Experimental: Mine

This is an experimental piece. It falls somewhere between poetry and prose and it deals with the idea of author ownership. There are things in this poem that are just for me to understand and love. I'm not trying so hard to convey a concrete idea/image to you the reader, so maybe you will not find one. Maybe you will just be carried on by the words and pictures I did use and feel a question or an emotion. Maybe you will hate it, and that's okay too.

Mine

An inventory:

Two lips indifferent blue

Eight ceiling stars soaked in glow in the dark paint

23 typos in a story about slugs

One newt or else a salamander or snake                                     I keep him in a safety deposit box

I label him with red pen

I organize her into star charts  

A decade old and I made the solar system—foam sitting on a dark matter poster board. Twelve and I made the ocean—earth fired and glazed into waves. 19 and I cannot fold an origami woman nor do I have the paper to begin. I substitute skin and follicles with a red hot itch. My face is three layers deep.

I need to peel out the sheet in the middle that fizzes like a hot tub when the jets are off. I need to soak the boiling oil out her pores. He wants ice that is cold enough to stop indifferent lips from moving or changing hues. But who do I tell.

 

Plastic stars don’t get to shine without the sun, so make paper ones instead and fill them with words that mean sounds that mean nothing unless they get heard. Wonder if you accidentally put them in place of the salamander. Wonder if safety deposit boxes are sound proof. Worry that you lost the key so far from skeleton but so deep within her bones. It landed with four of the ceiling stars, a pinch of salt, and a thumb tack.

Her banker doesn’t know the combination. Nobody has a spare. They don’t understand what is locked away. She signed the dotted line in a foreign language but it was still binding. She never meant to keep so many things.

She is not origami neatly folded. She is blown into glass at 2000 degrees and capped by the strawberry jam lid of a mason jar. Paper pokes into her edges.

Inventory:

24 typos in a story about a girl and all of them written in invisible ink.

Permission

She sits, wondering waiting

Why is it that she’s so alone

 There’s so much to see, so much to do,

 But its all empty all dust

 All vanity

Nothing is worth the loneliness. Alone

Afraid

She stands. Walks around, what is there to see? Visions she’s seen a thousand times

Pictures engraved into her lonely mind that have forever been there

Images of a life she never knew painted onto

pages and canvases

And then she is gone, 

out past her mind 

past the gaping window 

and she is flying

her fears are left behind and she is free. 

She passes people, houses, smiles and laughs.

---

Dear Reader, this is the first unfinished, unpolished, unposted draft that I found waiting for me on my return to this blog. I can honestly say I don't know what was going on in my life when I wrote it. I don't even remember if it came from my perspective or a character piece. I know I took the photo. I don't know why I didn't post it.

I make a lot of excuses, I don't have time, no one will read it...do I even want people to read it. I have a very particular thing about deleting and starting over--I don't just like to get things right, I like to get them right the first time. Maybe this is why I have never changed my Instagram username, or why I have trouble starting papers. Maybe it's why I have trouble sometimes producing art.

This year I learned a lot about permission. I learned about vulnerability and being wrong and making things messily, trying extremes. I learned that you have to let yourself be connected to your art--to own what your character did, be okay with letting people see parts of them in you, whether that character is onstage or on a page (or screen).

I like to post things that are concise, I don't like to explain (or I explain too much). I don't like to ramble. I like to be profound and artistic, but that limits me. I have been inspired by a dear friends blog--someone who is sharing life with her audience (shout-out: you know exactly who you are)--and I know I want to write. Maybe I just need to give myself permission.

I have also been inspired that I now have people in my life who I believe would read my blog (however infrequently) and who might just might care about it. And that terrifies me! But at the same time... thrills me. And I thought about it and, yes, I like it a little that people actually read my stuff--I guess maybe its selfish or showing off, but if I'm going to wait to make things until my motives are completely pure--No more art for me.

So here's whats going to happen reader,
First, I'm going to call you reader when I feel like it. I liked this idea a lot (#stolen or inspired, whichever you choose to believe) and it makes me less inclined to be profound or perfect. Plus it reminds me someone in fact might be out there!

Second, I am going to post. I don't know what, I don't know how often, but I am going to give myself permission to post rough drafts, unfinished pieces, opinions that I might contradict later, observations about life. I even want to do some videos of pieces read out-loud and link them here, but lets not get carried away.

Thirdly, I am going to ask you to continue reading. It challenges me. I might write a separate post about why later, but to have people I know reading my work--it is a good kind of difficult.

Excerpt from Grape Flavored Death

Dancing on Tile Floors and Climbing Ladders

chapter piece from my WIP, Grape Flavored Death: and other adult observations

You know that pinching aching feeling that you get when your calluses bend in at too sharp an angle? Like when you put your foot down and the skin folds, but it’s so hard it can’t flex anymore? Funny how the armor you have built up from joyful pain and sharp rocks creates something that hurts you more.

            I was walking through a half-path in the forest, cringing as my tender skin touched branches and sharp stems, and rocks so small they stuck to the sweat. Every step my face contorted as I prepared myself for the sting. “Wow, you need to build up some calluses,” my friend retorted. She had to turn her head at an awkward angle over her shoulder because she was so far ahead of me and my feet. I wanted to tell her that last week I would have been fine. I wanted to paint for her images of peeling skin revealing pink and contrasting with the unnatural blue of the nail salon’s pedicure tub. I wanted to tell her that something made me vulnerable, that I let down my guard and let an Asian woman peel away the past. I wanted to complain that all my hard work was gone and I shouldn’t have spent the forty bucks.

            But I also wanted to tell her of the bliss. The teal petals dripping along pale toenails in my prom shoes… I wanted to say how nice it felt when Maria complemented my color choice. I looked down at my mud covered feet and saw the remains of peach lingering at the tip of my big toe. It was chipped and there was dirt edging its way under the paint. I wanted that color to be vibrant and at the same time I wanted my calluses. I wanted to enjoy the forest path. But I flinched as a rock that had been persistently stuck drove deeper into the crevice of my sole.

It’s been maybe a year since then, and I can touch the bottom of my heel without being aware of any sensation. The stiff padding is white around the edges where one thin layer slowly peels, revealing hundreds of dead hard cells beneath it. I like to go barefoot outside because I know wood chips won’t hurt me and rocks can bear to scrape a few layers without pain. But sometimes I wish I had a callus shaver that could pare down a few layers.

            I was wearing heels at a dance and quickly noticed the inconvenience of an extra inches, so I tossed the nude pumps in a corner. My feet liked to feel the floor below, but it was tile held in line by lines of mortar. These valleys dip low and pull skin into a ‘u’ shape, small and uncomfortable. For the skin that can mold--that can adapt to the new experience and accept its beauty-- there is little to no pain. But the callused feet, built up to withstand the sharp reality outside becomes sharp itself, scrunching into a stubborn ‘v’. I don’t know when I began to notice it or if I ever stopped, but the dance kept reminding me of walls instead of freedom. And I wished I had painted my nails.

Now here I am climbing ladders into lofted beds, and my feet pinch sometimes. The ‘v’ digs deep into nerves and into memory, reminding me to buy a callus shaver and some teal nail polish. 

---

I've been vaguely working on a NanoWrimo project. It's a half personal half fiction piece formatted in a House on Mango Street style. This segment is based off real observations and situations, but not quite true to my perspective.

Sans the Sky

She was a tree

Planted not by a stream

But on a mountaintop

Never seen

Sans the birds

And the

Rain-heavy clouds

Which couldn’t care if they tried

If she cried

Or her roots died

Instead they were the abusers

Who used her branches

Without purchase or gratitude,

They were villains

Wandering over skies

Causing Storms that left her

Less grounded,   to die

Confounded as to—why me?

Afraid because she tilted with

Even the gentlest of winds

She was a tree

In a precarious position

With cause to fall, and

The mountaintop killed her

But with all the other trees

In forests below,

No one cared

                        Sans the sky

Who without

The permission of clouds,

Could not cry

Simple Sonnet

Twice Life Refused

As I to you believed in your ability

That fleeting power of self sacrifice…

Then I did hope yourself would you commit to me

When life itself not death- presented twice

Two lives entwined we could as lovers be

No death could o’ertake our hearts and minds

But you reject the possibility

That mortals could toge’er happiness find

As You to I confessed your inability

That e’er present ‘xcuse of mortal birth

Saying strengths were not what once you held them be

But I knew that you could not see my worth

Now I alone in solitude do live

Lacking what you once refused to give

Just a little poem

Random Reality

Frogs can’t swallow with their eyes open

Its true

Sometimes I wonder if they are afraid to swallow reality

Not having to look it in the eye makes it go down easier

In the average lifetime, a person will walk the distance of 5 times around the equator

Its true

How ironic that we should go so far and never get anywhere

Maybe we don’t like the reality that we don’t know what’s out there

Cats sleep 16 to 18 hours per day.

Its true

I wonder if they want to sleep the day all the way away

To dream in subconcious reality seems so much more appealing

It took Leo Tolstoy six years to write "War & Peace"

Its true

When you finish, you are done and have to see what you wrote

Maybe like the frog he was afraid to look

The king of hearts is the only traditional king of cards without a moustache

Its true

But what does it matter

Some truth doesn’t add much to reality, but at least it’s real

So look at it sometime.

Look at reality,

And see what you see.

Lace A. Narrator

Monday's Minute Challenge

Elena

 Maxiel twirled the mask around his finger. “It’s lovely isn’t’ it?”

“No! Stop!” Sara cried, reaching for the mask that had been her mothers.

“Oh stop now, I won’t break it, it’s much too valuable for that. I just plan to keep it. How does that sound?”

The girl kept reaching, but she was barely half the height of the tall man. Tears streamed relentlessly down her face. The mask was all the memory she had. It was all she had period. No home, no family, not even a dress but the one she was wearing.
“You’re going to be trouble aren’t you,” the man sneered. He twirled the mask one last time, its brilliant jewels flashing in the sun before he tucked it away in his coat. He smiled cruelly and grabbed Sara by the wrist.

“Ow! Stop it, help!” she cried pitifully.

Maxiel shushed her and tossed her into a rusty discarded animal cage. He slammed the door and propped up a bucket from the pile of rubbish against it. “Now…’stay,’” he laughed. The villain turned around and stroked his fingers over the mask-Elena’s mask. 14 years he had searched for it. Elena had run far away, so far he couldn’t get to her until now, after she was long dead. He wondered how she had hidden all those years, what fear must have always been in those blue eyes. He was a fool to ever have loved her…married her. Stupid emotions and their fickle nature.

Sara whimpered in the cage trying to calm the tears spilling from her crystal blue eyes. “Let me go…” she gasped, but Maxiel acted as though he hadn’t heard.

Suddenly another voice entered the alley.

“Let my daughter go, Max,” Elena demanded, her blue eyes glinting.

Lace A. Narrator

10 Minute Writing

Wow I haven't posted in awhile! Here is a little something I wrote in ten minutes. I guess you could call it free form poetry? Anyways enjoy!

If snow was silent

 Some people say that snow is soft and silent

The quiet flakes fall down and tickle noses with downy feathers, cold tendrils reaching with whispers

They say snow hushes the forests and the trees

It gives hiding to the birds and padding to tiny paws

Well if snow is silent, silence is not always what you would expect

Silence becomes the sound of eerie creaking and the twanging of a rope as fresh powdered snow flattens beneath feet padded with toe warmers and wool socks

Beneath boots heavy as anvils to the fragile piles of crystal

Silence is the slushing and sloshing of muddied white, imprinted with footsteps’ marks

Silence is the scrape and pat of mittens on domes of snow piled towards the chilly sky

If snow is silent silence is a crunch

A mighty or gradual sinking crunch as the topmost layer of sheets collapses in on the hollow pillow

It is the poof as a carefully sculpted sphere dissipates against the marshmallow protection of a winter coat

Or the cry of delight and horror as the snowball instead collides with an unprotected face

If snow is silent then silence is sound

A million sounds that all feel like a chilly day in January

Snow sounds like smiling and layers of clothing and crackling fireplaces inside

It sounds like winter storm warnings and traffic reports and closed school for the day

It sounds like delight and snowmen and it sounds like a grumbled comment about moving far away.

That’s what snow sounds like to me.

A million different sounds. But no, snow is not silent.

[][][] The Story Weaver [][][]

Monday's Minute Challenge

Aubrey walked through the overgrown brush with vigor. Her ankles were grabbed at by curly-cue vines and angry thistles, but she kept moving straight ahead toward the old ferris wheel. Her sacred spot was still untouched and she sat in the niche that was molded by her body. She looked up to the sky and the squeaky iron seats while her shaky hands tried to light a cigarette.

“One last time right?” she asked the sky. “One more time today. Perfect day right? Same day you did it? Same day you gave up?” she coughed harshly. “Better get it  over with before winter comes. Before the leaves fall off this place—everything dies. Better hurry before autumn comes. Be the first thing to fall…” she trailed off in her delusional murmuring. Her unsteady hands couldn’t seem to work the lighter, and Aubrey retaliated, shouting curse words.

Another sound echoed among the iron bars and foliage. A barking golden retriever ran underneath the leaves, whining and whimpering at the girl with curls tucked under a grey hoodie. “No, Maxwell…no! Go away! –don’t want you here…go…” he hung his head. “before winter comes, finish it.” Aubrey shook her head, unsteady and dizzy. “give up. Easy. Like mother like…”

“Excuse me?” Aubrey looked up and saw a tall man far along in years looking down at her. She immediately stood to scare him off, but her shaky legs couldn’t hold the weight. The man steadied her, “I’m sorry, I know I probably shouldn’t intrude, but I couldn’t help overhearing.”

Aubrey looked at him, wanting to cut him off, but she didn’t have anything to say.

“Listen Aubrey.” She was startled to hear her name. “I think we should talk about this first…about your mother.”

“H-how did you…?”

“Let’s go inside.” He said.

Monday's Minute Challenge

The young black-haired girl ran her thumb over the leaf and the sticky red substance coating it. Blood. She pulled its crumbling brown form from the end of the arrow. She had hit something, but whatever that something was, it was still stalking the woods she now roamed in. 

Amalia wiped the blood from her hand onto a cloak just as red.“Granny bless this place, keep me alive in…” she hadn’t yet begun her description of the tangled forest when a snap echoed behind her like the sound of china shattering in an empty hall. Her hand gripped the arrow tightly, ready to use its point as a weapon. Amalia waited until she was aware of a rushing wind and a hot breath close upon her. She turned swiftly towards it, her arrow poised for attack. She aimed for the flash of fur and teeth, but before the arrow was displaced a centimeter, she felt her arm snap back behind her.

Amalia almost cried out, but found it did not hurt. More than that, she found when she looked cautiously, that the wolf had only her sleeve in its mouth…it had not dared to bite her. It waited intently, staring at her with emerald eyes that did not blink. Though its posture appeared aggressive, it made no move to attack her. Amalia understood and dropped the  arrow. The wolf in turn released her torn red sleeve. “Why-“ she began, but a low growl from the wolf’s throat silenced her. It looked beyond her, over her shoulder at a massive shadow. Despite her cloak Amalia felt a chill run up her spine. She caught a slight reflection in the wolf’s eyes and gasped.

There was something much bigger, and much more evil in this wood. And it waited behind her.

Lace A. Narrator
300 words

Riddles and Reflections

When first I appear, I seem mysterious, but when I'm explained, I'm nothing serious...

 What am I?                                                           

I have always loved this riddle, ever since I was young. Not only because it appears in my favorite audio production at the time, The Song of the Unicorn, nor because of its later recurring appearance in what became my favorite musical, Into the Woods. Rather I loved it because of its elegance and simplicity. The fact that its answer was in its very nature, that                                the answer was its own name. 

                                                                                                         A Riddle. 

I am myself when I become my opposite...what am I?

This is a riddle I composed myself, far too vague to catch on anywhere as a mind-boggling masterpiece, but interesting enough to consider here. The answer is a reflection. When you take the opposite of a mirror image, what you actually have is the original form, which would in turn be a reflection of the "self" in the riddle- the first reflection. The original form of the riddle that I wrote was this:

 My shape becomes yours when I become my opposite. But if I become myself a second time, I will also take your form. 

This version was dumped because frankly, the other was shorter and more poetic. In this draft though, you add yourself into the equation. And now we get to the point of all this. 

    
Is it odd to think that the opposite of your reflection is you? Isn't it supposed to be that when you look in the mirror you see yourself? Or even in the Mulan-esque moments when you know you won't see yourself, shouldn't you be seeing more than the opposite? At least more that the strict contradiction of everything that you are? Well luckily mirrors and reflections have value and don't show only the opposite, save in direction. But it begs the question, how much distortion does a mirror give us? or any reflection? And how much power should something so distorted be allowed to have?

Fortunately, and unfortunately, we are the ones who decide how much power we grant to such a thing, and often times it is too much. You can read countless stories or blogs on what giving power to the society-distorted image of a perfect reflection can do to women, but I would like to focus on a different kind of reflection: the one you give off of your character and self. It can be one of the most powerful reflections, and it can easily become distorted.

Any reflection should reflect you, not the opposite of you. What you reflect to others of your character, should be who you are. We need to be careful of two things in this: We must not reflect a false self. And we should be cautious that we are not projecting ourselves in a way that is easily misinterpreted.

Often we reflect negative emotions that sometimes bounce off us, coming from other's negativity, and sometimes originate in our heart. If we do so constantly, the reflection of a moment will combine to form in our audience's eyes the reflection of a person. Any "projection" will do this. Have you seen inception? The projections were creations that came from the character's mind, and became reality (in the dream). What we project will become to others the reality of who we are. 

We also need to take heed in this area because the Bible tells us that what we have in our hearts will spillover outwardly. We may think that people are only misinterpreting what we reflect, but the "reflection" is truly going to be the overflow of our hearts, which reveals who we are, and it's important to know who you are. The false self issue is an even longer discussion, one that your English and philosophy classes might cover in studying "identity" as mine did, but this has become much more than I intended and I fear if I continue I will never finish. What I want to leave you with is just the inkling of this idea. I want to make you think, not tell you what to think or how. 

If you have any points you would like to add, criticisms or sparks to begin discussion, comment below.

  The Story Weaver                                                                                                  
  Lace A. Narrator