Usagi's blog

Fire...

She loved watching the little flame, wavering, curious, peeking its orange head over the top of the clear purple-blue lighter, reflecting off the fingers that gave it life. She killed it quickly with the flick of her thumb, then brought it back a moment later, a phoenix, reincarnated...

She lit leaves, tiny twigs, isolated in shallow pits she scraped in the cool September dirt of the park. It was sandy soil that didn’t grow much but stiff-stemmed grass. Dried rivulets and gullies snaked across the field, steep-carved little canyons downhill. To a mouse, the tiny streams were giant lakes, slim rushing oceans. The girl’s small flames were bonfire signals that flashed against the night.

Silly girl, half of this is in my mind
or used to be; I don’t know what I’ve started
or if it [can?] [must] end.
Silly girl, making something out of nothing.
But I already know
that’s all we do anyway.

I live in a world of thoughts built on thoughts,
pain on words on dreams on words again.
Where did it all begin? [Suggestion is powerful.
Possibility so wants to be reality
it doesn’t remember how subjective truth can be.]

Silly girl, look what I’ve done;
what I’ve started, what I’ve ended, what I’ve killed.
I describe it in great grand metaphors
that don’t mean anything at all.
Nothing becomes a something never there.
Words are good at painting pictures
on canvases that once seemed so clearly white.

But humanity craves complication.
We wallow in our confusion, our chaos of complexities,
pursuing clarity with reaching arms—
but wait! stop to think, to realize:
perfect order is gleaming polished stone—
flawless, sterile, dead.

Pain, pain, that wonderful warning:
Danger! Something’s Wrong.
Stop, turn around, log out, run away;
I shouldn’t feel like this.

I ignore the jangling bells within my skull.
Pain is welcome, pain cuts through
this dense steam of summer sweat and confusion
through which I stumble, one hand over my eyes
for surely I can see better that way.

Silly girl, lost in her poetry.
What are words but tools;
hammers, pins, blunt scalpels
that fail to isolate the source
but cut deep anyway.
No blade held by me will ever again brush my skin
but the rounded stroke of my pen on paper
works well enough

and as I pour more of me onto the page
my vessel of a body only drinks more
life from other sources—not my own.
Ha! What life is here? I laugh;
my face stays blank as fired clay.
I leech my parasitic days from the veins of those around me.
I remain bound to my ever-present notebook,
bent over the college-ruled pages
transcribing crudely translated bits of thought.

i.
Am I cheating? I typed not long ago.
The receiver replied No. He knew
that was what I wanted to hear:
something comforting
I could twist myself into believing.
I’m good at that.

Definition notwithstanding, “cheating”
is a poor label to slap on just another source
of pain. It hurts, damnit—
but it’s not hurting me.
Not as much as it should.

ii.
Damn this empathy of mine.
It’s why I dug that point into my skin
those months ago; why one person’s tears
were enough to make my own eyes sting as I read his words.
[Does anyone else see the parallels here?
A poem, a conversation, an agreement-that’s-not;
rejection, confusion; hurt.
Return. Repeat. Déjà vu brings nothing but
a better understanding of that latter half of March.]

I cannot summon tears for the boy beside me,
the one I dodge behind so transparently
with my thoughts displayed naked to the world.
I’m not cheating, no, but I’m hurting him.

I.
I cut my fingernails today, those long talons
everyone thought were fake.
They’d started to tear, to catch on things
and rip away, leaving a jagged edge
that drew blood.

I’d pressed those fingernails
to the skin of four different people in this past week,
laughing, joking, pretending to be some monster from the deep—
but really to see if I had that ability
to speed hearts with my attention, my clawed touch.
I’d figured out long ago that half of attraction is circumstance,
but I still took advantage of it, still enjoyed
the power so easily handed to me.
Evil girl. Yet I can’t manage to hate myself.

Lately, I’ve been screwing with a lot of peoples’ lives.
I’m sorry sounds so childish from this young throat,
these lips that have only ever kissed one person.
I didn’t mean to, the girl whines, six years old again.
Oh, but I did mean to. Did I intend all this to happen?
I fucked you up. I fucked myself up.

"I'm losing my favorite game..."

I listened to that song this morning, pretending
I wasn't on the computer, shoving the laptop
back into his hands when I heard footsteps on the stairs.
Now it remains in my consciousness as a constant reminder
of my lies.

Juvenile handwriting crawls across the page,
limping in half-dead black pen.
Summer air smothers me, tangles in my hair,
drags me down to the seat as the car lurches
to Boston, four hours away.
Cornflowers line the road, waving
their purple-blue faces as we press pass, hurrying
to get away.

"Yeah, I'm losing my favorite game."

I wish I could drive. I wish I can go somewhere else,
my path undictated by anything beyond my desires.
I want to sing, scream something with a heavy beat
and pain in my voice.
I want to escape this agony of lethargy,
this existence-on-the-edge-of-nothingness,
choking on the air I waste, the water I suck down my throat.

Who are you?

I called you Geist that whole weekend; it was only afterwards you became Nick. I fell for the face of a ghost, the voice of a ghost, the mind of a ghost. I knew Geist, and I met the body of Geist. Did I ever know Nick?

Once a girl fell in love with a ghost. Online: that never would've happened. It was meeting you that did it. It was making the ghost real.

Where do the metaphors end?

The ghost is you. [Who are you?]

[Who did I fall for? The boy or the ghost?]

There's something about typing words that make them true, even if they weren't already. How do I remember what was true before? It's hard to write the truth when the truth keeps changing. It's hard to find the truth when it's only what I think it is. It's hard to know what's ever true at all.

I.
Watch the girl, the coward, scared.
Watch her steps, her hand in his,
stomach flipping, forehead creased.
Watch her stumble, almost fall—
watch him rush to catch her,
watch her twist away.

Yes, watch her, see her,
through her pixilated mind,
fingers jerking, typing
what her eyes can’t see, can see—
don’t want to see.
She only believes what she wants to be true.

Watch the girl watch herself,
trip herself, catch herself.
Watch her standing upright, dazed,
convinced that she’s still falling.
Falling hard.

(She never hit the ground.)

II.
Little words on little pages,
ink on white on thoughts on dreams.
She walks barefoot up the driveway,
talking, grinning, laughing, acting;
groping blindly for the words
she knows she has to say.
Words used to be so easy for her.

Silence, but for the birds,
ever-present birch-tree birds.
Silence as his arm curls around her shoulders,
silence as her thoughts arrange.

More late-night half-crazed ramblings from Johnson State.

Nothing is more real that this.
There's the superficial--the moment. Nothing else.
The girl in the pink shorts
tugs our key from around my neck
and braces one rubber-flip-flop'd foot
on the wall by my head as she yanks the swollen door.
The surface. And beneath that
a hundred thousand connections & random words
firing in brief bursts of electricity and chemical messengers
coursing through the fragile tissue of the consciousness.
And below that? More. Molecules. Atoms.
Numbers too big to comprehend of particles too small to imagine
stacked to form the world so familiar,
the one of straight lines and blocked shapes
past which we stumble, looking about,
searching for the underlying path THAT ISN'T THERE.

We're trying to find out where we're going or what we're supposed to do
and it's nothing, really, only what we think is there
beneath the rough-built rule-walls we impose upon ourselves

Midnight last night found me hunched over a mass-produced desk in a dorm at Johnson State, scribbling frantically sideways in the thin yellow stripe of light from the hall. This is what I wrote.

Red for passion, red for pain.

Nothing has any meaning
beyond which I assign it.

Everything seems connected now. Everything
makes sense.

Late night writer's ramblings.
Will I understand in the morning?-->

& yet it's slipping away even as I think.

Will I dream of him tonight?-->

It awakened in me a longing, one I wish I didn't feel.
But I want that desire satisfied.-->

I want his
lips on mine
again. I want
his hand on
me. I want
his voice
behind me,
speaking poetry.-->

This isn't good.-->

Yet I almost like it--
the longing.-->

That's the problem.

*New page*

My roommate's soft breathing behind me.-->

I like the idea of kissing a girl, but I've never had the desire to kiss one in particular.-->

She wants to stand in the dark, in the rain,
in the swirling waves of a dim summer storm.
She wants to let thunder writhe with her pain,
let lighting embrace her tall pale reaching form.
She sucks in the scent of the bruise-colored sky,
fills her thin lungs with the storm's violent breath.
She tells me lightning is how she'd want to die,
a shock of a booming, shouting quick death.
She stands straight in the rain, stone, ghostly thin.
The world is taking what she doesn't give.
She's begging for lightning to enter her skin,
release her from life she can't know how to live.
In a reality she can't entirely feel,
only the welcome sharp haze of death is real.

Last night, I dreamed you kissed me
before the dream switched to you kissing her.
When I woke up, my fists were clenched with jealousy
and I could still taste your cold lips on mine.

She was standing so close to the fire that she thought she could feel her face blacken and bubble like the marshmallow she held in the flames' blue heart, but when she looked in the mirror afterwards her skin was normal, perhaps a bit redder than usual. Her hair smelled like smoke and stars and dirt. She ran her fingers through it and dislodged bits of ash.

She'd never felt a bomb blast, the dull whoomph of impact, the hot wave that sweeps through the immediate world. She'd never seen her home burn, though she used to have nightmares about it when she was younger. She'd wake up, sweating and tangled desperately in checkered sheets, to a home as solid as she remembered. She had nothing to be scared of. But she never could go back to sleep.

She was sheltered, ignorant, desensitized to the news stories that scrolled across the television screen in yellow and blue. Another generic reporter reporting another death. Not her, not anyone she knew. Not real.

It was a peculiar kind of conversation,
she reflected, slipping bare feet through layers of dead leaves.
A strange sort of story, a plot-within-a-plot
where maybe the ending's been reached and maybe--maybe not. Not always.
She's realized life never has a last page, no final "The End."
"Everyone lives happily ever after," says the child,
slapping the cardboard covers together
and dropping the book to the bright cluttered floor.
I smile and hand her another. "Once..." she begins to read.

There's a girl in a forest somewhere,
and there's a girl in her kitchen, typing,
the heels of her hands turning red from the heat of the ancient laptop--
and maybe they're the same.
But I'm not waiting any longer, sitting by that familiar tree.
I don't need to.

Thank you. I've learned a lot about myself.
And part of that is when something happens,
I can let it. And I can deal with the result.

Things'll still be hard. There's someone I need to talk to.

I’ve changed this year.

I’m no longer the dazed freshman who titled my new high school “The Labyrinth of Education,” who wandered nervously around unfamiliar hallways and shrunk against the back of my plastic chair in class, surrounded by upperclassmen with dyed hair. I used to write short poems about leaves and the smell of fall; now I write longer posts where the leaves are always a metaphor and the smell of fall is probably sexual. I banter with people I would’ve been scared to talk to. I get up on stages and on sidewalks and on stone walls on the edge of waterfalls and yell poetry out to the sunset sky, which ignores me and goes on doing sky-type things, as skies are wont to do. I’m a little more crazy and a little less cautious and still oblivious, but about different things. Maybe that means I’ve matured.