The Rejectee is More Often Than Not the Rejector

Throughout the night I try to forget I was ever kissed, delicately against the nape of neck like I was something delicate to be kissed. Or that beneath flecks of dead flesh something foreign and soft bloomed—that inclined the orchids on my bedside to cling and bow, like I was something to bask in.

I close my eyes and drift away from the way my name was whispered in my ear, over and over again, like a promise assured and a desire confided.  I ignore the smiles exchanged, throw away maps traced, recant afternoons fermented by the buoyancy of your laugh because you asked questions.  About the scars that peeked out from the breaths of fabric I did not always cover because you made me forget. 

I rather call down the Sun, shut the blinds, and eliminate exposure so I can cradle myself in expensive linen...I rather push you aside, tell you to stay and paralyze you with my isolation...I rather bury it in the back of my mind—that you ever knew my story or that there was ever one to tell.  I rather watch the orchids wither and brown, suffocate beneath the weight of a shadow I cast on all things, than hear you when you tell me every scar is known, every mar beautiful.  Because I cannot stand the terrible lightness of Love.

I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness. I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us too. I can feel the sufferings of million and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think it will all come right.
-Anne Frank


Song of the moment: Consider The Ravens - Dustin Kensrue (Please Come Home)
This entire EP is humbling; truly gritty and wholesome and down to earth.  Makes you want to light a candle and stomp on your front porch.

"It's a name for a girl, it's also a thought that changed the world..."

My inner strangeness could mostly be owed to my curiosity and love for eccentricity; finding the normal in the abnormal and the extraordinary in the ordinary. A sort of leveling I suppose—an even trade of beauty and substance till you find it in all things. Not that all things are wholly good or even beautiful, but everything has a tinge of beauty in it. And it takes a carefully trained eye to find it—or maybe just a person at peace with their own mix of darkness and light. But even that is a tad too self-flattering, perhaps it merely takes a person with a vague awareness of it, or, simpler still: faith—a wishing to see it so you do. Like magic. Yes, it’s like magic—so very absurd and other that the determination of fact or fiction marks the eye of the beholder in such a permanent and powerful way that it divides, distinguishing Believer from the Non. It can be alarming at times—like a house of mirrors, distorting and reshaping things you were sure had fixed form. It can unravel a rose’s beauty till you are simply awed by the nature of its thorn and make a crippled man strong, straight and true. It leaves you appreciating different things—things you never thought mattered or were integral because you weren’t looking as close or far away as needed to see it in its element. It’s strange, alarming, overwhelmingly simple yet complex. Dirty. Clean. Regenerating. Quiet. Flexible, dangerous and lovely. It’s Grace.

Don't Delete This

The unpoetic thoughts of an articulate person is the most poetic thing they have to offer.

Natural Disaster

Laying next to you I know I heard it.  A flutter.  A Shuffle.  A burn or a shiver.  I’m not sure what, but it was movement, friction.  An archaic, rusty beating despite the death we both knew hung over your head like an Old Testament curse.  It was delicate and humble like the seed we saw in the garden, accidently sprouting before the spring.  I remember how you bent over it with a quiet bewilderment.  It was so tiny and green and desperate to drink in the sun. It was precious.  And it horrified you.  So you plucked it, brow furrowed.  But the roots did not come so you violently clawed at the soil, staining and crusting your fingers with time.  It took you minutes to undo what took nature thousands of years to pack down.  And I’ll never forget how you looked back up at me and smiled.  Eyes large and ferocious, fresh from the kill.  You were so pleased with yourself, dangling this web of thin life from your fingers like a trophy.  I should have known then you weren’t a soul to nurture so much as a force to reckon with. A natural disaster that lived above, maybe below, but definitely outside any of the moral laws that bound the rest of the world together.   Something other. That freely allowed itself to tear up all things intentional, beautiful and delicate because it was in its power to do so and do so gracefully.  But I still slept with you that night…and every night after, because I felt it when you closed your eyes.  The humming that resided deep within your cavity.  That almost sounded like my name.  That drew me in and stirred me up.  Made my hair stand on end.  I thought it was connection.  An intimate dance between protons and electrons that raced and charged and could not be reproduced.  Electricity.  I should have known I was only chasing a storm.

Undecipherable

The rocks or the waves; you can’t tell which one you are…worse still, which one is which.  Deciding where one thing begins and where one ends is something you’ve never been good at defining—it’s the reason your silverware drawer is a pill to open and why you can’t remember who came first: Jake or Lucas…or was it Leandro?

Teaspoons and tablespoons go largely undefined in your presence as do salad forks and dinner forks. You carelessly toss them in so they crisscross, lock and ungracefully spill into one another with sharp hostility and nest. Forging a mêlée of edges you know your fingers won’t be able to emerge unscathed from the next time you dare to reach. Utensils come with a fight, much like your memory.     

Rehashing yesterday’s love songs could make anyone raw and a bit unnerved, but being unable to confidently see the face of the person’s pants you were unzipping when you heard it can really fuck you up and loosen a couple screws.  Shoulders lose their curvature, eyes their color, whispers their breadth and depth of tone till the only thing you have to anchor you is a month and three possibilities tallied in a diary you forgot you even kept till you needed it.  You still can’t decide, is that even worth keeping?

The way the fog congregates and swells around your head makes it damn near impossible to see past your nose.  Or maybe that’s your bangs.  They haven’t been cut in a while.  They shag at an awkward level that lets them brush up against your lashes.  You like the way it feels when you close your eyes.  Butterfly kisses that bristle and caress the base of your lids.  Small sensations that make you involuntarily inhale and unknowingly wake with child.  But it doesn’t look flattering.  You’re sure of it.  Almost.  You’d go fix it now if you could remember where you put their card, or if you even grabbed one as you ran out.

Your coffee’s cold now—rendered useless, though you’re not sure you ever had much of a use for it—you remove the lid and give it some momentum.  Let the wind do the rest.  Watch it carry it up and over in one graceful swoop to greet its first death, or second, who are you to judge? It merges with the mist and breaks mercilessly against the rocks below, where it scatters into a million crystals that swirl and glisten defiantly in the sun ‘till it’s reunited with a force that drives it asunder to wind it up again. And you lean over the ledge and wonder, would you ever look as beautiful and broken crashing?

You can’t see that you already are.  

That you lost your footing, and forgot about the railing.  And never once grabbed for the belly that, despite yourself, was quietly trying to grow something inside. 

You just fall.

And leave the divvying of sinew and bone up to the elements, allowing them to rhythmically fracture parts equally you and not you, 'till you become what you always wanted.  Undecipherable.

Here's The Deal

I'm trying to be more disciplined with my writing.  So, with a little nudge, I'll be aiming to write two pages every day.  Fiction, non-fiction...perhaps even a bit of crapy poetry.  But mostly fiction.  'Cause that's what I truly like to do.  They'll mostly be character sketches or the humble beginnings of somethings and nothings.  They'll have to be waded through, but the point is writing every day.  Practice.  In hopes that I'll get better, and the words will flow more freely, and I'll learn how to derrive inspiration from things even when I don't necessarily feel it.  It's time I started to take this stuff seriously.

So, first up...