May 2013
4 posts
4 tags
Observations on a pristine day
Pigeons swarming over by dropped civilian crumbs, table legs, umbrellas over the eating area that don’t do their job and point in the other direction. A brief respite provided by a cloud. The sound of dropped coins on cement, slow-leaking gas, car engines, a medley of voices conversing over soda straws. Lunch in the city is nice.
1 tag
My fiction professor preferred the short story I wrote the night before it was due to the story I’d worked on for a week. I guess I over-think things.
3 tags
The brain works intricately, it is adaptable. We like to think “colorfully,” though our brain’s junctures sometimes fail to present any type of meaningful idea. We also think as impulse, we engage in reckless behavior as a way to seek reward: acceptance swaddled attention, anything but a contrite reaction. Our brains allow us to negotiate—we can think of ways to get out of virtually any...
4 tags
“Guess how soon. Guess at the taste of locusts and wild honey. Guess at the taste...”
– “Make This Simple Test” by W.S. Merwin
April 2013
4 posts
4 tags
5 tags
When I Think of Life
You are, at once,
Infinite and finite,
Old and New,
A cog in the cosmos.
When I think of life
I think joy and pain
And freedom. But I also
Think chains and boundaries.
We are tied to our selves,
Stuck on Earth,
Bound to this body.
We are stuck, so utterly,
Like moss on a rock.
4 tags
Portfolio Time
I have a science writing portfolio and a fiction portfolio due tomorrow… and here I am on Tumblr. Shame.
5 tags
Blow soft kisses into the wind; I know we’ll never come back here. It was last autumn when we officially decided, but standing now at the brink of abandonment, those passing four months seem to have sped by. I don’t want to go, but I know it is for the best. It’s something we discussed many times before. I didn’t always see it the way he did, but I suppose it’s him who needs to make all of the...
March 2013
5 posts
5 tags
“Nothing will get you into trouble so deep or as sad as faith.”
– Rich Bass - “Juggernaut”
4 tags
Staunton, VA
I’ve never been
to such a place- where dreary hills
make wastelands shine.
Content in stasis, slow moving
like syrup suffocating
and squeezing the light from eyes
bright and new.
The day is grim, and promises snow.
To Staunton we go for The Country Wife.
3 tags
Six Word Story
sisyphean-loop:
copunicus:
The beginning, the middle, the end.
the rise, the climax, the resolution.
Days to live; he came back.
4 tags
My advisor asked me whether or not I had a blog. I panicked and said “no.” Not that I update this frequently, but I guess it still counts. He recommends one post a week. Oh, and he said to learn the entire Adobe CS. And he used preparing for a hike as a metaphor for entering the job market. He’s kind of the greatest.
3 tags
She seared herself with knowledge and the hope of making all that is wrong with the world somehow bearable. Anguish and fate copulated under boughs of whispery willows. Beam after beam of reflected headlight reminded them of home. You see, it wasn’t the end, as they say, for there is no end. The book may say “The End,” but the story goes on for as long as time is or isn’t.
February 2013
3 posts
3 tags
Sometimes I Write Random Shit
Piling tricks of the light, synthetic noise, an analysis of ethics. Nothing is right; everything is blunder. The old world tells you nothing is fine. The sterile hold of the elite traps you in false manifestations of wit, too much time, the way we’re meant to feel. You are a rumination. You make me itch, a fever unlike the notion of summer or varsity sports. I’m made whole by your absence...
4 tags
“A good writer always works at the impossible.”
– John Steinbeck
2 tags
∞
January 2013
1 post
4 tags
And in that instant nothing in the world mattered. My heart beat beneath the book snatched to my chest, throbbing blood and pain, utterly captured by the words enclosed. Food, water, shelter, sleep, all irrelevant. The only thing worth knowing was the insane sorrow those pages provided and their dehabilitating blow to my innermost self.
December 2012
4 posts
5 tags
We live, we die. No god or greater power is going to sweep you up to heaven. Life is just one fluid movement, unconsciousness to consciousness, and back out again. Life is like waves lapping at the shore of a beach. The waves run up to the shore, stay for a brief moment, and then recede back into the expanse of the ocean. Our bodies rejoin the cosmos, and our thoughts disintegrate into the abyss.
3 tags
The world is made of particles. These particles are always humming. You’re not really touching something- the particles are repelling each other. Realizing that you’re not really who you think you are. It’s all cliché. The urge to tell someone they’re a cunt; the urge to fling open the car door on the highway; to vomit up your food even though you’re not bulimic and it tasted really good. No one...
3 tags
3 tags
Once More to the Summit
Pine needles blanket the forest floor- some freshly fallen, others brown with the helplessness of death. There is still a trail, delightfully preserved in all its root-laden brilliance, swerving up and through the same wise, stoic trees that have outlived generations of humans come in and out of being. And even the smell of young twigs broken in the clean, undisturbed mountain air is the same. I...
November 2012
1 post
3 tags
Sap
My father knew that he was going to die at the age of 62. He knew because the doctors at MedTrust Hospital ran a multitude of tests on him and all signs pointed to an untimely demise.
When the nurse came to the lobby, my mother’s hands tightened around mine and began to tremble. Four months, she struggled to repeat after the nurse. In four months my father would be 62 and dead. And I...
October 2012
4 posts
6 tags
Dash of Despair
Smoky tendrils
Offer the blaze of autumn
With lust and pyre, relenting,
With amber spokes.
Stab and prod
Overflowing disgrace
And silence
Unto common disbelief.
3 tags
The morning light does its best to squeeze you from every corner of unconsciousness, but your mind cannot help itself- it returns to the indulgent world of the dream.
4 tags
3 tags
Atmosphere
If you look hard enough, deep enough, you can see the atmosphere. You’re taught that air is invisible, present, but unseeable. But I can see the swirling molecules of oxygen. The layers of air that bind life to the Earth- they can be seen, and they can be understood. On an intrinsic level, the air is something to be revered. It is the reason our life is allowed to exist. Without it, this...
May 2012
2 posts
4 tags
The Mistake
I know it is too late. I know it is too late, and I can do nothing. I hide. I want my mother to come and tell me that everything is going to be all right and for her to take me home. She doesn’t come. No one comes for me. I am alone on the train tracks at 12:05 a.m. and it’s all my fault.
[[MORE]]
The platform is empty aside from a newly reunited couple and a homeless man drinking a...
3 tags
The moment when you’re so extremely bored that you...
Even though you’re incredibly unpopular, you decide that it’s necessary to refresh your browser at evenly paced 30-second intervals. It doesn’t matter that your email server has a live update of your inbox. You need to be sure that your wifi didn’t have a spasm, the website isn’t down, and that your aunt remembered to send you her eggplant parm recipe. After you refresh the page a few dozen times,...
April 2012
1 post
4 tags
Dialogue
Conversations draw you here
or do not,
Fumbling vain attempt to clear
The air of cheap nonsense,
Noise noise noise you see
Constantly
Making bonds out of segments that may appear.
Fumbling: Can you recall the blocks
Held together;
The fortress
Of time wound about a clock
expanding continuously
by the sea
by the sea where moments float and shiver?
Conversations: Just think
About all the wasted...
March 2012
2 posts
4 tags
Lenox Soap
A beige border, a few centimeters, precisely
traces the edges of the collage
inlaid with the repeated pattern of
small three-petaled flowers.
This is merely the background—
a cut up box of cigars, arranged on both ends
golden and ornate. Written
in script the indecipherable words
spell out some brand or another.
And yet another rectangle
encompasses this.
The opposing side filled with
neatly...
6 tags
Sleeping & Waking
“I remain deep in my ego and unconsciousness. The night drags on, perpetuates, and reminds me of my vector state- forever a shell, a void to be filled. And yet I sit, arranged so perfectly in the darkness of indestructible energy. Awaken, sleep, stasis, synchronicity; I am merely a cog in the delicate triad of birth, life, and death. My current position? Somewhere in between functionality and...
February 2012
4 posts
5 tags
4 tags
White Walls
The room had a bright, sterile look and feel to it. I walked toward the middle of the square area and, like a fly to the tantalizing warmth of an incandescent light bulb, hovered in front of a two by three foot painting of a proud mallard that was surrounded on all sides by five feet of white wall. My cracked lips parted and my jaw dropped ever so slightly. If my mouth weren’t dry from shoving...
6 tags
The Sidewalk
Often, when you sit by the window
Looking out at the alleyway behind the house,
I feel lonely near one or two p.m.
And go for a walk in the affluent districts, adjacent to our own
Until the sidewalks don’t look
Grimy and littered with plastic asteroids.
I stop at the tulip garden,
Along rows of mansions, too big for their own good,
Complete with oversized shutters plastered on
The front like a...
5 tags
Slouchy Woman
OUTDOORS, THE SLEET falls fast and diagonally. Zelda James is dressed in an oversized peach-color sweatshirt and starchy dark wash jeans. She cups her hand over a match to help light her joint. Pure sulfur enters her lungs along with a wave of relief.
Humphrey Pollard opens the door to the parking lot, disdain on his face, slowly rotting away his resolve. Zelda can hear...
January 2012
3 posts
4 tags
Dense
Overwhelmed by the brevity of existence.
Disinterested in the fate of the world.
Congruence.
Futility.
Chk, chk, chk.
Your last breath will falter; harmony interrupted.
7 tags
Cleaning Service
George was silent in the back room. He had done two walk-throughs of the building to make sure all of the students were out, locked the doors, and flipped the light switches off in the main hallways. He was sitting at his boss’s desk, toying around with a small pair of scissors that once rested precariously on the edge of the mahogany.
Ned had gone to the liquor store as soon as George...
2 tags
Here Lies My Youth.
The only distinct memory I have of my childhood is of one day at the playground. I was on the slide, gripping onto the railing, afraid to go down. My hand slipped and I tumbled down, to my death, I thought, only to be caught by the arm by a little boy about my age. Five, it was. My one childhood memory. And it wasn’t even a good one because I forget what happened after that. It might...
