“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.
...
Monday, August 12, 2013Posted by Alicia147 at 7:48 PM 0 comments
I know I’m getting over something when I can finally write a poem about it.
Saturday, August 10, 2013
My last loss
After Rainer Maria Rilke
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/you-who-never-arrived/
Posted by Alicia147 at 2:49 PM 0 comments
Destiny
Monday, June 3, 2013-->
Posted by Alicia147 at 6:49 PM 0 comments
Irreversible
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
Posted by Alicia147 at 11:01 PM 0 comments
Questions
Monday, February 4, 2013
Why do dry spells always come during wet years?
Why does happiness make one suddenly hyper-aware of their mortality?
Is contentment truly attainable?
Posted by Alicia147 at 12:41 PM 0 comments
So about my last post...
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
I'm still quite happy.
That's all.
Posted by Alicia147 at 8:39 PM 0 comments
Good things come in waves.
Saturday, October 20, 2012
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
Posted by Alicia147 at 2:46 PM 1 comments
Flight
Saturday, September 22, 2012
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)
Posted by Alicia147 at 9:23 PM 0 comments
Inconvenient Moments
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
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)
Posted by Alicia147 at 12:52 AM 0 comments
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)
Posted by Alicia147 at 12:42 AM 0 comments
Love suits you well
Sunday, April 29, 2012
Posted by Alicia147 at 1:20 AM 0 comments
Playing With Fire
Monday, April 23, 2012
-->
Posted by Alicia147 at 12:38 AM 0 comments
Ecclesia
Saturday, April 21, 2012
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)
Posted by Alicia147 at 12:49 AM 0 comments
Morning Prayer
Monday, April 16, 2012
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)
Posted by Alicia147 at 11:06 PM 0 comments
. . .
Monday, February 6, 2012This 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)
Posted by Alicia147 at 1:53 AM 1 comments
What makes a life?
Saturday, January 14, 2012This 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. :]
Posted by Alicia147 at 2:05 PM 0 comments
A waltz:
Sunday, December 4, 2011Good 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)
Posted by Alicia147 at 10:55 PM 0 comments
Tense, past
Saturday, December 3, 2011You 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)
Posted by Alicia147 at 2:05 AM 2 comments
Tea Fire Anniversary
Sunday, November 13, 2011Three years ago today...
...was the beginning of the breakdown.
Posted by Alicia147 at 10:38 PM 1 comments
These days, I feel less like a singer and more like a poet.
Tuesday, November 8, 2011Gathering 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)
Posted by Alicia147 at 11:35 PM 2 comments
Hope
Sunday, November 6, 2011I'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.
Posted by Alicia147 at 4:50 PM 1 comments
"No one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good." -Plato
Tuesday, October 18, 2011Sit with it for a while.
Posted by Alicia147 at 10:31 PM 0 comments
You are so young; you stand before beginnings.
Saturday, September 24, 2011"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...
Posted by Alicia147 at 5:56 PM 0 comments
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...
Posted by Alicia147 at 9:51 PM 0 comments
The Art of the Song Recital
Monday, August 8, 2011The 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)
Posted by Alicia147 at 12:00 AM 0 comments
Santa Barbara, here I come.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011There'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)
Posted by Alicia147 at 1:22 PM 0 comments
Lace
Tuesday, June 28, 2011Lace, 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)
Posted by Alicia147 at 11:19 PM 1 comments
.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011May 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.
Posted by Alicia147 at 10:44 PM 1 comments
Crossword
Thursday, May 19, 2011Posted by Alicia147 at 8:36 PM 2 comments
And yet again...
Friday, April 29, 2011Posted by Alicia147 at 4:50 PM 1 comments
Dies Irae
Monday, April 18, 2011Posted by Alicia147 at 4:01 PM 0 comments
Vocalise
Saturday, March 26, 2011Posted by Alicia147 at 4:55 PM 0 comments
One of the weirdest Postsecrets I've seen...
Thursday, March 17, 2011Posted by Alicia147 at 1:08 PM 3 comments
Absence
Thursday, March 10, 2011Posted by Alicia147 at 3:50 PM 0 comments
Purple
Thursday, February 24, 2011
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)
Posted by Alicia147 at 11:14 PM 0 comments
Be still and wait without hope.
Tuesday, December 28, 2010Which 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."
Posted by Alicia147 at 12:10 AM 2 comments
Unsexed [Why is it that whenever I have a ton of stuff to do, I suddenly have a poem to write?]
Friday, October 8, 2010Posted by Alicia147 at 4:46 AM 1 comments
A few hours alone in Galway...becomes a poem.
Saturday, October 2, 2010On 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.Posted by Alicia147 at 1:06 PM 0 comments
The result of philosophical conversations in the drizzling rain at 1:00 AM. [Edited]
Wednesday, September 22, 2010[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.]
Posted by Alicia147 at 6:25 PM 0 comments
Yes, I am blogging about Project Runway.
Friday, August 6, 2010A 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.
Posted by Alicia147 at 11:55 PM 0 comments
New Blog!
Thursday, July 22, 2010I have a new blog for England Semester!
Posted by Alicia147 at 12:48 PM 0 comments
Of course not.
Friday, July 16, 2010Almanac
Posted by Alicia147 at 1:17 AM 0 comments
Noteworthy quote from my dad:
Monday, July 5, 2010Posted by Alicia147 at 11:38 PM 3 comments
When the time comes to leave, just walk away quietly and don’t make any fuss.
Monday, June 28, 2010Posted by Alicia147 at 2:08 PM 0 comments
Walt Whitman knew what was up.
Thursday, June 17, 2010Posted by Alicia147 at 11:42 PM 0 comments
Mozart
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
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)
Posted by Alicia147 at 11:28 PM 1 comments
Jealousy
Thursday, May 27, 2010Her fingers danced across his shoulder,
Posted by Alicia147 at 12:18 AM 0 comments
Nocturne in D Flat Major
Saturday, May 8, 2010
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)
Posted by Alicia147 at 11:39 PM 1 comments