in appreciation

She walked out and lit a cigarette,
just one, to clear her head.
She's been trapped too long,
too wrong about everything.

I won't begrudge her anything,
not on this rainy day. It brings
a gray distress, unrest and
it hangs from her fingers, gently.

She sweeps across the quads, swiftly,
her arms crossed. Moving intently
somewhere better, a bit later,
but not quite ready to leave.

She's prettier than she believes,
yet she waits for a reprieve:
love gone sour, a regrettable hour,
a fast unraveling dream?

this is another one of those poems about someone real. i've always been drawn to people who look like they are troubled.

lucid

Dim, flickering light of yesterdays,
amiss, alone and out of the way.
Then a work of art, as if to say:
"Allay your fears, I'm here to stay."

A feverish dream. Wake up to find
a litany of "neverminds",
and sighs, and in the end
"goodbye". I'll stand to represent
the survivors, long dead inside.
Would I ever sleep again?

Don't try to commemorate;
it's a little less and much too late.
Say nothing, and everything will be
an honest, brutal summary.

this turned out much more meaningless than i thought it would be. i'm just having a lot of words pop into my head these days, not least of which because i'm trying so hard to write something else

bitter tea

Up at one and sipping bitter tea,
I'll write a poem about you and me.
So much in time, the left unsaid,
the buried truths, old ground to tread -

- "gently" said thee, not quite honestly.
What universal wisdoms will be willingly
divulged and twist the knife? I see
not much in murky misery,
so I'll keep to writing about me.

What's not tainted by you? I seek
not reprieve but grist to feed
a machine of unrelenting ennui.
Some semblance of life, maybe?

Maybe the one who's left will breathe
it in, and you, who's right, will leave.
But careful what you take with you
and leave me the loneliness I'm due.

I won't ask anymore of you, so do
as I do: forget, and learn to love anew -
- an emotion easily abused, and used,
and in the end refused.

I'll take responsibility.
What could I have done differently?

Maybe every line will be a suicide note?
On and gone, our life's footsteps wrote.
To stand along or to stand alone?
One mote of life, half-emoted tone.

And on this night, at not quite one
or two, or even none -
I'll sit here drinking bitter tea,
alone and lost in memory.

there is a certain moment i'm trying to evoke. i'm really quite proud of this one, despite how dishonest it all feels. i'm not sure where it all came from.

an encounter at one

At a half-open window,
just me and you -
a girl named Katherine
a meeting of truths.

You, a red sweater
over floral print;
Me, a white shirt and
another underneath.

Seated on the floor
on faded blue jeans,
overlooking a field
of lights: a city's scene.

We talk and I laugh
and you smile.
Seated together, alone
for a while.

You point out to me
the highway lights
and General Jones' Armory
bright in the night.

I said I couldn't see
very well in the dark
So you took off your glasses
to see the splotch marks

of orange and gold
and white,
a gesture I took
to heart -

I wanted to ask you
to come home with me
for the view and point out
what I couldn't see.

An encounter at one
and soon parted,
soon to be none,
nothing, really, started.

this was absolutely true, name included. i will admit that with no reservations. it was a nice moment, worthy of more than this incompetent piece of writing. but i tried my best.

silence induced

Left of the center and not alone.
The streets they meander away from home.
The things that we look at to set the tone,
more noise than light, more hidden than known.

From out of the blue a vision renewed,
from the depths of shadows a voice resumed,
breaking the quiet that lately assumed,
truncating the silence long since induced.

Hold on to the recent and not the news,
forget the regrets and the ends left loose.
A line left dangling and never to use,
forget the upset and the anger, the blues.

very random collection of words. i think the main point is how quiet is something that is very unusual in our lives, even though we tend to take it for granted. it's something that we try very hard to create for ourselves at times, and then we get scared by it. should we be more afraid of what's breaking the silence? well surely this isn't really about that. it just seems like a good justification.

Underground

I'll make time to redefine
the meaning lost in translating.
I'll make time to realign
my thoughts to your misgivings.

The long and short of it
will never be said.
So many better ways
to keep it in your head -
keep it all dimly lit.

In a place small enough
for both of us to see
that we are both present,
but not to you or me.
It's easy to be strangers
in a crowded room,
another person to push
your own way through.

this sounds somewhat awkward. it's also highly banal. the question is whether i keep writing about the same things because i can't get it out of my head, or whether i can't get it out of my head because i think about them in this way.

there was something very amusing about the moment that inspired this. oddly, the one thought that really stuck from that really awkward moment: i AM really quite a bit taller. it made it so much easier to avoid any form of eye contact, which would have, i suppose, made some kind of gesture necessary. fortunately, none occurred, and all is well in the world of new found strangers.

i think it's really uncanny that there was a small gathering of people not 20 feet away from me that essentially made up the shortlist of people i wish i had never met. now that is clearly a bit harsh, but unfortunately not altogether untrue. and there were obviously other people in that conflagration that i don't actually know/care about. but still.

this is clearly material that belongs to the other blog. that said, i think this one piece of writing got rid of most of the people that motivated my self-censorship. but just in case, i think i shall keep this here.

lucy running across the court

Lucy, not her real name, sat two tables away at the cafe. I wonder whether she noticed me at all. It's the third time we're at the cafe together. I use that word, 'together', loosely. Maybe she didn't notice the other two times either. Was she here all the time? Or can this be interpreted as fate?

She was with someone. A friend or something more? Perhaps just an acquaintance who's really good at making her laugh. I'm tempted to remove my headphones, just to hear what she sounds like, laughing. We've been in the same class for 8 weeks now, and I have never heard her voice. Who is he, and how did he get that privilege?

What does it matter? I only fall in love with her every time she stepped into that classroom on the 4th floor, 3 minutes late. In my mind, her colorful coats hid the profound loneliness that only I could see in her eyes. She wore 3 rings, one for each boy who broke her heart; in my mind, she hopes to collect that all important one on the 4th finger of her left hand before the other fingers are full.

I look up again and steal another glance. She's playing with her coffee cup. I play with mine, popping the lid off. The seam of the cup is stained yellow, much like how I imagined her fingers with be from smoking one too many cigarettes. She only smoked for the lack of something to do, so that she would refrain from picking at the scabs of her emotional wounds. I've never actually seen her smoke.

She's putting on her coat to leave. She's in my favorite one, the red. Running her fingers under her wavy hair to move the ends out from under her coat, she says her good byes. She's smiling. I look down at my notes before she notices me staring.

When I look up again she was gone. Out the corner of my eye, I see her, half-running across the courtyard. I wonder where she was running to. Perhaps she was running away. Perhaps she was just running. I will never ask.

this whole exercise turned creepy. suffice to say the above doesn't come anywhere close to my actual thoughts. i admit, however, that lucy is based on a real person, and up until not very long ago, i didn't know her real name.