If I was a Rapper

I want to get my brain back. I think that’s why I listen to rap. The words mean something about booze and drugs and da hood, but that isn’t the point. The point is overcoming, of having a tough time but getting through it anyways. It’s about winning, and being able to be proud of it because you got there writing every single syllable for yourself.

I wish I was like a rapper. I sort of am, I guess. I write poetry, I just don’t speak it. And I write lots of other things, too. Take this piece of shit I’m writing right now in this paragraph. Absolute shit, but here it is. Here I am, I should say, doing it anyways. Because if I’m not writing something useful, I should still see just how many words are left underneath my skin. Turns out, there is a spectacular amount. I’ll be writing forever, I figure, so why not get used to it now. With my novella, my big works, I realise just how far I’ve come. I mean, I look at this huge document with its 28000 words; that’s a lot of zeros behind that number. And I wrote, fought for, and loved every single phoneme. Some of them didn’t make it, but most of them did, and that to me is something worth celebrating.

I also wish that I was a rapper because they can be so concise. I don’t think that my work is awful or a roundabout sort of thing, but it can be hard to be critical once it’s finished. After all, it’s like a psychotic person: everyone thinks they themselves are being reasonable, otherwise they wouldn’t act accordingly. And I think that I’m writing as beautifully and well as I can, otherwise I wouldn’t keep spilling ink onto page. And whenever I’m finished, I’ll pass it onto someone more judgemental so that they can show me the error of my ways.

So I’ll sit here in permanent purgatory, waiting to bleed myself dry of every single fucking word that I can, to show something that means I was here.

I write because I’m a writer. I don’t rap. I wish it was different sometimes, but I always come around again in the end. Because if all I did was write shit that other people found enjoyable, I don’t think I could bear it. After all, if I write for someone else and they end up not reading it or not caring, then it was all for naught. If I write something close to myself, really talking putting me on a page, then at least I can derive some gratification from rereading it, if absolutely nothing else.

See, this is why being a writer is dangerous. Or maybe why being a human is dangerous. We get so attached to creation, and once we start, it can be so addictively hard to stop. Oh well. That’s the bargain that I made the very first day that I started writing. I don’t recall exactly what that piece was, and that makes me kind of sad, but at the same time I guess it doesn’t really matter. I mean, having the dreamscape all those years ago was something. But I never even tried to make it seem good. I just kept rewriting those three pages. And hoping for the rest, I guess? But now, here it is, an undeniable work and, I daresay, an achievement.

Staring at those highlighted spaces can be a bit disheartening. It’s so much more to go. But then I get this rush, because I know that it has to be just a little bit longer, little bit bigger, little bit better. Somewhere, and I’m racking my brain for this, something is going to come from my mind and through my fingernails onto the keyboard. And here now it’ll look like something that could be worth reading. So for now, that’s my mission: fuck it, let’s have fun with this shit. Can’t be all work and no play.

heard and not seen

I often wonder why I close myself off to most intrapersonal relationships. I find them smothering, too attached, too safe. I like the idea of holding some sort of power over someone, and them over me: that if either leaves, it will be a cold war situation. Perhaps that’s why I find things so odd with her. I find myself wanting to suppress these aforementioned emotions, and that if something should suffice me, it ought to be long hours spent together rather than alone, and that we never run out of things to talk about. I find myself loving her in a way that I discreetly find discomfort in, although through no fault or part of her own. I find a peculiar line between euphoria and calm; and so, I think, I have appropriately abridged my quest and thoughts in regards to her.

But there have secretly been others who have made themselves into my obsession, my safe surrounding, never smothering nor even really erring. They are the people who never existed– or rather, the people who only exist inside my mind as the characters that I live out in daily monotony, feeding them spiritually more so than myself. Mourning someone who never was is a considerable feat, and added to that, near impossible to wean off of, for it slips so easily in the mind– by that I mean spending time whenever necessary or inspired, or any other case. It is a toxin, almost narcissistic that they exist only by one’s own making and yet are preserved in such fantastically un-shaming light. I don’t love myself the way I love the creations that unfold in my brain. All this makes so many things difficult in regards to foreign people; the outside world will never understand my mourning, my loss of life when it comes that the character exists no more. And it shouldn’t, either, for sanity’s sake. And so the closest thing that I’ve tasted has been her, and although incomparable, it is divinely sweet when laid next to its alternates. Perhaps I will learn to love better.

Perhaps I ought first to learn to mourn.

My Old Friend Google Docs and the Fabulous Characters in My Head

What if I cut a quarter and courted it to do my qualms? A penny for my thoughts— on second thought a fraction of one hundred for the hundred problems I have: and ninety-nine of them aren’t you. Take away another digit from that, actually, then another and another, until I have them stacked like straws, drawing lots to see who I’m becoming today. What about the rest of me, typing away and splicing away, rolling dice and, seeing how nice it all could be, I stay here awhile and watch the ice melt into rainwater that drizzles down the windows into my head.

Syllabic Concerto

I used to write to feel free. It was like I was flying, pressing the keys to form words like a pianist presses keys to create a symphony of sound. Nowadays, I can hardly contain myself as I force my fingers to spell out something new, something worth reading. It isn’t that there isn’t potential. Perhaps that’s my own honesty, pouring our earnest apologies for lack of another paragraph. Lately all I can think about is the word count, about finishing and stitching together and editing. Perhaps I will never be happy enough with what I produce.

A passer by would see the cliché that I strive to avoid: pounding away on a laptop in any spare moment, in a café, in my bed, on the street, in the library. Little do they know what words I’m writing. They could be in a letter to myself, such as this. They could be words streaked with malice, like a ransom letter to myself: capture this scene, and you can sleep tonight. Maybe that’s why I never sleep. Occasionally the mood takes me away again, as if these intrusive thoughts never were.

I don’t entirely like the new creations. They aren’t me. Or maybe they are, and I just don’t like myself as much as I used to. That’s a recurring theme. I wish that my dreams would come back to me. They are fleeting now, less lucid and more ordinary. If I feature in them, I know I can’t transform them into something else. And that single damned dream. Actually, two. The two that I can’t push out of my mind and onto paper fast enough. The dreams that secure my future, not as in goals, but as in the pixels that crowd my sleeping mind with something new, something creative, something that I can work with.

I refuse to give in, nonetheless. Because as long as there are words to be said, to be thought, I will toil to capture them and arrange them so that my mind is paralleled on the page. So that they can all see exactly what I envisioned all those years ago, and still to this day can taste.

The true test of a dream is if it’s still magic after waking up.

Elle

The skin is smooth and parts easily at the mouth where I breathe in all the moments I hope to gain. Everything is quiet for a moment; all that can be heard is light breathing and the rustle of blankets that fall to the floor like marbles. Every once in awhile, things are even calmer; there is nothing between us, but so much empty space around us, filled with other people, filled with darkness, filled with outside.

There is nothing worse than earnest words. Our words try to be as unbecoming as possible, interrupting our own mouths as we step back from it all, glancing at the space we’ve created (Or hardly noticing it, whichever comes first).

Part of me wishes it never took place; it would be simpler, without any hesitation of what I would be doing any evening. Then the other part of me screams. ‘Look!’ it demands. ‘Look at what you have.’ And it is nothing less than a masterpiece of scraps of happiness stitched together like pages in a novel, with glue that binds but also flakes and flexes when it is bent.

Bent. That’s what I am.

Compression Bandages

Socks are usually meant for feet. That’s what I think to myself as I look for fabric with sustenance, after my tissues have been thrown sopping and pathetic on the carpet. This has become my laundry nightmare, washing up in the sink at three in the morning because the stains won’t spread to my other clothes. There’s the thing about my duvet, too, but I can pass it off as something else– a nosebleed perhaps. Sometimes I repeat so many times that I forget what I’m doing. Other times I stare to be sure none of them are too shallow or too deep.

The worst part is ripping the dried socks off in the morning. Damn. Having spots on my skin from where the tape adhesive has been sitting for too many days, too many hours. It burns, but nothing a little baby lotion can’t fix. Except when it gets in all those tiny slits.

I have to stop sometime. Save my socks. Because my shoes will start to smell if I run out.

Mon Ménagerie

An excerpt from my memoirs, The Girl Who Left a Butcher’s Knife in the Door

 

For the majority of my life, I have been raised by people without proper uvulas. I found this out officially from my grandmother when I was in the kitchen, tossing swoll blueberries into the air and trying to catch them in my mouth.

“I can’t do that,” she said, “because it would just go straight down my throat. I’d choke to death on it.”

I looked at her from across the ugly forest-greenish-bluish counter. Part of me vaguely remembered discussions involving uvulas from the past—it’s not hard to keep track of quirk topics with only two or three conversations to their name.

I call such things capybara thoughts, thus dubbed after my friend Chris observed one day during AP Lang: “You know, capybaras exist.” I think about capybaras about once every three years, but they are still in the back of my mind, somewhere with all of the other useless things that are too useless even for me to use. (My quotidian visits to the Internet placate my unquenchable thirst for niche knowledge).

If prompted, my brain goes back and pulls out a full album on capybaras: pictures and incredible facts about them. I have other albums that feel the same way. It’s weird to think about, but somehow, I had a capybara thought, a capybara memory, that my grandmother did not have a uvula.

She elaborated on this, after I had asked to make sure that my conviction was correct. In fact, she had had it reattached after her tonsils were out, but one day she opened her mouth and bam, no more uvula. She had swallowed it. My grandfather had his cut out as well, but I don’t think he ever digested it.

And so, these are the people that raised me. Without fleshy, dangling throat sacs, and even more without filters.

Memories of Rain

the first time I remember rain was sitting on the porch in the front. my grandfather has been to Kazakhstan, and he related for the first time a story about a house ride with the very unruly Chenkis. he told me how the horse had backed away from him the first time he attempted to strap his pack on. and later, how he either ran or slugged on through grueling terrain and weather. and because of the pine trees in our front yard, I found it especially entertaining to think of Chenkis walking repeatedly under a low brush in an attempt to knock my grandfather off his back. he had stories of trekking with horses through the mountain crests. he had stories with a Russian man named Sasha who spoke very little english, of a small mountain cottage with meat stews and brawny, red faced women who spoke only Russian but served heaping portions of cooking with tidy smiles. he had stories, and faded Polaroids capturing it all to prove the tales. every time it rained for about five years, I heard about Chenkis. and each time, the story was drizzled with details as long as he ground was drizzled with water. the last time I heard it, it wasn’t raining. it was in a drought, like the mountains in Almaty during the months before the 1990s my grandfather had visited. but in the dry heat, more and more of before and after Chenkis was said, and more of the real purpose of that trip was realized. more Polaroids came about from a thick off-white envelope held together with a rubber band, and it’s companion albums in a similar manner. the last time I sat in the rain, I had bare feet and lots of jewelry and I was alone. it smelled like spring but I don’t think it was and there isn’t a way to remember. I used to hate getting wet in the rain. but if it was planned that I had nowhere to be, then I didn’t mind pretending I was part of a remote tribe, and everyone knows that tribesmen do whatever they must, even if it means getting soaked. of course, people everywhere must do what they must; but it isn’t quite the same. very improper to abandon an umbrella or the shelter of s house, safe from water and dirt and grass sticking to one’s feet. the last time I walked in rain wasn’t too long ago. I had a warm black peacoat my grandmother thought I lost. I walked away from my house down the street. with my head down, I thought how simple it could be to walk far away. one foot, other foot, left, right, until mile after mile was between me and where I began. Keep walking forever. I never realized how often I thought I could. but of course, those thoughts of potential leave with the rain. a lot of things leave with rain, like sun and warm. but also away with melancholy and jammed thoughts. before rain, there’s a tall slate of space from sky and the bottom. kind of like a sheet that is a natural to-do list. fill it with clouds and wind and hot and cold. and sometimes with rain. once it decides to, fickle or frightful, it comes. it’s only seldom missed, because it always comes back, even in the desert. it’s here now, seeping from the clouds, filling all that space between

I Used to be a Shark

I stole wine from the white cabinet, but red wine, even though the back of the cabinet is red. Sometimes I paced back and forth, resenting myself in front of Bahá’u’lláh. But that never stopped me from turning to the cabinet and taking only a small sip, plugging the narrow opening of the bottle with the back of my tongue.

Many times are there that I find myself looking down into the garden— if it could be called that. I look on to the trees early morning and realise for them, with their blood-red leaves, that it is more accurate to be mourning time. If someone took to clipping every tree, there would not be spindles growing where the rich and matted grass once grew, being groomed daily in some distant nostalgia of past summers turned to autumn. There was once another tree that grew alongside the others, and now it’s sad reminder is not itself, but its own cubicle at the far side, where, at one time, the stairs led to a mystical place on the horizon, a place where gazes of mine often found themselves directed to day-dream. No longer may I sit beneath the slim trunk, among the leaves it shed that had been crisped in the sunlight and thus had not rotted nor drawn insects to disturb me. But never did I sit there anyways, because always had I been busy doing something like day-dreaming.

Every time that I sip the wine, I think that, if inverted, the bottle might resemble its naked trunk, the skeleton of that particular tree. The glass has a narrow base that is moist with cold precipitation offered from the wine, much as the snow might make in regards to a barren tree in the winter. In view of the peculiar drinking circumstances, it could be pathetic to compare trees and wine bottles to one another— but the reality that they are not all that similar could make me rethink the ways in which I once did find them similar. I have never poured a bottle of wine vertically upside down, nor of course taken a drink, even if my tongue might plug the entire opening. If I were to drop it, the residue of my crimes would be clear. I never could fully take advantage of the wine, just as with the tree. And once the tree had indeed given its all into life (however long that might have been is anyone’s guess) it was chopped down, and even in hindsight I never have taken advantage of trees that thrive still on the yard.

In fact, I have neglected every branch that used to serve as a seat, a means of fantasy times and now quite realistic ones, a place of hallowed solitude and creativity. I bit the night-time air with everything I had. Reckoning the woes that might have befallen me, and quite had in my mind, I glowered at my past self as I laid indoors. Even still, I am not the attacker. I never was. But the trees were my sea, a sea as close as anything to the clouds that I could never be among. Now I’m not hunting or fishing for anything— not my own ideas; I’ve gotten three-fold what I will ever need. Suppose it’s become a place to call upon for simplicity.

I am an absent in many rights; nothing ever came of what I did. Definitely no evil, but not good, either. I wish the small fish in my sea— but small in the sense that one doesn’t notice them building up, as with snow— would be eaten by the jaws of my mind.

My fins (not wings, fins are for swimming to not drown; and I never reached the front edge of the water to climb out and distance myself from it by means of the air) have fallen, so I don’t swim.

I used to be a shark.

I will be made soon into soup.

Asphalt Playground

Asphalt Playground

The first lane was the street I grew up on

time to jump on the roof

look up from just before dawn at the house over the garage

and then fall back down to the trees.

lanes I couldn’t see painted but tracked

people live here.

people live over there.

this is my domain.

it was repaved and then so was everything.

that wasn’t my domain anymore.

too many cars

can’t lay in the street like in the pages of a novel

I wrote a lot.

Snow wasn’t as much fun as it should’ve been.

nothing is when you only have one lane.

The second lane came when I met the world

and i couldn’t drive

but I went everywhere

I was on the ends of the earth

to and from.

left and right.

everyone was in me and we were a circle.

big lines on the cracked pavement where only busses drove

and i didn’t want to get on that bus

I couldn’t drive.

separate paint strips into equal pieces

but they aren’t equal.

one always has a better destination

when you have two lanes.

The third lane was

so so so so busy.

I was just trying to find me one

the left turn, the right turn, no turn.

but whichever one turned under

in the big arches under the roads

in a clover pattern, that was where I wanted to be.

the feeling in the pit of my stomach

city streets had more lanes

and it was far away from home, just like I wanted to be.

more exits when you have three lanes.

The fourth lane came when i was already in the wrong lane

switch left

switch right

middle

a permit to drive in those lanes

but so many lanes only hold so many people.

I want to know them

so they don’t know me first.

so many things move so fast

when there began one lane

and now there are four.