Another Year in the Body

Well, I popped on Blogger last Thursday, in a brief attempt to jot down words to immortalize the passing of yet another year. However, my birthday makes me annually cranky AND the massive company holiday party (of which I was in charge) was last Thursday night, so instead of fluid writing, I had halting moments of verbal constipation, interrupted by "urgent" requests from co-workers.

However, I awoke Friday morning with the Muse sitting on my bed. It's been a while since I arose with a poem building itself in my head, so I rushed for paper and a pen to scratch down the morning's first utterances.

What came out was unlike any of my previous poetry. Usually, I am a fan of free verse, unrhyming and arrhythmic. This piece stirs the memory of beat poetry, more appropriate to a poetry slam than an online reading. Its style is clearly inspired by some of the Sage Francis works that I have been listening to lately.

No matter how odd the phrasing may be for me, the feeling behind it is clearly one inspired by birthday blues. It gives voice to the fury of futile attempts to defy aging and keep up American society's flawed definition of beauty. Directionless rage, turned within, damaging body and soul.

Me Carve Pretty Someday

gotta pain buzzin’ underneath my skin
rage & slice, drag it out from within
Put it on show
Let everyone know
Fat ugly insides, jiggling round there

Television, magazine
Teaching me to purge
Fighting to be clean
Get it out, set it free
Stab into the real me
Flay & peel
Defy what’s real
Till I’m standing there
in nothing
but my BONES


then wrap my bones in skin
hold me up
call me thin
RAGE
at time, age and gods’ design
cut, pull, tuck & suck
tiny girls are good to fuck
spray adhesive just to hold it all in place
no lines allowed on my titties or my face
draggin’, pullin’, cutting, fightin’
still losing time’s cruel race
I’m so dry and tight
I’m wearing BEEF JERKY

looking in the mirror
still hating what I see
paintbrush and exact-o knife
create ‘the perfect me’
blood red, my color
bringin’ out my eyes
small cuts, band-aid hidden
distract me from my thighs

Screaming to the godless sky
Make me pretty or make me die

Screaming to the godless sky
Make me pretty or let me try

Screaming to the godless sky
Make me Pretty
Make me Pretty
Pretty
PRETTY
Please

Grab the frilly edge scissors and a dying hope
Like a 3rd graders’ snowflake
Gonna carve myself pretty

**DISCLAIMER: No folks, I'm not suicidal. I'm not even angry today... just OVER IT, ya know? Worry not, I'll be fine.

Haiku for Tag

...who is currently on a businesstrip in San Antonio

It is hard to wake

Next to your empty pillow

Grey gloomy mourning

Sunday Scribblings on Monday: Two Peas in a Pod

Completely Free-Form Stream of Consciousness

Two Peas in a Pod
Coupling
Connection

Bright green bouncing thoughts, enclosed in a hug
Lover in a warm verdant salad
Alive
Life

Hiding out with friends, making pillow forts and giggling
Giggling, a word, a sound that seems to be written merely for the joy and use of little girls who still believe in unicorns and mermaids
27 years later, we don’t giggle as much, but oh the tales we can tell

Two Peas in a Pod with completely different genetic coding
Yellow peas, green peas, wrinkled peas and smooth peas
Bio 101, time spent looking at dominate genes and how
Some peas are wrinkled
And I have brown eyes

Brown eyes… Bane of my existence. Always wanted Daddy’s blues… but *sigh* brown was my luck of the draw.

Brown like ground
Like chocolate chip cookies
Like puppies
Earnest and eager
Warm wet brown like the Great Mother herself,
Pushing up crops
Churning out peas
Peas in a Pod
Friends
Lovers
Whatever

Peas in a pod… that human need to not be all alone in this mess.
This salad
This entrée
This vegetable farm

Little bit of sun on a damp mound of Earth…
Bursting with possibilities, potential and zesty wholesome flavors

Two weeks pass

...and I feel there is nothing to show for it. A flurry of activity, always moving in this seemingly endless swirl. Like a dust cloud, all stirred up, but only shuffling around the discarded bits of trash and worry.

Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. *sigh*

There's a lot of unresolved issues and angers floating around. Bubbling under the surface, not close enough to break like a wave, but certainly causing an undertow that is deceptively strong, pulling me under,when I thought I was having a lovely swim.

Meeting people's expectations. Having my own remain unmet (or sometimes worse, undefined). Even the articulation of a blog entry is just beyond my grasp.

And thus... you get left with a poem, cause that's all I have to give today.

Our love is like a dead squirrel

fallen too young from its nest

decaying beneath the tree that was once home.

There is no one to bury him

But as the seasons come,

the leaves will gently fall,

obscuring his corpse from sight.

Grandmother Oak, laying him to rest

Tree Dryads giving him a 21 acorn salute.

Through the turning of the wheel,

he will breakdown, feed bugs, disappear

under a foliage drop cloth.

Come spring, perhaps

some haphazard garderner

will rake clear the spot,

showing that he is gone.

Consumed by his Earthly Mother,

leaving a memory for no one,

and a fertile spot for something new to grow.

copyright yummyteece 02/19/06