icarus

deep breaths.

harder, better, faster chick; quick quips of wit on a reckless wreck erect upon reactive revolt. exercising ostracization, organized cessation, suffering sensation. gifted getaway, stored away a force unswayed, diving to depths to ease the obsess, a life laid to rest, unaddressed journey, bloomed in a gurney, turned to fruition postmortem admission. take a step back.

deep breaths.

qualified to be terrified, electrified; left to detest self-arrest, tested through time to reach a  sublime love of a mind that’s only just mine.  fucked off for too long, hopeful throng, familiar song played on repeat and i’m stuck to the seat letting the words just pour over; soft touch to the shoulder, words burn and they smolder and singe, feeling that twinge that gets my legs moving. a pain that brings soothing repast and i’ve cast aside what’s been on for so long.

deep breaths.

time to think twice is what will suffice to find within the din of overcast days i prayed to takeaway what’s left of the past. chastised and sized down, brown eyes burn red, passion unsaid, ready to act on this pact between me and my power, forget the sour days in the maze filled with thick hazy scent, where no turn was right. bright times on the way, swing life away. though may come a change, life is strange, step into the eye.

deep breaths.

 

i’ve been taking a sabbatical — today is called the present because every day is a gift.  i’ve given myself sixty this summer. i’m stretching out in the sun and feel like i’ve absorbed a whole new being, clean and serene but just as obscene. this thursday i travel back north to rev up my life with some fresh introspection. every day might not be a work of art but i’ve painted a pretty picture. cut out the toxicity, replace with productivity. i’m starting from square one.

re-roll; you throw the dice and don’t always roll 20’s. ive been down this beaten path less traveled before; i’ve got a new pair of boots ready to hoof it. no proof of a greener pasture but with stronger stature. i’m feeling tall even on my own, heart, mind and soul gone to hell and back and back on track.  it’s taken some time but i’ve devised a good course of action, climbing out of rock bottoms one trap door at a time.

the worlds just going to have to get used to me.

good morning, i’m coming home.

 

 

v

gold rush

i only just realized the singer for Death Cab for Cutie was the same guy from The Postal Service.  this sounds silly, i know, but i was a TPS fan when i was 16 or so and never took a listen to Death Cab.  so, it was only recently when a new song for DC came up on my pandora (“Gold Rush”) and i abashedly admit that the realization came to me 14 years up the road — and then this totally brand new song threw me hurdling down back the same way i came

// letting all the shadows free, the ones i wish still followed me // 

like a bright light shining in my face, i immediately remembered a rushed world of heart-driven hurricanes; the explosiveness of love, the explosiveness of loss — both starting just as cataclysmic as they ended — discovering how to live with yourself as all the feelings seemed to flood you all at once

// oh how i feel like a stranger here, searching for something that’s disappeared //

late night whispers and confessions of him, her, hows and whys.  skipping class and lunch just to lie by the stream — hidden in the reeds with a bit of spirit, shyly engaged with whispering lips.  sneaking into the community pool, stripping down to bare essentials and floating along, linked with what we thought was forever.  delving into the first social graces of others and then ripping through lawns like herds of gazelle fleeing blue lions

// all i see is a long goodbye  //

awed gazes of those newspaper-lined shopping carts, lit ablaze and careening across empty lots.  getting that first high — it took is to another world together and made us questions if our legs existed beneath our knees.  it felt like it would last forever, goodbyes for eternity and “i love you”s for even longer.  taking photos in the midlight to find beauty in an angry world with our arms clasped around shoulders to form circles while we cheered

// it seems i never stop losing you, and every dive becomes something new // 

 jumping the tracks split seconds before laughing with death while we rested with the cars thundering by. walking along the ghostly streets, singing songs while three sheets to the wind and emotions running like high voltage.  the slightest touch to move the bangs from your face creates a lightshow behind your eyes that could make fireworks cry, only to be met with a sinkhole you think your heart will never see the rim of again

// and all our ghosts get swept away, it didn’t used to be this way /// 

the first days of the end of early adolescence seemed tragically stunning, fatally gorgeous, lip-puckeringly sweet apocalypse.  whatever it was, that moment — that exact, very moment — it was the most precious thing that meant everything

// it didn’t used to be this way //

there’s no replica for that intensity.  those were real feelings, experienced for the first time and gobstopping you at every turn.  they’re burned, engraved, etched into your heart and rise up as a feeling of nostalgia that you relieve with a long, shaky sigh.  then, the world was anew in any which way you wanted it to be before you ever knew a thing about the world

// it didn’t used to be this way //

… and as the song goes to fade out, my memories settle back down to rest, curled and cosy, and i wake back up to a life where i think i’ve had it all figured out.  memories.   that’s all they are now, memories — not daunting haunts that dwell like a long-lost curse.  memories.  and it feels like i’m still looking for something i’ll never find

// it didn’t used to be this way //

but i know what it is now anyway, i think — it’s to find that totally new world again, surprising and unassuming, a black swan.  it’s out there.  it keeps me alive and wondering every day.

// it didn’t used to be this way //

and it doesn’t have to be.

 

v

 

valentine’s day: the great escape

happy valentine’s; this is a memoir of sexual youth in deviance and train derailment

(let’s go to a little different of a place for this day of hearts and cliche kisses)

at 19, i was mentally elderly and going through a weird phase. i’d taken up with 18-year-old, boot-clad, marxism-promoting, anti-establishment, trenchcoat-clad county college go’er who for some reason sparked my interest.

we’d met, we’d flirted, we’d somehow gotten together, the poor boy and the fireball that was i, raining down upon the dinos. at some point, he’d confessed his virginity, which i had no problem with. shit, who cares when it is you boink? so there we were, on a slow ride and cusp of experimentation (on his part) and the day came (ha) where i went for the gold

he’d smuggled me into his home while his parents were out until the next day, past his tattling little sister and into the upstairs. events ensued, flowers fell, we chortled, we laughed, we chilled.

sitting on the bed in the buck, mid comfy conversation in his parents’ room no less, i heard a strange clank and tilted my head towards the shaded window.

“someone outside mate?”
“naw, they’ll be gone till the morning”

i pried my finger through the slats of the blinds and breathed, “..’cept they’re back now.”

his eyes widened, and with the next sound of a slamming car passenger door, he lept towards the window in a frenzy, pulling down the plastic to see not only his parents but extended family moseying up the drive.

“IN THE CLOSET!” he crowed
“huh–I—”

but before i had a chance, the kid threw me stark naked into his parents’ closet, slammed the door and ran to scope out the situation. now, i know i wasn’t supposed to be there but somehow being found stark nude in his parents’ closet seemed to be a hell of a lot worse of a situation than being found there in general. alas, there i sat, shivering and inexplicably nervous about the outcome.

thankfully, sooner than later, he returned for me to throw my clothes in the the closet, allow me to change, and transferred me to, yep, another closet but this time in his own room. much smaller, way more uncomfortable. i sat there like a discarded rag doll with my feet halfway up the wall and the rest of me shoved under long coats and avoiding discomfort on collected trinkets and boot wear.

with the closet a smidge open, i saw his ten year old sister saunter into his room and make her way up to the kid. he held out a tenner, she took it and smiled this wicked, devilish grin

“thank you for your patronage,” the little conniving weasel said as she skipped away readily. he was paying her for her silence.

i huffed in the closet. ridiculous, i thought, but not as ridiculous as the next steps i had to take.

the dude leaned down into the opening of the closet door and quietly said, “you’re going to have to go out the window”

“fucking excuse me?”

february, after snowfall, without a coat, at 9 pm at night, an entire family a floor below me from the second story and this guy wants me to shimmy on the rooftop to make a break for it.

“it’s the only way”
“you can’t be fucking serious”
“if you make your way around towards the kitchen, i can get you down”
“there’s snow on the roof..I..”
“I brought your boots up”
“oh my god, you’re fucking serious”

so there i was, one foot halfway out to a three foot roof canopy with about a one foot clearance of lack of ice or snow, gulping cold air and watching my breath float down towards the bushes that i half considered making a jump for and ending this entire fucking debacle. but no, i was gonna go for it. thank god timberlands used to be of great quality and treading.

i began the slow shimmy towards the kitchen patio. i watched a family member go to and fro the car, right below me, as i stood frozen like a deer in headlights. i thought, the ability to commit suicide on sight definitely eased the idea of facing total and horrendous humiliation by strangers in the event they happened to look up. crisis averted, i rounded the corner and waited a whole five minutes until boyo there appeared with a ladder.

apparently he managed to walk through his living room with this fullsize ladder without question of where he was going with it.

“hey” he had said

“hey” they had replied, as he mosied his way to the porch. no question. aite.

he propped it up, i scurried down, i booked to my car, i dove inside and began seriously reconsidering my dating habits. he managed to gather my things and bring them to me.

this dating scenario did not last.

but if you feel left out in the cold this valentine’s day season, remember, you could literally be out in the cold trying to james bond across a roof in an attempt to avoid embarrassment meltdown.

go buy yourself some chocolate mousse and consider yourself lucky!

love yourself

v.

humphrey the snowman

once upon a time, i made a snowman named humphrey and he met a grisly demise.

i was going through my photos when i came across the time a group of us went to the catskills; a friend’s parents had a house in east jesus nowhere there.    we all drove up, partied hardy and two days in a buttload of snow fell down, like two feet.

i spent a part of the couple days working on this snowman. i’d stacked him pretty tall by rolling boulders of snow around.  the head, however, i’d made out of a large chunk of ice that formed from dropping rooftop water.  i plunked the chunk onto the second bodily bulk and formed a sphere round it with snow.

he had carved facial details, like an eyepatch and a very pronounced set of jowls.  i started giving him buttons and other costume details.  i was proud of humphrey (i’d then named him).

later that evening, a friend of a friend’s came out in his jeep.  he offered to take people to go offroading on the fields stretchin’ across the way.    they went to go off to the backyard.

i put out my hand, “man, watch out for my snowman”
“what?”
“my snowman, man, it’s standing in the backyard there, don’t run it over.”
“oh for sure, no problem!”

it was about ten minutes later when they came back in.

“well,” said the guy, head hung low, “we hit the snowman”
“what the fuck!”
“yeah but … the snowman…”

…turns out, i never did tell anyone about makinghumphrey’s noodle from a giant chunk of ice, so, no one expected that it would fly off mid purposful collision and shatter the ever-living-shit out of this dude’s window.  it almost went through.

in disbelief, we ran outside to look.  sure enough, there was this crater in the mirror, the entire thing spiderwebbed and shattered.

“i told you not to fucking hit my snowman..” i said, mouth agape,  staring at glass.  it was gnarly.

he played it off by calling home and saying ice fell from an overpass.   i drank a shot to humphrey’s demise.  we tried dropping the ice ball from the highest window possibly and the sucker still wouldn’t break.

i don’t think i’ve tried to make a solid snowman since.  maybe this year.  maybe a little less solid.

you were a good snowman, humphrey; rest in pieces.

 

v.

life can only be understood backwards

”I had a dream that the world was ending a few days ago. What’s up with that?
Seems kind of out-of-place to me.

I feel like I need to be somewhere else and I’m not talking, like, metaphorically, I mean right this exact second in time. Don’t you fucking hate that? Especially when there’s nowhere else to physically be able to go? (Maybe that’s just my problem).

Talk about being between a rock and a hard place and with a different side to it, even.

Not being comfortable in the place you call a home can be a real huge shit on the brain. I don’t mean like, waaah-I-hate-my-life-here-and-want-to-move-out kind of uncomfortable. I mean the kind of uncomfortable where you’re almost literally itching to physically walk out the door and just start driving.

The right-this-second, spur-of-random-feeling, my-head-hurts-and-I-think-I-might-actually-puke-in-my–toilet uncomfortable. The almost-pissed-off-for-no-reason uncomfortable. The nearly total and irreversible bad, bipolar mood uncomfortable.

And that really blows because I’ve lived with other people and never felt this way. At least not anywhere near usually. I don’t even think there’s been a time to record this kind of brain splooge.

(Ding)
(Then it’s gone. As quick as it came. Like nothing ever felt a hair different than before.)”

 

some sketchbook; c.2008

younger, strung out me used to catalogue every thought and event from back then and i’m thankful for that now.  it’s actually reading these that makes me go back into trying to do that again.

reading a lot of things.  things like how my family and i never really did click.  things that sounded similar to things now.

ever look back into your old writing, your sketchbooks or whatever and it’s you who ends up explaining your current life mysteries to you the best?  albeit dramatically, but explanative nonetheless.  really raw reactions and every day normalities that weren’t normalities at all.

augh, gives me the weird shivers

v.

my name’s bones

in august of 2008 i was sitting in a psychiatrist’s office waiting to get my fix and ended up making a new friend in the waiting room

“those look like some cool inks,” commented a dude sitting across the way from me, “mind if I see what you’ve got?”

i blinked, consented, and he got up and limped over.  the guy was about 50, had blue hair, glasses with only one dark lens, a sleeveless, torn shirt that revealed countless tattoos snaking on his skin and pants covered by boots that reached his knees.

“wowwww,” he said in a simplistic manner, “this dragon’s pretty cool.  the stitches too.  that hurt, gettin’ that done under your wrist?”

“hey man, you’d know better than me,” i said pointing to his arms, “you’ve got way more than me and most of them looked like they’d sting a bit”

he looked down as if he’d just realized he had ink, “huh?  oh yeah, yeah, some of these were a bitch,”  he pointed around his wrists and the cobweb done on his elbow, “what’s your name?” he asked as he wobbled back to his original seat.

“ky,” i said.

“my name’s bones.  hey, come sit over here for a second, lemme give you a poem.”

i walked over and sat down in the seat to his left. he rummaged through his bag for a bit and took out two sheets of paper. carefully, on the top of one sheet, a poem that he had written, he marked my name.

he looked it over for a second and then handed it to me, “here ya go. this is a poem that I wrote (I’m a writer, you see) and this is a flyer for the open mic night down at Miller’s.”

i remembered someone on campus telling me about the place once and nodded, “yeah, i’ve heard of it, i’m pretty sure i could find it without much of an issue.”

“you should come and speak at the mic. write somethin’! you should always write, all the time, never stop. then go out and tell it to everyone.”

i smiled, “not so sure about the performing thing, my boyfriend does most of that. i’ve got a stage fright issue so I usually hang back and take photos of the gang while they’re doing their thing on stage. i get enough kicks watching them be crazy.”

he laughed at this. we continued talking for a while. he told me about how he was in the office for his bipolar condition.

“my friends tell me Bones, Bones, don’t take the meds, they’re bad’, bah,” he waved his hand, “they really do help.  you seem like a real smart one, like ya understand.”

he mentioned his bike and i remarked seeing it parked out in the handicapped spot, coincidentally marked with the words “BONES”.   he said that he had gotten into an accident not too long ago that left him in a coma and his right leg crippled. even so, he told me that he loved riding his bike way too much to stop.

“no car, just my bike. it’s just hard riding in the rain and snow. i have electric heated suits for those kind of days at least,” he chuckled to himself, “bikes are just so cool.”

before long, i was in and out of the doctor’s office and bidding farewell to my new acquaintance. be reminded me once more about the open mic on my way out the door. i never did end up going but i never forgot bones.    i regret it a little.

the world is like the USA channel; characters welcome.  you never know who you’re gonna meet.

 

 

v.

the wizard of new york

i remember the first time that i actually went to new york city on my own just for shits. i was 16 and living in englewood, nj and the bus only ran about $3.50 or so to get into port authority.

i was bored on a saturday and hopped on an early morning line.   i’d been to the city before plenty of times but never without adult tethers.

with no destination in mind i turned down the sidewalk and started walking  along the street, staring up at the buildings and maneuvering through opposing human traffic.

all of a sudden, i noticed a bright purple form walking to the right of me, curbside.

it was a man decked head to toe in a raggedy wizard costume; purple pointed hat with a bent tip, lopsided, sagging white beard, semi-crinkled purple robe with a slacked-tied rope around the waist leading down to socks and tied up sandals, all paired with a long wooden staff.

being my first time taking a bite of the big apple solo as a teen, i couldn’t help but gawk.   didn’t notice a person incoming at 12 o’clock on the walk in front of me.  i dodged right briefly and accidentally stepped in the warlock’s path

“WATCH YOUR FOOTING, SILLY GIRL!!” he bellowed into the air

people turned their heads and looked in wonder as he started crossing the street.  they watched  him halfway into the road and he noticed them looking on.

“WHAT’S THE MATTER, HAVEN’T YOU MORTALS EVER SEEN A WIZARD BEFORE?!” and with that went down a side street and mosied out of view

i went home and told my dad what i had seen

all he said in his thick russian accent was, “welcome to new york”

 

v.

ice cream man

i was thinking back earlier to a time somewhere in 2010 —  my then boyfriend’s band was having their thrashy weekend practice in the basement and i was just kickin’ it around with a chick the drummer was dating at the time.

the neighborhood was this small bustlin’ town and you could hear the bass drum bouncing off the houses for blocks.   the other noise that echoed everywhere was the psychosis-inducing tune of the ice cream truck that was always happenin’ by

like two little kids, me and this chick flung ourselves up from the back porch at the sound.  with overexcited, lopsided grins we galloped over to the curb and flagged the truck down

it was a foreign dude driving; probably in his 50’s, raggedy facial hair and sultry expression.

my friend was a small, childish looking thing with a voice to match.   after taking her treat and taking a bite, she looked up at the guy and decided to ask,

“what do you have to do to become an ice cream man?”

the man looked back and, without missing much of a beat, responded,

“when you’ve lost everything in your life, you become an ice cream man.”

with that he just drove away, leaving my friend and i to slowly turn to each other, mouths agape and brains in torment.

we relayed this experience to the band to which my then boyfriend commented, “man, i really wish we had a recording of that to open a song up with”

v.