March 2013
1 post
5 tags
The beginning of the second part of my short story
Part Two: The Hunger
The first time he saw her she was taking out the trash. Her hair was greasy and tangled. That and the fact that she was clad only in a large t-shirt helped him surmise that she had just gotten out of bed. It was about three o’clock on a November afternoon. Morgan had moved in to the yellow house on Yvette’s street the week before. He did so quickly and quietly, moving in all...
February 2013
3 posts
3 tags
Part One of my new short story
This is still in the editing phase. And there are some things that don’t make as much sense as they should because I couldn’t get italics to work on my phone…
Part One: The Meet-Cute
Why is everything in black and white?
Yvette squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again. There was no one around her, no one to verify what was happening. All the color had simply drained out...
5 tags
A poetic moment of my life through the eyes of...
I was here and it was awesome.If you like good food and good writing read this:
www.umamiandaglassofwine.com
4 tags
Inspired by an awkward almost meeting
The Magnetic Unwanted
Your eyes are the same.
Your arms are the same.
Your nose, mouth, and clothes are the same.
Your walk is the same
as you walk on a course to collide with me
my mind, my unexpected memory of a heartful
of you, my dear:
I have left you now, far
far behind me.
I long ago forgot you (once)
a subtle cessation of conveyance
of love to an absent memory.
Your voice is...
January 2013
4 posts
4 tags
A long poem/ a micro story
The Bus Ride
Damn, I need a drink.
Sticky-hot tongue pressed against
the dry roof of my mouth.
Cold plastic bus chair adhering to
bare flesh on my arms and back.
I’m thinking of the communist in my postmodern literature class.
He sips iced gin nonchalantly through a straw
in a plastic water bottle
beneath the naive eyes of an unsuspecting professor.
Long, black, sinuous limbs spring...
Postmodernism class
Human Ingenuity
E
eh, ee, uh
a whole in two,
a three-legged creature;
this is not an E.
O
a hole in a page,
infinite points doomed
to chase one another
infinitely at the will of a pen.
oh, ah, oa
H
scratches, scratches
h. h. h…
straight and different,
in running away
colliding.
P
a blight, a blip
on a blank slate.
Tragedies, rainy days and Catch-22 make for dark...
Mechanism
Little rivers on the road
have left my socks and shoes soaked through,
and I with soggy feet am cold
on a tepid day.
As a woman, bowed
by the erosive rain,
diminishing and curling into myself.
I have flitting eyes—
to and fro
from navel to sidewalk.
one… two… three…
four cracks passed by, two with grass
and two muddy.
five… six…
seven...
3 tags
Trying to find space to mourn
On the Loss of Our Ancestors
Each of us is shot into life—
stems from roots burst from senseless dirt.
Ex Nihilo into a cacophonous assault of stimuli—
our lives are wasted over-differentiating the chaotic void from the chaotic all—
all because of a joyful injection into a vacuous black hole:
a momentary release, a snatch at immortality.
Their roots were ripped from...
December 2012
1 post
7 tags
exerpt on a paper about foundations for...
Sexuality in Perichoresis
The true goal of the understanding that women are the image of God as completely as men is not to destroy the difference between the two sexes. Indeed just as with the persons of God in Trinity, it would be to destroy all possibility of love to do so. On the contrary, the goal of the image of God understanding is to promote freedom for the other: space for him or her to...
November 2012
1 post
A poem by Michael De Backer
Here is a short intermission from my dream series. I wanted to share this sonnet my husband wrote!
Oh hair of auburn woven into wreaths
That drape an ocean severed into twain
Comport thyself well nigh and thus unsheathe
My stone-held heart; untie this loveless skein!
Oh child of earth for thee the crowd of stars
Do trip across their course from dusk till day
In hopes their winsome...
October 2012
9 posts
Dream Series 4
A professor of mine said this today in regard to the defisciencies of western theology and its hyperfocus on logic:
“Mystery alone can challenge the human imagination.”
I loved this although I cannot explain logically why this mystery is important. Other than, or perhaps in tandem with the fact that mystery is the strong motivator in the pursuit of Truth, I have an innate sense...
Continuation of the Dream Series
Sloping down, the blackcurrant bushes with the hill
to the basin before me. A hollow thing,
the bushes cease at the rim. A deep place,
a gaping gullet with the gravity of a black hole.
I atop the precipitous hill, my place
at its summit more transitory by the minute,
have deflated lungs, the breath having hastened away
to answer the basin’s grave command.
Away to follow, I flying...
6 tags
Dream Series
To Life and Longer
There is a spring somewhere beneath your bed
I’m sure. From your window I smell the fresh water
rushing forth to nourish the world
and entice creatures like me.
I am a deer
I fleetly leapt from the ground to here.
I forage on all fours to find your spring.
I submerge myself and drink,
drown happily, so happily
a bliss beneath the place where you sleep forever...
Dream Series
So I have been having beautiful dreams and daydreams lately and it has inspired me to write more fantastical imagist poetry. I am planning on making a series of it so here is part one:
Purple fog, the clouds that pass along the ceiling
charging the room to live as though blanketed,
watched, crowned.
Many colored, the people below
the carpet on which they’re strewn
the stars around...
My Wedding Vows
There are those who have requested that I post my wedding vows because apparently very few people could hear them when I was saying them at the wedding. Here you go!
I take you, Michael Lucien De Backer, to be my companion, best friend and husband, just as you are and no matter what you become, for the rest of our lives. I will aspire to love you rightly with my body, mind, heart and soul...
Writing in the deserted restaraunt that is my...
At First Sight…
The blossoming, the blossoming!
How we cherish the blossoming!
But then… Cherish? Do we not forget
in a milieu of bile and ire,
in a veritable swap of oversight and misstep?
How, then, can we truly hold dear the springs of our loves?
We exalt them, surely, to the heights so high as to obscure,
their shadows making grey all that follows thereafter.
We fling...
Born of a shy young man speaking up
Ode to the Ones in the Corners
Your hair curls slyly out from beneath the brim of your slouchy hat.
How I thrill when your eyes lift from your tenderly cupped coffee mug!
They are dark in such a way as to draw in the observer until
eureka! They are blue!
I knew it though their hue was veiled and unseen.
You are beautiful because your hipster headgear so gloriously clashes
with your...
I know this is too long for anyone to want to...
There’s this little place in my hometown that’s shaped exactly like a salad bowl 20 feet in diameter sunk into a grassy clearing. It’s just on the other side of the tree line behind the brand new Wal-Mart. While all the parents in our small town were ecstatic at the prospect of finally getting a store as convenient as Wal-Mart, we who had not yet shouldered the responsibilities of household...
Micro poem (as yet without a title)
Every hope a drop of rain.
Rushing, rushing from heaven,
so many from before coming again
to [hopefully] dash themselves to slivers
in some fertile soil.
September 2012
3 posts
The first two paragraphs of my upcoming short...
There’s this little place in my hometown that’s shaped exactly like a salad bowl 20 feet in diameter sunk into a grassy clearing. It’s just on the otherside of the treeline behind the brand new wal-mart. While all the parents in our small town were ecstatic at the prospect of finally getting a store as convenient as wal-mart, we who had not yet shouldered the responsibilties of...
I Can't Sleep
How does one live at 4:32 AM? I haven’t got the knack. There seems to be a reasonable amount of hope to be had that I could sleep at such a time, yet here I am talking to really what can only be called myself. There’s a man lying next to me. I suppose he is a man. Sometimes when we lie together, it’s hard for me to know if he’s real. I just think, “I am holding this...
1 tag
August 2012
1 post
Staying Up All Night and...
Untitled
Tonight I sat outside with you while you smoked a cigarette.
And the night…
it was a night that you could only call an evening
no matter how late it became.
It gathered about our feet and hands
and the way it crowded around your face…
I knew it pressed also on mine.
He could only be a He
for I was caused to conceive
and She could only be a She
how She held me...
July 2012
3 posts
11 tags
So far no one knows what to make of this
The Woman in the Black Hat
She’s folded into that corner
like she’s got something to see.
The low lighting of the place
drapes shadow around her in a way
loving and matter of fact;
she’s a sister here.
“Sister,” I sighing say,
“drink with me and tell me the ways of Man.”
Shadow-dark her silent reply;
she slinked away when I blinked my eye.
4 tags
Sitting at a bar with a glass of wine is the...
Basilisk
I thought I’d know what I was getting into
when I washed the alcoholic piss from my hands,
raised my head, as a matter of course,
and found a cold slab of prophetic glass.
An affront! when the creature I never knew peered out.
I never knew her.
The wretch! I never knew her!
Her eyes are a mannequin’s.
Cold. Dead.
The furrows in her brow at odds
etched into a stone...
5 tags
Poem prompt: ostracize
When I Came Out
Eighteen times in eighteen ways
each year of my life was a blaze of colored lights
and fights against the flashing signs.
The lines they made! Come here, go there;
be this or that and nothing else.
Let nothing go, let no one know
any of that shit that might fracture the Mind.
The Mind is made of spun glass:
sharp, fragile, intricate.
I was caught up in worship
lost in a...
June 2012
2 posts
3 During a boring Greek class
The Need to Create
A bastardization.
An exaltation.
A hopeless aspiration to divinity.
All is a skewing,
an evolution perhaps,
though more in the mutative vein,
because we fail and despair.
Disintegrating.
…
I Wish I Were a Scab
I am a scab
though not.
I envy the scab
soft and tender,
vulnerable.
I cannot be ripped through.
My lifeblood is guarded
[and trapped]
by some...
4 tags
Rhythm and Greek Blues
How Can I Help Her to Shout and Rejoice?
SHE is a herald
shrieking in the rafters
shattering the stained glass
walls imprisoning God’s grace,
brittle though they may have been.
A joyous battle cry!
A dread phonic forge!
O Harpy! O Angel!
Beating, beating!
the drums of my ears
the walls of my mind.
O Temptress! O Savior!
Scratching, shredding!
the curtain from my eyes
the...
March 2012
1 post
My first ever team effort poem!
Collaboration of Kelsey Bell and Kyle Carrasco:
Comforter Incubation My bed, a backwards day lily, closes around me as the light streams through the shutters and dyes my black thoughts gold. Shying here, lying here, my throat swells of deceptive pollen clusters: whispers of blissful regeneration drifting through covers, nostrils and ear canals, tickling my cerebrum to the brink of hope. brim,...
February 2012
24 posts
I don't know what to say about this one
Sometimes It Just Doesn’t Seem Like Enough
I sputter this out like I’d spit up
a piece of choked on meat:
Sitting alone in my apartment
the sounds of the people fucking next door
are silenced by the bludgeoning voices.
The voices in my head which in a torrential cacophany
pulverize my humanity and leave me
searching for another.
And I do! O,
I do and find this paper
...
2 tags
Remembering the beauty in my life
Our Bed a Spot of Life Sleeping next to you I breathe your breath. Am I dizzied with carbon dioxide? Or have I been snared by the promise in your gravitational pull? I orbit around you and revolve, my source of life in a cold, airless abyss. The lashes of your closed lids entice me to the paths my lips would take, tenderly brushing your cheeks. The water betwixt our tangled limbs overflows from my...
2 tags
Another on implicit guilt
Consumerism I watched as the flesh yeilded scabbard-like to the repeated thrusting of a bloody sword and I hated. I hated the Man composing the law which ravages humanity; I hated the woman all eagerness to please and fading into non-entity; I hated myself who joined my voice with those in the horde, despairing that my whimpered protests were lost in the squall.
2 tags
From a season of anguished questioning
Ruminations on Giving Up Hope Each Day passes away as I pass away. A cycle of sleeping and waking: always sleeping and never resting, relentlessly shaken from sleep never fully awakened. Even the wraith of me fades. What a hardy shade! It dwindles to a lone atom, ever dying yet not to be extinguished.
2 tags
For a friend of a friend
I Know Your Head Aches Scream, cry, prick yourself and moan… You’ll never get home… now lick your wounds. … always alone, you’ll never get home. Off on a shadowed island unattached and bound ever on and into nothing. You are nothing where you are your self and alone. You, the cause, are not the solution. You, the lonely, are not a home. So flee on, and as fleeing...
2 tags
Inspired by CS Lewis' "The Man Who Was Born Blind"
Tribute to Things Unknowable or Uknown The light, when it illuminates, does not discriminate. Embracing all in equanimity it self-eviscerates. Doing all it can to share its heart its plans are fraught with flaw, and in showing him everything shows nothing at all. The Man Who Was Born Blind knows only what the light contributes; the ease it brings to his commutes or unease (all other...
3 tags
For Neil
Box What a poetic word is box, and it in all its ways is yours my dear, dear friend. The box and the word together (is there one without the other?) contain you and you them. Yet only one god there is the box and the word for the god, and the god self-bound ever and unto the boxish, boxing, box-ed box. You, you’ve got your box.
2 tags
and this one
Forever Is Not So Long Out there is a canvas all gradations of black and white and metallic shine, but flecks of life here and there among the synthetic bustle. The organic punctuates—no—it defines. It punctures the plastic surface and the real escapes in bursts; irrepressible shocks of air which force us to breathe and know. And know whom? Or what? Or whence?… Or why it is we...
2 tags
I started to feel like a slave
Untitiled Egg shells, egg shells egg shell white the walls that wall my mind sometimes whether to write or whine to climb or jump or sing the walls wall up my mind white like egg shells egg shells, which surprise to prick deep and halter me; my bleeding feet.
4 tags
Feeling oppressed by conventions
Engagement Rings there is an outward sign that feels… so very sign-like arbitrary to a tee. can such a thing be hurting This? an arbitrary sign is never free from That which called for an added signishness. That is alive while the sign is not it is That which will wash This under like no sign could. That makes nothing real without the sign and so the sign which was not substance becomes...
3 tags
I really like this one too
Address to the Dead and Dying How do you go from breath to breath Stepping with them to your death Choosing truth with grim, toothy maw Over me, my brilliant smiling realm of free Love and loving? To God have I harkened and heard The ever judging, crushing, whispered word: My world would ill be kept in our eye For my eye is mine and you do die quickly With and without me. The sweet is bittered...
2 tags
When I feel bored with temperance
Dying of Consumption Give me something against which to rail with passion anything but myself Let me die, killed by another hand anyone but myself I cannot survive my own wrath and you will remember everything but myself You will never be alone, but I will be ever so by Myself.
2 tags
An experiment
Your Feathers Rake the Wind Herald to me a coming of clarity. In charity i trust you will be kind. Nevermind the disjunct and stammering, The quiet clamoring of my heart wrenched ajar, And all of the far-stretched hopes, that fly in your usual wake.
3 tags
For a friend
You, Odalisk I think I’ve known you all my life. I’ve hidden beneath the roots of your dark, cloudy hair. I’ve tasted the rushing flavors behind your teeth. I held your very own breath; the one which with each exhalation stays motionless in a chamber just behind the place where your nostrils meet your throat. It’s to that breath you send all the blood from every cut,...
2 tags
A criticism of criticism, if you will
[sic] If you’re trying to find Truth, fine. Attempt to discern meaning in the breaks of my lines. If it’s ground zero you want, or a pre-packaged moral rigidly addressed to you, resume. But if you want truth, the beauty of an unrestrained mind, falter here. Box nothing but mozy, dreaming and awakening together. Assimilation is understanding, where we meet each other not in...
2 tags
On a March day...
Waiting for Summertime O sweet June! Come close, Closer now until your breath mingles With my eyes and tingles on my tongue. I will hold you, dearest June For the entirety of the moon And beyond its waning, And further than the scent of the honeysuckles Or the enlightenment of the fireflies echo Into the darkness that is the lack of you. With you the night is glamorous For the stars are...
3 tags
A three-parter
Lucien Ah! Now I see! I’m awake now I really don’t know how I got here I’ve been away for at least a few hundred years. …
There’s a spot kindling of concentrated light at about the height of your head compared to mine. It’s just you with poems on your arms and a novel on your lips that I want to eat. …
Let it linger like strawberry juice, a sweet...
3 tags
I lovelove this one
Mother The Night was like the rain As it fell surrounding me, Washing me, astonishing me. It sustained my being, that is to say She catalyzed my coming to be. Indelibly my feet crept Through the glistening bricks, And my outstretched arms Ever extended to the mystery of the stars. The Night like the rain Fell like a womb, A dark dwelling place for Potential. My rooted feet, no longer allayed by...
1 tag
A two-parter
A Long Night’s Work I Like a turned down bed she beckons to you, Come in! Come in! throw off your weary garments and come in! So saith the night in her whimsy of you. Sweet sojourner find your comfort in this: As much as you yearn is surely as much as you’re missed. II Shallow, shallow shot glasses littering the bar carve my heart to pieces all for a few quick releases I forsook you like a...
2 tags
I was chilled. The result:
Goosebumps Perfect little irregularities Running around, all up and down My body, Pursued by cold, persistent fingers. Don’t get fresh with me!
2 tags
One for a class
And the World Will Shudder Rain is wet and cold But the Sun is rising And the rain sings like gold. Children chase the eastern showers Brothers, sisters, sons and daughters We once called our own Dance, soak in exultation And are swept up. We refrain, we remain Much too wise Staying confined to Watch them in glorying Our mouths crinkled and moving Constantly chewing As if we can never...
