Panic

And it's suddenly struck home once again--

The arrow into the heel of Achilles.

I'm violable, I'm nothing special, I'm real.

Thud.

Amphibian arrowheads sinking into my softest skin

Pry open my thief-knotted secrets,

Rendering me as pale and unarmored as the fabled beloved

shining, suddenly, with no Hephaestus to hide behind;

My glass wall is spear-shattered and my mind is left staggering

Across bedspreads and library stairs,

Miming the spastic flight-dance of a turtle with no shell.

It's too far to the sea.

Lying in the field I'm waiting for the gulls,

Welcoming coyotes,

Gathering sand.

Weekly Writing Prompt 2: Reaching

(thelotuseater.com)

Sitting alone at night, I can feel you beside me in the prickling silence, feel your hands ghosting over my skin. I look to you and the world dissolves around me, narrowing, simplifying, concentrating around your figure. My eyes see nothing else.

Love fluctuates like mercury; as the summer fades to autumn I find myself beginning to doubt your solidity. Anxious, I try to wait it out. Petrified, I can do nothing else; I am frozen--longing, hoping, wishing for your return--and when I close my eyes I can feel you beside me, never close enough.

The land is bare and dead, its beauty now lying in desolation... a stark contrast to the joyous vitality of summer. I wait ever-longer, never truly believing you'll come back to me, but far too terrified of solitude to leave.

Rough Silk

Ribbons, ribbons, ribbons; my hair, your fingers, my face. Laced between our outspread arms, silken cords of what-nows and I-wonder-ifs stretch taut through cellophane silence that freezes our limbs and stifles our words. Eye-to-eye and breath-to-breath, our lungs are paralyzed in empty anticipation of speech; we are waiting waiting waiting on the verge of confession, petrified of refusal but hanging heavy and unsteady on fraying bands of wanting. Your eyes twitch with unspoken questions as I stand-- colder than I ever meant, than I ever wanted to be-- with a face that leaves no room for queries, but a gaze that begs answers. Plaiting strands of barbed wire and organza across your shoulders, I weave patternless purposeless tangles in a fool's attempt at intimacy, wanting only to find clarity and comfort in the opacity of crumpled ties, in burgundy ribbons across your spine.

Bare

I haunt the sharpest place in the world, where the trees ring with astounding clarity before my eyes, but slip, shivering, out of focus at the edges of my view; they slide into a vast, unknowable darkness of rustling wings and shifting shadows. The curling smoke spiraling tantalizingly upward carries abjection, remorse, anxiety to the sky, leaving behind only being. Let the fire burn, oxidize your raiment, expose yourself-- let it go. Forget to remember. Strip down to your bones; stand calcified in the omnipresent, omnipotent blackness, close your eyes. One, two, three hundred heartbeats pass before you regain sight, eyes open to the ever-watching, ever-patient trunks. Hopelessly dwarfed, your eyes turn upward to the great velvet bowl of the sky, as it sinks slowly downward to envelop you... swim amongst the stars, love, and condense, brighten; let yourself burn.

I'll watch from down below, ossified in my ring of stones, roots pushing ever farther, holding fast-- the waxen fingers on my weary boughs reaching, reaching as you shine ever-distant: cosmic and unreachable.

When there's nothing left to burn, come back for me-- inflame me, engulf me in your silvery conflagration. Constellations, we'll fly.

Travel

We're on a train in the night,
accelerating with such a solid relentlessness
it sometimes seems we'll never be able to stop,
we'll just barrel on through the coaldust darkness forever,
ghosting through the skeletons of ironworks
and the shuddering bones of dying industry,
watching civilization level and smother the landscape,
watching flora and fauna slowly but inexorably claim it back,
watching the atmosphere oxidize the shining lines of the city's arteries,
watching each capillary turn to rust,
watching the blood rattle tiredly on.
Bleed it out, bleed it out, bleed it out.

This is obsolete

We are floating on a picnic table in the sky beneath a harlequin moon. We drift out over the edge of the precipice, singing, laughing, mendaciously carefree. Every smile condenses a little more-- the moon is twitching, leering down from the clouds, the silhouettes of sedentary ghouls. The trees are melting as the air begins to hum, sounds dripping past hearing, into pure feeling. I stave off jealousy with denial, but you are phosphorous. The night is vibrating as I pull you ever closer, eyes shut tight against your plurality, against nothing wrong, against everyone else. I hide truths in lines of ruby down my back, absorbing, mending, darning all the loose threads in the stories I tell you with a lunar grin. The sky ripples disconcertingly as the crew of our picnic table/boat/zeppelin shifts uneasily. A lion roars through the reeds and I shiver with wanting, with waiting, with never-having. I steel myself to take what I can, give nothing back, and smile like the moon.

This is old

She stalks ever nearer, raindrop footsteps on the soaking grass, shadowdancing, cloyingly coy, unreachable but never quite unsensible. Her taunting tainting eyelids, dark with laughing, shining with flirtatious sidestepping, hide nothing; I don't need to see your eyes to know I'm being played with. Roadmap toes caressing the mud, she waits to run. I tie on my blindfold and give chase.

Insomnia

I'm mesmerized by fireworks and thunderclouds, lying on a sinking island in a swamp of navy and sepia, alert as you sleep, crushed, failing, falling as you rise. Overcome, as always, by hesitation, there's something hooked behind my solar plexus that won't let me go.

Caught unanchored in the center of a counter-current cyclone, I'm adrift. Catch me, my cavity; collapse.
Pure lymph, pure ache, purely hollow.
Collapse.

Cold

We are traveling forever, crushing the ground with fibers so much more efficient than gears, sanguine levers greener than cylinders, feet more silent than wheels.

We run endlessly across Antarctica, and the only sound is our breath freezing into glittering clouds of ice.

We laugh soundlessly, and the night sparkles.

We were turning cartwheels, barefoot in the snow

It was a year ago today, though I'm sure you don't remember, that you offered me your gridlocked graphite heart stapled between a plaintive fold of green. It said everything I'd denied in our twisted fingers and heavy heads; everything I refused to look in the face drilled defiantly into my ears. Maybe I was stupid, maybe I've always been far too literal, but I made myself believe it in my frenzied eyes and the lines down my back.

Yeah, I'm pathetic--yet I still don't know whether I'm regretful... but everything is emptier than ever before.

Acres

everyone lives trapped in a revolving industrial garage with five-ton caution-striped hydraulic doors.

--

there's a black hole in the rearview mirror
as we drive out of nothing, into nothing
the world materializing fifty feet ahead
and dissolving as we pass.
we exist in a circle of definition
going nowhere at fifty-seven miles per hour.

--

We walk along fallow fields, jumping marshes and wading through reeds. We walk along the hedgerows under a leaden sky, into tangled apple trees whose withered fruits lie bleeding and frozen in the mud. All the trees have claws, here. Fingers reach across the pond, eating its icy casing, dyeing it aquamarine, dyeing it blackish and brackish as it starts to rain, and the pool becomes a drumskin, every drop a ring of sound, rippling into our eyes and our ears. We follow the memory of deer up the hill, into true woods. The moss and the ferns are rebels, survivors, verdantly alive in the monochrome scene. Our boots crunch down the slope, over stream and through brambles that tear our skin and clutch at our hair, onto a landscape laid belly up, open to the mercy of the sky... I wander in a daze toward a fallen cloud, a bit of still-frozen snow...? Through someone else's eyes I see the dead goose, its saline feathers sooty and rubied, strewn across the clover. Ornithinian ribs tear at the leaking sky, the ruined head tucked under one mangled, outflung wing. I sing a lament as I walk. I can hear the hunter in the woods; I am dressed all in brown. I sing as I capture the tiny hooves, scattered limbs, the pile of skin, the empty shell, the head, still erect. I sing in the sunlight to the open sky, to the strewn feathers and whitest down, the tangled intestines, the empty eyes and crushed beak, the crumpled feet. The shots ring, ever nearer, and I flinch; I wander, stagger, and weave; I scatter.

Drift

a magnet with no opposing poles
pushing closer and pulling away
caught in a tangle of electricity
spinning, spinning
with no direction at all.
a ship sails a cerulean sea
I watch an island through a spyglass.
stranded, not for lack of canvas
but the wind, listless
spirals out and down
and carries me nowhere.
bruised by crystal and brass
the compass never rests, these days.
as sable spreads outward
from lids heavy with thought
dripping with apology
drenched in regret.
lashes whip the room
freezing to stillframe
every smile
every kiss.
stomachs acidify
my basest thoughts
so I can stand here, neutral.
yes, I can look you in the eyes
and not even blink.

Wandering/Wavering

the highway is beautiful at night
a ribbon of flowing lights
mesmerizing
and I lose myself in the drumbeat
drowning in the bassline
pretending it's your heartbeat.
consciousness flowing through
the empty passenger seat
dissipating out into the air.
it is twenty eight degrees outside
and I hardly notice.
I'm eighteen miles ahead
and seven months behind
walking the razor edge of ambivalence
as you slip in and out of focus
flying past
lingering, maybe
but only for one grasping moment
so I'm left again with only air to hold.
you're my cloud
but I haven't found the sun yet
what is it that burns you away?
I'm sorry that I can't feel your vapor
waiting for the rain
or another sunny day
I'm assaulted by mist and fog.
she twines her hand in mine
and I...
twitch.
what is this silence?
I patch your holes with scraps of plaid
but you're wearing so thin
and I'm almost out of thread.
weave me tartan from your hair, love
it's brazen, oceanic
just the thing for mending this
unless I'm illiterate
unless I'm deluding myself
into thinking I could read the words
you traced upon my arms
so I'll sit here calmly erasing you.
I know you didn't mean to kill my balance
but I'm tumbling.
if she catches me
does that make her mine?
alternately pushing and pulling
it's go limp or tear apart.
I stare out my spiderwebbed pane
with mendacious clarity
hoping the shards hold
always just a few more weeks.

Refusal/Denial

My brain batters at the walls of my skull like the silvered moths beating themselves to death against the window pane, confusing my flickering candles for the spiraling stars. It wants out it wants out it wants out I want out. All the colors on the walls have begun to laugh at me as they melt and meld and drip down to the baseboards, pooling around my shaking ankles as I stand unmoving, squeezing my eyes tight against the tiny insect legs scratching at my bones, the wings thudding against the lenses. Open your eyes, open your eyes, lift your head and stare the world in the face before they make a cocoon of your head. Your mind is already being spun to silk. Force them out your pupils until the room is filled with the frantic vibrations of a million feathered wings. Never speak a word, they'll only steal them away from your cracking lips, just cry until their agitation tears the walls to splinters and the colors run to dust. Cling tight to the taciturn trees, hide your shivers in their branches until the wind dies.

Attraction

if you wanted this
you should have picked me up before I melted into the sidewalk
it pulled me in
as I swirled my fingers through the cracks
they pulled me under
my nerves tangling with the roots of the weeds
I reached in
the clay soft, quiet, choking
I sank down
floating gently in the silent world of tiny worms
suspended
dark behemoths rising beneath me
I fell towards the sky
as the cracks widened with every step
you pulled
viscous resistance, apathetic limpness
pulled me out
the sun was blinding, but you were there
holding me
closer than ever, after it burned
I pushed you away
cold and dripping, caked in concrete
don't want this
let me sink back into the sidewalk
I'll hear you
the echo of your boots on the grey cement
reverberates
I'll know when you're near me
but please, just let me go

Spin

Floating in an effervescent sea of thistledown
Rocked by your infectious, fevered pulse
Washed by waves of black ribbon
That extract all thought
All emotion
All sense of being
Leaving only a body
In an ecstasy of pain
Reaching, reaching, reaching
Never quite enough.
Jumping, always waiting
For you to catch me in your brittle arms.
You never will, will you?
Not until I've already splintered on the smoking ground.
Twist me out from your spindled tongue
Or send me shooting up your spidered veins
Make me a part of something beautiful
Anything that isn't me.

Nerves

It's a wave of sensation that begins in your feet, ringing your ankles and shooting in cold prickling spikes of flame up your legs, pulsing against your shins with every stride, settling as angry embers in your joints, sending waves of shivers racing up your body as your blood distills and the sweat begins to drip. It's a lithographic assault, the Gaea revenge, a disease you have to learn to counter or ignore to survive. It's not your place to protest, you, as transgressor, must accept this penance as your due. Laugh as you embrace the fire shooting up your limbs. It's an invasion, as waves of heat wash down your throat and shocks, shivers radiate out, pushed back farther and farther with every desperate gulp. Push your emotions out of your fingers and your feet to attain perfection in emptiness more beautiful than the purest ecstasy. Hold it off as long as you can, let your mind rest in the cold, clean bliss of untormented logic. Hold it off as long as you can, cling fast to your numbness... but your feet always pull it back, your bones are greedy, as the color spirals, rushing back up and around, encasing your skeleton in a riot of feeling and warmth. It takes another to push it down into your bones, stop it writhing through your skin, shuddering through your fingers and pulling at your eyes, rushing through your ears and washing away your focus and sense of self, of reality. It pulses manicly, in and out, in and out, eroding your skin and your apathy.

Failed Attempts

I am an emotional sink, a lightning rod, if you will
I draw in the raving and hysterical and shudder their shrieks down my bones
Twisting my entrails out and jolting my nerves in an electric ecstasy
Too blunt for effective attraction
Intended catharsis still doesn't work
I'm sorry I don't know how to hold you together when you fall apart on me
In the middle of the night when you're besieged on every side
And the persistent thud of the ballista and the sickening rumble of powdered masonry
Makes me drown myself in stale chocolate
Laced with nostalgia
It doesn't really help, but I do like to pretend
That bitterness cancels itself
Rather than building on every regret
Every reminiscence
Do walls hinder or help, here?
Should I render myself defenseless before you
Or would a strong solid facade be better?
As much as I believe in honesty
I don't think omitting how shaky I am
Really counts as lying
Does it?
I just wish I knew how to hold you together
Without lying to you completely...
Trust me, I wish
I wish it could work
It would do us both good, I think
At least for a time
But I just can't risk that
It's too much
Too much
The stakes have risen far too high for this
I don't care if the shrapnel collides with my body
A shield may be all it's good for anyhow
So I'll catch your pieces, love
And put them together as best I can with bits of wire and
Binding twine
Scraps of ribbon
Don't worry, love, no needle.
But my hands are far from deft
I'm sorry
I'm sorry
I'm so very sorry
I wish I knew what to say to you
But everything is mud, now
All my clarity... did I ever have any?
I wish I could remember how I used to handle crumbling minds
Instead of how hypnotizing you smelled...
Why can't I go through and erase all that?
I really don't want to remember you anymore
I was so much more content when I didn't know how lonely I was
But I don't understand
I'm... I guess I'm glad
But I don't understand why...
Hell, I don't understand any of this
That's why I run away and up
Into the wings of the night on fire
Into the spectral current far above your uncaring head
I walk up her fingertips
Crown my head in flames
Because I can't believe you anymore.

Stumble

I meet you there and enjoy a few sweet minutes as we sit draped and entwined and I condense into, finally, a real person, concrete and heavy, and I bask in the luminous lucidity that has found me at last... but then you shove cheaply off and drag me away and up and out and down with you and everything that I am evaporates and my reality fades out like the words you wrote so lovingly in the sand when we were seagulls and danced in the razor-blade grass, not caring about the cuts ringing our calves or the bruises blooming aubergine and aquamarine on our bare sun-baked thighs. I ran away from you on a train in the darkness, and as we roared through the night I laughed to be so free of you, but I disembarked on a minefield hung with glittering spun-sugar lights and clouds of chlorine gas over a deceitful marsh of creme brulee and sofa cushions. You lied to me, to all of us, and then slowly slid your shining knife between my ribs, smiling sweetly all the time, and when you shower me with your false concern I will laugh in your face like the madman I am so surely becoming. You don't even notice, you just think I'm laughing at some stupid joke, or just for the thrill and the joy of being alive, you've never been able to tell when I hate you. Maybe you just think I'm as blind as you are, that I don't see your hands, enticing behind your back, as you stand far too close for innocence and lie with your smiling hopeful eyes at us for fear of losing the people you say you love the most. Pray to whatever you hold dear, darling, because every day you're pushing harder, testing the sinews that we've got tied around our swollen ankles, and they won't hold much longer, I'm warning you; your horrible mistakes, your greed, your complaints, your utter disregard for what anyine else wants or needs, your incredible, mindboggling inability to understand how anyone but yourself is feeling have set off an apocolyptic collection of alarms-- the flashing lights and air-raid wails have got everyone else hiding terrified underground, wrapped in itching blankets with their eyes tightly shut, but you don't notice a thing as you stand on your alabastor pedestal and tell yourself you are raining benevolance upon us, the unwashed masses, but we just shake our heads as we open our umbrellas against your acid, and slowly walk away from your philistine face turned in rapture toward the sun. I leap down and sail on a moth's painted wings across the blueberry sky to settle in your virtual arms even as they fade away and I am left to stare blankly at a cold and unresponding emptiness where I long to see your love flash before me so I can forgive my unresponsiveness and the way I faded away from your linked arms and onto the train in the night. I ramble rumblingly on as my head splits open and forces my body into the sleep of the terminally passive-agressive overthinking psychotic pansy.

I am an island.