Curate, connect, and discover
Fires burn in the shape of mountains, mere miles from my porch step.
The vegetation cries in red and grey.
My feet in my front yard grass ground themselves there, against the peeking patches of dirt hiding beneath the stiff yellowing blades, as if nature itself is afraid to look at its destruction. I cannot look away.
Our dry seasons get drier, rain will become myth, and water legend. I wonder when it will be my turn to record the destruction, to tell others of what happened to me, and not hear of what happened to others. I wonder if that day will be today.
I watch the climate crisis march to my doorstep, and
invite itself into my living room.
The blaze is outrageous, but not nearly as much as his friend, the politician.
He insists the fire isn’t here, that my brown felt couches have always been black and crackling,
That the water from my kitchen faucet has always been boiling from its spout.
I watch my world turn to ashes, and the fire take its leave, and the politician smiles with heavy pockets.
Insisting he wasn’t paid to let him in in the first place.
I don’t feel anything anymore. I don’t know if I miss it or not. It can be nice being withdrawn from the world, until is isn’t.
You can run away from reality, and shield yourself from introspection, but in the corner of your eye your life is always happening.
Even in its darkest hour, the world carries good people on it. And we must fight for them. Love is sustainable, a replenishing and revitalizing energy. Hatred ravages the wielder just as much as those it is wielded against. It can propel you, surely, but for how long? How long can you hold the fire before you, too, are turned to ash?
I want to change.
You can.
But I am afraid.
You ought to be.
I can't change.
Yes you can.
My legs are shaking. My feet are stuck in the ground.
Unstick them. Walk. Move. Change. Now!
Now?
Now.
I’m trying to hold onto myself.
Rushing water.
I can’t remember what I came out here for.
Rain coming down.
I wonder if my mascara is running.
Wind pushing.
But I can’t bother to wipe my face if it is.
I feel the grating fingernails of progress on my tender skin, and wonder how it lead us here. To desolation, destruction. We were supposed to be better, stronger, kinder. But instead we are are weaker, crueler and so poignantly and horribly worse.
How disappointing that evolution does not promise improvement, only difference.
What use is death to a creature like me?
Well, I’ll tell you:
Death is an old bedfellow, a partner, a wife;
Is there anything so sweet as a union born in blood?
A promise to always be at each other’s finger tips?
Tool the marble into statue, we sculpt the world,
To improve it, cull those unfit for life by scythe point.
A silly question to ask me, what use is death to a
Creature? Without it, I would not have a life at all.
Like a mutant calf, my village shunned and cast
Me out to meet her, Lady Death.
Is everyone on the verge of completing and utterly losing it?
Or am I here on this cliffside alone?
Intelligence grand and ever expanding,
his head pounds with new ideas, while the heart in his chest beats slower,
his empathy is sluggish and cold.
The same old cruelty that ran in the veins of the cavemen is steady in him, his wisdom in vain. He has become acutely worse, torturing with metal tools instead of wooden ones, brainwashing with television instead of word of mouth, colonizing with guns instead of swords. What use is knowledge in the hands of a dominator? It becomes just another weapon, words to razors sentences to spears. Do not waste intellect on brutes, they will wound you deeper because they will know where it hurts.
“You’re gentler than they said you would be,” the girl remarked.
The siren smiled graciously in return, and took another chunk out of her calf and thrust it down her throat without reprieve. The girl didn’t feel a thing, her saliva numbing her skin the moment it touched it.
“We’re only hungry beasts girl, not cruel. We leave that to the men,” she said frankly and wiped her mouth of blood the way a child would of jam.
How do you deal with the unending feeling of things that must be done? Towels folded and put in the cabinet, dishes washed and dried on the rack, bills paid and sent to the post; done only a moment before the day is started again, the month is at its height, the year is born anew. How do you fight the tiredness, the weariness brought down by mundanity? How do you win?
Eyebrows thin as wire and lips black and dotted with white latex highlights; Lottie was unmistakable.
She kept her hair short to her ears and curled like cat tails, determined to spend one of her nine lives dying fast and young. Fur cheap and puffed up over her head, she strutted down fourth avenue like fire dripped from her heels. Her eyes were naturally half shut and her neck was as thick as a wrist; she had a way of easing people into spilling all their darkest secrets to her. I was not among them. As a friend of Lottie, she switched off her siren like personality for me, to spare me I think. Maybe she felt comfortable enough to drop the act, or like I was too lowly for her to bother dawning a mask for. Either way she got me into the best dinner spots and didn’t let me spend a dime on anything. I had to appreciate her for that.
-a Friend of Lottie’s
Is the joy of wearing anyone’s face, dawning any voice on command worth more to you than possessing your own? Then by all means act your life away. Express yourself in characters, distilled emotions and memories of yours, collect awards, applause, whatever it is you think will fix you, make you happy. And when the curtain is called and the limelight dims and you sit with your viewer of one and struggle to communicate to other people in real life without the hug of a facade, I want you to remember that you wanted this. You wanted to be shucked and hollowed out to be filled with the adoration of millions. Don’t step down now. There’s nothing worth returning to anyway.
-Diary of an actress
You weren’t there on the mountain
when its last glacier melted,
You weren’t there in the river
when it’s water ran empty,
You weren’t there by the ocean
when it’s body rested over much of the land.
You didn’t watch the dying happen, but nonetheless, it happened. And one sunny day, when the skyscrapers stand hollow, and the cars don’t run, and the world’s heart has beat its last,
You won’t be there.
Spun silk from out my ear, divine ideation risen from a splintered mind.
Envelope your flesh with damnation and dance with me this night.
This isn’t me,
I don’t know who I’m pretending for.
Why is love not enough to keep someone here,
but enough to take them away?
Splinter my dream into a web of cracks and gaps.
Take what little splash of anticipation I have pestering my rancorous mind and freeze it, immobilize me.
Take me where you want to go.
I’ve a pin with a ball end pinched between my index and thumb. Ego inflating like boils in me, I pop every idea that I am something good, worthwhile. I wonder if a harsh inner critic is a blessing or a curse as she darts pushpins in my spirit, and punches holes in my identity until I am paper thin and hollow. Light as a feather taken by the slightest idea of greener grass; convinced going anywhere is better than here.
The Girl who Cried Wolf
Was never met with hurried steps coming to her aid in the dead of night. The first night she watched for the beast, his golden eyes burned from a breath beyond the treeline. She shouted out for pitchforks, torches, and only felt wind and moonlight rushing to her side. Nobody believed her the first time.
Dirt bends into the maw of the mother’s wound, blood coldly trickling out of her, unhurried and luxuriant like vomiting molasses. She died by missile; its nose dove unflinching through her kitchen’s closed window and flung open the curtains and obliterated the walls like a dozen sledge hammers cracking concrete in cacophony. Dinner was not set to be served until 15 after 5 o clock; nobody waited at that table but her. Setting plates down on linen, forks and spoons down on napkins, face flat down on the broken checkered tile and a split where her ribs used to be. And so much dirt. She never would’ve allowed that, particular as she was about the dusting of the varnished oak wood and the shining of the tarnished silver, dying under such layers of soot would’ve killed her again if her eyes were ever to open. She must’ve died instantly, so instantly, that her body had time to give away its warmth as she lay bleeding slugs, for there was contentment on her face. Like she had just gotten the table setting the way she liked it, and she imagined the faces of her family sitting there none the wiser to the effort she put in to create their everyday fairy tale. But she knew. I’m glad that she knew just how wonderful she was, that particular anal persnickety woman whose home was mistaken for a terrorist’s.
More hours in the day ought to do it. Just four or five more, and my dreams don’t seem so far away.
Polymaths are rarer than single subject experts; lofty does not begin to describe my future. But who ever aimed low and went high? Better to do the opposite I say, and maybe I’ll warm up to medium.
Shadows cast under noses, in sullen cheeks and eye sockets galore.
Highlights on the rims of sharp roses, with thorns that grow ceiling to floor.
Nothing quite so soft and unforgiving, as the woman that waits at your door.
I just want to paint and forget a while;
Yes just a drop of wine, and a fan brush for blusher,
And my portrait will smile as wide as I do.
Taken by the wind’s sweet pressure on my face, I am swept to the little church on the hill. Sugar atomized in the air; footsteps bringing life to the silent cedar floorboards, nothing felt simpler than there. My eyes are sealed as I soak in the feeling, finding a smile in the blustery darkness.
Though nothing can haunt a crooked ward, her neck often cracks and turns rapidly as if she fears something coming. As if eyes leech onto her rigid and bark-like back, and their hunger for her image alarms her, or the echoes left of her fallen mind. Nothing can hurt a corrupted spirit, but perhaps the past. She fears not a hunter, but a walking memory, pulling her back to her former self. How wicked a deed to dredge a dead woman's mind back to her rotting body, to convince her only to die.
She wanders barefooted, on dry and cutting blades
Something has died here, in the glades of her old memories
Its terrain water-hungry, fertile with long-lost mistakes
Sweet aroma of morning dew has forsaken this place.
But she returns, like sunken ship to lighthouse unmanned,
though only yellow grass grows in her past.
Remembering him is like biting glass. I don’t know why I do it, why I keep hurting myself on the sharp details of his shattered memory. His eyes, such a pale blue, had a depth to them you wouldn’t expect like stagnant ocean water. My mouth bleeds as I masticate his face, the way words would leave his mouth; his voice is like rows of pins in my tongue. I can’t help myself but to recall him, over and over again, no matter the pain. I think that’s what draws me to recollection actually, feeling anything again. It’s the numbness that lets you drift into autopilot, living while asleep, that ruins you so much more deeply. Losing a loved one, and yourself along with them.
I thought if I could redeem something in him I could redeem something in me, too. But I failed us both. He is not a project, and I cannot be healed vicariously. The only path we can take here, is forward.
With glass in our soles, tearing us apart and revealing us at the same time. Forward.