something is rusting in my throat, the ends of summer, i kept the apology meant for you//i’m growing smaller, honey-hay cottage, i still keep the postcards//i only see swan painted air, gaslights dissolve sweet on tongue, i fold the day into a newspaper memory//
My fingertips are mimicking sensations, guessing at existence beyond themselves
But there is only one thought burning in me, burns through the room to nowhere,
reaching you without touching you.
And my shoulders wilt//And my skin is only the ink of words.
Lately, I’ve been inspired and enraptured by Lorde, Lana Del Rey, old cars, technicolor, neon lights, and the overall teenage experience.
Milk-dipped suburban fantasies
The sweetness of bones and watermelon rinds
I’m eating ice-cream but really,
I’m tasting the soft-served vanilla clouds, denim skies,
gasoline, charred tires, or old records?
It always looks like half-past two here,
Trimmed afternoons projecting into dazed teenage girls,
letting Polaroids burn sun-scabbed colors onto their mouths,
the kind who choke on the notion of perfect lawns and perfect behavior
there’s always a sour knell beating behind the flavor.
Closing hour: brass teeth gnash within their locks.
Darkness has changed the night-watchman’s son, mellowing his form, transforming his skin into a wan frenzy, his tiny body seeming to meld with the black of the museum passageway he is crossing. Half-running with his hands stuffed in his pockets, the boy strides into the next room, where portraits of regal looking figures line every wall. He vaguely remembers, though he tries to choke the thought, that the dates on these paintings were centuries old. Whipping his head left and right, his eyes flit over the faces in the frames, just to be sure none of them get any notion of moving into their two-dimensional minds. You never know, he thought, funny things happen at night. The boy comes to a halt in the center of the room, eyes wide and spark-like sensations darting through his limbs. Here in the numb-twilight, the hush has more depths to it than he should like to know, yet the boy lingers, gripped by the thickness in the air and the feeling that he is taking part in something cherished. He stares, eyes wide, imploring, while the painted humans look back, bemused. A low hum, a plea, reverberates throughout the museum, seeming to be conducted by the paintings themselves. Beauty, preserved and ancient, hesitantly unfurls itself to him, but the boy remembers the possibility of phantoms lurking in the shadows, so he darts away.
Hello all! I received exciting news this afternoon: I’ve been nominated for The Creative Blogger Award by Julia of https://myredpage.wordpress.com/2015/04/03/creative-blogger-award/. Huge thanks to her; be sure to check out her blog! This is the first nomination I’ve ever received and, as a sporadic blogger, I’m extremely grateful. Anyway, part of being a nominee involves sharing five facts about myself and nominating at least five fellow bloggers, so here I go!
One – The first book I fell head-over-heels in love with was Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief. I borrowed the book from a friend and became so obsessed with it that I bought my own copy of the book. I then re-read it until its pages became brittle and bent, and even wrote to the author, Rick Riordan, to express my admiration of him and my hopes to become a novelist too. To this day, it and the entire Percy Jackson series stands on my bookshelf, and I still wish that I could join Camp Half-Blood.
Two – Due to the blue palate of my blog and the starry background I have, you may assume that my favorite music is somber, indie pop composed by the likes of Daughter or The xx but, in truth, my favorite band is Mumford & Sons. I’ve been a fan of their music for almost three years now, and I saw them live in concert when they were in town. I can’t wait for their new album this May!
Three – I am fascinated with the aesthetics and the lifestyle of elites in the 1700s and early 1800s. The age of opulence: velvet-lined theaters, marble staircases, soirees, court life. Wouldn’t it be amazing to run barefoot through the hallway of a Baroque palace, knowing it was your home?
Four – When I was about four or five, I had two imaginary friends who were talking deer. They would follow me around as I went about our little garden, picking herb leaves to add as garnishes to my mud-pies.
Five – One of my dreams is to visit Prague in winter, find an old cafe that sells good coffee, and to write there while I watch the snow fall outside.
Now it’s time for my nominations. All of these blogger-artists are diverse in their topics but each one is equally fantastic. Give their blogs a look!
My nominees are:
The rules of the Creative Blogger Award:
1. Display the Creative Blogger Award logo on your blog
2. Thank and tag the blog who nominated you
3. Write 5 random facts about yourself
4. Nominate a minimum of 5 other blogs and let them know
Congratulations to you all! With the one-year anniversary of my blog approaching, I can now say with confidence that the WordPress community is a lovely and positive one. Keep on creating everyone!
Who is the greatest thief?
The world.
What is its worst robbery?
Snatching our moments,
pocketing them away,
devouring them.
Why are your memories
so nebulous?
Like cream to tea.
Like dust on wood.
Because you’re conjuring their ghosts.
Summoning their grains from the soil.
But pieces will always be missing,
spaces between the threads,
stitched into eternity.
And why are ghosts never whole?
Some part of the past
has found something greater
than being fully human again.
My second collection of jumbled, half-baked thoughts, poems, and stories.
1. Flames & Snow:
Feathers of angels,
fingerprints of ghosts.
2. Old spaces we’ve known entrap pieces of our former selves.
3. His lies translated into fairy tales in her ears, each of them equally fantastical and enchanting. And she thought the key to seeing their existence, like elves in the flower-bed, rested in total belief.
4. Possibilities hang more poignant than realities.
5. The barren tree-branches jutted frantically upward, bending in the night wind like lost veins reaching for their hearts.
6. Swans:
The curve of their necks,
movement and form that bends reality.
Feathers like snow, eyes of night,
Courting solitude.
7. Every cello stroke releases a procession of shadows
8. It’s hard, holding all my history together, knowing there is only one present moment, yet existing in a thousand other places. I move through time as if I were running on piano keys; every last note hums around me even when I step on the next bar.
9. We are all ecstatic movement,
The greatest riddles in the universe,
And can hold more matter inside of us
Than any planet.
10. Only the heart can pick up the scent of rusting glory, stale and mesmerizing.
From above, our lands were nothing more than shattered plates peppered with lights.
We were artwork suspended in a gallery of dark.
On display for the stars.
Ethereal and lonely.
We are not able to choose a great many things in our lives, which is obviously annoying, but when we can’t cheat our way out of ourselves, no matter what methods we try, now that’s maddening. By this, I’m referencing our physical appearances: how we look. Do we have a pretty smile? A big nose? Freckles? And since we’re on this path of rhetorical questions, what do looks signify anyway?
Nothing. They signify nothing, and I have a feeling you already knew that. From taking a simple glance in the mirror you know your eye color doesn’t match the exact colors of your thoughts and emotions. We spend most of our early lives watching ourselves grow, hoping we’ll become more of like who we really are, and when this goes awry we angrily wonder “Why can’t I look like what is in my heart?” Because of this, I constantly wonder why our world doesn’t show more empathy towards each other on the simple fact that we are not to blame for our facial structure or body type. Why can’t we judge people on their personalities alone? From personal experience, I can attest that sometimes it’s near impossible to separate someone’s appearance from their substance and, if we can, it’s usually because we get to know the person, which takes a bit of time.
Beauty and it’s opposite, ugliness, get in the way: we love beautiful people, and we can’t help it. Whatever we see as beautiful, we follow with hungry eyes, perhaps because beauty is soothing, it’s art. Beauty represents something godly, ethereal, it scrapes the edges of heaven itself. But now, for ugliness. Ugly is frightening, jarring, it shakes us out of the realm of angles and onto the earth, dropping us to a level that is so repulsively human. Because of this, we avoid people who are ugly, plain, or strange looking, and seek out those few of us who are pretty or even beautiful. Sadly, this allows us to overlook many people who have rich inner worlds, people who could have challenged our views, and people who could have helped us solve a bit of the mystery that is life. Yet we struggle to escape the pull…
The cure: books.
Books with little or no illustrations are the perfect medium to use to escape the barriers appearances cast on every human. Unlike movies or plays where the characters appear before us as solidified, definite real-life humans, which makes it harder for us to separate looks from character, the images we create in our heads when reading are much more fuzzy, since the only thing we’re training our eyes on are the words. We sculpt book characters out of the descriptions the authors offer us, and put them into the dream-like movie playing in our minds and, assuming you’re like me, these characters don’t appear in high-definition. Rather, I always feel as though I’m looking at these characters through squinted eyes, which blurs most of their features, which is actually a good thing, because for the first time we can easily judge these people for who they are on the inside. This works in part because the authors don’t remind us of what the character looks like every second of the novel, and even if they did, the characters don’t appear before our eyes as people do in real life, making it less likely for us to concentrate or judge them based on looks. In books, we can read, and therefore see into a person’s soul. A character’s actions, thoughts, feelings, and words become who they are for us, which is fantastic, only I feel that this clear advantage is largely underutilized by many writers.
Since looks don’t matter in books, we shouldn’t care at all what our characters look like, but we should be honest about how looks do affect someone’s life, since all of the characters in our stories have to see and interact with each other just like we do with people in real life. Sadly, I feel that many writers are playing it too safe when it comes to deciding character appearances, especially the looks of their main protagonists and their love interests. In fact, my attention was brought to this issue when I decided to branch out and read some popular YA novels/series such as The Fault in Our Stars, The Infernal Devices, and The Hunger Games, in which this pattern occurred. Now, I know that this is only a small handful of YA novels, and I’m not saying the genre as a whole has this issue, but I felt that these novels/series were the most popularized examples I could reference. Each of these books centers around a female protagonist who is described as being “plain” or “ordinary-looking”.
This is perfectly fine; in fact, I like it when characters look like this because it makes them feel identifiable and real. The majority of people are not gorgeous, so it’s good when we have characters who look like everyday people. However, I’m beginning to feel that the average looking MC is becoming a bit cliched. Having someone who is neither pretty nor ugly but remarkably “plain” looking falls in the safe-zone for writers, because heaven forbid we should have a female character who is strange-looking and actually has deal with daily problems based on their face. Why not give our characters some peculiar facial features? Why do they always have to be ordinary? What’s more, even if our main character’s looks are executed in an original, interesting manner, the writer usually messes it up by having it have no outward effect on their lives whatsoever. Yep, it doesn’t effect how people treat them, how they view themselves, or their romantic relationships. A perfect example of this comes from The Fault in Our Stars, wherein our MC, Hazel, who describes herself as odd-looking, falls head over heels for a smokin’ hot boy named Augustus (can you say cliche?). Whats more, he falls in love with her too.
Once they become a couple, everyone, and I mean everyone around them always comments on what a beautiful couple they are. The thing is, Hazel as introduced to us as looking pretty shabby, so it baffles me as to why no one would act even slightly averse to her. That may sound cruel, but if you think about it, most people who look that way are treated worse than others, and they most certainly do not get hot boyfriends. This leads me to believe that the character was actually pretty and only had low self esteem which would explain why they went around lamenting their looks. TFIOS is not alone in this issue: many other novel’s I’ve read recently have done the same thing, leading me to believe that our modern authors need to have a little more bravery when playing with our characters looks. After all, as I’ve explained above, having a character look ugly or gorgeous won’t make us like them any less. What will, however, is when the writers are dishonest about how their appearances affect their interactions. For books, the actions and inner worlds of the characters help to seal the reader’s opinion.
A book that executes this flawlessly is Jane Eyre, which just so happens to feature my all time favorite heroine, the titular Jane Eyre. Physical appearances play a centric role in this story, and from the start, Jane is neglected by her nurses and her Aunt because she is small, sickly, and plain. This is made all the more tragic by the fact that she’s an orphan, and as a woman living in 1800s, the only thing which could have possibly redeemed her would have been beauty, but sadly this was never endowed to her. Later on she becomes a governess and falls in love with her rich employer, who IS ACTUALLY DESCRIBED AS BEING UGLY. CAN YOU BELIEVE IT OH NO THE WORLD IS GOING TO END. Anyway, he in turn is being pursued by a rich and gorgeous young woman. Throughout this period of time Jane wonders if she, in all her plainess, can ever be enough to gain importance in the eyes on anyone and, in turn, she learns to honor the dignity in herself and begins to see everyone as her equal. Now THAT’S how you write a strong woman. Despite the flaws in her looks, Jane has since become my favorite book character. She has shown me that one’s worth is not diminished based on external appearances and, even if she were pretty, that would not make her any more valuable than any other character I’ve read about.
I suppose, after turning this post into a slight rant, the main call to action I wanted to get across was this: as writers, we have a responsibility to write our characters as they truly are. We shouldn’t omit or sugar-coat any of their flaws, and the same goes for their appearances. We need to be more honest about what they look like, and more honest about how the world treats people based on looks. In doing so, we will create more realistic characters and therefore better stories.
‘The mice have gnawed at it, and sharper teeth than teeth of mice have gnawed at me.”
I’ve recently taken to re-reading Dickens’ classic Great Expectations, and have become enamored all over again with the character Miss Havisham, her decaying house, and all of the tragic circumstances that have come to pass in her life. Though she’s incredibly cruel, you can’t help feeling fascinated by the extreme to which she has taken her abandonment. Also, there’s a melancholy beauty in seeing all that she has preserved decay along with her. This poem is inspired by her very character.
“Chewing”
An old wedding dress lay
In a rotting disarray
Within a mahogany chest
I spotted it there
Sewn with elegant flare
As the moths chewed at the rest
I picked it up then
And thought with a grin
How happy that it should rot
The yellowing décolletage
Was full of my sabotage
As my tears fell down with the lot
My thoughts began to fray
For the dress seemed to say
You could have been so blest
I then laughed with glee
And let the moths chew at me
As I ripped, and tore at the rest
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