Tag Archives: relationship

Poem: Dark One

14 Jul

Dark One

I worry I am too much chaos. You stand there, in your sweet and indeterminable beauty, and you think I am frail because you see me cower. But I am only crouching, trying to hide from you my soul as it glowers.

I am a stormy soul, oh light one. I worry I might obliterate you if we were to crash together.

Insanity so easily swallows up naked possibility.

I’m worried we would go insane, if I tried to swallow you.

But you are so tempting, you over there with your soft breezes and gentle kisses blown at me with a wave. Your fingers chide my suspicion so cheerfully.

I am fearful to wave back; I do not trust my darkened sensibilities. They can so quickly snuff a greeting so bright as yours.

Ah, but you might taste so sweet, as I devoured you…

And the end of what you promised – well, death need not always be a wretched case.

But would it be so easy for me to say that then as I watched you limp away, wounded?

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Poem: The Anger of a Lamppost

8 Jul

Love’s a terrible thing
when you’ve been reduced to a scheduling item –
the emotional equivalent of a lamppost,
lovely and terribly convenient to have around,
but not exactly a high emotional investment.
Sometimes you don’t even notice
when the bulb’s gone out.
And then the stretch of putting it off and putting it off,
always meaning to attend to the deadness in your room,
but so much a second thought
that such a nonessential scheduling item
stays dead,
for months,
until finally you know you’ll never put a bulb back
and say fuck it,
then throw it in the trash
so you can get a different, shinier lamppost.
I did not like being that scheduling item.
My bulb left broken for much too long,
even though you kept saying that one day,
things would be brighter.

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Parents

27 Jun

I don’t write normal parents. Not that I write parental figures with seven limbs, or serial killer tendencies. I just don’t write “traditional,” functional relationships between parental figures.

Yeah, hi there Freud. I see you smirking over there in a corner.

The more I’ve written, the more I’ve come to notice about my abnormal parent figures. The fathers, for example – most of the time, they just don’t exist. My earliest stories, written in the big, round handwriting of an eight or nine year old, they just didn’t have father figures in them. The absence wasn’t a key component; it just was. Without explanation or ado. It was just the norm for my characters, something they didn’t think twice about.

Makes sense, seeing how for a very long stretch of my life, it was something I didn’t think twice about either. Business trips, golf trips, hunting trips, gambling trips, affair trips. My father’s presence was an anomaly, not a rule. I simply didn’t know how to write about present fathers. I had no material.

Mothers, however… Even before I hit puberty, they got a broader ranger of characterization. They were present, for one thing. Sometimes, they were caring. Or neutral, at the very least. NPC’s there for the main character to interact with, if not exactly salient actors in and of themselves. Other times, though…

Off the top of my head, I can think of at least three pieces of writing with abusive mother figures in them. Around thirteen or so, I spent my nights angrily scratching out a story of a nineteenth-century, Sarah-the-little-princess-esque near-orphan girl whose central conflict was with a physically abusive mother. The narrative was basically F. H. Burnett’s novel boiled down to a purely familial relationship. The horrid school teacher became a sort of evil stepmother figure – minus the “step.”

Abusive mother figures have shown up again and again in my writing. Left alone to parent because of an inexplicably absent husband, they take out their anger of what life has dealt them on the children life has dealt them as well. They cause silence in their daughters. They cause their girls to withdraw and go insane. They yell. They hit. They degrade.

They are not my mother.

My mother has always been more of a passive victim, or inactive co-conspirator at worst, in my eyes. My worries around her have been of the protective sort. When it came to the battles between her and my father, my mother is always the one I have sided with. I have been frustrated with my mother, yes, but more for her inactivity. She has accepted my father’s maelstrom. She has not fought back. Even when I needed her to.

And yet she, in her many literary representations, is the one that I have made the abuser.

Perhaps it’s because in some way, I do hold her responsible. She didn’t stop my father. She taught me to shut up and keep quiet about it. She passed on a sense that I must just deal with whatever shit I’m served. That having someone and taking their blows, emotional or otherwise, is better than having no one.

Over the course of my childhood, I asked her again and again to do something about this father of mine. Tried to make it clear how it was hurting me. Hurting my younger sister. Hurting her.

Her response was largely to shove her head in the sand.

With the life experience and therapy and psychology education that I now have at 23, I can rationalize her actions. I understand victimization. I understand co-dependency. I understand the fear that leaving something bad will only result in something worse. I understand. I do.

But I think that growing up, and perhaps even now, some part of me still holds her responsible.

Why not write father figures that are abusive? Why not assign the blame where blame is more truthfully do? The defensive answer is that it’s my writing, and I’ll do whatever I damn well please, thank you very much.

The more truthful answer is that I’m not sure I could handle it. Not sure I want to have to handle it. I already dealt with one abusive father, thank you very much. Why would I create even more, in my writing? I have a mother that I love. That I want in my life. Even with all of her fretting. So even if I write a culpable mother figure in my stories, I still have a less culpable one to return to.

I cannot say the same of my father.

So much of writing is a sort of authorial wish-fulfillment. While 99% of my narratives barely involve a father figure at all, the 1% that do feature fathers that look nothing like my own. In a YA manuscript I begun writing at the the age of 14 and have been editing ever since, there is a father figure that I am fairly shocked by. He is calm and gentle. Scholarly and patient. Quiet and fiercely caring. He cares for both his daughter and his wife. He might disagree with his well-meaning but overly-fretful wife sometimes (the fictional mother who comes closest to my own), but he does not belittle her.

Ah, hello there, fairy tale father.

I find it somewhat comforting to know that in the narrative that contains the most real version of my own mother, I would assign her a partner much better than the one she’s got. Even with all of the frustration I channel at her through those other less-realistic mother figures, when it comes down to the “real” her, I would wish her more happiness than what she has, rather than punishment. I want better for her.

I want better for myself.

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A Lover’s Lament

19 Jun

A Lover’s Lament, or “I Am Confused.”

I am confused, dear lover. I am confused how you could choose to throw me away like trash, while I am only just now beginning to slough off the skin of our life together like so many dead cells become love litter. The detritus of memories rots there on the floor, as every day I am forced to trample it underfoot as if it were nothing, and I were not worried in every moment that something will snag and I will trip. Too often, so often, I fall anyway. I am confused, dear lover.

I am confused, dear lover. I am confused how you could not be at every moment distracted, wondering where the new rush of air through one more hole you hadn’t noticed in yourself is coming from. Does not your body ache from the pock marks of so many barbed associations? Are you not left with new emptiness and crevices as the once fertile ground of your soul dries and cracks with a terrible opening groan? Do not you feel as if there are parts of you missing? Are you not spending every waking and sleeping moment searching for where they have gone and how you could possibly, desperately, ever in your life or your death get them back again? Are you not dying from the nothing of where you used to be filled? I tremble every second, wondering if this will be the time when my increasingly paltry skeleton crumbles. Did I not make up just as much of you? I am confused, dear lover.

I am confused, dear lover. I am confused how you could have escaped the shroud of insanity that is slowly settling over me as I see your ghost at every turn. My mind breaks just a little more every time I must exorcise your demons, finding again a phantom that must be released from a particular way of flicking my hand, or tilting my voice, or arranging my face. I do not know whether it is better to slowly tease away where you have interwoven with every fiber of my being in an attempt to salvage what is left of the original cloth, or if I should just cry to hell and remove the stuff of both you and me with a slaughter of tearing, unforgiving attrition. It’s not like I would be left any more frayed than I am becoming now. I am surprised, from the way that your fingers used to interlock with mine, that you are not finding yourself similarly ragged. I am confused, dear lover.

Oh dear lover, I am confused.

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XXX: My New V-Day Book Release!

14 Feb

HOLY SHITWHIZZLES this turned into a ridiculously long post. Tl;Dr – new book of poetry released today! XXX: The Poetry. ALL profits from sales between today and Monday Feb 17th are being donated to Planned Parenthood. Check out the book here: https://www.createspace.com/4668600.

Happy Valentines Day, lovely readers! Or, as some refer to it, happy bitterness day. Whatever you call it, go eat some chocolate and smash some stuff. Lips, genitals, old computer monitors and sledge hammers (Caltech is an interesting place on February 14th, people) – you pick.

And guess what, oh lovely readers? I’ve got a new book out! Released today, Valentines Day, is my newest anthology of poem, XXX: The Poetry.

I'm kind of in love with this cover.

Alrighty, “anthology” is maybe a little too heavy an epithet. (Side note: has anyone else noticed that it’s just a tad awkward how similar “epithet” and “epitaph” sound?) At 28 pages, XXX is more of a booklet than a tome. But hey, isn’t that what valentines are supposed to be like, anyway? “Here, pour forth your bottomless, undying love on this candy heart in no more than 10 characters.” Short and sweet, right?

Speaking of sweet – this new book release isn’t just some consumer hook BECAUSE IT’S VALENTINES DAY AND THEREFORE WE MUST BUY EVERYTHING THAT HOVERS AROUND THE RED WAVELENGTH OF THE COLOR SPECTRUM AND IS VAGUELY HEART-SHAPED AND WE’RE ALL GOOD COMMERCIAL CAPITALISTS, DAMMIT.

Ahem. As I was saying. This Valentines release, I’ve got a – well, it’s not quite a sale, because it’s not decreasing how much y’all are spending on the book (sorry), but it *is* decreasinging how much I’m making off of it – so, it’s a promotion, I guess, is a better word, going on from today through Monday.

You see, on all units sold from RIGHT NOW through Monday, I’m not making ANYTHING off the royalties, because I’ve decided to give my own “short and sweet” Valentine to Planned Parenthood this year. So, ALL PROFITS* I make from XXX sales through Monday, February 17th will be donated to Planned Parenthood.

Now, some of you might be nodding in approval and some of you might be screaming your heads off right now. Whatever. My two-second rationale: Planned Parenthood, not all about abortion. In fact, mostly not about abortion. Planned Parenthood is mostly about keeping people healthy and safe with pre-reproductive medical services. STD screening and treatment and prevention, birth control and safe sex protection, mammograms and informational consultations- there’s quite an extensive list, really. And oh yeah, they also help women who do want to be pregnant and have a baby and whatnot do that in the healthiest way possible. And they do all this while trying to keep costs down as much as possible. A lot of the time they even manage to make services free.

So. Planned Parenthood. I personally like them. You are free not to. Whatevs. My point is, if you do like them, and you like poetry, then OH MAN you can put those two things together AND BUY MY BOOK WOOOOOOHOOOO! And the hard copy costs less than $7 if you buy it through the createspace store. I think that’s a pretty good deal. 😉

Because the book release is so new and fresh and shiny, XXX is currently only available through the createspace store. Give it a week or so, and it should start popping up in places like Amazon.com and B&N’s online store. I should also be getting up the (hopefully) multi-platform-accessible ebook version up later today.

Anyhoo, you all are probably wondering about this book thing itself! After all, XXX is a bit of a, uh, provocative title. Now, to calm some of y’all’s (y’alls’?) nerves, no, it’s not a book of porn poetry. I hear the porn industry is doing just fine without me, so I don’t feel any particular need to contribute to it, thank you very much. However, many of the poems in the book are heavily sensual. They’re love poems, after all. Some are lust poems. There are hints – sometimes more than hints – about nudity. There is an entire poem about boobs. So yeah, I would say the words “mature content” probably applies.

Though I’m not sure a comedy piece about boobs actually counts as mature…

Anyhoo. There are four sections of poetry: sensual, morose, doggerel, and senryu. The sensual poems are the more traditional love/lust poems in content; the morose poems lean in around the sadder side of longing; “doggerel” is basically another word for “I felt like a fourteen year old boy with a bent for bad puns when writing these poems”; and “senryu” is a Japanese form of poetry that’s kinda like a haiku except that it’s about humans instead of nature. Most of the poems are completely new ones I’ve written in the past five days (lemme tell you ’bout rush projects…), but a couple might have appeared on this blog and on the secret past Miceala blog that nobody here needs to know about.

Also, a note – yes, I am a cis-gendered, generally heterosexual woman. However, I wrote the poems in XXX with the aim of being gender and orientation inclusive. Because poetry is a highly personal thing, my own tendencies probably still bleed in somewhat, but all in all, I think I did a fairly good job of producing a book of love/sex-related-ish poetry that someone with any set of genitalia or brand of horny-ness could pick up and enjoy.

I dunno. Maybe you should just buy it and find out. :p

So. This is now an obscenely long post, so I should probably stop blabbering now and give you all the link to actually go buy the damned thing.

XXX: The Poetry currently available for purchase here:  https://www.createspace.com/4668600

“Heavily sensual.

Hotly morose.

Frisky doggerel.

Flitratious senryu.

Written to tantalize the mind and rouse the fantasy whatever its partner’s orientation or genitalia, herein lies poetry undressed and posing, draped agains the wall of erotica.

A word of advice to the reader: you might want to brace yourself, to.

This is poetry that leaves its partner tingling.

These words encourage voyeurism. They enjoy an audience. They live to be handled by a lover – so go ahead, get your hands on this book. Hold it in your favorite position. These poems will mutter and sigh with pleasure as you move in and out of their pages, tucking your fingers between the spaces and brushing the edges this way and that. These are poems that will beg you to take them home and have them in bed. Morning, night – whenever you want. Let these poems show you what they can do between their covers.

They think you might enjoy getting to know them.

After all, it’s XXX in here.”

* “ALL PROFITS you say? How do I really know you’re going to donate all the profits?” Well, lovely readers, I believe in this thing called honesty. Also financial transparency. Once I have the report of sales through Monday from createspace, I’ll take a screen shot. Then, I will write a check to Planned Parenthood (totally gonna try to get one of those ginormous checks for this) and take a picture of that too. I can even give you all a picture of me handing someone at Planned Parenthood the check (if I do manage to get an excitingly and absurdly large check) or dropping the check in the mail or something. So, breathe easy, lovely readers. I’m not lying to you. Lying makes me feel all queasy inside. Also I don’t like scams. Or spam. For the record.

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The Ironic Love Story

2 Nov

The Ironic Love Story

I’m tired of fucking loneliness.

It’s a terrible lover.

But I couldn’t stay in your room

and be reminded of the absence of you.

I wonder if you’ll even notice

that my side of the bed is empty tonight.

Or are you really fucking empty, too?

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The Dowager Queen

1 Aug

dowager queen

She was the dowager queen, they said,
never married at all but once.
But I have seen the wrinkles in her eyes
and know they are faded
far beyond the skin of time.

Boys will be fair, she said one day
while I sat at her knee,
and men may be kind,
but life is cruel
and in the end a heart can break
more than once.

I looked up at her,
the questions in my eyes,
and for once
there was no disguise
for the pain behind the laugh lines
and the crow’s feet
and the bags
that so often escape the notice
of those who do not look for life’s weight.

 
She smiled,
the only cruel mockery
time had left her
of a once whole heart,
shook her head,
and sighed.

 
In the end they will disappoint you, my dear,
the lovers, the suitors, the husbands, the friends.
They will murmur sweet words
while they lay in your bed
but the days always come
when the dream will end,
and you will be left
with the scent on your pillow
and nothing but the excuse of their lips.
And even should the sweetest stay,
in the end this world will have its way
and the lips will turn cold
even if the heart does not –
and time will do a man’s job for him
should he refuse.
If he does not leave,
then he will be taken.

 
I raised my face to protest
but there was nothing to say,
not when the dowager looked that way.
Not with the memories tearing through her eyes
and ripping across her face,
her old, veined hands trembling,
held by a thousand ghosts.

 
They say the dowager was only married but once.
But I,
I say that she has been married forever –
or not at all.

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