Sunday, December 26, 2010

Reject if seal is missing.

“Have a good one,” he says, and then he walks away without meeting my eyes, but that could be because I’m looking at everything--everyone--but him. He slips away, out of my field of view, and it feels strange, unfinished somehow. It’s not until I’ve helped another three or four people that I realize why. there was no sadness in his leaving, no longing. No lingering. No goodbye. And the last time I heard his voice, I was near tears, biting my lip, trying not to make things harder on us both.

“There. That wasn’t so hard, was it?” he says, and I have to say no. Because what else is there to say? Yes. Yes, that was hard. Harder than anything I’ve had to do in my life. Hard enough to make me feel like my lungs have stopped working and my heart is beating maybe half as much as it should be. I feel like I have more to say, like he deserves a better explanation, but he doesn’t seem to need one. Or maybe he just wants me gone.

“Goodbye,” I say, because there isn’t anything else.

“Goodbye,” he says, and that’s all. I leave his bedroom alone for the first time, holding back tears as I wave goodbye to his mother in the kitchen and, as politely as possible, declining the ride home his father offers me. The walk home is filled with fragmented song lyrics that once belonged to us, and the next time I hear his voice

is when he is wishing me to “have a good one.”

And I have to think, Is this what we’ve come to? Because even at our worst moments, even in the awkward days when he was the boyfriend of my friend and all I knew was his name, we always said more than that.

I wonder as I fumble through my next orders with shaking hands and a stuttering voice whether he’ll be in my dreams again. I never used to dream at all, and now that I’ve begun having visions in my sleep again, he’s the one recurring character. He hands me sheets of numbers that don’t make sense, and he tells me empty things that drip with the flavor of the past, and I wake up confused until I remember that the shape of those words is only a residue in my head, and that they are sitting comfortably in someone else’s now.


A few days ago, a friend of mine was recounting a conversation she’d had with someone else, and she mentioned considering herself as damaged goods. As I walk away from here, the brief encounter with him now an hour--maybe even more--in my past and my brain unable to stop playing it in an endless, painful loop, I wonder if that’s what I am now.

Damaged goods, ruined by the side-effect flavor of mistakes and regrets, and things I might wish, someday, had turned out differently.

Saturday, December 25, 2010

We Are The Hopeful

Today is Christmas, albeit closer to the end of it than the beginning. And today I feel like saying I'm sorry, and saying hold on, and saying I love you.


I know that Christmas is hard for a lot of my friends. I know that many days are hard for many of my friends. But as I'm struck by a melancholy feeling I cannot explain in the quiet lull of after-Christmas, I know that today in particular is harder for them. For me. For us.


For those of us who sit and wonder, is this all there is? and have the question not even touch on presents and food. For those of us who miss holidays of years passed—years when loved ones were alive, when parents were together, when we lived in places we loved, when we were able to make a phone call and know that the person on the other end wanted to be with us as much as we wanted to be with them, wherever they were.


The great Jamie Tworkowski said today, “If you feel abandoned and haunted today, please know you're not alone. If you feel overwhelmed by questions and pain, please know you're not alone.


And this is true.


I want you to know that if you're reading this, I love you. If you're hurting, I want your pain to stop. If you want something more, I do, too, and I know that we can fight for it if we want it.


So do you want it? And will you come with me to find it, even if it doesn't seem like it wants to be found?


There will always be despair. A friend of mine said to me today, “The bad guys always win and there is nothing we can do.”


And I told him, “The bad guys only win when we admit defeat. Remember that.”


This, I believe, is also true.


So will you join me? Will you step up and let our refusal, our denial of that defeat, echo in the bones of those who tell us we are, will always be, have always been nothing? Worthless? Hopeless?


Because we are not hopeless. We are only young, and we are learning. And we are fighting. And we will not let ourselves be trampled by our despair anymore.


We are the Hopeful.


Are you with me?

Friday, December 24, 2010





Sunday, December 19, 2010

The New Voices Anthology

Earlier in November, I submitted three pieces to Bemidji State University's New Voices anthology. I got two letters in the mail today, telling me that two of my poems were accepted, and one of them had also won something called the Langston Hughes prize for poetry.


From what I know, there are over a thousand submissions for New Voices every year. Of that thousand, fifty are chosen to be included in the anthology. Out of those fifty, six are given awards. I'm not sure if this makes me feel very, very big, or very, very small... I guess it's a little bit of both.


There's a reading at the beginning of April, where I'll be able to read both the accepted pieces and receive my two copies of the anthology as well as pick up more (which I'm sure I'll have to do--every relative I have will want one xD)


I am so excited and so dumbfounded, and so speechless. It's never been more than a dream to ever be published. And now it's more than that all of a sudden.


The poems: Midnight's Concubine and Indigo

Saturday, December 18, 2010

Indigo (New Voices 2011 Version)

On December 14, 2010, this poem was accepted into the Bemidji State University New Voices anthology for 2011. More information on New Voices can be found here.

It also won the Langston Hughes Prize for Poetry.

Who would have known that,
as we wandered in the wilderness,
our hearts were collecting colored sand
grain by
grain?
Purple dust filled
the gaps between
your ribcage and your lungs,
and tiny bits of royal blue
sifted through the cracks in my spine,
muffling the beat of my heart.
They threw us together and
while we collided,
the hinges of our bones must have broken and
rolled back our skin like the stone from the tomb.
Our hard-won sand went skittering along the ground and,
while we scrambled to reclaim it,
it attracted to itself,
mingling until we could no longer find our own.
So call it fate or call it
indigo,
it amounts to the same:
no one has called me a truer name
than the one in your eyes that you never speak.
Someday will we wear our finger raw,
picking apart the colors?
Leave half the grains behind and
emerging diminished,
but entirely our own again.
I doubt it.
Something changed in our collision,
and something became;
Rather than walking away from it
as halves of some whole,
we walked away complete.



Sunday, December 12, 2010

The parchment's message was worn away by salt.

Professions of love are
glimmering shards of ice you can barely see,
heralding icebergs underneath;
seaman's stories told behind gnarled hands,
mixing hyperbole and truth;
confessions
usually made in the dark.

Speaking those words is somehow like
taking the anchor from your stomach,
back-swallowing the chain in great long chunks
of rusty metal
so that it slides away from you—
the stability of the secret
is no longer yours.

It never really matters if the ground you're over
is tearing up the hull of your heart.
You toss your compass over the side
and let yourself be bashed against the rocks,
to be lost.

People come to gawk at shipwrecks, don't they?
Perhaps, with your makeup like ship's paint
running down your cheeks like an oil spill,
and your hair
plastered by the salt of tears to your face,
you will become something to remind them
of the tragedies in life.


Will you tell the tale of your once-great ship,
her beauty turned to mold in the gray-green storm—
or are you going to give up your grip to the threat of a storm
that might shatter you
or might put you back on course?
How hard can it be to navigate
by instincts like stars in the dark?
They've always been there,
after all.

Whisper it to the grains of salt that sting your skin,
to the water that is always shifting colors
just enough to keep it new.
It always knew,
and so did you.
So say it.

I love
have loved
do love
will always
love

you.

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Nothing great is ever done alone.

This is an post to remind you all, and to remind myself, that I'm alive. And so are you.


This seems like it would be a given, but honestly, it's so easy to forget. To forget that you're living a life that's just as great and important and beautiful as all of the other lives you see around you. It's just harder to see your own life and your own actions in the same way you see the lives of others.


This is a thank you note. This is to say that I love you. This is to tell you to step outside, however cold it is, take a deep breath, and breathe out a dream, or a wish, or a prayer. And this is to encourage you to take that wish and own it, and to make it happen. Wishes and prayers are powerful things, but they're all the more powerful when you put your own strength behind them.


I think sometimes it's easy to look at the world around us and assume there isn't much we can do—this person is stronger than us, that person is better than us, these people have more charm or talent or skill or a better reputation than we do. But here's the thing: there's always going to be someone better in our own eyes. The trick isn't to be better than the people around you, but to do better with the people around you.


Nothing great is ever achieved alone. Unite with the people you love, and you'll be surprised at how much easier life can be. That's the point of having friends and allies, you know? So that they can life you up when you fall, and you can help do the same thing for them. And I think sometimes we, as young people, forget that. To us, friends sometimes become the people to hang with in the hallways and crack jokes with. We stop seeing them as people as full of life and depth and experiences as we are.


Here's a challenge for you, whoever happens to actually read this rambling of mine: take a second look at the people who are close to you and, as the great John Green says, imagine them complexly. Look at the people you love and realize that they have the same capacity for love and pain and happiness and hopes and dreams and fears that you do.


And then just love them.


Remember that wish I told you to make? Keep it. Tie it to your finger with a string. Don't let yourself forget it. Turn it over in your mind until you know it upside down and backwards.


Then turn to those complexly-imagined people that you love, and say to them, “There's this thing I want to do. Can you help me?”


And I bet you I know what they'll say back.


Just try it.


I dare you.





Believe in Dreams | Remember to Live EP | Flyleaf