Placeholder for Something Less Dramatic

when it comes.

everything reminds me of [____]

oh! i remember her. her little snub nose.
matches his little snub nose.

an upturned nose. expressing permanent disdain . . . delicacy.

sickly sweet soda, trickling through my lips;
buds pressed against the cylindrical edge;

a potent moment. only remembered because the sensation was so intense. drug-induced, probably.

bland girl.
bland summer day.
bland date.

blond girl;
blinding sun;
bleary-eyed.

above the too-short philtrum, a damnable snub nose.

a buttoned face.

sleight of mind

overcome by a fear of lacking insight

Horace’s Advice to the Young Person in Need of Editing

. . . although you have your father to guide your judgment aright and are yourself wise to boot, cherish this lesson and take it home: that only in limited fields is mediocrity tolerable or pardonable. A counsel or second-rate pleader at the bar may not rival Messalla in eloquence, nor possess the knowledge of Casellius; yet he has value; but mediocrity in poets has never been tolerated by gods, men or — booksellers. Just as, at some pleasant banquet, ugly music, coarse perfume, and poppy seed mixed with Sardinian honey offend the taste, because the meal could have passed without such things: so a poem, created to give delight, if it fails but a little of the highest sinks to the lowest.

If, however, you should one day produce something, pray submit it first to Maecius the critic, to your father, to me; and then put the manuscript back on your desk and let it stand for over a decade. The unpublished may be cancelled; but a word once uttered can never be recalled . . .

In days gone by, whenever you read a piece to Quinilius he would exclaim, “Correct this, I pray, or that.” If you replied that you could do no better, that you had tried twice or thrice in vain, he would bid you cut out the ill-turned lines and bring them to the anvil again. If you chose rather to defend rather than to mend the faulty line, not a word more would he say, or waste his efforts. Henceforth you might hug yourself and your works, alone, without rival.

A kind and sensible critic will censure verses when they are weak, condemn them when they are rough; ugly lines he will score in black, will lop off pretentious ornaments, force you to clear up your obscurities, criticize a doubtful phrase, and mark what needs a change . . . he will not say, “Why should I take my friend to task for mere trifles?” — it is such trifles that will bring into sad scrapes the poet who has been fooled and flattered unfairly . . .

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mouth

Two chapped petals. Inconsistent hues of pink. They fold. Purse.

Little chips of porcelain cups, lined up in two neat rows. They gleam.

That tricky tongue, snaking down the bottom of each throat.

All the senses meet here.

(It produces/hears/feels/tastes/sees sound.)

It is lined with flesh like the rest of us.

Of all things, the mouth seems the most irritatingly there.

too early.

gray light of dawn seeps in through slatted blinds. the pale streams wash the salt from my wounds, the gashes that run through me, body and mind, inherent and acquired.

merritt loops around me, an aural towel, rubbing me down, scrubbing the morning into my skin.

my blanket remains heaped.

i have always been afraid of the dark. i’m older now. it should be better. it was better, for a while. but the night terrors are returning. unfriendly shadows! menacing trees! evil mirror worlds! dreams that spiral out of control. i am never in control of my dreams.

i’ve heard a few tricks to create lucid dreaming, but i can’t master it. the dreams control me. that’s the way it’s always been.

a psychic state of arrested development. the dreams and nightmares of a child, amplified by an adult vocabulary:

I can’t remember much. But I’ll tell you what stuck out the most. I was in a room with Jon and Abe and Ashton, maybe a few other people that I know. I was asked to watch a horror movie. I vehemently refused. They insisted. And before I knew it, we were in a horror movie, and everyone was getting killed, and the bodies of everyone I knew started piling up on the floor. I was immobile. I had a vague urge to “find the killer,” but nothing could uproot me. I hated the situation, didn’t want to acknowledge it. So the bodies continued to accumulate.

A face fills my field of vision. Huge, white, Japanese, you know, billowing black hair. She shrieks at me. Maggots spill out of her mouth, a sea of little white ones, growing into wiggling black centipedes. It washes over me. I can feel them under my skin.

I refuse to acknowledge it. I close my eyes tight. I hate her. I hate this stupid dream. But I can still feel the bugs, still hear the screams. I want to yell, but when I open my mouth, they push on, down my throat.

I flail, clawing the air in front of me. The insects start fading away. The woman laughs. I open my eyes and see the bodies of my friends, heaped on top of each other like old photos from the Holocaust. An arm reaches out from the pile and the end of it opens up; the arm becomes a devouring limb, and starts swallowing a nearby body. Jon’s arm. As it munches, it becomes distended, full, crunching bones and mashing ligaments. Then a leg jumps out, gulps up the arm. Each body is slowly digested by another body. Every body part opens up. They are more vacuums than mouths.

I close my eyes again. It’s too much. But as before, when I close my eyes, the room roars, and the other sensations double. Waves of blood lap at my feet. Offal wraps around me. Guts and skeletons and ghosts and demons.

It’s Halloween. It’s a haunted house. It’s a low-budget film. It’s a yawning abyss, it’s all too real, and it returns to me, night after night. These stupid images…a ventriloquist’s dummy, tying up someone I love, pointing a gun at their head. Raptors tearing loose from a museum. A fun house in a county fair that goes on forever, that I can never escape, where each room is more horrible than the one before.

It’s juvenile yet mortal terror, and it’s constant.

barely coherent, but i couldn’t sleep. so there’s that.

something inconsequential which now seems essential

—and then I realized that, for all that we shared, we had never been to the beach together, and he had never run his gritty fingers through my salty tangled hair; and, as submerged as we were in each other, we had never submerged ourselves in anything else, and we lacked depth because we waded through each night, a tidepool bond—

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A Fun Idea:

Be alternately sincere and flippant until you lose the trust of everyone you hold dear!

i fear that i am too open

Here are the thoughts that mill around my head when I ought to be in bed. They are small and simple, I promise you; small and simple, just like me. (Still coming to terms with these words as applied to myself.)

i have let down the drawbridge and invited everyone in. some rush in, some wander nearby. and yet, i have locked myself in the stone tower, and i cannot explore the same crevices of my own domain as another can so readily.

scratchmarks on coffin lids, spoons clanging against jars, a seal bellowing with the timbre of a large angry man. apply pressure, increase volume. bruises peppering skin.

“lick the salt take the shot suck the lime,” don told me. three actions so completely distinct and succinct i felt weak against these dagger commands. tongue + seasoned hand, lips + little glass, teeth + fruit flesh.

i followed. the murkiness soon was covered in soot, and still, i composed myself. although the dead dull brain may be roiled it does not require ongoing updates of its current status. and so i let it rot, peacefully.

i have not yet reached the winter of ‘63 — in fact, despite my stagnant state, i feel a great period of growth coming on. phoenix bursting from the oven; oh, how deliciously tacky.

fecundity

out of the great blankness, jeanette’s head emerges, her face tilted towards the ground. i tell her to look up. she looks up. her eyes are two ink blots in water, spreading outward and downward at once; they seem deep and limitless, yet wavering.

her eyes are intelligent, but not kind. they unnerve me. i reach out, but before i can touch her, her eyelids close with a great swoop of thick eyelashes, resting nearly on her made-up cheeks. the thin follicles are accentuated by moist drops — maybe they’re tears, maybe it’s condensation.

i can’t take it.

jeanette’s face shifts into minerva’s. the jaw is lengthened and made square, the skin sheds its make-up and becomes raw and porous. the eyes are kinder, but flatter. the gloss has disappeared, and the wet dream becomes dry reality; trite but true.

i get nervous.

and in struggling to express myself, i find that i don’t know where to begin. came up with a list of all my influences, then got frustrated, because it was the list of the common man. my list was as plain as my face, as unremarkable as anything i hold dear. as tired and threadbare as the imagery that fascinates me, the moments that i struggle to hold on to, the glimmers of life that have been served countless times by better fingers than mine.

but i must not trudge deeper into that barren mire.

i re-focus. minerva.

make a move make a move and be careful not to enthuse enthuse enthuse. do not reveal your hand too soon. move in soft and slow, gliding into her kitchen like a trapped dove; move in swift and serious, like a practiced knife. just make a move make a move.

and when i came home that night, i came by way of bike, and as the wheels spun across the dark ground i relished the crackling of leaves and the crickets crickets crickets crickets that rarely stopped their crooning