Blurred Voices

Today is the first day of 2010.

Today I woke up next to the best friend in the spare room. It was already afternoon, the light peeking around the corners of the blinds. She kept tossing and turning, like she was trying to wake me up. She is a breakfast person, you see, and I am not. Last night we had our annual New Year’s Eve game of Trivial Pursuit and our annual meal of cheese, crackers, and sparkling grape juice and our annual movie. I would have liked to have been somewhere, done something wonderful, lived a little more brightly. But there will always be later, more youthful years for that.

There is a kind of cold that stays with the body. Like my fingers are icicles, my hands the roofs they hang from, trembling in the winter wind, oftentimes.

Today I ate too much (gross, I feel), today I dreamed of reading, today I decided I should post more, just to make myself feel accomplished. Today I ordered Madre’s birthday gift. It is late.

Today I dreamed of colleges, of doing well in the cold and terrifying world of academia. I thanked God for the Princeton Review. Thinking maybe this “doing well” is possible. I dreamed of money – that buys pretty things and makes one loved, yes? – and I shuddered in fear of work. Not any job or occupation, but the daily little things, innumerable duties, surrounding, encompassing, frightening me with their angry routine. Willpower dies in the face of fear.

No more fear, love, no more worrying.

Today I feel the guilt of this decade, and

it is the first day of 2010.

after the curtain it’s you

me

and the red velvet.

the partition, the soft shroud,

tasseled gold

smelling of stagelights:

stale.

the audience gone to their

stagecoaches and snow -

where we go, there will be no more winter,

no more february eyes.

you are my one love,

my one bright cornstalk

inside this sea of heaven-bred gold and green

Don’t Tell Me Cynicism Is In Vogue – Then I Should Have To Become an Optimist

I have grown old too soon. Before my eyes have become wreathed in crows’ feet, before my body in brittle stiffness has refused to bend at any angle larger than five degrees, I have grown old. The “pulse of joy that beats in us,” as Oscar Wilde hails youth, has left me more quickly than it came, if come it ever did. Am I so devoid of hopes and the bursting, golden energy to enact those hopes already? Am I devoid of all but my old, convulsing brain, wracked with intermittent infoldings of thought-pinocytosis and these lengthy testaments to discontent? Is such life? Ramshackle opinions and imaginings are all that I possess.

You must understand, love, that anything holding familial connotations is extremely unappealing to me, even distasteful at times – so much so that I begin to fear that it might never be possible for me to marry; but, after some cogitation, I soon dismiss that thought with a grim but resigned-and-trying-to-be-happily-accepting “so be it.” And thus the gavel falls upon my doomed and disoriented (for the time being) existence.

Consequently, perhaps my youthful vista shall arrive with the quitting of this familially tainted house. Each wall is slathered with thousands of petitions, orders, bickerings, heated discussions, barrages, and summonings that I simply can’t stand to be enclosed by them anymore. I have not considered myself to be part of a “family” for years. I am but a boarder in this house of horrors, a sojourner stopping over in an aggravating asylum. I care not for praise nor punishment, I care NOT to place my personality upon the dinner table to be gorged on with the rest of the pork-chops or sipped prior to the soup! No, I am a separate entity and would much rather be completely self-sufficient and – even – alone. Accordingly, alone I must be.

Forgive me, but I believe this is called dissociation.

Warm Brick and Cold Hearts

There is a door in the wall. My love spread through it, into it, out of me.

There is a door in the wall, and there is darkness inside. I stood on the outside and saw your shapeless forms, and I dared not go in.

The sun was bright on my side; in me, the drapes were being pulled.

Ache, what is this new ache; and for what reason have you left me outside?

I entered, and the shreds and snippets of love fell from my trembling hands. You discarded them, forgot them, absentmindedly stepped on them. And you didn’t say goodbye.

That day, the rest of my sweetness was siphoned from me.

He Said I Was Off the Wall

My hands are always so cold. I can press them to my forehead, and they are smooth and cold, like cool water; but they just bathe my face in hand-oil. My hands feel gigantic in proportion to my wrists. And my hands are small. With them, I can encircle those wrists and feel the bone and imagine the thin marrow, deep inside. Bony wrists are for the melancholic.

Your skin is so warm, diffusing golden, afternoon light. Like summer to touch, radiating warmth: your aura enthralls me.

Sometimes my neck is warm when my hands are cold.

Sometimes my small, cold hands on my skeletal wrists make you flinch. Sometimes, when it is not summer.

Yes.

I see the glint of unfamiliar towns,

And my eyes sift their nascence through my mind

That wanders, picturing lovely evening gowns

And lonely sidewalks that invite and wind.

Yet I’m told that in Paris stars won’t shine

And that the glowing moon wears now a shroud

To hide the nighttime garbage – rotting grime -

And that the people – nasal, rouged – are proud.

But what of suave valentine avenues

And twilight incandescent lovers’ lanes?

So then are tainted all her sweet venues,

And do her parks flourish from acid rains?

Those who’d dissuade the wand’rer’s dreaming heart:

‘Tis they themselves from home could never part.

Drag Me With You; I Won’t Fail To Come

I’m no Barbie, just a rag doll, soft and malleable, weathered, worn. But at least you can jump through the puddles with me.

You can take me anywhere.

This Is For You

i’d give you the earth in a tupperware container,

the oceans in a bucket,

if you would just give me your heart.

 

wouldn’t i sew all the patchwork, green-hued fields

into a marvelous blanket

that would calmly cover your fears and your failures?

 

couldn’t i bleed through the veins of the sunset,

seep into the summer-houses of the stars,

until the whole sky was my sitting room?

 

oh, i’d do it for you

so you could sit on a settee in the stratosphere

and absorb the infinity of the same.

Let Me Tell You About Mirie

I love her. 

She says I am cute. She says I have a voice like an animated character. She says Disney will kidnap me.