...

“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

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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

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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)