Patches and Badges Pt. II

The beginning of the second part of my short story

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 16:00:27 -0400

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 of his belongings on a Tuesday morning, finishing up in time for a late lunch. No new neighbors had greeted him. It occurred to him that perhaps no one had noticed.

It was a dull and sleepy street. He had moved there because he had found a good deal on the one bedroom house and it was closer to his job at the local liquor store. He liked to think of his abodes as “bachelor pads,” although he never had any parties like those associated with the name. His neighbors never had noise complaints and therefore never felt the need to acknowledge his presence. At the small apartment he used to occupy, his only visitors had been his weed dealer and a coworker named Hailey who liked to sleep with him very once in a while. He was settling in to the idea that this place would be just like the last when he saw Yvette and was suddenly in love.

She used her whole body to swing the trash bag into the bin. Morgan noticed her thin, frail looking legs and that they culminated in bare, bluish colored feet.

“It’s fucking freezing out there.” He said it out loud, irate with this waifish, nameless woman. “Why is she outside with no pants? Where are her goddam socks?”

He leaned against the windowsill and studied her as she made her way back inside. Gradually he became aware of a boiling sensation starting at the floor of his abdomen. He thought about the pure bone-ivory color of her skin and it began to climb, scalding his stomach lining. He thought, brimming with compassion, of her weak, beautiful limbs being smitten by the November chill, and the boiling leapt up his esophagus. By the time his thoughts alit upon the magnetism of her unkempt head and the glimpse he caught of a face all luminous eyes and no mouth, the heat was so severely scorching his throat and mouth that he ran coughing into the kitchen to drink water from the sink. Gasping, he raised his streaming face from the tap and rested it in his hands. A quiet and desperate knowledge hovered at the limit of his immediate consciousness. He knew religiously (the way a man knows when he is in love) that his love would destroy him unless he did something. So, with the adrenaline-fueled concentration of a man in dire peril, he began to watch.

… … …

Though she hadn’t seen him since Christmas Eve, Yvette had come to realize that Morgan was miraculous.

Part One of my new short story

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 18:04:00 -0500

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 of her world.

“Well, fuck.” She shrugged her shoulders and put on her socks, trying her hardest to balance on one foot. She put on some army boots and a large t-shirt which she pretended was a “tunic” and considered herself dressed for the day. She ate popcorn for breakfast. White cheddar popcorn with what looked to be greyish black kernels. It still tasted alright.

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK

A very handsome stranger at the door.

“Yes?”

“Excuse me, does Chris still live here?”

“No, never heard of him.”

“O… Well I live next door. Sorry I never introduced myself before. You live here long?”

“No. I’m sorry, did you need something?”

“Oh… No, not really… Well it’s just that I got this wine from work, and Chris, you know, the guy who lived here, he got me something last year and I just wanted to return the favor you know… So I have this wine. Well do you want it?”

Yvette noticed that there were greyish ribbons wrapped around the bottle in the handsome stranger’s hands. “What you get him a gift for?”

“Like I said, he got me a present last year and I just wanted to be neighborly… You know, it being Christmas Eve and all.”

It was Christmas. It’s Christmas?

“Hey are you alright?”

“Um, yeah. Sure I’ll take the wine.”

“O, ok. So you got any plans tonight?”

“Not till now.” She gestured with the wine bottle.

“O, heh heh… yeah right. But really do you?” His face was kind of thrusting forward.

“No.”

“Well me neither. My family lives far away and stuff so… Well hey want to drink that wine together? You can come over or I can come here…”

“Ok. Give me like an hour and I’ll come over there.” She started to close the door.

“Ok. Wait, it’s that yellow one right there.”

“Ok.” The door was almost closed…

“Wait! What’s your name?”

“Yvette.”

“Ok, I’m Morgan.”

“Ok, bye.” Yvette shut the door.

… … …

Is this the yellow one?

Yvette stared up at the light grey house. She thought this was the one (Morgan?) had pointed to. She shuffled her feet a bit with one hand smushed against the crease where her leg hinged from her thigh as though there were a phantom pocket there, the gift bottle of wine pressed against her side in the loop her arm created. Her fingers closed tenderly on her dwindling cigarette as though it were a blunt; she took a final drag and continued gazing at the house. Her gaze was a squinting one, not because it was particularly bright (on the contrary it was overcast), but because she thought it made her seem/feel shrewd. She did it on purpose. It didn’t matter if she thought someone might observe her. Dropping her cigarette, she cut across the lawn to the front door.

“Hello?… Morgan?…” She hadn’t knocked. Her head lead the way into Morgan’s living room. The room was plain: blinds but no curtains, a couch, a beanbag chair, a shitty entertainment center that leaked DVD’s and Xbox controllers, a couple of floor lamps… no posters or pictures, but several stacks of books, most with library barcodes. It wasn’t neat, but it was clean. Yvette put down the wine and picked up an ashtray from the coffee table. It had a suspiciously marijuana-like odor.

“Oh! Hey…” Morgan looked nervous with surprise at finding her already in his home. “I didn’t hear you knock.”

“I didn’t.” She twirled the ashtray in her fingers.

“…Oh…”

“You smoke weed?” She brandished the ashtray at him.

“It helps me relax… Why don’t you sit down? Can I get you anyth—”

“You want to smoke now? You got stuff you don’t mind sharing?”

“Um, sure… Jeez!” He flung his arms out to his sides as if at a loss. “Fuck. You make me feel like I’m uptight, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah. But look, it doesn’t matter. It’s Christmas. Shit, I didn’t even remember it was Christmas, you know? And you invited me here so I figured, let’s have a fucking family Christmas, right? Right?”

“Yeah, ok… You know I guess I was thinking the same thing. I just didn’t think it would really happen. That it would be so easy, I mean.”

“My feelings exactly.” She didn’t really know what he meant but, wanting to get things moving, she decided to skip it.

“So let’s just… Relax.” Morgan disappeared to some invisible room elsewhere in the house, returning with a bag of…

“Green! I remember it was green!”

“Calm down Yvette. I mean, Jesus, you trying to wake up the neighborhood?”

“I’m telling you! The weed was green!”

“Most weed is, my darling.”

“The weed was green, and that’s why I can’t stay here alone. It doesn’t do that anymore. It stopped, it all stopped, just before that night!”

Yvette knew that she was in denial. She knew that everyone else was too. Ever since the color had drained out of the world, people just went on behaving as if nothing had changed. Yvette knew that the world was ignorant, but sometimes she forgot. “It doesn’t matter.” She quit arguing.

The weed was green. She didn’t remember smoking it, or finishing the bottle of wine. She couldn’t recall what munchies they ate, or Morgan leading her stumbling body to the invisible room, his hand clasped around hers…

Black. Black that muffles the sounds. Sounds like: breathing, heavy, sometimes shallow sometimes deep; moans and stifled cries; begging— please, please, please… Oohh please. Pressure, pain, pleasure. Sick-sweet feeling in the stomach, nausea bubbling up… No. Red.

The light woke her, and Yvette woke with a hangover. Opening her eyes and breathing calmly, she realized her surroundings were familiar. She was in her bed. She looked around: white ceiling, white walls, grey curtains, grey blankets… there. Red on her thighs red on her sheets.

Part Two: The Hunger

A poetic moment of my life through the eyes of another

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 15:49:00 -0500

I was here and it was awesome.If you like good food and good writing read this:

www.umamiandaglassofwine.com

Inspired by an awkward almost meeting

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 15:18:51 -0500

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 deeper now
you’re more grown up I think
you look happy. You look strong.
I wonder how long its been since you thought of me naked
vulnerable with love beneath you
breathing, breathing
hot shallow breaths into your eyes and lungs.
You ate
each one.
You gave each back,
lifegiver
to a life long since abandoned.
You were mother’s milk to me,
dripping richly from the teats of existence herself
and she weaned me.
She ripped me from her breast
not unkind but harsh nonetheless
I found you outgrown. I found you unbest.
I’ve passed you by now
with no word and no sigh
the sidewalk bears us by
and bye and bye
you will no longer meet my eye.

A long poem/ a micro story

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 15:54:00 -0500

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 from a vibrant,

sturdy trunk, terminating in capable looking fingers.

They press around his frosted gin/water bottle.

A gentle, firm grip…

Damn, I need a drink.

Last night, saw him in a seedy bar.

A long, chestnut colored wig:

the curls ripple electrically around his shoulders.

His lips are shining robustly,

red and sumptuous.

I smelled perfume rising from his glitter-powdered breasts

and I was drawn face first

into the silk dunes whispering across his skin.

His pointed shoes cause every leg muscle to self-proclaim

ecstatically

she danced for me.

And there he was in my memory

taking notes on Derrida

sipping gin in postmodern literature class

holding the bottle like a large, straining member…

…and damn, I need a drink,

a drink from a bottle of gin.

Dive head first among the ice and spirit

evaporate into the muggy atmosphere and rush,

return to cling again to the cool plastic bottle

sweating down till I am a melted puddle at its base,

the communist’s ebony fingers tracing circles through my flesh.

His/her fingers tracing circles through my flesh…

The windows on the bus are plastic and do not open.

But I see the shadow of my face

blend with the shapes outside—

the buildings and cars, strangers’ faces—

we drive by.

A gust of hot breeze through the opening doors

peppered with the fragrances of hot metal and exhaust,

of concrete and newspaper and sweaty bodies,

hot, burnished hair crowning their heads.

The soap and rose water smell

of the Sunday school lady stepping onto the bus.

Her hair is twisted cleanly

off her cleanly pressed, white blouse.

She is a pale china doll with a demure brown skirt;

sensible brown pumps full of neat nyloned feet.

Her humbly manicured nails wink

from pink, curling fingers around

a metal ring swinging from the ceiling.

She points her chin out the front window.

She half-hoods her lids over her eyes.

Damn, I need…

I let out a husky breath full of the communist

will it up through her nostrils.

There he will dangle in her olfactory

I inhaling myself up her nylons

and pooling in the soggy apex where her legs meet.

Dirty, salty sweet.

I trickle down her leg and re-solidify in my seat.

Damn…

I’m thinking of the communist and the Sunday school lady

twisting, swirling together in my brain,

dancing metallically on my tongue.

I push them out into a fog on the window

suck them back in and gulp them down, warming

my already burning stomach.

She has gotten off the bus.

He was never on the bus.

I am on the bus.

The seedy bar where I watch the strange girls—

the strange communists—dance

creeps stoically up on the left.

Stop.

Stop, please.

Heat from the bus engine radiates

pushing my skirt against my thigh:

I am crossing in front,

got to get across the street.

The noise, the grey and white swallow the bus

the street

the people outside.

“You look like you need a drink.”

I look up at the bartender who is leaning

against my low wooden table at the corner of the stage.

His mouth is moving, chewing, chewing.

Saliva rolling, bubbling, chewing nicotine gum.

A smirking, chapped-lipped mouth.

Freckles on his nose.

I need a cigarette.

Breathe in the smoke of the place.

Postmodernism class

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 15:02:06 -0500

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 thoughts

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 15:03:00 -0500

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 left behind and with them my mind

is dropping its higher processes—

I’ve made a trail bedraggled bits of what it has meant to be human.

eight… I have judged…

nine… I have hoped…

ten… I have searched…

eleven… twelve… thirteen… fourteen…

… … …

Trying to find space to mourn

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 15:12:00 -0500

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 beneath them

and they thrust out blindly,

groping for an anchor beyond their present.

We are condemned

to depthlessness as from depthlessness we have come.

we have been flung out as we too will fling

our seed in our withering—a last attempt at breathing—

we flailing fall abysmally, hoping our last shot will hold us hanging.

exerpt on a paper about foundations for egalitarianism from an Eastern Orthodox perspective

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 15:12:00 -0500

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 exist just as he or she is. Bartholomew I says that this is the role of religion: “to promote freedom among human beings as the basis of encounter and communion.”[1] The understanding of the Trinity as having this personal space for freedom within Itself in Its communal nature is the basis for practicing such communal interaction. It is the mandate for humankind to uphold the values of freewill and respect for each person’s self expression which manifests itself as egalitarianism.[2]

Many feminists believe that assigning any characteristics to a particular sex causes polarization of the genders and places potentially oppressive limits on women and/or men. For example, extending the qualities of motherhood to the entire female sex might equate being a whole woman with being a mother, therefore excluding the women who do not wish to be mothers or who cannot become mothers.[3] With a proper understanding of the perichoretic nature of humanity, the rigidity and exclusion which occurs with the assignment of gendered characteristics can be overcome. There is no empirically supported research on the differences between men and women which definitively delineates between masculine and feminine behavior and personality.[4] Obviously there are physical differences in the anatomy, and these differences allow for the only true differences in the actions of men and women: only women can give birth (and only men can impregnate women). It is true that some women may choose not to bear children, but the female’s choice of whether to bear children or not is a profoundly womanly experience because only women may make this choice. Therefore choosing to not to give birth is as feminine as choosing to give birth. For those who for whatever reason cannot give birth, they may still understand their identity in regard to child-bearing as it relates to their feminine heritage. Certainly these women are still whole women in spirit, though their bodies may malfunction in some way. The point in the end is that the potential for motherhood is a 100% female experience whether or not 100% of females experience it.

There are attributes of God which are most perfectly captured in the female physiology. Her body is an icon of each the Father, the Holy Spirit and Jesus Christ who is the Son. She is the icon of the Spirit because the Spirit is the Mother of this world, all creation being in Her womb. The female, who is the rightful steward of the vessel given to her by God, is the icon of the Father, who only brought creation forth from chaos out of His own free will. When the female chooses to give birth, she does what the Father did at creation: she names herself “for” the other, the child who she has chosen to bear out of love. In pregnancy and in nursing, she literally gives of her body to sustain the life of the other selflessly, for the child at her breast can give nothing in return. Here in the mother we see Jesus Christ himself, who said “take, eat; this is my body.” (ESV) Of course there is also the blessed Theotokos, who prefigured the most perfect disciple by bending to the will of God to make Christ incarnate in and through her. Mary’s blessedness is the blessedness of all women, who alone have special insight into her physical experience.

But child-bearing women are not the only people blessed. All humans are blessed by the blessedness of one. Men, and women without children, must through the model of perichoresis of humanity, understand the female child-bearing experience as a human experience. The first step to the wealth of femininity being shared across sexual bounds is the allowance of freedom in personal space. This can only occur in the case of distinction between the persons, in this case between male and female, and then recognition of that distinction and the value of the consequential specific experience. The second step is the recognition that at no point in the formation of the child is the male, the father, absent. The female is greatly indebted to the male for her blessedness, because only with the male was she able to be born a woman, and only with the male has she the potential to give birth to new life. The male is blessed through the female and the female is blessed through the male. Not only are females defined by males, but males are defined by females by their otherness. In addition, no act of male or female is done apart from the other, and this is the key characteristic of perichoresis (the Son does nothing without the Father and the Holy Spirit and so on). Each female carries with her the identity of her father in her blood and so her actions are done with him, just as each male carries his mother’s X chromosome in his fundamental genetic makeup. In the bearing of children, the unity of the acts of men and women are even more closely connected.

In the sacramental union of marriage and its consummation, men and women physically represent perichoresis. There is no better metaphor for the perichoresis of the Trinity than the conception of a child through the consensual sex act of a man and a woman. In the sex act, a man and a woman become united in their wills for one another in love, and in oneness produce new life out of their love. They are distinct but intertwined, one force for a particular, love-driven end. In the Trinity, the persons are different ways of expressing an identical life. There is no division of feminine and masculine attributes among the persons of God, because the only attribute ascribed to God are shared by all persons of the Trinity. Some of these attributes (the ones appropriately assumed by humans), which have been revealed through God Incarnate in Christ, are as follows: love, mercy, justice, faithfulness and goodness.[5] The Holy Spirit is not the only person who exhibits love, and the Father is not the only person who enacts justice, and certainly the Son is not the only faithful person of the Godhead. To say so would be the heresy of Tritheism.[6] So too men and women must be expected to image the whole God as modeled by Christ. Above it was mentioned that deciding to give birth is a self-naming of being for the other; this is love. The interest in the other without self-interest is exactly what God has done in freewill at the creation of humanity and the incarnation of the Son. If in parenthood the love of God is iconized, fathers too should be expected to be good, faithful and loving parents.

Socio-Ethical Implications

An important thing to realize is that though this paper focuses on the female experience, it is not because the female experience is a more complete or better icon of God. The female is not a more complete image of God than is the male. The focus on the female is to emphasize that there is no complete human without both male and female, and the female has not been afforded the same freedom and personal space that the male has had throughout history. There should be no subordinating of the male experience to the female experience and vice versa, because there is no subordination in the Trinity for which humankind is the image. Instead there is a dynamic flow of responsibility, of action in the human sphere by each of the persons in which the wills of all are present where there is a primary actor. The Son is the one who walked the earth and died on the cross, but his death was not his own. It was willed by all three and all three participated, just as all three participated in the resurrection which was brought through the power of the Holy Spirit. “Remembering these, don’t you belittle and within the Godhead, putting this one above, this one below,” for each is equally God, continually making space for the other in action for the world. From this perichoretic understanding of God, and knowing humankind to be in that image, “should we not consciously move towards an ecclesiology of perichoresis: in which there is no permanent structure of subordination, but in which there are overlapping patterns of relationships, so that the same person will be sometimes “subordinate” and sometimes “superordinate” according to the gifts and graces being exercised?” And because we understand it to be what is expected from humans ecclesiologically, in the Church, should we not understand it to be what is expected from the perfect human, of which the Church is the body as it is the body of Christ?

CONCLUSION

Throughout this paper I have attempted to bring together three areas of my education: Eastern Orthodox theology, feminism, and psychology. I have used sources from all of these areas to make a point about a different directionality for humanity. It is a circular directionality. Its movement is progress, though not progress as is understood by modern society. It is not toward prosperity, power, or independence. It is toward each other; it is perichoresis. Only through a shift to perichoretic movement in humanity can humans approach the kingdom of God, because only in perichoretic movement can humanity mirror God. The Incarnation puts the Trinity at the center of all theology.[1] Because of the enfleshing of God at the Incarnation, “[o]ur social program is the doctrine of the Trinity, a God in communion, a social God. Every form of community—the workplace, the school, the city, even a nation—has as its vocation to become, each in its own way, a living icon of the Trinity.”[2] Through perichoresis God has done this—through the interpenetration of the divine and the human in Christ: “[h]e imparts to the flesh His own attributes by way of communication in virtue of the interpenetration of the parts one with another, and the oneness according to subsistence, and inasmuch as He Who lived and acted both as God and as man, taking to Himself either form and holding intercourse with the other form, was one and the same.”[3] So also through perichoresis will human beings enact transformation in each other and in the whole world because of it. “So much radiance has the Trinity revealed to my eyes.”[4]

A poem by Michael De Backer

Sat, 03 Nov 2012 21:53:00 -0400

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 winkings might unbar

The mortal cage that holds thy flight at bay.

Oh wannish skin for which the moon rays wane

Cast out thy glow upon my midnight way

And lead my lilting lips towards that plain

Where oft my tethered kisses burned to stray.

Oh boundless soul, as rivers to the sea

Are all the streams thy love doth loose in me.

Dream Series 4

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 17:43:00 -0400

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 that mystery is an essential quality of Truth itself. Herein lies the beauty of poetry. It is the only appropriate verbal medium for transmission and not mere description of Truth because it is the only verbal medium for which mystery is essential. In the poem we do not simply hear about Truth; we hear its very echoes, we see its dark and murky colors, we feel its magnetism, and are drawn in by its aroma in anticipation of a cacophany of tastes flowering upon our palettes. We experience Truth in a poem by virtue of its poemness separate from any virtue of the author. With that I now present to you my newest and one of my most inscrutable poems.

Enormous creaking doors hanging crookedly
on celestial hinges:
what gargantuan racket!
pulled and pushed as they must be
by some inscrutable figure
of titanic size and strength.
Stardust sweeps along with
the gusts which rush in pursuit of each door
dusting our bodies and making us luminesce;
we are soft white
in a place all indigo and charcoal.

Continuation of the Dream Series

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 17:17:00 -0400

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 fall and tumble,
groping. My eyes are blacked and my nose is stopped;
what hope have I to breathe again? I cannot taste or feel the air.
Have I fallen the interminable fall, or have I fallen ill?

Dream Series

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 14:21:33 -0400

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 and ever
and perhaps I’ll inhabit your dreams.

Dream Series

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 01:45:16 -0400

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 their heads and in their eyes.
All their colors bow to gold and shine.
They throw their light on all the air and clouds
the people throw their hands aloft and askew to touch the world.
The whole room approaches. Hark!
and hasten ahead so we might look and not be acquired.
Its movement is steady and expansive
an ever-inhaling lung of life.
It will swallow us
we fall behind and are consumed
swept above the clouds, we settle and dissolve
into the air
over and over gilded anew.

My Wedding Vows

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 18:46:48 -0400

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 without regard to my own gain or benefit.

Your thoughts will become more of a home to me than any building, and your presence will offer me more security than any amount of money. With you I will count myself wealthy, and God and the world will be blessed because of our love and the life we have been given through each other.

I will glory in the godliness with which you view me, and I will live to reflect the love of God to you along with the love from my own heart. I have relinquished a life of solitary freedom for love and life with you, a choice I will never regret.

With this vow I pledge my life gladly because giving my freedom to one who truly loves me, who resonates so completely with my own soul is no sacrifice at all. In loving you, I have found the best opportunity for true freedom, and my best of all possible selves.

I thank God for you, and I love you. With this ring I promise to continue for the rest of my life, and remain your wife until the end of time as we know it.

Writing in the deserted restaraunt that is my workplace

Sat, 06 Oct 2012 10:34:00 -0400

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 springtime to the heavens and destroy all we profess it to generate,

lost in the shadows: the only thing that ever blossomed.

Born of a shy young man speaking up

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 16:53:28 -0400

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 somehow standard-issue t-shirt and slacks.

Slacks! not pants, and your shoes which are clearly from Wal-Mart!

You’re so quiet, so timid,

growing upon walls even where no walls are to be found.

I see you, but you don’t know that.

In the integrity in your movements, those motions so convinced of their invisibility,

you have won me.

I know this is too long for anyone to want to read, but it's the first pages of my short story

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 05:01:02 -0400

Nobody knows how the Bowl got there, to tell the truth. There are many legends; some people say it’s a crater from a meteor landing hundreds of years ago. Others say that a few feet below the ground of the bowl there’s some kind of sinkhole. These are probably the most likely of the Bowl’s genesis stories, but by no means are they the most widely accepted. The general consensus among the youth who are concerned with the Bowl is that it was made by way of the malevolence of the people of our town in the olden days.

In my town there are essentially no newcomers or outsiders. In the rare event that someone new moves in around here they either leave quickly, or they keep their heads down long enough to dredge up some mysterious ancient ancestry based in the town and in this way they become natives themselves. For the kids and adolescents in the town, it is important that their ancestors be established as having been present during the time of the Bowl’s formation. It’s this time that we believe our town became our town. The Bowl, as it grew, was like the womb of the town, its people the colliding genes and chromosomes which would determine its mode of being. When the Bowl finished growing, the town was born; a town named Perge.

Perge got its name from the Perges, and this much of the legend is definitely true: that the Perges were the most influential family in the history of our town. They could be said to have been the wealthy people responsible for the founding of Perge. Marlon Perge was the family patriarch as well as the town magistrate during the era of the town that currently concerns us. Anastasia Perge, his wife, was some sort of foreign countess or gypsy princess—basically she was shrouded in mystery and money, which was presumably why Marlon married her. She seemed relatively invisible in the life of the village until—and this is where the line between history and legend blurs—the formation of the Bowl began.

As I said before, at first Anastasia was a barely noticeable citizen of Perge. She apparently stayed hidden in the Perge house all day. Any other woman in her position would have been expected to entertain all the major families in her proximity because of her husband’s importance in their small society. Any other woman in her position also would have been able to expect a reasonable amount of flattering attention from the gentlemen and ladies of those families. I guess it was the fact that she was so foreign that caused her to both neglect and be neglected by the townsfolk. It began to be said that she engaged in “unnatural” practices behind the closed doors of the Perge home. One thing for sure became evident: someone from that house had been digging.

It started out as a small hole on the Perge’s property to the left of their house. It could have been a dog that made it, so nobody paid it any mind. As the days went by, however, the hole grew until it reached an alarming size. Nobody really knew who made the hole, but naturally suspicion was directed toward Anastasia as the Perge’s kept no housekeeper, had no children, and of course someone as respectable as Marlon would never do anything so inexplicable. No, Anastasia must have been the digger. Anastasia must have been up to something.

I don’t know if you’ve ever lived in a small town, but if you haven’t, think about how nosy people in your school, family or office are. That’s probably something like what it is to live in a small town. Everyone is entitled to know everyone else’s business. The town is a unit; there boundaries between people are not static or concrete. This problem was a great deal worse in Anastasia’s time, because there wasn’t even any television or anything.

Micro poem (as yet without a title)

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 14:57:00 -0400

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.

The first two paragraphs of my upcoming short story

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 01:01:00 -0400

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 household shopping were fraught with anxiety over what might happen to “The Bowl.” It’s not very creative, but that’s what we called it, and it was a good enough name in my opinion. Anyway, you can’t imagine our relief when a couple of scouts came back from the construction site, joyfully announcing that the wal-mart property fence ended a blessed few feet from the trees surrounding the Bowl. For us there might as well have never been a wal-mart after that.
Nobody knows how the Bowl got there, to tell the truth. There are many legends; some people say it’s a crater from a meteor landing hundreds of years ago. Others say that a few feet below the ground of the bowl there’s some kind of sinkhole. These are probably the most likely of the Bowl’s genesis stories, but by no means are they the most widely accepted. The general consensus among the youth who are concerned with the Bowl is that it was made by way of the malevolence of the people of our town in the olden days.