...

“Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.”
--William S. Burroughs


I'm finished settling. I'm finished living a half-inspired life. I'm finished selling myself short.

I refuse to remain enslaved to an idealized vision of the past and a shattered vision of what I thought that my future could be. I find reality more refreshing these days, and I'm learning that I have the power to create a reality more pleasant than my dreams.

Funny, that it took the abandonment of all of my dreams to come to this realization.

I have so much potential and so much to give. I know that I deserve more out of life and relationships. I'm ready to truly live before I die.

I think we could all use a bit more trust in our own inner strength and our intrinsic value. It's time that we stopped accepting half-truths, stopped settling for anything less than our best, stopped trying to be happy with the half-hearted efforts of others who cannot love us in the ways that we truly deserve.

You are beautiful and powerful in your own way. Believe it and live it.

I know I’m getting over something when I can finally write a poem about it.

My last loss

After Rainer Maria Rilke
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/you-who-never-arrived/

Love, you taught me how to leave,

palms outstretched,

my hope, a garnet gemstone

floating weightless away.

Each step,

an annunciation.

You taught me how to bend,

but never break.

Chalk it up to missed connections

in infinite iterations of space.

Our melodies wove in sync,

and then out.

Your impermanence stitched through me,

I spin through cycles of

possibility.

I recall

Your eyes’ vast silence

and I wonder if you were nothing

and no one at all.

I recall

how you buried

your face in my neck,

and held my edges lightly.

I recall

the vast demise,

and how you almost tried.

Your resignation, a black expanse

running rivers through my chest,

my invisible strings

clenched tight

around your neck.

My white knuckle grip.

And I try to forget

how you bloomed a field of flowers

in my stomach, and then

tore them up by their roots.

My colors spilled,

bold and brazen. They run,

always in excess.

Yours withheld.

For all the love in letting go,

I’ll learn to forget the way

you almost understood,

and will never know.

--Alicia (2013)

Destiny

-->

The inspiration for this poem can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJWU3YH4Vaw


Destiny

I dreamt you were meant

for Marble Halls,

crystal chandeliers’

candlelit glow.

Effervescence, incarnate,

silver voice ringing

through ceiling vaults, you were.

Or perhaps you were meant

for plaster and oak,

for terra cotta stone.

You dull descend into monotone,

waiting for peach blossoms,

a sinking feeling that

this was never

meant to be your life.

Stave off hunger, worry, rust.

Perhaps you were meant for dust.

--Alicia (2013)

Irreversible

 

She slept in the hollow of his side,

The bend of their bodies matched:

Two twin concave crescents,

Breathing in sync.

In the air, the essence

Of something irreparable:

A shattered crystal vase.

The sudden realization

That you can’t deal back change.

Moments before, she sang to him,

Come in to me and I will open as a rose,

Palms outstretched in sacramental ceremony,

Submerge you in undulating chambers

Of crimson memory.

I’ll let my cold premonitions

Recede into temporal bliss,

Where “forever” is a hollow promise

Spelled in sand and played on

By changing winds.

Come in to me and you will know

My charcoal nights.

Hold me.

Stay a while.

In moments, soft,

Always your ghosts trailing ten feet behind.

--Alicia

Questions

Why do dry spells always come during wet years?


Why does happiness make one suddenly hyper-aware of their mortality?


Is contentment truly attainable?

So about my last post...

I'm still quite happy.


That's all.

Good things come in waves.

Do you ever feel like all of the positive energy in the universe has suddenly directed itself at you in a most inexplicable way?

After experiencing so much pain and loneliness for really as long as I can remember, it's quite a refreshing change. I feel like I've finally allowed myself to be open to good things. It's freeing. But at the same time, there's still part of me that finds it hard to trust that happiness can stay; part of me that still caries my darkness in light moments. Perhaps that's what makes life interesting.

Time will tell, as always.


"There is so much dark light is space
and so many dimensions suddenly yellow
because the wind does not fall
and the leaves do not breathe."
--Pablo Neruda

Flight

Butterflies in patterned fray,
blunt cut grass,
and strong hands
sectioning the world as citrus,
on a rotating axis
the size of a needle's eye.

A flurry of birds lifting off
in frantic spirals over ocean,
they crash in their frenzied spray.

They slice the sun;
an omniscient jewel over azure.
Oh take, oh break, oh take me away.

What is the difference
between fight and flight?
Love and hate?

How long does it take
for a bruise to fade?

Will she be made new
once she has bled for seven days?
After forty days and forty nights,
drowning in a solipsistic sea?

Will land only find her
once she accedes to her saline fate?


--Alicia (2012)

Inconvenient Moments

A bright day.

You in your white dress,
like a bound foot:
a vision
of submission;

so small,
if you turned sideways,
you would almost
disappear.

The sound
of grating steel
against glass.
Gasps.

My ruined white
Ford.

My lesser self
in the parking lot,
trying to parce together
the pieces of my rage
with cellophane
and duct tape.

All the while,
the pearls
around my wrist,
they're wrapped in metal chain.


--Alicia (2012)

Poetic Irony

You prayed for rain,
Your eyes closed and head back,
Standing prone,
Arms out and hands wide;

A brazen invocation
At the static sun.

Now you cower
In ionized air,
Streaked with the
Weight of your wished fate.


--Alicia (2012)

Love suits you well

Love suits you well,

Like a tall

Cylindrical vase of water

Filled to the brim,

Tipped and pouring out,

Like laugh lines

Leathered into

Sun baked skin.

Unmatched, I stand by,

Let my loneliness expand

Into the black hollow of my chest

And blossom in dark,

Perpetually happy

For everyone else.

--Alicia (2012)

Playing With Fire

-->

Poetry is emotion

Recollected in tranquility.

            --Wordsworth

Upon our exit,

You handed me a souvenir matchbook

With an image of the Virgin Mary

Printed on the back:

            The icon, an emblem

            Of my suffering.

When I asked, you said

You did not recognize her face.

That night, you swam in my visage

Among low lampshades

And velvet sofas.

The dimly lit bar was a submerged ship.

We sat three feet apart

And talked about ions diffusing,

There was no spark.

I took the blessed face in my palm,

Her visage burnished in blue.

I saw her lips slightly part

And heard her whisper:

You can’t fight fire with fire.

So I snuffed it in Ethel Alcohol

And forgot about her,

All the way back to your place.

Fair Phyllis I saw sitting all alone

Feeding her flock unto the mountainside,

The shepherds knew not,

They knew not whither she was gone,

But after her lover Amyntas hied,

Up and down he wandered

Whilst she was missing;

When he found her,

O then they fell a kissing,

O then they fell a kissing, a kissing, O then

They fell a kissing, O-

The way you ravaged me

Under an ivy-choked Magnolia tree

I recall lost vowels,

Your tongue, your teeth,

Your lips soft and sucking.

A rhythm, punctuated, a Mary,

Falling from grace in the mind of a saint.

It wasn’t so hard to be found.

But in the end, it’s always in the coming down.

I’ve heard it said that poetry

Is emotion, recollected in tranquility.

Here I lay, untranquil

And I don’t feel a thing.

--Alicia (2012)

Ecclesia

  
I am from the slow unravel
of slip knots,
and streams of water
springing from rocks.

A helium balloon unquiet,
I gage the alignment of the spheres
as I rise, rise.

Held down by ginseng and jasmine,
I approach the limit line
until zero becomes
an untouchable axis;
memory, a hollow light.

I am from emerald streaked white
horror, my once linen ascete
sunk down deep
in garnet wine.

And I will never measure up
to your golden ruler,
idyllic image of a Mary, Madonna
pearl of blessed virtue,
to have and to hold - at arm's distance,
because you want my light
without my dark.

I'll unfold my pain
in silver triangles;
throbbing, metallic.

As a rock absorbs water,
a cut, six skin layers deep,
takes ten seconds to bleed.

I'll bite my tongue and note
the bitter copper taste.


--Alicia (2012)

Morning Prayer

It's a small wonder
I never cease to exist

The way Monday morning
Blends into Tuesday's obituaries,

The way we drift among this gray haze,
Our pallid illusions.

I sit silent, listening to the sound
Of no voice on the other line.

Just ringing.


--Alicia (2012)

. . .

This night will stay
Clothed in your miasma

I'll go down deep
In dim red lights,
Finger the edges
Of a ticking time-bomb,
And carry my lust
In fistfuls of air.

What would I know
Of love? Of loss?

I only wanted your orange in azure,
Above a swelling tide.
The sand instead waits
Yearning, dry.

An honest disaster,
I'll collect my frayed edges,
As water, spilled.
I'll apologize, disappear.

--Alicia (2012)

What makes a life?

This stunning poem, about the mystery of life and spontaneous generation, was written by the Irish poet Sinead Morrissey when she was pregnant with her first child. We were lucky enough to hear a private poetry reading by her in Belfast on England Semester last year, and I was struck by her humility and genuine sense of wonder. How can I possibly write anything worth reading when I've just re-visited one of the most awe-inspiring pieces of literature that I know of? Instead, I chose to copy the poem out of my copy of her book. Enjoy.

Matter

from Through the Square Window by Sinead Morrissey

Aristotle observed and recorded it all-

that out of rainwater, the marrow

of the human spine, foam from the sea,

or the putrefying carcasses of bulls and horses

spring living beings: frogs, serpents, anchovies,

bees and scarabs, locusts, weevils, maggots.

St Augustine agreed: what matter that the smallest

(and most meddlesome) of God’s creatures

find no mention in the chronicle of the Ark?

So long as alluvial mud remained, or rotted

wood, of rinsed white bones of crocodiles

after the wash abated and the salvaged couple

and their braying entourage were pitched

on top of Ararat, wasps and gnats and fleas

would manifest once more in clouds and colonies

without a union of the sexes (like Mary)

and the earth would effortlessly teem.

Recipes for rats and ‘small white puppies

a child might play with’ followed

during the Middle Ages, which typically included

hay, excrement, dirty shirts, wool

simmered for an hour then hung to dry

in an outhouse or chicken coop

(the air of such places being itself

so mutable and laden with infusoria,

it acts as a bridge to live). Golems

moulded from clay still needed a spell

to keep them animated, as though by

growing bigger and more complicated,

the offspring of the elements

were in danger of winding down,

yet Paracelsus, arch-advocate of decay,

saw no reason not to apply

the laws of spontaneous generation

to ourselves: let the semen of a man

putrefy itself for forty days in a sealed

cucurbite, it shall begin, at last, to live.

Fed on an arcanum of human blood

and kept in darkness, his fleet homunculus

had all the features of a human child.

Leeuwenhoek bore this experiment in mind

when, decades later, using his own microscope,

he scrutinized his sperm, magnified

as much as three hundred times and fashioned

like a bell, with the wrought perfection

of a tiny man curled inside each globule.

Ovists may have envisaged instead

a sacred cabinet of children, encased

inside each egg, opening in time

both backwards and forwards

to the breaking of Eve and the End

of the World, the likelihood remained:

whether one believed in this, or the evidence

of a light-blanched workshop and a knack

for polished glass, or whether one went back

to what the Greeks expressed

as the facts of reproduction,

a woman’s quest for contraception,

stacked against the odds of dogged visitors

finding lodging in the womb

at any beckoning, was hopeless.

No wonder Soranus suggested water from blacksmiths’.

No wonder olive oil, the pulp of a pomegranate,

honey, pine resin, mercury, beeswax,

pennyroyal, tobacco juice, arrowroot, tansy

were burnt, brewed, inhaled, ingested,

inserted into the cervix, or buried in fields left fallow

if the coppery stain of menstruation

persisted into the seventh day.

No wonder witches consulted the sky.

And though I know, thanks in part to Pasteur–

to his gauze impediments and penchant

for boiling–how your came to enter,

how you came to roll and hiccup and kick

against the windowless dark, feet to my heart

and skull to the pelvic cradle, I still think

of our lovemaking as a kind of door

to wherever you were, waiting in matter,

spooled into a form I have not yet been shown

by the umprompted action of nature,

by something corrupting in an earthenware pot

in Corinth, say, or Kingstown.

Stay the wind on a river eight weeks after equinox–

witness blue-green mayflies lift off

like a shaken blanket; add algae

and alchemical stones to the lake floor

in the strengthening teeth of winter, what swans.

--
Happy Saturday. :]

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)

Be still and wait without hope.

"I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth."

--T.S. Eliot (The Four Quartets)

I. LOVE. THIS. POET.

For the past few months, doubt has overwhelmed my perspective. I can't pinpoint a specific incident or issue. It's all interrelated and complicated, but in short, I have been living without hope.

After a long period of silence about the issues I'm dealing with (I'm choosing to be vague here), I reached a point where my need for answers began to outweigh my fear of being honest. I have finally been able to talk things through with several good friends; some who are dealing with the same things, and some who aren't. These conversations have been healing, life-giving, and honest. I'm grateful for them.

I started re-reading Ecclesiastes after friend reminded me that it was once my favorite book. This time around, I'm realizing how much uncertainty Solomon expresses in his writing. My current reading of it is likely being influenced by my state of mind. Still, the supposed wisest man seems unsure of the possibility of a resurrection, the difference between animals and humans, the existence of a soul, God's degree of involvement with the world, and the purpose of man's existence. Interestingly, uncertainty on such issues is not popularly expressed or acknowledged in the church. If I've learned one thing over my past few months abroad though, it is that silence surrounding these issues solves nothing. Openness about my doubt has given me a new kind of freedom from it.

In my doubt, I have also gained a new understanding of what faith is. Faith is not independent of doubt. In fact, you cannot have faith without doubt. Believing is a process. And "certainty" is often a crutch. Faith is not as safe as we would like to think it is.

"And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices

In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices."

--T.S. Eliot

Unsexed [Why is it that whenever I have a ton of stuff to do, I suddenly have a poem to write?]

Unsexed

Come, you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,

And fill me from the crown to the toe topful.

--Macbeth (I.v.40-42)

I read once that cloistered nuns,

When caught in the torrents of desire,

Would grind up the buds of roses

And drink their pulp, in order

To abate lustful cravings.

Their penitence sheathed

In self-denying acts,

They found salvation in an Order;

In a balance, finely crafted

Of holy love--of chaste touch.

Crushing their lust to pulp,

They drank full the very pap

Of the un-budded passions

Which they denied themselves,

Clipped before blossom's flourish.

I can see them,

Their silver chalices

Of blush liquid

Tipped back on pale lips,

Drinking a world of sin away,

As Yam, god of the sea-

The world his goblet, tipped

Back on vast lips-

Drank the sea's roaring wake.

How did it taste?

Was their liquid lust sweet?

Did it burn as they swallowed,

Dross rising like froth

Away from their golden flesh,

Burned holy in denial's fire?

I, too, drink to holiness,

Have cloistered and denied,

Skimmed sin's dross, and strong-willed

The passion of my wiles. I try

To follow suit, seven self-flagellating nuns,

Painfully, as they rise above.

--Alicia (2010)

A few hours alone in Galway...becomes a poem.

Galway, Ireland

On a promontory between two rivers

flowing out to sea, I walk alone.

One river thrashes virulent.

The other flows placid.

In their parallel journeys, one fights

as the other accedes to tide’s inevitable purge;

a resigned recognition

of the unjust workings of the world.

I am alone with the silence and the fog,

the flecks of rain on the grass at my feet,

and the overcast glow of the sky

as the sun’s faint orange ekes through white.

Pale light glosses the evening; a reminder

of another day, another era fading.

Smoke drifts from distant chimneys;

the heavy ash a smell, black as this land’s history.

It rises silent above the rooftops,

carrying secrets unuttered, toxic.

I pace to the sound of my own blood

pulsing behind my ears.

I accede to the rhythm of my heartbeat,

as the rivers accede to their end.

The smoke accedes to the sky,

as the people accede to their myth.

The land accedes to the waves,

as history crumbles in clods of broken past.

The sea is giant tear, rolling down the cheek

of a nation, stained with blood and ash.

--Alicia (2010)

The result of philosophical conversations in the drizzling rain at 1:00 AM. [Edited]

[I just wrote this poem. I'm sure it needs a lot of editing. But I'm going to go ahead and share it before my better judgement prevents me from doing so.]

You are the devil at my left shoulder,

Leaned back against the bench

As you draw from your pipe,

Smoldering languid, casual.

Soft plumes

Of smoke drift up - sweet miasma

In night's black expanse.

Above us cloud tufts pass, changing

Over the constant moon - ever distorting,

Ever re-shaping its image as it looms, distant above.

And the moon is never the same

Or exactly explained

By what we can see of it,

In a single moment under starless expanse,

Suspended with the effervescent ping

Of invisible water flecks on skin.

Always there is a thin veil

Shrouding its full,

Luminescence.

You wax calmly about Kierkegaard,

Existential philosophy,

The downfall of Marxist theory;

About how you don't believe

In objective reality,

Or any collective human identity.

Beside you in the dark I hope

For some sign of your belief in my own

Fragile reality; want you to touch me warm,

Touch me soft under the smothering

Canvas of dark, amidst the faint hiss

Of smoke diffusing through light rain.

You depress me more than anyone

I have ever known. And still,

I see the luster of your lips in moonlight,

The firm angle of your jaw,

And wonder how it would feel

To brush lightly, lips over your brow,

Across the satin of your skin,

And blossom for you, the throbbing,

White-hot reality of my presence.

I shiver next to you in the dark.

I gaze up at the sky for a shard

Of escaping light,

As the fog obscures the moon.

--Alicia (2010)

Yes, I am blogging about Project Runway.

A new season of Project Runway premiered two weeks ago. And this time, Tim Gunn has a clear favorite, who also happens to be my favorite (in my supremely limited knowledge of fashion - I really only watch this show for the antics). His name is Mondo Guerra. He's kind of eccentric, and more than a little shy. Mondo is cool. I don't think he knows how cool he is.

In last night's episode, they aired a clip of Mondo getting really emotional during one of his interviews, talking about how lonely he is. I've never seen Project Runway (or any reality show, for that matter) air such a genuine, heart-wrenching interview. It was actually kind of uncomfortable to watch.

Mondo said something along the lines of:

"I need a connection to be whole, and I haven't found that with anyone really. I am alone with my thoughts too much, and they just eat away at me. I am all alone, and I just want to be loved for who I am, but it's what I create that I need to be loved and appreciated. I am so creative with this gift and I am cursed with always having to create to get by and be noticed."

Sometimes our gifts can become curses. Sometimes they can define us in an upsetting way.

Mondo doesn't feel like he's connecting with any of the other designers. He doesn't feel like he's ever been loved for who he really is. Instead, it's always about what he can create. I feel for this guy. I have felt this way before about singing. I hope he's ok.

In other news, this week I had my last voice lesson for the next five months. I am SO excited for the break. I think it's going to be refreshing to concentrate on English.

New Blog!

I have a new blog for England Semester!

http://aarchambault.wordpress.com/

Don't worry...I'm still keeping this one. I'll continue writing in it after I'm back. But in the meantime, the new blog is a good way to share what I'm experiencing in the UK (because a lot of people don't know about this blog :).

Until next time, cheerio!

Of course not.

Almanac

by Carl Sandburg

Scrutinize the Scorpion constellation

and see where a hook of stars

ends with a lonely star.

Go to the grey sea horizon

and ask for a message

and listen and wait.

See whether the conundrums

of a heavy land fog

either sing or talk.

Let only a small cry come

in behalf of a clean sunrise:

the sun performs so often.

Speak to the branches of spring

and the surprise of blossoms:

they too hope for a good year.

Search the first winter snowstorm

for a symphonic arrangement:

it is always there.

Take an alphabet of gold or mud and spell

as you wish any words: kiss me, kill me,

love, hate, ice, thought, victory.

Read the numbers on your wrist watch

and ask: is being born, being loved,

being dead, nothing but numbers?

[See title of post.]

--

Also, I wonder...

When did I stop thinking in paragraphs

and start thinking in poems?

Is this some weird form of ADD?

Noteworthy quote from my dad:

"Love is patient, love is kind.

Love means slowly losing your mind."

haha

If you haven't met my dad, he's pretty much the best.

Update:

Another quote from my dad...

When asked about getting a facebook: "No, I wouldn't talk to anyone. I'm just your garden variety stalker."

When the time comes to leave, just walk away quietly and don’t make any fuss.

--Banksy

Life has been teaching me how to do this lately.

Walt Whitman knew what was up.

A Noiseless Patient Spider

A noiseless patient spider,

I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood, isolated,

Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,

It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,

Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you, O my Soul, where you stand,

Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,

Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,

Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,

Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my Soul.

--Walt Whitman (1900)

Mozart

It was only fitting that the child prodigy should die
before fruition,
before age stole his verve and dried his mind as a raisin
in desert sun,
before years carved bitter lines, like rivers
into porcelain skin,
before he gave the world all that he had, and was left
without a melody.

Instead he left at the height of an era, his eon,
a Requiem Unfinished;
unheard and unwasted on dying ears.

He surrendered to the earthen enemy, Time,
thirty-five years still young,
as a star crumples on itself, then expands.
It explodes in its cataclysmic
infancy and is lost, having left all of its light so hastily,
forcefully at once.

And then the dark.

--Alicia (2010)

Jealousy

Her fingers danced across his shoulder,

traced a line up the back of his neck, and

brushed through locks of umber brown.

Wry lip corners curved upward, behind

the frame of her shining blonde's arc,

as his eyes fixed and smiled on hers.

My neck muscles tightened as I

let out a silent scream,

muffled by tongue and cheek.

--Alicia (2010)

Nocturne in D Flat Major

I can’t stop listening

to 
Chopin’s Nocturne in D flat major.

Quietly forceful, lyrical, sad,

it reminds me of you.

Staring at my computer screen

in an empty coffee shop at dusk,

I can’t force myself to write

my Music History paper.

There is nothing for me to say

about Mozart’s harmonic structure.

All I have is a list of things

unsaid on that last afternoon

as I stared into your ocean blue,

right across the table and close

enough to touch. But I

was terrified and could not make

the invisible wall between us

disappear. I could not tell you that

I want you more than a melody,

more than a breath; not for me, but for

your lovely soft blue, and for all

there is to know behind it.

The air hung, static,

screaming in my silence. I opened

my mouth to speak and felt

my lungs touch, deflated and dry.

I don’t think that you knew.

And now, as I gaze at the

vacant chair across from me,

its emptiness is smothering.

As Chopin’s melody rises,

pulsing strident to its climax,

I realize that this is the last crescendo

before its final cadence, and soon

I will sit aching in the silence.

And I am not ready

for it to end.


--Alicia (2010)