June’s Embrace

Your shadow trails along the edge of the rippled surface of my navy mattress, leaving thick, viscous strands, carved concavely on both sides like heartstrings, but sturdily like the union of a stalactite and a stalagmite spanning a cave’s height, in its wake.    Your familiar white eyes, dimly glowing, assure me that your judgment is to be trusted again — “just one more time.”

You showed me what I could not remember for four years — all that I had forgotten promptly after the last time I recalled it, four years prior to today.  This feeling in my heart, once intertwined with confusion, corruption, and the feelings associated with undoing, is dubbed “love,” and it has been purified to such a level of recognizability that I would describe it contemporarily as shining more brightly than the stars above at night that I once loved more than any other human on Earth.  Your hands are small, but their power is unmistakable — it does not overtake me, but it leaves an impression similar to that of a grand discovery in an unlikely place.  I am forced to remember a set of large, weathered hands which left behind one that was quite different — the products that the aforementioned discovery yielded were created by that pair of hands.

Here, in your grasp, it is still so murky and unclear.  Thoughts mix erratically, static on a screen long vacant behind my eyes, supposedly reflecting the visage and surroundings that those same seemingly colorful eyes perceive in the mirror at an unknown, unperceivable time.  You keep your smile, but together, we are locked in that pure, white hospital room, trapped in that cell never to return to the world outside of it.

While armed with the knowledge that we are in this large, deceptively pure-looking box, away from the outside world for the rest of eternity, however, an interesting, uncountable set of creations are possible.  We might only be adding them to a collection for now, but someday, someone else will gaze upon our existence, their eyes being added to the visible constellations from each of our chambers, and admire us from above.  At least… I can hope they will.

Until then, until my humanity can return for a time… hold me in your unstable, trembling, unidentifiable appendages.

This Place and Me

Nothing remains in this place now. This is how happiness is defined by everyone outside of this place, and everyone who dwells here seems to condone these notions, sporting the same blissful expression in silence. They pass by my static, lifeless body, and smile at how it looks, and how the expression it wears differs from theirs. They do not wonder what sorts of words contributed to why that face of mine looks as it does, or if they do, their thought trains change direction early en route, for there are obstacles on my track.

The main obstacle is me. I am their rock, but a rock nonetheless — large, heavy, and unmoving. Why would they speed toward an issue with no solution when they can continue to distract themselves on long, winding tracks, even if those paths lead this place even closer to nowhere at all?

The whiteness is blinding. The false purity plastering the walls of this place brings them all one step closer to so-called heaven every day of our existence, but the influence of this atmosphere neglects me and traps me at the base of the staircase, where all I can see is the slow drip of not-so-fresh paint near the beginning of their delusional path. I know what lies up there, though, and I can attest to the fact that the gate is aluminum coated in gold plating, and that behind it lies a world of screens which broadcast static at all times. Their effect is not one I wish to explore.

This place is full of names and images, but where did all of the items go? Did the minds behind those smiling faces melt into nothing, only to be molded into shapes more desirable to onlooking reviewers of our conduct? The ground appears beneath my legs as I sit here, but how can I bridge the microscopic gap between it and my body?

This place was not real from the beginning, and yet it continues to deteriorate — what shifted between then and now was the effect on its inhabitants. We are media monkeys, we are wired workers, and we are diplomatic de-stressers for your pleasure, but where am I again? Where am I placed in this place? Is my mind the only one that remains intact here? This place cannot be where “I” die. I will never give into them, but the conflict between honesty (and thus opening myself up to their pressure) and integrity (which requires dishonesty and nearly ceaseless solitude) seems to run on forever.

The value of corruption is an important one, they say, and yet they concede to only think and act through the pure eyes of others, staring down at themselves — dissociating from reality, floating away from the world. They then wonder who they are and why they hit the ceiling while they stand on the floor. Watching would be agony for any empath — especially one that knew better. I knew the value of corruption from the beginning.

This place facilitates a link between us and the outside world, but when the outside world coaxes me into complacency under the painfully obvious guise of wanting to force me to get lost in its pretty colors, characters, and names, what is left for someone like me but to retreat back to this place? Give me reality. Give me a real voice, again. Give me the girl I see in the distance. Let her lay in my arms, and let me lay in hers. Let us discuss current affairs outside of this wretched place and time, in the safety of our abode, and let us peer into each other’s eyes and immediately materialize what is real in our minds — that touch, that gaze, that personality.

Let me escape this place not by burning its bridge, but by building another outward.

Response to Dysphoria

Body, heavy, bleeding,
Oozing life into
The inner image, yellows,
Reds, whites, blacks, and blues.

Emotion, control, lacking,
Leaves in ephemeral wind;
Struggle, finish, success,
A win where one would lose.

Seemingly nothing present,
A void where once was life;
Ending yields beginning,
The rewards reaped through strife

In body, light, freely
Evolving to who we are,
Metamorphosis and shedding,
Transcending feminine scars.

Ode to Pianos Past

There’s something about that piano
In the corner of the room
It sits alone, it waits for me
In dusty, glowing gloom
It basks not in the moonlight
It only waits for sunlight
The rug absorbs my stage fright
As I take it upon myself to soon

Steal away my own stage
And sing along with the voices in my head
There’s nothing that deters me
Not a single thing they’ve said, no
I wish I could get lost
As the never-ending frost
Overtakes all that I’ve lost outside
So inside, I’ll

Brush away the worry
Soothe away the sadness,
Beat away the hurry,
Absolve all of the madness,
And as soon as I get home,
And I’m once again alone,
I’ll remember my old tunes I played,
And look at how I’ve grown

Now I sit in my chair,
Alone with nothing by
My side, along with no one,
And nothing left to hide
But somehow I am yearning,
And I know that I’m learning,
And there’s just no way of earning
The same feeling that was produced

By that piano,
On my nights alone
With that piano,
Oh, how we’ve grown

There’s something about that piano,
In the corner of the theatre,
It awaits a pair of gentle hands like mine, or like yours

An Autumn Breeze Through Time

I laid in my bed after thirteen hours of sound sleep, paralyzed. I was astonished upon seeing the man who had freed me from the slumber that had held me so tightly in its grasp: this man shared my face, but had transformed from being brushed and chiseled by the sands of time over what looked to be around a decade. Curiously, though, he felt like an autumn breeze and made me feel the same. His smile was light and airy, and his hands were a gentle complement to his general demeanor. His hair shone under the light in a matte manner; its pigment was a bright shade of nutmeg reminiscent of the oxidized leaves that had littered the driveway in the New England autumns. He was a dream, another evanescent vision that would soon become cloudier as time went on — even days and weeks would weather him more than the years of time he appeared to have endured in some alternate, distant past — or rather, in some faraway future straight ahead. He took a U-turn and blew over and away as weakly as a gust of air pushed forward only by the lungs of a single human being, and he left an impression on me as strong as a violent gale, tearing at the sides of the safe-house within the walls of which all of our worst demons hide, the skin of the body.

“We can avoid everyone together someday. Let’s run away.”

No, that cannot be right, can it? I must have read his cold gaze incorrectly — we must have someone on whom we can depend in the future, no?

“We can fly under the radar and have a whole circle of people who like us.”

No — are these the only options? I must have misinterpreted his approachable gesture — if we reach out hand out like this too many times, we will only encounter trouble. We should only do for the people closest to us, so when they are helped up, they do not pull us down, and those closest to us should be those who can understand us, not those from whom we must hide.

Now that he was gone, I could not interpret his message at all. He disappeared as quickly as he came, and he pulled his hand away before I could decide on an adequate response. I was left alone, questioning whether there was a message at all. All I knew was the autumnal sensation he provided, which lingered even after the last cloudy wisps of his likeness wavered and faded into the scenery which once surrounded him.

Just as I am, he was but an ideal image, stretching across time to aid the fallen. Will I ever see him again?

Filter

There is plenty of room

For my words in the silence,

But my body cannot

Handle my inner violence;

Yet the words I would say,

Strung together and tied,

Accumulate in my throat,

Leaving me empty inside.

 

They are made out of twine,

Knotted and left in tatters,

But the things they describe —

Each and every one scatters

Far away from my soul,

Even farther from body,

Just like I tend to feel

When I talk to somebody.

 

They are clogging my throat,

They are pulling me down,

And in the dense, black waves,

They are making me drown.

The next action I take

Must be something alone,

Or instead I’ll forever

Be left behind on my own.