even amidst spring
there is death in the face
of flowering trees
Distant river, looming hills
It’s eighty degrees already, right out of forty degrees in good old Virginia fashion. There’s a small chance of a thunderstorm on the horizon late tonight, though I haven’t been able to smell the ozone yet. It doesn’t quite look like a storm—that yellow-green haze hasn’t settled over everything, and the air isn’t snapping with currents along my skin.
It’s eighty degrees and sunny today, and all I’ve wanted to do is run down Monument, sit out on my old balcony with the white blooming tree—I don’t think it’s a dogwood, but I’m not sure what it is—out front, and go down to the river and the rocks with bourbon and guitars.
I have none of that; I can do none of that. Perhaps sangria and guitars on a new balcony—minus the already-blooming trees, for the ones further north haven’t quite started in full just yet—and a small hike through the park to the lake will suffice.
Perhaps we can sleep with the windows open, now that the only noises are spring frogs and crickets and cicadas coming out from their 17-year hatching cycle, and pretend we’re everywhere else but here.
Blood in the Morning
Today a car was flipped over in front of an elementary school, blocking the only road out of the neighbourhood.
And crowds gathered, as crowds always do. Never all in one place, but three or four together, some here, some across the street. All of us watching as if we knew how to help, how to quicken the process. All of us watching as if there was anything any of us could do. People got out of their cars, their trucks, their vans to stand in twenty-degree weather and watch the tow-truck slowly tip the car back over. A car on the other side of the road must have been hit; it’s back left tire twisted and jutted out from under the wheel well—like a leg broken and bent in the fibula—and completely flat, the rim alone left to bear the weight of the trunk and backseats. A second truck waited down a side street, a carrion bird biding its time to pick up the bones of the broken sedan.
I sat for nearly an hour before the trucks came; people were there before me who idled longer. I couldn’t help but think how different and how much the same this was as the city that I miss so much. There doesn’t seem as much to write about here—there, something was always happening, whether celebratory or tragic. Something was always sparking these hands and fingers to itch for pen and paper. Here, aside from this morning, all is quiet on the northern front. There is no pulse here, no living, breathing city that wakes and sleeps and dreams around me.
Or, maybe I’m being too harsh, too quick to judge, too reminiscing. Perhaps the pulse here is just softer and quieter, and takes a keener ear to hear, a firmer touch to feel beneath the skin.
I don’t know if I want to find this suburban heartbeat, instead of marking the days until the urge to fly south for the winter that roars through the blood in my ears and the breath in my lungs has the chance to be appeased.
A heavy, costly exhale
And through the extremes of an impulsive decision, I finally and fully realise that who I was is very much no longer who I am.
I have to be ready to let go. I have to move on. I cannot cling to ghosts of the past and force the circle I have become back into the triangular plug where I once fit.
I hope this is the last turning point I have to go through to get this concept through my head.
try to see the silver lining in it all, girl.
From Innar I come
This morning is a gypsy dawn. I can feel it in the bones of my fingers, and I will draw it out of them with knives carved like pen and ink.
Drums and tendons strung over wood, and I will sit and read the tea leaves when I’ve finished.
At Night
But in these bones
that you feel move
the weight of a hundred lives
a thousand lies
sunk to the marrow
a beating heart does little good
inside those echoes
It’s mostly the night
when pockets of air are perfect
when you don’t have to think—
yet thinking is all you do
when the world turns dark
and everything sleeps but you
and those bones
That thing was such a tangled mess
but if you work your heart
and fingers raw
all the knots come out
like drawing poison from blood
those bones are brittle
that heartbeat is shallow
With haggard letters
we must greet the dawn
Though the road be laden with snow
I will lead the way
Though the path be narrow and dim
I will lead the way
And when the light slips into dark
Listen for my sure footfalls
For though the road be long and hard
I will lead the way
Writing Boost
The Boy Who Once Loved a Lake pt 1
The Boy Who Once Loved a Lake pt 2
The Boy Who Once Loved a Lake pt 3
Character background snippet. Shameless self-promotion.
still need a name.
I have worries to give to the sea.
It has been far too long since I let out my breath.
“And the story of love is a long sad tale ending in graves.”
Jack Kerouac (via loveyourchaos)
But oh, what graves they’ll be,
that leave us standing tall and free
E’re will the wind and breeze
take our ashes to the sea
and there, only there, can we at last breathe
(Source: seabois)
(Source: visualgraphic)
“We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still.”
Carl Sagan
Why I love being a writer: reason 674
When I work on my Arthurian legend trilogy, I get to do heavy heavy research into Welsh mythology (in addition to Arthurian, obviously). I get to see and read in-depth theories about the intrinsic connection between the myths to probable real history of ancient times and people.
So glorious. Why can’t all my independent research be put toward a degree in this? I do it anyway.
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