Yesteryear with Bowie

*By lingering on who you were, you prevent who you have become

A pot calls the kettle black. The pot wants to take it back. One can’t find more wrong in anything like they can with the past. It’s so reliable. And things that happen in there—only happen in your mind. 

Daggers

Although I am a writer, I have nothing to write. Perhaps I’ve pumped dry the wells of the past. I’ve grown weary of my past as a writer. Perhaps it can serve as the subject for someone else’s poem.

The present is simple and here. It is almost too simple to be written about. At the very least, too fleeting. Besides, as compared to the past, it can be controlled and manipulated right NOW, adding that much more pressure to achieve and succeed. 

Write that poem, idiot!

Alas, the present bores me. So naturally, I’ll turn to the future. Pregnant with dreams, possibilities and…other boring things like that. I’ve lost interest in time, I think. Each mode, moment, state inspires me to put two letter Xs on my eyes and take a nap for a while. But, I must find something in all this. Some beauty here [to write on]. [dangling parti....who cares]

Ephemera

Borges, someone told me, realized his own mortality when entering a gigantic library filled with thousands upon thousands of books and suddenly put the fact together that he cannot possibly live long enough to read all of them. 

What does this have to do with anything? I should fucking read more. But I don’t like Borges. 

Hide and Peek

I suppose there’s a ball. One that I could crawl into. I wonder, however, if this tale entails my body’s distortion, because I just don’t feel up for it. 

Your breath

 I spend my nights creating tomorrow’s hangover. 

I spent all of my 20s waiting for someone to call me. And in my waiting, I kept leaving. The time that passes hits me like bad breath and my reaction is the same: turn the other way. 

Taming

Regrettably, inspiration escaped hours ago. But I, being the stubborn fighter that I am, picked up my pen (sword, bla) to attempt the amazing.

I wonder why I’m scared. Love. I try to convince myself I don’t believe in it, nor in its calculated numbing tendencies. That’s what love does, or at least the notion of it; love makes everything better. Before it makes everything worse.

But, I feel it now. Suddenly. Thrusting towards me. His hands are a companion. His hands I want to hold. One would think I’d cry more. He’s definitely one to cry over. He is magic.

I will allow him to penetrate into every drop of existence I can possibly tolerate. Says the shrew. But I don’t want to fall in love with him. The departure would be too painful. Love is fleeting. Is this wise or ignorant? Am I hurling the cup of life to the ground? Shattering it intentionally? Have I, as the old knight would disappointingly testify, chosen poorly? Is the unexamined life not worth living or the unlived one. Precautions can sometimes ruin the beauty that could be. 

Descartes

The more one thinks about something the more they understand it.
-Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man

...and yet

Analysis is Paralysis
-Something I heard once and continuously say to calm myself down

...and yet

The unexamined life is not worth living 

...and yet

Ignorance is Bliss

Enter: lemniscate

There are No Stupid Questions

I scared off another one and currently berating myself for my incessant need to know what’s going on. Instant replays, flashbacks, split seconds and detailed play-by-plays are what drive me to the brink of asking this question. For fear of being led on and the fact that I’m super confused and it took this guy 9 texts to ask me out, I asked.

Instead of berating myself for inability to ‘go with the flow’ I must accept instead the fact that I will never be able to ‘go with the flow’ and the only time I’ve ever come close is when I have the assurance of his interest. Ten years of dating and I just figured it out…yet I still feel that I know nothing. 

Rivers in Egypt

It isn’t surprising that a month has gone by since my last entry. It feels unnatural to do anything ever since I decided…that I had a drinking problem. I suppose it’s incorrect and misleading to recognize this problem in the past tense. I have a very real present tense problem. I can’t only have one glass of wine yet I assume, at the check stand every night, which it is feasible. And then I sneak the bottles out so that my amazingly centered and drink-free boyfriend remains unaware. But I know that he knows. We both pretend. So, in the end, I hope I remember how happy I was on in my last sober entry and that it could have been the start of a truly beautiful thing. 

Tryst

Nine hours after the first one of our pack got married. Depressing. Not for the newly married but for the hopeless spectator who views love with the utmost skepticism. The love that my friend feels for and receives from her husband shows that I can at least see a semblance of good in marriage. I just don’t think I’d be happy if they were my nuptials. I can’t hang around one person for too long—we’d mutually annoy each other to no end. I don’t feel inclined to fall into this institution; certain people are good mothers, while more than the majority are capable of bearing children. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. And what are the odds that you and that kid will be complementary to the husband/man in your life?

A friend earlier tried to emphasize the errors of my perspective arguing that I should get married as “everyone is put on this planet for a reason.” "Yeah," I replied, "mine is to write books." That shut him up. I guess my priorities weren't what he expected. 

Felicity

Somehow I’ve changed and I’m skeptical believing that it’s for the better. For a girl with no expectations, I seem to get disappointed fairly easy. Getting a PhD meant redefining myself, and showing that person off…whoever she is…in whatever light I chose. Why didn’t I realize the absurdity in this expectation? Why did I want to ‘redefine’ myself when I had never actually been defined at all. I still have no idea who I am, ironically less so than before. 

Cutting

“Deafening my pillow with the screams I throw into it.” A perfect way to begin a poem, I thought. But poetry has become an intimidating word. I once leaped to embrace it, not caring where I fell but I now fear it with all my life. I do to the words now what I am guilty of doing to myself: force beauty out of nothing.

Fiery passion, which once filled pages and books with a passionate fury, couldn’t even light a cigarette now. Rhymes are for nursery tales…and I’m the jaded scholar…tired of poems because I’ve read too many. I can no longer take heed to dactylic meter, nor do I care much for alliteration. What was art to me is now hanging in “drafty museums.” Plath? How fitting, yet not fitting at all.

My verbal embrace has lost its edge. It used to cut. I would scream—not into pillows, but unto paper. Blank, hollow, virgin sheets of paper—impregnated by my pen. Is this what happens to old whores? They fade away? Forever? Perhaps this is the beginning. Perhaps I’ll take control of what’s mine again.