Tag Archives: Poetry

A Study of Denial

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One from the archives. Witness the crazy of my previous self.

 

 

 

 

Don’t touch it

It’s poison

It’s a lethal little snake

And it will bite you

With its nasty fangs

And you will die

And I will cry

And wonder why

And bake a pie

Or a ham

But either way

I’ll gain weight

And lose money

And be lonely

And lose a friend

And lose a little piece

Of my heart

So stay away

From that nasty little snake

For my sake

If not

For yours.

 

When I first heard

That Santa was coming

I swallowed it whole

When I second heard

That Santa was coming

I let it slide

When I third heard

That Santa was coming

I scoffed

And went back to the kitchen

And ate up all of the cookies

That the children had saved for him.

Because I’m a bitch.

 

Sometimes you just have to run

Run run run

And don’t look back

And don’t look forward

And don’t think

And don’t feel

And scream away any thoughts you may have

Because at your ankles nips destruction

And in your mind despair is whispering

And in front of you yawns

A long, long life

Which is better left

Unexamined

 

“An unexamined life is not worth living”

 

Tell that to the miserable, the half dead, the crack whores, the ingrates, the shit of society who have thrown everything away. Tell that to the cruel and the heartless and the murderers and the pedophiles and the filthy sin wallowers. Tell them to examine their lives. Watch them wilt. Watch them find bridges from which to leap. Watch them push the examination away in denial.

 

A study of denial

When everyone sees what you won’t

You are protecting yourself from pain

You are defending your precious identity

You refuse to admit you were wrong

Because what if you were wrong?

At what point does denial first set in

When it starts small

And can be easily corrected

When it’s only a small worm in your consciousness

If it got caught and excised then

Nothing would happen

But if it is allowed to remain

It will feed on your common sense and perspective

It will grow to outrageous proportions

Take over and block out an entire lobe of your brain

Until you are simply babbling lies

Which a year ago you would have caught in an instant

And you are laboring over something so stupid

And have been laboring over it for so long

That you can’t even see it for the bullshit it is

And your friends and your family

Have given up on telling you

Because you freak out so badly when faced with the truth

That they’re afraid you’ll choose your mountain of bullshit over them

Some even get dragged into it themselves

And lose their sense to it

This is insanity

This is reality

This happens all of the time

We are all fighting to keep

Our mountains of bullshit

Because we don’t want to admit our wrong

It’s all about fucking pride

Why don’t we have the intestinal fortitude

To take a hit to our pride?

What are we

We build identities

We make them up

Based on what people tell us

Based on what we tell ourselves

And then we fight to protect this construct

Sometimes at the expense of our loved ones

Sometimes at the expense of ourselves

Jesus fucking Christ

We are so deluded

Two Lovely People

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Two lovely people

My brother and new sister

Gorgeous souls

They are going to live together

They fell in love online

They fell in love through a camera

They fell in love while four thousand miles apart.

They have struggled to be together

They have done SO MUCH PAPERWORK

They have fought their way from the brink of madness

Battled loneliness, isolation, heartache

To find one another on opposite shores.

 

I am glad they are together

They can find a little quietude

They can be complete now

They fit together

They are going to take care of each other

Snuggle up

Take solace in each other’s eyes

And face the future

Hand in hand

Doubly strong

For the things they have conquered

For the things they will fight together

For the people that they make each other into

They will grow together.

They have so far to go.

They have come so far already.

 

On Language

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Language. What a beautiful thing.

The English language with all of its silent letters

Complex ins and outs that drive people batty

Born of German, French aunt

The fingerprint of man’s migration and time

All can be read if one looks deep enough.

 

Root words.

Ah, root words.

I’ll tell you a secret:

There is a magical source of language.

It goes back to Latin

And then it goes further yet

Indo-European, and further

To the hazy histories of the beginning of humanity

Some say we sang before we spoke.

 

We sing to our children

We speak with our hands

But we are not the only ones

Who carry the magic of language.

Birds have complex conversations.

Animals are anything but mute

To the right kind of mind, they are as clear as words

Scents, postures

A flick of the tail

Attentive ears belie a casual mein

But I digress; forgive my babbling tongue.

 

Language changes

Some dream of uniting language

No. If we ever had one language

If our culture homogenized to that extent

We would lose precious perspective.

 

Some dream of preserving an ancient language.

This, too, is an effort in futility

Though a beautiful one.

Scholars will be scholars.

 

All it takes is for a group of people to live together for a while

And a new sublanguage is born

Every generation has its own phrases

Every locale its own accent.

 

Some fear the Internet

That it is changing our grammar

How could an emoticon be a word?

No one can spell anymore!

 

I love language unconditionally

Every new word or phrase is a delight

A paragon of brevity.

 

We are all human

Language is only a medium

A shortcut to another’s mind.

Maybe that is what makes it

So very beautiful.

The DL on Chai

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I wasn’t happy with what I wrote yesterday, but it’s my policy to post things anyway, even if it takes me a day to get over myself enough to post them.

The last couple of days I’ve been trying to make stories that are 100 words or less. There are some really gorgeous ones online but last night I only managed this:

***

“Recognize this?” She said, leaning gently against the counter. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a handkerchief. In marker on the corner were the initials, “DL.”

“Where did you get that?” I asked.

“From the garbage,” she replied. “Next to a spoon, a light, a needle, some porn.”

“Sounds like the motherfucker has found Jesus,” I said bitterly.

“His loss is our gain, DL.”

“I give up,” I said. “Hand me that needle and I’ll wash it.”
***

I also wrote a bunch of bad poetry. This was the best of it.

***

 

Chai tea

Is a redundant phrase

Chai means tea

So chai tea

Means tea tea

Why do the Indians have such a bounty of spices

The rest of the world once used their spices as currency

Fought wars for access to these rich flavors

While in India a cup of tea is not a cup of tea

Unless you’ve casually tossed in a handful of ancient gold.

Night River

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I’m learning so much from the WordPress community.  I just found out there’s a beautiful form which blends prose and haiku, called haibun. Naturally I had to give it a try. Here goes.

 

 

Night River

 

There is stillness on top of the water, though it swirls and currents underneath. The river is quiet and deep in the cooling summer night, the world in black and white.

My sister says that underneath the darkness swim a multitude of carp battling for survival, pushing out the native fish with their incessant hunger, rapid reproduction, excessive growth. But can a stillness so deep really house this dramatic abundance? How can so much life be unseen, unheard? They do not sing their vitality like land creatures.

 

Warm river surface

Reflects a perfect full moon

A ripple twitches

 

Two men have lines running into the heart of the black water. One of them has pulled a gar onto shore and extracted the hook. He doesn’t want it. He rolls it toward the water, loathe to touch it any more than necessary. It comes to rest on its back, long pale belly toward the sky, little flat fins like a baby shark. It wriggles slowly, blind and mute, struggling its way down across the gray wet clay toward the water. It stops short, its body too heavy to move, eyes unable to blink against the dry bright moonlight, simple mind utterly overwhelmed. The man pokes it again with his foot, its instinctive defenses are nothing here in the light air, it can only writhe in an empty hopeless way. We all want it to go back but we can’t bring ourselves to touch its mucousy skin. There is a smell to the river (does the water smell like fish or do the fish smell like water?). It is ameobal, the smell of primordial soup, algae, microscopic life, placenta.

 

Alienated

The water won’t keep us now

She has new children

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