Thursday, January 29, 2009
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Seperate, but not really
Three separate occasions that are in some way related to each other.
(1) Floating through fields of tall grasses and blue bells
We catch our breath with glowing gauze butterfly nets
And exhale
The shards of each other’s wings
That stick to our throats and lungs.
The sky above us begins to quake
And the stars unseal,
Their firefly centers shimmering
And falling
Towards us.
Though we stretch pale arms into the sky, they slip
Between our fingertips
And fall to the ground
Like butterfly wings.
(2) We rush to control the wavering rhythm of
love crescendos
and staccato love-making
like conductors in an orchestra.
But we are pinned to twilight
As orange and blue hesitate in the sky
Stars swarm and stutter across the sunset,
Meandering and mingling
As a storm that plummets to the horizon
And rises on an undetected current.
(3)We are jellyfish in jars,
Hanging like bleach willows, tangled tentacles dangle,
Flaccid and nonliving,
All the gifts of the Pacific
Will not stir us now.
Time moves on without us.
Our lives write the love songs.
(1) Floating through fields of tall grasses and blue bells
We catch our breath with glowing gauze butterfly nets
And exhale
The shards of each other’s wings
That stick to our throats and lungs.
The sky above us begins to quake
And the stars unseal,
Their firefly centers shimmering
And falling
Towards us.
Though we stretch pale arms into the sky, they slip
Between our fingertips
And fall to the ground
Like butterfly wings.
(2) We rush to control the wavering rhythm of
love crescendos
and staccato love-making
like conductors in an orchestra.
But we are pinned to twilight
As orange and blue hesitate in the sky
Stars swarm and stutter across the sunset,
Meandering and mingling
As a storm that plummets to the horizon
And rises on an undetected current.
(3)We are jellyfish in jars,
Hanging like bleach willows, tangled tentacles dangle,
Flaccid and nonliving,
All the gifts of the Pacific
Will not stir us now.
Time moves on without us.
Our lives write the love songs.
I give you my [outer space object] of [emotion]
I picked up my journal in a drunk stupor one night and this is what I discovered (with some spelling/grammar corrections, of course)
I think I was reflecting on past love(r)s...
- - -
I'm suspended on an ocean of red,
kissing black holes and having empty conversations
with stained coffee cups.
Scrawling observations with erasers
on the back of old receipts
and killing old optimism with blanks.
Lovers like us pass on slowly,
drowning in loyalty.
Stubble budding above a shuddering lip,
we are lashing across the table, aiming for the heart.
But what is to "die" anyway?
I'm being asphyxiated by a self-replicating system
that is voice activated.
Black nail polish caressing smoker’s teeth,
I'll pound this perfume bottle into your throat
and leave you suffocating on pheromones.
Kiss the morphine off my lips, lover.
I crave you like an amputation.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Monday, December 15, 2008
Note to self
(Just trying to keep myself grounded...)
Art.
It is a quiet kind of artificial reality we create for ourselves. We paint it, we write it, we capture it, and some days we live it. If even for a second we jump into our home-made realities, we feel all the more safer and maybe a little less lonely. But there’s nothing locked secretly beneath the words, or the ink, or the colours that could keep you breathing or your heart beating. It is the loneliness and the heartbreak that keeps our lungs in tact. Though we are living in a rather spiteful world, this is what we have. This is our reality and it is in no way artificial. It is a beautifully bitter world out there and if we work it, we can love it. If we love it, we can live it. You cannot live with your head in the sand all your life, because someday you’ll suffocate and there will be nothing but your dried out brushes or pens to pull you free.
It’s not so much carrying a mask in front of your face. It’s leaving your body to fend for itself in a world where chance will just as soon send you love as drop a piano on your head. Pain is the best we have. From pain we learn joy and learn to be amazed. If you hide from that pain, you lose touch with the joy everything else in the world - including your made-up reality - can bring you.
It hurts; but it’s true and it is wonderful.
The freedom we seek is not locked behind the walls we slowly build. When we hide from the world, we simply imprison our minds which yearn to fly and grow. When we race beneath the trees at sunset or swim in cold water below the moon, we find the quiet freedom we’ve been fighting for through art.
Art is beautiful - but it cannot define, control, or be you.
Art.
It is a quiet kind of artificial reality we create for ourselves. We paint it, we write it, we capture it, and some days we live it. If even for a second we jump into our home-made realities, we feel all the more safer and maybe a little less lonely. But there’s nothing locked secretly beneath the words, or the ink, or the colours that could keep you breathing or your heart beating. It is the loneliness and the heartbreak that keeps our lungs in tact. Though we are living in a rather spiteful world, this is what we have. This is our reality and it is in no way artificial. It is a beautifully bitter world out there and if we work it, we can love it. If we love it, we can live it. You cannot live with your head in the sand all your life, because someday you’ll suffocate and there will be nothing but your dried out brushes or pens to pull you free.
It’s not so much carrying a mask in front of your face. It’s leaving your body to fend for itself in a world where chance will just as soon send you love as drop a piano on your head. Pain is the best we have. From pain we learn joy and learn to be amazed. If you hide from that pain, you lose touch with the joy everything else in the world - including your made-up reality - can bring you.
It hurts; but it’s true and it is wonderful.
The freedom we seek is not locked behind the walls we slowly build. When we hide from the world, we simply imprison our minds which yearn to fly and grow. When we race beneath the trees at sunset or swim in cold water below the moon, we find the quiet freedom we’ve been fighting for through art.
Art is beautiful - but it cannot define, control, or be you.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Three Trains of Thought
Two trains of random, incomplete thoughts, one train of a complete thought.
And there you heard it.
I. She breathes haikus, a tenderness wrapped
around her slender fingertips, pale and cold.
She folds her hands into white gloves, walking
through thin air. She is lost in a photograph,
yet she smiles. But, smiles can deceive.
and they do.
II. I have mirrors reflecting light
reflecting the back of my brain.
He tied his shoes and with his coat
half on, he walks into the cold.
Time grew as only miles do:
cold echoes sinking
hot passions rising.
But oh, how it began. Shoes tied and hands gloved.
III. Suffice it to say, love is not a myth, but a real thing.
This is where love goes:
One: Lust
Blind sexual passion, a stage of seeking.
Felt both for men and women
as a result of the male hormone.
It gets us out to door to find our stimulus,
Our man or woman.
Two: Adrenaline
We react in chemical waves, dopamine: the same drug
we see in nicotine or cocaine.
Love is a morphine, a painkiller.
A neutralizer, a doorway to nothing.
It is just an exit song, after all.
You can frown on dopefiends, on crackwhores,
But glass houses, my dear, glass houses.
It is our adrenaline.
It is what makes our hearts race in scary movies,
what makes us run.
what inspires us to go;
or in one case, inspires us to stay.
Three: Attachment
We never quite reach that first, never that rush.
High again, but every time a little less.
More and more and more we fight.
An ugly dragon: We need more than we can make.
Tolerance has moved in. We are attached
addicted.
But it's just not the same.
Four: Settlement
The rainbows, the butterflies, are gone.
Routine settles, annoyances rise.
The honeymoon has ended - the condoms have deflated.
It is a dangerous life, this love.
Many people cannot survive it,
When they develop a tolerance of themselves.
But my dear,
Dying for love is not dying for nothing.
Love is real thing.
It can be tasted, felt, seen, and even bottled and sold.
But perhaps, my dear, this is worse fate.
After all, nobody dies for retailed goods.
And there you heard it.
I. She breathes haikus, a tenderness wrapped
around her slender fingertips, pale and cold.
She folds her hands into white gloves, walking
through thin air. She is lost in a photograph,
yet she smiles. But, smiles can deceive.
and they do.
II. I have mirrors reflecting light
reflecting the back of my brain.
He tied his shoes and with his coat
half on, he walks into the cold.
Time grew as only miles do:
cold echoes sinking
hot passions rising.
But oh, how it began. Shoes tied and hands gloved.
III. Suffice it to say, love is not a myth, but a real thing.
This is where love goes:
One: Lust
Blind sexual passion, a stage of seeking.
Felt both for men and women
as a result of the male hormone.
It gets us out to door to find our stimulus,
Our man or woman.
Two: Adrenaline
We react in chemical waves, dopamine: the same drug
we see in nicotine or cocaine.
Love is a morphine, a painkiller.
A neutralizer, a doorway to nothing.
It is just an exit song, after all.
You can frown on dopefiends, on crackwhores,
But glass houses, my dear, glass houses.
It is our adrenaline.
It is what makes our hearts race in scary movies,
what makes us run.
what inspires us to go;
or in one case, inspires us to stay.
Three: Attachment
We never quite reach that first, never that rush.
High again, but every time a little less.
More and more and more we fight.
An ugly dragon: We need more than we can make.
Tolerance has moved in. We are attached
addicted.
But it's just not the same.
Four: Settlement
The rainbows, the butterflies, are gone.
Routine settles, annoyances rise.
The honeymoon has ended - the condoms have deflated.
It is a dangerous life, this love.
Many people cannot survive it,
When they develop a tolerance of themselves.
But my dear,
Dying for love is not dying for nothing.
Love is real thing.
It can be tasted, felt, seen, and even bottled and sold.
But perhaps, my dear, this is worse fate.
After all, nobody dies for retailed goods.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Regret is Wasteful
Can you see?
Listen.
Come the morning, as time draws me from my slumber
and the light taints the safety of my white sheets,
I leave my bed, shaky and unsteady from dreaming.
I slip on my shoes (they are the colour of ivy),
and wipe moonbeams out of the corners of my eyes.
As I step across the floor, I set waves into motion:
a transparent ocean that oscillates with my breathing,
calling out “New day, New day, New day”
Do you see?
Listen.
The sky trails the earth as though she was her mother
and the light kisses the wind as though they were lovers.
And I know that somewhere there has to be another
who can reveal to me the secrets of the summer.
The way she dances up like daisies, feathers in her hair,
and rains sweat across my forehead and down my cheeks.
She walks where others, even the moon, falter
And her words burn skin, seeping down down down
Straight down.
Into my core.
Is it possible?
Can you see?
Listen.
When summer has finally faded and fallen, there survives
a calm peace that is reeling from what was ruined.
As time draws me near once more, words unspoken are sealed
and left for dead in capsules buried in the sand,
awaiting overtures that never come, but always come.
Until at last their song is forgotten and done,
(by the sun, by time, by the waves)
they call out “New day, New day, New day”
Is there still a chance?
Do you see?
Then listen.
Could God himself count grains of sand?
Could you live forever, holding the brand that burns
And calls
New day. New day.
I am old.
Yet young, but still old.
Can you see?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
