Scramblings and Ramblings

Day VIII


(shot number two with catharsis)

we press frail hands to our lungs, slowly
pulling oxygen to the air and twisting the muscles
of our diaphragm like laundry, drained and dried and pale
on the line;
tipping water from our tearducts, we knelt
over the water and tried to bleed the bitterness of
bleach from our eyes, pulling at our lashes;
we want to keep the color of our irises and the black of our pupils--
(it's so hard to see when the whole world is white
and our hands are pale enough already; they wrinkle
up into golden little raisins so quickly)

chemical burns clutch at the pulses of our esophagus
and we choke on scars of catharsis and terminality--
we empty ourselves into idealism, lost-forgotten-
found by someone we've never known, somewhere deep
in the edge of a needle, somewhere in the makeup of
drugs bought by those few who still care.

can we even remember what love used to taste like?

"Ducks!"




iridescent with oil and lamplight,
ink is in their feathers
like blood is in our veins and they
stroke with feet in careful patterns.
(this letter goes this way and
that letter goes that, and this is
the poem of the lake, words
of which way the fish swim and the
best way to catch them)

slackjawed with coughing peals,
they cry foul at the croak of frogs
caught in reeds and black eyes
go beady at the thought of branch-bones
snapping, and they write
dinner below them.

then comes the dive.

hoarse dreams and honey coated words strung along my
teeth like fluoride, like cavities pulsing in and out and eating away
at my letters before I can even say them;
I find the sounds in segmented palms like
wandering ponderings and I feel stupid, tracing
them round the delicate curve of hand--
(beproductiveandcontributetosocietyandstopwastingyourtime
thinking--
it'sneverdoneanythingforyoubeforeand
itmostcertainlywon'tnow)

and I scratch at the back of my head, unsure
of where my words go, and I want to find them
engraved in my scalp like a Franz and Zooey mantra
haunting anemia in the lines of my spine and pressing
my back forward instead of up-- I hunch like
a sparrow caught in a storm (spare branch and hail, and it threatens to fall)
and I feel the water drip down my shoulders, cold fingers
whispering a mantra of their own,
and I wonder where they keep their words.

Day IX

I don't have much time between packing, finding myself a bathing suit, and flying so... here are three unfinished little stanzas. I know. I'm a failure.
(These may or may not be killed/turned into something else later)




Big breath now: with winds
howling between the rock plates of your shoulders,
jagged ends of vertebrate, feel
the incisions between skin and muscle and
the way butterfly knives curve, wings like glass
twisting into nerves;
feel how soft the feet are, how light death is,
perched on the way you twist in your sleep--



shifting fragments like shrapnel dreams and
gold wire eyes: here are their cloth catchers, high
above your head where the spirits can't reach them:
do you remember your nightmares?






Untangling myself from the knots
of society has always been a trial
and a half; I have scars
cross my body with the ropes chafing
against my too-soft skin, and
I wish that my bones were stronger.

Spoiler

I probably won't have internet access for a couple of days, so I'll make up when I get back.

DAY X

Sıppıng aırpor beer and coats go
off ınto conveyor belts
so they can look at your ınsıdes
and determıne whether you are pure;
there are chemıcals ın the lack of pressure
and there are pulses beneath your feet.

Here ıs your modern day Daedalus, calculatıng and sure.

*likes*

DAY XI

Spoiler

I know these are crap--sorry. Wrote em straight into here.

Sometimes I forget
who I am in the gaze (haze) of
smoke and in pools of amber
(like tarnished looking glasses)
and all the memories that I have held
so dearly to my chest
(so dearly, in fact, that they've
left their mournful imprint on my chest,
tears that I never let myself cry).
And sometimes, I can't help cry
myself-- though these are different tears entirely.

(Down with inhibitions and the teachings that we've taught.)

DAY XII

Lying somewhere in between our
frailties and clasped hands
(a broken cross on her chest from a careless priest)
there were dying days and beds
carved from oak.

words read as "undefined" and indifferent
(listed through bloodless lips
and prayers, the clench of an aching
jaw--but continue) we can find meaning
in the sounds and tear philosophy away
from your hands,
grasping at the cracks of the piped organ
and the rust covering these pews.

let's find the translations and the
Hebrew that you sing
(though the sounds are alien--where
is God in this unfathomable language,
and why has he not rebuilt Shinar?)
following the words with our fingers.

you wish it phonetic, just like your faith,
but it dies in the back of your throat and smells
like frankincense and confusion. here is God,
laughing like a madman as you swirl your
tongue round your tonsils, wondering where to find love.
(because maybe you don't know after all.)

---MAJOR WORK IN PROGRESS--



We follow alleycats like we follow
the whispers of cold April wind:
blind, because the world is gray.

We wonder where all the glass from
the broken windows went--
how many bottles of paint they rattled into
a name across abandonment, a name that nobody
could read (one that I've stared at for hours and hours,
one that I've run over with my hands, wandering across textures
like memories of someone that I wish I could know)

First time we saw the city, it echoed through the
empty fisheyes on the empty bridge
left over from the catch, tithes for our flea-ridden guides;
they paw and mewl and brush at
strangers' legs and find Allah in those that offer
hands. Their prayers thrum deep
within their stomachs, and we feel them tremble
right below their ears.

We feed on iridescence and fall to the sea between the
broken bars of a copper gate; we tumble like
the brick walls tumble toward modernity,
and fins fly from our sides, wingspan filled with
salt and old names stolen.

And then, pollution makes us cough out
the shisha memories of last night;
we breathe deep the scent of cherry and futbal and
sweet green tea.
(breathe deep before we are carried back to the oxygen,
before we flounder back with our lungs and too-human limbs).

We think about how we should fall in a
country like this, delicate veils 'cross our not-so-delicate faces,
gold painted wrists, and hands covered in spice,
steeping and soaking in the sea.

We surface, and prayers thrum in our stomachs,
and the Call to Prayer warbles on like a ghost.

Hello Perse. We have talked plenty and the preface will be short.

You must draw out the true voice within you and stop attempting to construct your writing. Your natural voice and writing is direct, to the point, and poignant. And yet you are not the contents of a first impression or a cursory glance of a NaPo thread. Precisely what I am looking for in responding in these. And here we will begin Perse.

You wondered how to expose your soul as a fraud
and rip the heart of a lily in full bloom clean from its socket in the wall
to present it to a eventual groom as the present of your love, but-
I digress those aren't your words, these are

I’ve lusted for these lucid dreams
to take my body
and leave my soul, to turn from dust in my 
cobwebbed mind to a reality

a reality you ponder between days in a strange land from a lifetime in a motherland,
but what will you do when the hills and the treetops of both become the same shade of green
and dreams once solitary to home have grown far beyond what mother ever planned?
Perse, is an Apollonian dream existing separate from the soul, the mind vacant of physical Dionysian
release in a world where mortality is chained; amongst the eddies and the crags will you find
the nostalgic mountain-lands where you once roamed,
or has it all changed, changed terribly from what you've once known?
Perse can you pen the expression of an identity exploding at the voice of god
or are you seeing now the voice is the side of yourself you've never faced?
Perse are you lost as you've always been lost?
Perse do you write with your life and your love to express, or is your voice a fear of falseness,
a fear of lye soap made for explosives and a suicide bomber come to hunt you to ends of the world
drunk, drunk as a madman who for eternity haunts your every step; is that why you write Perse?
Self-destruction is an art Perse, not a science, not a habit; it's like drinking heroine in a sippy cup
compulsively and pretending it's from mother's breast, when you pay your favorite junkie
in every poem of theirs you've reread until your death; you are a fraud in your own mind,
your soul reciprocated in a mirror you view submerged in the river Styx; are you a fraud Perse?

Hope you don't mind I used part of that poem. I won't use anymore. Hope that helps!
Enjoy NaPo.

Not that I've said anything before but...

Where are you and why are you on the third page? You are now on the first page, Missy.

EDIT: Oh no, I just saw you have bronchitis. Ew.

EDIT: Get well soon.

DAY XIII


There are shawls across our faces like sins,
washed out and wrung
on the tongues of cavern prophets
and the lips of a pipe;
with eyes like alleycats we
claw embroidery into hidden faces with hidden hands and
we wonder when the swathes
of religion will fall from our shoulders:
when judgment will find our skin.

DAY XIV



The air was cruel like her hands
on the china, pale and cold under
the tap and fragile; so fragile in the steam.
We wondered where winter went,
if it rested down the drain
with the rest of the crisp white while
summer swept us by.

When we press our fingers to it,
we find the shards and cry out
as autumn blooms spread across
our skin,
and we nurse them thinking of spring.

DAY XV



and saturated even in a pregnancy
of thought like this, we cannot think,
not when there is paper to be rolled and foam
to be smeared across our drunken lips;
we cannot fall from our knees and with
waxen wings we have all the world to kill us.
forget disciplines and habits because
arsenic and hemlock seem to coat
the tips of pens and radicality
in this day and age lies in the ticking
of a chest-plastered bomb and
the card-board box anthems that we throw
change at
(I'll pay you to shut your mouth for once--
let me die in peace)
callous our hands with glass and amber
and the scrapings of cash between our fingers--
we know how to the world works and we like
to think that we work with it,
and we like to smoke and toke and go broke
at the bar and we smile as we waste away.