pomegranate season

first third, raw

2007-06-29T22:30:27Z

a series (a ghost story?) i've been working on, probably ten parts in all. this is not so much the first third as *a* third; i don't know that i'm writing them in order. anyway, it's been in my other journal, but spaced out.

Dreamed all day of thunder, rain cast over green oceans, trees stretched, bowing to unearly dark. Now the night hangs limp and thirsty, and I unbend to wander, just to stir the air. Here in a house I could stifle, caught in the mouth of summer, only waiting. Outside the air is still, brought low with white flowers; jasmine, woodbine, lily, rose. Beneath this, hot pavement, earth and grass, grilled meats, cannabis, honey, sweat. People are roaming, languid and hushed, hands flickering mothlike in the dark. I want to kiss each of them, full deep; see who is lemons, who is musk. Your scent swells in the idle air, and I look for you among them, past them, to the open park and damp clover, to see stars made dim with heat and longing. Are you a ghost, dim like these stars, ungettable? My lust is another white blossom, thick on the summering vine.

--

Night birds chaff like sleepy lovers; their other shadows still the night, still heavy, rich and perfumed. When did I wander? Was it hours now, or longer? You have only left the room, and my hands are white where you held them, dark where I tore the earth, searching. I swallow stones to hang this hunger, and when the moon rises, it is a warning, red and sudden, sharp and close. I cannot read it, and retreat back to the wide-flung window to pull the moon past me. Oh, desire--only your absence lingers, full like this catching sweetness, the rot of the bursting season. So I bloom, caught at this window, pacing, held by the long evening, breathless. My want has no name, sent running to find you out, show you my heart and beg you return to me. I will swallow your dark, your own heart so like the moon, waning full.

--

Dawn; a burst seam in the night, and I am bleak, revealed, stark. You would not know me, here now throwing stones into a shining sea, itching to shed my skin and unknow anything; the want of you near me, the length of my longing, the dream of your lullaby tongue. Birds wheel, perilous, in that hot nothing between sea and ceiling, and I am, I am, I am as monstrous as the thing I love. To climb, then, to the teeth of noon, flat and dingy, cheap as paint, and where to then? At that shadowless hour the spirits walk, drawn on like flies along the path, and then are devoured, caught in bells and beauty, sugar traps, first words, last looks. If you were among them, I did not find you, and perhaps you too are transformed by daylight. Are you a stone, a bird suspended, or some other eidolon, too quick for noon, always away? What is in me unearthed, has learned your shape from aether, and do I yet remember? It is your breath shines flourishing in my breast, meeting my needful sighs, ripe and impatient. The farther I go, the further you are.

(very rough)

2006-03-10T11:32:24Z

written out for you
these
how i twist and am twisting
writes
"i will open for you"
don't you hear
all my
don't you still hear
such little hymns
whose words
could wound
written twisting to
you still
little you hear how
i am born beneath
your hand
or my own remembrance

**this was private, because of roughness, but it's not doing anyone any good as a secret. maybe un-private-ing it will get me to work the idea in to something i like.

non-comment

2005-09-27T10:56:44Z

edmund clerihew bentley
should not have written frequently.
we must assume he failed at guessing
that slipshod scansion is entirely distressing.

applegrain @ 2005-09-22T02:55:00

2005-09-22T09:48:30Z

it's easier at night, and worse. everything condenses, everything is tidal forces, reckoned in small figures, two breaths. there is the light, there is the door, here is an indecision; not much. distinction suffers in the late hours. what moves this faint spark? only possession, maybe self-possession, holy possession, the stark procession of minutes and hours and two more breaths, no aching pause, march. no tides, not even these of thought and idle antic, deepen, nor draw from out me this last one, two, this wilding knot of sighs, all while we know there is only the space between hands.

cross-posted to onehundredwords

2005-09-07T01:05:13Z

we are only strangers now; maybe acquaintances. your hands lie unflown, elsewhere, my hands are unheld here. and i don't care, it doesn't matter, i don't care that you don't miss me much. i don't care that i can't smell you on my skin, in my clothes, through these rooms. you would say, i'm sure, that we weren't like that, anyway. you would say you were a friend, a bird, and i would say, "but can you feel,
can you feel those drops of my blood inside you? i miss them when you're away, and you can't give them back."

atony

2005-06-02T09:50:59Z

curled on the bathroom floor, retching, i dream of a golden bear. in his mouth is a ball; in that ball is a room, is a floor, is a figure, collapsed. in my mouth is the endless flavor of sugar, aching, and i reach for anything. lift me, pull me; too hot to touch, too bare. i am laid stark and waiting. i am unwaking. i have left this prayer of colored stones, of cold floor; i have left this puzzle of light and sugar. now in stillness, dreaming. in my mouth is the answer, biting golden at my lips.

applegrain @ 2005-02-26T04:17:00

2005-02-26T13:15:47Z

at three in the morning, i am fully full of doubts. my heart beats like a bird against a cage, an ache, my hands are tangled in my hair, and all around me there is space. inside me there is only space. i lose your love here in the dark.

lay your hand against my chest, slow my heart to measured sureness, come unwind me. help me to vanish these dark things. teach me to live in the space between your mouth and mine; show me how to sleep, in hope of tomorrow, fathomed in kisses, here in your arms.

yet another hundred words. more swoony crush writing.

2005-02-25T12:54:26Z

i'm falling in love with you right now, this second, this breath. this is my heart dropping through the floor. i am too wild with it; it stretches my fingers, grins my mouth, and stutters and trembles and bursts. there's joy in the marrow of my bones, a lightness, expectation of you, searing. i don't believe in this kind of thing, this too-fast-too-much kind of thing, this crush kind of thing, but my disbelief is dropping from me like my heart through the floor. delicious, new, this is the best part. just the same, you terrify me.

(i'm not as satisfied with this as the last one. the rhythm gets all weird in the middle, and i think i might end up making it longer and changing a few things around. or scrapping it as an important thought that i can't package well in words. i hate it when that happens.)

another hundred words thing

2005-02-19T11:32:38Z

just we two then, finally, icing sugar in our mouths, as achingly sweet as each of these songs: my teeth are on edge; i am dissolving. i bleed in to your eyes, your hands. your smell is faintly on my skin and i still shiver. wanton, soft, delicious, shy, and you are the strangest of angels; so up, swoony, stumbling, blind, still somehow strung apart, we are two too delicate, yearning. i will lick the salt from your mouth, rain and skin smells, and still this sweetness, the tenuous ache of tender kisses, oh! i can imagine no finer thing.

(this originally had line breaks. i'm still not sure whether i should put them back in.)

applegrain @ 2005-02-09T04:22:00

2005-02-09T13:05:58Z

oh how i miss you

it started today, the black pavement parties, the iron lung, the endless flights of colourless birds; we watched from hung windows, breath frosting the uneven glass. our own glare caught us off guard, unbalanced us, but we've been falling for some time now. you held your hand bent back, a sign to stop, and i touched it once before the gravity spun us both away, flying, falling again. we've been cast to either end of things, distant, parted: we're not like we used to be. faded now, silent, i wish only for your star, your hand bent back, glass.

--

this is...this isn't, yet. part of something bigger, anyway. my head is exploding with words, and nothing is making sense when written down. all too wildly; i cannot unbend.

applegrain @ 2005-01-19T04:16:00

2005-01-19T12:15:31Z

let's go home
please i'm
tired
and anyway let's
be mice
be snug
be softer than
you can let's
hide
and not allow these
bruise
blossoms
not breathing we
please let’s
i’m still
sore and
still bereft
can we
be hidden
mouths hidden
home where i am
not so
loveless?

--

we were better broken
fixed one can
hear that faint off-tick
the swing-time of
hearts spread
across
now we
rattle and pace
unfitted, aimless
all while when
broken we
were still
content

--

gilded stars, paper
creases across painted lines
i’m pretty tired now

--

they dive, we diminish.

the last line i can't explain. the second and third were just what i was thinking about. the first i think i maybe like.
100 words total, but not posted to the community.

most old, last new

2005-01-14T08:41:24Z

these are my posts from the onehundredwords community, where the challenge is to create any kind of piece stated in 100 words, no more, no less. they're in order, oldest to newest--most are fairly old, but the last i wrote today.

that’s when i felt him come in me, in that moment after the crack of the bird hitting the glass. he didn’t notice at the time, and in that loose minute i thought maybe my heart had broken, before i looked to the window and guessed what the sound had been. his eyes screwed up and i stared out at the evening, empty, unable to push him off. when he subsided, a loose arm locked itself around me, and it was maybe fifteen minutes ‘til he was finally asleep. by the time i made it out, the bird was gone.

-

logic tells me it's not so....
i'm afraid of the girl in the mirror. she isn't me, and i don't know what she's doing here. i've seen her before, but i don't know who she is. she was there in the weeks before my mother died, two years ago, caught in the dark windows, grinning . i knew she was waiting in the mirror at the back of the converted living room, shying from the light. now she’s back, and bold enough for daylight, and i can’t make her leave.

i don't know who she is, but she isn't me.

-

We stood and fought as men, who now are crooked and crabbed with age. Our backs were straight to the eastern armies, poised at the river to watch us topple; now we bend and bow in free streets, in finally our city. Now we have commerce with the Russians, now Germans come to see our city sights, rebuilt from the rubble their fathers and grandfathers left. Now we ourselves are grandfathers; our children’s children have never known what it is not to be free. We tell them what we know, that for sixty-three days, we stood as men should stand.

-

if i ached to hold you, it wouldn’t have mattered, but now i ache where you held me, and everything is wrong. between the bruising and the soft place where my hair pulled out, i measure the space between my door and my bed and wonder what stretched it so long, what made it so dark? what did i say? how many ways did i ask between that space and this? something grates in the loose rattle of my chest, and you can’t tell me—you tell me, you’re not even sure it was wrong. it leaves me so stark.

-

i felt you hang over my shoulder today, following me like a wayward balloon. every place i walked was in your shadow, like i'd lifted you from my sad dreams of happy times and brought you with me when i woke. you once lent romance to the streets, sketched spires on office buildings, filled in arcades and alleyways with light. now here, alone with ghosts of you, i drag my feet. even the sky is only grey now, faded, grim and strange. i wonder if you know what little you have left, how close i keep it, how it haunts.

applegrain @ 2005-01-08T03:34:00

2005-01-08T11:50:44Z

stopped up.

fuck.

if not a good something, at least it's a something. or something like that.

2004-11-08T11:46:35Z

1.
night pools
still and subtle outside while i
dreaming
wash again stains and stolen artifacts
safe before it pours itself in to
this room
is perfectly fit for
pacing and
for waiting i am listening
too long and it can almost
be like
being dead
too wide and out the door flies
stillness while night
it eddies in to fit the hollow of my bed
and even
here even
some leaves might turn and fall
some might be left on streets
until the winter’s gone

2.
stirs under
bone cathedral arched
achingly
it rings
feelingly i
fumble
to touch
to put the light in my mouth
where biting
i could draw it plain

a dream

2003-12-19T22:33:47Z

the tables in the bar are sticky, bare, and closely set, and when you try to move at me, accusing, they stumble you. you don't kill me just yet. instead, you scream,
'she died for you.'
and spit, and keep talking, but my heart hurts too much to listen. i am too afraid.

the beach is important, down by the docks, but no one will stay with the seeds, and we can't take them with us, and no one will explain. you're not in this crowd, but i know you're somewhere nearby. a woman i don't know takes me to a library on a tenement block. i think she's a lawyer. she calls me a name i don't recognize and pretends to find out who i am, reading in the records room.

children are performing our story, in the manner of the actors in hamlet. there are many people to watch, and there's you, and you look so angry, and so sad. a monk or priest sits behind me on the bench--i can't see him, and i don't dare turn. he won't stop touching me, pulling at me, and i'm willing my body to fade, for his hands to pass through me, but it doesn't work. i stand to move away, and you lunge for me, enraged that i would dare to interrupt the pantomime.

she calls,
'don't kill her!'

i don't even think to cringe. my arms are out to you, in welcome or surrender, and you tear the length of them with angry fingers, but then push past me.

you kill the man behind me, and i collapse, weeping.

suddenly, i don't know if this is real, or just a game. i don't know if you're you or if you're him. but i do know that you kneel beside me and tell me
'you don't understand...you're still her. she's still you.'
and you hold me, and carry me to my friends, and then you kiss me...

...for about a thousand years. you kiss me like you need the air from my lungs.
you kiss me just like you used to, sometimes, and even then, i can feel the crack and crumble of my heart.

it's ok. i give up.

applegrain @ 2003-05-06T00:16:00

2003-05-06T07:12:18Z

yeah, i love you too
(i'm screaming underwater)
goodnight and sweet dreams.

it's not important
(so what the hell do you want?)
i can be patient

it's not doomed, i swear
(it's true, i'm just broken now,
i love you like salt)

definitive (archetypes)

2002-11-11T12:08:04Z

he·ro
in mythology and legend, one who is endowed with great courage and strength, celebrated for his [or her] bold exploits, and favored by the gods. a person noted for feats of courage or nobility of purpose, especially one who has risked or sacrificed his or her life
vil·lain
a wicked or evil person; a scoundrel
in·no·cent
a person, especially a child, who is free of evil or sin. a simple, artless, or unsophisticated person. one who inexperienced or guileless.
se·duc·tress
a woman who seduces
mar·tyr
one who makes great sacrifices or suffers much in order to further a belief, cause, or principle. one who endures great suffering.
bad·ass
a mean-tempered or belligerent person.
pa·ri·ah
a social outcast. an Untouchable.

applegrain @ 2002-11-06T15:18:00

2002-11-06T23:29:20Z

i'm not evil because i lack empathy. it's simply not so. i feel for her so much i feel like gouging out my eyes, like cutting out my heart, sometimes. in every way i understand her position--if i am evil, it's because i don't care.
that's not fair--i do care, but i can't do anything for it and it's hardly going to be the end of me. i'll own my mistakes, my indiscretions, my petty cruelties, without blinking, without buckling, but i've enough of them that i can't stand under her blame or any other lie shaped to excuse a person from their own load. if i am evil, it's because i am no more than human.
if i am evil, it's because i know how to be good.
the apples are rich and red now, grainy. i fed them to him, licking up the juice, there in her corridor. she and i both know that, days later, he will taste them, hidden in me, as he comes.

applegrain @ 2002-11-06T15:02:00

2002-11-06T23:04:58Z

my soul sings.
i'm not sure that i even believe in a soul, the soul, my soul; nevertheless, it sings. my soul sings, it speaks, it shivers, it sighs. it never saw you coming, no, not until you tagged it smack between the eyes with fingers ever stained with grenadine. the sugar-sweet smell fell from everywhere and there i was, undrunk, my soul singing over you.

applegrain @ 2002-11-03T17:52:00

2002-11-04T01:53:45Z

a wash. a waste. i'm still awake.

another

2002-11-02T05:46:12Z

one july, when we were new, I collapsed in a park near your house. I had searched you out for hours, but, as the saying goes, the streets all looked the same. I had taken a barbituate, one of my mother’s deadening drugs, out of perhaps morbid curiosity and suburban ennui, and was sick and shaking and alone. it was the second time, the last, that I was overdose-sick with secret painkillers, but unintentional, or unaware. the drug was in a transdermal patch, the chemical so strong that, in the lazy sunshine on that july afternoon, I could feel it eating at my skin. I found a stash of drugs today, in a small box in the cupboard, a cocktail of my mother’s medecine. just a sampling,. just enough. as if in case she should need them. as if in case she should come back. as if in case she could.
all afternoon in that park, I waited, but you never came to find me.

***

2002-11-02T05:44:17Z

I knew you couldn’t stay, and so I knew I couldn’t keep you, but I was dying all for love of you just then, still panting at your kisses, hot and sudden, and not mine. not anymore. how could you be so undrunk with it? why is your love ever the business of leaving?

1.

2002-11-02T05:43:13Z

my father’s house grew smaller on the day my mother died, and smaller still the day we put her ashes in the earth. the wide hallways and windowed rooms are too small and too few to contain the detritus of her disease, of the treatments to combat the sickness that ate her away. a truck came once, to take the hospital-issue bed and the i.v. stand and we’ve thrown all of her medicines away. her wheelchair sits forgotten in the room we watched her die in while all around our things, the things we collect to fill ourselves, instead fill all these rooms, and all the space between us. everything is softened with a shadowing of dust. my father paces, looking both lost and strange. these rooms are too small for him to bear.
my room, on the second floor, has been half-lit the summer long, and the window left half open to remind me of the world. I forget, sometimes, that there is an outside out there. I forget that there are people who might miss me and places that might comfort me. I forget that there are things I need, like food, and warmth, and soap and water, and movement. sometimes my body is a stranger, and I forget the feel of really feeling me. sometimes I am still and silent for so long, I forget just how to shape my mouth to speak. the window is still open, although the nights are cold.
it’s still strange to me to call this house my home, to walk its length and own it, in my heart, alone. I don’t want to see my father there, looking sad and old and small now, like this house; I think he is shrinking.

applegrain @ 2002-10-29T02:18:00

2002-10-29T10:30:51Z

"so the dream...i have no idea what freud would say--i was a member of a conservative (in the old fashioned sense, not the political sense) religion, and my father's house was in the woods...it was after my mother's death, and he'd changed things
and made it into a church, of sorts
and there was this very odd little community in the woods around it
but there were also people, catholics or something, so there was mild discomfort and a questioning of beliefs
and mostly the dream was about being in love
in this really nice way, with this boy who was one of the religious leaders in the little forest community
yeah
he confessed minor lust to me, and was asking me to marry him, and i stopped him, to tell him that i had all these doubts about the faith, and then i woke up before i could, very suddenly
umm, i don't think [my father] was in the dream
it was like in a movie when they can't afford the actor or whatever--i went to talk to him sometimes, but that part was kind of glossed over
yeah
and the church my father built, and this house, were for the new faith, not mine
i mean, i can read all sorts of things into that
i think so
i think mostly i just thought [the boy] should know [about my doubts], actually
i don't think i worried it would make him not love me, or something, although i assumed he'd want to think about it
i have no idea what he looked like
he had a really profound faith
and was sincere and honest and kind and not hateful toward the new and unfamiliar faith--it sort of just suggested to him that he needed to be there more for the community
well, not faith specifically in god
just faith in the rightness of things. he was completely and utterly sure of himself
in a nice way
he just knew what he was doing was right and good, and he had confidence that other people could be encouraged to do what was right and good
yes
things were really right in the dream, even when i was having doubts about the very nature of things
[my dad] wasn't religious
but i think things kept not turning out just as he wanted them to, and he kept adapting his ideas
but the house became a church, prinicpally for the other religion
i don't know
first he was remodelling the downstairs half, to create and area with lots of seating, and it didn't work, so he converted the whole thing into a church
the geometry of the space was not real--the church was pretty big
the new faith wasn't evil or anything--it reminded me a lot of the presbyterian church i used to go to. it was just absolutely unwilling to allow space, philosophically, for the beliefs of my church
it was really that i found this new faith to have a lot of problems, and wondered about my own faith, and what weaknesses it might have
i still felt good and all, but it was the first time i'd questioned things
and the boy didn't feel a need to question
and really, i was the main character. they were pretty peripheral, although the love was major, even if the boy wasn't
..."
(actually only my half of an im conversation about the dream, but that pretty much covers it)

applegrain @ 2002-10-29T01:30:00

2002-10-29T09:35:21Z

pomegranate season
~~a lovestory~~
~~a caution~~
~~apotheosis~~
...
?