Friday, July 4, 2014

Planter - A Poem

A poem about growing and learning to remove the things that stop you from doing so.  It's hard, but I'm figuring out how.

Warnings for mild body horror (but not actual scary horror).

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Planter

It's a little too late to break the winter-dusted ground
and turn the soil
and plant the seeds you've been given.
There's no room. They won't grow.

Dandelion roots stretch deep into your heart,
so deep you don't bother trying to tug them out anymore
because it only makes you bleed.
It's okay – they look nice for a while.

But they die so fast
and spread so quickly.
When you cough
you breathe out their seeds.

The other weeds have too many names
and you can't remember them all,
not even for the ones that sprout on your brain.
Especially those names.

You cannot replant until you unplant,
and this means opening yourself enough
to let everything old wither and die.
It means letting the wind ghost over your bones.

Cleansing yourself means unscrewing your skull
and exposing the rest of your bones -
to pick out each root and fiber
and to deal with the blood and acrimony that follows.

You're overgrown but not rotten, and like bristlecone pines
you're alive even if you look mostly dead.
The wind will erode you into something new.
Something strange and anomalous, but better.

You've started the hard work already -
you're pulling rhizomes from your toes.
Bluebells are weaving out from between your ribs.
You're making room for new things to grow.

Tuesday, May 20, 2014

a poem

i had a bad day so here have a bad poem about bad thoughts that i don't have the energy/will/life force to make better. nice.

and if you haven't read the story i posted yet then that's a damn shame bc you're missing out something great (read: ridiculous), do not sleep on that story y'all

ps listen to this song or this song if you're sad

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You cut all your hair
but now it’s not long enough
to pull in front of your face
when you’re crying.


You heave yourself up two flights
of the school stairs
and you go so slow you’re not even winded
like normal.


You get frowns for not smiling
and people tell you to be okay
without even realizing
that you’re trying.


You leave yourself inside your head
for too long and it gets cold
and foggy and dark in there and no one
can break it.


You talk to yourself with your head on your locker
in an empty hallway and it’s enough
weight gone to keep you up when you feel
like you’re dying.

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Cool Lady Knights IN SPACE - A Story

[spooky yet strangely funky tunes à la Ghostbusters begin to play from an ambiguous source as a cool teen who vaguely resembles an anime skeleton rises from her grave. that teen is me.]

What's up kids

I wrote this months ago and never got around to posting it, oops!!  This was a story for school that had to be written with vocab words, so that's why it reads a little funny.  I also went overboard?  I just really like cool ladies and knights and dragons.  Sorry I haven't been posting, school is busy as heck.  Final exams are coming up but final projects are already HERE and READY TO PARTY!!!  And by party I mean destroy me.

But yeah, this is the most I've written in several months and I WISH it weren't so but alas!!!  When school is out maybe I'll get back in the game.  I've wanted to for a while, I just have had no time, so this is all you're getting from me for now.  Been tossing around a few poem drafts but nothing's flowing too well.  Maybe because I also haven't had time to read as much.

Hope you all have been doing well!! <3
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Lancelot was still cowering in the second to last crater, twenty feet back. Percival hadn't yet left the first one. Annie couldn't see Gawain, but two minutes ago he had been using her as a human shield, so her hopes for him weren't very high. Absolutely unsavory behavior, really. She made eye contact with Arthur, six yards away behind another boulder, and jerked her head to the side in the universal “let's-go-kill-this-monster-so-we-can-go-home-and-sleep” motion. Instead of nodding back in the usual “heck-yeah” response, he grinned sheepishly and shook his head very quickly.

“No thanks,” their leader mouthed, and Annie's eyes rolled so hard they flung themselves straight out of orbit and into frozen clutches of deep space. So much for the valiance of knights.

A tap on her arm and Iris was beside her. She was panting hard, breath misting on the front of her helmet. Percival had been holding her back to “protect him” (literally, he had wrapped his arms around Iris and refused to let her go, despite the fact that she abhorred him and would have not hesitated to throw him to the dogs), so how Iris had gotten up here in a discreet manner was simply another unsolved mystery of the universe. Annie patted her on the shoulder and grinned. Iris winked back, exhaustion gone, charming disposition back in an instant, and pointed in Arthur's direction. Holly was now crouching next to him, both thumbs up.

Her crew all set to go, Annie peeked out from behind the boulder at their adversary. Originally it had taken the form of a bear-sized donkey with the head of a whale, but now the thing had augmented itself to the size of a small house and was starting to look like a pastel pink dragon, with teal and yellow accents. Against the backdrop of swirling galaxies and shining stars, it really didn't look as pernicious as its official profile made it out to be. But then a space bird flew overhead on its way to blow up another dying star and the dragon torched it with a blast of purple fire and caught the burning carcass in its jaws. Blood and feathers flew everywhere.

Okay, that was pretty vile.

Rolling her shoulders, Annie took a deep breath of the recycled air flowing through her spacesuit, and then gave the signal. She and Holly darted out into the open, while Iris opted to take advantage of the lower gravity of the small moon and leap dramatically over the boulder. In the slight reflection of her transparent bubble helmet, Annie saw Arthur scramble to his feet and stare after them. She waved back at him, and he slowly sank back down, his face sullen. Not good. He's going to make this out to look like mutiny in the official report, isn't he? Annie mused. What a loser.

For the mission to turn out favorably they had to rely on the cowardice of the Knights of Camelot, which wasn't exactly something any of them were comfortable with, but it was constant. Even though the Knights were renowned throughout space as being the bravest there were in terms of monster hunting, during her time on their squad, Annie had found that when faced with anything larger than a dog, the boys would adhere to their doctrine of unnecessary terror, hide together in a small huddle, and draw straws to see who would have to go kill it. And then they would stall as long as possible, while Annie and Iris placed bets on who would do something useful first. And then usually it was Holly who got fed up and went to go finish the job.

But was it Holly on all the posters and merchandise that decked the rooms of every child this side of Andromeda? No, it was the cowering bunch of idiots behind them. The boys looked good on paper, but in actuality, they weren't a very good example for posterity. They belonged in a TV drama, not actual deep space. Holly, Iris, and Annie did try to respect their teammates, but for the most part they just feigned obedience in front of higher-ups and did what they wanted the rest of the time. And if anyone with a higher rank did notice their transgressions against Arthur's command, they didn't say anything. The ladies got the job done and that was really all that mattered.

Arthur seemed to realize this, and the longer the three girls were on his squad, the more his dislike of them festered. While the predominant monster-related course of action for the Knights seemed to be cower, avoid, and then capture as quickly as possible (usually while screaming or crying), the girls had very little trouble skipping the first two steps. It also wasn't very difficult for them to capture the monster – and only if beguiling it into stopping its rampage didn't work – without the added hysterics.

Which was, in fact, what they were doing right now, while Arthur tried to burn holes in their helmets with his eyes.

Annie lift an arm and waved at the pink dragon. “Hi.”

The dragon stopped crushing the fancy moon rovers t that surrounded it and looked at her, unblinking.

“I'm Iris,” Iris offered cheerfully. The pink space dragon swooped its head around to her and she smiled wider. “These are my friends Holly and Annie. What's your name? The file said your classification was NNN888 but that's boring and hard to say.”

The dragon made a gurgling noise and misty blue smoke began to rise from its nostrils.

Iris nodded sagely. “That's okay, buddy. Take your time.”

The dragon unhinged its jaw and Annie tackled Iris out of the way of another stream of purple fire. Apparently their dragon friend was going to be unwieldy.

“Hey, dragon, can you not torch those two?” Holly frowned and crossed her arms. “Also, the whole crushing thing? With the moon rovers? Cut it out.”

“It would be much appreciated,” Annie wheezed as Iris pushed her off and she rolled across the moon's dusty surface.

The dragon looked like it was unsure of who to snarl at. “Why?”

“So you can talk!” Iris cheered in delight and then lightly sprung way from the fire shot at her. Holly leveled the tranquilizer gun at the dragon and looked at Annie for permission. She shook her head and Holly nodded in recognition, but didn't lower the gun.

Annie heaved herself back to her feet and stared at the dragon. It hadn't been crushing the rovers with much enthusiasm. Usually the beasts they faced took great joy in causing calamities, but their dragon friend was only halfheartedly destroying the precious science. It was also shapeshifter, obviously, but they weren't native to this star system. So that meant...


“Dude.” Annie waved her arms to get the dragon's attention again. Before she was turned into crispy dragon snack food, she tapped a button on her arm and a small hologram star chart popped up. “Do you need a ride home?”

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Note down here because I didn't want to put it up top but I'm getting published in a cool thing SHH DON'T TELL it's nothing that big but I'm excited because it's my first time getting anything published!!! yeehaw