This place isn't back up, really; I just vividly recalled this a few days ago, wrote it down, and needed to get rid of it, to release it. It isn't healthy to dwell on the beginnings of things that have ended.

The bathroom was blue, as it always had been; it may still have had the tiles that seemed to float off the floor if you stared at them. It must have been night, since the light was on and gave the room a yellowish wash-- a sick tinge for a blue room. It's still like that at night. I'm glad I don't go there often anymore; it's my brother's bathroom now.

I stepped on the scale. (Nothing good can come of that sentence.) My mother peered over my shoulder at the numbers, lurid red and counting upwards. They jumped up, down, still, up, down-- that old scale caught every fidget of cold bare feet. We don't have it anymore. The one that replaced it is off by five pounds, but at least it's consistent.

I can't remember now what the number was, or even how much lower it was than the previous time, three pounds or five. It shouldn't make a difference. But I remember saying, with a woman's bragging instinct, that I had lost weight. I remember my mother sounding warm and amused, telling me that weight fluctuates monthly (I knew.) I remember protesting, still in a pitiful too-old-too-female scoff for a girl brought up to believe that age fifteen should be no different from age ten, that three pounds (or five) was too much change for a month. I had to be losing weight.

I remember panicking the moment the words left my mouth-- a fluttering, heart-clutching panic. That was it. It was the insidious uncoiling sickness that was just beginning to sew my lips closed telling me Shut up! Shut up! You'll give yourself away!

I knew that I really was losing weight. For the first time in my life, I was. But I had to keep it secret, hide it from the warm faces peering over my shoulder at the indecisive judging numbers on the scale. If I did not, the game would be up and the cold sick thing I was becoming would die. I did not then understand. But when my mother, hiding laughter, indulgently said, "All right then, I guess you're losing weight!" I felt regret. Guilt pricked at the bare soles of my feet as I stepped off the scale. It had never occurred to me before that what I was doing was a thing to hide. A diet was a public thing, announced while picking at a sandwich to a group of supportive, equally dieting friends. An eating disorder is a thing behind closed bathroom doors, waiting for the scale to resolve two meager pounds lower than last time. An eating disorder is a thing behind closed lips.

I will not pretend that was when it started. But that was when I should have known.

The Notebook is going low-tech for a while. I'll be back eventually.

You have never been alone, sweetheart,
Candy-eyed dear with a honey that sticks
All spores and seedpods to your skin.
Nectar-darling, you need never thirst.

You have never been alone,
Waxy-fingered sunflower girl.
You stand without touching in
A garish grove of upright, beaming friends.

You have never been alone. You couldn't know
Black-footed trees and leaf-dust inhalations
Tumbling, hair full of bark, over a slimy hostile root
Landing breathless in the stream, lips dripping berry red.

You have never been alone, Sister
Who I never touched. I wish you had.
I wish you hadn't given up hope while still warm and safe-
I'd have never been alone, sweetheart.

Focusing on a story I'm betaing this evening. I feel like I've been neglecting the Notebook lately... will rectify that starting tomorrow. In the meantime, here's a Sandburg poem that always gives me delicious shivers of yes-that's-the-way-it-is.

Joy

Let a joy keep you.
Reach out your hands
And take it when it runs by,
As the Apache dancer
Clutches his woman.
I have seen them
Live long and laugh loud,
Sent on singing, singing,
Smashed to the heart
Under the ribs
With a terrible love.
Joy always,
Joy everywhere--
Let joy kill you!
Keep away from the little deaths.

"You still aren't writing," he stated from just over her right shoulder. Her hand on the mouse instinctively moved to close the game of Hearts that overlaid a one-sentence Word document, but she thought better of it-- he'd already seen, and he wouldn't be angry, just concerned. If mad, incessant writing meant the violently self-annihilating end of the spectrum of unhealthy emotional states, not writing at all meant the opposite. It meant a stagnation without rest, a withdrawal without meditation.

He knew all this. He also knew that gently rubbing her hunched-over shoulders and bringing her a glass of iced tea was not going to cut it. So because of this (not because he loved her startled yelps or the way she squirmed beneath his hands, of course,) he yanked her hair back, making her neck arch over the top of the backrest and drawing one of those adorable little gasps of surprise. "You're getting out of that funk of yours and writing, darling," he purred as he tangled the elegant fingers of one hand deeper in her hair and traced the other over the line of her outstretched neck. "Or I'm withholding... um... inspiration, at least for tonight." And with a nip just beneath her ear, he left her to reawaken her own demons.

It's the Fourth of July. I'm exhausted. So instead of writing or doing anything else useful, I ended up at nosurprises. GOOD LORD. I was propping my lower jaw up with my fist to keep from gaping. Hello, thinking in color and spirals! If I don't sleep now, I am going to pass out.

Tell Me A Story in poem form, sort of. A simpler variant on climbing rhyme. Really just an attempt at getting myself enthused about this story again.

The fragile city is
aglow, iridescent, this time
temporary, muted-mime hush.
Try to brush gates
and cleats fall through,
tattering you, sun-sprinkling your robe.
This is home, but
speech is not your
own here. Four steps
and check the journey:
broken glass. Hurry! Feathers
sharpened, voice feather-hush.
Rush, rush, scream out!
Drown out doubt, drown
out now, shatter towers,
crumble poppy-flowered heaven.
From your blue place, leaven mine.

My brother bit into a ginger snap with a sharp cracking sound and immediately started giggling. "What happened?" I asked. "Break a tooth? Your skull?"

"Both," he replied, but the cookie was broken. I smiled and took two more for myself. As he started on his ice cream, he grinned at me.

"I remember," he said, "when you were fifteen, you hardly ate any desert." Wince. Cower. Try to change the subject. "I like you better this way, [Scarlett.]" He gestured to the cookies, tried to pat my arm.

It isn't an option, really, any more than snatching the cookie from my brother's hand would have been. Starving myself starved them of me. I wish they would beat that into me. I wish they would throw it in my face. I wish they would stop their passive aggressive meanderings and tell me outright, daily, loudly that I can't do that to them again. Because, if not, I'll just keep listening to "Vanish" by A Perfect Circle—Disappear, disappear, thinner, thinner, into the air—and someday I'll reach my breaking point again.

It's the point where my self-esteem hits rock bottom and I suddenly need to "prove" myself. It's where my weight plummets and my grades skyrocket. It's where, slowly, cruelly, blindly, I disappear. I shouldn't listen to that song anymore. I should listen to my brother. He is fourteen, dumber, louder, and skinnier than a twig in a high wind, and wise in a way that I will never be again since I fainted, clutching my chest, at the bottom of the stairs and never told anyone.

Still not done, or even close. Some lines are just stopgaps at the moment. But that's what this place is for.

Chest on a Closet Shelf

Fingertips slip warily through shadows,
wafting dust to pale, expectant faces.
Just deny that what's found really matters.

Have you trusted hands to darkened places?
Sometimes you must, to seize the snake inside,
wafting dust to pale, expectant faces.

Stopped by closed eyes, all thoughts swirl back to mind;
cobwebbed hands reach sightless into boxes—
sometimes you must, to seize the snake inside.

Once found, will you have the key that locked it?
You thought you'd never need again, but now
cobwebbed hands reach sightless into boxes.

Chests long abandoned may have rotted through
and ceased to guard the precious things that once
you thought you'd never need again, but now

without a heart, you'll never have a chance.
Fingertips slip warily through shadows,
an imperfect, desolate, trembling dance.
Just deny that what's found really matters.

Still working on the terzanelle. It's definitely harder than it looks. So here's "Mad Girl's Love Song" by Sylvia Plath, the first poet with whom I fell head over heels in love. It's a villanelle to boot, while we're on the subject of loveliness and repetition.

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

Currently working on a terzanelle, which is an awful lot of fun, but harder than it looks. I absolutely love villanelles, but this is my first time with this form. Since I'm not going to post half a poem, here's one by Lewis Turco. I suppose I'll keep doing this: if I don't have anything postable, I'll quote something. I'll leave quote-posts in italics to make it obvious that what I'm posting isn't mine.

"Terzanelle in Thunderweather"

This is the moment when shadows gather
under the elms, the cornices and eaves.
This is the center of thunderweather.

The birds are quiet among these white leaves
where wind stutters, starts, then moves steadily
under the elms, the cornices, and eaves--

these are our voices speaking guardedly
about the sky, of the sheets of lightning
where wind stutters, starts, then moves steadily

into our lungs, across our lips, tightening
our throats. Our eyes are speaking in the dark
about the sky, of the sheets of lightening

that illuminate moments. In the stark
shades we inhibit, there are no words for
our throats. Our eyes are speaking in the dark

of things we cannot say, cannot ignore.
This is the moment when shadows gather,
shades we inhibit. There are no words, for
this is the center of thunderweather.

"The two boys stood, hand in hand, at the top of the cliff. In the gloaming, the plain looked blue-grey and lonely. 'Can you do this?' the bronze one asked the silver, hesitant but trusting. The silver boy nodded. His throat was tight and his palms were sweating, one sticking hotly to the hand it held and the other turning frigid in the biting predawn wind. He opened his mouth and exhaled.

"Nothing. Of course there was nothing. Was the black speck circling against the lightening sky far off in the direction of the city a hawk or a vulture? Would each flap of its wings send fossilized feathers down to pave the road from the city to the cliff? In a land where even eagles refused to cry, how could a boy who glowed like the moon be expected to scream?

"The bronze boy, the sun-boy understood. He always understood his friend's need to shout and roar and tear at his delicate throat, although he had never felt it. Gently, he disentangled his spidery fingers from the slick confines of their intertwined hands. Then, imperceptibly at first and with increasing force, he gripped heaving, cloak-covered shoulders. 'Try again,' he urged. Head hung, breaths deep. Trying. For him, the silver one would try anything.

"Silence, one minute, two, ten, too late. The rising sun tinged the horizon dazzling white. Soon, the hazy, ethereal light of a day-long morning would begin again. Soon, the city would once again look even more fragile than it was. Soon, the grass would hiss like brushed fur and the jagged inviting edges of the glittering buildings would crumble slowly in silence. Soon, the boys would be back in the incessant musical tittering of the city. A world with room enough for everyone but no space for a scream."

Your mug of tea is sending dreamy curls of mist up from between your cupped, warming hands. The steam forms, spirals, dissipates, and forms again in a diminutive cascade of sheerest lace that will end only when the tea has grown cold. This will be long after the heat sap of your hands is gone—long after the doorbell rings.

While you watch the tea, he watches you. You don't need to meet his vivid blue gaze to know that he is analyzing you, questioning. He wants to know if you are ready. He wants to know whether a whiteness in your knuckles means that you are thinking of backing out. And you thought about it last night, hair splayed sweaty on the pillow and one hand clasped in both of his. You thought about it this morning, splashing your face and squinting to block out the harsh fluorescent bathroom light. You thought about it at lunch as you picked anxiously at your sandwich. But you've stopped thinking. You've stopped doubting. Before your tea is cool, the doorbell will ring and you will do this. You look up from your tea, past his coffee, and into his assessing eyes. When you smile, they smile back.

Still, the doorbell makes you both jump and break eye contact, only to regain it with nervous laughter a moment later. He answers the door with what you're sure is a friendly, self-assured smile, although from your position hovering behind him all you can see is unruly brown hair and muscular shoulders. But as soon as the half-shouted hellos and masculine back-clapping begin, you're drawn, as always, to the hand on his shoulder. You are mesmerized by fingers as pale and delicate as the wisps of steam still curling off your untouched tea in the kitchen, so different from the large strong hands you know so well. As always, you try to tear your gaze away—but this time, you realize, you can stare all you want. This time, you can even do more. The shiver that rushes up your back at that thought feels like the brushing of smooth, tapered fingertips.

Editors - An End Has A Start

Someone turn me 'round. Someone press your palm to my chest and give me a slow push, walk me backward away from the wall. Someone lead me out of this wet garden, this menagerie of droplets canceling each other's glitter into brushed-metal grey. Someone tell me to stop ending my sentences on a dropped-down tone, tell me to try singing for a change, tell me to wail, tell me to howl. Someone turn on a fan and let throwing-stars whip through my hair because it's too much a quiet cloud that sits on my neck and slowly smothers me. Someone grab me and slam me against a wall, shine a flashlight in my eyes and strip me naked. Someone drag me stumbling into the center of the Sun, blind me and burn me and let it all stop in high-velocity spirals. Someone make me over again, someone make me new. Someone wrap me in a cloak of stars and toss me into the sea. Someone wrap talon-fingers around my wrists and jump off the edge with me. Someone make me soar. Someone unstick my eyes and unbind my breasts. Someone fork my tongue and stab a ray of light into my belly.

Someone bring me back, I want to say. But back isn't where I want to go. I want to pitch heartrendingly forward and find myself suddenly in the sky.

Someone stop me. Someone make me stay. Someone tell me that if only I remain collecting dew with my palms upturned, the hazy morning light will come and slowly fill me with rainbows.

What do you do when your fingers have gone numb? It makes no sense to have to feel with cheeks and tongue, elbows and toes. It makes no sense to pick a pot up from the stove as if heat had never touched it. It's a long day when you have to flutter your eyelashes at something to sense it, create a breeze that bounces back to you like a bat-screech. What if you close your eyes and reach out? You might as well be in a void. Even if you reach out and touch someone, nothing will happen. There will be no warm, smooth skin, no caressing of wrist and neck. Unless you are willing to reach out with your lips, open, ready to run into someone and knock yourself over, you must wait. You must wait until someone reaches out and touches you, and the waiting is hard. Waiting can make you bitter. Waiting can make you lost. Waiting can make you open your eyes and break into laughing shards the experiment in trust.

If you show me Heaven, I will meet you there. -Blaqk Audio, "Stiff Kittens"

If
Distant sunrise,
You burn the hull
As white sails battle the horizon.
Dripping-amber perfect
Weighed down by blue you wait.

You
Can't unclench childish fingers
From damp wrinkled so-soft shirt.
I would wrap you in fog and breathe it in.
I would sink my teeth into your scalp
And dig thumbs into glinting eyes.

Show
bam-bam-bam
elevate me
bam blinding bam
did you see i saw
Do you understand?

Me
Lollipop-licking fairground girl
Filthy fingers, a fruitbasket of a place
How can the tigers scare me
When I have cotton candy,
Mommy?

Heaven
The Aztecs told me
I would be sacrificed,
Become a hummingbird,
Fly to the Sun.
I am looking for flowers.

I
Let's erase the monolith,
Tumble it down into blocks like river-stones.
Let's empty the pool
And make a stream.
Let's go swimming.

Will
Purple swirling past-perfect,
She thinks in video, and the screen keeps expanding.
The chattering voices and spit-shine mouths
Always out of sync.
When it happens, we will say it right.

Meet
Locked click our hands clasped
Did he just look at me as if he loved me?
Click, click, I can't let go.
From fourth to fifty-seventh street I loved you,
Sixty-two you took my hand.

You
And press my tongue across your lips
And hold your breastbone in the palm of my hand.
Hold me like an infant
Safe, safe, safe in the cushioned circle of your arms.
Damp cotton like shed feathers in my fists.

There.
Welcome to the place
Where the sun is beneath your toes,
To the place where you swim in seas of stars,
To the place where everyone sings lullabies,
To the couch at the end of the dead-end street.

It wasn't what either of them expected. They clung to each other in numb disbelief for a moment, darkness and music washing over them like a sudden rainstorm and leaving them speechless. Heaven wasn't supposed to be like this.

She had always known she was going to Hell. Why not? She hadn't once given a damn, not from the moment she spoke her first word ("no") until the moment she crashed her rattletrap pickup, drunk, stoned, and sleepless, into a pine tree on Elm Street. (Irony, eh? She was always one for irony.) But she'd never particularly cared. Heaven didn't sound like much fun anyway. Clouds, light, God… eh.

Killed in their bed by a falling pine tree. What a weird way to die. They'd known for years that the tree was unstable, but they couldn't convince the stodgy city planning commission to let them cut it down. And now they were stuck here in what looked for all the world (the sky? underground? where?) like a rave the size of a small island. There had to be some mistake. They had promised each other that whoever died first would wait for the other in a cottage by a stream in Heaven. Someplace where the Sun was always rising.

If she had been alive, she would have laughed until she spilled her drink at the idea of standing, light-drenched and dressed in white, on what appeared to be a cloud and cursing at the top of her lungs. But that's what she was doing, because this vast white place was obviously Hell. Her Hell was everyone else's Heaven. Oh, how fucking ironic. Obviously, someone up here had it in for her.

Muse- Supermassive Black Hole

They strode down the sidewalk as if they were engaged in a particularly violent tango. The woman's plain khaki skirt swayed with her hips and clung to her legs, trying desperately to become a flamenco dress and nearly succeeding. Her nails dug, glossy red with substitute blood, into one sleeve of the man's perfectly tailored charcoal suit. He stared straight ahead, stride determined and arm around her waist just firm enough to hurt.

They were reenacting a primeval mythical trope, the ageless conflict of hero and Amazon, warrior man and tiger woman. All mankind was caught up in the reenactment, really, going through the harsh and graceful motions of a dance choreographed by their subconscious. But these two were the only ones on the crazed, skyscraper-lined street to be nearing the denouement of the myth, and it ruled them, surrounded them, made them magnetic. Everyone they passed wanted them. But no one had them, either of them. Not yet.

Frustrated to the point of pain, you chew viciously on the end of your pen and glare javelins at the crossed-out page of absolute drivel you've just written. Mediocre, every word, every sentence, drab and shabby and doing no justice to the crashing and bubbling visions you're trying to let out of your aching head. You have absolutely no idea why your notebook isn't laughing at your utter, ridiculous helplessness.

Of course, you're still so startled that you send your pen flying across the room and let out a squeak when it does. It takes you a moment to realize that the laughter is too genuine, open, and musical to be coming from your stubborn bitch of a notebook. By the time he's kneeling next to you, pen in hand, asking, "Drop something?" and still chuckling, you've recovered your senses. But you lose them again a moment later in his smiling eyes and gently parted lips. What little frustration you had left floats away as he places the pen in your hand and wraps his tapered fingers around yours. Shakily, he guides your hand to draw a lopsided heart on the remainder of the page (platitudes, mediocrity, a badly drawn heart. You store it all for later.)

He's so cheesy and romantic that you shouldn't be able to stand him. But sometimes, like now, the badly drawn hearts and the breathy kisses brushed on your wrist are just what you need. Again, you let the pen slip out of your fingers, and again he picks it up. This time, the wobbly lines of a heart appear on the wrist he has been kissing. He raises an eyebrow and glances up at you. You gaze back, tender but unmoved. It's not enough. The pen-tip tickles your wrist again. You shiver; you don't need to glance down to know that his name has been traced onto your skin. "Write something for me," he whispers in your ear. His footsteps retreat, quick and even, from the room.

An early edit of the beginning of the second chapter of Tell Me A Story. Hopefully, it won't look much like this when I'm through with it.

"Once upon a time," he began (he always began with 'once upon a time,' not for lack of a better beginning, but as an incantation, a 'speak to me, muse,' a four-word portal to the world of stories. A wardrobe, a painting of a dragon-prowed ship, a pool in the forest.)

"Once upon a time, two boys lived in a strange and beautiful city far away from rain. One boy was warm, with a body full of angles and a soul of soft light, and the other cool, with a face that didn't make sense and a knack for extremes. They didn't have names—no one had a name in that city. No one needed one. Everyone spoke softly and in pairs, catching each other's attention with coy glances and subtle movements. In the perpetual hazy-dawn light, the city sounded always like a breathy-voiced woman murmuring sleepy nonsense as she awakes. People slept like cats in corners and on balconies, for fifteen minutes or an hour, then got up and went back to work without a movement of the sun or a shift in the blurred splashes of shadow. It was a city of shattered-glass butterfly wings with Faberge eggshells strewn in the streets. It was a city so delicate that it could flutter apart at any moment, that if the blinking-eyed barefoot people meandering aimlessly through its archways dared to reach his tapered fingers out, he could send a rainbow of scales down to nest in his hair....."

Written this winter; a revision.

I Wish I'd Never Let You out of That Drawer (or This Ain't Neverland, Darlin')

Something keeps snapping
Fourth-of-July fluorescent necklace
Green-beans-into-the-bowl
Perforated-paper snapping
Is it you or I, dear
Who keeps doll-joint popping?
Something between my shoulders jumps.

sweetest Shadow,
You are more beautiful than I

is it you, my dear
Pulling at my fingertips
Where we connect gouged-tabletop cold?

They're blunt pencils,
I could never stretch them
To make spirals out of strings

But the sick bone-cracking
when you pull, darling,
Makes something between my eyebrows clench.

I wish you everything
dear sweet Shadow
That my ten painted pencils
Are too blunt to grasp,
That my tendrils are too curled to reach
I have always been
Too swelling and too folded
To meet and fit together

I'll feel you whispering away
At sunset, when your legs are long
To wrap around a thousand lovers,
And your head
Higher than mine will ever stretch

I want to stop
The ears-on-an-airplane popping
When we pull against each other,
dearest Shadow

Most of us have never looked into the eye of a whirlpool. Most of us don't know what the man at the back of the bus knows, that there is more green and purple there than blue, and more black than either of those. Most of us have no idea that the air inside is calm, dead calm, colder than a dead man's hands, and so wet that each breath coats the lungs with condensation and makes the weatherbeaten man in the torn grey coat feel like he is already fallen into the abyss.

He is a sea-poet now, he tells me. He writes about the cannibal mother who took his arm like a sacrifice. He still loves her, he says, washed-out blue eyes collecting little replica oceans barely held in by dense near-blond lower lashes. I think, at first, that he loves her like the adult children of drugged-out mothers love the blue-cloaked, hand-clasping Madonna they set up instead. But he says he loves her for her book-throwing, boat-breaking rages, for the way a calm felt wrong, for her coy promises of bottomless mysteries unreachable to a rusty fishing-boat and a tiny ragged figure mending net after net.

I can't help but personify his sea-goddess. I can't help but picture a blue-grey swirling woman with dark eyes and tangled kelpy hair. I can't help but see the creaking boat in my mind's eye as becalmed on a smooth, unlined palm or crushed between a water-wrinkled thumb and forefinger. But I know he sees her the way she is: vaster than memory, deeper than song, as unknowable as the Sun. She isn't ours, he says, and she isn't like us. I believe him, but I don't understand. I tell him so, and he looks away. Reflected in the window of the bus, he sees an incomprehensible realm where all the colors are cool and human flesh does not belong. I only see him. I don't understand that there exist things I can't understand. I have never looked into the eye of a whirlpool.

Was out most of the day, so here's something on a few of the song lyrics that are most meaningful to me. Random introspective blather, really, rather than writing, but it's the best thing I wrote all day.


I offer grace, I offer blood, I offer everything 'til my heart is crystal clear. -Sacrifice Theory

The words I lived by, passionately, until around the beginning of 2006. Then I realized that endless self-sacrifice in search of purity was completely destroying me, and wasn't doing nearly enough in terms of making other people happy or bettering the world to justify that. It was a strange revelation and has led to a complete change in the way I live, one I'm still dealing with. Paradoxically, it takes a lot to stop trying to give everything. It took a lot to convince myself that a heart isn't supposed to be crystal clear, it's supposed to be hot and red and messy and alive. But that line from Sacrifice Theory still haunts me because it is the best wording I've ever found of the beautiful illusion that pushed and pulled me in the wrong direction long before I'd ever heard the song.

Your sins into me, oh my beautiful one. -Silver and Cold

If one song is my universe, Silver and Cold is it. I can't even come close to describing what that song, and this lyric in particular, does to me. It's... it's about being strong enough to carry another person's soul in the palm of one's hand and centered enough to take all their wrongnesses without becoming poisoned. It's the satisfaction of the need I tried to fill in the Sacrifice Theory way, but healthier and, in the end, more beautiful: one doesn't purify oneself by taking on other people's burdens, one is purified by having one's burdens taken. No one should have to carry everything on their own, so people hold each other, take each other's burdens. (Before I die, I am finding my Silver-and-Cold person: someone strong enough to carry everything I picked up over all the years of trying to be pure. Not that I would make them carry it all-- I just have to find them. Make sense? Not really? Thought not, but I'll keep looking anyway.)

Am I the star beneath the stairs? -Morningstar

It's "my" lyric in the sense that I've appropriated it: I "am" the star beneath the stairs sort of like I "am" Scarlett. It's something I identified with, picked up, and twisted into my identity because I had space for it and it fit. I have a friend who is the ghost upon the stage. (...) Stars and spirals are two of the most important pieces of my "symbolism" (it's difficult to explain... somewhere between a metaphysics and a language) and this line always gives me an image of a star beneath a spiral staircase that does interesting things in the symbolism. I'm currently in the process of appropriating "Can you tell me what stopped the rain?" in a similar way. (...)

The stone is aching-hot and rough. When she stands up, the backs of her legs will be mottled pink and white where her rumpled denim shorts end. But she blesses the warmth of the boulder and the heat of the scarcely perceptible desert breeze and the sticky hot-sap rolling of sunlight over her already peeling, bark-dry skin. She scrambled out of the wash over a scree of rocks worn smooth by long gone torrents of murky floodwater to get here, on the crest of the only hill in sight. She couldn't stand the shade anymore, never mind that even there her cheeks looked brushed with lily pollen and her close-cropped sandy hair stuck, dank and salty, to her scalp. No, she had come here for heat, for something that would soften her brittle chalky frigid bones into a sort of liquid gold that would run through her veins for the rest of the year. Something that would flow out to the tips of each short hair and make it glow instead of dirtying by extension the too-pink skin stretched taut over her angular (but not enough) cheekbones. Something that would swirl through her brain and turn it from a grey and aging parasite into a sun in its own right. Something that would keep her warm, stop the shivering, stop the sudden huddling into her black plastic office-chair, into her clean-cut navy blue suit, into anything but her chest, because that is where her heart is and why retreat from the unbearable cold into its source?

She sits with one leg tucked under her and the other dangling over the boulder's edge, staring at the Sun, eyes closed behind amber-tinted sunglasses. Warmth, yes, she has found warmth. Never mind what everyone says, that you never find what you're looking for in California, that the whole state isn't what it's cracked up to be. They're all looking in Hollywood, she thinks, or at the Golden Gate Bridge, or the San Diego beaches. What we grey-city people need, she thinks, is unbearable heat, something to take and suffuse us, just once. But she hasn't heard, or else heard but didn't understand, the other truism about California: that it is a place of extremes. That nothing there is real, but instead is inflated ever-so gently by the arid winds of the desert or the bracing ocean air into something larger than anywhere else. The poverty, the sprawling cities, the ocean, the redwood trees, the gossip, the heat. And so the desert valley beneath her goes a bit fuzzy, then begins a halting, irregular crawl (mirage, she thinks.) She suddenly feels dizzy, weightless, nauseous (finding myself, she thinks. Mountaintop experience.) Heat exhaustion. Dehydration. Her skeletal fingers on the searing rock tingle and twitch, and then it is finally happening, she just knows it, and she smiles, lips cracking and blood drying on the cuts almost instantly, as her marrow runs hot with liquid gold. Something in her ribcage is thawing, slowing. No more brittle bones.

I wish we hadn't lived so long as butterfly wings. I wish we hadn't been quite so colorful, quite so light—too light to fly, really, and so we blew, end-over-end, in spirals on the updraft. That's where it went wrong, where we singed ourselves in the too-intense sun, where gasping in the too-pure air we suffocated. I know people who would kill for two wings, whole and beautiful, perfect and bright and outstretched against the barriers of gravity, treetops, clouds. But we were two wings without a person, and a butterfly without a body is merely a pair of wings picked off by a sadistic child. So, left to dry and wither together on a suburban back porch, the summer breeze took us. Some child, in his terrible innocent malice, tore us apart and cried, "There! You're free! Are you satisfied?" But it wasn't freedom that he gave us. It was slow death without control. What good is lightness when the wind chooses our every move? What good is purity when we've lost a voice to sing and legs to dance with? It is a sick and leering world that let me find my other wing, only to hurl us into the killing sunlight. We lived too long as butterfly wings, you and I. Color and lightness tore us apart. They always do.

It was middle school when she realized that she was a writer. But she had decided at the age of about three that she was going to be an academic—figures. What, isn't that the way it always works? Paleontologist, astronomer, physicist, Egyptologist—wait. Artist. (Because she couldn't write well enough yet, and she didn't realize that she hadn't started to draw early enough, didn't have enough talent anyway, had no spatial sense.) Then writer. But too late for that—classicist, then. Fine. Writer on the side. Of course, by that time, four years without writing anything but the occasional poem, mostly awful. Trying to be "classicist, then. Fine. Artist on the side" and wasting time in Mrs. H's utterly unhelpful public-school art classes. AP Studio Art. Got the portfolio back, looked through it, realized that it was all utter crap to begin with. Damn.

So she spent a few weeks lost. She knew damn well that she wasn't an academic. She'd claimed it as her "last summer to be a child" even though she wasn't a child anymore. Too much time on her hands, acrylics and canvas tossed in the back of the closet. Finally, she stumbled across fandom, and then written erotica in general. Stubbed her toes on some truly awful writing. Ouch, ouch, ouch, wait, what? Good erotica. Hmmm, maybe I can write erotica. I won't post it anywhere… just write it. Try something new. Why not.

It was harder than she expected. She kept sublimating everything. Where the plot was supposed to climax at, well, climax, it kept climaxing at kisses. She wrote lots of kisses. Kiss after kiss, bland peach-tinted love stories, cloudy bits and pieces of ambiguous relationships. She started writing poetry again, the first time since that first abortive attempt to be a writer. (You know, when most angsty little prepubescent children try to write about slitting wrists? She tried to write about dancing in the sunlight. She tried to write about flying. She tried to write about stars and spirals. You can't write about those things until you've been wrenched away from them and forced to claw your way back. She still isn't back, and so she still doesn't write about those things. She tries to draw them sometimes anyway. She can't.)

Eventually, she gave herself a good slap in the face, got over it, and wrote the goddamn erotica. There. For a few months, she couldn't write anything but erotica. No good. So today, she is starting a writing journal—two pages a day, every day, all summer and possibly into the year. It can be two pages of anything, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, utter nonsense, it doesn't matter. It can be two pages on anything, two typed pages (size twelve, single spaced,) two pages of standard notebook paper, two Post-It notes, two typed pages (size forty-two, double spaced.) The Spiral Bound Notebook. Because spirals are still important, even if she can't write about them for now. Maybe they'll show up here, rough, unpolished, tossed off in a hurry like everything else here, eventually. Because the Notebook is just a kick in the seat of the pants, not a showcase. It's two embarrassing scribbled pages a day. The point of the Notebook is to make her write. It'll go anthropomorphic or personified or something, she just knows it. There's a ghost in the Notebook, and the more drivel she feeds it, the stronger it will get.