Wannabe Yuppies.

They’re not high class but something about the way they wear floral skirts and white capris and square-cut diamond pendants hints at husbands with important suit and tie kind of jobs.

                They gesticulate with splayed fingers circling around the point and discuss serious issues with dead eyes and grown up valley girl voices. That’s as close as they’ll get to truly feeling, their watered down words.

                They nod passively as if something is interesting, sipping cosmopolitans. They stand, say things like “Thank you ladies,” and “Please stay in touch,” collecting phones and sunglasses and purses, spouting off their hopelessly busy schedules, hoping with everything in them that busy equals important.

                Going home to their washing machines and getting drunk on the spin cycle of youth.

Get Me There.

Desert compulsion
Sucks
As life twists
Two hundred by two hundred.
A little box of bipolar
Weather
Bloated and lovesick with moisture.
Some various battlecries
Sing out through my pores
And toughen conjectures of
Five
Ten
Twenty revolutions.
Those Aztecs worshipped
The sun
While it baked them wholeheartedly into the ground.
Damn lucky, dusty souls.

A Salmon Merlot.

This is another old poem of mine, and to be honest I'm not sure
how I feel about it. I think it's something like embarrassment
 with the occaisonal pinprick of enjoyment.
Just so you know I am going to be away for another week, I'm
headed out of town in about an hour as of the time I'm
writing this. But I am leaving for reasons pertaining to
creative writing, so don't think I'm slacking. That also means
the potential for some fun, new blog posts when I return.
I'll be seeing you. (:

You’d say humanity looks like a dead trout,
squished like lunchmeat
between layers of ice in a fish mart.
You’d say she’s long gone;
left on the Oregon Trail and never came back.
Silence yourselves
naysayers, pessimists, curmudgeons.
No,
Humanity survives in feeling.
To be human is to
think, err, feel, breathe, love, triumph
deeply.
As deeply as that wine stain on the carpet,
the one united to the very fibers,
that even the Stanley Steemer guys
with their presumptuous, boa constrictor-like hoses
can’t make surrender.
As long as the feelings are true,
As long as vulnerability lives,
somewhere in Freud's country
Humanity persists
in her fantastic omnipresence.

Her emotions bend at awkward angles.
She’s melancholy hysterical.
Sensation exploded from stewing too long
under Plath’s bell jar.
She rears her beautiful head
through that beautiful dent in the wall there.
Where your wine bottle erupted like Krakatau
when drunkenness and art proved to be false escapisms
from Despair’s chasm.

Critics say
Picasso’s blue period painted the road to insanity
yet in the words of the Hatter, “we’re all mad here.”
They snake through a table set for English tea
like blood cantering to the cheeks.
A byproduct of a subtle, elephant-in-the-room madness.
Rage like acid and fire,
positively caustic, acerbic, acrid in its chemical reactions.
Humanity,
She isn’t test tubes and lab coats,
she’s emotion.
Gullet throttling, entrail searing
ire
that presides over and feasts to
bar fights and trashy reality show brokenness
exulting with the face deflating suckerpunches and
bitter hair yanking.
Actions divested to the instinct
from a wine that now leaps like salmon onto hair and clothes
and carpet.

Jam your thumb into the off button
ignorance is bliss,
heaven,
nirvana,
the ending of an Austen novel
where Lizzie Bennet’s guffaws
can be heard from the streets outside.
A good mood like a summer’s day,
like faultless happiness.
Tickling heat and blatantly perfect breezes
you can simply picnic in.
Not even a drop of wine on the linens
can empty such internal sunshine.

Humanity’s tumultuous rollercoaster,
nay, Humanity’s turbulent theme park.
It is sadness, anger, happiness.
It is depression, rage, ecstasy.
It is bunching up skirts, throwing back hair
and living vicariously through the raindrops
that stain the earth in purity.

Abort! Abort! Abort!

It’s a thin morning and I feel like I’m about to puke. Not because of him or her, but because all my emotions are caught in some funny place between a terrible guilt and a terrible relief.

                The seat beneath me is cold still after the ten minute car ride.

                I can tell by the way Liam drags his hands across his jeans and doesn’t look at me that he just wants to get in there. I wish I could say that I’m doing this because it’s what’s right, but there’s something stuck in the back of my brain that knows I’m doing this for him. I love him. He will always be my first love and the thought of ruining him leaves me feeling horrible.

                “You ready?” he asks after a tense ten minutes.

                I can’t vocalize it, but I nod, letting circumstance carry me where it may.

                Liam takes my arm and ushers me out of the car and into the building waiting for us across the sidewalk.

                I don’t know what it looks like inside, not even when we’re swaddled in the heat behind the doors and the synthetic scent of plug-in air freshener. Not particularly.

                It’s just the same sort of waiting room I’ve been visiting all my life. It provides a sufficient backdrop to my internal histrionics.

                Liam takes care of it all. All I have to do is supply him with all the little pieces he doesn’t know. He writes slowly as he fills out those forms, trying to make his handwriting appear as neat as possible. He seems satisfied, but I still see the waver in his O’s.

                He hands it in to some receptionist I don’t see, but takes my hand when he sits back down and I am reminded of how overwhelmingly I love him.

                It’s a hollow three minutes listening only to the sound of the receptionist’s pattering on her keyboard.

                “Hey,” Liam says quietly. I turn to look at him and attempt a half-smile.

                “What?” I ask, keeping my voice low enough so that it’s only rumbles to everyone but him.

                “I heard Mr. Tenny is postponing the research report’s due date.”

                “Oh yeah?” I try for genuine excitement.

                “Uh huh. Back another week.”

                “Cool.”

                A girl comes in a few seconds later. She has beautiful red hair and cries quietly in the corner.

                We don’t talk anymore as her tears spill onto her paperwork.

                “Tally.” A nurse in cerulean scrubs opens the door to the back, calling my name.

                 No one had prepared me for this gnawing bite of fear that erupted in my chest cavity and fizzled out into my limbs. Liam squeezes my hand and my love mixes with the panic, creating another emotion that is neither here nor there.

                “You can do this. I’m here for you,” he almost whispers.

                I’m so scared my knees are shaking, but I focus on him. I have to do this for him. I love him.

                I can’t look at the red haired girl as I walk behind that door. Alone.

                “Alright Tally, I want you to hop up on this chair here,” the fifty-something nurse says and motions to a torturous looking chair to her left.

                I sit.

                “And I don’t want you to worry about a thing. This is a safe and quick procedure, nothing to get worked up about.” She pats my arm and smiles stiffly.

                I nod.

                I’m prepped before I even wrap my head around the concept of this room.

                The doctor comes in. He’s tall with salt and pepper hair, he looks kinda friendly. I grip the hand rest and trust him.

                They use a tube. Suction.

                I’m shaking as they begin.

                “Alright sweetie, I’m going to need you to relax. That’s a good girl. Keep breathing, it’s be over in a jiff. Don’t you worry kiddo, just think some happy thoughts.” Dr. Lichtenberg prattles on. I try to do what he says, I do. But there’s something building in me. Something…

                It’s a sucking sensation coupled with the most disgusting sound I’ve ever heard. And as I watch that baby fly through that clear tube, the numbness consumes me.

                This is worse than every pain I’ve ever felt combined.

                And it’s my fault.

Insane.

“Are you afraid?” she asks. Her face is hard, unyielding except for her eyebrows. Her sympathy, her sadness, even her fear are all expressed through the eyebrows.

“Of madness? No.” I slide my gaze coolly from her face to the window, leaving her with only my profile to contend with. “There were too many years I spent fighting. Now that I’ve accepted it, there’s only peace.” I thumb through my hair as if to find something, I find nothing but a cold, white fingertip.

“Peace?” Her dark eyebrows quiver ever so slightly.

She’s used to always being in control here, my cold confidence is unsettling her. I no longer have a problem.

“Let there be insanity,” I say, “Insanity is beautiful in its own way.”

We sit on couches across from one another.  I face east and she faces west like opposing sides of a war. A stand-off, a stalemate, our eyebrows telling all our secrets.

Out in no man’s land a cardboard tissue box is lined in green and pink posies. While the battle for my mind raged, I used too many of those tissues to count. Now that I have lost, I am dry, waiting for the terms of surrender to ebb me away.

I feel a certain intensity radiating off of her. It builds until-

                “Insanity is not beautiful.”

                “To each his own-“

                “You’re basing this off of a feeling. Feelings are arbitrary.” Her features are still under control but her eyebrows are hysterical. I can just imagine her horror at the thought of watching me fall off that ledge with no reservations, no inhibitions. Giving in and giving up.

                “This is no feeling. I’m sorry, but I’m convinced.” I say this in a quiet, 9.0 on the Richter scale kind of voice.

                Today is the first time I see my mother crumble, her features wrinkling together, flimsy as newsprint. She knows I’m right. I reach out to take her hand before I know what I’m doing.

                I hold her hand while she cries, probably for the first time in years. Color starts to pump into the edges of my vision I let it come and enjoy the beauty, neither accepting nor doubting its verity.

                The half-moons of her nails bite into me.

“We’ll get you help, okay?” She grits her teeth through the ambush of emotion.

                I simply nod, feeling rocks roll around in my head.

Your Typical Suburban Hotshot.

He a bit funny, tall. Yet they way he eats his yogurt hints that he’s a no-nonsense kind of guy. Stubbly with ruddy skin that’s somewhat reddened, somewhat freckled, somewhat wrinkled.

                Born somewhere in the sixties, he’s got to be a Mike or a Dan or a John; possibly all three.

                He worked hard in his youth. Dad either was a military man or acted like one and Mom cooked like a fiend and never doubted the positive results of a good spanking. Pushed mowers since his tenth birthday and shoveled driveways for the elderly without being asked. Something he tried to instill in his own son, but somewhere down the line found out the hard way that times have changed.

                His wedding ring’s a bit worn down. Twenty years of nicks and dents prove his marriage to the over-coiffed, slightly bloated woman at his side. She was a true prize to be won back when they first started dating, but sometimes now he feels he needs God’s grace to get him to the golf tournament unscathed.

                The college years were his glory days. Majoring in business and frat parties gave him the first taste of the wild life. Four years of streaking and drinking were a beautiful distraction from the real world. The real world that came crashing down the minute he inherited his father’s business full time.

                He’s the polo wearing, basketball watching, grilling on the back porch, daughter in college, suburban hotshot. Give him a beer and his aged frat brothers and he rules the world.

Hysterical Friendship.

                 “Hey hon,” said Rosa sticking her cell phone between her shoulder and her ear, “Did the Suns win, or did you just miss me?”

                “No, it’s- I gotta tell you something.” He had a contemplative, drawn out voice that usually would have already had her beaming, but something in his tone hinted that she should brace herself.

                “What?” she asked, fighting the trembling of premature panic.

                “It’s… it’s Becky.”

                The June air started to feel icy as it blew in thorough the screen.

                “What about her?” His tone was sickening her with worry and she felt her hands slowly starting to shake.

                “She’s- she…”

                “What about her Eli?!”

                “She attempted suicide.”

                Rosa could no longer feel herself, the blackness and the hysteria came charging at her before she even had time to blink. Her heart felt like it was falling out of her chest as she began to gurgle incoherently.

                Her body felt too small to contain this as her voice sobbed into the phone.

                “No! No! Eli! Where is she?! Where- where?!”

                “Methodist Hospital.”

                Rosa was flying around the room, willing all the numb and frozen useless parts of her body to find her car keys.

                “There’s something else.” Rosa heard Eli’s voice in the phone she’d completely forgotten was in her hand.

                “No, no. What?!”

                Shards of daylight were scattered in beams as she struggled to pull herself together enough to walk out of the room.

                “She blamed you.”

&&&

                The parking lot smelled like gas and French fries from the Hardee’s across the street.

                The steering wheel felt taut and bloated under its incasing of leather.

                The red Honda in front of her looked a little too new, a little too shiny.

                It was too quiet. Too absent of any kind of noise that could possibly battle with the uproar that was going in between her ears.

                When five minutes passed, she felt like vomiting.

                When six minutes passed, she felt like leaving.

                When nine and a half minutes passed, she went inside.

                Eli was there at the entrance waiting for her and she didn’t protest when he came to wrap his arms around her. They’d always been a miracle drug of sorts, but today they did nothing to allay the soft panic that curled up in her toes and sizzled in her heart. Other than the panic, she felt nothing, just numbness.

                “It was terrible Rose,” he muttered into her hair.

                Some animal instinct told her that he needed comfort too. She blindly fumbled at his back and shoulders, trying to find a landing point for the fierce pressure she could provide.

                “I come-,” he cleared his throat, “I come home and all these ambulances are surrounding her house. There’s a crowd and a stretcher and police tape.” He still hadn’t let go and his messy, rushed sentences were right on her ears.

                “She jumped out the window. The highest one too. She just jumped. Cracked spine, cracked skull, broken leg. Thank God she’s alive. We’ve been- we’ve been friends since forever, and I just, I just…”

                “Mmh.” Rosa felt the suckerpunch of fear mixed with surrealism.

                “I want to see her,” she said, pulling away.

                Eli shifted his glance to the window.

                “The note-,” his voice cracked, “The note,” he continued after clearing his throat, “was crumpled up beside her. Aaron told me, he had it in his hand. And, and I read it and…”

                “And what?” She didn’t want to hear, but she needed to.

                “It said, ‘I couldn’t be Rosa.’”

&&&

                She walked into the room without thinking, because without thoughts her feelings had nowhere to land.

                She looked small. Of course she always looked small. But right then, pale against the sheets, Becky simply exuded juvenilia and vulnerability.

                “Do you have to come in here like that?” asked Becky, some kind of unspecific contempt spinning outward from her.

                Rosa’s preplanned words stuck in her throat.

                “Like what?”

                “Too beautiful.”

                Rosa didn’t say anything. She watched the sunshine out the window without seeing the way it illuminated her cerulean eyes.

                She sealed her lips and nodded swiftly before walking out.

                It was ten minutes before she returned, hair slicked tight against her scalp in a low ponytail and every vestige of make-up gone from her face. Red borders rimmed her eyes and made it look like she’d been either crying or scrubbing too fiercely.

                The silence felt a little like airborne nausea. Rosa tried not to occupy her mind with anything other than the feeling of her arms crossed over her torso as she walked back in.

                Her throat caught and her voice stumbled as she attempted to say something, anything.

                “Better?”

                “Hardly.”

                “Becky?!”

                “What?”

                Becky’s eyes were gently emitting only a small fraction of the hate that leaked out through her words.

                Rosa slowly made her way to the uncomfortable-looking bedside chair and sat. She pressed her nose between a pair of folded hands and let a few stray tears escape. The only thing she could see, feel, or smell was the mixture of skin, snot, and saltwater.

                “Why would you do this?” she asked quietly.

                “Like you don’t know.”

                “I don’t!”

                “Please.”

                Rosa wasn’t acquainted with the Becky that attempted suicide. The one swaddled in plaster who had eyes like stone. But she was best friends with the Becky that hated to fail, the one who kept a bit of angst always in her back pocket, the one that never gave up.

                “I just don’t understand.”

                “You seriously don’t understand?!” Becky looked like she was on the verge of tears herself.

                “No, I don’t. I don’t understand Becks, explain it to me.” Rosa was already crying fat, heavy teardrops that blazed slick trails down her cheeks.

                “You’re perfect! You’re beautiful, you’re smart, you have the perfect family, the perfect friends! You have the grades and the confidence and the social life!”

                “Stop it, stop it, stop it,” Rosa kept muttering as Becky spoke.

                “And you have Eli. You won him. God, it’s not like it was even a competition. Why the hell would he want me when there’s you?” Becky was crying now also, spitting the words the deluge and her wavering sanity.

                “What the eff do I have? My bookshelf? My butler? My silver Jag and my so-called family who doesn’t give a rat’s ass about one another?”

                “That’s not true!” cried Rosa, braking through the rant.

                Becky fiercely wiped at the puddle of water collecting around her eyes.

                “Then why don’t you enlighten me as to my many blessings, oh perfect one?”

                “Don’t call me that!”

                “It’s true. It’s so goddamn true!”

                Rosa stood up from the chair shaking her head and crying

                “I could never live up to you, and you loved it.”

                “You don’t see my cracks Becky!” she cried, the sharp edge of scream in her voice. “Everyone has hard times, everyone has issues! You think I like living in my sister’s shadow? You think I like feeling guilty about Eli and worrying about how I’m going to pay for art school?!”

                Becky rolled her eyes, “I bet you never even liked me.”

                “Becky, I love you! Why would I be your best friend if I didn’t love you?”

                “I’ve always wanted to be you, that’s why we’re best friends. I satisfy your vanity.”

                “You’re crazy! Don’t ever talk like that! Don’t ever say that again! I love you Rebecca Wilks. I love you because you’re hilarious and witty and smart in offbeat sort of way. You teach me something new every time we talk. I love you because I know you’d drop everything to help someone if they needed it. I love you because I know you’re such a good person through and through.”

                Becky had broken down into sobs that contorted her face and shook her torso.

                Rosa picked up the tissue box on the window ledge and offered it to her.

                While her best friend cried, she took hold of her tiny, pale, left hand just to let her know she was there, just to let her know she wasn’t going to leave.

&&&

                It was an hour of hell and silence before Becky spoke.

                “I don’t hate you,” she said quietly.

                “No?”

                “No. I think it’s more of myself that I hate.”

                “Please don’t.”

                “I’m sorry. But I’m not sure that I can help it.”

                Rosa swallowed and squeezed Becky’s hand a little harder.

                “Just tell me this. If you could try suicide again, would you?” It was almost a whisper, but she needed to ask.

                It was a full minute before she responded.

                “No. No I don’t think I would.”

Think something in this could be better? Let me know.

Thanks for reading.

Hate Like.

Heartburn in your stomach.

Organic lattices grinding in circles

Against

Flesh that sparkled

Yesterday.

A temper,

An attitude

You can only halfway give up on.

Bad breath

And some stagnant sort of pall in the room

That won’t be ignored.

A waistband too tight.

A face furiously plain and

Red deserts along her cheekbones.

Tears trickle from complacent yesterdays

When this goddamn biosphere

Was toxically controlled;

When depression was a blind man’s game,

A hamster’s game

And ducks were able to form lines with their bodies.

A nagging sensation of no one

Evolves into cloudy, over-dreamt  

Tsunamis.

Wishes

In Middle America

Die two feet from the front door

And paint peels too quickly.

Fall Away

This is an old poem of mine, but I'm promising you newer, more substantial stuff starting next week when I finally get to write full time.
However not on Sunday because I'm going to be out of town.

&&&&&&

Fall away sweet child
Fall away from this world
With its hatred
With its violence
With its uncertain future
Fall away from the disasters
Fall away from the jealousy
Fall away from the greed and the spite and the horror
This imperfect world
You do not deserve
You deserve to float
In the clouds
And fall in the rain
You deserve to walk hand in hand
With Jesus
Fall away from your pain
Sweet child of God’s
This may seem like the end
But tomorrow you will live
With flying colors