poems and writings, aesthetic fragments

[fiftybirds]

i like to write. i've never been confident enough in my abilities to produce long works or fully realize my ideas but i've written various short things which i'd like to share with people, i think. i try to capture momentary feelings and inchoate insights. i like rhythm and assonance, my poems should be read aloud or in your head for full effect. poem for dead bird on roof the sparrow who dared to dart out from its dense flock of wingèd particulates plunged through the bright air towards foreign gateways (as we gaze at Nature, so it gazes at us) — the glass-guarded kingdoms, straightsided and smoothcurved, space sorted and ordered: wings sliced wind like water, whipped after the crystalline, — and crashed, cracking birdbones, its course brought to crass halt — curved flight dropped vertically, dead body tumbled down onto sunbleached shingles and softly, in lawngrass, landed with quiet thud; languidly lingered, bereft of its bird-being, until swept away. poem for dead mouse by side of road “Ｃａｔｓ ｋｉｌｌ ｂｙ ｓｅｖｅｒｉｎｇ ｔｈｅ ｓｐｉｎｅ ａｔ ｔｈｅ ｎｅｃｋ” raindrops fall on grainstalks (flowers on gay graves) the cold in your bones drifts listless like alcoves rotted shutters, roofs dart stark against the sky (grey and red-grey) the dust of cigarettes drifts placidly the bones soon rotted through to woody cores the eyes that droop to feet on dampened concrete, where greybody squirms paw-pinioned to the pavement – squelching snap – falls still. the feet keep on. the eyes float up back to the clouds and bones of empty homes. the grainstalks by the highway sway and flowers wilt. poem for obligate lovers (i think this one is really awful, but i posted it because i think people will be able to relate to it) i've been on nightdrives with doctors' daughters in new cars, felt the cold of the floors of their great empty houses. winter fog, phosphoresced by the streetlights, hung low when I walked home. next morning, the ravine filled up with sunlight: the stark rows of rooftops were gilded with white gold. the snow fell in drifts. your fingers, who yearned to feel warmth like bare treelimbs, traversed the blank surface of my skin as lightly as foot glides on ice, by the fence in the backyard of the abandoned house, when the wind sliced us through. your eyes gazed beyond me, at mazes of fences and househusks and pavement and grey woolen sky. if there is love, it hides in the corners of parking lots, down long aimless stretches of road through the dead land, or out the fogged window of your childhood bedroom. what's gained from the presence of another is absence: the song of the heart rings most cleanly in silence. convalescences (excerpts) these are selected verses from a 16-verse (!) poem i wrote while hospitalized last year. it's very self-indulgent as i was writing for the sake of entertaining myself - frankly i find this poem embarassing - but it has more of a formal structure and is probably more accessible to most people than my other poems. i have edited the verses to maintain the rhyme scheme of the original poem (last line of verse rhymes with first line of next verse). On sheets of stainless steel pool languid flesh: a bone-spire twists along its slender scaffold of transparent plastic tubing, and the bedsheets (geometrically arranged, Platonic white) hang in disorder, linen cloth besotted with feculent effluvia -- and oh! What permeates the architect's great pride, these grand and spotless panes of tempered glass, but reverberating cries from far below, the hungry seagull shrieking in his flight? I lay beneath a paltry sheet last night, in white-walled rooms (which ones, I can't recall -- there were a few). Awaiting fate's decree, I gazed out at somnolent suburb-streets, the sky a backdrop, comfortably blank, and streetlights, beacons radiating warmth and beckoning towards a path whose end by skilful human hands was artificed, while flickering fluorescent lights above made figure-like the features of my face. A dreadful drawing's easily erased: the architect destroys and builds again. Whatever hands may craft, those hands may heal: the multifarious tools of the earth are malleable, and bend to our requests to mend material errors of our making. But what of those strange faults which, unbidden, surge from visceral depths and drown the peaks, those infinitely high and sunlit mountains of Freedom and of Essence, in thick blood? Do what you will to stem the swelling flood. Erect your barriers of metal, glass and high-tech polymers. Intimidate the beast with your pedantic mastery of the atom -- how in school, you cut out a pig's heart, poked it with your scalpel, laughed, compared it to conceptual diagrams, and, satisfied, strode off into the hall, blind to your damp, dark, churning body-caverns wherein contagion and its coven-mates conspired. So waves of poisoned blood snuffed out the fire that coursed throughout the causeways of your being; innumerable parasites now breed in each warm and stagnant crevice; as a vine that's overgrown suffocates a tree, disease invades and takes up residence: the coruscating landscape of the self with fractal peaks infinitesimal and infinitely large - its topography is lost, and lysed, in atavistic surge. My lungs are tied in knots. Hoarse words emerge -- "more morphine?" -- and the portly nurse obliges. The black-blood torrent twists along its course of veinways, architectures before man, and meanwhile washes over me in waves, coating me in febrile blood and then receding, leaving bleached upon the shore dried seabird bones, a dessicated husk, through which the air shoots sharp like needles, and the sterile sun irradiates, in its incessant glare. A printed plastic band enwreaths my arm, revealing my name, my date of birth, my allergy to walnuts -- all that's relevant, emotional errata filed away conveniently, and somatic clutter abstracted down to numbers and a name -- "So the problematic code can be snipped out, the pencil-sketched deformities erased," the doctor sniffs. He leans his back against an ivy-obscured window, smooths his coat. Nature proliferates. Its vulgar growth, growth of sunflowers and the growth of weeds, from butterflies' miraculous rebirth down to the sludging-through of soil worms or gluttonous exorbitance of microbes who feed upon the beating blood of men -- its growth explodes out from the central point and branches off in darts and curlicues, with endless knottings and encirclements, an ever-spreading ivy, one and multitudes. If a straight line sketched on paper seems, when viewed, similar to maple branch or human arm, it's pareidolia and nothing more. The force, the endless pushing-through and breaking-out of Nature's power, like a waterfall which gushes fervently, and when it meets its reservoir, bursts into crystalline fragments of itself, each fragment whole -- this force will never be contained within a sterile room, nor doctor's calipers. Yet within the drowning body-world there stirs a nature of its own, in opposition to the nature of disease, its violent spurts that dissolve the order of the blood and bone: a scintillating core of brightest light, a heatless fire at the heart of being, that propagates and surges up against the force of illness, spreading with the essence of unearthly Springtime: birth and purity and health, eternal convalescence, breathing with the rhythm of the Earth, becoming one: a parting-gift from Nature to her son. alright so those are my poems; here are some longer things. i have spoilered them because if i posted all of them this page would be very long. i don't like to write long things generally but i do it sometimes. i left the first one unspoilered so you can get a sense of what my more organized writing is like. agony, ecstasy, and tedium the thing about having intense experiences, whether they're intensely bad or intensely good, is that it shifts the scales by which you measure your life – so that your baseline lies no longer at the centre of the graph but somewhere above or below, and greater depths of despair or heights of exorbitance are opened to you. so everything's thrown off balance and you're left drifting around in a liminal space bereft of meaning and direction, awaiting the next event that'll hopefully hurtle you back towards the spot you once occupied. and if it doesn't, what does it matter? you're lost already. if life were a movie, you'd cry out in agony and plead to God for relief with blood pounding in your throat and claws tearing at your chest – then, spent, you'd collapse on the floor and awake to baptismal sunlight streaming through your apartment window onto your placid skin, fresh and newly-formed. but life's not a movie and instead you lie motionless in bed while vague animal discomforts squirm around your viscera and you stumble through suburb-streets in autumn and stare at the pavement. and you walk and you walk and you walk and the pain in your legs isn't pain anymore because all you can recall of pain is its dictionary definition. there is knowledge but not knowing. the irreducible light-burst that cries out “this exists!” is extinguished. the drive to go and do and move forward and run towards has left you. and so you walk for miles, never going anywhere. eric's story this is the very beginning of a story i was going to write about a schizophrenic boy in a mental hospital. i wrote it while i was in a mental hospital, although i am not a schizophrenic boy. i never finished it because i couldn't figure out where to go with it, and also because i got discharged from the mental hospital, but i wrote this, and i like some parts of it. there was more to this actually but i lost it somehow. Spoiler for click here to read: “Do you know why the birds don't sing around here?” That's what I asked her the day she arrived. I leaned in close to her, leaned close so that the angles of my face fit into the crook of her neck and shoulders like they do in the old paintings in the books in the library, and I asked her the question I ask everyone who comes here: do you know why the birds don't sing around here? So, did she know why the birds don't sing around here? No, she didn't. She just looked at me with one eyebrow up and she muttered “I don't know” and walked away. But I knew from the shapes of her face and the way she walked as she walked away from me – she walked softly – that she really knew, even if she didn't know that she knew it. Then it was dinner, and dinner was three slices of roast beef with mashed potatoes and peas, and apple juice. While I was eating it I kept thinking about her and the birds, and it was like the meat slices were really delicate bird wings and the mashed potatoes were as soft as the softness of her walk, and they serve that meal once every two weeks, and every time I eat it I still feel the same thing. Then I went to bed, and I slept well, and had many dreams. The next day I knew I had to ask her about the birds again. I was just waiting for an opportunity, and that opportunity came when I saw her sitting alone in the break room and looking out the window at the oak tree, the tall one on the east side. So I walked over to her, slowly, and she didn't notice me at all. The light coming through the window made her look like a silhouette. It made her seem unreal, like when you hold a piece of paper up to a light, and that made her beautiful. So I knelt down next to where she was sitting and I said to her: “You don't hear any birds, do you?” She jumped up, and her body went stiff for a moment like it was frozen, like her blood had turned to ice and was holding her body up on icy scaffolds, but then she sat down again. This time she didn't walk away. She looked at me, right in the eye, with her dark brown eyes and said, hesitating, “No – uh, I don't think so.” “And you know why, right?” “No...” She hesitated again and her movement regained that same icy character. “I don't think so.” “Well--” The words were caught in my throat like a cough. some thoughts on death just some ramblings. armchair philosophizing intermixed with semi-narratives. Spoiler for click to read: As a security guard patrols the roof of a bank, his gun slips out of his holster and falls twelve stories into the hands of a teenager who proceeds to aim it directly at her head and pull the trigger, splattering the contents of her skull across the sidewalk and the smooth tinted glass of the skyscraper. The child's eyes are fixated on the screen as Superman dashes across the sky to defeat the evil villain. He is aware, very aware, of the gnawing pain in his bones, the weakness of his limbs, the quiet but incessant burning at the spots where the cannulae have invaded his veins: but he is too enraptured in the superhuman spectacle to take notice of his mother's voice as she reads to the boy from his bedside a local newspaper article detailing his bravery and heroism in the face of death. A human's conscious life is a point of bright light, infinitely small and bookended at both sides by stretches of cosmic blankness. We fear death, for we fear our inexistence, but we fail to recall that we have experienced it once already; and we mourn more fervently for the suicide than the miscarriage, although they are one and the same: the rejection of consciousness in favour of eternal Nothing. At the very moment I write this the ceiling above me could cave in and an errant chunk of plaster could bludgeon my brainstem into a viscous slurry. As I scratch the mosquito bite on my arm perhaps I am colonizing it with an assortment of bacteria that, while I sleep, will engage in a frenzy of conjugation and set off on a daring voyage through my bloodstream, awakening me with visceral agony and fever-delirium and then graciously returning me to my slumber. A bullet could break through my bedroom window and lodge itself inside me, as could an AIDS-infected rapist. I will go on a walk tomorrow and by probability's vagaries a lightning bolt will strike at the exact coordinates where I stand. A neuron will misfire and its spark will arc across my brain like a jumping fountain, activating the subroutine that drives me to go to the hardware store, buy a tank of helium and suffocate myself. Or maybe I'll just die. I am walking along one morning and my body decides it's had enough; I stiffen up and tip over, geometrically, as a playing card does. The birth of a baby or a bounce back from the brink of death – these are not the only miracles. It is a miracle that anyone is ever alive. tyler's dream this is an excerpt from a longer story that i wrote to make fun of my friend tyler. although it was written in jest there are parts of it i like and this is one of them. it deals with dreams, dream-imagery, and dreams as insight into the psyche. Spoiler for click to read: Mourning Dove stormed out of the lab as Dr. Hawkins lay disoriented on the ground. It hadn't been a particularly strong punch, but the sheer unexpectedness of it had shocked him. It was like he'd been plunged into ice-cold water or struck with a bolt of lightning. For a moment his mind was blank; then he found himself plunged into a cacophony of frenzied thoughts and visions. “Tyler, you're so funny!” echoed a distant voice before disintegrating into peals of reverberating laughter. Phantasmic faces flashed before his vision; brown hair whipped against sky over and over. “...so funny... so funny....” “Tyler!” Sunlight drifting through vast glass panels onto linoleum floor. “...second candidate...” The curve of her back, illuminated by afternoon light. “...the eradication of....” Fluorescent lights in sterile rooms. Empty desks. “Tyler... so funny...” Dr. Hawkins, chest heaving, eyes wide open and unblinking, drew himself up to the lab bench and fixed his gaze on the bubbling test tubes. This was the distilled essence of deceit; six years of amorality and hubris made incarnate within twelve little glass vials. Her face – With a whip-like swipe of the arm Dr. Hawkins knocked the test-tube rack onto the floor. The sound of shattering glass tore through the laboratory's silence; fizzing liquid splattered the floor and walls. The chaos within Hawkins' mind instantly extinguished itself. It was a release, an ejaculation of sorts. The scientist stared blankly at the pink liquid pooling around his feet and then collapsed onto the ground, falling into a heavy sleep. *** Through the fog of sleep shot searing jolts of light. Hawkins' brain was a storm of electricity: energy coursed frantic along neural causeways, white-hot fires formed between synapses. Hawkins' limbs twitched and jerked as his brain rearranged itself. He found himself plagued with febrile dreams: one moment he was a hunter chasing a lion across the plains, and the next the lion's body had become an aggregation of great stone blocks which crumbled at his touch. Then he watched from the balcony a grand burlesque show: voluptuous women in feathered gowns gyrated around the stage, at one point drawing together into a tight circle where they became indistinguishable from one another in a pulsating mass of colour. The mass then liquified, coating the stage in viscous fluid, and the audience rushed to drink of it as if it were a curative tonic. Hawkins stepped out to vomit. He exited from the theatre into– into Laura's apartment, as it was three years ago. Morning light filtered through the window, casting long shadows on the walls. All was still. Hawkins tiptoed into the bedroom, where he found Laura lying face-down on a hospital bed. “Laura?” Hawkins asked. She did not respond. He sat down beside her – and at that moment her body split in two, releasing two birds, one black and one white, that perched on Hawkins' shoulders and sent waves of euphoria down his body where their talons touched... And it continued on like that, all manner of disintegrations and transmutations, expansions and contractures, the dream imagery mirroring the myriad transformations taking place within the sinuous convolutions of his brain... teenage diary (excerpts) this is based upon the same theme as "eric's story" -- it is epistolary and written in the voice of a schizophrenic teen boy, although it takes place in a suburb in 2003 and not in a mental hospital. it is unfinished as all my narrative things are. my goal here was to depict the bleakness of suburbia & of life with mental illness. Spoiler for click to read: June 16, 2003 I didn't sleep for a long time and when it was really late mom knocked on the door and she asked me if I couldn't sleep and she gave me my sleeping pills. So I fell asleep and didn't have any dreams, and I woke up in the morning. I don't really remember what I did then but I fell asleep again. I think Ethan called but that might have been a dream. I was really tired all day and I just kept falling asleep and I'm going to sleep again now. I had another dream about Stephanie but it wasn't as bad as the other one. It wasn't really a dream it was just a faded picture of Stephanie and she was saying things that didn't make sense. Anyway today was ok. June 17, 2003 I woke up in the afternoon because the phone was ringing, it was Ethan and he asked if I wanted to hang out. I told him I didn't want to smoke weed again and he said he's not going to, I told him I was really tired anyway and I'm probably getting sick which was true and I didn't feel like hanging out with him, but he kept saying I had to because he had cool things to show me on his computer, his parents got him a computer for his birthday and he played games on it and went on the internet all the time. I finally said yeah I'll come over because he kept telling me to and I was kind of curious about the things on his computer actually. I didn't feel as weird as I did before, I was just tired. So I went to his house, even though I don't like going to his house because it's dirty and there were old clothes everywhere. His parents weren't home. So we went into his room, he showed me how he could download music onto his computer and he played some metal songs, which I didn't like because they were too loud and angry, and then he showed me porn pictures. There were a lot of naked girls and stuff and Ethan kept saying how awesome it was but it kind of bothered me because it's strange to see girls just show their body to everyone like they don't care and their vaginas kind of bother me because it looks like a cut, it's like how I imagine Stephanie's neck looks like and actually, blood comes out of a vagina too, I just thought about that, so it's really gross and makes me feel dirty. I didn't tell that to Ethan, but he still saw I didn't like looking at the porn and he said you're such a faggot and laughed at me, I told him no I'm not, because I don't like looking at men either but he just laughed again. He always laughs. I was getting angry at him now but I didn't say anything. He asked what's wrong with me and why I kept acting so weird and I told him I was thinking about Stephanie a lot, he laughed again, and said dude that shit's retarded, I was pissed off at him for saying that so I told him it's not what if it's real and he laughed even harder. Then he said he found a page with stories about Stephanie and I should read it. He loaded up the page and it was all black with pictures of dripping blood and skulls spinning around and a drawing of Stephanie that I clicked away from really fast because I didn't want to look at it. I sat in the computer chair and read one of the stories, it was about a man who was hiking in the woods, and he laid down under an old rotting wood shed to fall asleep, and he had a dream where he was Stephanie and he got murdered like she did and it was the most terrifying thing in the world, until he woke up, and he was glad it was all a dream, until he saw his reflection in the pond and he had a huge scar on his neck that wasn't there before, and he was so freaked out that he left the woods that day and went home, but then he got an infection in his legs, the doctors didn't know where it came from and it was horrible and painful, and he had to get his legs amputated. He was in the hospital for a while recovering but one day he disappeared, the bed was just empty and there was no signs of where he went, until someone discovered his body in the woods hanging from a tree. I just sat there for a while thinking about that until Ethan slapped me and called me a faggot again and said I was just staring at that page like a retard and told me to get off the computer so he could look at porn again. I should have been angry at him but I was thinking about the story too much so I just said, ok and I went home. The story is really bothering me now and I think I'm going to take my sleeping pills now because I just want to sleep and forget about it. June 23, 2003 Mom was giving me the sleeping pills like every day and I think she forgot they make me really tired and I can't remember anything because I've been tired and sad all the time and I was too tired to even write in my journal. I should write the things that happened while I wasn't writing but I don't remember any of them except the dreams. Anyway I'm going to stop taking them because they make me tired. I just spit them out and flush them down the toilet. I don't need them anyway. Anyway I'm still tired because I only stopped last night but I'm ok. i also wrote vampire porn for money once. thankfully, that piece of literature is lost to the aether. so that's my writing, if you find it interesting or have any comments i'd be glad to hear it. just posting it here to get it out to an audience i suppose. i also doodle a little but i don't really consider that art, it's just for fun but hell, have some doodles (click on the thumbnails for full size)... yep. so that's my art i guess. i hope you enjoy it or find it interesting in some way. : ^ )

[fiftybirds]

quick, goofy poem i wrote today. a bit more formal than my others O roads that I have travelled -- where do you lead? I've sailed across the oceans in a pond and cartographed the globe's perimeter in trampled grass on subdivision lawns. Wherever you may go, you will return. Remaining elsewhere is returning home, in search of true Home, which exists between your ceaseless journeys. --------------------------There is no destination: all travel sums to circumnavigation.