Stranger things have happened

"Take my advice and live for a long, long time, because the maddest thing a man can do in this life is to let himself die."

Thu, 16 May 2013 01:14:11 -0700

Fragmentation

Mon, 13 May 2013 23:00:00 -0700

I don’t understand how I fall in love so often, so passionately, so utterly without abandon. I won’t ever admit why, or how, or who, but I do know that the most cowardly thing about myself is that I don’t even have enough faith in the world to admit that maybe it’s more than just a vaguely proven chemical effect of two people spending extended periods of time within the other’s vicinity but, that, perhaps something greater exists. I choose to believe in surface animal attraction, nothing further.

I’m tired of feeling

Do you think you're a friendly person?

Mon, 13 May 2013 22:16:40 -0700

Not at all.

I am hardly ever in a good enough mood to put anything more than the most minimal of efforts into regular human interaction. With the stress of schoolwork, reading, writing, working out at the Rec Cen, eating balanced meals in the dining commons, the recent addition of 12+ hours of work a week, the necessity to put up a show of apparent effort in various friendships and relationships forged solely for the benefit of personal gain, and a general inability to manage time wisely, the energy required to be a good and friendly person is simply not worth psychological strain.

That’s a lie. Well, mostly, at least. I am enough of a friendly person in the sense that I am not an outright (or even shady-manipulative) crazy bitch who somehow grew up outside the scope of standard child development and evidently never fully acquired a grasp of basic social cues. But my humor, truthfully, is crude and sardonic - and not in a pleasantly filthy way, either. It’s simply toxic humor. The majority of my voluntary statements consist of self-centered, attention-fishing, quite pathetic self-deprecating remarks that indelibly cause the people around me to visibly wonder if it would be more appropriate to take it lightly and jokingly or worry about the state of my mental health.

Most settle for a nervous laughter coupled with darting eyes not sure what to rest upon.

A secret that I will reveal, however, is that I am easily amazed and even inspired but a wide variety of people and their particular mannerisms. The sharp humor of some, quiet quick-wittedness of others, even the gullible and ignorant guffaw of a few chumps often inspire in me the most basic and raw forms of human connectedness and appreciation for our society - shitty as it is.

So I suppose I’m a friendly person in the sense that I care about other human beings in some distant way and therefore wish to bond with my fellow species on some existential and potentially cosmic level, or whatever, but life and people just tire me out so much that I forget to give a shit about being friendly.

I fear the world would eat me alive, deftly and mercilessly.

Art is to console those who are broken by life.

Mon, 13 May 2013 21:49:29 -0700

Vincent van Gogh

Nihilism

Mon, 06 May 2013 18:20:30 -0700

My hands drag themselves down the ridges of the wall and the searing I feel as cartridges of inky blood pour out matches the fire I feel from your eyes as they burn into the back of my skull and for the umpteenth time I yearn to soar out, far away where I don’t require Reason, but only Rhyme. You inspire in me simultaneously the dichotomy of opposing seasons; the icy snowfall of winter resisting the blaze of someone else’s eternal summer - Camus is insisting that in the haze of numbness he discovered true meaning but I can’t handle the wounds this feeling is inflicting; maybe I’m not quite as brave as he who wrote those words.

Photo

Mon, 06 May 2013 17:12:58 -0700

"The body was there and the soul was elsewhere, seeking Troilo without knowing where."

Wed, 01 May 2013 13:42:46 -0700

“The body was there and the soul was elsewhere, seeking Troilo without knowing where.”

- Troilus and Criseyde
By Geoffrey Chaucer

One day he asked me what I believed is the purpose of my existence here. I said not nothing but,...

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 13:51:26 -0700

One day he asked me what I believed is the purpose of my existence here. I said not nothing but, rather, “nothing.”

“Often he felt stupid: this was because he had only an ethical intelligence (i.e., neither...

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 01:41:24 -0700

“Often he felt stupid: this was because he had only an ethical intelligence (i.e., neither scientific nor political nor practical nor philosophical, etc.).”

First day

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 15:50:47 -0700

I open my eyes to the unfamiliar feeling of sandbags in my tear ducts and eyelids the size of overstuffed pillows. Mind reeling from the night before I wonder again if you were telling the truth or just calling my bluff. In not having trust you stifled my voice and robbed me of my joys; in locking the door you created a cage that inhibited my ability to fly and which I despised. I don’t remember the words you said but I can still see the shining gleam in your eyes before my own spilled over and blurred my sight. I kissed you on the forehead and left for the last time composing disjointed rhymes in my head. I crawled into bed exhausted and wide awake, afraid to touch the things that you made but desperate for a placebo comfort for the real one that has to fade and I stared into the stars in space that I imagined far past the confines of the ceiling one foot above my face and wondered if they are as constant as the first day we were out under the sky, or the night we took the place of kites and soared among the twinkling lights. Then my stomach drops as reality hits me nearly as hard as last night’s fight. And all I can think is, well, at least now I have material on which to write. But I don’t think I ever wanted to write like this.

Word cage

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 04:59:00 -0700

Every poet has words they return to over and over again. It’s not necessarily in the title or the way it ends, but embedded steadily in the flow itself, born and bred in the “soul” of the poet herself and nurtured to life through creativity and an addiction to familiarity and it’s always present in the diction you don’t have to be searching for a rarity. Scarcely, I’ll notice the similarity in different poems and note the lack of disparity and think it’s time for a change in direction. But I come back to those words like “home” every time and find new “freedom” in these rhymes because no two feelings are identical and each time I dabble in the centrifugal I get “lost” and the words are like maps in the “stars,” taking me back through the wording overlap no matter how far I’ve ventured off. And I’m learning to open my “eyes,” to diversify, but I can’t fight a feeling of nostalgia and the fear of re-mastering how to “fly” when I haven’t spread my wings in so long - not since I’ve felt the sting of inspiration unburdened by hesitation. These words ground me, define me, produce my sound, confine me. I’ve tried escaping but they drag me back like bittersweet addiction - they think they’re saving me but there’s no cure for a poet’s affliction.

"Stop All the Clocks" - fragments

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 01:29:46 -0700

And I leaned on his shoulder, ‘O Johnny, let’s play’:
‘Squeeze me tighter, dear Johnny, let’s dance till it’s day’:
‘O John I’m in heaven,’ I whispered to say:
‘O marry me, Johnny, I’ll love and obey’:

Ten thousand miles deep in a pit there I lay:

But he frowned like thunder and he went away.

But you frowned like thunder and you went away.

"Earth, receive an honoured guest; William Yeats is laid to rest: Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of..."

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 23:13:00 -0700

“Earth, receive an honoured guest;
William Yeats is laid to rest:
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.”

- “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”
W.H. Auden

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 00:54:11 -0800

Golden state of mind

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 15:58:00 -0800

I am shit at what I do. Inspiration bounces within these prison walls that are my mind but I can never hear its calls because of the ounces of fluid that I blame for my instability. These words are not meant for easy readability; it’s just a lament for my once-believable philosophy. Possibly, I’m dreaming of a botched lobotomy, probably, scheming how to do it properly. I can’t survive on that existential life, thrive on the meaninglessness of unnecessary strife and not for a second ever realize what it feels like to truly be alive. Words well up like tears but I choke them down so I won’t dwell on them but somehow the ghost of a rope around my neck still lingers like fingerprint bruises from one night I can’t forget. But please don’t take anything literally - I never wrote so people would take me seriously. It might be all one sick mess of a joke that resulted in a sickness blazing like a forest fire I can’t control but, instead, continue to stoke and somewhere along this road it grew too strong. All I ever wanted was to write. And I think that’s where I went wrong.

VLADIMIR: You should have been a poet. ESTRAGON: I was. (Gesture towards his rags.) Isn’t that...

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 22:21:00 -0800

VLADIMIR: You should have been a poet.

ESTRAGON: I was. (Gesture towards his rags.) Isn’t that obvious?

how to cut yourself without getting a staph infection

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 03:48:06 -0800

I titled this piece before I started composing it, which I have never done and would preferably never do again except that an hour or so ago I read this article on Thought Catalog about how 20-somethings should really try to step out of their comfort zones and immerse themselves in a bunch of things that will pretty much guarantee any level ranging between mildly itching discomfort to raging, blatant, spiders-crawling-on-and-under-your-scalp physical, emotional, and/or psychological distress which is really the only reason why I’m not hiding behind a pretentious lexicon of esoteric language and allusions and abstract symbolism that makes up the bulk of my work and, instead, opting for this peaceful yet oddly and inexplicably disconcerting rant of such utter meaninglessness that I could potentially (not in this world, perhaps, but I can’t care too much to not bank my wishes upon the existence of a parallel universe in which it is just so) give Camus or Beckett a run for his money, if only I weren’t lying out of my ass right now and could have even a smidgen of belief in my own ability as a weaver of words in the real sense instead of this pseudo-artistic style I lovingly but painfully refer to as the product of my life and worth because it is just that, more than I am anymore myself, these words that I squeeze oh so painfully from my life force to the ends of my fingertips, this is what I have been reduced to and what I love and I can’t help but recall the one time I wrote I do what I love and I love, love, love what I do and I know that I wasn’t referring to writing in this instance but it’s okay because it was something equally as torturous and self-destructive as these words

Disclaimer (much as I despise them)

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 11:38:18 -0800

“the room is alive” is most definitely not about sexual intercourse; though, reading it to myself now, I cringe at what could easily be taken as an entire ranting poetic paragraph filled to the brim with innuendo and disgustingly graphic descriptions of zoomed-in images of bodily movement.

In all honesty, the inspiration for that post struck me as I was standing in the middle of crowded, pulsating, alcohol-empowered dance floor at a typical frat party on a Friday night.

Read it again. Think about the drunken stupor that lays like a thick woolen blanket over the party attendees as a whole.

I know, I know. Poetry shouldn’t be explained and it’s open to interpretation and all that literary crap that we learned in four, five, six years of Honors English in high school or whatever. It was just really important to me that I don’t get written off as another irresponsible college student with an alarming imbalance of hormones.

Correction: I’m completely okay with that label. It’s the subtlety and tasteful discretion part I want to establish.

the room is alive

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 15:50:54 -0800

We find ourselves in the darkness of a room where the walls come alive with the starkness of the lights and there are no such things as thinking or feeling; only physical moving and mental reeling while your heart pounds the beat and your body burns awake with heat. Instinct overtakes thinking, then there’s no distinction between desire and motion and so fires are set ablaze with simple execution. Body to body, the crowd becomes one entity through intoxicated camaraderie and hands become necks become fingers become lips which linger until morning or the stop-motion of your hips stops rolling the way the ocean does to ships but we can’t remember daylight because in this place we are dismembered fragments of night as an instant of memory standing stagnant in time. Smoke clouds the air and binds us all within the wrap of a shroud that both comforts and chokes and mediates and provokes. I can’t feel my extremities save for the pounding inside my arteries and every time I close my eyes I visualize the resounding pumps coming from the very heart of me – and it’s synchronized to the beat of every person who is living wildly alive.

"Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia."

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 04:01:00 -0800

“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”

- E.L. Doctorow