Don't Sell What's Mine

You can sell all your childhood playthings. You can sell the patches off your clothes if it brings you profit. Is the icy wind on your skin going to make you happy?

I thought not.

What holds my words? My brain can't. My paper can, and so I save old notebooks. What lets me write in every color? My pen can't. Seven or eight or nine couldn't, and so I need every marker and colored pencil and crayon. What keeps treasured remembrances warm? My memory can't. Letting a forgotten object wander back in time to its most treasured place can, and so I keep all sorts of things.

Who can predict the future? No prophet but the past. Where is my future? Where is my past? They're all around me. They burn out of my head and enflame my desk. They're branded all over the walls. They smoke into my pages and smolder on the floor. You call me sloppy and you say I'm a hoarder. I'll never be a simple person. How could I be? I'm alive.

Maybe your mind made you all that you are. Perhaps your psyche is perfectly organized. But is your inner self is a mosaique that lives in full color, that blazes all around you? Are you part of your room? When your foot brushes a tile, does it explode and become your very own? Do you inhabit the very air? Do you blaze in my pupils, do you sunbathe in the very word you write?

I thought not.

Your head is full of canal locks. Your soul isn't worth as much if it's shriveled from the cold, you know.

The Value of Nothing

Today is terrible. Oh, it was, it was!

So it's a refrigerator. The meat drawer's a "deli chiller". A delicatession cooling off in your refrigerator! Yours! Yours, with all its useless grooves, dinged metal trim, and five-sided corners full of old crumbs. It would make me laugh if I didn't have to wash the whole damn thing. The produce drawers aren't even nouns. They're labeled "garden fresh". They're adjectives!

They're adjectives! They're stupid adjectives and I'm glad it's not my refrigerator. Garden fresh came to your state in a truck and to your kitchen in a plastic bag. "Garden fresh" is a stupid yuppie adjective for stupid wannabes who wish they had a garden. They don't even wish, they wish they wished and they'll never be seen with a trowel. Victory!

Victory! Ha. You say they look better. What you mean is that they're white. Refrigerators are white, too. You'd never think of thinking that, but I know you better than you do and better than you'll ever know. The extrovert's metacognition! And you would say that you know me better than I do, in your fashion. I know your fashion! I do!

I know, I do! I can see your socks, and your lock doesn't match your knob. Both our Bibles have the same stupid plastic binding, but mine was lost on purpose years ago. I dumped it in a drawer and left without it. It's not garden fresh! No one sent a truck after it! It's there still, with its stupid four-ribbon bookmark. I remember making that thing. I was disapointed that we were only supposed to use it in our Bibles. I tried it in other books, but it didn't work. Victory, victory!

Victory! Can't use the bookmark without opening the Bible. They won that battle. I won the war. If I cared, I would be crusading for you. I don't care! Ha! You're think you're being fed from the Garden of Eden, but it all came in plastic bags. It's all stale, but you can't tell. You're being fed hard plastic! That's an oxymoron you've never even thought about. You hypocrite!

Ces cocons plastiques! Rien! Mon Dieu! I never hit left shift. I have a left brain. I'm always right! I'm always right! Non! Non!

Si, I'm always right! Sit and dine on your garden fresh tomatoes. They're white in the middle and you're pretending the red is for sacrifice. Candy cane, candy cane. Who was it that said bloody steak was full of colored water? That's twisted, they are, and you are too! Hypocrite, you hypocrite! Twist and shout, because my head's been screaming all day.

You bought a new van the first year of your band
You're cool and I hardly wanna say, "Not!", because, I'm so bored
That I'd be entertained even by a stupid fuckin linoleum floor, linoleum floor
Your lyrics are dumb like a linoleum floor
I'll walk on it! I'll walk all over you
Walk on it, walk on it, walkin, one, two

Who? Who? Who? Who?
-Le Tigre, "Deceptacon"

Drift

It's been one of those weekends in which I sit around in my pajamas and go hunting for indie bands and can't seem to write anything good at all. I've considered my knack for falling for punks, emo boys, and gay guys. I really don't know why. I've considered what a strange little kid I was - the marriage between the my dollhouse people was breaking up because Dad had a drinking problem. I've reflected that math, like other people's self-injury problems and the Pussycat Dolls, is just something that I can't fix. I've thought about my loathing of bathing suits and my love of salsa and flamenco dresses.

I've considered my love of new notebooks, and my total inability to come up with anything to write in them. I never come up with start-to-finish story plots, but I can't write without them. My drawing talent is sporadic. I'm not a great poet. I'm a terrible songwriter. I can't write about myself, because that's what my blog is for. I can't write about boys, because I'll have to tear up the pages into confetti later.

Confetti, that's what I'm like right now. Boring in small pieces, but altogether pretty cool. By tomorrow, I'll be vacuumed, recycled, and repackaged.

Go Away

There's people you meet and hate. Watch your daily parade and put on Jackie's sunglasses when they come by. When you can't stand their antics any longer, stick too many stamps on boxes of styrofoam peanuts and send them away.

So when you meet people you love, fall down at their feet and kiss their kickass shoes. When they're gone, keep your eyes down in sorrow. When you see those same shoes, trim a different color this time, look back up to meet the new eyes.

And when there's someone so fabulous, someone whose shoes don't begin to cover his mind, reach out and hang on tight. For pure soul is vapor, and you'll find yourself hand-under-hand to catch the falling star.

And hey, you, you, I know you, and we were such friends. I'll keep on apologizing, if that's what it takes. You, you might have asked, I wouldn't have held back. I've defended you from your rumors, and I'd fight off your demons, too. What's a girl to do when you won't let her speak?

Secretly, I want to lie in the grass outside your house until you come out barefoot and replace the sun. Stand over me and apologize - you should know that's what I really deserve.