Category: literary

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Fær

 

 
The hordes arrive, in families of twos and threes, all nationalities,

as I sip tepid tap water coffee, thirsty for succor in this jailhouse sweet shop.

Regulars, strangers, all alike, from the gym, retail store and pet trainer next door, 

all drop by at an appointed day of the week coinciding with their weekly habits and chores. 

And they ask the same questions, and look around with the same concentrated effort of choice.

The anesthetics of the daily hum through a storefront window surpass surreality–mere abstraction.

 
“They have too many choices,” one Yelp reviewer complained. 

A desperate failure for sure, this absence of the given, circumscribed, delimited and allotted. 

Failure abounds, thrives in the cracks and on roof tops, announced, derided, ridiculed and feared.

Professional success is a teflon mask of muscular smile, amused at fun house mirrors while

a stranger looks inside herself and winces at the truth: faking bemused stares.

Not a single one, no one is good enough, not since Caesarian born fær thundered alive.

 
A curious beacon, this failure, negative space, vertical inversion, binary split, 

a vacancy, trip, stumble, snafu and inferno too–blazing bailiwick’s forest funeral.

Fiery mourning howl weeps losses unfathomable but not forlorn forever.

No one stumbles on a pavement crack unscathed, eternal-glimpsed of false stability:

reinstating an upright illusion, death defying gravity-riven, absolved, re-calibrated,

restored but bludgeoned awake by the faltering blow, newly armed in science or religion.    

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Back to School

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I cannot recall the last time I sharpened pencils, yet I smell them.

Crayons disappeared from the house five years ago when the kids stopped using them, schools dumping color-in-the-lines after fifth grade. But I can almost feel their waxy paraffin between my thumb and forefinger, leaving that oily residue that stays way long.

Like a return to the new, the school year starts in the season of dying.

The dissonance, I sense it like spasmodic leg quaking that tremulates chairs while calming nerves.

“It’s show time!” I mimic the movie star’s manic Joker’s smile as I fly out the door. No chorus line.

Yet not the performance but the insistence that erodes: “Wake up!!” I want to jolt them in stentorian holler as my head spins and spits pea soup—in a virtual world they recognize.

In real time, I merely cajole, advise, admonish and filibuster, all for their awakening to themselves, their process and their world, adrift in someone else’s expectation.

 

credit: http://i.ytimg.com/vi/0OwImLxeoFI/maxresdefault.jpg

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Wrestling with brooding thoughts and ahimsa

 

 
So what, do the Ashley Madison hackers or “malicious crackers,” if you will, believe in some moral equivalency? Is it justified to harm unfaithful spouses because the victims of their hack are deemed by their culture to be morally bereft? Pretty easy to hide behind a screen and commit malice, not caring about the innocents in the bombing fallout, like children and unsuspecting spouses. Seems to me sociopathic, flexing God complexes by rejected social misfits, more likely. Hard to come up with a sympathetic narrative or righteous cause.

No, they cannot be blamed for subscribers’ suicides as something more goes on in the lives of suicides than fallout from exposure by affairs. Psychological destruction is already part of those poor souls’ lives. But the old but-for test could prove damning. But for the exposure by the hackers, the suicides may have not been pushed over the edge of the precipice, maybe found a way to seek help before grasping on to the no-hope ledge and sliding down.

A travesty seen up close, as well for the hackers who now can live as the hunted. That treacherous misstep or march outside the law is one in a long road into forever curtailing freedom so taken for granted like air. Even if they get away with it. Their freedom has been delivered up to forces greater than their prank, crime and self-serving “morality.” They are no Edward Snowdens. 

They remind me of the elementary school kids I grew up with who threw M80’s out of the school bus window on to the lawns of random properties along the bus path. The vandalists just wanted to stir things up, satisfy an urge in themselves to destroy something. 

Isolation and independence are an illusion, the distortion of the un-self-realized minds, like rowdy, selfish school children. The deluded hackers are learning about the laws of cause and effect in their god-i-hope-so-for-their-mothers’-sakes invisible hideouts. I am hard pressed to wish them well.

 

credit: regmedia.co.uk

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The Joy Girl

  

A petulant smile, upper lip quiver, 

never-ending streams of jubilant free

pours the honeyed golden, emerald eyes

smoked in calm to hide the sparkle speaks,

“I want…take me…so much to give…but I fear,”

all in fragility, fresh and tainted only at the fringes,

circling the crystal center yet to form whole, complete,

she deftly ball-toes the river logs spinning a strange land.

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Pratyahara

  
Cogs turn, whistles blow

feet shuffle, flee apace as

riders jump, arms akimbo;

leaves tremble, windswept 

ciliated born sussuration 

summersaulting walkways

of pavements steam, misty 

chlorophyl wafts green

lungful chunky clumps; 

engines hiss, track clacks

spine smacking clamor,

light beams rip clouds,

shredding skyward eyes,

tossing the bustle by

yard by yard, square on,

as chorus-ful chaos blooms

in the stillness of notice,

as I thread a hurricane’s eye.

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Jazz in a Silent Movie

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Feet moving inside my heart, knees a jostle,

Jazzin’ up my earbuds in java land amidst

Caffeinated denizens sporting mute stares,

A secret brain wrinkle, wet and colonized,

Winking the orbital pulse, steady sockets,

Jitters at the base of the spine, so nearly

A sign, trembling imperceptibly, in a race

Frantic fingers tap, tap, tap, heads nodding

As screen-lit faces wait, lapsed and relapsed;

Barristas squat, twist, shake, pour and squirt

A macchiato merengue whipping up smiles

While Chet Baker croons “C’est Si Bon”

To a rolling silent movie, my morning perch.

 

 

credit: http://i.ytimg.com/vi/jvXywhJpOKs/hqdefault.jpg

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Medicinal Embrace

  
“I hate when someone cuts me off, and then flips me off as if my very existence provoked the act.”

She nods, not lifting her eyes from the words on the screen, and mumbles a “hmmm…”

“But the worst part is that I get so angry about it, cursing out loud, speeding up, trying to make eye contact to give the person the stink eye and stab them with my utter disgust. Why would I even care? Why would I make myself so worked up?”

Still bathed in the glow of the screen and not looking up, she responds distractedly, “I don’t know.”

“And I immediately check myself and wonder how I could lose my cool like that, let someone just take me out of myself into the hate zone. My thoughts get ripped from wherever they were to this horrid place some stupid stranger took me to–with my permission. It frustrates me that I cannot resist…cannot NOT react.”

She looks up from the computer, and turns all the way around in her chair, 180 degrees, and faces her now–she with her back turned who rummages through the refrigerator as her complaints dissolve into questions that perplex the vegetables she picks up one by one–broccoli rabes, Japanese eggplant, and summer squash–examines and then shuffles to the far side of the shelf.

“Then my reaction to having reacted like an ass, an overly angry ass, is even worse, just berating myself for being out of control and habitually reactive. I mean I just want to let these things pass without getting my adrenaline pumping—just once. But the whole thing is just one big ugly pattern that I can’t change….ingrained, like….a disease…Have you seen the…? I think I put it…

Oh! I didn’t hear you sneak up behind me. Aw baby, that’s so nice…you’re so toasty warm. Just what the doctor ordered mmmm…”
 

credit: http://www.annashukeylo.com/

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Autophony

  
Clicking, no ringing, not quite a ring but a hum.

My breath, I hear my breath…and my heartbeat, 

flooding my ears with pulsing thrum, alarming yet calming.

Am I dying, an aneurism around the corner, pressure cooked?

Cyber facts point to clogged ears given my health history.

Simple fix, but something stops me from stopping the sound.

A comfort in hearing life, my life, in its rawest base components:

a heart beat and breath reminds me that I walk as mechanical wonder,

a miracle of meat and synchronized pumps and electric pulleys, 

anima’s dusty coat of confectioner’s powder smothering the shine.  

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The Little Death

  
Yet Freud’s or the French’s little death (orgasm) requires total submission and trust–to let go of holding on without fear of being judged or betrayed by another, a body or self. 

Different pathway to the same result, which is total obliteration, mind-erasure, loss of control over the world–fear and pleasure. 

Both test humanity.

When terror burns its path through a being, however, surfing its electricity at sonic light, what remains is not so much silence as a spentness, a vapid stripping of nerves that leaves a permanent mark, maybe a tic, a recurring memory, or a dullness close to death.

Dopamine refuses fear the same experience as orgasm, though dopamine injects its life-loving pleasure-ful substance in both, pre-death.

Both are ineluctable surrender, an abandonment of reason and belief, a blackness in the mind’s hole.

But I’d take a cheap orgasm over a good scare any day.

 

credit: http://www.notable-quotes.com

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