08/2010

The pump is broken -
poisoned.

It crept in and seeped through those hallowed passages to the core...it corrupted her. It's no use, calling maintenance - she already tried. In truth, the poison must have started there anyway. It's all in the attitudes, the habits, and neither of those are like suits that you can put on and take off easily. They both form and crystallize over time, and it's time it takes to alter them.

They wanted to dump chemicals into her, to make her better, but chemicals come in, wearing shiny hats and gadgets - impersonate their predecessors, kick them out, create dependencies...and she wants to depend only on herself.

So the pump is broken. She - the pump, the maintenance ... and the cure - is broken. For now. Just for now.

7/26/2010

Weight.
This poison is spreading,
through my chest,
my head...
Muscles contract,
seize,
tie themselves
into the heavy,
encumbered flow of my being,
and freeze -

This weight is taking over everything. I can feel it in my chest, my head, my neck ... I can feel it in the way the light strikes through my eyes and pinches at the nerves - needle-sharp. Everything is slow. I can't seem to drain this poison from my body, lift this dumbbell from my chest. So I'm suffocating...and splitting in two, all at once. One of these things alone would be enough to bring me tumbling down. It's overkill, but hey...so is the world.

Why, buried deep within the blackness of your being,
are there these spiders -
you hear them creeping, scittering -
bent and angled and grotesque -
on the verge of
self destruction.









(for my papa)

Grains of sand are falling down, speck by golden speck, leaving infinitesimally small scratches on this broken pane of glass. A million pieces shattered everywhere - no one to pick them up, to glue them back to solidarity. People will walk by and carry tiny shards away on the bottoms of their naked, padding soles. And will they pull them out? Or leave them bleeding and throbbing - let them burrow deeper and deeper until they themselves have absorbed that little piece of the looking glass? And does the answer even matter?

We live and die to be broken down, to pieces, composted, masticated, absorbed - picked apart bit by bit by those who want some parts of us, but not others. Picked apart bit by bit by insects that want some parts of us, but not others.

Not others.

You stand there, glorious,
like a Goddess of Destruction,
hair flowing around your porcelain face,
a moat of blood pooling at the shattered feet of your castle,
the gleam of victory in your shallow gaze
--and what have you won?

Metallic barriers rise and fall about you,
close about the corpses of those
unlucky souls
ill-fated enough to have had your favor for any short amount of time
--and I have to ask myself,
Are you really satisfied?

Are you content, in your solitude,
to have nothing to fear save the
(inevitable)
collapse of your own formidable defenses?

Once you said to me that you were glad to have loved,
to have felt as deeply as the darkest depths of the ocean,
to have felt
at all.
Once you said to me that you regretted nothing.

And now I behold you there,
beautiful and broken,
withdrawn from this world
--untouchable,

Unattainable--

and I have to wonder,
Was it really worth having loved at all?

Adaptation

It's cold here,
in my pseudo-skin.
I hear the walls cracking,
crumbling away;
the hands of the clock smashing,
shattering glass;
white noise crashing down like a waterfall,
tossing about pieces of the wreckage at the bottom
with nonchalance.
I feel wave after wave roll in,
hastey and impatient:
I'm waiting to become one of them.
With my eyes glazed over,
facial features askew in a grotesque arrangement...
the left limb telling the right not to look,
the head telling the lungs they're not drowning...
They're not drowning...
and in the event that they are, indeed, drowning
and in the event that they are, indeed, on their last leg
and in the event that they are, indeed, out of breath,
tired, suffocating, collapsing, struggling to survive...
and in the event that they are, indeed, drowning,
the head will tell the gasping lungs not to fret,
not to panic,
it's all in the head.

ghost child

sometimes i miss it--
waking up to see you standing there in my room,
surrounded by the darkness,
your hair golden-white,
snowflakes frozen on your eyelashes,
...smile frozen to your face,
a frosty heat permeating from your body...
like cold breath on a winter day.
sometimes i miss that girl...
the way she used to haunt me,
lure me back to whence i came...
but most of the time,
(no point in lying)
i don't.

Learning Curve

I'm sitting here, and I'm watching you slip slowly through my fingers as though every little piece of you were a tiny grain of sand, and I've been holding on too tightly. That old '80s song has been playing in my head:

"Just Hold On Loosely, but don't let go
If you cling to tightly,
you're gonna lose control"

Over and over. I think I'm learning something.