If one good deed in all my life I did,
I do repent it from my very soul
The devil has a name, my friends--it is none other than
Video Cassette Recorder.
Junk food, fag-wonderful,
goddamn-do-it-again,
Yeah, that's me.
I took it out of your room,
Straight up,
brushing my shoulder off with my
Bony little hands,
Bleedy fingernails
Rockin' a blonde-haired, blue-eyed
Valium-burn-blackened
Back-handed magazine
Lipstick, tall shoes,
Lead paint.
I can't read so
The pictures are a treat for my one good eye.
And, Ohhh My Goddd, you chased me,
which wasn't smart,
because I can show you fear
in a roll of
electrical tape--
Me and my friends
We got ways
You'll be sucking your Bactine out of a straw for weeks,
because I specialize in desecration
ruining your fiscal life with my
anemic medical expenses,
real horrorshow
Wine is fine but liquor is
the only reason I'm even alive today
So I'll eat your entire tax bracket for breakfast
And make your mister cry big tears
When I tell him
I just told him
so he would leave you
You might think you have it hard,
But I broke the poor man's back last night!
So who do you feel like calling an
A-cup monster, now?
You invented the goddamn VCR, Babe.
I just make the porn you watch on it.
Repent with me.
We've both done such good things.

Lately I've been really fascinated by reference-heavy poetry.
If you look hard enough, you can find references to most of the things I like in this world.

I love you like I'd love a stranger's crack-baby.
Conditionally.
I'm sad when I look at you
but I'm too nice to recoil--
It's that kind of filthy
conditional love
that made this friendship
bearable.
But, don't stress!
You'll be glad to know that
I look down on you.
Unconditionally.
At least I'm big enough
to admit it.

This one actually is bad poetry.
I guess I wrote it to be satirical. Or something. I wanted to write a MySpace bulletin (LOL INORITE?!?) about how people are assholes, but instead, this is what I wrote.
I actually just wanted to say this to a very special somebody.
But I won't. Because, y'know. I'm nice.

As the ambulance pulls away, everyone goes back to the old grind. Marco and Luke hose the beam off near one of the floor drains. There’s a messy red spot on the concrete that Jesus, the Boss’s son, who is slow in the head (slower than most at least), tosses some soapy water at, and then dabs clumsily with his filthy little mop. He eventually gets as much as he possibly can, but leaves yet another purple-pink bruise on the shop floor. Jesus licks his black teeth and hobbles back to the lathe.

I make my way back to my desk, slowly today, because my feet feel heavy.

( The whole scene curdles over and over again in my mind. )

Again, this one is pretty old.
This is an excerpt from a short story that I began writing a while back. So you guys don't think the 'Flies' are a racist allegory or something (I'm really paranoid about that), in the end (which I have written already--I just need a way to connect the beginning and end. Hahah.) a priest who lives next door to the narrator talks to him about Tim's death. Long story short, as the narrator starts ranting and raving about the Flies being useless creatures who are born to do nothing but work and then die, the priest simply says "Aren't we all Flies, then?"
It's supposed to be semi-political and philosophical, I suppose. As much as my tiny mind can muster, anyway.
If you guys want to read the ending, then just comment and I'll post that next. It isn't quite as polished as this one (and you'll notice that this one is almost embarrassingly rough, which should give you an idea of how coherent the ending is right now), but I'll be more than happy to post it...if somebody actually expresses an interest in reading it, that is.

And that was Lilith.

Lilith Cole. Mounds of curly white-blonde hair that sank down around her shoulders and covered her back. She, with her white, white skin. White, white lips. White, white hands. She, in her black, black dress.

That was Lilith at the funeral. Her small hands, smaller than they are even now, clinging gently to her father’s arm. She didn’t cling out of sadness or even to comfort her father, but simply because she was tired. She didn’t know anybody at this funeral. She hardly even knew the deceased.

Beside her was her older brother, Atticus. He stood, shorter then, but still tall and thin, like a post. The priest talked on and on, but Atticus wasn’t listening to a single word of it, instead he stared at Nicodemus from across the casket. Atticus should’ve been mourning the loss of Nicodemus’s father this day--but instead, he was dreading the weekend he would have to spend with Nicodemus in the house. He peered over at the dark-haired boy, nervously, hoping that he wouldn’t catch his eye. When Nicodemus glanced in his direction he looked away.

Nicodemus was his, and Lilith’s, half-brother. He was a quiet child with a terrible temper. Atticus didn’t know much about Nicodemus; just that he gave the reddest of Indian burns and the blackest of black eyes.

( Dramatic in his sickness... )

Old.
And not the best, but I do like it.
It was going to be a part of a larger project, but most of these things I write are.
The whole story (and I'd like to give it a shot one day) was going to entail the ongoing feud between Nicodemus and Atticus as they grew up.

It's going to be kind of a spamtastic night, just so you guys know. I have a lot of older things I want to keep track of here.

This was the Old North, then.
Houses, baked-up from the sun, screaming for paint. This was the North.
The red blood vesseled faces of everyone, pulling their heads deep into their down feather parkas like little birds shivering in the cold. I've been all over and the Old North--the Real North, Louis tells me--is just goddamn miserable.

But Louis, so sure that I would love it, gave me a little jab in the ribs with one of his stubby little fingers and said
"Eh, James? Real fuckin cool, isn't it?"

Louis didn't use to swear. He was such a nice kid. You know how I said that I hadn't spoken to him since the seventies?
That's because he became a Catholic. He spent every day praying his heart out. Twenty-seven and a half years of kneeling in front of statue feet. No drinking, no sex, just praying to Saint Francis to...well, let him go.

Then one day, he just said "Fuck it."

Saint Francis protects the little animals, and Louis had always seen himself as a bird. A little bird--so tiny and inhuman with a big nose and small feet and big wings that never really grew in. But, no. Saint Francis didn't give a shit. In all of Louis's smallness and stupidity, not even Saint Francis would pay attention to him.

I'd like to picture Louis clutching that Saint's card in his bleedy, fat fingers and sobbing at Saint Francis to bring him peace.

But the very second that "Fuck it" crawled out of his mouth, it was all over. He knew that nobody was listening. I think he says "fuck" in hopes that somebody will listen someday.

( The Old North with Louis, though... )

Yep, this is my birthday. Yay, me.
Anyway, this particular excerpt was written on notebook paper while I was drunk.
Before you start frowning at me, I don't drink often. This particular evening I just felt like drinking and writing.
And that accounts for the style change. I like the simplistic style of it in some places. In other places it feels a little thin.
Anyway, if you hadn't guessed, it's from a longer story that I've been toying with for a while. The gist of it is that two vampires hang out in a chilly little tourist town and cause spooky mischief.

you talk like you know it
that this is what you'd
call, sipping beer the next day,
smoking handrolled cigarettes,
writing alone in your room with
crocodile words to verify, classify,
justify anything we'd ever do.
you say,
this is all basic instinct,
the rotting core of impulse and desire,
our own human nature.

your voice could be quiet, but
it's more likely you're shouting.
anyone who will listen should know
just how human that was of you.
yeah, whatev, nevermind. that
wasn't you that evening, it was
human nature's chilly bow-lips
likewise, it was god-given instinct that
made my brain so very small
all we were was nature, that whore,
all by its lonesome.

these days
the connotations of human nature
don't make much sense to me.
i understand, but cannot follow suit.
y'see, recently, human nature has dictated
that i feel quite the monster.
but thank god you still have got
the good sense to feel human!

It sucks, but I want to go watch the Simpsons now.

tell me something
because these aren't your teeth or eye sockets
not your spine
just a small heart
leaking hunger from its
rotten little veins
and this isn't my ribcage
just a fading ghost
pale, sleepy, and hungry like your heart
push-pulling her body against yours
she's easily corruptible
and evil, she's evil, basic-instinct evil
but filled with your cold, she's corrupted
so quietly
but you can't burn
for corrupting something
that was evil to begin with
tell me something;
which one of us
will play the villain tomorrow?

an un-mediocre poem for a considerably mediocre person.

the truth is im lonely, ive been lonely
ever since those eyes wrapped around my spine
and snapped it quite in two
i miss quiet time,
the time when we didn't know what else to do
we do this thing
where we might as well admit it
but we never do
this thing, again and again
our lips touch, but it was never kisses
your hands move, but they have never reached me
im lonely, not alone, its not you
ive got more idle words
and small-minded confessions
than i know what to do with
true to form
i torment myself with you every night
norman bates style, a shower of pity
saint peter style, all upside-down
you, you could be me, i could be you,
it doesnt matter
because we never are
im always lonely
ive got my head all in the clouds
i dont love anyone,
or anything
just the air around my own head
but here
quiet time
i havent let go of a single thing ive loved
to this day ive got
my hand poised above yours
i wonder if that hurts
youre loud
but not like im loud
i wish that didn't hurt
you
and you could be me
but this is the nothing i wrote
right across my mouth
dont be me
and thats all
im lonely, yes,
but i have never been alone

I wrote this when I was sixteen.
I didn't think I'd like it two years later.

Don't you flop those hands in my direction.
I wish you would die as nothing but a shuddering mass (get it? Mass. That's a fat joke) somewhere on the filthy Wal-Mart linoleum that you would gladly lap clean if anyone asked you to.
Die of of secondhand smoke poisoning, as a punishment from the cigarette gods. As a punishment for smelling of the inside of a grandmother's purse. A punishment for your mind's softness. A punishment for sloth.
As a punishment for the words that crawl out of your throbbing, weeping orifice of a mouth, words thickened with sloppy self-love. Failure is a word that comes to mind, but God knows you would never describe it as such.
Hate your friends, but don't you dare leave them. Hate your past, but don't you dare even think about moving forward.
Hate your life, but don't you dare try to change it.
No, that isn't failure. That's you. You find solace in the self-hatred that you gain from this. You love yourself because you hate yourself so very very much. You love your misery, just as you love talking about it to anybody who'll listen.
Misery is safe.
You don't have to confront misery.

And I wish you'd die, die of all of the shit that you take.
Because you take it by the spoonful, by the armload, with every slip of paper they hand you. Every piece of unwanted advise, every nugget of prepackaged opinion, and every condensed wad of patronizing garbage anybody has even forced into your mouth. How passively you swallow! Because you haven't got a gag reflex, it all just slides down your throat and, into that stomach of yours, crawling up into that undersized mind and straight out your mouth.
And you feel sad?
Why, yes, you do. You will tell us all about how sad you feel a thousand times over before you understand that we've received your message (that reminds me, by the way, I lied. I received every text message you ever sent to me). Every time you get up in the morning and greet the day, every time you do something that you dislike, every time you follow orders, pay the bills, eat lunch, drink a beer, watch television, get rejected (!), the world should know that you are sad. The world needs to know that you're sad in the back of its mind. It needs to weep with you.
The world won't change because you tell it that you're sad, though, Friend.
The world won't stand up and say "I'm sorry that I was making you sad. I think that I'll be kinder to you straight away!"
No, you need fight to rid yourself of sadness.
You need to systematically alter and remove things that make you sad. You need to flip the world the bird, instead of sobbing on its shoulder like a battered, abused housewife.

But will you? No. You aren't lacking the tools or ability, you just don't exactly feel like it.
How aggressively your pursue passiveness!
And that's what people call sloth.

You once told me that God was most definitely male. That God is a Man. However, I don't believe in a God, and, of course, according to you, that puts me at the top of the list in the Book of Sinners.
The end of my life will be met by a tall glass of Eternal Hell.
But this is me. I have a life that I can and will change in my own hands.
It doesn't matter if God is a Man. It doesn't matter if God is a Man who lives in his older brother's basement. It doesn't matter if God is a Man who is nothing but another drone employee in a soulless corporate mogul heaven. It doesn't matter if God has to borrow vehicles from friends to take girls on dates and it doesn't matter if God is rejected by those girls, Friend, just like it doesn't matter how many blogs he's posted on His MySpace page this week.
Because that Big Book of Words, the one that you claim to have read a few times, but I, a heathen, tend to know more about than you do, says that it's a sin to be a lazy douchebag. It's a sin to complain loudly about the world sodomizing you while you buy yourself a ballgag and some assless chaps. It's a sin to just let your life go on sucking.
Your sin is sloth, Friend. And, if there is a Hell, you will occupy Hell for the same amount of eternity that I do.
The only difference is that I will have a life worth remembering while I burn. I will at least have the satisfaction in knowing that I keyed the world's car all to shit as vengeance for a poor hand that it dealt me.
What will you have?
Sin without satisfaction. It sucks to be you.

But no, honestly, I'm nobody in the scheme of things. Like anybody else, really.
Me and my friends, we're all nobodies.
We're nobody, and yet we can shift the events of my life around.
We're nobody, and yet we can decide for ourselves when to be happy.
We're nobody, and yet we have the good grace to puke the shit that people feed us right back in their faces.
We're nobody, and yet we can comfortably live in knowing that we've done all that we could.

But for every vice that we have, for everything that you will turn your nose up at, you have six failings.
I've never cared for the word "failure", and, up until I met you, I was under the sunny impression that nobody is actually, 100% failure.
But you are, Friend.
I've never met anybody quite as determined to leave no impact on the world or anything in it as you are, Friend. I've never met anybody so narcissistic that they would feel that their sadness is enough reason for the world to just change around them.
So, could it be, that you are even more of a nobody than I am?

It's a letter to this asshole I went on a couple dates with.
At first I thought he was cool. He kind of reminded me of my sister's friends when she was in high school and I had crushes on each and every one of them.
Then I realized that he was boring and, below the surface, absolutely nothing like I'd originally thought.
Then I realized that he was obsessed with himself.
Then I realized that he was a giant pussy.
After finally telling him to stop harassing me, I wrote this. I feel bad for the guy because he's had a hard life, but the more I think about it...
Well, so have I!
So have each and every one of my friends.
And I came to the conclusion that, no, he hasn't got a special reason for being a failure at all. He just needs to grow a pair.

Let me tell you about my favorite viaduct. Near where I live there's a point where my neighborhood becomes the darker end of downtown. It's a nauseating tangle of streets, overpasses, bridges, neon signs, homeless men, hitchhikers, bicyclists, billboards, strip clubs, fast food joints, bar-grills, gas stations, and motels.
My viaduct serves as the dividing line between the noise and static of downtown and what I consider to be my neighborhood.

It isn't a normal viaduct, though, which added to the appeal of this little beacon. A train runs over the top of it.

When I was a little girl, we moved to about half a dozen different houses. My favorite was this tiny yellow thing with shrimpy little shrubs out front and a stony, broken sidewalk that was perfect for skinning knees on. The house sat right beside the railroad tracks. My parents hated the noise that the trains made as they thundered by, but more than that, they hated having to keep track of my younger brother and myself from fear that we'd wander out into the middle of the tracks and get a shoelace or a finger stuck in the railroad ties.
But I loved the trains.
I loved the rumbling in the ground as they went by.
I loved picturing every person on the train, even though they were typically freight trains, not a passenger trains, which was something I never really understood. I loved making up stories that went along with these people. Why were these people on this train? Were they having a good day? What was their family like?
I loved trains. I loved walking as far as I possibly could on the tracks without being scolded and possibly punished by my concerned mother. I loved imagining the weird and wonderful places that the tracks might lead me.
Maybe I'd find my way into a dark Victorian alleyway in London or frigid wasteland above the Arctic circle. Maybe I'd find, where they would have the best hot chocolate ever. Maybe I'd find Middle Earth or Transylvania or Wonderland or Halloweentown or Fern Gully or a Secret Garden or a Land of the Dead. I was very jealous of the people who were on this train. Imagine what cool things the were able to see!

The North Pacific Railroad tracks rest on the top of this particular viaduct.
"Pacific", because it runs like a thick, blue vein, straight to the ocean. If I walked west from the viaduct, down the tracks for miles and miles, I would eventually find the Pacific. The North Pacific.
I've never been to North Pacific beaches before. I've always wanted to. Some days I think about abandoning my car and walking along the railroad tracks for miles and miles and miles until I reach the North Pacific.
And I would march right into the ocean.

I don't look like a beach girl.
I don't tan, I haven't got blonde hair, blue eyes, toe-rings, or a dolphin tattoo and my bikini spent the better part of the summer keeping my toe socks, fishnets, and other special-occasion oddities company in the bottom of my underwear drawer.
But I love the ocean. Deep, deep down in my bones.
Beyond how I love my bizarre collections, beyond how I love all of the made-up people I invent to go along with faces I see in crowds, beyond my daydreams, beyond all of the bullshit and drama that fills my mind, I have a love for the ocean.

Whenever I pass underneath this viaduct (early in the morning on Mondays and Wednesdays and late in the evening on Tuesdays and Thursdays), I think to myself that it could be my ticket out of here.
I could go to an ocean.
North, North, North Atlantic. Where the ocean is cold. I could spend my days sipping at hot coffee on my porch in a parka while my husband clubs baby seals for their pelts. There would always be snow, because it would always be winter, so there'd be no empty little gaps between springandsummerandfall, and I could leave Christmas decorations up all year.
And there'd always be that ocean. An ocean to keep watch over all of my collections, my friends, my family. An ocean to swallow me up when I was done with everything.

And the viaduct tells you how to leave; right there, right out in the open.
It's a rusted sign on the face of the concrete that says "Northern Pacific". It says "Railroad" below that. It also says "An ocean exists and you may go there! And you can leave this place! You can leave this stretch of landlocked asphalt. You can leave the tired old aching mountains. Follow me! An ocean exists!"

So, I make sure that I've got a cigarette in my hand when I drive underneath it. It makes a lot more sense in my head that it does out loud, but let me try to explain it. For some reason, it just doesn't seem right to greet a passage to the North Pacific without a veil of smoke to accompany its beauty. Without a veil of numbness there--something that will keep my erratic thoughts from drifting to the fact that I may never see that ocean.
So I smoke. In honor of the North Pacific. In honor of that ocean.
I read the name of the railroad out loud every time I pass underneath that viaduct. And sometimes I sing to it. Badly and loudly, as if that mess of concrete and steel could hear me; it's a sad testament to my own disillusioned dream to reach a place that's worth going.

A few weeks ago, I found out that somebody had jumped from this viaduct.
And that people jump from this viaduct often.
Leaping from that height straight into traffic--they almost never have the slightest chance.
At first I was crushed and I could see ghosts lined up behind to guardrails as I drove underneath it. They stared down at me. Some of them smoked, like I do, I suppose so they could see things through a veil.
I know that if I were on the top of a beautiful thing like that, I'd want a screen to brighten the world below me.
I read the name of the railroad out loud and watched as their lips moved along with mine. I wondered about their favorite foods.
First names.
Music they listened to.
Things they held in their pockets.
Small things.
I wondered if any of them had ever visited the North Pacific ocean.
If they did, did they love it?
Did they come to this cold place seeking adventure away from the North Pacific, only to find that they couldn't escape?
Only to find that they missed North Pacific, the baby-seal clubbers, the hot coffee, the salty air, all of that?
Did they find solace in this viaduct the way I do?
That this, this viaduct, was their ticket out of this place. This was how they'd escape.
They were ready to find the North Pacific, but I guess it's easier to fall than it is to walk.