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.