A waltz:

Good morning, lovely.
I see you've assumed a new
Hostility,

Clenched
Your fists against the bent world
And thrust yourself
From the depths of dark,
Bearing florescent beams
And bleached white,

All the more prolific.

Your silence speaks volumes.
I find myself leaning
On styrofoam waves.
The wires all crossed,
Scapegoats named,
And we remain

Estranged.

Your smile
Flattened
To a tense line.

Straight edge.
Straight mind.
I wind.


--Alicia (2011)

Tense, past

You taper the edges
Of your honest words
As I
Stare at the blank wall behind.

But there was something
In the syntax there:
"I was. I thought."


--Alicia (2011)

Tea Fire Anniversary

Three years ago today...

...was the beginning of the breakdown.

These days, I feel less like a singer and more like a poet.

Gathering Sea Glass

When I was seven and spent afternoons
At the Olson's house,
I always admired the giant vase
That sat on their living room table,
Filled with tiny spindled seashells.

I marveled at the thousands
Of pearl and bronze fronds,
Each of them wrapped
As miniscule and stretched chambered nautili,
Which seemed to infinitely spin.

It must have taken a lifetime
To collect so many.

One day, I finally asked
Where they all came from.

They're my mom's.
She found them on the beach herself
When she was twenty-four,
Before she met my dad.

I found it hard to imagine her
Pacing the shore,
Sagacious in her search
For each delicate spiral,

Her patience, holding them up for inspection,
Tossing the chipped ones aside
In a time before children,
Covenantal vows, companionship.

I found it hard to imagine her alone.

Now, at two years and twenty, I understand.
I pace daily,
Sand-powdered shores,
Gathering sea glass
For my own solitary collection.

I note their arrayed hues,
Their crystal, azure, bronze, and jade.
I hold them up to the light
And look through them.
I toss the imperfect ones aside.

I store the pieces in a large jar,
Their shattered green and white mosaic
Seems almost like me:
Many fragments of something
Not yet complete.

Something indefinite,
And all the more beautiful for it.

--Alicia (2011)

Hope

I'm starting to believe that literature is the only hope we have for truly understanding each other.

And this kind of hope is something worth chasing after.

"No one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good." -Plato

Sit with it for a while.

You are so young; you stand before beginnings.

"You are so young; you stand before beginnings. I would like to beg of you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day. Perhaps you are indeed carrying within yourself the potential to visualize, to design, and to create for yourself an utterly satisfying, joyful, and pure lifestyle. Discipline yourself to attain it, but accept that which comes to you with deep trust, and as long as it comes from your own will, from your own inner need, accept it, and do not hate anything. [. . .] Nearly everything that matters is a challenge, and everything matters."

--Letters To A Young Poet (Rainer Maria Rilke)

...Best advice I've heard in a long time...

We are unutterably alone, essentially,
especially in the things most intimate
and most important to us.

--Rainer Maria Rilke [Letters To A Young Poet]

Great book, by the way...

The Art of the Song Recital

The Art of the Song Recital

It's dying, you say.
Endangered as a rare bird,
Her song, a velvet ribbon
Wound, weeping to its end.

I sit and listen, silent.
Who I am. Who am I?

In truth, you can't handle me,
Delicate, strange.

I am dusk
Mixed with morning air
And ash, rising
From rooftops in rain.

My star risen half way
And dropped this far.
I free-fall in crimson,
Burn out white.

I am buried deep.

Lost music, I drift at ocean floor,
Songstress, streaming red melody
Into rippled chambers
Of undulating light.

Speak to me softly,
Whisper as rain in a wood.
Touch me as snow
Blankets its pearlescent new
Over dull ground.

Tell no one.
I will listen only,
Sing nothing.

--Alicia (2011)

Santa Barbara, here I come.

There's nothing like a long drive to clear your mind. And a change of scenery to make you appreciate what you have.

Also...another poem:


Last Wednesday

I almost believed in God
The way the sun bloomed
Over the sea's cerulean.

Waves white-capped,
A thousand miles beyond my visage,
Pure.

Amazing Grace echoed in my ears
And my eyes
Lit with the sun.

How sweet the sound.

T'was grace that taught my heart to fear
And grace my fears relieved.
How precious did that grace appear

The hour I almost believed.

--Alicia (2011)

Lace

Lace, black on white,
My delicate opaque
Made of a million woven
Facets and wiles.

Today you unravel me.

Soon you'll find
The measures of my
Vast patience
Are not boundless.

Palms outstretched, I hang on thin.


--Alicia (2011)

.

May becomes a memory as mist
Diffuses in afternoon sun,

As smoke
Rises in light rain.

Who knows how or where
It's gone.

--Alicia (2011)


I catch myself counting losses these days. I'm not sure how to do life right now: what's supposed to happen next, where I should go, who I should be.

Crossword

That night I was alone

And so were you.

We started a crossword puzzle,

Close against the cold in a little room.

We abandoned it, frustrated

At its enigmatic clues.

We moved on to other riddles:

My doubt. Your delusions.

You walked me home

In the frigid wind,

Hugged me goodbye.

We left it unfinished,

Never found

Four across,

Twenty-seven down.

--Alicia (2011)

And yet again...

"When the time comes to leave, just walk away quietly and don't make any fuss." -Banksy

--

Sentimental individual that I am, I have developed a series of personal traditions over the course of my 22 years, one of which is my practice of writing letters to myself. In high school I wrote one each year, then opened them around graduation. I did the same thing in college and just recently opened them. It's fascinating, seeing how I've grown over the past four years into the person that I am now.

I'm surprised at how much (and why) I've changed. Personal struggles that once seemed insurmountable - my insecurity, shyness, and fear of offending people - are not issues that I deal with on a large scale anymore. Interestingly though, in each of these things I've had to be taken to my breaking point (by a number of circumstances) in order to get any better. Reading my letters, I was struck by how grateful I am for the bad experiences that have shaped me into a more self-assured, open person. I am able to get outside of my own head and concentrate on what's going on with other people now.

On the other side of things, new issues have come up that I never imagined myself dealing with. I take comfort though, in the fact that change is always possible. For this reason, I'm grateful for the changes that graduation will bring and I look forward to the time that lies ahead. Though it is terrifying, I am choosing to appreciate the uncertainty.

--

Annnd what would this post be without a poem? . . .

May Grad, 2011

Tomorrow's alarm will need to be shrill

To wake me to this sunny diaspora,

Ready, willing.

Annie Dillard's The Maytrees

Sits unread on my desk, in the exact place

I left it after you handed it

Two months ago, saying "Take this, eat."

Your words, the wisdom,

A life full of wonderings.

When Spring ends and we move out,

I'll have to give it back.

--Alicia (2011)

Dies Irae

Dies Irae echoes in my headphones,

Drowning out the sound

Of your philosophical discourse

Three tables down.

You argue determinism

To a wry-smiled friend

And I have chill-bumps

On a hot summer day,

I close my eyes and sway

To the slow drone

Of dies irae, dies illa,

Solvet saeclum in favilla . . .

Chant sequence, ancient as

These unanswered questions.

Salva, salva, salva me.

--Alicia (2011)

Vocalise

Rachmaninoff could not know

The weight of what he'd done

When he wove

C sharp minor, dissonant.

Three chords repeated soft,

Before a vast

Chromatic descent.

Cluster chords assail as dark.

He bloomed a voice above it.

Oh, how a melody without words

Can speak.

Oh, how this ache grows as a vine,

Twisted tendril of sound

Out of my mouth.

Out from seat of stomach,

Chest heavy, and heart lead,

Through throat wrought and jaw dropped.

Head resting back, I am lost

In the ecstatic ache.

All things sad and lovely,

All unknown, leave my body on air

Until I am hollow again:

An absence I often have not found.

Catharsis is a million filaments of sound.

It's over,

As quickly as it began.

--Alicia (2011)

One of the weirdest Postsecrets I've seen...

"Whenever I finish a good book, I eat the last page."

Huh.

Absence

We coast through hills, rolling green

and blanketed in gossamer web

of liquid sunlight's diamond drips.

They glimmer on grass and windows.

The day sings while my heart

keeps its silence. The sky sits,

changing easel of orange

and gold on blue.

Traces of pink tufts

and a single bird

slice the horizon:

dark outlines over

illumined backdrop,

changing infinite.

To my right, the sun pants low,

recedes to day's end

as earth rotates away.

The car turns left with the road.

I am turned, am carried

off into dusk's gray.

One glance back

at the dying sun.

Unblinking, I soak in last light.

When I face forward, it's gone.

We drive east into night.

Still, I keep with me dark

spots in my eyes

from staring too long at the light.

When I blink,

they spark red and white.

My eyes open,

they blot spots out of view.

I carry the sun with me

as patches of dark in my eyes.

--Alicia (2011)

Purple

Purple-stained fingernails

Set off peaches and cream complexion.

I wait for you, buoyant,

Pace the room, placing each

Teacup, pen, and barrette

In perfect disarray:

An illusion of apathy,

Carefully controlled.

My green eyes lined black,

Changed to match your dark,

And this is all but natural.

I pace and pretend that I

Don’t need your touch,

The pinks and blush;

That you don’t make me weak,

Don’t toss me between black and pink:

Between I miss you. You can’t have me.

I want you. I don’t.

Someday I’ll try to forget

How you never came.

--Alicia (2011)