Wow haven't been on here in like two years... haha

I was just thinking last night that I really wish that we could just overcome these inane power plays and just be real and straight with one another. That I didn't have to worry if there's some sort of double meaning or if you're being straightforward. That I could say what I mean without being concerned with the social acceptability of my words. That I could know, without a doubt, what another person is getting at... and be sure.

But that's just the world we live in, I suppose.

Working On It

This is a short story based loosely on a dream I had the other night. There will probably be more added to this part, and probably three parts total. Feedback (+ and -) is greatly appreciated. (Mostly because it means someone is actually reading my work.) I know it's choppy, and I'd appreciate some suggestions on that, but please mostly focus on the characterization and imagery. Those are what I'm working on. I've never really written fiction, so help me out. For me, this is fun. So yay.

Working title: White canvas from her shoe that night remains on the wire below my window. (Ignore this, it will change.)

PART I

She crept up, surprised me, and a smile crept onto my worried, often lonely face. My lips grazed her forehead as I pulled her weak and struggling frame over the worn windowsill.

“They didn’t see you?” I asked, nervously glancing at the craters in the black sand below.

“Either way,” she replied. “You’ve got to experience freedom.”

Before I knew it, her wet lips were on mine, her strong arms were around me, and her ripped shoe was discarded like a used tissue. As we lay on my thin, damp, creaking mattress, the mist from the sea floated into the room as if pixies were sprinkling us with saline love potions. From the bed, where we lay twisted in each other, I heard the dampening footsteps of the monsters, free to roam in order to inhibit our autonomy.

As the tide rose, we wiped the sleep from our eyes. With the darkness tainted by silent moonlight, she reached for my only blanket, one worn and tattered by sleepless nights. I glanced at her skin, dark with sun, scarred and broken, and she quickly kissed my eyelids while covering herself.

“There is nothing to worry about in your cage, Noah,” she mockingly assured me. “It’s only liberation you must worry about.”

Sitting up, eyes down, I huddled up to myself, shivering and rubbing my soft, white arms, in the moist heat of the night. I just wanted to throw myself out the window, Carley in my white arms, and escape. Instead, Carley surrounded me, comforted me, told me about the wonders of the place without walls, and let the blanket slip off of her shoulders.

As the sun rose, we sunk into the bed, exhausted from a long night. We didn’t see each other much those days; it was too dangerous with the monsters on patrol. Outside, the sand coiled up and spun in the wind, whipping the ankles of the skittish prisoners of our once beautiful island, racing to their destinations.

When the conquerors came years before, we had greeted them in awe of their strange charm. Soon, though, their monsters became our prison guards, and they left us with them. I don’t know if the men intended to enslave us, but Carley insists this.

That morning she said, “Noah, do not be afraid of the monsters, it’s the fear that traps you here in your cell, nothing more.” She dragged herself up from the bed, pulling my hand and kissing my fair forehead. “Leap with me!”

Something held me back, the part of my heart that couldn’t trust her, with her scarred skin and brown hands. “I will see you soon. I love you,” I whispered into her ear as I stood. She pulled on her clothes and the torn shoes, exasperated with my fear.

Sliding out the window, she turned back and smiled with a smile that could cure blindness. With that, she was gone. I stood back from the window, watching her scamper from the fence below to one broken down edifice to the next, stopping at a bath house for a few minutes, and leaving clean. She looked back up at my window while she was running to her home, maybe a mile away, around the fallen trees and debris, but I guiltily drew into the darkness, jealously longing to feel sand between my toes.

My room is the same as that night, maybe more worn. The books I loved still sit in the corner, with the pages more dog-eared. After Carley left that morning, I sat beneath the window reading books in the sunlight, listening for the thunder of monsters’ footsteps, when I heard children’s laughter for the first time in years. Putting the book down and dusting myself off, I looked outside to see children tossing stones around, while their mothers nervously looked out for the guards and warned their kids to keep hush. I saw two young men creeping around broken buildings, squinting in the bright sun’s reflection from the sea. Probably sneaking into their girls’ rooms, I supposed. I was older than those boys, but I knew the days of security in my youth. I knew what was to fear, having known it’s opposite. A man of twenty-five-odd years, and I was too afraid to leave my own cell in the prison of the island. I did go downstairs each evening as the monsters fed noisily on the other side of the beach to bathe in the nearest bath house, never leaving through the loud metal doors, only slipping from the window silently.

A few nights later, Carley slipped into my window unexpectedly. She silently woke me, and with her finger to her lips, mouthed, Follow me. Without speaking, I shook my head violently and my knuckles turned white in fists. “You are always safe with me. For one moment, please be free with me,” she whispered in my ear and motioned out the window, showing that the coast was clear. Sitting her hips onto the windowsill, she slid down the wall to the fence below, and begged me to follow. I jumped down, and landed ungracefully. She took my hand, kissed my mouth, and said, “You will not regret this.”

I didn’t know where she was taking me, but I followed on eggshells. I could hear each grain of sand as the night breeze carried it around in circles. I gripped her hand, and she squeezed mine comfortingly as we tiptoed around fallen buildings and started sprinting towards the waters. Waves nipped at our shy toes. Since I hadn’t felt the sea in years, it was a burst of cool, slippery freedom; we let go of our inhibitions, splashing and laughing in the night air.

“This is amazing!” I gasped after accidentally swallowing a mouthful of salty seawater.

Carley grabbed me suddenly and looked me in the face, “What is it you fear so much? Don’t you see you can trust me?”

With that, I closed my eyes and fell back into a wave, taking Carley, letting its soft saltiness engulf our bodies as one. Catching our breath as we emerged with a strand of seaweed entwining us, I embraced Carley, that patient and wonderful woman, and kissing her, I tasted the salt on her lips.

It would be a lie,

If I told you I
am not sad you are leaving.*
And you would know it.

*or
am glad to see you go.

Tonight.

The air is so thick
Smoke sinks, rather than rises.
My heart is heavy.

The pale pleasure.

The first time you do it,
It hurts.
Hurts the soft palate,
Burns the lungs.
The pale shaft of pleasure.
Entering my mouth -- like a cave,
And my lungs,
The enchanted caverns beneath.
Its fabricated taste,
Its effect.

The pale pleasure feels best
Right when I'm done --
Down to the fingertips
And toes.
Although the ashy taste in my mouth
Signifies the brand I'm
Now tainted with,
I'm always left wanting -- begging for more.
Addiction, disease.
The small death
From the taste of pleasure.

i want to figure out why smoking is so sexy to me, even if it's not to you. so i wrote this. working with metaphors.
wrote this a long time ago, trying to fix it. suggestions?

Candace & Sister

I used to look at
You with love and caring. Now
Only with disgust.

SOCIAL Reform

It's not that I want to make a difference in the world to say that I made one (although that part would be cool), it's that I want the world to not need to change. I want the people on the planet to be so selfless that there is no want for a difference to be made. I do not believe that this selflessness will be.

Over the course of one year, more than a million children will find themselves homeless in America. The causes are widespread: from illness without insurance to unaffordable housing. I do not believe that the people in America can band together to solve this problem absent governmental intervention. I do not believe that we will be so selfless.

But I believe we can be.
Not on our own, however.

Maybe I just don't get it.

In a generation and culture whose senses are constantly bombarded by sights, sounds, images - moving and stationary - it is hard to get my peers' attention without these things.
Even so, tell me how seeing this:

or this:
Wouldn't make one want to do something about it?!


Maybe they are all so much more fucking ethnocentric than I thought. I hope that's not it.
Maybe you're just ignorant. (I'd say apathetic, but that's too kind. You're ignoring it.)
You know it's awful, and you let it go on. You say, let's focus on how happy we are.
How can you focus on happiness with the above images burned into your memory like an awful brand?

Sitting in suburbia, typing on my laptop, what did I do that makes me deserve this?
The answer is nothing.

I just don't get it. How one could not be fundamentally terrified of graduating from college and going into the workforce, doing no good? I just don't get it.

Patrick Park - Life is a Song

You say life is a dream where we can't say what we mean
Maybe just some roadside scene that we're driving past
There's no telling where we'll be in a day or in a week
And there's no promises of peace or of happiness


Well is this why you cling to every little thing
And polverize and derrange all your senses
Maybe life is a song but you're scared to song along
Until the very ending


Oh, it's time to let go of everything we used to know
Ideas that strengthen who we've been
It's time to cut ties that won't ever free our minds
From the chains and shackles that they're in


Oh, tell me what good is saying that you're free
In a dark and storming sea
You're chained to your history, you're surely sinking fast
You say that you know that the good Lord's in control
He's gonna bless and keep your tired and oh so restless soul
But at the end of the day when every price has been paid
You're gonna rise and sit beside him on some old seat of gold
And won't you tell me why you live like you're afraid to die
You'll die like you're afraid to go


Oh, it's time to let go of everything we used to know
Ideas that strengthen who we've been
It's time to cut ties that won't ever free our minds
From chains and shackles that they're in
From the chains and shackles that they're in


Well life is a dream 'cause we're all walking in our sleep
You could see us stand in lines like we're dead upon our feet
And we build our house of cards and then we wait for it to fall
Always forget how strange it is just to be alive at all

I'm in love with this song. I hope to make some art that incorporates it soon. It is me right now. It reminds me of something Candace would write.

Lazy

I'll try the rhythm.
But it won't be easier
Than not trying it.

Materialism.

Can't rescind harsh words.
Cancer billows from my lips.
Immaturity.
Drenched in rain, quintessential.
Breathe it down into your lungs.

I want to taste it, hear it, feel it. Life...

Maybe if I die,
I'll feel like I felt alive.
I'm not extreme. But -
Maybe I'll drive fast enough,
Or scream loud enough to know.

New poetry form for me: Tanka. I'm not emo or suicidal. FYI.

For some reason,

Rain, only tonight,
Feels less like the tears of God,
And more like my own.


wrote this last night.

When I'm with you,

I see skyscrapers -
You never make me taller.
While I shrink, you grow.

Compliance Traps

It's called foot-in-door.
When each event is little,
I cannot object.

this is the haiku version. I'm working on the longer one, still, and I doubt I'll ever finish it.

What is going on?

God is crying on me.
His tears bead on my skin,
Cling to my eyelashes.
I slam the door to escape (from what?),
And barbaric sounds emerge
From my strained* throat.

I stand, waiting for my turn.
No time left, I turn to depart.
Say goodbye, please, say it.
I turn, and nothing stops me.
Dazed, in a trance, numb -
I don't get a turn at the watering hole.

Suddenly, I'm in it -
Gasping, liquid filling my lungs.
I'm not intoxicated, but
Which way is up?
Opening my eyes stings,
All I see are bubbles.

Where am I?



*looking for a word that means "previously unused but now is used" preferably with a connotation of now out of date, rusted, not smooth.







what the fuck.

Graduation Speech for Auditions Tomorrow

Millard West says that it strives to impart a "world-class education" to each of its students. Each and every vessel of knowledge that each and every day of four years passes the "Home of the Wildcats" sign- except when you have to park in "Lot E...ven-Worse-Than-The-Dirty-Lot"-, and for four years crosses the threshold, through one of the heavy metal and glass barriers between school and everything that is outside school, ought to receive a "world-class education," according to Millard West's mission statement, which is the first thing you see when you open the Internet Explorer browser on a school computer, the banner on Millard West's home page. Maybe you've never really read it consciously; so I'll recite it for you now: "Millard West High School, a professional learning community dedicated to the process of continuous improvement, will guarantee that all learners achieve a World-Class Education." That sentence says a lot about Millard West and what it is striving for, but I'm going to focus on the fact that Millard West is supposed to guarantee a "world-class education." When I think of world-class, I traditionally think of striving to be among the best in the world, but when it comes to education, and more specifically the commencement of a new path in life in lieu of secondary education, this paradigm does not quite fit.
Looking out from where I'm standing, in Omaha, Nebraska, about to receive my high school diploma, with a house I call home, and a family unafflicted with any terminal illnesses, it is hard for me to imagine calling my life anything less than "world-class" by the definition previously presented. It is easy for me, however, to see the little flaws in my life, I've caught myself complaining about my car's gas mileage, but I have a car to drive. I've caught myself complaining about having to sleep on a hide-a-bed, but I have a bed to sleep in. It's hard from where I stand to imagine a life less than "world-class" by the previous definition, and similarly, it is difficult to imagine an education less than "world-class," with well-qualified staff and administrators (a 16:1 student-teacher ratio), high-quality technology, and a clean and new facility. Millard West visibly attains a "world-class education" in this regard, graduating over 95(?)% of our senior class.
What I purport is to view a "world-class education" in a different way, to see Millard West a starting point for the good we can do in the world. I challenge you as soon-to-be-graduates of this educational establishment put your "world-class education" to use in a very important way: to make the world a better place. We have already begun to do this, starting the Justice League this year to raise awareness for the genocide in Darfur, promoting Amnesty International to shed light on the human rights abuses around the globe, I - personally - have worked together with National Honors Society to raise awareness for the 22-year Ugandan Civil War in efforts to see its end. We - The Millard West Class of 2008 - even prompted our administration to form a committee dedicated to these types of global issues. We have already begun to change the world for the better, and it has only been through the help of Millard West's supportive faculty that we have had these opportunities. I challenge you to fulfill the rule that we learned as youngsters - Leave the world better than you found it. We are well on our way, but we can't stop now - we can't become self-interested as we go on to higher education or careers - instead we must press on, utilizing our "world-class education" to better the world instead of perpetually seeking only to better ourselves, for the only way to truly better ourselves, and to truly understand the world, is to start by trying to better the lives of those who can't do it on their own. As a blessed student body with "world-class" lives, there is no doubt that it is easy to think first about ourselves and spend any left-over time on "good deeds." But to truly meet the obligations of world-class learners, we must make the betterment of our planet, our world a priority.

COMMENTS? I'm auditioning after school, so let me know if something does not zen (is that a verb?) with you. The people that decide if I get to speak at commencement are a panel of teachers and administrators, FYI.

"Must Be"

There must be blood
Rushing to my fingertips
For my hands have ridges
Like little hills.

And the snow above -
The white, clenched knuckles -
Is a sign of restraint.
I must not let go.

There must be blood
Rushing to my brain
For my cheeks are red
Like a field of posies.

And the brook or stream -
The one trickling from my eye -
Is a sign of embarrassment.
I do not know what to say.

There must be blood
Rushing from me
For I am lightheaded - dizzy -
And you caused it.

And the red on your sleeve
Must be my blood - you've cut me.
(Maybe it's not blood at all.
But you have indeed cut me.)

still not sure about the last line.

Profundity

I'm trying to write a speech. Auditions for graduation speakers are next Tuesday, and I don't even have one word yet. I want to talk about "truth." I believe in it. With all my heart. But I'm having a hard time picking out the reasons for seeking it. Why have I sought it? Why will I continue to? Why should others do the same? I believe that my speech should answer these questions. It also should speak specifically to each of the graduates, the parents/relatives/family friends, and the administration/teachers. It should avoid clichés while remaining classic and more or less timeless. I want it to have the power to bring tears to at least one individual's eyes. You'd think that with the 500 odd speeches I've given in high school, this one would be a breeze. But I'm not trying to win anything here, although I guess in a way I'll be trying to pursuade, I'll be speaking my mind, not just arguing for the hell of it. I'm not used to that.

I'm ready, so don't stop.

Tonight I'll be traveling with Izzie and her family. It's quite sporadic.

After school in the parking lot, I had a blast, even though Landon pennied my car a little. It's already scratched. I love friendship and laughing. But who doesn't? Hitler, maybe. - no he probably liked it, too.