Um...?

I don't know how to delete posts, so I've just removed the somewhat embarrassing content of this one. ^_^

Speak

Speak.
I want you to use the voice that you were born with.
I want the roundness and smoothness and hurried tones
of your voice more than I've ever wanted anything
before.
Your words deserve to be released
from the polished silent luxury
of your mind.
The sentences and speeches that you could
toss out with a single twist of your tongue
would
save
the
world
if you let them.
Speak.
Stop being the person who fills up the corners
of benches
and acts out a story of her own happiness.
I want you to spell your soul
in the way that we both know
you've always dreamed of.
I want to see you silence a room
with the quiet power of
your speech,
and then
I want you to scream, shatter the
sound barrier,
let everyone know
the imperfect truth of you.
Everything and all of this and more
should be yours
but is not.
And when I watch you in the mirror,
notice the line of your jaw
that is also mine,
the sadness in your eyes
that also belongs to me,
the tilt of your lips
that could only ever
belong to us,
I want to hold your two hands
and tell you,
command you,
to speak,
but I do not
have
the words.

War

We can't explain the truth of things

and neither can we set our sights on anything real.
Something called faith, called freedom, called standing on
a ledge watching the drowsing city of generations' dreams, silent in
golden light -
and the way it fades away from you as the door
closes, never to open again but rather
to be blown from its hinges and ripped to wooden shreds.

Yes. We're all going to try to be very good.

Driving Practice

All of us are,
deep inside,
scared teenagers
driving at breakneck speeds
down midnight roads,
hunted by a feeling,
guided by emptiness,
south of the final edge
of the last map
and comforted only by
our own wheels' humming
and our anemic faith
that soon, the tangle of roads
will solve itself
and we'll find ourselves
back at home,
cringing under the harsh words
of those who love us,
but secretly
(not on our faces
or in our eyes)
secretly, carefully
smiling.

Search for the Answer

in this tiring endless circle
of school, then work, then sleep
we get caught up in the doing
and forget to look beyond
the words on the page.
we miss the meaning of the equations,
the rich stories unfolding
in languages as yet beyond
our comprehension.
the search for an answer
is everything, we think,
and none of us ever look up
even once
to accept as it is
(with its flaws and its failings,
its limits and chains)
the magic
of knowledge.

Mountains

I was a child of the quiet suburban streets

forever filled with warmth

in my memory.

On one side, the busy network of roads

pumping life to our neighborhood

and back again;

on the other side, the desert,

my desert, 

extending to the mountains

that held their secrets far above

my head.

My past is a story full of 

mistakes and regrets;

I was glad to escape elementary school,

glad to be rid of middle school,

and in all the gladness of these

necessary endings

we left that drowsy, melancholy house,

removing any attachment

that might have lifted it above

all other houses in my mind.

So I became a teenager of the city.

This house is an island of sanity

in the middle of the rainbow weavings

of cultures.  I traded

the narrow-mindedness of my birthplace

for the boundless acceptance

of my second life.

But still,

I cannot see my mountains

through the haze of dust and smog 

that falls like a widow's veil

over the land.

The sounds are harsher here, the smells

less vague, more insistent.

The song, though, is the same.

I can still hear the patient rhythm

of the earth itself, bound under buildings

and laced with concrete and roads.

And when I sit in my room

in the dead of night, the rhythm

brings me back to the days

when I lay on my stomach

and hugged the land itself to me,

staring at the purple beauty

of the sun-touched mountains

against the sky.

All the photos I've missed out on...

I try to upload a picture a day with my napowrimo prompts, but haven't been able to get to an uploader for the past three days D:  So here they are in order from most to least recent:

The Heart of the Wilderness

She walked
with measured steps,
draped in striped and fringed cloths,
treading the earth proudly,
with a slight jingle and flash
of barbarous ornaments.
She carried her head high;
her hair was done
in the shape of a helmet;
she had brass leggings
to the knee;
brass wire gauntlets
to the elbow;
a crimson spot on
her tawny cheek;
inumerable necklaces
of glass beads on her neck;
bizarre things,
charms, gifts of witch-men
that hung about her,
glittered and trembled
at every step.

(She must have had the value
of several
elephant
tusks upon her.)

She was savage
and superb,
wild-eyed
and magnificent;
there was something ominous
and stately in her deliberate
progress.
And in the hush that had
fallen suddenly
upon the whole sorrowful
land,
the immense wilderness,
the colossal body of the
fecund and mysterious life
seemed to look at her,
pensive,
as though it
had been looking at the image
of its own tenebrous
and passionate
soul.

- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

The Newsletter

Recently I signed up for my church's online newsletter.  This is not a normal Christian church.  It's nondenominational, and one might argue not even entirely Christian.  Anyways, here's the prayer I found in the latest edition of the newsletter:

       Living, loving God, I have listened deeply and You have lovingly shown me what is mine to do.  With a deep knowledge that You will give me everything I need, I am made willing to take the action that is mine to do. I am made willing to die to the old so that I may be born to the new.  I know that when I act in accordance with Your will, my actions are filled with the grace that You provide me.  Thank You, God, for giving me this work to do in order that I may be a greater blessing to the world. And so it is, Amen.     

Paradise

In the end we will all kneel at God's feet,

or maybe at the feet of Mother Nature or some

unheeding and hooded fate,

and we will wish for silence so that

we might better hear our future.

We will stare into the blackness of uncertainty,

stripped of our carapace of lies

and faithless before the presence

of limitless faith.

Then we'll remember the days

when we curled up in our boxes

and beds

and succumbed to the stories

of a lurid paradise.

We'll look back at the days spent

chasing the perfect life

and wonder if things would be better

if we saved memories of small things

and collections of the real

in the corners and closets

of our mind

to be released later, fireflies,

into the darkening skies

of our existence.

There Was A Time

There was a time
so long ago
when you were not
a memory
an idea
a voice in my dreams
or a faceless identity
behind a computer
screen

There was a time
when I wrote for you
and sang your name
in the darkness
of my life
believing it would
save me
from forgetting

There was a time
when you
and I
were people

Identity

I liked my middle name better than my first.
When people said my first name, it was as if
all the darkness in the world was shot out
at me through those three syllables.
I hated the roundness of it
marred only by the buzzing "z" sound
interrupting my thoughts, trapping my attention
whenever it was spoken.
Compared to that, my middle name was a blessing.
Over the years,
I heard a variety of accents roll over
its vowels, each reincarnation sculpting
the weight of it in my mind.
I changed again and again, but 
my name never stretched beyond its letters.
So the one thing that I trusted
beyond any sound or shape that might otherwise
have defined me
was the presence of me, nameless,
alone at odd moments in the spotty sunlight
of my days,
in the places where everyone all at once
knew
who I was.

Strength is Everything

They tell you strength is everything 
you need 
to pull yourself to the top 
by half-inches. 
Maybe it is. 
Maybe strength is everything 
in their uniformed 
march-together madness 
of a heartbeat. 

Strength cements your hands 
to the grey-scarred rock 
slowly, slowly, never slow 
enough. 
And like puzzle pieces 
spilled out of a box 
the spirits that once 
shouted freedom 
fall together under 
a common banner, 
a common goal 
of blindness. 

It takes strength 
to climb the wall built 
by tradition, 
but it takes courage 
to let go 
and push off on your own, 
even though the sun 
is choked with clouds 
and the rock grows 
shadowy with disapproval. 
Strength keeps your hands 
steady. 
Courage guides the wings 
you didn't know you had 
as you maneuver yourself 
in search of your own 
ending 
and laugh at the old 
photographs of you 
on their fossilized 
flypaper, 
their wall. 

Spruced Up

The box says that it will give her
all the things that God forgot to.
She believes in its magic
and watches in delight
as she brushes beauty across her face,
guiding a dark ballerina tracing
patterns in the dusty floor
with slippered feet.

Later she will curse halfheartedly
at the mirror and wonder
why beauty is so hard
to get rid of.

Some of my better photography...

I just started about a month ago but I'm addicted :)

Going, Going

Our memories are tangled, tightly woven clots of
life's miscellaneous castouts.
In our waking lives, we find no use for them, so
only when the whipstitched order of daylight
begins to fade do they dare creep along
over our blankets and pillows and tie themselves
securely into our sleeping brains
taking on the cloak and emblems of dreams,
resting the laurel crown on their balding heads
(perhaps to cover some weakness brought on
by time)
and dragging us, as quickly as they can,
away from the mind-numbing darkness of
a hungover Sunday morning and back into
the closet days, when all was bright.
They persist until the first buzzing of the alarm,
dispelling any halfhearted enchantment
they may have cast, our former selves'
last offer at a chance for
salvation.

-April 3, 2009

If you like it, vote! And then maybe check out some of my other work. :)

Heading on in...

This is my first blog post, so I think I'll wait for a tidbit before I start announcing it to the rest of the world :) See if I like it first, I guess.

I'm a poet and photographer, in the final stretches of 10th grade. Life is annoying, busy, and retarded. Life is also good.

These next two years are, I'm told, going to be some of the busiest I've ever had. I can't wait!