The Writer

Standing back

Thinking, and seeing

Not speaking

Just looking.

Wandering, seeking

Both my eyes are open

Listening, hearing

Silently staring.

Sitting,

 blind to the joy

deaf to the laughter

dumb to the well-spoken

Thinking is fearing

Doing is reckless

Loving is damning

Hating is worse.

Just sit there

And finish your story.

Kids

Running, jumping,

Kicking, screaming.

The noise is pounding in my head

In an uneven beat

Like the drummer is stoned and dying from the heat.

Skipping, struggling,

Lying on the floor

Climbing, ripping, tearing

Please don’t eat that please!

My nerves are fraying

My back is aching

I think I might fall over from thirst.

I don’t dare stop to rest,

For fear of what might happen lest

I take my eyes off of you.

Why do I concern myself?

Why do I care?

Because I would feel terrible

If they fell down the stair.

They’re not my kids,

Not even close

So do I let them do this to me?

The Office

Stapling and taping

Stapling and taping

Try to connect the pieces

Which left in alone would stay separated.

Dialing and holding

Dialing an holding

Reaching out, only to wait

Until your message has no consequence.

Driving and stopping

Driving and stopping

Our destination is reached

Once we have been halted on our way.

Understanding life

Understanding work

Barring the arduousness of the repetition

We learn to revel in the insensibility of it at all.

Alone

As I lay here in bed

I wonder what it would be like

To have someone beside me instead

of being alone.

I awaken for the day

And I wonder why

Won’t the morning stay;

This is my time to be alone.

I sit at my desk

The chatter of the office small-talk

Intrude my ears like a pest

This is when I wish I was alone.

Lunch is an ordeal

Cheap company abounds

“No, fast food does not appeal”

There is no such thing as “alone”.

The work is over,

Now for the gym

Other’s sweat leaves a flavor

No one speaks; it is close to being alone.

I head for my home

I fix my dinner

I do not feel lonesome

Silence is worth the price of being alone.

I go to bed and sleep

But as the morning sneaks in my window

And my eyes open a peep

I wonder, what is it like not to be alone.

Poetry Fuming

I didn’t realize until a little while ago that I vent when I write poetry. I know, I always vent when I write, but it seems to be especially so when I am attempting to be a poet, and it’s not an intentional fume, I just…fume. I let out whatever has been bothering me, or making me happy, or sad, or at peace. Whatever it is, I tend to keep true to what I’m truly feeling when I’m writing a poem. I don’t know why, maybe it’s because I’m so unoriginal all I can write about are my emotions in some form, even “Hostage” my last poem was addressing my feelings of being trapped and vulnerable.

  On the other hand, somewhere I heard that poets only write about their feelings in some form, well, if that’s true, I guess that I am a poet. I have always flirted with the art of poetry, but never have I ever pictured myself as welding the pen of poetry as an expert, I still don’t. I am first and foremost a writer, but I know that even ahead of that, I am a storyteller and I suppose if I think of being a poet as another way of telling a story, I guess I can accept the title of poet…nah.

Rebecca

Standing by the edge of hope

Of the precipice divine

We two walk a tight rope

For love so hard to define.

 

My Becky grasps my hand

Through the ridicules that measures in hours

Never alone shall I stand

No one can break this love of ours.

 

They say we are unnatural

They declare us unclean

God’s word is factual

What we are is obscene.

 

Within my heart there lies

The ever growing truth

If this feeling for Becky I must despise

Than pardon me, for being uncouth,

 

But I’d rather be crucified

Then walk away from her

For there would be no way to justify

Walking away from her.

 

We’re not the true issue of your debate

I don’t think we’re that different

We feel pain, fear, and hate

All the joys of Earth we too appreciate,

 

So what is your hate in us

What is it that you fear?

If you’re reasons are true and just

You may speak plainly here.

 

You have no new answer?

No reason behind your claim

Well then my dear pastor

Who is it I should put the blame

 

Of all the stones thrown

And taunts yelled

For the feelings that are my own?

Who has taught all others that we shall be repelled?

 

Return the subject back to God

The unseen Father we must adore,

I do not believe it is the will of God

To give me this love, so I maybe hurt more.

Now my life is filled with sorrow

No epitaph shall cover the feelings abound

That I feel at never seeing Becky on the morrow

For she, a love so sweet, never another be found.

 

My heartaches for my Becky

To see her smile once more

None felt the pain, more than my Becky

Every shout and cry left her feeling sore.

 

Until the grief was too great

And she lost her sweet smile

The ill words left her in such a state

Yet she hid it from me all the while.

 

No one will tell me how she died

They say it’s not my business

For many an hour I have cried

For wondering how Becky called for Death’s kiss.

 

No one informed me of the funeral

I discovered it alone

So now I stand before you all

Here I stand alone

 

No one will take my hand

No one will dry my tears

Here alone I stand

As I will for coming years.

Bitter

Tearing, biting

My skin is fraying

Tingling, stabbing, no feeling:

This is what I think of Freezing.

Melting, stinking

My skin is dripping

Boiling, rippling, no thinking:

This is what I think of Over-heating.

Graying, aching

My skin is wrinkling

Slowing, bowing, moaning:

This is what I think of aging.

Hurting, cursing

My skin is stretching

Damning, wasting, pacing:

This is what I think of growing.

Friday Report and Comforting Quotes

I just got the email from the agent that contacted me last week and long story short she is not going to represent my manuscript. So, while I’m disappointed, I’m ready to get back to sending out query letters again, and I came to the realization that whoever said that writers are fools, masochists, and crazies was right. Now, I was unable to find the right quote because I have no idea who said it, but I did find these, so enjoy!

Writer's were supposed to be a little crazy." ~S.E. Hinton

He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.” ~ Oscar Wilde

Perhaps I wasn't going crazy after all. Perhaps I was just becoming a writer." ~ Janette Rallison (Just One Wish)

"Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what?" ~Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)

"I have great faith in fools - my friends call it self-confidence." ~ Edgar Allan Poe

"Every writer, without exception, is a masochist, a sadist, a peeping Tom, an exhibitionist, a narcissist, an 'injustice collector' and a depressed person constantly haunted by fears of unproductively." ~ Edmund Bergler

"The writer is both a sadist and a masochist. We create people we love, and then we torture them. The more we love them, and the more cleverly we torture them along the lines of their greatest vulnerability and fear, the better the story. Sometimes we try to protect them from getting booboos that are too big. Don’t. This is your protagonist, not your kid." ~ Janet Fitch

"A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it." ~ Ronald Dahl

"I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools…Let's start with typewriters." ~ Solomon Short

The House Cleaner

Heather’s knees clicked as she finally stood up, she had been on her knees for far too long as she polished the legs to the wooden furniture in the Willis’s house. In her eagerness to got off the floor, she stood up too quickly and got a head rush, or a freebee as her friend Cathy would say. Once the dots had faded she surveyed her work. The room was sparsely furnished, there were no pictures on the walls, and the mantelpiece was dedicated to the diplomas belonging to the master of the house. Heather knew that he had a wife and kids, but you wouldn’t know it looking at this room. It was too phony, too much like a picture in a magazine, even more so since she had just finished whipping away the dust that had gathered since she had cleaned it last week.
Heather gathered up all of her cleaning tools and placed them in their closet next to the laundry room. The brand new chrome washing machine and matching dryer sparkled without so much as a scratch or smudge on the surface. Heather knew from speaking with the housekeeper that neither of these machines was ever employed, since all of the Willis’s clothes were dry cleaned in town.
After she put all the cleaning items away, Heather used the backstairs up to the nursery where the nanny would be keeping an eye on the Willis kids and Heather’s check since the housekeeper was out.
Knocking discretely at the door Heather needed only to wait a few seconds before the disgruntled nanny stepped out of the room, check in hand; she did not invite Heather in, nor greet her in anyway. So Heather let her self-introduction awkwardly fade off as she took the check the nanny offered her before ducking her disheveled head back into the nursery in response to a loud thump and muffled yelp from within the nursery.
Heather checked the amount on the check, which was written out in perfect script with a fountain pen. She tromped down the stairs and out the backdoor as she exited the Stepford house she sighed with relief, some things were just too perfect to be true, she didn’t know what kind of a price Mr. Willis and his family had to pay everyday for their apparently perfect lives, but it had to be a dozy.

Stand in the Rain

A poet friend mine was asked the question:

Why do you use the rain?

What is it about our pain

And renaissance that is the same?

At some suggestion,

I was referred to for an answer

Though I sensed my answer

Would bring me either fame or disaster

Throwing caution to the wind, I replied

To go through agony

We must have an epiphany

To move on and not let hurt

Reduce our growing gardens to dirt.

We can’t wash away the past

Though we sometimes try.

Life time lessons can’t be cast

To the road and driven by

The rain is not to wash away

The price of life we pay

It is to help us grow

And moving on with what we know

So you see,

It is not the poet who uses the rain

It is the rain that gives us the power

To write about the life.

Inspiration (Story)

The artist stared at the blank canvas as she had been for the past hour. Occasionally she would pick up one of her brushes, and then would debate what paint jar to dip it into. Then deciding she didn’t wasn’t the brush she had first chosen, she fumbled in her helter skelter pile of brushes before choosing one more to her liking. Picking up a jar of the lightest grey with determination, she dipped in only the very tip of her brush. Then gazing at the canvas again, decided to apply a little more paint to the brush. After all of this fuss, she returned to her prior employment of staring at the canvas with not so much of a whisper of an idea of who or what image to begin to create on the empty canvas.
So many possibilities, the canvas was the empty universe, and she was god, she could do anything, create anything she wished. She had the instruments, the power, and yet she could not bring herself to think of anything worth taking the time to create. To have all the power and being unable to come up with a subject was quite the conundrum. It would have been comical, if it weren’t so frustration.
What she needed was the first building block to begin laying the foundation of creativity and that was inspiration. Inspiration could come in so many forms, she knew this, and yet she came up with nothing. The numerous subjects for the painting, and the endless ways of getting an idea for the painting are so plentiful, that it seemed impossible that there should be a lack of an idea. Yet, here she was with nothing.
An empty canvas, making her the artist: a failure.

Oscar Wilde

I love Oscar Wilde’s work, he is a great writer: stage scripts, novels, short stories, poems, all of it fabulous. I eat it all up. He has a humor that is absolutely timeless and keeps the intellectually challenged in the dark, for it is not for them to enjoy the genius of Wilde. The wiser you are the more twists and turns there are in his writing. “The Portrait of Dorian Grey” will always intrigue me with the heartlessness of Dorian Grey, and his eternal beauty. “The Canterville Ghost” will always make me laugh at the American’s failure to pay the old ghost the proper amount of fear owed him. “The Importance of Being Ernest” with its absurd characters weaves a perfect example of satire. “The Nightingale and the Rose” will make me tear up every time with its beauty and sadness.

  Sarcastic and clever, serious and tragic, silly and absurd, sad and beautiful; Oscar Wilde’s work will last for as long as good taste for literature survives in human beings.

Cloudy, Lousy

All I can think about is the clouds here in Southern California. So, I think I'll just complain.
Yesterday was sunny and over ninety degrees, what the heck happened? It's sixty degrees out and cloudy...no wonder I felt like hibernating this morning. But I don't have that option. Even my dog, my adorable bouncy dog is depressed. He looked at me and asked.
“Where’s my friend, the Sun Nana?”
“You know that’s a good question Mer. He didn’t call to say he’d be late or anything, he’s just gone.”
“Did we do something wrong?” Merlin asked.
“I wish I knew Mer, I wish I knew.”

I've lost my mind huh...

Shinedown - What A Shame (lyrics)

Congratulations, or Not (A true story)

November 2009

Samantha was relaxed, and happy, and there were very few sixteen year old girls who had more right to feel that way than her. She had completed something that had been incredibly difficult, very few girls her age had done it: She had completed the Girl Scout Gold Award, which was the hardest thing she had ever done in her short life. It had been emotionally and physically draining on a level that she had never experienced before. But as she and her mother helped everybody who had made her dream possible clean up, she felt as if an huge load had lifted off of her shoulders. Starting an International Fair had been anything but a walk in the park; there had been time changes, last minute cancellations, and numerous misprints in the newspaper as to the time of the fair.
The night before, Samantha had little sleep, all the planning was over, she had seen with her own eyes the fair begin to take shape in the Riordan Hall auditorium earlier that day, her job was done. Now matter what happened now, she had completed her project for the Girl Scout Gold Award, even if no one showed up to the fair, she was going to get her award.....that's what she kept telling herself, and that's what her mother kept telling her too. However, the thought of an empty auditorium, sent chills down her spin, and rendered her sleepless.
Despite all off the set backs, and her worries, the fair was a huge success. Nothing could have gone better. As Samantha thanked everyone and everyone congratulated her, she felt as if all was right with the world, even if she could fly, her heart could not have been soaring higher.....


May 2010

In May the first congratulation certificate arrived, it was from the State Governor. Her mom was so excited, even more excited than Samantha herself.
It's just another piece of paper. She thought to herself, Nice paper, thick paper, pretty paper with a signature....but still just another piece of paper. Samantha was a very active young woman, who put herself out into different contests. She had one picture frame that she kept all of her certificates in. There were certificates for a large variety of thing: art and writing contest, there were certificates from dog training graduations, to piano contests. Certificates weren't really a big deal for her. She got them all the time. The only reason Samantha kept them in a frame was to keep them from getting wrinkled, (after all, she might actually care someday.) But if her mom wanted to buy her a frame so that this particular certificate could be all by itself, Samantha wasn't going to burst her bubble.


June 2010

Samantha's dad picked up the mail that morning. There was a manila envelope addressed to his daughter, he looked at the return address and saw that it was from Washington, the Supreme Court of the United States of America, no less. He couldn't wait to drive home and ask his daughter to open, so he opened it as soon as he was in his car. When he saw what was inside, he started to fume....
When he got home Samantha was serving herself left-overs for lunch. They said hello to one another, and talked about little things. Once Samantha sat down at the dinning table with her lunch, he tossed the manila envelope across the table to her.
"It's really sad," he said.
Samantha didn't bother looking at the return address, (she rarely did) as she reached in to it out, the first thing she noticed was the thickness of the paper.
It has to be a certificate, probably for my Gold Award. They must have spelled my name wrong, that would explain Papa's comment. The first thing she noticed when she had gotten it out of the envelope was that it had gotten wet. The color from the envelope had seeped into the thick certificate paper, making it look like someone had peed on it. She held the certificate on the edges, (it would just be her luck if someone had peed on it.) She looked at her name and blinked, not knowing what to say. Not only had they butchered her last name, but they hadn't gotten her first name right either: "S-a-m-a-t-h-a"
"Who is that?" her dad asked sarcastically.
"I dunno," was her reply. She felt strange, a large portion of her wanted to laugh at the absurdity of the mistake....but there was another part of her that felt upset, even hurt.
After all of her hard work, they couldn't even take the time to spell her name right on a certificate?

The whole point of a certificate was to make the recipient know that someone appreciated the hard work that was done, and if you appreciate somebody, you make doubly sure that everything about the certificate was just right.....Even the graduation paper she had gotten for dog training had her name spelled right; and all that she needed to do to get that was show up with her dog once a week, and try to keep her dog under some level of control. But the hardest thing she had ever done in her life; something that was honored and appreciated by a large portion of the community; something that was recognized as one of the greatest things that a teenage girl could ever do; something that helped bring people together to complete a common goal; something that helped better the community....You would think that a certificate for something like; a secretary would at least hit spell check. Upon closer examination, she and her mother found that Samantha's last name had been spelled wrong in the certificate from the governor, and all the other letters of congratulation as well.
If this was how people treated someone who had done something constructive and positive to help her community....it was a wonder that anybody anywhere ever bothered to do it.


Now

All of this ran through Samantha's mind as she sat down to her computer. It was running a live update. As she waited for the update to finish, she wondered how she could possibly make the twisted feeling in the pit of her stomach go away, and to make the corners of her eyes stop pricking with tears - tears that she did not want to shed....that would change anything, it would only change her face from dry to wet.
Writing was had always been the way she expressed her emotions, and vent out her frustration. As she allowed the live update to restart her computer, she made a mental list of all the websites she would post her story on.