Response.

Melon hearts

Carry dulcet tunes

Sop your face with the juice

Let it run peach and gossamer

Dripping in time to the

Vibrations up your body

From every tribal footstep

And delirious leap into nitrogen arms

Yank it down

Thundering cracked caravans

Running away

Circles and cleft palates

Splitting the fibers of the atoms

Electrons screaming for their mothers

Gnashing at the earth

They claw for her

Taste the phoenix as you rise

Soiled with the ashes of Lake Street

I know you can

Find fear’s filaments

Clogging your every pore

Life’s blood tiger blood

Trying to run

Twist yourself

Into the pretzel of the new generation

Pearl.

The cadences of your combined voices

Tumble down several flights

Of stairs.

These walls are your parentheses,

Scooping you into a

Sentence’s secret room.

Keep the bubbles in your freezer,

And every day

Check

To see if their frosty bodies

Stayed orbular

Through the night your brother-in-law’s best friend’s roommate

Slept next to you in bed.

You fold up your life like a paper fan.

Keep up zigging

As you zag,

Tracing the fault lines

In your cardiac tissue.

Inside Out.

I’m thinking about the universe

Lying in a bathtub,

Watching water droplets slip down the linoleum.

About gravity and embracing molecules and this

Elusive thing called a body

That houses my

Soul in just the right way

So that I’m able to think and feel and

Convert oxygen into carbon dioxide.

It isn’t the

Probability

Of heaven and hell

I worry about,

It’s the reflections and the

Forces and evaporation, intelligent design itself.

It’s the

Intangibility, the utterly precarious nature

Of everything

Outside our consciousness. 

An Unsuspected Turn of Events.

I know there’s no game

But I play it well.

Making the most of

This trap of

Cinderblocks and matrices.

I’m no competitor, trust me baby,

Just a shot in the dark from left field

A soft spoken rock star with a force field and a Richter scale.

We are strangers and cohabitators and best friends we never knew we had.

We’re just,

Always just something.

You know

I’m not painting my fingernails with hope or anything,

I don’t have wishes stuffed in my handbag

Or wear my desires strung around my neck.

It’s just

You wear blue a lot.

You look good in blue. 

Change Hungry.

My mother’s dress is loose on my shoulders

And tight in the ass.

I could just swim in

My father’s cheap leather Dockers.

Everything in the bluegreen light

Of a nouveau eighteen

Is pawing at the starting gates,

Of the insipid vernacular of

Higher education.

If you’re careful,

You could pick me out of a line of rebels

Of the

Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch cherry bomb variety.

But only if you’re careful.

I’m just waiting

As the birds on wires

And naked branches

Claw the real life from this city.

Updates, Resolutions, My Slow Descent Into Madness.

I think it’s time for an update as well as a reorganization of thought to both make my intentions clear and set some goals. I guess it’s because it’s a new year and that’s what people do, so I’ve been told.

I know I’ve been skimping in the posting area for quite some time now. There are reasons for this, some even legitimate, but I won’t even delve into justifications and excuses and blahdy blahdy blah. You’re welcome.

So, I am currently in the process of writing a short story (maybe two : ) for a bit of a high stakes competition. It seems like a really fun project to get involved with and the eventual prize would mean publication in a collection, and all that jazz. I’m quite excited about it. Though the jury’s still out on whether that story will ever grace this particular corner of the internet. I just wanted to mention it.

The deadline is at the end of January, so I will probably put much of this month’s writing focus into that. This probably means more quickly written poetry for the rest of the month. I’m a student so I don’t exactly have an overabundance of excess time. However, I do get considerable pleasure writing poems in my notebook margins during a particularly tedious lecture. Keep your fingers crossed for those gems.

I have another short story that I’m particularly excited about in the works at the moment as well. But who knows when that will be ready, considering my affinity for procrastination. It might have to be ready soon after January if I blow through all my poem ideas.

I may or may not have previously stated that my New Year’s Resolution for 2011 was to write at least one short story a month (amidst longer works and poetry of course). I did end up keeping this resolution throughout the year, more or less, and have no qualms about repeating it.

Other goals:

-       Start a round of more intense revisions for my work in 2011

-       Devote a week every couple months to writing a poem a day.

-       Become more open to including others in my creative process

-       Write more in my writer’s notebook

-       Explore new mediums in conjunction with writing

Thanks for reading and thank you for your support.

xoxo,

Jade Elizabeth