Locke-Peter's blog

I am corporeal in my dreams.

I walk among the living spectres,
my own lord and king,
prince of nox.

Silent still, reticent, but capable of speech,
my warm throat filled to the brim,
pulsing red in my veins, life with solidity.

Perhaps I'd walk on slender legs,
pale dark hair left long,
I'd walk and think solid thoughts,
feeling summer's first pale rays
poking through the permafreeze.

I always awake,
as dreams are wont to end,
slip conscious back into this dream where I live,
and I can't help but wonder,
could I be just that?

A dream of another,

Her heart beats like a semaphore,
sending countless
steady
dot dash
dot dash
dot dash
beats, sliding effortlessly through her,
through the wires in my palm,
see what love has wrought.

-Locke

Hey folks, Locke-Peter here looking at applying to that nice, wonderful writer's conference down at Champlain college. Big problem is I'm applying for prose, and I seem to... Have a lot to choose from. I'm not good at narrowing. So, my question, or favor rather, to ask of you would be to tell me what you think I should submit. Really, anything from my blog, a segment of a longer piece or a stand alone, whatever you think would be better. Thanks a lot folks!

-Locke and Peter

You are the wink drifting past in the wind,
a gray green specter,
the first to appear to my untrained eye,
full and human-seeming.

You are the white whisps of hair
clinging to the bald head,
framing a constant,
grinning joyous lover of life.

You are the fearless soldier,
marching to glorious war,
but degraded to loading bombs onto planes,
not killed by jungle hell but by cancer in the shells you lifted.

You are the image of God,
the one face I saw in my prayers as a child,
your gleaming squint eyed grin
staring back from the gates of imagined heaven.

Winter meant frost and chilly leaves, crunchier and browner than those Aubrey brought during autumn times, winter meant a palpable chill in the earth on Aubrey's shoes, a change from the cold mud of October. 

We are the centuries.
We are the bloody baskets and the guillotines,
and soon we will discuss the amputation of your head.

We are your singing servants, Sir or Madam, or perhaps you'd prefer not to choose, no matter.
Still we march behind you chanting our rhymes and repeats, which some find inscrutable and others hilarious.
Left,
left,
left,
right,
left.
Wir, as they say in the old country, marschieren weiter wenn alles in scherben fällt.
We are the centuries.

I have felt fractured,
divided since
forever.

It's never really
bothered me,
just a fact
of my
life.

And now that I have
your love to guide
my steps, I've found
I have a place where
my feet can always touch
the ground.

I feel a oneness,
a simple unity,
lying somewhere warm
loving every moment
I have spent one
with our soul.

Because souls can heal,
and souls can seek,
and souls can bond,
in pure white heat.

-Locke

We are a complex,
multileveled,
simple people.

We take pleasure in
complicated,
multifarious,
simple things.

The taste of you,
never quite
definable,
intangible,
yet undeniably
present

the delicate smell
that lingers in your
long
wonderful
hair I can never quite
place.

You say you feel
pressured
to conform to
nonconformity,
that you can never really feel
welcome
in the complex world.

We will always have
the simple
gentle
tenderness found in
our complex
beating
hearts.

With you I
drop
my guard, my interwoven
complicated
shield,

Today I steered at school. I guided myself along the halls, an hour into my off block, wandering the edges of things.

I watched students shuffle to class.

I watched teachers shuffle to different rooms.

I watched janitors clean the places no one walked.

In one corner, a forgotten essay, dropped maybe. A sputtering, stuttering, error ridden attempt to explain a complex young life.

All these people driven by the invisible hands of power.

I hate dolls.

The house I live in when I'm awake seems to be full of them, macabre imitations of life.

(So ok, this wasn't too great, and I still can't play any instruments, so it's just my voice... I had fun with it. Kind of long, i know.)

Silence, little country girl,
hear the cries and scars the way that you have
walked,
just to leave the wonderland you'd found
return to the still life you'd led before.
You could have lived your days out here,
there was never any need for you to fight,
but now you've chosen life in black and white.

But it was not your fault but mine,
and it was our love on the line,
I really thought it was my time,
and now my great and powerful mind,

Silence, little country girl,
hear the cries and scars the way that you have
walked,
just to leave the wonderland you'd found
return to the still life you'd led before.
You could have lived your days out here,
there was never any need for you to fight,
but now you've chosen life in black and white.

But it was not your fault but mine,
and it was our love on the line,
I really thought it was my time,
and now my great and powerful mind,
brings me here...

Hush, smiling scarecrow man,
let your boiling, roiling thoughts now come to
rest,

I think of myself, a faithless kind of man.

I hear, see, touch, those things I believe,
never to know the blind respite of faith's gift to the ignorant,
those who-in my narrow view-need to see the world through a
wider
lens.

Yet...
As I lay to sleep
I feel something
more.

When I hear you despair that perhaps
you're incapable of
sustaining
this,

I feel a knowledge I can't have gained from anywhere
(except perhaps the lingering spark, unquantifiable)
that you're wonderfully wrong,
that this was built to last.

I've learned a lot of things from you.

First the world is the wide sea
space unfillable, distance
unimaginable.

Second you see your unscarred
face,
resplendent in the perfect glass,
looking glass,
a phrase which I recall
bothers you.

Third you see the world shrink,
never know,
didn't see that you could grow.
We're human, after all, we don't think.

Fourth you met me sitting
on the lawn, wide black
hat waving in the breeze,
I expected a point, but nice.

Fifth my expectations
shattered by your green glass
bafflement,
fingers stretching unexpectedly, cool against my cheek.

Sixth your breath

Learning,
you were a shadow-slider,
an edge gracing,
corner of the eye extra

Living,
you filled the world imperceptibly,
adding a background to the
actors of the tiny world.

Playing,
your lilting easing somber
notes, held tightly in the
grip of your thin brown fingers.

despairing,
you made decisions
dark and terrible, choices
all too easy in this broken world.

dying,
you pulled the fateful hammer,
shattering the illusions of the lead-actors,
as well as your fragile frame.

Waiting,
your unreal tears slide down
illuminated cheeks, simply

You think,
therefore... You are.

I think,
therefore... I am
an anomaly.
Abnormality.
Unsolidified.
Unrequited.
Unprovable.
Unreal.

A bump in the grain, removable
by any means
you
deem
necessary.

therefore... I am
hunting,
seeking,
searching.

For proof. For solid, sanctified, sonorous signs
seemingly simple yet so slightly serpentine,
sliding sinuously past my senses.
Prove to you.

I see them but you cannot. They are taunting proof,
daunting proof,
themselves unprovable,
by extension,
myself.

Therefore... I am
frustrated,
liltingly
enraged,

In the brill-white stands of hessle thorn,
where glaigs sat saying sooth
the great mind-shifters sat, dwindling forlorn.
The young ones seen as foolish, the old as long of tooth.

When from the brine lands two returned,
or three with two between,
rode from beneath sun's set unburned,
one blonde, one pale and lean.

The pale turned to the other, his starry eyes agleam,
"let's sift the brightest minds from bracken that we see."
the elder one dismounted, his beast still wheezing steam,
"Let's go" he said, "and lead instead, and let the bright run free."

-Locke

i. In Scranton, I am a giant. I don't know if it's something in the water or the air, or perhaps in some shared ancestry, but no one there seemes to grow above five foot six. I'm certainly not the biggest person, but I feel like a behemoth, towering above the stooped populace like some blond deity, a messenger from the seldom-heard land of light.

Who are you?

We are the balance. We are the guardians. We serve and protect.

Why are you in my head?

Because we are dead. Because the last paragon has vanished from the earth, and the mother demands a progenitor.

Whose mother? I don't have a mother!

We all have a mother. Mine, yours, all of ours. Mother Gaia.

My mother had a name... It wasn't that.

Melanie crouched further under the rubble, her ears ringing from the noise all around her.

She'd just wanted to make sure daddy was ok. He had to be up with the Containment men up near the big white house, where Mr. President lived. But there was shooting and fire and thunder, all around her.

Angela and James were old as the hills.

They were two hundred and six and two hundred and twelve, an age difference that seemed more and more trivial with every passing year. She was small and petite, short cropped brown hair and twinkling, Irish eyes. He was large, broad but not fat, with darker skin, the physical manifestation of the Indian side of his family. They were in love, and had been since the day they'd met.

Albright slammed in another clip, shoving himself deeper into the safety of the side closet while Rennet pointed his gun steadily at the only entrance. The Hunters weren't stupid. They wouldn't attack a cornered foe. The air stank of sweat, and no wonder. Both Albrights and his comrade were drenched, adrenaline pounding through their veins.

We walk a ragged world, a razor sharp perforated slice of a world,
tiny scissors to the side tell everyone you only need to cut here,
and away we fall, down under psychiatrists' scalpel,
pass the analytical knife.

We live between the cracks in the oh so perfect made up face
of nations, ignored and forgotten save for repeated invitations to hide our ugliness,
wear the perfect mask of model citizenry, join the respectable ones and cloak our
shame, our inconvenient life.

There are those like me that don't really exist.

Therefore, all like me can't exist.

Beth pulled up sharply, straining for every ounce of height she could possibly get as the metal behemoth thundered below her. She struggled to right herself as the wind was yanked out from under her, threatening to send her tumbling.

The flashlight on Lt. Albright's gun lit up the room, and he half wanted to just switch it off. One of his newest recruits, Andy was his name, dead. His chest was torn clean away, almost scooped out, and he could see claw marks, and unmistakeable teeth.

His backup was outside the door, a big black man that Albright didn't know or entirely trust. Rennet or something. He cleared his throat, trying to strike up a conversation precisely when Albright felt like just sitting and contemplating the situation.

Elias tugged on his gloves again, making sure none of his hand was showing in the space between the black leather and his coatsleeve. The mask he wore felt strange, covering his face, clingy and unreal. He kept his hat low, knowing the rubber would never fool someone closer than a few yards. He did his best to act naturally, though he knew with the battle still raging above the city, all eyes would be turned up, and a hurried, nervous man would not recieve much attention.

The sky was on fire. The howl of the fighter planes drowned out all sound, rattling windows and doors. Melanie's sister covered her ears, her howling lost in the space between the thunderclaps. The night flashed blue, like lightning. Melanie stumbled out the front door, into the lot out in front of her family's condominium. She stared up into the strange violent day-night, pupils rapidly shrinking to decipher the sudden glut of light.

(Authors note: I debated posting this for quite a while. I feel like this site might be a little too open, like maybe some people might be offended about the ending of this story, this dream. Because I want to get it out of my head, and I won't change it. This doesn't reflect on me at all, and I'm not depressed or anything, in fact at this point in my life I'm about as happy as I've ever been. That said, if you think you'll be offended, then don't read it. Okay?)

The night was drawing near by the time the taxi cab skidded to a halt next to the bakery, in one of the less affluent sections of Port Au Prince. Dirk raised his collar, and pulled his hat down low in spite of the still suffocating heat. He knew how conspicuous they'd be, a bunch of white faces in the midst of this nearly entirely native part of the city.

Festivities for all souls day had begun, and they walked into the swinging doors of the bakery shoving past fire eaters and street performers.

Started in darkness, like all things,
I stood in the sandbox-place,
where the world was mine to create,
verse one of my personal Genesis.

First came man, out of sand, out of earth,
a body for this unfamiliar room mate I'd made.

Second came the thoughts, conversation,
and my compatriot forged a body all his own,

twisting pale flesh and black robe into a familiar face,
black eyes with star sparks floating centered.

Next his castle, a world all his own, left me outside the gates,
where I sat pondering the nature of this realm.

I build all that I see, all that I share,

Hey. This is a project I did for my public speaking class. we had to record a short speech about our beliefs, and, as usual, I over did it. The basis of this speech is a piece by comedian and slam poet Taylor Mali, "Totally like whatever, you know?" you can find that on youtube, unfortunately I can't provide a link right now, since youtube is blocked at my school. I feel like this is part of the reason I'm active on ywp. (even though I haven't been, recently, mostly due to being involved in a musical which has sucked up most of my time.)

Here's the text.