Saturday, July 30, 2011
"Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side."
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Thoughts of a Moment
Sunday, July 3, 2011
Hey Jeff
My patriotism construed via a once-jailed neo-soul/r&b star
I think this song is now mainly used for eighth grade graduation/promotion ceremonies. I remember when the video came out around 9/11. Still a nice song. Happy Fourth!
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Truly a Day in the Life of Loca
Proof that rhyme schemes beget emo poetry follows.
But although the years are wise,
Pain is not a creature that yields.
No, inside you he lies
in states either dormant or activated,
and during hibernation
he waited to be resuscitated by
new situations that emulated
old punctures and bruises
that once abraded your soul.
Though ephemeral they seemed at the time
within you pain has wrought his permanent hole.
Everything seemed fine,
but hurt is never truly abated.
It is only faded
into the background
of a vestigial vacuum
expanding, though still unfound,
until it rises again
as a phantom that impales you from within,
and you feel your old cosmic friend,
Pain,
here with his syringe.
“Be gone, I say,”
you recite in the words of a toddler at play.
And there you lay
temporarily protected by sleep
and your own naïveté.
Though, as you awaken the next day
there he creeps
and bores his boorish presence,
contributing to the internal fray
that withers your essence
as he makes his place to stay.
And you thought the hurt was gone?
Foolish—
it was only at bay,
and disappeared it had not.
It was there.
It is still here.
It always was.
You just forgot.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
A Very Self-Indulgent Post
Jellybeans
It's almost as though that tube of jellybeans, or better yet, the eye-dilating and mouthwatering response that I conjured while rediscovering them has already converted into a memory. Perhaps you experience this same feeling when you see your crush (Ew, sorry for the use of the oversexed Cosmo word, "crush"). And depending upon your carnivorous propensities, or perhaps, hornyness, you just want to keep staring and building up what is to come or even what it might be by visually consuming the refracted light and natural shapes presented in front of you until it is just a reality, broken down and digested. Don't consume without tasting. Eat your jellybeans and have them too.
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
The End of an Era
bright in all its whiteness,
the burgeoning summer sun bursts
through the windows in slats of victory
and the worldly photos on the walls
gaze at me and revitalize
the past year of my life,
an experience that now
all seems a dream—
a totally distant,
wildly unreal,
entirely unforgettable
dream.
Tracking back to
four years ago,
I was a drowsy
and disheveled
girl making an ending
for the sake of starting
a new beginning.
Though,
even in the midst
of the picturesque finales
and sunny futures
that I created for myself,
my past was
a ubiquitous entity—
He had my secrets,
and taunted me with them
in the third person
like an auctioneer trying
to sell a story,
my story,
for someone else’s
consumption—
“Fifteen dollars for the tale about how J spread herself thin…”
“GOING ONCE…”
“…she cried in the privacy of her apartment on her couch…”
“GOING TWICE…”
“when pushing a brick to clear the rubble of her self-deprecating thoughts, she realized she had waited for nine month to hear back a simple, noncommittal ‘maybe’…”
“And SOLD to the gentleman wearing the blood-red necktie!”
The past’s presence
in my mind had me
mulling over trivialities
and morphing them
into monstrosities
to the point where
everything was just
insanity.
Yet,
the avaricious past,
despite its bilious color,
is brilliant—
cunning,
in fact.
His mockery,
or my perception of it,
taught me
to lavish in
obscurity,
look for the light,
and propel
myself
forward
further
into the dark night—
Blackbird fly.
Right now
in this moment,
I am finishing
the end of yet another era,
not just to put a cap on it
and call it caput,
but to close it ever so gracefully
with the clean click of a lock
as the door slides shut
on an epoch lived
not for mere survival
but with artistic vision.
Blackbird fly—
I see myself
in three months time,
I am on the brink
of a fresh school year,
untouched and untainted
but positioned in the posterior of success.
Blackbird flies into the light of this dark black night.
Removing my head from the clouds
and putting pencil back to paper,
I am going in for the kill.
The cutting past
has me welcoming
the darkness.
I am the Blackbird
singing in the dead of night
who has just been waiting
for this moment
to arise.
There's no way I can stop writing, it's a form of insanity.
You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
As I'm typing this entry I'm hating it. I feel like I have nothing much to say. Simultaneously, I realize that that's ridiculous. I think writer's block is a farce, and I haven't been writing simply because I haven't been trying. Art (and I'm not saying that my writing is art, but a degree in creative writing is a fine arts degree, so there) is in the pursuit. Hence, Jack London's quote is the title for this bumbling entry. My apologies for its rather pontifical manner. Actually, no apologies for this entry; that's lame.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
A Place for Poetry?
So really, the reason to do hard things in life is for the story they produce. That's the reason that lots of people do hard things, anyway. I don't frequently orally verbalize my "hard things" stories to people. Though, I do write them down, as they are memories worth recording and keeping.
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
AAS 120
My friends Paul, Hayley, and Allison from my Intro to Asian American Pop Culture class all collaborated during lecture today to draw me this. It's really quite special--so many different pictures. I could just keep staring at it for hours which will serve me well come next lecture. Fifty minutes never seems so long. Thank goodness for iPhones (for satiating writing addictions and notating the professor's bombastic phrasing) and artsy friends.
Thursday, April 7, 2011
RT #8: Things I could do instead of going to law school
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Ethereal Grit
Thursday, March 31, 2011
J'ai une question pour toi.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
When obligatory nostalgia suddenly becomes voluntary...
I sincerely hope your years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have been happy and productive. I am certain that you will find they have provided you with a solid foundation upon which to build a career in business, education, government, and anything else you attempt. Enjoy your final weeks on campus, and please stay in touch with us after graduation.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
iPhone Notes
Monday, March 14, 2011
Today I Studied...
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Sunday, March 6, 2011
New Year's Eve
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
A rather dreary post with some scintillating flecks of interest
“Hola, Jackie. Una cosa… Podem jugar fora?”
“No, we can’t play outside. It’s too cold,” I responded in English.
“Pero la Gisela m’ha dit que si!” She argued back.
“Gisela told you that you could play outside? Really?”
“Bueno, segurament ens va dir que si…”
“So, you haven’t really asked her yet, have you?”
“I’m just looking at your eyes.”
“And what do you see in them?”
I cannot tell a lie. I cannot tell a lie. I cannot tell a lie. I cannot tell a lie. I cannot tell a lie.
Nothing. At all.
“I don’t know.” I lied.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Flowers and other natural shit that's synthetically managed
Sunday, January 23, 2011
The naïveté of a rising first grader
You have a boy’s name.
I don’t need to ask you if I’ve ever told you that
because I know you know I know.
And you thought it too.
You used to complain about it to me when we were seven,
telling me that you wished your parents had named you
Alexandra, as they had originally planned.
You bitched about it
all the way up until we were maybe fourteen
when you started playing guitar,
stopped showering,
(not totally, but seriously)
started hating the world,
and, for once…
loving yourself.
That was when you decided it was okay
to be a chick with a guy’s name.
Maybe it was even cool.
For the official record,
and by official, I mean in my opinion:
Of course it was cool.
Anyway, your boy name,
back in the day,
led me to think that you were,
in fact, a boy.
No, you didn’t look like one.
Not in the least.
But, you were a new student
starting summer school
the year before we both entered the first grade,
and you were absent the first two days of class.
Nobody knew who the hell you were,
so excuse my six-year-old naïveté
for assuming that the empty desk beside me
belonged to a grimy boy that ate his boogers for fun
and saved the remaining snot for glue.
I knew too many of this type,
and, quite frankly, had had enough of them.
As far as I was concerned,
you were some boy I didn’t want to know,
and just like that,
I flippantly wrote you off.
Imagine my astonishment
when you finally decided
to show up for the third day of class
with a summer scarf tied around your neck
to match the flowered dress
that was undoubtedly a sample garment from
your Dad’s clothing company.
Your mom had curled your hair
for your first day
and as Mrs. Phillips
introduced you to us,
“Everyone, this is Taylor.
She is a new student,”
you smiled meekly.
I stared at you.
Oh my gosh, it exists.
And, it’s a girl.
I was beside myself.
Nonetheless, you sat beside me.
**Disclaimer: Any suggestions that the above may make toward fact should be considered largely coincidental. I may or may not have a friend named Taylor. However, for her own protection, whether fictionalized or real, I am writing this disclaimer. Please also consider poetic license, errr, more plainly stated in a French accent, "zeh bending of zeh truze."
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Turn Off the Lights
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
I’ve never seen what my brain looked like on crack
I can only guess what it looks like on poetry.
If crocodiles mated with white cockatoos
and then vomited their offspring
in a fresh glaze of sulfuric slime
that writhed on the floor
gasping for air as a means of grappling
with its newfound reality here on Earth—
That’s how I imagine my brain on poetry.
A distorted mass of neurons,
all reactions,
that tries to cope with
the inevitable realities that the written word
prescribes—
even when the word lies.
For what is written as falsehood
may shed some light
on what is known as fact
and escaping reality
may be just as trying
as facing it.
My precious little bundle of wriggling neurons
is now thoughtless—
hopeless, in fact.
So dear friends,
it looks like I have a crack problem.