I see the sun setting and imagine all the days that must have lain down and rested their head on his giant belly; faded away into an abyss of past tense. A heaven of days. Dusk, their graveyard.
They leave behind the colours of summer that smile at me. There are infant flowers of purple resting contentedly on their mothers' green breast. They belong to a family of green. Their cousins, the trees, wave from above and dance and laugh when the wind sneaks up from behind and ruffles their hair. I feel tears pool in the corners of my eyes as I gaze up at them, wishing so very desperately that I could join in their playful charade. I stretch my arms up, squeezing my eyes shut as I will myself to feel my limbs elongating and my body growing tall enough so that I may reach up to hold their rough hands and listen to their stories of a world seen from the sky.
Monday, August 13, 2012
Sunday, August 12, 2012
Inferior
Your
Foot
Steps
Have
Left
Stains
On
My
Chest
From
Down
Here
I
Watch
You
Stand
Above
Me
Looming
Why
Are
You
Looking
At
Me
Like
That?
Thursday, August 9, 2012
Pleased to Meet You
There are words hanging off the walls of my throat, their little fists buried deep in its footholds. Anchored. "You're so close", I tell them, "climb higher, just a little further now. The world will make such wonderful use of you."
- Later: I imagine the words standing on my tongue, blinking and stretching and squint-smiling at the sun.
(The first encounter; when my words met the world... Hello...)
- Later: I imagine the words standing on my tongue, blinking and stretching and squint-smiling at the sun.
(The first encounter; when my words met the world... Hello...)
Ativan (A Plane Ride)
The heads of my eyelids lull,
Two sleepy sisters
Manipulated by a
Manufactured emotion
We are tired, my
Eyelids and I.
Oh how we sway with
The movement of this
Immortal, mortifying bird
We must hurry Eyelids,
We must hurry.
I ask them, my darlings,
Stay awake awhile with me
And shake the hands of
Muted neon lights
Kiss both their cheeks
In a luminescent hallway
That stain this page a temporary
Glowing green
It is nice to meet you, lights,
It is nice to meet you.
How lovely is this calm, dear friends?
Look what we can see when all is still
In this science lab of airborne endlessness.
We are floating, aren't we?
Yes, we are floating.
Two sleepy sisters
Manipulated by a
Manufactured emotion
We are tired, my
Eyelids and I.
Oh how we sway with
The movement of this
Immortal, mortifying bird
We must hurry Eyelids,
We must hurry.
I ask them, my darlings,
Stay awake awhile with me
And shake the hands of
Muted neon lights
Kiss both their cheeks
In a luminescent hallway
That stain this page a temporary
Glowing green
It is nice to meet you, lights,
It is nice to meet you.
How lovely is this calm, dear friends?
Look what we can see when all is still
In this science lab of airborne endlessness.
We are floating, aren't we?
Yes, we are floating.
Your Eyes
In wells of churning sharpness
Quiet hands sweep and slip and sway
Past each other in
A slow and careful caress;
A romance of fingers
(The colours of rust and liquid jade)
Seeping into one another
Intertwining... Reaching for me.
Oh, how they draw me in and
Call to me ever so softly.
In their palms they hold
The thickest of pine forests
Damp and dripping and dark
Laced with spider webs of sinewy gold.
Yes, in your eyes I see
A wonderful somewhere
I have never traveled,
And all the places I could go.
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Part One
I have a terrible yearning to be constantly poetic. I don't want to write anything down that isn't eloquent or meaningful or trying at least to communicate something worth reading at all.
And so, I don't write.
Lately I have gone through a period of complete blankness.
I'm already getting frustrated because I have so much I have to explain, and it doesn't come out the way I would like it to. I feel as if I don't possess the words to give a proper explanation of this given situation and it leaves me so frustrated that I don't write anything down at all, because I want it to be "right" when it comes out. I want it to do it justice.
I simply don't know where to start. Maybe what I'll do is break up the individual pieces and write about them separately on different days until I have poured out all that I have wanted to say in a clear and concise manner.
It is 12:32 AM, which leads into my first explanation.
I can't recall the last time I slept in my bed. I've been sleeping on the couch for the last two weeks, I'd say. I do try. I lay in my bed, at the time one would expect me to get to sleep. 11:00 or so.
One of my bedside table lights stays on. The one to my left, if I'm facing the ceiling. Often I can't bring myself to turn it off. I think. I get scared of waking up in the morning, for what reason I do not know. I toss and turn. I hate the silence. I reach for my phone, also my resource for music. Anything calming. It is on for only a few seconds before I feel overwhelmed by the lyrics; they enter my ears and pulsate and I stress because I can't think and follow along with the lyrics at the same time. I turn it down. I can't hear anything. I hate the silence. I turn it up. Too loud. I turn it off completely.
Back to silence. I hate the silence. It gets later. I am scared of going to school the next day. The temptation of not going rises in my chest. It goes away when I begin to stress about the consequences of not going. I hear the automated voice on the answering machine in my head. I wonder what I would tell my teachers if I missed it. What about university? All the absences?
The thoughts snowball and I wonder what I really want, anyways. Is it university? I would love to travel for months and months and write and then come home and lay on something soft, feeling like I hadn't sat down in years. I force the thoughts away.
University.
I decide I have to go. The cycle continues. Scared to go. Can't go. Have to go, have to go, have to go.
My thoughts are overwhelmingly violent. More crowd in.
Turn the right bedside light on. Get out of bed. Turn the ceiling lights on. The shadows are smothered by the brightness. Stare down at my bed. Can't sleep here. I plant my socked in the carpet and lean back to rip the white covers from my bed; sling them over my shoulders. A pillow is grabbed and I squeeze my blanketed self through the door into the hallway, shutting the door behind me. It seems to be a feeble and childish attempt to leave the thoughts in the room; lock them in. I imagine words and worries floating slowly through the air behind the door. They are grey and smokey and thick. Ghosts. This image frightens me and a new, irrational fear of my room sets in. I walk-run through the hallway towards the living room.
And so, I don't write.
Lately I have gone through a period of complete blankness.
I'm already getting frustrated because I have so much I have to explain, and it doesn't come out the way I would like it to. I feel as if I don't possess the words to give a proper explanation of this given situation and it leaves me so frustrated that I don't write anything down at all, because I want it to be "right" when it comes out. I want it to do it justice.
I simply don't know where to start. Maybe what I'll do is break up the individual pieces and write about them separately on different days until I have poured out all that I have wanted to say in a clear and concise manner.
It is 12:32 AM, which leads into my first explanation.
I can't recall the last time I slept in my bed. I've been sleeping on the couch for the last two weeks, I'd say. I do try. I lay in my bed, at the time one would expect me to get to sleep. 11:00 or so.
One of my bedside table lights stays on. The one to my left, if I'm facing the ceiling. Often I can't bring myself to turn it off. I think. I get scared of waking up in the morning, for what reason I do not know. I toss and turn. I hate the silence. I reach for my phone, also my resource for music. Anything calming. It is on for only a few seconds before I feel overwhelmed by the lyrics; they enter my ears and pulsate and I stress because I can't think and follow along with the lyrics at the same time. I turn it down. I can't hear anything. I hate the silence. I turn it up. Too loud. I turn it off completely.
Back to silence. I hate the silence. It gets later. I am scared of going to school the next day. The temptation of not going rises in my chest. It goes away when I begin to stress about the consequences of not going. I hear the automated voice on the answering machine in my head. I wonder what I would tell my teachers if I missed it. What about university? All the absences?
The thoughts snowball and I wonder what I really want, anyways. Is it university? I would love to travel for months and months and write and then come home and lay on something soft, feeling like I hadn't sat down in years. I force the thoughts away.
University.
I decide I have to go. The cycle continues. Scared to go. Can't go. Have to go, have to go, have to go.
My thoughts are overwhelmingly violent. More crowd in.
Turn the right bedside light on. Get out of bed. Turn the ceiling lights on. The shadows are smothered by the brightness. Stare down at my bed. Can't sleep here. I plant my socked in the carpet and lean back to rip the white covers from my bed; sling them over my shoulders. A pillow is grabbed and I squeeze my blanketed self through the door into the hallway, shutting the door behind me. It seems to be a feeble and childish attempt to leave the thoughts in the room; lock them in. I imagine words and worries floating slowly through the air behind the door. They are grey and smokey and thick. Ghosts. This image frightens me and a new, irrational fear of my room sets in. I walk-run through the hallway towards the living room.
Thursday, April 12, 2012
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
"The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as
perfect as you can imagine it. Because it's only intangible ideas,
concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots.
People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a
legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think.
The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change
the way people live their lives. That’s the only lasting thing you can
create."
-Chuck Palahnuik
-Chuck Palahnuik
Friday, March 16, 2012
It was much too late when we fell asleep last night. I don't understand why you keep your eyes open to listen to my tribulations. I stare at the ceiling, numb, blinking. Do I make you feel alone?
I drifted to sleep after you turned off the light. Each time you lay your arm across my side at night, I am tempted to give a silent prayer. The fear of the day when you are no longer able to bear the weight of my suffering and the stories I tell you of it, fills me with a nausea I cannot describe.
I had a dream last night. I was holding a map of the countries of Africa in my hand, only the map wasn't a typical one of browns, or greens or blues, to represent landscapes. The entire thing was a dark, navy blue. It looked like a map of constellations within the continent. I was to travel there in the morning, to a city that started with the letter "M", though I cannot recall exactly what the name was. Everything was dark, as if I were looking at the map at night. You pointed to small, obscure shapes within the country of Uganda, and you told me they were lakes. The lights that dotted across them on the map looked like stars.
You have been everywhere, it seems. I listened as you told me about them. I remember feeling so very saddened, hearing you tell me these things you've seen, knowing the places you've gone. There is so much life in you, you have seen so much that I haven't. I see the life that I want in the stories you tell me; I imagine them in my head. I cry out for them, sometimes.
At some point in the dream, I found myself in a boat out on one of these lakes. Like on the map, it was pitch black, the water a stirring navy blue. I looked out and saw nothing but the endless blackness of the night, as if land ceased to exist. But among this blackness, these small star-lights hovered over the water, or just beneath the surface of it. Everywhere were the lights I had seen on the map, the stars that now hung, as if suspended by an invisible string, a couple feet away, or half a mile, or anywhere in between and beyond. If one were to turn the night sky into a lake, and take a boat through it, they would know what it was to be in my dream, floating past stars, watching them wave under water, tilting a gaze upwards to see one perched right above ones head.
I drifted to sleep after you turned off the light. Each time you lay your arm across my side at night, I am tempted to give a silent prayer. The fear of the day when you are no longer able to bear the weight of my suffering and the stories I tell you of it, fills me with a nausea I cannot describe.
I had a dream last night. I was holding a map of the countries of Africa in my hand, only the map wasn't a typical one of browns, or greens or blues, to represent landscapes. The entire thing was a dark, navy blue. It looked like a map of constellations within the continent. I was to travel there in the morning, to a city that started with the letter "M", though I cannot recall exactly what the name was. Everything was dark, as if I were looking at the map at night. You pointed to small, obscure shapes within the country of Uganda, and you told me they were lakes. The lights that dotted across them on the map looked like stars.
You have been everywhere, it seems. I listened as you told me about them. I remember feeling so very saddened, hearing you tell me these things you've seen, knowing the places you've gone. There is so much life in you, you have seen so much that I haven't. I see the life that I want in the stories you tell me; I imagine them in my head. I cry out for them, sometimes.
At some point in the dream, I found myself in a boat out on one of these lakes. Like on the map, it was pitch black, the water a stirring navy blue. I looked out and saw nothing but the endless blackness of the night, as if land ceased to exist. But among this blackness, these small star-lights hovered over the water, or just beneath the surface of it. Everywhere were the lights I had seen on the map, the stars that now hung, as if suspended by an invisible string, a couple feet away, or half a mile, or anywhere in between and beyond. If one were to turn the night sky into a lake, and take a boat through it, they would know what it was to be in my dream, floating past stars, watching them wave under water, tilting a gaze upwards to see one perched right above ones head.
Monday, February 27, 2012
Jars
What if each individual tear held within it one minuscule bit of the reason you were crying? And you could catch them in a glass jar and hold them up to your face and see the tiny bits of your pain and sorrow stirring and intertwining inside. Maybe you would understand it better. Or maybe you would feel a little lighter, knowing at least a fraction of it was outside of yourself and not still hiding in some dark, damp corner of your heart.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Just a Blurb
Ms. Pederson ... Are we allowed to write in sort of a "rant" form? I have a bunch of thoughts I want to write down, but I don't want them in a poem, really. I want it to be as if it were a paragraph in a book, or something. That sort of "blurb".
I'll write it here, but if it's not what you'd like to see us writing on our blogs, I won't do one like this again.
There was nothing in the world that seemed appealing that day. Food slipped down my throat without taste, and although I could feel it making it's bed in the pit of my stomach, I did not feel comforted. I might as well have filled myself with rocks. And truth be told, I needn't any thing more to pull me towards the ground. I had rock bracelets hanging from my wrists, and rock anklets hung down by my heels, so one must see why eating just didn't seem a wise idea. I felt it fitting to eat nothing at all. It meant an empty stomach paired with an empty everything else. But tell me, how does this person find heaviness dripping down from her fingers and heaviness dragging down at her feet if everything is empty; her mind, her stomach, her days, everything? There is weight in my emptiness. I am empty and yet weighted down by some unknown. I am empty like a ghost and I am faint like one too, but I am weighted, weighted, weighted like a horse who has been working the fields too long. How long I can walk under my veiled master's loads he throws atop me, I am not sure. I am a ghost, I am a tired horse, and I am breaking.
I'll write it here, but if it's not what you'd like to see us writing on our blogs, I won't do one like this again.
There was nothing in the world that seemed appealing that day. Food slipped down my throat without taste, and although I could feel it making it's bed in the pit of my stomach, I did not feel comforted. I might as well have filled myself with rocks. And truth be told, I needn't any thing more to pull me towards the ground. I had rock bracelets hanging from my wrists, and rock anklets hung down by my heels, so one must see why eating just didn't seem a wise idea. I felt it fitting to eat nothing at all. It meant an empty stomach paired with an empty everything else. But tell me, how does this person find heaviness dripping down from her fingers and heaviness dragging down at her feet if everything is empty; her mind, her stomach, her days, everything? There is weight in my emptiness. I am empty and yet weighted down by some unknown. I am empty like a ghost and I am faint like one too, but I am weighted, weighted, weighted like a horse who has been working the fields too long. How long I can walk under my veiled master's loads he throws atop me, I am not sure. I am a ghost, I am a tired horse, and I am breaking.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
A Small Something
Morning in Kenya
Here, I sit, registering a movement just barely; consciousness impaired, lagging, as if being dragged through water. My jaw tilts upwards to acknowledge the voice of someone drawing nearer. A morning greeting. I feel my lips hook on either corner and pull upwards slowly into a smile, the muscles working to oppose the thickness of morning fatigue.
Here, I sit, registering a movement just barely; consciousness impaired, lagging, as if being dragged through water. My jaw tilts upwards to acknowledge the voice of someone drawing nearer. A morning greeting. I feel my lips hook on either corner and pull upwards slowly into a smile, the muscles working to oppose the thickness of morning fatigue.
Friday, February 10, 2012
Wind
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
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