Something Bent So Far In Me, But Never Broke. I Kept Thinking If I Went Far Enough In The Wrong Direction

There is something so magical about the bus boy’s dish cart. Coffee cups with cold wet sugar resting on their rims, plates with forks neatly splayed out on their porcelain cheeks, saucers holding old tea bags like newborn babes. Such a security in knowing the meal is done, and carried away, and nobody can take the conversations over your dinner table with them.

If I pull the dagger out

What will be left of me

I am blood unspilt, nothing more.

Life is happening, life is happening all the time. I can’t seem to catch it in between my fingers, elusive as rays of light. I cannot keep it high in my lungs, it leaves me like a breath. I am a meager stone in a fast coursing river and I watch what erodes me away. Life is cold. Invigorating. I wish I could hold its hand and study its face before it escapes me again.

What is all this?

It’s bioluminescence. You never seen it before?

No, I haven’t.

It’s little tiny creatures, every time something moves through the water they light up like itty bitty stars.

Do you eat them?

Do I-? No! They’re beautiful!

You don’t eat beautiful things?

You’re still here aren’t you?

-conversations with a siren

A letter to my father,

I behave youthfully around you, happy go lucky and thoughtless at times. This isn’t because I am those things, but because you let me be. You have never been a parent to me, but a friend. And as your friend, I must tell you:

I behave as if there is nothing the matter, to keep the peace, and not ruin what bond we have, but I have been lying to you, and to myself, that our differing politics needn’t ever intersect. In fact, they intersect every time I look at you and remember the hat you hang in your garage. The red one, with the white letters. I remember you voted against my interests for your own, which foolishly you did, as you will not get your way in the end.

And seeing as I cannot have my father and honesty at once, it seems neither will I.

In defense of the comic, whose characters are foolish but whose mind is not. I see her brilliance in the whites of the audience’s smiles, in the wit and the quickness of her responses. I know many serious men with the mask of intelligence hiding a simple and plain nature. I find the opposite quite riveting.

-Confessions of a Ticket Sales Clerk

Sweet thing didn’t bite me nearly hard enough to hurt me, though not for lack of trying. She thought I was dead, but she’d just woken me with her nibbling. My eyes dragged down to the source, a head full of spiked black hair, with droopey triangles flat on her forehead form being above water. Her eyes were black as well, I was transfixed by them, how her pupils devoured her face. The sharp point of her nose dug into my knuckle as her mouth inched it’s way up my finger. Our eyes met. She inhaled sharply and pushed herself away from me, her eyes warbled with shock, and then settled down to worry. I wasnt worried though. Not for a moment.

-Diary of a Siren

In twilight hours, when her day’s thoughts drift heavenly with the receding tide, and fears and doubts rescind, she thinks of her. Her head wet from the sea dampening her pant legs, resting in her lap as a black pearl. She runs her fingers through her short black hair and wonders how it rises underwater, if she could ever see it for herself without drowning. Salt and iron prick her nose. The siren opens her eyes and the moment she looks at her with a tenderness so palpable, her image disappears. Her lap lay empty. The sailor girl’s mind too shy to peer at even the idea of her so flagrantly. She hears the creaking of the floor boards, and inhales the lantern oil burning, and is brought back to dry reality. Skin itching for the sand in the ocean shallow.

I can’t explain the joy I feel. And isn’t that so wonderful isn’t that so perfect to have a problem doppled in sugar and cherries with pits you suck on until they are bare in your mouth.

What use is death to a creature like me?

Well, I’ll tell you:

Death is an old bedfellow, a partner, a wife;

Is there anything so sweet as a union born in blood?

A promise to always be at each other’s finger tips?

Tool the marble into statue, we sculpt the world,

To improve it, cull those unfit for life by scythe point.

A silly question to ask me, what use is death to a

Creature? Without it, I would not have a life at all.

Like a mutant calf, my village shunned and cast

Me out to meet her, Lady Death.