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Monday, January 16th, 2006
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12:08 am
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my solitary heart mourns the passing
of waves
of friendships
of leaves dying, spiralling to earth in the fall
of broken loves.
i shall build a nest
in my own chest
of pages torn from the book of old
i needed you once
but you've proven yourself to be
nothing more than
a bitter taste in my mouth
worth nothing now
but a sigh, and the accompanying regret.
a collection of phrases
mannerisms, expressions
adopted from you
and woven into my own fabric.
i can't shake the parts of you
that have become me
but i've learned to accept it
and not cry when i hear your words
expelled from my tongue.
you are not forgotten.
but you have become what i hope never to be.
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(2 ouchies | sink your teeth in)
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| Wednesday, May 11th, 2005
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1:50 pm
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you? are still there.
treetops and summer breezes, artifacts of past lives, a blush stealing across my cheeks and ribbons of shredded self-worth dangle from wasted limbs.
another year older.
another tick mark on the wall. saw me in half, count the rings in my bones. i wish i were as steady as a tree, bending in the wind. and sometimes breaking.
i'm deluding myself again.
thinking that things really are this simple
and can be masked
by complacency and
cable tv.
revisiting lost loves
and never-weres.
you can go anywhere in your dreams
but to deconstruct real life?
seriously, people
all you'll end up with is a broken aquarium
and rusted chicken-wire.
you, you are
the last
and best
and only
salvation.
and yet the morning after will never come.
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(sink your teeth in)
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| Wednesday, January 5th, 2005
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12:28 pm
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there you are in the corner of my eye. there you are hovering just out of my line of sight, a shadow blurring the edges of my vision. there you are lurking in the dim recesses of my heart, heavy and immovable. there you are flitting through my memories, skirting the edges. there you are.
tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick...
staring at my watch and wishing that it were taking me closer to you instead of farther away. wishing it were running backwards, take me back to the time when i could lay in your arms and breathe you in and i didn't think about anything else, didn't wonder what's beyond, what was on the other side of that wall. because when i started to wonder it took hold of me and possessed me and i couldn't resist the tides, but now i open my eyes and let out a startled cry because i'm not where i thought i was and it hits me that all those things i thought i dreamed really did happen, and now i'm standing at the edge of an unfathomably deep temporal chasm and there is an eternity between me and your eyes. there is a black hole between what is and what was, and it has sucked the feeling from my body and it has sucked away my will to live. why couldn't our lives be art together?
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(sink your teeth in)
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| Monday, December 20th, 2004
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2:10 pm
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my foot is asleep. random tingling in faraway phantom limbs. my heart feels like that sometimes, like it's been amputated. i can feel it still but i know it's not there. is that so hard? i'm killing time and killing time and kill kill kill. they think the laundromat eats hope. i think that my teeth hurt so much and so often that i'm not all here anymore. i suck down painkillers like candy. even more out of touch than usual. she says thank you for being here and i laugh. she says thank you for letting me love you and i smile malicious intent. i read somewhere once that a man had a toothache that turned out to be an infection that was somehow fatal and they caught it too late to save him. went straight to his brain. part of me hopes that's happening to me. hibernation and soft bread. i'm scared of winter. i can feel its insidiously icy fingers fondling me already. it's like getting fucked with an icicle, it gets into the deepest most vulnerable parts of you and then you're dead and frozen from the inside. this is it this is all you get. don't hold out your empty hand. i will swallow you.
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(sink your teeth in)
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| Wednesday, December 8th, 2004
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5:18 pm
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quantifying emotion is like counting breaths. trying to tag with descriptors and i find my vocabulary does not contain the words. i starting spontaneously bleeding today. not from my cunt, although that always seems spontaneous to me; rather my heel. it doesn't hurt, and i don't recall doing anything to it. but i looked down and there it was. makes me wonder if there is something in me that is trying to get out. curious choice of exit. my achilles heel. i could slap that label on so many things right now. achilles had nothing on me -- he was invincible everywhere but that one spot, whereas i am vulnerable everywhere. come on, mother, dip my heart in that eternal spring. tell me there is a better way to do this, a better way to keep on living. tell me i can fashion a helmet of tin foil to keep their alien rays out of my brain. tell me a little asbestos and superglue will go a long towards protecting me. tell me i'm a fool, and that duct tape can't fix a broken heart.
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(sink your teeth in)
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| Wednesday, November 17th, 2004
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2:37 pm
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twisted into me were the strange words that sparked my soul and when you took off your glasses i grinned and touched your arm -- it was an electric something i can't describe and my stomach is in knots but i don't know why. ducking my head trying to act coy and hoping you don't notice how hard i am blushing as you swing tight fist into the constellations of elephant tusk on slate and green felt, cracking together and spinning out of control. i watch you through the bottom of my glass and my eyes are sliding down your clean lines, smooth like summer nights and this is more than i expected. almost time to go and i'm thinking of nothing but the way you glowed all silhouette against the streetlight and how much i just want to lie in bed with you, wrapped up in my sheets heart beating and the shaking still doesn't stop. i like the newness of you, learning the smell of your hair and the shape of your fingertips. i like the awkward pauses and your metal between my teeth.
think of it as a cracked wine glass that is filled and spilled and keeps running. think of it as the motion of the waves, a sine curve, your hips in those jeans.
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(sink your teeth in)
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| Tuesday, November 2nd, 2004
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1:07 pm
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hypnotize
hypnotize
hypnotize
laugh 'til we cry
invisible stars sing me to sleep
telling secrets
sing me to sleep
sing me to sleep
and i've stopped drinking
and smoking
and eating
and breathing
so i should be pure by now
i should be pure...
this song will not let go of me right now.
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(sink your teeth in)
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| Wednesday, October 20th, 2004
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1:02 pm
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"what of art?" she asked.
"it is a malady."
"love?"
"an illusion."
"religion?"
"the fashionable substitute for belief."
"you are a skeptic."
"never! skepticism is the beginning of faith."
"what are you?"
"to define is to limit."
"give me a clue."
"threads snap. you would lose your way in the labyrinth."
~ the picture of dorian gray, oscar wilde
well beyond the limits of my own existence is an orgiastic plane beckoning me to join, a self-indulgency wrapped up in the finest of feather boas, teasing me with one lanky gam extended and hip gyrating. art. that which i lack and desire most. how is it that one can feel as if one's soul is screaming to express itself in a visual manner and yet one's physical self is incapable of that expression? i want my life to be art, every gesture every grin every rain-dampened blink of my lashes. but of course not. of course. because i exist solely to want what i cannot have, to desire things beyond my grasp.
when your life is so people-poor that you find yourself just pretending you have friends then that is the point at which you must decide if everyone else sucks or if it's just you. i'm thinking it's just me. i'm thinking that i'm so unhappy with myself that i've stopped thinking about it, i've stopped thinking about everything and i'm just floating along in a bathtub of ignorance. my own triteness makes me want to gouge my eyeballs out with a spork.
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(1 ouchie | sink your teeth in)
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12:50 pm
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i don't think anyone would ever call me ruthless.
but i have been called a heartbreaker.
how does that work? i'm not certain. there's just always been a part of me that is afraid of fragile things. fragility is a sort of power in itself, causing you to hold your breath, tiptoe around it, exert more effort to keep from breaking it than you might otherwise worry about. the power of the weak. and the easiest way to free yourself of that constraint is to break it. hearts are like that. you think i'm joking? when you're tied to something so fragile and intangible, it weaves its web around you, and whichever direction you turn you run into the chains, you're pushing against the threads and holding your breath. how much easier to rip through, break their heart, stride on with threads trailing and not look back. guilt and yet profound satisfaction. of course, the heart i've broken more often than not is my own, but it's not the hardest thing in the world to heal. hearts are very resilient.
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(sink your teeth in)
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| Saturday, October 2nd, 2004
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1:58 am
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when exactly is the moment you realize that you can never be alone again and you live in morbid fear of those 73 seconds in the bathroom when you have to look in the mirror and then you forget how you ended up here?
wrinkles. scars. dark circles. fat. makeup, jewelry, ill-fitting clothing to hide what can never be hidden.
and so you obsess and obsess over the things you might possibly maybe can change about the public you, the obvious you, in an effort to ignore what's going on inside, the way you sneer at yourself when you aren't looking, the way you hate everything you think and feel because it's wrong, just wrong. worry if the paint is peeling and you never think about the wood that's rotting underneath. do these pants make my ass look big? slaps a fresh veneer over suicide notes composed in your head, hides the stinking maggots of self-hatred that are eating out your insides.
if you are what you eat, does that mean i am nothing?
i hate people today. idle chitchat, daily blather grates on my ears. the more i try to ignore it the more it penetrates, searing into my brain, every sound wave pulsating raw nerve endings. it's so hard to pretend right now. even the alcohol doesn't work anymore. it just makes me feel sick, and then i get sicker at the thought of how i'm making myself sick simply to mask how sick i am of myself. and nothing i ever do in this lifetime is going to change that. oh look, a new addiction and a new way to break my body down before its time. this body isn't mine, it started out fine and then the sad twisted soul in it decided to make the roses fade and wilt, starve the life out of it, pierce it and prick it and bend it and break it. why else would i hang myself from meat hooks? i sometimes wonder. no temple, this. imagine dorian gray and then project that picture onto my soul. no wonder the body falls apart. the potency of this poison is manifesting.
why is it so easy to love other people but so damn hard to love yourself?
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(sink your teeth in)
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| Monday, August 16th, 2004
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8:05 pm
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i feel like killing. flesh ripping teeth gnashing bones grinding the whole gamut of bare-handed torture inflicted. the smell of fresh blood permeating the dank twilight of sensibility. blood boiling at betrayal, whispers behind open fists thinly veiled hostility. you have been reduced to monochrome, infinite shades of the same sickly colour pasted loosely on a gangling frame. i don't need reasons other than the vicious things i dream, hallucinations of a mind driven to madness by implicit trust turned violently against my own flesh. gouts of viscera flowing over my hands, and instead of trying to hold it in, i rip it out and free myself of the entanglements, the striated threads of corporeal tapestry unravelling as my fingers fly in rapid arcs of destruction. i've barely begun to play your game. i'm painting things that can't be uttered, dark mysteries hidden somewhere under your skin, and it's hide-and-seek with sharp pointy things, the keenest blade springing forth from my eyes and dancing in laughing lazy circles along your latent rivers of blood.
and to cool, to think of the ice, steaming and melting, melding, one element slightly pink and slipping from the sky. chill arctic winds more fierce than the desert sun, more determined to part flesh from bone and feed upon the marrow. this is harder to see. this is harder to comprehend. it comes before you notice. it leaves after you stop caring.
turning facetious facets of my hollow self further inward, echoing cavern of vicious dreams and haunting melodies. there is too little and too much these eyes never see, and i mean to make this one of those.
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(sink your teeth in)
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| Sunday, August 1st, 2004
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11:02 pm
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spinning fuzzy top and furry mind -- the axis of the world is a bit tweaked and there are fewer reasons for that than one might think. drawing lines in the sand and trying not to blur them, but the tides are creeping in and the vast obscurity of the ocean is ever encroaching. you're not who you are anymore, you're someone else and getting farther away from that as each day passes. the lexicon of self-definition is being rewritten and i don't have any say in it this time, onion-skin pages scrawled in a slanting hand that is infinitely superior to mine and too far away from the colour of ink that i would use. do you ever think about that time when we got soaked and just stood there, tasting the rain, laughing as the colour ran out of our hair and bled onto the pavement, biting our tongues about the wasted time the wasted years the cold concrete path that defines where we're headed, however reluctantly but ultimately with a desperate sense of necessity. don't be obtuse, you said, screwing up your face and watching the fading reflection of the neon lights in my eyes. and i just smiled, trying to be an enigma when i knew it was only my poor acting skills trying to assert themselves. maintain an air of mystery and elitism and you'll have them on their knees. i'd rather be holding her hand, but that's not in my stars.
how can a city's streets call so clearly to me across an immeasurable distance? how can asphalt know me so intimately, speak to the parts of me that never touch the sidewalks? my dreams are painted in black and yellow, spectral roads stretching from one end of my imagination into infinity, center lines stitching up the bits of me that i pretend are whole still. there isn't much left that roots me to this soil except the purely corporeal, and it's amazing how distant i am from my own flesh anyway.
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(sink your teeth in)
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| Tuesday, June 29th, 2004
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9:15 am
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there is so much more to this than any of you will ever understand. i almost want to laugh, thinking about how big fat secrets tiptoe around pretending to be more important than they are. i laugh because the rumors are flying, the sadly shaking heads, all staring up at that martyr on the cross(country) and thinking they know everything there is to know. i let them. i don't have to explain myself. if you really know me you'll know why i did what i did, and if you don't, well, that is your loss.
because i think i've finally learned that i don't have to answer to anyone but myself. that the time i spend staring at the space between the wall and the bed is mine, only mine, and that's the way it's always going to be. i've wasted things, diluted my life for the sake of another, and now i'm drifting around in this bog of uncertainty and diving to the unreachable bottom to collect the pieces of myself that have long since dissolved. i'm a firm believer that weakness is harder to see than strength, and only i know at this moment the weaknesses that propelled me forth from this.
you brought it on yourself, girl.
im done with finger-pointing and name-calling. i'm too old for that game. and i'd rather not waste my words on foaming expletives anyway. i have a new skool i'm learning from. and it has nothing to do with you.
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(2 ouchies | sink your teeth in)
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| Tuesday, June 22nd, 2004
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12:21 am
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life is one of those things that you don't really think about until you're down to the bare bones and scratching for anything. and at that point it's all you can think about, how you're going to survive, how you're going to make it through, how you're going to find something to put in or on your body, to take care of the bare essentials. the soul dries up while all concern is for the flesh.
i wonder what would happen if i stopped eating. what would go first? the flesh on my face, eyes sinking into dark sockets and cheeks melting away into sharp angles? would my wrist bones protrude more than they already do? would the veins in my hands become more apparent? or would my mind start to wither first, the fading away as subtle as the constant shaking of my hands? i don't know if i could do my body any more wrong than i already have. but i'm tired of feeding it. tired of taking care of it. tired of bathing it, clothing it, resting it, and doing it all over again. i forget how demanding the body is when i don't have enough left to think of anything else. it's all so futile, really. amazing that we haven't evolved into something more efficient. intangible. oh, that's right, humanity has stopped evolving. and i think i've stopped with it.
i envy you your ignorance. i envy you your security. i envy you your full belly, your petty concerns. i envy you your next meal, your warm bed, your empty fucking head. i envy you your parents' pocketbook, your shiny car, your trendy anorexia. i envy you your ability to stay afloat when the fucking world is crashing down again.
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(sink your teeth in)
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| Saturday, June 12th, 2004
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4:06 am
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islands of insecurity in an ocean of unflagging doubt. i am somehow swimming through the murky haze of a half-realized existence, wondering vaguely where the surface is and why i can't stay afloat.
i find it funny how we writers can shut out any experience of existence but our own. we have the voices in our heads, but they are all born of the world as we perceive it. some can pretend better than others, but you slice a character from a story down the middle and you'll see the writer inside, fetus-like, curled with thumb in mouth and pencil in hand. poets are especially bad about this. poetry is in large part self-absorption, a way not to communicate one's feelings, but to wave one's ego in the faces of others. and yet it is prized above all other literary forms. think about it: have you ever met a true poet who didn't have a lurking megalomania deep (or perhaps not so deep) under the surprisingly thick-skinned exterior?
perhaps i am too harsh. perhaps the world is painted in blazing primary shades and it is only when we don those refractive glasses that the light breaks into its true tones, which the naked eye is too blinded to see. but then again, maybe the light is only simplified, and what is otherwise a perfectly good mystery, needing no explanation, must be broken down into the subsequent layers of frequency before we can claim to understand what we only have the most minute of inklings about, and then parade about with fancy graphics and 256-color pie charts to prove our superiority. maybe the highest form of being exists not in asking why, but in accepting is.
all theoretical, of course. my world is much smaller than this, the day-to-day swallowing my soul in what the trivia card informed me this evening is the "yuppie flu," or chronic fatigue syndrome. perhaps it is anemia. perhaps it is the essence of my wasting existence to grasp at straws and come away empty-handed, until one day there isn't enough strength left in my hands to reach for anything.
i'm getting very tired of this bout with depression. ennui is so classic, so commonplace. sometimes i wish i were manic depressive, so at least these episodes could be balanced out with occasional surges of energy. but it never happens. i go from wasting on the bottom to treading passively just below sea level, waiting for the next wave to take me farther under. i wonder if there isn't something seriously wrong with my body at this point, because surely an ostensibly healthy 22-year-old should be able to pull herself out of bed. but it's almost funny how often i can't, how often my girlfriend has to dress me and stem my tears to get me to move an inch. one's limbs get so heavy sometimes.
none of this has been very poetic, i realize. nor does it have the certain tang of well-organized prose, but that's inconsequential. i don't have to explain my actions. the funny thing about the artist, you see, is that our art is our drug. and we can make art, to the depths of the addiction, and while the soul may starve the ego is fed, and that's all that really matters. i know that i am pathetic and worthless, lacking in true talent and merely parroting cleverly-scripted grammatic rules into speeches with some air of coherence, competent merely because i learned my lines right the first time. see how easily i fool you and everyone else. and yet the triumph is hollow, because the ego is propped with flimsy balsa-wood supports, guaranteed to disintegrate soon. but not before the artist slits her wrists and is lamented as a tragic heroine, awash in a sea of red.
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(2 ouchies | sink your teeth in)
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| Sunday, May 23rd, 2004
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11:28 pm
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where were you when i crash-landed into the neglected land of sunday afternoon dreams on the other side of the mirror? when the glass splintered around me and i awoke with shards in my eyes, your refracted self shining in my shattered corneas? because there was once a time when i thought you were always right behind me, if i turned my head fast enough i'd catch a glimpse of you before you could duck out of the way.
but i was wrong. you were only in my head, always taunting, making me think i had someone when it was always me, alone. filtering through repressed memories, filling in the blanks (or rather refilling the blanks, because there never was anything there.) i always liked those periscopes, where you can see around corners and over walls, because i thought maybe one day i might see myself as someone else, as others see me.
it's a pity how quickly everything wastes away in the summer heat. i am wilting like every spring flower, stuck to vinyl seats and bones melting away through my skin, too thin to keep anything in. too thin to keep anything out. i'm ashamed of how scared i am, ashamed to be seen as anything less than arms-crossed combat-boots lipstick-smears and the things i pretend, the way i imagine i am in my head, the way i wish you saw me. only in another life, another me.
golden foam melting into the wyoming sunset, i wrote once. i tried changing the names but that was a farce, i had to change them back because i never could believe that my words were anything more than they were. nevermind if i changed the colour of her eyes. it was all a big joke, all a stupid longing that i know will never be sated. man is a rational aminal. i may not be a man but i can slay my desires with a thought just as well as any of them.
current mood: wilted
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(sink your teeth in)
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| Monday, April 5th, 2004
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1:43 am
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i wasn't the me that walked out the front door tonight. accidentally huffing paint fumes and trying not to let the wind in under my skirt, because beneath the goosebumps i can feel my muscles tensing and the space between my legs gets colder than it should ever be. it spattered across the tops of my feet and i scraped absently with one long thumbnail, compounding the dirt under it and thinking of nighttime summer skies and grass stems chewed on someone else's front lawn.
and then there was the perpetual threat of opening up, of coming apart on that stained and ragged futon while i cried so hard because there were tears instead of words and i couldn't make anything out of them but an ocean to drown in. bubbling and sputtering while she cradled my head in her lap and tried to see into me but my eyes were screwed shut tight and no amount of her soothing could open them again. daysweeksmonths passed and it was the same, didn't cry again but kept it in. sewn in the seams of my skirt and it's not until i was on my knees again and screaming at her to take me in again and bleeding again that they tore, caught on the edge of the bed where i did the things i said i never would and tried to forget that it ever happened. you are not the only one with secrets as big as a dinner plate and twice as breakable.
so don't push in me and tell me to forget it all, to let it go, because it's rearing up again and i can't remember the beauty of a sunset or a butterfly's wing when the movie reel in my mind keeps spinning over the same damn scenes.
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(1 ouchie | sink your teeth in)
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| Tuesday, March 9th, 2004
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5:08 pm
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why don't you go jump off a bridge?
well i would but i'm scared see the water is so cold and so very far away and i'm afraid of the things down there, the things with sharp pointy teeth and lantern jaws and leftover salami rotting in davy jones' locker. no. not really. because those things i can imagine and that makes them less terrifying. it's the things that i can't imagine, the shapeless ideas that creep into my dreams and scare the shit out of me.
i've been having nightmares.
no, you don't understand, this is weird because i rarely ever dream at all let alone have nightmares for nights and nights in a row, waking up dreaming and scared and not knowing what to make of any of it because it's never me in there, never me. maybe the way i see myself or the way others see me but not me in my own head, not me running to some nameless destination where the unthinkable awaits but someone who stole my body, someone who's got me on remote control and they keep hitting the fast forward buttton, keep flipping the channels and i never have the slightest fucking clue where i am.
i haven't looked outside today. i'm inside my own egg and everything i need is here, although eventually i'm going to run out and then i'll have to breka the shell and look outside. everyday i get spit up onto the sidewalk, forced into searing sunlight, clawing at my eyes as my retinas burn and throwing up down in the dirt. pretty girl, dirty hair.
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(1 ouchie | sink your teeth in)
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| Saturday, February 28th, 2004
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3:23 pm
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fingers drifting through the musty pages of a book left too long in the dark, paper moth-eaten and smelling of ancient wisdom. the words lift themselves from the page and i float among them, closing my eyes and creating a new world from the old, clothing myself in someone else's dreams and ideas. this is the way i become something other than what i don't want to be, what i am. this is how i rebuild my soul on the ruins of the old.
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(sink your teeth in)
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| Monday, December 1st, 2003
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1:15 am
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let's count how quickly we can fall apart. one, two, three, dry fingers
cracking peeling from the cold, sad, dearth of anything and everything
and my skin is just a little too tight, stretched out over my pounding
pulsating brain, worrying myself to death with inconsequential details
and struggling to fit into jeans a size too small. it's stupid. there's a little
left over around the ears and i can't breathe here, now, in this too-thick
air and treading stagnant water. lip trip flip dip slipping deeper down and
forgetting to let go of those stones, that extra weight, sinking under the
pressure of changing myself to fit some ideal that will never happen.
can you tango? she asks me in a monotone. i nod, glide out onto the floor,
cut the steps with measured skill until i trip over my own untied shoelaces
and skin my knees again, fourth grade, lying to save my teeth and wishing
i could be just like everyone else. missing the beat, two left feet, nursing my
broken pride with a toy bottle filled with novocaine. forgot not to take candy
from strangers, they smile so nice with their pretty white teeth. fishing in white
cotton underpants drawing bright yellow sun, perfect yellow curls, green
green grass and pretty pink dress. squeeze out the lies, leave it there, change
the station and roll down the road with the windows down, rushing wind in
your face making you forget what happened, nothinkingforamomentyou'refree,
whatever. blase passe orangelemonhello.
forget how it rode on your tongue for a moment, how your eyes widened and
then rolled back, teeth numb and luring you in. eyes too bright and salty skin
slides against salty skin, chancing the last breath before the night explodes
and the stars die out. you are nothing without, even less with, and the horrible
truth pounds back into you and you're laughing at your own stupidity again. and again.
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(sink your teeth in)
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greystarfalling's journal