RiR 0.5
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Don’t call it a comeback.
It’s been a while friends, but I’ll spare you the comeback speech. I’ve been spurred into action by two burgeoning songbirds, who shall remain anonymous as per their request. Here is a little guy (baby steps, people). May he do well by you.
Today can only be described as opaque.
Sluggish drops of thought condense
and slide half-heartedly down my face.
I blink to brush them away. -
Oh, the Melodrama!
When will I stop relying on this crutch (and asking so many questions)? Apparently I was disenchanted with work when I wrote this; take it as a mood. Take it as you like it.
Untitled
Why do I crave purple dawn under fluorescent lights?
Feeding characters into electrical signals
can only be so stimulating. In this world of angles
and grays, I can never be sure whether
I’m asleep or dreaming.
“What are your plans for the weekend?”
I hear the pleated pants say to each other on Monday.
Tuesday brings thunderstorms and meetings;
they fill the day in an endless way,
self-importance in a puff of smoke.
On Wednesday, I crave the smell of cut grass.
But daydreaming about a breeze does not conjure it.
By three, on Thursday, I’m learning to do work,
focusing a teenager’s summer angst into
a momentary lapse of clarity.
Friday passes in a dizzy wave of impatience,
as I unlearn everything from the day before.
The weekend zips by in a cliché,
filled with the regretful laze long weeks demand.
And Sunday evening, I feel a tightening in my gut,
a sneer as I fall asleep.
Where are the lingering hours of my youth?
Where is the promised contentment of my age?
Are they bottled up in wrongful beginnings?
Hanging questions?
No. It comes back to that peerless purple dawn;
to the paradox in the pursuit of happiness:
That there is more vigor in being than in becoming. -
The Dark Lady Cometh
In keeping with the new tradition of overwrought dream logging initiated by my colleague, zee venerable Cory, I’ve composed a lovely dream-capture from a few nights ago.
August 2-3, 2011
Last night I had a series of vivid dreams. It was one of those odd-sleep-pattern nights that I occasionally have. I fell asleep while reading around 9:30. I woke up at 11:00, got ready for bed, and read until I finished my book around 1:00; then I turned my light out and embraced my room’s blue-dark.
The dreams began immediately. They started with the half-asleep, lucid dreams, which I cannot recall for you at the moment. But among these were a number of sensory-heavy dreams; lots of sound and motion, particularly falling. I felt weightless and my stomach turned quite a few times, coming to brink of wakefulness with each lurch. One of these, I remember running up a steep, seemingly suspended sidewalk. When I got to the top—a peak of concrete, rounded, that continued sharply down, inverted at points like a roller coaster track—I knew it was a dream and that there was going to be falling. I said to myself, “Ah, man,” as I looked out over the edge and began to feel the vertigo-induced nausea of dream falling. Abruptly, my vantage point became that of a third-person spectator while my body started running over the edge. I remember noting how realistic my hair looked from the back. Taking on a cartoony look, suddenly, I watched as my big-headed self skidded along the steep concrete, eventually face-planting when the side-walk leveled out. I think that brought me close to waking, but the oddities were just getting started.I sank into a deeper sleep; I remember because it felt heavy, like I was somehow aware the whole time that I was sleeping and not willing to stop thinking about it. The beginning details of this dream are blurry. I know I was in my apartment and the TV was on and I was laying in bed of sorts. The living room of the apartment was not the same as it is in reality, but you know how dream-logic works. Both my roommate Cory’s bed and my own were in the living room and we were propped up watching TV. The most important thing to note about this dream was that it was permeated by a low and incessant murmuring. This came first from the TV and later from Cory. It was positively Lynchian in it’s unsettling and mundane moroseness. The heaviness hung thickly over the dream, while the girl from iCarly appeared on the television, hanging upside down, suspended by her ankles and wearing a sequin bikini. I think, as is according to custom, Cory made some kind of critical or disparaging comment about her and I replied with, “She is pretty hot, though.”
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The Blue Forever
I’m sick of not posting and feeling crappy about it. So here is a questionable piece of fiction I wrote a little over a year ago.
The Blue Forever
It breathes, up and down and up and down, a massive chest heaving against the contractions of an unseen diaphragm. Stretching out before them, a blueness almost black against the infinity of the sky. It is a void unknowable, and they only tiny motes upon its massive backdrop. An insidious secret floating listlessly across the rim of reality, they are the point where the horizon meets the sea.
Jamie’s eyes caressed the edge of sight. His mind could not process the vastness that his eyes took in unconditionally. It brought them to tears.
“Do you think they’re looking for us?” he asked aloud.
His two companions merely looked up. Their eyes, red-rimmed pools of darkness, met his in answer. Jamie looked back toward horizon. The setting sun mirrored in the wave-mangled glass, red and yellow and purple amidst a mantle of black-blue.
Jamie let out a trembling sigh.Maria felt the hot light of the sun slap her face. She played at sleep a few seconds longer, feeling each breath of the ocean beneath her, pitching up and down. Opening her eyes to slits, she examined the familiar fuzzy yellow light caught in her lashes. She blinked repeatedly to acclimate her over-worked pupils to that retina searing light. Regaining focus control, she glanced about the life raft.
Jamie nodded at her and attempted a smile that only amounted to a twitch at the corner of his sunburned lips. Maria saw that Simon was still sleeping, his arms wrapped around his head to hide his face from the sun.
She crawled over to where Jamie knelt and he handed her a tin of lima beans and a plastic spork. He gave her a sympathetic look and she grimaced slightly as she spooned the beans into her dry mouth.
He chuckled lightly, a tilted moan. She gave a small smile and looked to the horizon and breathed, in and out.There was blackness all around, broken by innumerable tiny lights, stars but no moon. Jamie felt like an astronaut. He couldn’t properly determine what was up or down. He listened to the calm lapping of the waves against the raft. A constant drone that foreboded a slow death.
He took a small sip from a plastic water bottle and licked his dry lips. The other two were asleep, awaiting their turns at lookout duty. Jamie wondered how long he could last before the sea drove him mad. The sound and the infinity and that bastard sun. How long before the last feeble bit of sanity he clung to snapped in half?
He looked up at the stars and realized that many others looked at those same stars this minute. He took comfort in that.“I say we wait till night and shoot the damn thing.”
“We have to wait until we’re sure someone will see it.”
“That’s never gonna happen. You think we’re just gonna stumble on a ship out here? No. No one’ll come to us unless we let them know we’re here.”
“We can’t waste our only flare on a blind hope.”
Jamie and Simon continued to argue while Maria let their voices fade into the periphery of her mind. She absently fingered the flare gun. It was loaded with the only flare they had. It seemed the one precious commodity on their raft aside from the quickly dwindling water bottles and cans of food.
This was an argument they’d had several times in the last four days. How best to spend their last hope. Jamie had so far won the arguments, enlisting Maria’s vote for a two against one majority. But she was losing patience.
“We wait through one more night and day with lookouts,” Maria said distantly. “Then the next night, I say we shoot the flare. We can draw the food and water out for maybe two more days after that.”
Simon nodded begrudgingly and Jamie looked at Maria with a mixture of disbelief and hurt. Hers were the last words spoken the rest the day.Four nights ago, screams filled the night making the air thick as plasma. Simon stumbled to the railing of the deck. The cruise ship was being swallowed by the sea’s mighty mandible, tasted by countless tongues of flame. Simon’s head spun in a haze of dizziness and his lungs burned. He looked off the starboard side of the ship and saw three black shapes against the red reflections in the water, two moved about in panic.
Somehow, he wasn’t sure how, he knew this was his only chance of surviving this ordeal, so he leapt over the railing and fell the 40 feet to the water and came up gasping. The two figures pulled him over the edge of the life raft.
One yelled, “Help us look for any other survivors!”
Simon caught his breath. He wondered briefly if they had any way of knowing that he was the cause of this mess. And if they did, what would they do to him? Deciding that was impossible, he turned and began scanning the water for movement.The flare shot up into the night air, a huge orange star casting orange on the raft and the water below. Simon glanced at the others, bathed in that light, and saw their eyes upturned religiously to the flare. Maria’s fingers were crossed. Simon bit back a grin and settled for a small smirk.
Jamie watched the waterline as the sun peaked over the edge. No boat had come in the night. He cursed bitterly at the rising sun then began to recite a nursery rhyme he’d liked as a child.
Maria’s eyes tried desperately for a tear, squeezed every bit of the tear duct for one drop, but it was all spent. She lay on her back and stared up at sun at its zenith. Simon slept soundly beside her as Jamie kept muttering incessantly. They were on their last water bottle. She felt herself drifting off to sleep and didn’t fight it. Her last thought before darkness overtook her was whether or not she could endure the slow progression of her death.
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Sorry Time! and On Running
I apologize, quickly-dwindling RiR faithfuls, for going more than a month without posting. I have been busy, to say the least, but that is no excuse. I will update you all quickly on the goings on in my life. Several weeks ago, I was hired at Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill as a server. Not my first choice, but it was a job. Right before I started there, however, I had another interview at Lexmark, Inc. for another technical writer position. Needless to say, I was hoping to get that job. And I did! After about two weeks as a server again, I found out that Lexmark was hiring me (prayers answered to be certain). So after three weeks at Shakertown, I started at Lexmark and have just completed my third week there, where I am responsible for software documentation. Dry, but leagues above food service. Say thank’ya.
Since, I am now a corporate stooge, I am afraid that my creative writing will slip. In order to combat this, I have committed to myself to produce at least one form of creative writing every week, be it good or not, fully complete or not. I won’t necessarily be posting all of these, however. Anyway, this exposition has gone on too long. Today, instead of a poem, I have a creative non-fiction piece about running for you that I wrote my junior year for Intro to Creative Writing. I still like it; though I did have to edit some of the cheese and over-writing out of it, but there’s still some there (see the heinous title, which I couldn’t bring myself to change). Enjoy, and sorry for the long introduction.
The Power of the Shoe
There was always a feeling of anxiety before a race: a palpable fear of the physical task I was about to undertake. It was never worse than the moment I stepped up to the starting line, awaiting that dreadful blast of the gun which would set in motion twenty minutes of agony. This day it was particularly bad. This day, it was all on the line.
I began seriously running at the age of fourteen, joining my junior high cross country team. This was around the same time I began to enjoy writing. I don’t know whether the two interests led to one another, but they are uniquely akin in some fundamental ways. What drew me to running? Maybe it was the fact that my brothers did it or the coercing of a friend, but, whatever the reason, running and I have enjoyed a love/hate relationship ever since.
I have run through rain and snow, sunlight and blue skies, excruciating heat and bitter cold, but, in the end, running is running, romanticized or not. There is scarcely a more pleasant activity than jogging through a nice quaint forest, or sloshing through the mire of a waterlogged cross country course. Running in the morning is very peaceful: getting the achy, weary body to do physical activity while enjoying creation, not yet awake but beginning to stir. Racing also has its glories. Pushing tired legs and addled brains beyond their limits, just to gain a sense of accomplishment and pose the ever-present question: What am I doing and why am I doing it?
Running is so many things to me: an escape, an affliction, a chance to truly think, an inner struggle with myself. It is the writing of a story. The runner and the writer are, in many ways, engaging the same mystery when they perform their art. Starting a run is like staring at a blank page ready to be filled with words; words that can inspire, words that explore thoughts, words that free the writer’s and readers’ minds. As the runner progresses through his course, plots and tensions develop much like a narrative. -
Utterance
Utterance
Rasping.
Words slip out over slick
lips, ripened in the act of revealing.
They slide, yet unspoken, around
tall-standing hairs, tracing goose bumps.
Mere breath.
Shivering.The presence is comforting,
sometimes ecstatic, economical,
always loving.
The Spirit moves like the
breath of God
in thick lumps of flesh,
inciting panic and awe, even contempt.
It emboldens and shows how to love.
A persistent still, small voice.The word is hardly whispered.
It comes out in the heavy hush.
Breathed out, it catches like a
spreading conflagration.
The next heart tapped, followed by
hard shuddering. And finally the
labored expulsion with smiling eyes
and ready palms.
Gasping.
“Revival.” -
Madeleine
Madeleine
It lies there
in the sprawling arch
Of a lifted eyebrow:
Her, or what he’s made of her.
A fiction, a romance, a disease.
He breathes in her scent through
Her tightly kept hair,
A flowery blast of ocean spray.
It is steel and bites his nose and
Fills him with warmth to bursting,
Beginning in his groin.As innocent as the fiction began,
It has now captured him in a sidelong
Tornado, bleeding colors in his mind
Into one green haze.
From it, a specter
Dances out: a union of
The two sides of the continuum.
And he takes it, her, and
Molds it and bends it and fits it
Into a familiar romance.Well, as all good fictions do,
The story meets a climax.
A second death to a second life.
And as the two climbed to the peak
Of that arc, the green haze was jarred
Loose, fading to blackness.
But the blackness had violence to it,
And with a buffeting gust, it pushed
The poor doll into the falling action,
Leaving our hero to ponder his misery. -
Coda
I am beginning to feel disenchanted with this whole unemployed adult thing. I thought it was going to be so cool, but it doesn’t seem to be. I don’t even qualify as a starving artist. It will be a good weekend, though. Some friends are coming down to bright Kentucky for a visit; should be a good time. Here is Coda, a sort of expression of the above bitterness, but I like it. Consume and enjoy.
Coda
You thought you were approaching an end,
but that end was a rising swell,
reaching, stretching,
it pulls back.
Pulls.Ripping words out that settle
like severed insect wings.
They prod you toward rising dust.
How fearsome!Hurrying towards
an alcoholic haze, to advance
the thrusting creative life.
Lo! the romantic:
lazy coffee-shop mornings
spent writing, reading,
boiling life down to arithmetic.
And of course the slow unearthing
of mind-relics made concrete.The pulling subsides
in a rush of swirling colorsand you are left wanting more.
But wanting yields nothing.
Ambition is a quiet house
filled with the ghosts of poets.
Yeats tangles your tongue with his gyres while
Blake flays your innocence into threads
of shadowed memory,
till, barren and white,
you’re thrust off the porchinto the new lows of adulthood.
The music fades out. -
I feel fortunate
I feel fortunate
I feel fortunate
that I am free to create.
That I am free to gaze
at stars and shadows
and wonder what
God’s grace looks like
when many can trace the
lines across Christ’s face
for need of Him.
For need of water.I can lean back and think
about the poetry in
labor and promise of slow
afternoons, while some struggle
to see through the
sticky film of dirt that clings
to their sweaty, sun-touched faces.
The awe I seek to record
is the support-system these
faceless others depend on.I rub my bursting belly and
regret that last bite.
A sickening abundance
ripped from a starving child’s
cracked lips.
The human in me cherishes the human
in that little one.
To create, to touch
the living source of nature
and never forget those others.
To love. -
Part IV
I’m sorry that I’ve gone so long without posting. I’ve been busy looking for a job and working on my grad school application, but I know that’s no excuse. The good news is: “Life in Stasis” is done (for the most part, anyway). So, posts should come more frequently, now that I can resume my random repertoire grabbing. The move to Kentucky has been a success so far. Just pray that I can find a job now, or God provides monetarily for me in some other way. I feel like I had something else to say in this pre-poem post, but I can’t remember it. So here is part four of “Life in Stasis.” As always, comment if you have critiques; I’d love to hear them since this is going into my portfolio.
Live in Stasis IV
Life in stasis, I hang here dreaming
While my stem-pitch weakens from
Shuddering kisses.To drift away would be bliss,
Ripped away, clipped from the
Clinging strands. Tumbling
End over end, plummeting
Faster and faster and fearingTo be trapped and bagged with the rest.
Not me.
I’m on the path to infinity.
Quickening steps forward,
Light speed ahead.Life’s apotheosis
I will pen.
I want to scar white paper with black type.
To write all my heart’s
Discontent. Far awayFrom the sticky sludge of the hole,
The tar that keeps this boat afloat.
And until that ship runs aground
On some far-distant shore,
I will hold my breath,
Till I turn yellow, orange, red,
And dance in the crisp autumn breeze.
Likes
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Half Life // By: Lewis Gaston
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Heaven
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