itching graphite

Motley, adult, it/they pronouns. I write some things sometimes. Personal blog is quarternotewhistle

[halfnotewhistle]

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I love you, I almost said, but then-

I loved the thing that wore your bones,

that laid them against mine,

that made the shape of you known to me.

It slid your hand into my hand, claws and all,

and by its hand,

I will learn to love you too.

[halfnotewhistle]

sat on the bathroom floor for a while yesterday morning writing this one, and continued to adjust it throughout the day yesterday and this morning. I think I’m satisfied with it now.

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i wouldn't be the iron to cauterize the edges of your wound, not the collagen that binds it- but they come in time.

my fingertips would explore your scars, curious and doting, seeking the shifts in sensation, reminding you they’re still skin

as you survey the crater left, smoothed echoes of jagged terrain, part of the landscape all the same- a site not of lack but of impact.

[halfnotewhistle]

concept I’ve been toying with, which asked tonight to be a poem. I may yet expand on it, we will see.

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I love you. I love you. I love you reverberates. Sweetening my breath. Bursting to be spoken.

I love you. I’m thrumming with it. But wouldn’t the words make you freeze?

Love is an action, I hum like a mantra, so I hold my tongue. I write it cursive in caresses on your arm, and hold you when you dare to ask.

[halfnotewhistle]

Reggie either knew I was tense and came to help (as he often does), or heard me plucking at Clover Song and wanted to listen. Either way, please enjoy my cat vibing to my music.

[halfnotewhistle]

eh what the hell here's a demo of the wip i'm most lately obsessed with working on

[halfnotewhistle]

A demo of my current wip!

[halfnotewhistle]

I’m gay and quarantined and yearning, so here is “Clover Song” which is tentatively done enough for now. Lyrics under the cut. ...

[halfnotewhistle]

Here are some phone note scribbles because it is 10am and I am soft and have been enjoying the morning.

[halfnotewhistle]

This song isn't finished yet I think, but here is some asmr of my cat slowly melting as I serenade him

[halfnotewhistle]

early piece of a wip still, but a concept i've had on my mind this week.

[halfnotewhistle]

1/18/19 scrap

--

"You talk a tall game about earned confidence," they laughed to themself, "but you hunch over a near-empty page like a secret and jump when anyone walks by. Relax," they said, "you are smaller than you've come to know. The senses span so much information- what's a kid against the wall scrawling tentatively in a notebook, against the stretching hallway, fluorescent lights, the warm indoor air settling on skin, the rustle of footsteps and the bustle of a dozen others finding their next destination? If you're even on their radar, you're only just- and why should they care for the letters you do not offer them?

You are not nothing, but the world is so much that you are scarcely visible. You may as well write freely, and write where you wish."

[halfnotewhistle]

My cat found this series of things that I wrote six years ago !! Each piece I wrote in a different cafe, and left it folded on the table for someone to stumble across or not. “For strangers in coffee shops,” each folded paper was labeled. 

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She wondered what it would be like to sway the hearts of thousands with her words. To be quoted in speeches and novels and diaries and be read and misunderstood by scholars and students alike.

But she’d always been too meek a thing for her voice to carry so far.

It suited her far better to whisper her dreams in coffee shops and leave them on the table for strangers to find and maybe quirk a smile at before slipping them halfheartedly into pockets or trash cans or dreams of their own.

“A humbler role,” she murmured aloud. No one, of course, was listening.

-

It always seemed unnatural to find a place she felt at ease. Such was the corner she took to when the sweep of strangers’ gazes threatened to overwhelm her and the clamor of someone else’s words made her bristle, but today it was her home as she sipped on the coffee that was lately her lifeline and slipped her life onto a page. It was an exercise she’d taken to when her world and wit grew dull. It rekindled her will to place herself in stories worth retelling. It soothed her like nothing else did.

Sometimes she imagined shaping her life this way, a transient, wandering the world and inhabiting coffee shops and leaving pieces of her story behind- for what home did she have but the one she wrote herself?

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The first road she took out of that tiny town led her astray. It set her towards roads she’d never taken, roads that didn’t know her name, roads that wouldn’t remember her once she passed out of their clutches to tread some other path.

It gratified her.

It terrified her.

But she had to get out. Ever the agoraphobe, she felt trapped by those old town buildings, strangled by those suburban streets threaded too closely ‘tween the houses like wardens that had held her captive for the almost nineteen years since her birth.

This town had held her long enough.

And so she left, enticed by a lonely road that whispered sweet things like fresh air and freedom.

It didn’t tell her it would leave her lost and alone. But that was okay. After nineteen years, she preferred it that way.

-

She thought a map was easy, but soon she found the winding roads had all tangled themselves together in a knot she’d never unravel. Desperately she drove and drove as if her four wheels would set her free, but every road looked too familiar. A thousand miles led her right back to the place she tried to escape. She wondered if she was ever meant to leave. Maybe these winding roads had taken a fancy to her. Maybe her little coffee shop haven would miss her if she ceased to circle back.

What reason had she to scorn its affections? She’d been so wrapped up in new beginnings, but why? On principle, she realized. She’d been so determined to hate the thing that held her back, but perhaps she could move forward without leaving everything familiar so far behind. She’d always been more suited to a leisurely pace, after all.

She drove a winding way, and felt at ease. “I know an old road that suits me.”

-

It took her months of ambling through towns she’d never know, but now she knew her destination- a lodgy cafe where voices sounded in melodies on tuesday nights and strangers played fiddle on her heartstrings and filled her with reverence and hope that she could make the air thrum so beautifully one day. It was a short distance from the bridges she’d hoped to burn, but a safe one nonetheless. She’d found in it a place to call her own- but she had just enough desolace left in her to feel attuned to the place where the narrow pavement met the horizon, and there she often found herself. Another coffee shop, another stretch of road. Today it was an empty place with terracotta walls and mahogany couches and a bookshelf that made her smile, and she was miles, she thought, from home.

But the barista welcomed her and left her in peace and the coffee was enough to keep rhythm in her pen.

Home wasn’t familiarity, after all; it was any place that would have her.

[halfnotewhistle]

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– I’m no romantic.  My heart doesn’t flutter, exactly; it never burns but the closest I’ve felt to unbridled adoration is in a dark and crowded room, just off the stage, where music courses through me, skin buzzing with it, bones resonating, the drumbeat more important than my heart, and you- your voice among them, permeating the air to brush the fingertips of anyone who’d listen. For all of us indiscriminately, but… each of us, intimately- and even I can feel the softness in your gaze, the warmth of your arms, and in that improbable moment, almost, almost find myself wanting- until the final chord erodes the daydream. I don’t want to be your everything,  and it’s not that I want you to write me a song, but… it’s good to pretend, for a moment, that I could be something to you.

[halfnotewhistle]

insomniac poem from my old dA, 2/27/13

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When the sun sleeps, I am restless; the cold blue moon sends shivers in return for the sleep from my eyes, and the stars some midnights see fit to console me with tales in their wake. Sunken shadows above my cheeks are the remnant of my dreams that maybe if a story were etched on the back of my eyelids, I could keep them closed til morning.

[halfnotewhistle]

Stumbled across this on my old dA, I remember this one fondly because I did the writing process entirely in sharpie on my then-husband’s back. Dated 4/16/14.

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She ran her fingers gently along the bumps on his back and sought familiar constellations or letters in Braille. She loved him in the way she loved the night sky, a muted way that made her feel at ease- the safe dark, quiet longing, gentle breeze. She wrote to him in verse, ink on skin, enveloped him in the only way she knew; though her vagrant mind loved letters, the language of bodies was one she feared she’d never understand.

[halfnotewhistle]

I asked a musician I admire for some writing advice, what kinds of things prompt him to write, how he makes writing happen etc. But the question I almost posed was “Do you ever worry you’ll run out of things to write about?” 

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I was wry and clever, many years ago, as fine a poet as ever held a pen, careful to place my iambs where they’d flow and counting meter line and line again. Had I ever thought to save words for the future, maybe it would have never come to pass that one day, in my hubris, like a poacher, I hunted down those phrases to their last. In recent years, I’d wait by eager pages to turn a phrase the way I used to do, but keepers say the language is endangered, the last few words surviving in a zoo with plaques that say their number’s growing thin. To think- I used to catch them on the wind!

[halfnotewhistle]

An old thing, about five years and a week old, but I was thinking about it the past few days and wanted to share it

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The weather is warm today, and you are tempted by the fresh air and sunlight; your pallor reminds you that you’ve gone without these for far too long, and you risk a venture out onto your back lawn, though the world presses in on you sometimes through your white picket fence.

Your gaze trails the ground for the first time since snowfall. The spring is evident in the clover patches, and each diverts your attention a moment as you pass. This is fine, you think, remembering the houses that tower next to yours. People your age are allowed this much, to admire the aesthetic.

You admire the aesthetic, but it isn’t what draws your eyes. You don’t mean to, but in each moment you give a patch, you scope it for four-leaf clovers. It’s a childish thing, you know, but you can’t help it. You’ve trained your eye to be discerning, your heart to clutch its hope. You’re not superstitious, but you’ve found ample in seasons past to know luck isn’t hard to find if you only keep on looking.

You see one, you think, now and then, from the corner of your eye, and without your permission your knees buckle with a practiced motion and you are crouching in the grass, your fingers brushing tiny leaves aside. You hear a call, and whip your head to your left. Your next-door neighbor is out playing with her dog, and you imagine her walking to the adjoining fence and asking you what you’re doing, perhaps with condescension or perhaps only curiosity. You imagine yourself telling her about your search and asking her if it’s something you’re supposed to grow out of. 

Your four-leaf is gone from sight, or maybe it was only the three-leafs layered just so. You dust yourself off and make for your back door, wishing you could have dropped something as a pretense to protect your fragile pride. You find yourself scanning clover patches on your way, catching a four-leaf now and then in your periphery only to pause and find it isn’t there at all, and you wonder if this is why children grow up and why grown-ups learn to stop looking. Inside, you cast a glance at your neighbor through the window and wonder what made her give up on clover-luck and how long it was ago.

You ask yourself if you’ll give up one day, too. Your heart will clutch its hope that luck isn’t hard to find, but the world will press in on you through your white picket fence until you only look when no one’s there to see.