A Dream's Scrapyard

[just-shower-thoughts]

For many, girls consider a guy to have a sense of humor if he can make her laugh, and guys consider a girl to have a sense of humor if he can make her laugh

[dream-scrapyard]

Dear Cordelia

Dear Cordelia,

I meant to write you long ago

But what I needed you to hear

And how to share it I didn’t know.

It’s not my time here anymore,

It could have been yours

Had I let you grow.

Dear Cordelia,

Know you who I am?

Constantly I looked for things

And loved none but you;

I’d tell the others “I’m sorry”

But their faces I don’t know.

It’s coming back to me —

The words I should’ve said

(I lingered too long)

As I hid from the light,

As my fist gripped the crown.

I ceded nothing for the others,

Understood only the language of bastards and brothers.

Dear Cordelia,

It was so easy with you,

I didn’t  need focus to say

That I loved you, last of all.

I couldn’t act in concretes,

Others expecting objects I couldn’t speak.

With it came quickly,

The mirror of charms

Casting me bright-eyed.

What did I mean to say?

Oh yes, how I cared for all

But loved thee.

And in the crumbling arches of memory

I grant you all that’s left softly.

[dream-scrapyard]

Writing The Mayfly

Pear tree. by Igor Shcherbakov

I had the basics of a nouvelle fairy-tale short story written.

Some simple paragraphs of plot and characterization written for a draft simply titled The Mayfly in my head. The story is simple but I still felt my title needed development. In this "age of age," studying a woman aging many times faster than a man seemed almost obvious. But...this plot snags at me for more than a single critique of age killing a woman's prospects before own timely death should if it's so simple. In this story is also the the hunter/protagonist man enjoying both a girl's youth and innocence and a woman's pleasures from knowing the flesh.

Not only will he be the voyeur, but also the teacher, protector, savior, and lover. Then he will also live out his own short-lived journey alongside the reader by now hanging onto the death of his lady. It is more limiting for a woman's life to be punished into a plot device for the nearest man around, but is is also a flat characterization for masculine development.

What is a man's proximate suffering at the woman's cost intended to reveal in his true character? A woman's assault, death (accidental or not), or her frailty has cost the man distress and maybe loss of love, but it does not mean he actually did anything. Enjoying the marrow of life and then watching it die in your hands is not a personal achievement. As the oft-repeated misery of some poor woman or girl is an injustice in her story, giving a man only pain by a woman's suffering is not an affirmation of his complexity.

[dream-scrapyard]

NotAnElegyToWinter

i know that again leaves will fall and snowflakes’ll drift slowly

by. but now i must let you go,

let you go where others die.

i see the dead when you are gone,

lost with their dreams drifting at my feet.

i search the swelling crowds, fearing

your face my eyes will meet

this parting will sting, but do not worry,

soon i will be numb, as you leave our breathless quarry,

to bring fresh life from the heavenly ground,

make it so spring has sprung.

others do not understand us, and sometimes

so don’t i, but until you’re back in our home,

i’ll keep a watchful eye, on the wars that rage

and famines that take, and the men with watching eyes,

and when you’re back with me again

we’ll live without goodbye.

whatever shall you do up there?

will you write to me? Will the next bloom remind you

that you’re one step closer to seeing me? when a visitor

opens up our gate, the dog does not see you,

and sighs. I wish that we two could sit together, 

do nothing until you finish your stint

up there in the sky.

you are closer to the stars up there,

practically walking in the clouds.

i hope you do not walk to heaven.

please return, to me, to mine, to ours,

and do what you must and nothing else,

as your heart to mine is bound.

these people don’t deserve you you,

but we both are without purpose if you don’t resume your revival.

i shall try to keep your garden, here,

though we know i’m without the green touch

that can plant a kiss, touch my heart,

and flower into love.

you’ll remember that the sky is darker here,

so please gaze at the stars above,

and see how sunlight casts the dew and bleaches the navel fuzz.

watch the bees stumble with their hoard

watch the vultures splay their wings.

but when you think of death, do not think of me.

when you think of dying, mourning, or grief, think instead

of what those people did when they stole life, and do not think

me the thief. we will love together, and our love will

 only grow. but until then i wait everyday for that first flake 

of snow.

By Eleanor Pettit-Kruse

[dream-scrapyard]

Meet Me in New Orleans

Meet me in New Orleans,

It’ll be such a sight to see

The stars will dance on tree tops

As we sway cheek to cheek.

We’ll never forget New Orleans

As long as our memories still reach

The cobblestones uprooted by holy magnolia trees.

Oh, meet me in New Orleans, I’ll be waiting

For you to see me,

And then off we’ll go together

Alone but not lonely

We’ll wear the night like velvet

After seeing the city leave the sunset

And if I can I’ll never forget

The way you came for me!

So take me to New Orleans,

Show me all the sights to see,

And if we can still get along

Maybe you’ll leave New Orleans with me.

[dream-scrapyard]

Untitled

If all I have are the slivers of time,

With the brush of eyes and blushing cheeks,

Then I am still so lucky to have what I remember.

If all I will receive is your hand held in mine.

A rollercoaster of feelings, a slow dance of purpose,

Then I will still be rich woth your gifts of touch.

If all I can know of your heart and its contents

Is what you publicly prepare,

Then I will have what I need to know, what you wish to share.

I cherish what you gave me, and understand we’ve moved along,

But if you want to dance with me, let’s play another song

And if you’d rather out times stayed behind, then I know where I belong.

For having known you I’m still rich with warm memories from the past,

But if I had your hand in mine, those memories wouldn’t be the last.

[dream-scrapyard]

Straw Burns Fast & Bright

Scarecrow Man, Scarecrow Man,

You’re the handsomest man in all the land. 

Tall and straight, you work all day,

Standing there with your hair straight as hay.

Scarecrow Man, Scarecrow Man,

You’re the handsomest man I’ve held in my hand!

The clothes you wear hang just right

While you do your job day and night.

There never was a man I ever did know

Who worked so hard, even in heat and snow.

Scarecrow Man, don’t you see,

You’re the perfect man for someone like me.

Scarecrow Man, Scarecrow Man,

You could be the happiest man in all the world,

If your grinning smile was mine

To have and to hold.

In your pasture you scare the pests

But when I see your frame my heart can rest.

Scarecrow Man, Scarecrow Man,

You’re the best man that straw can.

[dream-scrapyard]

Sing-Song

There’s a bad habit I have

Of falling in love with a singer’s song

If I love the way he sings about love

I’ll be in trouble before too long

When the voice can reach me, babe

When the lyrics can touch me, babe

What you’ll be like as you reach for me, babe

What else am I to do but fall in love?

The artist has his way with singing,

And alongside he’ll be plucking or keying

And all the while I’m there listening

Listening and falling in love.

I don’t know if they’re the right kind of lover,

But through their melodies I have discovered,

That the singer’s skills leave my heart uncovered

To the bittersweet story about falling in love.

What am I to do?

Oh, what am I to do?

When another soul lives out there 

And it knows how to speak what I feel?

When he can sing of life and death

Being in love and without it?

The swell and bursts of passionate breath

The sun-hot warmth of contentment?

What am I to do when a soul knows how to speak what I feel?

All I can do is fall in love!

[dream-scrapyard]

Untitled No. 1

If I could but hold you once, 

I would be more complete,

But at least I have known you.

The five senses are so few, but I’ve only had two.

I’m missing the scent, touch, and taste of you.

I’m sorry to not know this about you,

But to know those two things. . . 

Five senses isn’t very much,

But every minute I imagine your touch.

Passing through me is a trembling view

Where a different me knows the feel of you.

Every moment I’ve had so far will be enough,

But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to know if your touch is soft or rough.

[dream-scrapyard]

Visions

Flashes of loving flutter through me

The half-pronounced images of sweet dream

Fantasy or prophecy that I yearn to touch,

The stuttering vision, what could it mean?

My dreams are a great comfort to me,

But when I see this much, the memory doesn’t fade

Details surround me, and while I love what they say

Living without doing leaves a lot to be desired,

But the desire drives me to put out this fire.

Visions can fade but all that I see 

Is the dream of a lover’s touch running over me.

[dream-scrapyard]

No Sugar Ch. 1

She was sitting in a cushy old armchair - the fixture of any local coffee shop - and reading the newspaper while listening to some music. At least, that’s what the outsider was supposed to see. Arriving well before the band arrived, she got her outwardly caffeinated-appearing drink (it was really steamed milk with a shot of peppermint syrup), sat down with her headphones, set up music, pulled her laptop to finish an online assignment, and eventually turned to the newspaper to fill her visible disinterest with something sufficiently amusing on this Thursday evening.

In truth, she was there to see The Guy play with his group that night, but in a desperate act to not look desperate (or involved or even mildly aware) she had arrived nearly two hours early with her Very Important Business to attend to. While she found the atmosphere of coffee houses pleasant, actually consuming the namesake beverage put a hit on her fragile little nervous system.

(This was a curious subject. Her fear and anxiety could fell a horse and she’d maybe raise an eyebrow, but a small chemical dose be it opioid, amphetamine, or caffeine hit her like a truck)

However, in the face of a challenge, she was fully capable of being the metaphorical Prometheus this situation necessitated. Normally unable to sit still, drink coffee, or waste time, this situation was about The Guy and dammit if she wasn’t going to endure it so she could happen to hear him perform and happen to see him afterwards as she headed out, earbuds in as if they were actually playing music and hadn’t been off since 15 minutes before their set began.

Truthfully, this girl was very clever in every other aspect of her life, which allowed her to use her natural quick-thinking to be Very Dumb around The Guy. There was immediate relief to not making a fool of herself around The Guy, but it also made her hide herself to the whole open, romantic, sentimental, and generally vulnerable facet of herself she otherwise was fairly good at sharing with those she cared for and felt safe with. The Guy was all of those things she tended to hide about herself around him, but he was like that with everyone he knew, so it was hard for her to be around him for too long.

As luck would have it, tonight The Guy also showed up a little early, with actual caffeine on his mind to perk himself up in advance  of setting the stage up and eventually playing that night. Ordering his cup of coffee to go so he could go and get started, he was oblivious to his watchful audience.

The stalemate would continue, besides an overly casual run-in and goodbye, through the night and through the weeks afterwards as she refused to be open and deal with being told no and the dizzying possibility of being told yes or even maybe. Now, as they are both old enough to talk and walk, she was not the only guilty part. But as she lay awake pondering her sticky situation with The Guy she made a point to herself that if she really was the only one who cared this way then she was the only one who could say anything.

Relying on him to break the imagined ice between them was in itself an assumption of his feelings she was reluctant to lean on. But after years of feeling this tension that set her aflame, could this be so one-sided? At least he had negative feelings, not just cluelessness?

[dream-scrapyard]

Up, up

I am filled with an overwhelming desire

To kiss you softly and love you roughly

It starts low and rolls higher

Up, up to my heart

Then up to my fingertips.

I want you filled with an overwhelming desire

To cling for your life on my hips

Oh, I want it desperately, that desire

To run up, up into my bruised heart

And brush myself across your lips.

Now I’m filled with this desire

To hold your soul, however briefly

Grabbed through your chest, then moved higher

Up, up to taste where your lips part

Down, down to where my heart skips.

[dream-scrapyard]

Memory’s Handbook to Places Traveled Pt. 2

You’re camping out West, up North. Somehow you traveled for hours in your dad’s gargoyle of a motor up, up into the Sierra foothills. After gaining in elevation and latitude the hills really begin. Whatever you might call dad’s FJ60, it still lacked air conditioning or fans, so in the summer it also tended to lack doors and a roof. Despite the constant ventilation the heat grows. 

The head grows, the hills climb, and the roads wind. Tight, dog-legged, hairpin turns under redwoods and manzanita. You’re last stop in town before the campsite is in a place called Auburn, where the gas station has a variety of ice bags, malt liquor, and sexual enhancers. Your little party leaves and after another journey through the switchbacks (was it 15 minutes or 40?) you reach your new home: a state park nested in the mountains. This hot, dusty, and hidden piece of wilderness was the obsession of hundreds of desperate men. This river and these mountains were treasured for their contents. You’ve entered Gold Country.

Have you wondered where we coined the phrase “hitting pay dirt”? It was on these red dirt trails and in these hills. This land was and still is rich in minerals and precious metals, but this park is especially well preserved and it’s patrons like to try their hand and pan for gold. While some are lucky and find nuggets bulging like popcorn dropped in ichor, most try to find gold dust in the sandy mud, vaguely imitating the technique they learned as 9 year olds on a state history field trip.

Equally as tantalizing as gold prospecting in this heat was the glittering and barely blue river of snowmelt that I could dip into. This is a river so pure that despite the rapids and silty sand you could see 10-15 feet down, swim under boulders and stalk spotted fish and dragonfly nymphs. Unlike swimming in a dam, the water is only cool enough to rinse and refresh, not freeze you in place as you attempt some careless summer fun.

Upstream from the shallow water, the young toddlers, water fetchers, and live-in gold panners the water is a little deeper, a little slower. This is where the fish congregate and the area gets a little wilder, more alone and larger than any life you’ve known so far. This is a new phenomenon for you, for you are a child of the redwoods, of Pacific waves and unforgiving cliffs. Sharks patrol your waters. Rattlesnakes surround you. There are wolves, bears, cougars, and druglords at your front and back step. It takes a lot, you think, to remind you more than everything else that you are a small ridge of a cog of a gear in this big, big world, but this was it. This is a place where you know the entire time you bask within these gold-flecked waters that you are so lucky to be in this ancient place. The water is slow enough that you can lean against the current and be able to sit cross-legged at the bottom of the river and look up.

Billions of gold-dust pieces amble between sand and water, aimlessly dancing through currents. The river is an absent-minded touch, excusing itself as it moves past you to carry on with its business. It does not focus on you because it has been doing this voyage since before carbon and oxygen got a little frisky one night and heating things up, only to realize they had created life in their steamy collision the night before.

These waters, carrying their gold gifts, have voyaged since before the salmon began their courtship, rut, and betrayal. Since before the monarch butterflies navigated their desert crossing, or the whales moved to warmer waters. So even through this is a continuation of an ancient commute. it is still a sacred gift to see this piece of the world.

What makes this moment so different from the magnificence and danger and surprise you’ve had before now is that this is the closest you will find in nature to total silence. There is a gentle rushing - but is that your blood or the mountain’s?

Missing the ability to hear, your sense of touch and vision is exaggerated with the bright golden columns of light bleeding through and the comforting enrapture of silly sand and the wettest water you’ll ever be in.

You can wait only as long as you can go without breathing, so this day is spent kicking back and forth, back and forth between the water’s edge where it meets air back down to where it meets the earth.

[dream-scrapyard]

Memory’s Handbook to Places Traveled Pt. 1

It’s up a closed trail used only by the local wildlife, veering steeply off a fire road to the top of the range. Without my dad’s guidance we wouldn’t have noticed it in the rush and cacophony of our young family’s climb to the top.

When you climb up, you’re going to look around, moving slowly through the tall grass and thin oaks. Rattlesnakes and poison oak are on the forefront of your mind. This will make your arrival to the secret place even more shocking, because the entire trip up there you’re looking at your feet, checking every step before plunging forward. Suddenly, after a near vertical trek following your parents, nearly bouncing from the excitement of breaking the rules and doing it at your parents guidance, you spring forth into a clearing. It is unlike anything you’ve seen before, a perfect balance of green and dew and trees balanced with spring flowers and blinding light.

When you were dragged to go on this hike by your parents, the frost was still a solid and the breathes were harsh, but after climbing up and moving into the day, the nearly frizzy frost morphed into millions of cabochon beauties. The trees are not towering, nor fully fingered with leaves and thick branches. Instead the early spring has just begun to grace the trees and enter into adolescence.

Upon entering the clearing, your band of travelers will grow quiet. Everyone steps softly, the easily climbable threes are left untouched by the children, and the skeptic conversation between the parents will become silent. Only soft murmurs of wonder and velvet footsteps are heard. We disconnect, spread through this sparse grove of land that must belong to the fae, but we step together looking, seeking every detail this sacred place can give while we intrude.

The short grass is a pale green, cradling the dew and small branches of life. The trees have small flowering bushes tucked between where the trunk meets the earth. small crocuses and snowdrops carrying yokes of moisture from their graceful necks.

In this area, this is a very special time of year, where it has rained enough for the green to last a few more weeks, but the seasons allow other life to begin.

I would love to return to this place, to grasp a few more details from it than I did the first time. I would love to follow my parents up that deer trail, trodding up and out of the wild oats and into the bright orchard of the elves or fae or simply of light and life and water. But I can’t go back, ad you can’t go there either. The place is gone, grown up and changed. It’s boulders may be the only things left.

This place is only in my mind now, stuck in my memory with blurring around the edges and details, disguising leaf patterns and tree height and keeping me from remembering the trail we diverged from, where on it we turned, or how long our journey was into the unknown land. But it was fantastic. It was a perfect moment without darkness or mistakes, instead brimming with the lifts light and water can give: life.

[dream-scrapyard]

December 9th, 2018

I felt a tightness in my chest. What is it coming from? It feelings like what I remember crying to feel. . .

Oh. That's why.

[dream-scrapyard]

Late November 2018

I’ve been relearning the shapes of my face. I’ve learned that there’s a difference between vanity and knowledge, and where I avoided vice, I missed truth. I literally did not know myself before I began to make myself look in a mirror. Whoever I saw in a mirror, slowly blinking back before turning away as the corporeal partner I’ve been deprived. Men’s contempt for women knowing their bodies and confidence in their face and figure taught me more than I let myself teach myself. Men alone are not guilty, as the piety my mom used to hide her guilt convinced me I was a more whole person when I tossed aside the flesh.

How can I be more whole, more centered and pure of heart, when I don’t know my own face? My body is more visible, but contorted by the angles I have available. If the worst part of vanity is loving your vessel, is that not loving yourself and thus following God’s doctrine? I’m so tired of someone else’s religion teaching me shame over my own body. How am I supposed to be bold and confident but unaware of myself and afraid of what lays in others’ gaze when their view passes over me?

Why am I to believe that it’s my mind and soul that counts when the body is forbidden? Now I crave someone’s touch but cannot fathom the gentle brush of fingers or stinging plumpness of passionate lips.

[dream-scrapyard]

Late November 2018

I can’t remember the last time I was touched. While I realistically know I must have hugged someone in the last few...weeks? Everything I can remember has been halfway done and barely there. When was the last time I let someone completely touch me? Hold my hand or sleep shoulder to shoulder? I know who the last person was and recollecting those memories makes me want to wash myself with steel wool, slicing the old memories off my skin. 

My mind an live without someone’s touch. I can make my own warmth and entertain myself. But my subconscious is screaming for arms to hold me, for legs folded, intertwined with mine. My breasts and cunt ache for someone’s pressure to relieve them. The other night I woke up from whatever I may have been dreaming and was gently petting myself on my hip where a bed partner might hold me for comfort in sleep, either their comfort or my own.