Song of Songs

On my bed at night I sought him
whom my heart loves--
I sought him but I did not find him.
I will rise then and go about the city;
in the streets and crossings I will seek
Him whom my heart loves.
I sought him but I did not find him.
The watchmen came upon me,
as they made their rounds of the city;
Have you seen him whom my heart loves?
I had hardly left them
when I found him whom my heart loves
I took hold of him and would not let him go
till I should bring him to the home of
my mother,
to the room of my parent.
I adjure you, daughters of Jerusalem,
by the gazelles and hinds of the field,
Do not arouse, do not sir up love
before its own time.

A Hero's Journey

I have passed the gates of hell
and tasted fire brimstone in my
grinding teeth.
I descend through years
through ages
through lives I've lived
and those I haven't lived;
hundreds of bodies
thousands
millions of bodies--
touched by flames
twisting taunting
burning searing
ruining beautiful flesh;
we wail together but with
no earthly avail,
as a ship with empty sails
caught in the clutches of barren winds.
We wail together but to
what avail?
I descend into hell.
I descend to a sea of souls
swimming swarming sweeping
sensations that crawl like
insects.
(I detest the feet of the insects
that find ways to creep under
my skin. I crush them with my fists.)
Into the dreary waves I plunge.
Sickness steeps through my clothes.
I am naked and I hate it.
Naked I kick and swim and fight
my long hair billows. I grow
stronger. No need to breath air,
I inhale light piercing from above.
Piercing white light--and I fight
the demons clawing at my defenses
chewing through my skin--insects pour out.
I purge and they pour. The
piercing
light
burns them from my body
and I am clean.
Rising (a force of levitation bears me) from
the pool of souls, trembling feet meet hard rock
I climb with dagger clench between my
grinding teeth.
The dagger is made of diamond--
materialized from carbon crevices and
deceased organic material pushed into the bowels
of the earth, so conveniently--where hell is located.
Wings flap
teeth try to bite my fingers
I climb on
weak and strong
and take my diamond dagger
and strike the cages hanging
tight upon
stalactites.
I break the bony locks
and free my sisters
my brothers
my sisters...who are living still
who will find a way out.
Fly away.
Fly away from here.
There is freedom
there is life
away from hell.

Of Ghosts and Antinodes.

Invisible supports can lift you into the air. I've heard that it feels like a force is pushing up; I've heard it feels like nothing. And all of the sudden, you're off the floor and there is space between your feet and the ground and you're closer to Heaven than you've ever been.

Some of us fall on our faces. Some of us struggle to stay up. Some of us believe with 100 hearts, and some of us believe with somebody else's heart.

I once had a conversation in a haunted garden about the little faith I had in my heart, and a woman I admire lent me her faith. It stayed with me all this time, and grew. Then just two months ago, she told me she lost most of her faith but a few shreds she had scratched at as it slipped away. They were little pieces; I gave her back some of the faith she'd given me, and now we both have lots and lots.

What happens now that ghosts come back? I've recently heard something familiar--something I hadn't heard in 6 or 7 years. Disembodied voices that encouraged me when I was a young sprout in a world I thought I understood. The voices resurfaced unaltered, as if they had been hibernating or lying dormant in some dusty corner of my brain --like my Physical Science flashcards preserve with crusting rubber bands from 8th grade which resurfaced in time for my college senior year Physics midterm and actually helped me. In my 8th grade handwriting, I scrawled in marker on the yellow folder, "Maybe I'll Need These Someday." The dust made me sneeze, but the note cards were brilliant. "Antinodes." "Vector Quality." Saved me a lot of googling.

I suppose we store up our nuts for winter, as they say. (As squirrels say.) We can take a seed, bury it, forget all about it, and find it later when it's grown some kind of fruit tree, and then we can be like, "Awesome. Peaches!" I wonder how many invisible seeds and voices and pieces of faith have sunk into the ground right below our feet, where they wait to randomly sprout up and surprise us.

Go to hell, Satan.

Round 3,285
I'm kicking Satan's ass
But I know that he'll come back
with something stronger than the last
something vicious--
something fast.
But I'll anticipate the blow
blocking everything he'll throw
using every prayer I know
and back to hell he'll go.

Snow Day

10 o'clock and pancake batter bubbles, grease fizzles softly while the aroma of coffee steams out of the machine. The wooden floors are warm from heat blowing through vents, but the breakfast plates are cold. Outside is blanketed in a thick fleece of snow. White fluff covers everything: sticks, stones, shovels, garbage cans, broken refrigerators, 1995 Chevy vans, roads, houses. I'm wearing a tank top and drinking french vanilla coffee. No obligations for one day. 24 hours of weekend bliss encapsulated between Tuesday and Thursday. Thank God for sweet, sweet lake-effect and giving us all a break.

Communion

Exposition
-expose it in
secret.
Adoration
-adore it in
secret.
God's
agape
ultimate
act of love;
a sustained gaze
-amaze
-heart and skin.
Closer than we've ever been.

Advent of my Digression

Words, do not betray me.
Never cease to yield.

Armor, steel, spirit, chains
horses, walls, moats and mud

Arrows, swords, bows, knives.

Hide me in your crashing mass
or push me out to sea.

Crash

Scene set slipping ice and crashing metal

death takes life's incipience and truncates

bated breath and breath hot and windows cold

The terminus of longing comes with labor pains

and dinners set for one

and walks in frozen snow

and letters writ and never sent

and stacks of books and stolen looks.

In death, longing lies

lies on the road in mangled physics

lies safely in tormented sleep

lies about its self and lies about

and somehow beauty lives.

Confession #568

Over the weekend, I had a quick love affair with Sir Isaac Newton. I know it was wrong and, in many ways, I betrayed my professors of Theatre and English with my thoroughly un-artistic tryst, but before I graduated, I just wanted to experience and equal and opposite reaction. And it was quite a reaction. 3 and a half years of theatrical pushing resulted in an intensified wallop in the other direction. Physics. It has left me breathless. The most intriguing thing about Newty (as I now call him) was his theory of universal gravitation and how every body has mass and every body is somehow attracted to, and pulled to, one another. He showed me how a body at rest will remain at rest until acted upon by an outside force, and conversely, how a body in motion will stay in motion until acted upon by an outside force. It was weird and interesting. He also showed me his telescope. Then I wrote a paper about it.

Type away your own legion
speak it into glass etchings
your soul stained glass
and beautiful
light bleeds through
morning
if not
mourning.
Write it into books
your handwriting
scrawled like narrow caves
stalactites stick like dried
ink.
Press it close in leaves
of parchment
rolled in fabrics--
dead sea scrolls
hid under rock of
arid air and ancient places
Hollow spaces hide
hallowed treasures.
Make it write.
Make it right.
Make it write.
Blind men gain their sight
and somewhere in the night
the angels fade through brilliant light.
Pour balm and ointment on your feet
and wash them dry with loving eyes
and tears and weeping,
sweeping sorrows,
casting stones
our own reflection.

Consequentially

Boxed wine is cheap
and cheap is exactly what
not to be.
Wild and free.
I find myself at the bottom of
another box
of chocolates.
I feel disgusting.

Self-Indulgent Reflection

I was having one of those moments where life was just a tad too much for me to deal with. I really needed a cigarette, but as I groped around my coat pockets, I remembered that I didn't smoke and smoking was bad for me anyways.

What I really needed was an expensive cup of chocolate coffee with espresso and whip cream. I emptied my purse and collected every penny and totally had a "Taylor the Latte Boy" moment at the coffee shop, which left me a little dazed, awkward, and reminiscent of middle school. He gave me a double for whatever amount of money I had cupped in my hand because I told him it was all I had to my name and I could really use a "Big Cup of Christmas" (which was one of the winter specials at this particular coffee franchise.)

I walked back out into the bitter--bitter cold weather and as I pressed my lips against the rich sweetness of frothy milk and warm chocolate syrup, I remembered that there is a God and that sometimes, rainbows appear in the sky. "Life is beautiful" is what I said, I believe, a little bit too audibly, to the chagrin and general confusion of fellow pedestrians. (I have to remember to stop talking to myself; or at least to put my cellphone up to my ear and pretend I'm talking to someone; or else save it for when I'm driving in my car or in my room when my roommates aren't home or in the shower or when I'm blow-drying my hair, or in a pasture of daisies and wild horses--which has never actually happened but I wish it will.)

Anyway, that's the end of my story. Now I'm at work and I should be doing something of use, but my boss is on facebook so I thought I could afford a moment of self-indulgent reflection.

Hell-in

I am the face that
caused the war
in Troy
It was my charm that
launched
one-thousand ships and
shook your country to
the sifting sands of
decimation
a mighty nation
now in bits and pieces
tiny grains of
sand now blown across
the sea.
I am the face of swift
destruction
look upon my features
each in love and fear
-women wither
-men will melt
I am a heroine
drug-like, toxic
take a drag--
I'll drag you all to hell
and wrestle in the fires--
but you can't win
because your sin is
more than you can
take
and I an sense a
God-forsaken
fake
Come taste the temptress
in the temple of the goddess--
bow down and cower--
within the hour
I'll devour
the shrinking power of your
self respect
You can't expect to
disengage the rage of
torment and desire.

affinity detached

Lost connection
to the motherland
birthed and wondering
soul's unrest
forced to glide upon the
earth
looking for
where we came from.
Sewn into a beaded pocket
I am a lover lost
forced to glide over
words
miles and miles
of black on white
I keep you in my book
Refer to you in footnotes
stamped in glittery snow.
If I grow to be old
will I mention you in passing?
Casually cast a line out
a line pulled faintly
by a tugging of the past
--let go--

I see all

Intuition cuts like a knife
in a boxed reality--
roots hang like limp fingers hoping to feel--
excitement drops dead on account of misused fire arms
around the wrong person
breath catches
oxygen tight
and carbon dioxide
smothers trees' roots--
wither.
Intuition chops like a hatchet
and thence comes
weeping willows and
startled eyes.
A boxed reality spills our illusions
of invisible packages
spills like discarded wrappers--
crushed--
abused--
disregarded--
empty bottles of
God-knows-what
litter
and roll clinking and
crinkling amidst the
stench of
half-empty truths
and smoking stubs
of self-esteem.

Music and free drinks?

Erasing words
one by one
swallowed up by white
nothing
is my mind
my heart is slate
good for roofing
they say
remember when we could surrender
to the innocence of
hide and seek
time is an interruption from
the eternal game we play
we mask
we endeavor to accumulate the hardened shell
-exoskeleton-
of bullshit molded just for
you and me
but I'd rather curl up
along side of the lion
vowing to eat no flesh
the lion and the lamb
decide to rent an apartment in Denver
and work minimum wage jobs
despite their degrees--
what shall we learn from
William Blake-
William Shakespeare-
Will you Will you not?
To be or not to be
that is not the question when
Freud says you're mentally insane to
ponder this question and Melville decants the premise
I'm out of my mind but
in it all the same.

A confession.

My college decision rested upon purely cosmetic and thoroughly inconsequential elements. Don't get me wrong--I think I ended up at the right place-- I've received a fantastic education and I consider my subsequent experiences to be beyond value-- but listen to this:

I initially ruled XXXXXXX out because I thought it was too expensive. And then some friends told me that the campus had lots of trees, and that I would probably love it at XXXXXXX. I kept this in my heart.

After I ruled it out again, around December, I called the college to tell them to take me off their mailing list. But the admissions counselor off-handedly mentioned how the campus looked like a big frosted cup cake under all of the snow. This impacted me strangely, and I kept the image in my heart.

When I decided to go to XXXXXXX XXXXXXXX University, I visited the campus for a visitation day. They were giving bus tours, but the idea of blurring past all of the buildings and secret nooks that I might be spending the greater portion of the next 4 years of my life--did not sound appealing to me. So an old friend who was attending the University gave me a walking tour. She told me all about this tunnel that ran under the campus where countless rapes took place. Tunnel was sealed off, but it was still possible to get into. The idea of repeated atrocities previously occurring in the location just below my walking path freaked me out; and I kept this in my heart.

XXXXXXX was back on my list. It was between XXXXXXX and a really really small college called XXXXX, for which I was eligible for a full ride. Unfortunately, the scholarship competitions for XXXXXXX and XXXXX were on the same day, and through some convoluted mathematical process, I figured my chances of winning a substantial amount of dough from either college were about equal. Slim, but equal. And therein was my dilemma. Which scholarship competition should I attend? I had no idea what I wanted to major in, so the programs didn't matter all that much. My decision rested in a factor I invested an absurd amount of meaning in, which impacted the subsequent four years of my life, which in turn, butterfly affected the rest of my entire life. A friend suggested that I consider the mascots. It turns out, it was a moment in my life in which I had to decide between being a "Red Devil" or a "Saint." I took it as a sign from God, and I am proud to say that today, I am a Saint.

Today I give tours for XXXXXXX, and I make up a bunch of crap about how I considered the size and the faculty members in the departments I was interested in, when in reality, I totally stumbled my way to XXXXXXX blindly.

Shhh....listen.

Fan blades circle quietly above, gently sifting the air molecules in the room and producing the slight tattoo of subtle movement. The pendulum swings out of time with the fan blades. The refrigerator hums a half step flat of the blood pumping by my ear drums. Some where a computer beeps and punctuates the perfect flow of discord and I sigh heavily, considering the delicacy of nothingness. But if I were alone in a desert or in outer space, I might go mad listening to the disturbing lacuna of sound.