Sonnet Sequence
Dawn
Your sleep sounds, whisper through me
And crest, just along you lips with a sweeping flourish
I watch the sun, speckled on your eyelids—
Light lingers along the edges of you, laughing
Into the sweet silence that drifts into the corners
Of the room. Your face is soft, my eyes searching
For sunflowers, sifting through the sieve of your
Essence, is exhilarating, joints ache, fingers folded
Against the sheets of apprehension in a knot, neat
Around a neck that once longed to resemble a swan
Swindled of affectionate gestures, swift sanity.
Red blooms, burning bright beneath the weight
Of the morning’s open wounds that simply
Let themselves in, becoming, bleeding, bruised.
Noon
Dust motes, swirl, spackled paint that warm smell
That permeates the eaves, leaves drift through
The door, and you sweep, sweep, sweep them out.
Windows thrust open, drifting drapes, dancing like
Phantoms, while you pleasure your solar plexus
With clouded lemonade. Your eyes never quite
Finding my face. I tie my pride around my waist
And let it shimmer like wind chimes in the breeze.
The vase, shatters, shatters, shatters, the shards
Constantly multiplying until the door, cracks, loud
Like thunder, rumbling in your chest, filling my eyes
With tragedy of tepid tea in tense hands, it spills
Over, along my hands, and you recede, you recede
Until all that is left, is a sparrow, spare me—Spare me.
Dusk
Breath condenses, cold, poor circuitry, they said or was
It circulation? Shimmering sound, deafening, you said
Silence was the answer, shh, shh, shh, no notes needed
nor nestled in entropy, to entail a trigger, linked light
Sharp sounds, simmering mercury beneath a bleeding
Tongue did you—”of course not”—knotted around his
Neck, never, swirling syllables in a symphony of shh-shh
Shelves of synchronized soliloquy, silhouettes, spinning
Sedated dreams like dragging your soul across the floor
Of the Universe that you once called home one-way ticket
To “Hello, what brings you to the ward today?” Agonizing,
Unwanted, weary of their eyes that eagerly indulge in the
Sun speckled on my eyelids, and the soft swinging of my
Head, the answer is no, no, sparrow, don’t spare me today.
Editing Shakespeare’s Sonnets…
For a university task. I..know that editing them is pretty much essential as there were numerous different versions of different sonnets etc, so to get one coherent piece of work there needs to be some kind of intervention, but I don’t agree with modernising them. Yes, having v’s instead of u’s, i’s etc makes them slightly more alien but what is the point of modernising all the spelling really? Its like imposing a set standard on everything and removing all individuality. The point of language changing over the years is that older things sound old, have a unique feel to them and are rooted in their time - there is just no point whatsoever in editing them, modernising the spelling and making them sound as though they were written now. Its like flattening out - like taking away any sense of uniqueness, individuality or character and it just makes no sense. Its taking their essence away, is what it is. Its like getting a load of really talented singers with unique voices and then putting them in a recording studio and altering their voices so that they all sound identical and average.
I think that it’s just for the sake of learning, really, and understanding the structure. Especially in terms of pentameter, as well as stressed and unstressed syllables. While I completely agree with you that ‘modernizing’ takes things away from Shakespeare’s poetry, I still feel it definitely helps in terms of teaching it in a more comprehensible way.
(Source: k-asiany, via patedfruit)
(Source: fcukingchoke, via story-dj)
Personal Post: 4.14.2012
So, moving in the middle of the semester is never really easy. I managed to fall behind on things. I’ll catch up, though. I have to. I don’t really have a choice at this point. At least everything is moved. It’s about two weeks until my twenty-fourth birthday. Woohoo. I’m just updating here since I’m taking a full-on hiatus from Tarotblades until May 15th, and just doing my thing. Perhaps I’ll update with some more writing soon.
Sonnet IX
Stirring the tea in large sun-brewed jars
The sun is shimmering off of blades of grass
That have gathered, glistening in your hair
It drifts along the soft curves of your shoulders
Into the crooks of your arms; fluttering along your lips
As you breathe in sweet summer-sleep.
The horizon paints you red, and I am
Taken by your fire that recedes along your
Aura, kissed by cosmic mountains somewhere
I long to trek with eager senses.
The jars perspire in the twilight, and the moths
Come to extend their feelers in a flutter of wings.
Glow-bugs flicker green—
You rise from sleep.
I put on a good face for you
Everything slows down
Falls down (Falls Down)
I put on a good face for you
I put on a good face
Panic underneath
Disorder underneath
Unable to hold on to anything
(Anything)
Pulling folds of paper
Dedicated final words
To the ashes of a woman
I considered a mother.
And I count the length of her body
By the long, never ending ties
That separate the iron
That separated her forever
That separated her—
From all of us.
I need a season to sleep.
Where autumn can be tucked away
And when I return every
thing will be new again.
I’ve become disconnected
Forgetting tea on countertops
Since you leapt like a ghost
From my heart.
And your
“Once was”
And
“Could’ve Been’s”
Whistle through me
Silent and hollow.
There is no fullness in movements now
I just keep catching on the edges
Of your death.
That came invisibly.
September
There is calmness in the autumn moon. In that chill that cuts into the edges of your face. I am eleven. There is graffiti on the walls, and we lift the carpet to the long slats of wood beneath. There is an old woman who sits in my bedroom, gazing longingly out the window to the Barletta House. I acknowledge her with a glance. She vanishes.
The bathroom never makes me feel clean. Shoes stuffed in the hole in the floor to prevent leaks. Death clings to my skin, to my soap, that lathers with unseen grit that scrapes along my skin. There is rain. Girls at school ask me if I brush my hair.
My hands slip on the doorknob I am not strong enough to open.
Cyborgs
He sat across from me in his bedroom, his curly hair long, to his shoulders. He smiled at me, distractedly scratching the back of his hand, between his forefinger and thumb.
“My hand has been really itchy lately. It’s like there’s a bite, you know? But I know it’s not a spider since I didn’t get a fever like I usually do.”
“Let me see that.” I scooted closer across the bed, taking a hold of his hand, pressing firmly against his skin with my thumbs.
“What are you doing, Angie?” He raised a brow at me.
“Shh.”
I pushed a bit harder, whatever was beneath his skin felt about the size of a grain of rice. I felt my stomach drop and twist itself into an impossible knot in my stomach. I had a feeling I knew what it was.
“Get me a knife.” I said.
“Get you a what?”
“Get me a fucking knife, John.”
He looked at me quizzically and rose from the bed, unperturbed by my volition. He went into the kitchen and got a paring knife, small enough that I could use fairly easily with my hands, and sharp enough to slit skin.
“Tweezers.”
He nodded to me, snatching a set of tweezers off of his dresser.
“Don’t you think I could…”
“No,” I said. “It’s in your right hand. Unless you’re ambidextrous, I wouldn’t suggest you try doing something this precise with a paring knife on yourself.”
“All right.” He sat next to me on the bed, and I took his hand and put it onto my knee. I felt his skin again, pushing up against the tendon so the bump would be raised on his skin. As soon as I got it to a point of where I felt it was best suited for extraction, I slit his skin open, blood blossoming in the wake of the knife blade. I then used the tweezers he had handed me, and when I got the tips to grip the tiny thing, I pulled it out. I was impressed that John hadn’t made any sudden movements or winces. He just had closed his eyes and evened his breathing.
I used my shirt to wipe off the small rice-grain-sized chip before holding it in my palm.
“It’s a Verichip.”
“I see that.” John was clutching his hand to himself, using his shirt to staunch the wound.
“I hope I don’t need stitches.”
“You’ll be all right, I’ve done worse on myself. When did you get this implanted?”
“I…I’m not sure.”
“Has it stopped bleeding yet?”
John looked down at his hand, astonished to see it healed.
“This chip releases antibodies into the tendons of your hands that heal it instantaneously, that way the chip doesn’t form any cancerous tumors.”
“Brilliant. Creepy, but brilliant.”
“Yeah, only problem, you wouldn’t have an implant.”
I then gripped the knife and slit his throat before he fell face down on the bed. I watched as he dematerialized from his holographic persona to the robot beneath, acid searing into the bedsheets.
“Fucking robots will never learn, will they?”
Just then the real John walked in his eyes growing slightly round at seeing me sitting there, the head of the robot lolling off of the edge of the bed.
“I guess you had another mishap?” John asked, setting his bag down.
“Yeah, he answered your door. You’ve got to remember to re-kick your tetra drives or they will swarm.”
“Gotcha.”
“Here, pop this in the Lector, it’ll be interesting to see what pops up.”
I watched as John went to his computer desk, multi glass monitors spread out, twenty of them, all forty inches each, together. He pulled a small steel disc out of his drawer, syncing it wirelessly by simply placing it on his desk, which was also made of glass, news headlines running around it as well as world clocks. When he set it down, feet shot out of it, and spikes shot up. It looked like a very sharp set of collapsible cylinders. He dropped the Verichip in there and it collapsed before it started to spin, whirling electric blue, and ethereal sound emanating from it.
“See this, here,” John pulled up the chart on his monitors so that I could see it. “Works for the AIU.”
“The Android’s Intellegence Unit?”
“That’s the one.”
“Poor guy was just assimilated into the Concentrique not even two days ago.”
“Well, shit.”
“There’s nothing you could’ve done to prevent it, really.”
Apparently the robot had regenerated itself, and had gotten up from the bed. John pulled a laser gun from the side of his desk and shot it square between the eyes, annihilating its circuitry entirely. It collapsed on the floor with sharp screeching sounds, groans, and fizzles.
“Creepy fuckers, aren’t they?”
“I’ve seen much worse.” He turned to his desk then, and I watched as thousands of files were rifled through within a matter of seconds, his eyes flicking so fast that they rolled, and all you could see were the whites.
“You’re fucking creepy when you do that, John.”
“Sorry.” His eyes swiveled back. “It lets me read the information faster since, well, man, these eyes are so fantastic. I don’t know why you refused to have them implanted.”
“Oh, I don’t know, because I’d rather have a more humanistic look .”
He snorted. “Oh please, look at that leg!”
He was right. My left leg was now made of stainless titanium steel, sleek and smooth, excellent joints for flexibility. I was wearing a skirt, and wiggled my toes fluidly, just like a human, lights giving me polished toenails of any color I wished with just a thought.
“Thanks. Did they try to chip you again today?”
“If by me you mean the handsome force of unstoppable nature that couldn’t be chipped even if all of AIU tried, then yep.”
Quick Sketch
She sipped her tea through tight lips over the brim of her teacup. She didn’t want any of it to slip out onto her chin. It wasn’t very ladylike. As it was she had to wait for it to cool, and she looked to her mother, her lacquer colored hair looped neatly at the nape of her neck. Her face was only slightly wrinkled, and only a trait observable at certain angles. Her lips were lightly colored with pink, and her eyes were a rich, dark brown. Daiyu on the other hand, had her hair tied at the nape of her neck, and it swept down to her mid-back, and her visage was precisely that of her age, and not a day older: Ten. She had the tale-tale signs of a beautiful girl, which would mean slightly awkward adolescence.
“Do you like your birthday tea?” Daiyu’s mother said.
“Yes,” Daiyu piped up, a bit of tea drippling onto her chin, which she failed to catch with a sweep of her hand, drops of the amber liquid shattering onto her legs and part of the tabletop.
Writing: The College Experience
Some days, I feel like I’m stuck. I feel like I’m stuck in the nooks and crannies of the hows instead of the doings. It’s how you start to feel when you realize that you really, really hate literature, and are really picky about what you do like. (I’m not saying all literature in general, I’m just saying the ‘Greats’ that we need to learn how to emulate if we’re ever going to learn anything at all.
And my Forms and Techniques of Poetry professor spends an entire period showing us impressionist art, and never really tells us why.
I haven’t written prose for a class in a pretty long time.
I feel like I hate literature. I hate analysis. I hate having to pick shit apart all the time. Why? Not because I’m lazy, but because it ruins everything. You start reading things with a fine-toothed comb for a brain. You come off as arrogant and pompous. And more importantly, you can’t enjoy what you read. You’re too busy subconsciously proofreading, checking for syntactical mistakes.
Not to mention, the stuff you do write? Gets completely slaughtered by your peers in a matter of seconds. There is always something to pick on. Always something to fix to make poetry, or prose perfect. People say you can’t write if you can’t edit, and that half of the process of writing is editing, but let me tell you something:
It sucks the fun out of it.
Sure, it sounds witty, and even intelligent at first. “Oho I can edit this and it is fantastic.” Then suddenly, the pedal sticks, you’re on overdrive, and guess what? You’re turning into just the thing your professors want. A copy editor. They don’t try and embrace your ideas, help you develop characters, ha! They stick you in bullshit classes that have nice names, but don’t follow through on their promise.
Honestly, I never thought I would be miserable writing. And I’m not, I’m just miserable because I am constrained, caged, tied down, and not one of my professors could really give a shit about it.
If you want to go straight to college out of High School? My advice, is only do it if you feel you really really have to. Otherwise, wait, think about it, and experience life a little more, because college kicks your ass. I also know that even after five years of this stuff, do I really know any more than I did previously? It really doesn’t feel like it. Could I have taught myself these things? Most likely.
And it frustrates the living shit out of me like you have no idea.
Her mouth moves with an obstinate glare of teeth. You shake out your hat and hang it on the door, The plastic bag, swaying, dental floss. You are fixated by distance. Her mouth moves, but her lips become Tangled in the matted hair encircling her face Like a wreath, protruding from an unknown soul She grips you by the heart and wrings it out, Like a sudsy sponge, coupled sleet Between your fingers. She spits your eyes back at you Dangling from their sockets You are nothing.
