If I wasn’t before
Well then now I am.
You can’t make me,
But I am getting out of the car
And this is the end of the road
It’s been six years and I haven’t seen that face since then.
-
Phew! Scene 1
Read the note written in caps.
Hand quivers a bit.
Wait.
Turn the body slowly slowly [but not the gaze] back toward them.
Just stay there, almost looking them in the eye.
Then let them make the decision.
“Whatever. It’s not even fun taunting you anymore.”
Phew! Almost needed to be brave.
-
Sonnet 001
Though she be bare, each curve is free from chinks;
For times her life leaned on a draining source
I swore we’d last that one night over drinks
The words themselves pushing me forward with force.
I’d hoped so deep the technician was right
Restoration: new battery and case;
We’d go back to where we were that night
My mind occupied, blue light in my face.
The bulk was done and now came time to choose;
You deserve new color and brand new air;
Bells and whistles, I splurged for full kit, too!
Saving you showed me plainly I was bare.
The things I own, I told myself, held worth.
Without care, how’d I expect you to go forth?
-
Shards Will Nestle the Marble
I fear, on the day of my wedding, we will drop our glass and won’t care where the shards fly. We’ll receive the news. It will be time for us to leave to the wilderness. I’ll be shocked at how irrational I feel, but I’ll be upset–so upset I will refuse to flee in time. I won’t forgive myself if I miss a dance with my father. We sometimes speak on the phone. I feel the fizzing ringer and the phone lights itself. I do some smalltalk with him until nearly twelve minutes when, once again, I see we are both are so keenly aware we have failed where we could’ve connected. It would kill him just as much to miss the father-daughter dance.
We might just take those moments to sway while boulders ripple the ground in vibrations around us. Something metallic sounds like it could hit us next time. Each time we hope its the next time and not this time. Our audience will be partially made up of those crying and looking for cover. The rest will be made up of those too enthralled by the issues of others, they will risk their safety to see us. “They waited until the very last moment to admit there was a gap between.” We will spin both in our favor. They are here to see us.
So my romantic half… Who is to say he doesn’t also see himself waiting for the fall of boulders to stop him from marrying me. Until I know him, I can count on what I have. And I am still imagining what isn’t quite here. So I feel no guilt wanting all the romantic pleasantness even if we are running out of serious time. It feels like as I lay here, looking out at the orchid leaves in the midnight lights, it doesn’t make sense this desire should be off limits. Can’t we all want different things? When I am considering what I personally want, to hell with progressiveness! And never come back!
I know one of the songs I will dance to (even if it has to be with my father): “You are the Ocean” by Phantogram. Even if the song is in my head or I hum it while I cry.
“He loved me. Because he loved me, he waited to hold me. He waited. He waited. And when he finally, finally, finally finally did hold me, there was warmth and acceptance and understanding and purity.” – I cannot remember if I wrote this line or read it.
-
Mochi-chan
Chew on your foot
Sleep on your pillow
Walk with your step
Paws on your chin
So you’ll drop your attention down to me
You have me now
When at one time
Watashi wa inu o mochimasen deshita
-
May Not be Art At All
So many other projects and skyward goals laid themselves out to him, but he could not bear to surpass them. He hadn’t wanted to surpass. But the life of a saboteur chose him. He was built to consider only himself–support only himself. Humanize no one.
Instead, I looked to finding ways of believing the dream was a farce. At this moment, I closed my two wet eyes, forcing my energy into a charged fence around him.
The woman smelled of limes and some other spice my untrained nose was unable to pinpoint.
“He’s going to ruin your life.”
“Who?”
“You know exactly who I’m talking about.”
Her last letters rounded like a dog’s tail in its slumber. I may not have known the smells because I hadn’t had enough meals, but I knew her. A grandmother of mine, but not mine. Of skin, but not quite the undertone. She was unmistakably Dominicana. This statement (outside of feeling and knowing and knowing I knew who she was speaking through) slapped me in the mouth as a paradox on its own. But without smells and sounds and ways of hands and other loud whispers, no one can be quite any one tribe. But I knew.
Thursday morning, I had a pimply whitebump in my mouth. I resisted getting out of bed, telling myself it’d still be there when I got up. No rush. I brushed my teeth after some red wine. As I pulled the bristles back toward the front of my mouth between ragged breaths, I noticed the brownblack bottle of peroxide nearly wobbling on the sink’s edge. It all comes back to guilt, sloth, and lust. Hassle-free addictions. Often not even requiring extra stops to pick them up. And so hard to drop. Afterward, eventually looking up and asking, “But haven’t I always been this way?”
Can you imagine my surprise when the Twitter app force-quit on me each time I went to draft a tweet? It is still the best possible PR for me, honestly. The last account I had was a shitposter’s dream. I wouldn’t dare attach my name to it. Or “couldn’t bear”–you choose. Whatever fits your idea of who you believe is writing this. Assume you know anything about the writer of what you’re reading and you’ll see yourself soon enough in the patterns. Going into patterns like that. Until you become an example of an anxiety-riddled bundle of chaotic, untrained ‘potential.’ So the audience is what determines the meaning…writer’s fallacy… Too bored to unpack it.
Ah! Then I happen upon a tweet I feel too ashamed to share, but I felt the keenest connection to— What I enjoy could offend someone. So then what happens? I hide my opinion in the lower crown molding of the small wall I get in the gallery of my life’s work? Because the other perspective is that it might not be art at all?
And I cried and woke up crying again. The tear on my nose one moment and then my pillowcase the next minute.
What is the weakness with him?
Going in patterns like that.
-
Futility
resistance is futile.
thinking of us daily
prepared you for me
since before you’d heard
of resistance.
and still
you have wanted it.
Pearson Pivot 