your eyelids, trying to hide back the tears. Your emotions can be taxing so this is healing, but still. There is a comely wind you smile at with lethargy. There is that breath of fire you begin to release but can't. You search, lost, for the moon, but the trees are concealing it. You think, you think, you feel a friend embracing your hands, embellishing your heart with stories you yourself can't make up. You feel a stressed dichotomy between you two that hacks the atmosphere with more tears of your own, but it's a fine difference, because for once you don't feel that alone.

And there's a moment with no dialogue, just a curt incision in the wind, a shift from swinging back and forth. There's an ignition here somewhere, a crossword puzzle prepared in the storage room of your heart, and you think you exhale the smallest of blue flames. There is a pause in the storytelling. And you can attest to the fact that you really are never alone.

To Know Winter

a cold froth.  ❅

requirements:

                           1. you must believe

                           2. the night is simmering

                           3. but only inside brick houses; outside it is howling with frigid air

                           4. it is December

                           5. you feel okay—nothing is missing

                           6. but, yes, there's a howl in the wind

                           7. it reminds you of something

                           8. you peek outside your window / your door

                           9. you realize it  is December

                           10. and you remember

what to do / how to do:

                            

                           1. if it doesn't snow, pretend there is snow, and pretend you exhale white puffs of ample carbon dioxide

                           2. listen

                           3. put a pair of boots on

                           4. then your coat—your best one

                           5. step outside (yes, out of your house and into the cold and dim, and there you go)

                           6. listen

                           7. listen some more

                           8. click your window, or door, safely shut

                           9. you can walk, you can get in your car, you can ride your bicycle

                           10. but don't bring music—no turning on of a radio, no earphones, no habitual humming

                           11. so: just listen (bring down the side windows if there are side windows)

                           12. hey, hey, what's that? you hear something

                           13. you stop, halt, get off, get out, walk somewhere vaguely tearing

                           14. to the heart (i hope you brought your heart)

                           15. you see a lake

                           16. come closer

                           17. it is frozen—you aren't frozen, but you may as well be

                           18. you feel a cold froth

                           19. kissing your heart (let it)

                           20. you are breaking

                           21. you don't find it easy, funny, how you could forget, then remember, then forget, then remember

                           22. winter

                           23. the cold seeps through your lungs (let it) and it is another

                           24. winter

                           25. remember

about winter / hypothesis, of some kind: 

                            it is a flood, an earthquake, a step on the ground, a splash on a puddle, a cold froth, an excuse to stay in, an excuse to stay out, a snowflake, the melting, the freezing, the crunch of boots on forgiving snowflakes, a furnace, a tear upon your face, a cup of hot choco

The Moon Told Me So

I was meant to make an analysis, but my thoughts—I cannot jostle.

I.  A cataclysm of curiosity arises, fresh from my appraising eyes. You are the cracking ebullition as you are heaved up, and I bet my spine straightens up and my brows cock up, too. It is intriguing how you draw forth, upward, dead but awake. Alive, new. Beautiful. Is that an enough word? You say you first saw darkness. Is it lonely down there? Do you remember fresh tears? Do they boil hot or naturally stream helplessly on and down your cheeks? How does the night sound down there? Are you stricken by nostalgic reminiscence as you float up? Your being here, your first day in sheets of ice that are in love with you, is a mystery waiting to be solved. Did life feel too unfamiliar? Gosh, I don't know. Would you know? Is your tongue roasting with fire. Is it waiting to erupt?

(I like the way you wake up, kiddo.)

II.  Or is your entrance mum with stroking breath? The air is new to your frosty lungs, aren't they? You have no luggage following you. Where do you come from? Is something trying to pull you back? Into the darkness? Is an end pulling you back, tickling your throat, strangling you? Are questions murmuring too loudly too soon? Does wintry oxygen knock in you bashfully? It is.... magic, eh? Breathe in, breathe out, choke on chilly gulps of a beginning. You seem sad, stranger. Alien. What are you, special snowflake? What is that beauty tracing out of that pretty face? Oh, nope, I am not mad. You are mad. You can't help but wake up from, what, a bad dream? Oblivion? Darkness? A strange boy with a pretty face—that's what you are. You are colors of frostbite. I like you.

III.  There you are. You're almost there. Oh, your eyes. Are glossy. You blink dreamily. I am befuddled with how sad you look, or I may as well be misinterpreting. You might just be drowsy. Is there such a thing as a misinterpretation, though? I digress. I can see you. Are you scared? You're undeniably suffocating—that is your beauty, and your expression, and your birth. You seem so alien, but you're so human too, I guess. Do you need more air? I'm beginning to think I have too much air supply. Your breath is a refreshing imprint in all of space. I can't think and it's weird. Naught flitters by without a wish to take it all in, like you're taking it all in. I know I'm not supposed to be sad, but I am, and it's funny because you're beautiful???? Is this a routine of yours, strangely mad and madly strange boy? Knocking under skinny and slippery ice and looking all mildly aghast? Why do I think you're mad? I guess you're not. Your emotions aren't dormant and they create elegant patterns on your face. There is something honestly and enchantingly intrinsical in you that makes me feel funny. I don't know it yet. 

I know it's lonely.

I can't think straight.

Ringing Chimes

When you're downcast, and when you're crestfallen, don't look outside. Don't see the sun be the sun; it lowers into the trees and it boils down to the night. Think of the happiest things. Take a walk through the park, and see the people who sweat and breathe in the afternoon haze. See the hammers break the bricks down into miniature people and trains. And when the day kisses goodbye and the night is now a hue you try to digest, think of the quiet morning when you are all garbed in blank pages. The morning can be sweet. The morning can be a toothache.

Waking up, think of the happiest things. Rejuvenate yourself with dreams of bright flowers and lemon juice. Daydreams would be great, too. In the business of woolgathering, you better watch your hands. In the morning you yawn and everything is bleary, from the stretching of your limbs to the dawning of the sun. And it is now familiar—I know—the sadness that indents itself on your mind. It likes to stay awhile. But it will pass, like the day will. Your breaths may feel like they try to smother you every day. The day may feel inhuman. The world may feel bland. But these things shall pass, like your cough will. You'll escape the immorality of superficially happy walls. You'll find things worthy and terrifically nice. You'll find yourself feeling worthy and terrific and nice. There is light that can triumph the dark. It is the clipped secret of an eskimo kiss, but it is the most heart-warming and touching. And promising.

Don't you get it?

That Resurrection

You’re that redundant beat in my heart, that tickle behind my ear or beneath my feet, that blooming of rose petals across my face. You’re that whisper thumping the air, that clever spark of life, that missing spring of light and love in my life. You are those nimble feet of yours as the day leads on and the clouds part. You restart my heart in many ways as the tips of your boyish smile linger under my eyelids. You are that breath of life, that resurrection, that urgent need in the morning as I mumble in lethargy, as the sun rises but I still scramble for warmth tepidly. You are that cut on my heart, that published letter of a pillow case’s zipper on my skin, that rising of the hairs on the back of my neck. You are that fogged up circle on glass. You are that faint play of wind and childish laughter in the streets. You are that sway through midnight, that march from night to day. You’re that gasp, that hurt, in the hollow of my chest. You are that flurry of held back tears, that hiss I pretend to hear from time to time. You’re that impatient kettle clinking inside my ears, that travel barefoot, that flurry of nostalgia. You are that funny interrobang, that reasonable enough Oxford comma. You are that vintage set of records, that flame born anew. You are that goose skin, that tickle on my mouth, that ringing alarm. You are that unanimous vote, that recipient of my cheer, that zap in my backbone. You are that cunning smile, that delicious mess, that improperly proper presence. You’re that steaming hot, that precious cold, that dreamy bright light. You are that. Precisely, unmistakably, unerringly, inaccurately, invalidly, sickeningly that. You.

And I am but that girl in a queue of dangerously riled up pointing fingers. I am that puddle of freezing water after a snowflake dies. I am that embarrassing hiccup, that glitch, in a video entry. I’m that singular piece of repulsiveness, that slithering gust of wind in the backdrop of Snow White’s ugliest nightmares, that droopy, ersatz smile turned full-out grimace. I’m that lousy space of ennui in the past, present, and undeniably the future. I am that reduce of riveting words, that cutting out of a stalwart performance, that breakdown, that imminent thumbs down from a critique. I am that gushing blue of sadness, that trespassing outsider, that lawbreaker, that joy murderer. I’m that blindingly shocking call, that keen for something better. I am that. Typically, helplessly, unremittingly, unattractively that. Me.

Kindly wrap me away, covered and never dusted, in that lonely corner of your attic, just like I had been. Send me to the corners of your smile, if you’re kinder, although I am content with drawing out my solitary, it is exhaustingly dark and I am famished. You are so you, and I am so me, and I will always have little to no understanding and knowledge at all why our paragraphs are next to each other. And somehow it isn’t too bad. Never so bad. But also never so great. My penchant for wintry days is next to fictitious, because who knows how great a snowflake tastes.

                                               who knows if the moon's — e.e. cummings

who knows if the moon’s

a balloon,coming out of a keen city

in the sky—filled with pretty people?

(and if you and i should

get into it,if they

should take me and take you into their balloon,

why then

we’d go up higher with all the pretty people

than houses and steeples and clouds:

go sailing

away and away sailing into a keen

city which nobody’s ever visited,where

always

            it’s

                   Spring)and everyone’s

in love and flowers pick themselves