Personal

And yet, the weeks move quickly. I feel like all I've really done this week is watch anime, play with the cats, and send applications. Which isn't true; I took my nephew out twice since Dad was off so little man could go play with the train set he got for Christmas. I even managed to read two books; an old favorite and something new.

Haven't done much else though. I've found some websites called KissCartoon and KissAnime where I can watch pretty much any animated thing I want - I've been catching up on some nostalgic shows (Hey Arnold, Gargoyles), modern shows (Phineas and Ferb, Avatar), and checking out some anime (Kino no Tabi and Pretear). I'm amassing quite a list of things to watch The selection is unbelievable.

I can almost get the neighborhood cats to come to me now; granted, I still have to bribe them with food. Buttercup will let me pick her up, and the orange one will let me pet it as long as he's got food in front of him The fluffy one doesn't much like me, but will tolerate a brief pet for food; the grey one sniffed my fingers a few days ago, and that's the closest I've ever been to that cat. I feel weirdly proud of the patience I've been exhibiting.

And of course, Doc continues to call me every night, and I read stuff from dA to him.

Around dA

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Features!

Every year, I do a special feature of 100 pieces of literature - this time, to avoid being overwhelming, I'm breaking it up a little bit. You can find the first half in my previous journal; here is the last grouping

Mastering MeIn another universe, 
I have green eyes, curly hair,
and paint smeared across all my fingers--
a war cry of artistry
instead of needlepoint scars.
The pooch of my belly
and the lumps in my thighs
might be from anything else
but the insulin I inject four times a day.
I grow up a child, not a parent,
the master of my destiny
not running away but running toward;
I'm a little bit taller
in spirit and stature,
in all the ways that matter
when darkness creeps under the door
and phantoms howl.
I shave my legs every day
instead of once every month
once every three months
once every only now and again when I feel like it
and I'm confident--
a goddess with the stars 
around her neck
instead of pearls--
in any type of heel.
In another universe,
I still trust myself 
behind the wheel of a car;
I have mastered winged eyeliner
and smokey lids;
I gave up chocolate
or caffeine
or whatever it is
that brings on migraines
just because I could,
just because it's better for me,
just because. Heat AdvisoryWe are an air-mass thunderstorm at the height
of an Indian summer -- a cloudburst colliding
into a cyclone, raising the temperature of any
who wander through our sweaty inversion.
I soar above the earth buoyed on your thermals,
straight into a clap of thunder conceived by
lightning fever. A roiling heatwave travels
across our connection, evaporating the atmosphere
surrounding the eye of our storm. Your humid
breath wisps over the thermodynamics of my skin,
pushing cumulonimbus up the drought in my spine.
Muggy kisses trail down my body like volcanic ash,
a haze blurring the lines between our hurricanes.
And as the barometer spikes, my heartbeat quickens;
I am sucked into the vortex of your tropical storm.
Old FriendsThe visit happened suddenly, and to her complete nonsurprise.
She had been typing up a report on various South Asian butterflies when he had simply appeared in her room, as casually as if they had agreed beforehand to meet there. “Hello,” he said calmly from the doorway. “Don’t mind me.”
“Hello there,” she replied, just as casually. “You’re always welcome here.” She didn’t bother turning around, knowing that, at her age, she would no longer be able to see him. She was aware that she was far beyond the age where visitations by imaginary friends, however beloved when younger, were considered acceptable. But she was about as bothered as she was surprised.
“It’s been a while since I last visited,” she heard him say mildly as he walked around the room, just out of her sight.
“It has,” she agreed. “Sorry, I don’t think there’s another chair here.”
“It’s all righ <da:thumb id="443270450"/>

Haiku 19.01If stars are wheat fields,
The moon – a scythe; we shared the
Harvest festival. NakedI want you to look at me naked
No, I don’t mean in the comfort
of your bedroom twisted amongst silk sheets
as I lay beneath your looming figure
waiting,
I mean look at me
in my flesh
in my barest form
parading my flaws
as if they are my trophies.
I want you to look at
this 5’5 frame of fragile bone
and pleasantly plump baggage
and see not the way
my hips curve underneath tightly
stretched skin or
the way my thighs touch in jeans that
hide my full waist,
instead I want you to
notice the way
my dimples curve like half full moons or
the way I bob my head to the
beat of my favorite song.  
I want you to notice
the way my shoulders are
always hunched over as if
my body is always asking a question
and the way my eyes dart skittishly
over the cracks in the pavement
because I'd rather notice
the weeds beneath my feet
than the perfect
36-24-36
that passed me by.  
I want you to look at
my petite hands and the chipped polish
that covers my nails and watch as they run EphemeraI wrap myself in your pages.
Thumbing your edges,
tracing your spine;
feeling the leaves of you
with every fragile turn
Your ink is on my skin.
You mark me. With
Words and rhetoric.
And I'm not sure where
the pages end and I begin
(Canvas est corpus -
I can feel you writing into me.)
And though I'm never sure
if I am lovesong or
parable; dreamscape or
memoir - I love
the ways you write on me.
I am simply afraid
to one day see your
Masterpiece.
And all I have been
is a gloss in your margins.
equinoxthese days Autumn stands with crossed arms
and a hunched back, branches bending to braid
her auburn hair, toes curled around dry leaves
and withered roots.
she's tried to call me a few times,
tried to water the traces left over from
last year,
thinks a reconciliation can happen out of
stems and petals.
13 missed calls: one for every day
she's been back in town.
her stance used to be wide; feet apart,
arms spread to the sides, smile aimed
towards the sky-
her smile aimed towards me.
i go to the park every day and see her hanging
upside down from the trees, scratches etched
all over her arms.
i trace the ones coating my own skin,
remembering the bark slicing me to
pieces-
i can't help but hope that she loses her grip,
loses it the same way i lost her
when Winter came along. <da:thumb id="450121323"/>

StrengthMy grandfather was the strongest man I ever met. If you’ve ever seen someone on TV perform some superhuman feat of strength and thought that it wasn’t real, you’ve never met my grandfather. I have seen him rip a telephone book in half. He reached his full height of 6”4’ at the age of fourteen, and by the age of fifteen he had left school to work in the metal works. No one thought twice about it, because he was more than capable of the work and looked older than he was.
I am not strong. My joints frequently hurt, although I do not think I can convey to you how much of an understatement the word ‘hurt’ is in this situation. Most people didn’t understand why I didn’t run as long or as fast as the other children, or take delight in the frequent football scrimmages that almost all the boys I knew took such delight in. when I told them “I can’t, my legs ache,” they just told me to be strong.
My grandfather didn’t. AnxietyYou close your laptop, hungry for
discs of cabanossi and cheddar shavings,
and aching in the throes of indecision.
Yet here you are, shut up completely.
Discs of cabanossi and cheddar shavings
flow in abundance at parties like these
yet here you are, shut up, completely
lost in daydreams and nightmares, which
flow in abundance at parties like these—
well, you should know, except you don’t:
lost in daydreams and nightmares, which
more or less, for better or worse…
well, you should know. Except you don’t.
You close your laptop, hungry for
more or less, for better or worse
and aching in the throes of indecision. ApocalypseContrary to popular misconception, the end of the world is not global warming, a nuclear fallout, or a mechanical uprising. Zombies do not erupt from their graves, aliens do not suddenly decide to invade. There are no horsemen, vengeful Gods or wayward comets. Lightning does not smote the wicked and angels do not lead the worthy to peace. The end of the world is not a mass disaster; there is no exploding sun, tidal wave or earthquake. Instead, it is those quiet moments happening all over the world, every day.
***
Resting my hand on the gentle curve of my belly, I croon sweet nothings to my baby. I have decided that "it" is a "she", though the ultrasound confirmation is still several weeks away. Still, I have heard her heartbeat, and I am looking forward to hearing it again later today. I sit like this for an hour or so, soaking the sunlight into my skin and communing with the life growing inside me. I am lulled by the sound of traffic in the street, but the unmistakable drone of my hus
<da:thumb id="454364904"/> Goodbyei didn’t fall in love with you
until your skin was already grey and i
had to tell you what the weather was like
since you couldn’t leave your bed.
i didn’t mind long nights in the hospital
because making you laugh brought a warmth
to my cheeks that burnt hotter than a
forest fire, you never laughed at me for blushing
i snuck you in alcohol and forbidden foods
and pushed you around in that rusted wheel chair,
and all the nurses looked at us with
miserable eyes that said more than the doctors
would ever tell me.
naively i thought it was good news
when you said they were sending you home; but
when i saw you strewn across your wine red sheets
my heart was heavy with foreboding, and
neither one of us said anything while i
slid an iv into your paper-skin hand, so
i never asked if you were okay.
we kissed and i didn’t comment
on your snowflake lips or the fact that
your hands shook like earth quakes when
they grazed my thigh and i held you tightly
like if i could keep <da:thumb id="468460747"/>

love letters to introvertsi.
To the boy who prefers spending Friday nights at home:
the world does not understand how beautiful silence sounds
sometimes. 
As you crack open that book you've been waiting to read,
  or plug in your computer,
    or listen to music,
      or, 
         or, 
            or, 
or maybe just stare at the night sky from your bedroom window-
(please) remember what everyone else seems to forget;
that being alone does not always equal lonely--
and that sometimes no company is the best company there is. 
ii.
To the girl who does not speak up in class: 
I was once you. 
You are not deficient, I promise, despite everyone telling you otherwise. 
You might be the only one who will ever know the universes 
tucked inside your head, 
because they are beautiful secrets you cannot bring yourself to share,
for fear that they might be vandalized. 
When you speak, 32:3I poked holes into my palms
when it came time to pray.
Hoping that maybe some of the holy liquid
would drip
    into the cathedral floors
and into bones holding up sinners &
saints. I thought
God would understand my sentiment  of knowing
departed  people  and the segments
that drove them mad. 
The Sundays that stood churchless
in the yard, outside by dad's 
overpriced tools
always told me stories of the whale
that swallowed the man that swallowed
his pride that ate his faith
and ended up a new whale with hands
as big as baskets. 
To this day he hands out bread
in his fresh-baked book of poems
and waits for me to poke more
tiny holes into my tiny hands. 
Half-praying a please.  HandsHands were the subject of many discussions in our household. My mother used to trace the head and heart lines on my left hand and say, "Don't get too violent. You could kill someone." If those two lines connected, she warned, a person would be branded as aggressive, short-tempered, or mentally slow. It was spoken of by Thai ancestors, but I dismissed the story as pure folklore.
This was never an issue for me. My palm lines snake past each other, with only a trickle connecting them. It was, though, for my brother. His palm lines collided and diverged angrily across his palm. Whether it be a coincidence or not, my brother grew older with a fierce temper and smoldering grudges. I grew feebly, contracting illness constantly and succumbing under a weak will. Years later, however, our roles switched and I was an angry, explosive preteen with no filter on my mouth. I still constantly have fits of rage, but I've begun to learn how to stifle them temporarily.
As I grew, so did my hands. Others'
an ode to asthmayou're addicted
to suffocating
it's not the nicotine that
claws your lungs within it's hold,
it's the smoke
you're drowning in
and i ain't throwing a line
when you're nothing
but an anchor ignorance is a virtueI did not know my glass house was
in fact a store front window display
where my every action is an advertisement
and my words are to be changed and hung
up  and thrown out with every season I grow.
When I was younger, I was not aware that
I was a product, a special commodity to be bought
and paid for with chocolates and unzipped pants, and flowers,
to be programmed with only certain phrases and
preapproved emotions, that I am a fantasy but breathing.
How could I have known my education was to consist
of the equation to finding a man, the art of subtlety, the
science to domesticity, and how to write myself as
a book easy enough to read, but still deep enough
to make the reader  feel like a wise man.
That I was to be opened only when needed
and my place was on the top shelf, looking pretty
and unused, because well-worn is not a compliment
as used goods are for people who can't pay full price
and my value is lessened with each mark made.
That I wasn't to be made of stone, that I

<da:thumb id="460103956"/> The Well Beast and I"NO," the beast in the well said.
"What do you mean, 'no'?  Don't you know what an ultimatum is?" I shouted down at it. "I really will do it!"
"NO," the beast said.  "IS TRICK."
"I really don't have to cut you this slack," I yelled.  "I really loved that cat!  Not even the Prior would blame me for taking revenge!"
"WAS GOOD," the beast said.
"Was...? Wait. Did you just tell me how delicious my pet was?  Did you really, in the name of cruel irony, tell me that my Mr. Snickers was delicious?"
"WAS GOOD," the beast confirmed.
"Alright, this is fucking happening," I said, getting up onto the lip of the well.  I unzipped my fly.
"NO, IS TRICK," the beast said, a little uncertainly.
I whipped out my man-hose and started peeing down the well.
"NO NO NO NO NO," the beast said.  The walls of the well shook as the beast writhed around.
"Nowhere to hide in a well, is there?" I called down.  "I've been drinking an awful lot of water!  Why, I daresay I c The Karma Train‘There is nothing worse than going to school by tube!’ said Alice.
James had no reply.  They were hanging onto a pole in the middle of the carriage, swaying and bumping into each other, and into people on their way to work.  The train smelt of sweat, coffee and clothing.  The only passengers to acknowledge each other were those in school uniform.  The rest stared through each other, or over each other’s heads, expressionless and silent.
‘The next station is Southgate.’
‘I’m never getting a tube again after school’s finished,’ said Alice.  ‘Well, not in the rush hour, anyway.  I mean, look at these people!  What a bunch of zombies!’
For a moment, James  tried to shrink into his school shirt like a tortoise into its shell.  Then he realised no one was looking at them.  Alice was right.  They were zombies, and not the flesh eating kind.  They saw noth
The Coffee GodThe Coffee God behind the counter shuffles foot to foot, a dance of steam and espresso.  Black painted fingernails, inch gauged ears and a gray striped sweatshirt, hood crooked on his back.  There's a cigarette tucked behind one ear; it bobs and twitches with each step.
“Non-fat caramel latte,” he calls, just as he always does, part of a spell, part of a mantra, toneless (just a tuck at the end).  I reach.  He looks up.
The espresso maker hisses.
There's something like a grin, something like a spark, something like a shared secret linked eye to eye.  When he passes over the drink (rough cardboard sleeve hot to the touch), he lingers.  Our fingers brush, a shiver, a jolt, a ten-watt shock.
The Coffee God tilts his chin, shouts, “Hey, mind if I take my break now?”
and ducks around the counter without waiting for a reply.
He slips his cigarette between his lips without taking his eyes from mine.  I follow him out the door.
Outside <da:thumb id="501303338"/>

Mature Content

the girl next door has been disconnectedlove was a serial killer
a shadow on the streets
a wanted poster
stapled to the phone poles
black and white touched
by lonely hands and
damn the splinters
love was a little prize
in a plastic package
at the bottom of a box of cereal
artificial coloring
and raw sugar to sharpen your teeth
don't worry she said
there are plenty of girls
drowning in the sea
but I don't want to be
wrapped in plastic
to plaster the inside of my heart
with lifeless photographs
fading in my waning sunlight
(I love the wildflowers
that have survived the wildfires) country's distancethere is a simplicity to feelings without faces,
the voice carries a weight
that touch cannot match.
syllables seek truth
like tepid fingers,
hungry for the soft skin of another soul.
you see,
there is a loneliness that plagues me
like my mother's cancer.
it seeks me in my silent moments,
the times where i am alone
with the devil that has tried to take me
since i was 3 years old.
it seeks to silence my breaths and absolve me into the stillness of early morning light.
but you,
faceless voice behind the neon glow,
keep me grounded
and my breathing humming soft
with the morning news
from a country's distance. Trisagioni.
Hallelujah is a cold sweat and you
are afraid of God,
afraid of salt pillars, afraid of floods
and Heaven is afraid of angels,
angels with wings torn out,
and it is afraid of Gabriel, afraid
his next command will only taste like
ii.
Ash in your mouth and you,
you chant in Latin and
Greek and Aramaic and Hebrew and Arabic,
as if the tongues God spoke will untie yours,
but you have forgotten the vocabulary and
God has too, lost in movements,
movements of the celestial spheres,
faster than the eye can see,
the eye takes it in as stationary
because in the beginning there was Chaos but
before there was Change there was the fear
of Change and
the eye is stationary like the eyes
of the doves that will fall from the sky,
from the crystal sky
to the hill, the plains, the meadow named
iii.
When the Covenant wasn’t a year old and you
looked into the ark and were blinded,
blindness like looking into the sun,
the sun holy
only to heathens;
though this story is mostly about death,
the proph
the suicide hotline was unavailablethere are pill bottles cluttering up my bookcase,
multiplying at such a rate that i begin to wonder
if they've somehow learned to reproduce.
they take up the empty spaces between
Wilde and King, Grimm and Pierce:
(the spaces between my lungs and my heart,
my fingers and my toes, the vertebrae
of my neck and spine; all the gaps
that you left behind when you died.)
it's 9 p.m. and i am finally waking up,
wishing that i could stay unconscious just a
little bit longer, only another ten hours or so,
buried away in my foxhole of a bed trying to
escape the war that's taking place inside my mind.
i thought that if i carried you on my body,
you would always be with me when i needed you.
instead i found that i needed you more and more,
and felt you with me less than ever:
the groundskeeper is getting tired of seeing me. harbingeryou are a bullet to the head
testing the porosity of bones and
loaded blood, slobbering,
seeping, sliding into and over
my thoughts of
self harming and disarming
in the conscious peaks of voices
—and i adore you still. FFM Day 4- Fifth World    Four men waited in a hallway. Three were nearly identical: a man in a coal grey business suit, a man in a slightly lighter grey business suit, and a man in a black business suit. None of them were wearing shoes, and each man was missing his right eye.
    A woman popped out of the office at the end of the hallway.
    “Mr. Robert Bailey is next,” she said, then darted back into the office.  
    Robert rose stiffly to his feet and walked towards the office. The three identical men each tipped their hats to him as he passed.
    “We hope you bugger it up,” the first said.
    “Please do very badly,” the second man said.
    “We would like the job,” the third man said. “But please do as well as you can.”
    The second man jabbed the third in the ribs.
    “He’s lying, we want you to fail,” the first man said.