30 June 2012

Dearest,

A million billion people connected through the press of a button, and everyone feels alone. Why is that?

All the kids are killing themselves. There's something with this generation and crying suicide. Maybe we don't know how else to get someone's attention. Nothing's shocking anymore. Better to cry fire than to cry rape, even better to chase a bottle of pills with a bottle of vodka and to call everyone you know asking for a ride to the hospital, and even better yet to slash your wrists horizontally, pretending you didn't know there was a wrong way. It's that much more dramatic if blood's involved. People still come running for blood, right?

In place of friends and lovers, I've had six dozen depressed acquaintances who've taken me for a therapist or a 24-hour suicide hotline or one of those squeezable stress balls. Because that's what I've learned that true love is: letting someone else use you up, swallow you down like a bottle of antidepressants, until you're empty but they feel better and then they can throw you away. I may as well have a dosage tattooed on my ribcage because I give away true love to nearly everyone I meet.

Of course, I hear a scream, and I come running every time. And I don't complain because to complain about someone asking for your help when they really need it would be callous, and I'm not. I'm getting more cynical, but I could never be callous.

I've known two people who've actually gone through with it. Maybe one and a half. The second was an overdose, possibly an accident, but I kind of feel that if you're in a place where doing a lot of heroin seems like a good idea, you must know that dying comes with the territory and, for some reason or another, you must at least sort of be okay with that.

Proportionally, one and a half successful suicides does not even almost compare to the number of threats and attempts I've seen, but this is one of those times where I can't think like an economist because percentages and statistics don't easily translate into human lives.

I'm almost used up because almost no one gives back the amount that they take, and the weight of not giving, of not caring, on my conscious is heavy enough to break me. So, I'm out of commission either way.

Tell me, dearest, what's a clown to do?

Very Much Love,
Pagliacci

25 June 2012

Calla Lilies (e-Book I'm published in)

Hey, so my story "Something Like Belonging" is now published in an anthology called Calla Lilies. It's only $5.00, and it's supposed to be up for sale on Amazon sometime this week, so it'd be cool if you wanted to look at it or buy it or read it or download it or something. It's also available on the Smashwords website:

24 June 2012

Tender Loving Care

When I was ten, my mother sat me down at the kitchen table. A paring knife and a reddish-yellow apple on a paper plate lay in front of me. "Today, I'm going to teach you an important life lesson," she told me. She came up behind me, her arms around both sides of my body, and took the apple and the knife off the table. "Today, I am going to teach you how to slice an apple," she said.
I'd seen her do this countless times. She'd twirl it in one hand, effortlessly shaving off the skin with the knife she held in the other, and then cutting the flesh into twelve perfectly even pieces. Sometimes the slices would be arranged on a plate with a glob of peanut butter for my after school snack. Sometimes they'd be dropped into a Ziplock bag and placed lovingly under the ice pack in my lunch box. And then, at holidays, when the apples were bitter green and not for me, they'd be baked into a crust with brown sugar and served with vanilla ice cream. It had never occurred that someday I'd have to learn to slice my own apples. My mother did it so well. She dissected it quickly, precisely, and with little or no concern for the damage a paring knife could do to her lovely, manicured fingers were she to make one false move. I had little confidence that I would ever wield a knife with the same insouciance.
My mother put the apple in my left hand and the knife in my right. I flipped the blade over so that it faced away from me and touched it lightly to the skin. My mother took my hand and gently turned the blade to face me. "You always hold it so that it's facing you," she said.
"But what if I stab myself or cut off my fingers?" This was as a likelihood that I immediately wished I hadn't thought of. Images of me slicing off my thumb, blood everywhere, passing out, a trip to the emergency room immediately came to mind. I wouldn't be able to hold a pen without my thumb. My classmates would make fun of me. I'd drop out of school. I would never marry; no one would want me. My mother would be slicing my apples for the rest of my life—if I could ever bear to eat another apple. I'd be doomed to lead a lonely, thumbless existence.
"If you hold it like this, you won't," she explained, thoughtfully. "Because when you're pointing a knife at yourself, you'll be careful. You're aware that you could get cut. If you hold it away from you, it doesn't have the same effect. You'll get careless because you'll feel safe, and then BAM! you'll slice your finger clean off."
This did not reassure me. I turned and looked up at my mother's face. She was smiling. I was so terrified that I began smiling, too.
"Trust me, honey," she cooed as she put her hands around mine, moving them to make cuts in the apple in a slow, controlled way that made me less afraid. "There you go, you got it," she said as she removed her hands. I sliced the rest of the apple in the time it would've taken my mom to slice ten of them.
When I was done, I picked up a piece and bit into it. My mother did the same.
*****

22 June 2012

Robot love

art illustration cartoon romance asexual feelings emotions does not compute romantic valentine machines

Ice Cream Love

ice cream cone love couple happy romance stick people heart cartoon illustration holding hands

Six Word Memoirs (2008)


  • Should have worn a bra today.
  • "Fuck" isn't such a bad word.
  • She fell in love with everyone.
  • Writing my name on your face
  • Never in the company of sanity
  • She knew that everyone had something.
  • In the business of soul stealing
  • She was a nightmare, at best.
  • A billion reasons not to care
  • Maybe I want to look trashy.
  • Put the world in a box.
  • I love you./You love everyone.
  • When life gives you lemons, cry.
  • Love me. Love me. Love me. 
  • I don't know who I was. 
  • What do you want from me?
  • You were everything./You were nothing.
  • I never noticed all the staring. 
  • I never noticed all the caring. 
  • Can I sleep in your bed?
  • Milk shakes melt and people change. 
  • I'm too sexy for my shirt! 
  • Keep your coins, I want change. 

For You/Moonbeam's Response (October 2008)

For you, my pretty, for holding me
Under the microscope and studying me so spiritlessly, I
Could be subtle if I wanted to be, I could be
Kind, but I fear that it would make me a messenger

Of lies;
For the way I truly
Feel has already revealed itself.

*****
It does not occur to you
That your dress is covered with
Tiny, little fish hooks.
On most of them,
Scraps of bait still hang,
Cricket wings, child wings,
Worm torsos, warm torsos,
Used condoms, and
Drained bottles of exotic perfumes.

Paint sample inspiration

purple paint sample sharpie tumblr

To write love on her arms

love on arms sketch illustration art ink and pen and paper heart LOVE anti self-harm love your body

15 June 2012

Vacation from the Internet

My computer committed suicide yesterday, and it's going to take a week to fix. Since I hate using my phone, it appears that I'll be taking a brief vacation from the Internet. 
I'm like 90% sure that the novella that I've been working on hasn't survived, so it looks like I'll be rewriting that. =\ Oh well, I still have my notes on it, and it could probably use the revision anyway. Maybe from now on I should use Blogger or Google Docs for my novella writing so that they'll be safe from kamikaze computers. 

13 June 2012

The Liar

She was an artist.
Picasso had painting.
Poe had his writing.
Dickinson had poetry.
She had lying,
and her masterpiece
was a love story.
It was the story of us.

It went like this:
Once upon a time,
(This is how the best
lies always begin.)
there was a lovely girl
without a name, and
one day she met another
lovely girl without a name.

And together they were
lovely—no, they were more
than lovely, they were
happy. They were in
love. Everything was
absolutely magical.
And the frogs got along
with the toads. And the
witches stayed in their
fortresses. And the princes
stayed in their castles.
And the nameless girls
lived happily ever after.

The end.

12 June 2012

Leanan Sidhe

And I've tried to put off writing about Mag because she's a cliché—a real life cliché. She's been written ten thousand times over by writers ten thousand times more talented. She is Holiday Golightly, Miss Daisy Buchanan, Beatrice Portinari, that stereotypical kind of extraordinary that permeates pages of classic literature. It's true—she is my muse, but she is also part demon. She is a spider whose bite I invited. The venom dripping from her fangs is inspiration. She pumped me full of it, and now I dance like mad for her amusement, scribbling away at sonnets in her likeness as her poison courses through me and rots my insides. I can feel her sauntering through my blood stream, her laugh echoing in my brain, her scent causing my lungs to swell. My greatest works are merely seizures brought on by her bite.

11 June 2012

3 more weeks...

My Juli Blue moves in in less than a month. :) :) :)


The best kind touches the soul, she said.

After Mag, I stopped touching people. I stopped letting people touch me. It wasn't something that I thought about so much as it was a chronic symptom of knowing her.
I remember the first time I zipped up her dress, the first time I braided her hair, the first time she silently grabbed my face just to scrutinize my every pore. I remember our first meeting, how she snuck up behind me and placed her hand on my back, as if this was the customary way to greet strangers. I remember our feet and knees nervously touching under restaurant tables and in movie theaters. I remember her arm casually brushing against mine when we stood in line together. I remember each strand of hair, each tear, each eyelash, each bit of mascara or eyeliner, each smear of lipstick, each trace of paint or pen or frosting or foam, each miscellaneous smudge we wiped from each other's face. I remember my palms sweating when she took my hand in hers. I remember her collapsing onto the floor, sobbing at the thought of being apart, and I remember lifting her up into my lap, holding onto her and truly wishing that I never had to let go. I remember smoothing back her long, blonde hair with one hand, squeezing her cool, dry palm with the other. I remember how her skin was always just a little bit colder than mine, how on a cold day she'd pull my hands to her face or her neck or wrap them around her own to warm herself up. I remember the bruises, the bite marks, the scars—hers and mine. Mine: wine-colored, some shaped like words, some shaped like stars, precise. Hers: little gray-pink crescents, a galaxy of quarter moons in a milky white sky. I remember the first time she sunk her teeth into my shoulder, purring, "I hope you don't mind pain." I remember the first time she peeled off her jeans and t-shirt, straddled me in star-patterned underwear, told me to relax. I remember tracing her ribs with my index finger and her calling herself a "starving artist." I remember waking up in a cold sweat over reoccurring nightmares and how she'd pull me in close to her, breathing warmly into my ear. "Shhh, it's okay. You're okay. I've got you." I remember her standing in my doorway, screaming at me over things I'll never understand and how much I wanted to grab her and shake her and yell, "It's me! Don't you remember me?" I remember letting her go, letting her slam the door behind her, after she looked at me like a stranger and didn't kiss me goodbye. 

07 June 2012

The Scar

"It's like this," Mag said, lifting up her shirt to expose a jagged, moon-shaped slash across her ribcage. 
A gasp fought it's way out of my mouth, though I tried to keep it in. "How did you get that? It looks awful."
"No, it doesn't." She sounded frustrated. This was clearly something that she had expected me to understand. "It's my scar. It's beautiful. It's me."
I found myself staring at her and felt my cheeks start burning when she suddenly grabbed my hand. With her thumb pressed against my palm and her slender fingers wrapped around mine, Mag traced the length of the scar, coaxing me into touching it. She gingerly uncurled her fingers from mine, and my hand was left pressed against her cool skin. She had goosebumps. My whole body felt hot. I became very aware of the sweat forming on my palm and wanted to jerk my hand away, but as long as I was touching her I could not seem to connect my thoughts with my actions. 
She searched my face for some sign that I understood, but all that I offered was a look of terrified confusion. 
She didn't seem upset. "Think about it, what is a scar? How does it happen?" She paused, perhaps expecting me to answer, perhaps for dramatic effect. "Pain. Something wicked, unimaginably horrible happens to you. It slices through you, opens you up, makes you vulnerable, and it hurts you, but then, naturally, you sew yourself back up. And this time you've changed. You're made of stronger stuff. You look different, you feel different, and that's how you keep going."
Mag's eyes burned through mine. She let go of her shirt, smoothing it back down and pushing my hand away.
"I am this scar," she said. "You got it?"

05 June 2012

Adventure Time Me

So, my friend Richard drew and Adventure Time version of me, and I love it so much that I'm posting it all over the place. :)
richard o'brien art illustration doodle drawing sketch cartoon network finn the human jake the dog fionna the human cake the cat

02 June 2012

Sir


rescue that
laissez-faire made in
America god
damn sellin' distress
and go around
robbin' the hood
to give to the upper
middle-class white
collar knights in
shining three-piece
none-the-richer suits

The moon is a banana

This is the age when nothing fits.
Smoke all the cigarettes you want
out of my heart-shaped box,
And we glittering monsters
will grab the town by our teeth,
chew it up, and spit it out
because nothing looks good
from where we sit.
When it's over and done,
we cavalier creatures toss
our heads back and laugh
a great loud HA for our loss.
This is the fishnet age
where I fucked up
and felt a prickle in my spine
that never quite went away.

Day Terrors



a breathing pack of lies, 
i've watched them
eat their young
while sleepwalking;
they spit up bones
when they think 
no one is looking
(i'm looking).



a breathing pack of lies,
i've seen them do it;
they go down grinning
and come up again
covered in crimson,
still smiling,
a chemical white half-moon
against a red night sky
(they don't see me).




a breathing pack of lies, 
i watch them 
whether my eyes 
are closed or opened;
and when I hide
under the covers 
they believe
that i want to be found
(i just want to dream).

Sweet tooth



You're clinging to me, hanging on by a tiny thread of festering flesh, and instead of yanking you out, I just keep touching you with the tips of my fingers, gingerly running my tongue over you, tasting your warm, salty rot, and letting you stay. I'm hoping that someday you'll just fall out on your own, and I won't have to feel that godawful rip—the one where my skin snaps and you take a little piece of me with you when you go. I don't want any get-it-over-with tricks, no slammed doors, no swift jerk to get you out quick and leave me with a mouthful of blood. I don't want a professional poking at me, pumping me full of godknows, and putting me under; I don't want to wake up hours later, swollen and stinging with a bill to pay. I don't want my friends trying to help, telling me to tear at you like you were a band-aid, trying to take the matters of my mouth into their hands. I don't want them icing my wound. I don't want there to be a wound. I just want to lose you as gently as possible. I just want to wake up one morning to find that you've packed up your decay and gone. I don't care if I swallow you, so long as I can't feel it. It doesn't matter how long it takes, just don't let it hurt.

Pichouette



I've never been
more sure of anything:
Her heart tastes
just like blackberry crépes
from a dilapidated diner at 3 AM
after sneaking out
through the basement window.
Her heart tastes
just like black coffee
with a menthol cigarette
bummed
from the boy one table over
who must be
at least 2 years your senior
but who is still
just a boy.
Her heart tastes
just like chocolate milk
in a cold glass
which makes you feel
just a bit too full
but which you do not regret
at the moment.