Things I Write
A smattering of poetry, prose, and thoughts in no particular form. All of these come from my head.
His Daughter Asked Too Many Questions
His daughter asked too many questions.
She would peer up at him, her lips twisting into a smile, cajoling him. She looked just like her mother: same smirk, same flash of gold in green eyes, same utter curiosity.
His daughter asked too many questions. The answers came with painful thoughts, searing his memory with what was gone. He would always tell his the truth, always relay to her the exact answers. He remembered everything.
What was her favorite color? What was her favorite book? Her favorite flower? What movie did she love the most? Did she like poems? Where was she born? What season did she like best?
The questions would go on and on for years, and he would forever tell her what she wanted to know.
Teal. Wuthering Heights. Poppies. Fight Club. She loved them. Bristol. Spring.
It was all easy to reply with one-word blips, only bits and pieces of the woman in his heart and his daughter’s head, until she was fifteen, half the age her mother had ever been. She asked the single question that filled him with dread. He wanted nothing more than to shut his eyes and his mind and his door to this string of words floating in the air on her hoping and frightened breath.
Why did she decide to die?
And he answered the only way he could, in words he’d never said to her- I don’t know.
His daughter asked too many questions.
Persephone
First, I missed my mother,
The woman who cradled me until I breathed.
Then, I learned of love.
I live underneath the earth,
I am the beating heart of death.It’s mine.
I fall under lust until spring shines
Six months of cold,
Six months of warmth.Monster-man,
Death King,
Melted my heart and led me underneath.I sing to him,
I long for him,He sets me free.
Demeter cries,
Wailing until I fall into the grass,
into her arms.She petitioned gods and men,
to steal me back from my beautiful captor,Six months here,
Six months there.I would rather be eternal queen of all the damned,
Than live above.
There, in the fertile air,
I am trapped.I am not loved.
Spinal
It’s all in your spine, you know.
All in those tiny bits like puzzle pieces that hold us all upright
(Until we are broken down by grief or love or rage)Ignore the tension,
don’t let it take you,
or make into a fist-
Curling, waiting to throw death’s blows
right hooks to life’s face.We bruise ourselves this way,
Living through our spines,
those vertebrae twisting up-(When I see yours poking through the flesh of you back
that is when I falter)-We hold that line of living marrow in each other-
bleeding-
through clenched hands-
at wounds from knifes shoved in the space between back and neck.When you curl away,
and I see the embedded blades tucked under skin once smooth
I think,
You’re broken from the weight of sharpened metal.And then I remember my marks, my puzzling bits and pieces
That some unknown and unknowable One gave to me
In the time before creatures knew what upright could mean.It is then I know we all are punished through our spines,
that paralysis
and flexibility
Both come from the knives we hide behind us-That we learn to grow wings only when we have softened,
And that, my love, is when spines turn from ever working molecules to stars,
And we become the angels of dust-(Yet I cannot carry your world and
You cannot carry mine)-Our backs may melt before us,
in the stifling heat of the hell we make,
We may buckle,
but we have our spines,We will not break.
The Bird
This morning,
My cat came up to the door.
Her cries were as crimson as the dawn.Blood,
On her paws
Whiskers
Nose
Teeth.A tiny sound
Coming from underneath her skinny belly.I saved it.
It had fifteen missing feathers,
Those that were left were
blue black white gray-
like the thing could be a flying bruise.Shooing cats and children,
I bring the broken thing to sunlight,
To morning.She cried.
Her wings became akimbo
(Can wings be a akimbo? Her’s seemed it)She fruitlessly flapped,
Pointlessly prodding her beak into my hand.My hands touched death, today.
She could not stand the cage I made,
The cage that would let her live.So, I let her go.
She was hopeless,
Not used to ground and now forced to walk.
I watched her navigate the grass.
(She should have been in the sky.)I told her goodbye, felt my heart break,
(The quick pounding of her little heart remains in my fingertips.)I wanted something I could save.
I found her body later,
and buried it with the other things Cat has killed.The vicious feline wins again,
and her yellow eyes tell me so.I took her meal,
But not her victory over life.
Mayonnaise
If you cut out my iris, I will not cry about this. Our language has changed; you use less adjectives and I use less verbs. We were so close that we’ve separated. I’ll keep telling you stories, though, and you’ll just say goodnight.
Maybe I don’t want to sleep. I don’t want to forget you in my dreams and wake up all alone in my head with just a jar of memories on the window sill. My jar- used to be our jar- sitting ready to fall and shatter and the girl and boy inside, so full of hopes and dreams, will slip through the floor boards and never be seen.
And you won’t mind the broken glass, unless it makes me bleed. And my delicacy will frighten you away, because I could be destroyed by you. So you get it done and do it quick, so I can go to pieces in peace under blue lights, curling around the emptiness.
Your voice comes over oceans. It’s no gentle help, only a hardened bit of grief that grates against my ears.
You, my own special ghost, won’t haunt me anymore. You choose instead to let me be real and tangible and free. But I don’t like the world, with all its burdens to bear. You used to carry some away, putting them on your back. But now you’ve returned them, so I could swallow them whole. I think you’d rather have me choke than crack.
But I would not ever break in you grip. I become soft and malleable and fluid. If you dare to let me drop, I will be in fragments of myself- and it’s all been done. No amount of words will or could ever breakdown the thick wall around your mind.
And so it’s so easy to let me go until you’re gone. Even if I’ve always been lost, even if a made a wrong turn some time before time, you hands were a map. You plotted points on my neck and lips and finger and back. And as you walk or keep yourself away, the lines are erasing with every one of my breaths.
So I’m here and all alone and left, with nothing but words and the far away thought that once upon a time, you were mine.
How to lose your virginity:
Lose it with grace. Don’t have it stolen. If it is, you are granted an honorary second chance. That is fair.
Lose it with someone, anyone. Do not make it up to feel better, because you won’t. Doesn’t matter if you love that person, or if you don’t even know how to pronounce their name. They mean something now.
Lose yourself in the moment. It’s going to be with you for the rest of your life. You’re going to regret it, cherish it, go back to it in your head a thousand times for whatever reason. Let yourself be able to do that.
Lose it at three in the morning, at dawn, on an afternoon your parents aren’t home. Lose it at a party, in the backseat of their car, in a bed, in a tunnel, on the grass. Lose it when and where it happens. There will most likely not be candlelight and a bed covered in rose petals after a date of fine wines and stalled conversation. Make do with what you have, because you have that.
Lose it however you choose. Lose it to whomever, wherever, whenever. It’s your virginity.
Untitled
Laying inert on a bare mattress, because there is nothing in the world for me. I take the time to look up photos of Wendy’s fries on Google, hope to anything I can that I will find a way to get myself up. When the phone rings and it’s only the insurance company, my dad, my boss. They all ask the same questions in different words. When will you come outside?
Get up, gather my thoughts like laundry to be burned. I feel like igniting something, anyone. My footsteps breathe in the empty box full of nothing but things. I break a vase, I recreate a scared boy’s face.
Later, I will make up event for the day I did not have, saying I ran a mile in dusty shoes, say I ate something I made, though the dishes are clean and my stomach is full of bile. I will tell them so they can love me, so they needn’t fear my lack of life.
In a month I’ll find myself on roots of ancient trees, staining my fingers with mud trying to hold myself down as I open my misshapen legs to whatever man-creature came forth to offer my solace. I’ll only ask them if they know my name, the sole key to having me sprawling.
I will lie and say I don’t remember why I fell into the trap of solitude, why I’m smoking more cigarettes in the dark corner of my room, why I drink to excess, why I give myself freely to anyone who asks.
Untitled 2
The way her face looks in the sunlight is a secret. She hides in the shadows until moonshine rains from a heaven of stars. Her darkness is the enigma forcing itself on everything she touches.
She refuses to be loved, believing it to be the cause of every sin there has ever been. She wants only to be a ephemeral stain in a man’s mind. They could touch her in passion, should they wish, they could find in the full unfolding of ecstatic fumbling her heart and they could take it, should they wish. But it burns their blood to look too long, so they allow the sparks to fade.
She keeps to the darkness, moving ahead of the sun, shifting her eyes so they will not shine.
Welcome mats.
When she was five,
she asked what the doormat meant.
She’d just learned to read and needed to know the story behind every word.
They told her Welcome meant Please come in.
She grew in fright,
Her limbs elongating in terror.
“Welcome even the monsters?”
They laughed at a child’s query.Drifting into slumber, she feared nothing immediate,
Only the gradual slipping in on beasts through the front door,
Welcome.When she was older,
and thought she understood how the doormat worked,
those monsters welcomed themselves in.They crawled their way in,
making shadows in her mind that her good ghosts could not shake.
She allowed them,
Welcome.Now, having been consumed,
she shakes.
With them, those who have made themselves home,
she becomes the welcoming woman,
ushering them in with dark thoughts and mixed drinks.
Welcome.
I have a habit of wanting what’s forbidden.
I have a habit of wanting what’s forbidden.
I’m an Eve in an Eden filled with talking snakes in the shapes of temptations.
Those speaking serpents, whispering lines of how I can learn to live, only if I take a bite.
I’ll sin and sin to get my fill; I’m starved for the rage of stolen moments and the deep sadness of an ephemeral love.I am a thief, a beggar, a liar, incomplete.
There are moments I cannot breathe, for my mouth is full and my mind is crushed beneath the deafening screams of those beasts.
They sell me my soul on a silver platter, offering all I could ever need.
Eat, they say, I offer you something free.
Lastly, there’s a boy who made ephemeral love on a dirty basement floor to a girl whose name he knew, but could not say
There’s a boy who slept with a girl in the back of a dented car, higher than the stars and forgetting her upon morning, when he had to go home.
There’s a man who took a girl up to his bare mattress and fucked her until she bled a heart-shaped crimson stain all the way through to the ground.
There’s a man who pretend he was free to love and take anyone he could have, and took a naive girl into a room for only a moment, then kissed her in shame.
There’s a boy who a girl loved, but stayed lost for three cycles of the moon, finding her and loving her and leaving her again, regrets pouring out of his head.
There’s a man who led a girl into a world mixed exotic drinks and a deep sort of sleep in a bed close enough to the beach.
There’s a man who came in a fluid like bile, ugly and mundane, who took pity on a girl so very, deeply alone.
And very first in line, there’s a boy who stole innocence and virginity in one fell swoop, collecting them and letting them gather dust in a pile with the rest.
Untitled 4
If I blow our shared air back into your lungs, will you inflate?
If I hand you darkness, will you dress yourself in the shadows?
Do you understand how your fingers work,
do you realize how they trace my spine and make flames?I’m sorry I’m scared to speak,
that you make me shake so much so that I forget to breatheYou’ve got your sins, I found them in your eyes.
You have your sins, now give me mine.
The Things They Carried continuation experiment
Mary Anne became a myth. The jungles of Vietnam, the ones she longed to melt into, had consumed her. She stopped being real and became the storied harbinger of death, the Kali, the Freya, the Hel of the dense trees. She chased her prey with fluidity and an indifference that made her lethal. The villages learned to fear the woman with the black tongue necklace and eyes that shifted from blank blue to jungle green. She was the fire in the night, the wind and the rain, the frenzy of bullets. She took the energy of battles. She would wander to the men who lay dying, soothe them, show them she was a woman and they would cry to her like they would to a mother or a lover. She would only smile in a vague way, languishing in the throes of death. It was rumored that she could suck out their souls as she took their tongues, leaving them trapped in her, in the jungle, in the dark and lonely land.
When they told her story, to frighten children or warn of the perils of jungle life, they didn’t mention who she had been. To them, the simple villagers and occasional gullible soldier, she had never been Mary Anne Bell of Cleveland Heights. She was always the death woman, the jungle wanderer, and the horribly beautiful killer. She became the jungle and the stories. She was consumed.
Links, because I’m too lazy to copy and paste a bunch of stuff.
