Together

Can you imagine it, what together feels like? It’s not a word that exudes a certain feeling but if you asked someone and they gave it a moment of thought I believe you’d get an answer that would satisfy your mind and your heart. So, as you sit there in your pretty dress with your pretty smile and your pretty eyes, can you imagine what together feels like? Would you whisper your answer in my ear and cause a shiver to pour through me? Will you let your dangling strands of milk chocolate brown hair caress my cheek and overwhelm me to where I can’t help but pull you into my arms?

Together, to me, feels like warmth on a cold day. Sharing a blanket and your weight pressed into me as if we’re one entity. It’s also a quiet summer night in a darkened room, save the yellow glow of two lamps on either side of a couch. Our bare legs stretched out and intertwined, mine between yours and yours on top of mine. One of my hands clasping a book while the other kneads at the soles of your feet, my ears gifted with soft pleasured sounds slipping past your lips.

Every time I would look up at you as you made one of those sounds. I don’t know if you we’re doing it on purpose or if its involuntary, but eventually you catch me looking and begin to do it more often. Our eyes catch and you’d bite your lower lip. That would be the end of it. The end of me. The end of the book and the end of the saccharine moment we were sharing, because I’d stare into your green eyes and get jealous of your teeth biting into your lip.

I would split your legs and summit your body. My hands beginning their trek at your hips and dragging all the way up until they dive deep into your hair, pulling it back. My fingers through your hair like forks through sand.

My lips wouldn’t have the same patience. They would dive immediately for yours and indulge in a kiss that started in the middle as if it were paused from the night before. The soft and gentle moans from my hands on your feet would sound like a Disney movie compared to the NC-17 designation I would pull from you. The windows would fog with steam and after our deeds were done we’d be thankful that the house was empty, as we made no consideration for others when letting our lungs loose to play.

And then we’d lay there together, again. Some of our clothes in various stages of wear, while other pieces at random distances around the room. My hungry lips unable to stop feeding itself with quick, repeated pecks of your cheek and shoulder. Your hands traveling my thighs, up and down, before they reach to hook on the back of my head and pull me in for another kiss in an awkward and stretched behind you kind of way.

Together. The two of us.

Wasting another night against each other and redefining the way we think of certain words.

Compliments

“I love the way you write,” she said, and it was the beginning of the end.

It was the beginning of the beginning, but I’ve always fallen for easy compliments on things I’m self conscious about.  My hair.  My clothes.  My voice and my writing.  All it took was sincerity in her voice, perceived or actual, and I was overlooking a vast ravine and wanting to jump into the nothingness just to hear her say it again.

“Sorry, what?”  Never take a compliment for a compliment unless you hear them say it twice.  You may have misheard it and they said something different, or they were just being nice and will dismiss anything said previous.

“Your writing,” she held the piece of paper and shook it as if it had bells hanging from the edges, “I love the way you put words down.  The expressiveness.  The visuals.  The oddity and randomness of it.  I really like a lot.”

Does she really like it a lot or does she love it?

“Thanks.  Yeah.  I don’t know.  I just kind of dump my mind onto paper sometimes.  I don’t really know where it comes from.”

“Well its nice.  You should do it more often.”

Now it’s just nice.  I should have just said thanks and left it at that.

I nodded and smiled a closed-lip half smile and kept my head down.  I wanted to write some more but nothing was coming into my head.  Nothing except that she might have been staring at me.  I was too nervous to look up and confirm it so my pen just swirled around the letters on the newspaper in front of me where I had been writing in the margins.

It was out of boredom really.  Sitting random places doing random things.  My cellphone was the high quality, super rare kind that could still only make phone calls.  It probably could take pictures too but computers nowadays didn’t have the sophistication to handle the tens of hundreds of pixels it was capable of capturing.  So busying myself like everyone else in the room with their necks crooked and faces glowing against the light of the tiny screen wasn’t really an option.
So I would grab a piece of paper nearby and entertain myself.  Often times it would be a newspaper or a magazine.  I’d never take a current one in case someone wanted to read it, but there was usually a day old paper laying around so I would grab that and paint the canvas with my nonsense.

Most of the time it was literally complete nonsense.  I would keep my head down and listen to the conversations going on around me.  I would start writing parts of them and then take off from there into a world of the bizarre pieced together with fragments of reality.  When I was done, or my time was up, I would leave the little piece of brilliance on the table for someone else to enjoy or become perplexed by, either way it was out of my head and splashed across the page and I’d never even remember what it was a few hours later.

I wasn’t even sure anybody read any of it.  I thought someone might read a few words and then furrow their brow at the oddness then toss the paper in the trash.  I didn’t think people actually sat down and made it through everything.  It was a chore, and I partially did it as a joke.  I would sometimes end the writing saying that the reader has wasted minutes of their life they’ll never get back reading my nonsense.  Yet, here she was seemingly reading every word.

I finally let my eyes come up for air and took a quick glance at her.  She wasn’t staring at me but it looked as if she might have been side-eyeing my paper as the tip of my pen swirled along the words of the bold headline.  Was she waiting for me to write more so she could watch?  Strange.

When I brought my eyes up and not-so-smoothly took a look at her to see if she was watching me she noticed and caught my eyes with a smile.

“Well ran dry?”  she asked.

I shook my head, “no just the right inspiration hasn’t come along yet.”

“Oh.  What kind of inspiration do you need?”

I looked down away from her engaging smile and interrogating eyes, “I kind of know it when I see or hear it.  It takes a hold of me and my mind unfurls like a flower.  I don’t really control it.”

“Unfurls like a flower huh?”

I nodded.

“That’s kind of poetic.  Those visuals I was talking about.”

I don’t know if it was being conveyed on the outside of my skin but on the inside I was feeling flush and blushing.  I’m not used to praise or admiration in anything I do.  It always felt fake whenever anyone would say something nice and I never know how to take a compliment.  I froze and she kept talking.  I felt like I was sweating.  I completely forgot how to communicate with another person.

“I uh, yeah.  I don’t know.  I-, uh, uh huh.  I’m like-, uh, heh,” I wanted to bang my head on the desk and groan so loud but she was still staring at me, or at least it felt like she was.  She was still sitting there trying to engage with me and my tongue’s decided to swell three sizes too big and cut the circulation off to my brain.

“You know you could just write about me,” she tilted her head down and tried to catch my lowered eyes.  I looked up with my mouth slightly open in surprise.

“Uh…huh?”  I always gave the most eloquent responses when confused.  This is why I preferred to communicate in written word, I could write a hundred times better than I could speak.

“Me.  If you don’t know what to write about then write about me.  Make me a character.”

She was smiling.  Why was she smiling?  Write about her?  What?

“What would I even write about?”  I had forgotten about my awkwardness and engaged in the puzzle of what/huh/what are you talking about.

“I don’t know.  You’re the writer.  I’m just trying to give you some inspiration.  Selfishly of course.  I want to read what you’re going to write next and if its about me I’m curious to see where you’ll take that story so, yeah.  You can just write about this, right here.  Our conversation.  A back and forth and see where it goes.”

I wish she would stop making eye contact.  It’s so annoyingly polite and she was being too nice.  It felt like a trap but I couldn’t help it if it was.  She was asking me to write.  She requested my words written down for her.  The abyss was long and wide and never ending and I was going to fill it with words for her.  About her.
They would build a bridge from one end to the next and she could walk along it and peer over the edge to see all of the beautiful things I’d constructed below.

And all it took was for her to say, I love the way you write.

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It only hurts when I remember how good we were.

It only hurts when I think about what we could have been.

It only hurts when I look in your eyes and see nothing where so much used to be.

It only hurts when you’re around so I have to leave you.

It might not matter but at least I’ve tried.

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Even when it’s been so long

I can still smile

at the way you looked

when words were never needed.

Idyllic

Poems and prose comparative to old never seem to to hold the same weight.
Talking of love and lust and greed.
It all seemed so new then, but wanting it now would be akin to long walks on the beach.

Everybody loves those.
Everybody does those.

We want to be unique.  We want to be pure.
We want to feel the feelings and through them be the cure.

How are we poets now?
Everyone has their words.

How are we poets now?
Everyone is so sure.

There is no understanding of the plight of woman or man.
We don’t use words the way we used to, now it’s video that holds our hand.
Yet the words written, or typed, hold strength and power still.
These words are burning fire to show the oppressed’s will.

It will come from bordered lands with fences high and sharp.
It will come from wombs and bills that voices will never cease

and never stop

The people will feel the passion through the words and never let up.
The people will be the philosophers and poets.
The people will be the people again.
Poets will be poets
and we will feel the words once more.

Integrity

All I do is repeat pretty words by people with minds much more beautiful than mine in ways that are far less articulate.  All I am good for is second rate bargain bins and what not to do’s.  All I can be is this person with their fingers on the keys typing out emotions that don’t quite click.

I wonder if the past dies as silently as the future.  The words are still there.  The smell fades pretty quickly.  The taste and look of you aren’t far behind.  Memories betray us like the sun will one day.  Burn me as I touch it’s face because I could not comprehend the heat that comes from something so far away.

Don’t ask me to explain myself, I’ll just let you down.
Everything in life is only seen through memories of people who tell stories better than me.  All I can do is repeat those pretty words.  All I am good for is swimming in the tears that pool along the bottom of your eyes.  This all makes sense.  Don’t worry, it will all make sense.

When your daughter’s school is anti-woman

I don’t do a lot of blogging.  I prefer to lose myself in creativity but something recently pissed me off and I wanted to vent about it.  It’s going to make me jump off of a cliff of ranting but it’s frustrating and doesn’t seem to be changing, despite the bullhorn placed to its mouth in today’s society.  I’m afraid it’s just going to fade away.

My 11 year old daughter told me on the drive home from school last week that a boy called her a Stupid Ass Bitch in class.  She said it without any emotion and it didn’t seem to upset her but it made me mad.  I asked why he did that.

She said, “because I wouldn’t let him use my glue stick.”

I seethed during the ten minute drive home from school.  I ran things through my head about just letting it go because it didn’t bother her, but the more I thought about it the more angry it made me.
She wouldn’t let him use her glue stick and that’s the natural response he gave?  It was extreme and vulgar considering it was a boy calling a girl these names.  The word bitch has much worse connotations when directed at women, so there is no “it’s awful when anyone gets called a bad name” nonsense.

I asked my daughter if she told anyone and she said she did, she had told the teacher but the teacher was busy and didn’t hear it.  The only answer my daughter was given was “okay, sit down,” and a passing “I don’t want to hear any cussing” to the class in general.  This boy’s verbal assault was not addressed individually.

So I decided to email the teacher and I wasn’t satisfied with the response.  I didn’t tell her the exact words that were used, simply “some vulgar language was directed at my daughter.”
The teacher’s first line was apologetic in favor of the boy.  She said that the girls were rude to him but she would investigate further (this despite her saying she didn’t hear what was going on).   At that point I decided to let her know what words were used and was further let down by her follow up response.

My daughter is a rule follower.  She is pushed to tears if we’re going to be late for school because she doesn’t like the attention of walking in after the bell rings.  She finished homework well before its due.  I’ve asked her numerous times to skip half days because no work gets done anyway and she refuses to stay home.  The information that the teacher gave in response to my email and her follow up goes against everything I know of my daughter.

The teacher said that the boy had his feelings hurt by nearby girls not wanting him to use the glue stick.  The boy then lashed out with “you stupid…” but managed to hold back the nasty words.  Yet, according to the teacher, the “bolder and more outspoken girls” filled in the blanks and spread rumors of what he said.  They then went onto harass the boy at lunchtime so he had to go to the Vice Principal.
The teacher followed this asinine description of events by informing us that she told the boy to ask other peers or her for supplies if needs them in the future to avoid these kind of triggers.

I was floored by her response to this situation.  I was not expecting them to string this boy up on the flagpole by his underwear, but she completely ignored any wrong doing of his and took his words as to how the events occurred!  She called my daughter a liar by saying he never said mean words.  (We confirmed that she heard the “stupid ass bitch” part first hand and she said yes, she heard the words out of his mouth).

The way she categorized the other girls as bolder and outspoken made it come off as a negative trait.  That these were mean girls picking on this poor, little boy.  That they were a scourge of the playground and the boy needed to be coddled.  How can a woman in today’s society be taking this position?  Outspoken behavior should be encouraged when constructive.  Boldness should be cheered.

I didn’t respond to that email.  There was no point in doing so.  I wanted to.  I wanted to email the principal and ask if this is how the school sees the female population.  I wanted to ask why the boys take on events were accepted as what actually happened.  I wanted to cause a fuss and make problems about this incident.
The reason I didn’t was my daughter.  She didn’t care.  She didn’t want the attention and I didn’t want to cause problems for her with a month left in school.

Which is a shame because I wanted to be her guardian.  I wanted to defend her and if she said this boy spoke those words then she isn’t lying.  I wanted the school to know that this kind of bullshit is unacceptable.  I feel like I should have kept pressing and made a bigger deal so the next time a boy verbally assaults a girl a proper punishment will be applied.  I wanted this boy to know that he can’t get away with talking to girls like this because he’ll grow up and it’ll be acceptable if that’s his initial response to adversity with women, to call them a nasty name.

I’m glad my daughter wasn’t bothered by it because, unfortunately, I’m sure it won’t be the last time some neanderthal male calls her something awful.  I just hope she knows that I will always be there to defend her when she needs it.

Dulled Senses

You make me a bad writer.  My words are clunky and short.  They’re like stuttered reaches of my hand for your thighs.  You’re turning me into a carnal being, only interested in feasting on your flesh with my lips and tongue.  Come here, pretty.  I want to devour you.

It isn’t always like this.  When I’m remembering you it’s all about flowers and eternal beauty.  It’s about love and depth.  But when I can smell your lavender coconut shampoo and see the darkness painted along your eyes every coherent thought sinks.  The claws come out.  The teeth grow long and sharp.  That red cape never looked so good on you.

I get stupid around you.  My mind grows duller.  The tip to my pencil breaks and all I can think about is the way my hands need to hold you and my lips burn unless they’re kissing you.

I saw your ghost again

I can’t remember what attraction looked like before your eyes.

I’m haunted by you.

Your lips. Your stare. Your everything.

I can only see you. I think this may be how I serve my sentence. In love with someone who is in everyone, but never her.