A Cluttered Heart

[with-original-energy]

Where the Grass Grows on the Mountains; There the Stars are

[aclutteredheart]

withoriginalenergy:

We live lives filled with unexpected journeys and secrets buried in permafrost. We often overlook the beautiful because we are too afraid to venture out and find it. The clearest ocean water exists thousands of miles from shore, but we prefer to just loll on the beach. The secrets of the world slip away from us indefinitely. Our love stories may go untold forever for we never dared to journey a thousand miles away in order to bump into our soulmate on a rainy day.

                                                * * *

She spills youth and radiance from her porcelain skin and rose petal lips. She knows the world holds a thousand and one discoveries and she always dares to go looking. Her left hand longs to pull the stars from the sky, and her right hand is always plucking flowers asking why, why can the violets not grow through the winter. She lives by the mountains and most are barren and snowy but in strange parts you can find prickly grass growing high on the mountaintop. Where the grass grows on the mountains; there the stars are. The girl knows this and it guides her like a light from afar.

                                                * * *

He is less a boy and more a dream. He stands in the far off lands of the inbetween blackness of star and moon. He exists because the dreamers will him to live. His right arm is sunshine, his left hand starlight. He laughs with the pulsing of the universe. And he likes to watch the solitary dreamers gathered on the mountains where the grass grows staring at the stars. He wishes them beauty from afar and laughs into the blackening night.

                                                 * * *

We often choose to only believe in the things that benefit us. We only question something when it will do us wrong. We keep promises in our back pockets and they often roll onto the grass for someone else’s profit. We live in cities polluted by lamp light roaming between sky scraper forests dreaming of better but getting the worst. Yet somewhere out there where the grass grows on the mountains; there the stars are.

[butterformybun]

[jarringaesthetics-deactivated20]

Broken Cheekbones

[aclutteredheart]

elegantabsurdity:

A friend of mine that served two tours in Afghanistan once told me that he would spend the entire day in the blistering desert heat filling sandbags with his small portable shovel. While the rest of his friends relaxed and killed time between orders, he would stack these burlap sacks of sand higher and higher, hoping that as each inch of protection ascended from the ground his pleading with God would stop once fragments of shrapnel came scattering from the enemy. It didn’t matter how many blisters stained his once soft hands—when bullets were being sprayed in his direction, he could only plead with God. 

"And that’s why building a wall is pointless" he said with a smirk. He leaned and choked a little with his cigarette planted between his lips. I watched tears drip from his eyes and dive into the red solo cup he held in his left hand as his head bowed slightly. 

"I’m sorry, I don’t know what to say" I squeezed my beer can so tightly it began to form an indent.

"You don’t got to say anything. There’s no difference between you now and me behind those sandbags."

I heard the screen door slam behind him as he walked back into the party. I sat for a while staring into the blackness outside, wishing I had a cigarette to mask the contemplation. 

***

My eyes watered from rage as I sat in the clerk’s office scrolling through digital photos of a woman who was in need of shelter from her abusive boyfriend. The cheekbone under her left eye was sunken in—a direct result of having the bone shattered by a blunt object. Her eye was swollen shut but the opposite eye was puffy from tears. I thought about her sitting on the floor of her bathroom taking photos of the remnants of her face. 

"Jesus Christ." Another intern named Chris came up behind me with a fresh mug of cheap coffee. I continued to scroll through the photos without speaking. He stood behind my chair breathing heavily as I continued to see the fingerprint bruises on her arms, neck, and thighs from being raped. 

"I forgot you like cream in your coffee" Chris muttered. I sipped from the mug politely, completely forgetting that he had done something thoughtful for me. 

"Did you read the PR yet? Dude says she injured her face slipping at work."

"Where’s the file on his mugshot?" I replied coldly.

"RPD didn’t arrest him, saying there wasn’t enough evidence to detain on an assault charge."

I slammed my palm onto the desk. “RPD is filled with a bunch of community college idiots who know how to do ten pushups and recite the fucking alphabet."

"My dad’s RPD and I don’t understand why you’re always getting so emotional over cases. She’s a junkie Steph! You’re so quick to insult police officers but you get all worked up over a fucking drug addict!"

"Junkie or not, he doesn’t deserve to be let off with a fucking warning just because people like your fucking dad think she’s not worth the paperwork!"

I rubbed my eyes as I heard him storm out. I pulled up the police report and began to cry once I saw that she had two children, ages eleven and eight.

***

"What to do with you kid?" My boss, a public defender for Monroe County, sat across from her office desk with an unpleased expression slapped across her face. 

"I’m sorry, those photos—"

"Should be treated with absolutely no emotion or bias in terms of the case" she cut me off sternly. 

"I’ll send Chris an apology" I replied timidly, feeling like a child in trouble with the principal. 

"I think that would be best. Can I offer you some advice?"

I looked up, embarrassed by how close to tears I was.

"In this field, you can’t always go around telling everyone what you think—even if it’s right."

I nodded and stood up. I turned around before hearing “that woman isn’t your mom, and that defendant isn’t your father. The sooner you stop imposing yourself on these people, the better off you’ll be."

I turned to face her, instantaneously deciding that the termination of this “selective" internship was worth offering her a piece of my mind. 

"Save it. You’re a hell of a kid and you’ll make a damned good lawyer but I mean it. You cut this out now, the better off you’ll be up here" she tapped the side of her head.

"Chris dehumanized her."

"Chris didn’t grow up like us."

***

I still have dreams about the cot that felt like it was filled with straw and covered in piss. I was too afraid to stir and accidentally wake my mom, who had finally fallen asleep after hours of crying. Coughing, sniffling, and the wails of babies echoed in the damp room. It was like a storm shelter but for women fleeing the torrential downpour of abusive boyfriends and husbands. I kept promising myself that one day I would be strong enough to protect us all—financially, physically, emotionally…soon I would grow up and be the hero I was meant to be. The support beam for my mom, who had no family in the states and was forbidden to contact her family in Korea from my father. I’ll make him sorry, I repeated to myself. I’ll have my revenge.

"When are you going to stop hating me Steph?" My dad asked at the luncheon following my great grandmother’s funeral service. 

I shoved my fork into the plate of pasta and looked up. 

"You aren’t good enough for hate."

My aunt cleared her throat and swallowed a gulp of red wine. “Steph honey, maybe we should get you a drink from the bar?"

I cried on the drive back to my apartment, desperately attempting to convince myself that they were tears over the death of my great grandmother. They weren’t. I eventually pulled into the parking lot and smeared away the evidence of all emotion. I walked in and smiled at my roommate who was cooking.

"You’re out early" she grumbled and cursed at the time.

"Yeah I had some last minute writing to do." I shrugged and shut my bedroom door behind me, wondering if I’ll ever stop filling and stacking sandbags.

[myfavmoviescenes]

Lore (Cate Shortland, 2012)

[mystrangesilhouettesblog-deacti]

The sober scent of paper.

It’s everywhere.

When you have always been writing, even reading for so goddamn long.You can’t even figure out when and where it all started. That pull. You will know that scent. It haunts you. It cripples your control, take your feet and open the nostalgic pages with words swimming through your mind, inside your veins, and into your vision of life. 

I’m in love with getting lost. Into a unfamiliar place, a deserted plain, a stranger’s bed, a friend’s thought, most especially a writer’s lonely mind. A book, is a deathless sanctuary but it is also a cold mausoleum, where lonely hearts are kept and only a few smiles a lot.

I can smell it. The sober-like stench underlining every printed word on the papers, it reminds me of rain spilled like teardrops or tires screeching on asphalt in a hurry—-to escape, to hide away. It smells like the color—ochre, like old empty buildings and unsent letters. Yellowish brown, decaying sun. It smells like dried up tears and whispered goodbyes.

It’s everywhere.

When you have always been writing, even reading for so goddamn long. You know it’s everywhere. Because, like me, you know it comforts you. The shelter you find in books, like battered open arms out-stretched for you.

Read on, my love.  

[cinemahall-blog]

[blankspage]

Love or Chemicals

Where does it begin? In our eyes, a parlance of two people across a crowded room or train-carriage? The pupils dilated, as if this descendant phrase of Latin, dilatare: to spread wide, were an invitation to enter. Do we see this? An organic sphere of gel and retina rested in cavities of bone. Do we leave ourselves, do we enter? The blues, the browns, the steely greens. Is it the limbs and integumentary system, the angles and curves, the definition and folds? Is it the finger crooked through the ringlet of hair? Freckles at her clavicle. Crow’s feet at the corner of his glare. Do we feel this? The bone, the nails, the rudimentary bite. Is it the lines, the elasticity, the statuesque posture of the body vs gravity, or the honeyed surface of a fingerprint? Is it the areola, the nape, or the deftly flesh of the earlobe? Is it in the sharply pinched lip, bit between a considered incisor and deliberating molar? More Latin:  incidere: to cut; our inhibitions, our insecurities, our fleshy disappointments. Where does it begin? Is it a rumour, a riddle, is it just wanting to know? Her charm a laughter as sure as any sniper. His chest a padded cage for a beating wild cat. Do we hear this? Their words, crafted and anxious. Their language, deferred, calculated, the meaning not in what they say but in the spaces in-between. Is it an intellect, a culture, is it the way we carry these things into the breach? Is it a tap-dance, an exotic drink; do we finally know when they reveal the cut of their tailor? Is it in the tone, a whisper, an invitation to shed the world and its textiles? Where does it begin? Their mouths pressed and ingesting, the pheromones, the endorphins, the genetic code of a hundred stray romances. Do we taste this? The electricity of our regrets and fantasies, the synapse firing like the front line of any great war. Their wells overflow, the epinephrine, the norepinephrine, the adrenaline coursing through the riverbeds and flooding the horizons. Do we smell this? The lavenders, the shirt starch, the pomegranate body wash. Is it the respiratory calm at the edge of hollowed breaths? The swelling moisture of her insides, the rush of blood into his sex. Is it the full moon of her cycle, the intimacy our mother fed us as a child? Is it more than this, the daydreams, the means to an end, the pantomimes singing in a candlelit bordello? Is it infinity, a dead pool, is it the dance to find our children? Do we even know our feelings, or are they the colours we give names for the mysterious tricks of light? Do we know anything of this? Is it the secret, or the dream, where does it begin? 

[ghost-of-lectricity-blog]

[theendofpromise]

The French called this time of day “l’heure bleue." To the English it was “the gloaming." The very word “gloaming" reverberates, echoes—the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour—carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the shadows. During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone.

Joan Didion, Blue Nights

[aboutagirlnamedjessica-deactiva]

[ionofalion]

Bride Of Frankenstein

I’ve never heard of him you’ve said It was me, my love, who visited your bed- side while you died. We can’t bring you back, my dearest, I promise we tried.

[jennapowers]

[pupps-x]

i fell through lakes of silk the suns rays binding my flesh burying me deep within the earth encased in molten rock my heart slows and lies in wait for skies  worthy of my eyes. 

[aclutteredheart]

Hell is loving you in my sleep and waking up alone.

[returnpoint]

A shaman said I was a killer in a past life.

  We’ve all tasted blood at one point or another- dripping from our wounds, coming down our nose, stuck between our teeth. Most of us, however, have nothing to compare it with. I haven’t met a lot of people that can honestly say they’ve sampled someone else’s blood just to see if it would taste the same. I can let you in on the secret, if you are interested - it doesn’t.

   Strange blood has an uncanny sweetness, I’ve gathered. Personally, I find my own to be a tad sour for my taste. It brings to mind a poisonous snake that bit its leap and found it salty. Strange blood, on the other hand, mmm, tastes like a rainy summer afternoon; melancholia and romanticism all neatly packed inside a tiny drop of life force, or a galleon of someone’s prolonged death sentence.

   A shaman said I was a killer in a past life and I laughed with my mouth but he was focused on my eyes. Dead give-away those eyes of mine are; something about the reflection of my darkness inside their little spaces of ordinary color. The shaman took a step back and called forth his gods to shield him of me. I told him gods don’t belong in tents, or skin and flesh and misery. I told him he had said I was a killer in a past life, as in previous. But the shaman paid attention to my words no more.

   Sometimes I wonder what was it that my mother saw in my father and went and made a human being half of her and half of him. Her blood tasted of sunrays and bliss, but then again, she had always been a stupid woman. His blood tasted of ashes and resurrection; the bastard that wouldn’t die however tirelessly my tiny hands would pick him apart like tiny restless vultures night after night eating on Prometheus’ guts.

   We’ve all tasted blood at one point or another – it doesn’t take killing someone to do so; only yourself - in barely noticeable, little, everyday ways that are supposed to remind you of your own mortality.

   A shaman said I was a killer in a past life and I told him that it is not wise to go around accusing people of things they have no control over.

[show-me-moonlight-on-the-sunrise]

[newbeatnik]

poems ate my gorgeous heart and gorged out my eyes  and withered my fingers and rhapsodied my belief and thinned my wallet

poems burnt out my insides and broke my febrile bones and cut out my talker’s tongue and bent my moral code and took from me what i had and now i’m left  with  poems.