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| this house was abandoned with the people still living in it. they live here still, trapped in their filth and tears while the world gains speed around them. they're frozen in the amber of despair where they keep the beauty of their art in boxes and brown paper bags, saving it for christmas or "maybe next year". the tools of their expression are lost, broken, or misplaced and the brightness of their intellect slips each time they forget what they were saying or become distracted by their fledgling insanity. only hope keeps them breathing in choking sobs as they hold back hysterical screams of what they could be, once were, and now fear they will not have the chance to be again. they take their walls down at night only to seek the darkness of sleep and awaken to dream tense dreams of A Better Day Than Yesterday. Ashamed when put before those who got out and chanced to come back, they sparkle as much as dullness allows even while the other inmates misbehave around them. they're all looking for love without knowing it surrounds them because they die once every other day in the drowning pool of their wasted aspirations. |
| That's something I wrote the first night I was back in Ashland, back home from college for the first time. It was devastating to walk into that house again. Horrifying to come back to something I thought I had left forever and know I couldn't save the people who were still there... I pulled it out today because I thought I was ready to refine and share it, to make it into something more lengthy, to add it to the next thing I'm going to post up, make them both into a single piece that exemplifies the fever of anxiety I found myself swirling around in my Freshman year at college... But the mere act of typing the above out and editing it a little so that it would make more sense than what i originally scribbled with a broken crayon by furnace light has me weeping cold tears on my shower-warm cheeks. In light of that, I've decided to just share for today. Another day will be soon enough to tie all of this together, perhaps even with a third piece that just came to mind that I wrote before I ever left Ashland... That piece will go last here because, now that I think about it, the three belong together. |
| i have the world to kiss but it tastes bad and it bites. i have paranoia to hold my hand and an aching back and a foot i hurt because i'm not used to walking so far at once yet and i tripped over a loose brick in the pavement that i should've seen but didn't because i was looking at the sky for once in the day, for once in a week, and wishing for the hundredth time that i could see it without having to peer around the cold gray towers of buildings. buildings. buildings everywhere and i'm suffocating with fear because he won't stop hugging me when i cry. is what "life" is going to Be for me from now on? i thought going home would help but i'm only more depressed now. i came from trash and now i'm Poor White Trash in a huge city that's small to the rest of the world and i don't know what to do about it. i wake up hysterical and pass out at night so exhausted that my month is one long, seamless day. i eat cardboard and drink piss and call it fast food. i breath pollution, swim in sewer and gather puffs of erotic inspiration from the few flowers that bloom in this malfunction. interruption from above beyond between and i have to cease being me again so the others that can, smile. |
| I wrote that in the dorm, obviously at some point after I had gotten back from the visit that inspired that first bit up there. This next thing I wrote my senior year of highschool, before things -really- started to get bad. |
| This far and she can still here them screaming at each other. She's always been afraid of the dark, but sanity is more important. She just needed out. No shoes. No thought. Walking down the drive-way. Sharp rocks bite tender feet. In the cold grass she stops to defile herself in a way they can't. Urine hotter than the tears that won't come streams down her legs. Standing in her own waste, she wonders what if... what if... BLINDING HEADLIGHTS!! She steps out of the road into the churchyard beyond. After the car passes, the night is so much darker. She turns and embraces it, still afraid. |
| obviously this is going to take some work to combine into a solid depiction of how i got where i am now, and it's a little scattered in its presentation today because i'm somewhere between getting dressed and leaving for work, but i'm going to be thinking about a fourth and maybe fifth bit that needs to be added. i'm not sure anything needs to come before this last bit i've posted, but i think that maybe it's only fair for their to be something that comes -after- the middle thing i posted. i think my family and i are doing just swell in life now. i want this to be both a travel piece and a personal/family catharsis piece... it'll be interesting to see what i can manage with it, i think. (2-18-02) |