Ads
I just got an ad for rollerblades on Youtube, and I’m horrified. It must be because something heard me talk about them in my online classes half an hour ago. Or maybe it’s because I was surfing the web for a new pair last week, and the Internet hasn’t forgotten. I feel uneasy. Someone's just trying to sell me rollerblades. But why is it so offputting? It's not meant to be. The pretty colours and low prices are supposed to lure me in. This is just a few lines of code that sniff out keywords and generates a little ad. I don't like. I defy it in the only way I can, by scrolling away.
PS: I'm not a native English speaker - feel free to point out my mistakes! Thanks :)
Mori
A frail boy, with trembling thighs and black hair clinging to his brow, climbed up the crooked roots of the vast tree. He was a touch shy of eighteen, tall and broad, but lanky like the stems he gripped onto for balance. His black cat, Luka, who was much less sweaty and did not quite have nearly as much hair, accompanied him on the trek.
The roots of the tree cradled the city below, several of them hollowed out into trainways, traveling from one layer of the clay city to the next. He had managed to catch one to the highest level he could – the royal level. The level that loved to rain money down on the poor to watch them scramble, even tossing in a few green leaves for good measure.
But going to the level above that was not something people usually did willingly. It was dangerous, so to speak, physically and mentally.
The boy never understood why – aside from the sheer height, of course.
Moonlight dripped through the curves and cracks of the roots, light raining on the worn path.
It was a great climb, but one he had made several times, although never with the same intentions. Tucked under his arm, and wrapped tightly in an old, tattered cloth was a jar. It buzzed and tinkered, glowing orange as it heated and cooled.
Luka was having a much easier time on the trail, trotting a few steps ahead of him. He sat down, his yellow eyes reflecting all in his view.
“You look as if you’re about to fall.” He commented.
The boy huffed, but smiled. “You would like it if I fell, wouldn’t you?”
“On the contrary, I would not.” His tail wormed against the bark. “Who else would give me those fish you swoop out of the trench? My paws dare not reach that deep unless I want myself to become the snack.”
“Oh, I don’t think that would happen. You wouldn’t taste particularly good, plus you’re pretty scrawny. Although,” he paused, stroking his chin, “considering you’re hairless, it might be more tempting.”
Luka’s skin rippled, shoulders going stiff. He flicked his tail up and trotted forward. “How many ways do you intend to offend me in one sentence?” The boy opened his mouth, but was cut silent. “Regardless, let us keep moving. Must not keep the others waiting too long for your return.”
“Why are you in a hurry? You have a date or something?”
“With those fish you promised me, yes.”
The boy chuckled as they continued, although the canopy of the tree never came any closer. Red and yellow leaves teetered around them, the wind sweeping them away before they could land. It was getting colder, the jacket over his shoulders not sheltering the heat of his body nearly enough, but the warmth from the jar hugged his side, making it bearable.
Emerging from the small, rusted roof of the city, the boy wrestled to the top of the root, looking up at the wing spread branches. Peeking through them were stars that littered the sky, grouped together in arcs of dust and rainbows.
Luka perched himself beside the boy, swishing his tail anxiously, but keeping an eye on him.
The trek, despite his sweaty arms and sore legs, was always worth it for the view that he would have never received while being stuck down below. “It’s so pretty.” The boy whispered.
“It is.” Luka grinned.
Pulling the jar closer, the boy’s heart fluttered against his chest.
It wasn’t long before a heavier weight pressed itself against him, one that hooked his smile and anchored it. Being up this high, with the sky and city nothing but twinkling lights was always so exhilarating.
But not today.
Today, they looked like tears.
“I don’t want to let them go.” He whispered.
Luka tilted his head. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. Everyone came up here at one point or another, and in Luka’s long time of being alive – much longer than most cats – he had seen what happened every time.
The jar clanked uncontrollably under the boy’s arm. He almost lost grip, fumbling as he held it in front of him. The cloth, soiled with the sadness and cries from the night prior, loosened.
Letting the covering fall, the night glistened.
Inside were flames, flickering fireflies that bounced against the glass.
The flames, like many others, showed themselves when he was much younger. He did not know what they meant, only that they were beautiful and pleased him more than his toys or even his mother’s smile. He would chase them, hold them, embrace them, They were his comfort even on the rainiest days. No one said anything then. It was when he grew older that it was viewed as a nuisance.
Holding onto them was not something that made a successful adult. It was dangerous. He had seen what happened when those flames became too big – maybe too brave. Those people who held onto them and let them grow, destroying their society and the ideals held with them. Those people never lasted long. They were always mocked, ridiculed, until they were taken away. To where, he didn’t know, but they were never seen again.
So, he collected these small flames of his own, put them in a jar, and walked up here to where he would let them all go, his family and other random onlookers urging him on with smiles and reassuring words.
“This is so important.”
“You will make us all proud.”
“Think of your future.”
But it wasn’t as easy as he thought.
His fingers curled around the top of the jar, shaking, and teeth clattering. His cat watched expectantly.
“What are you thinking?” Luka asked.
“…I don’t know.”
He would release them so they could join the stars, among thousands of others that were left to wander.
He hesitated.
Once they were gone, would he ever want to come back up here? Would there be any desire or wonder? Would he be just like everyone else? Wandering the grooves and streets of the city with soulless eyes, devoid of light? Exhausted, tired, but being of use to their home, their people.
There was some happiness in that, right?
The cat’s eyes slowly closed. He could sense the boy’s pain. “It’s never easy for anyone.”
The boy chuckled, but it bled. “So, why do people do it?”
Luka thought for a moment. “I would assume fear.” He said. “Humans are fearful beings and there is no greater fear than the fear of oneself. How we appear to others, how others perceive us, even your own death. Mindlessly chasing dreams, challenging what is already the norm, especially when they may hold no reward is terrifying, especially in such a short life, don’t you think?”
The boy took a breath.
“Are people really that scared?”
“Hm, in my experience, but I am an old cat. You are the first person I have talked to in ages. Things may have changed since days long past.”
“Why? Are people scared of cats, too?”
“Perhaps. More so of talking ones.” Luka smiled, his fangs as bright white as the milk he drank. It quickly fell when the boy didn’t return the same expression. “Do what you believe is best. I will be by your side, always. Even if we no longer have anything to say.”
He wished that eased the tension in his shoulders.
The boy’s head swirled. He couldn’t think about this, he had to get rid of them before something worse happened. Like the girl who made shadows from her fire, telling stories of wicked people. The boy who tried to escape to the outside, to see more than this ugly brown world. The parents who hid their children because their fires burned too bright. He had to. He couldn’t imagine putting that much burden on his family, his friends, the others around him.
He had to.
He had to make them all proud.
Without a second thought, he twisted the lid off, and the fireflies rushed out. Snaking around him, they pecked his body with warm spots that glew and faded into his skin. It was painful, a poison dripping through every layer of his body, eroding it to its core, and turning him inside out. Tears leaked from his eyes, blood staining the ground, and his flesh rippling into a new form. A form that he did not recognize.
He wanted to scream, but even his breath was taken from him. Everything he knew was being singed to a crisp, insides smoking with a smell that he was sure would never leave his nose.
All the flames kissed him one last time before being sucked into the sky, through the colorful leaves, through the clouds, until finally among the stars.
And just as the fire grew farther and farther away, so, too, did the light of his eyes.
And when they were no longer visible, his hands dropped to his side, the jar clattering to the ground and rolling among the many others under the tree roots.
As quickly as the pain came, it vanished, everything shifting back into place, but missing one incredibly important something.
The boy didn’t know what that was.
It wasn’t until now that he knew why people never went up here to gaze upon the tree, Mori.
He was scared, just like the rest.
There was nothing more to do here. He had to return to the others.
Turning towards Luka, his eyes laid heavy. He didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say to a cat.
Luka meowed and mournfully trotted alongside him as they descended into the clay city.
blooming amongst the rubble
Butterscotch and fine things
Doesn’t know what they mean anymore
Her grandmother’s house reeks of death and morphine
Hospice house, her uncle declared before he shot himself dead
Sick in the head, mad in their beds, the neighborhood children cry
And sometimes she thinks they’re right
Right about her, right about where the stains in the bed of the pickup truck came from
The best nights are found in the worst of times
So she’s off laughing in the subway and crying in Central Park
And partying alone in the Hamptons in a full loft that costs more than her tuition
She leaves the home that doesn't love her, doesn't acknowledge her
For the city that could care less whether she lives or dies
The city that doesn't care how long she's staying because she's just another wandering soul
She asks Zeus to strike her down because the only god she believes in is unfair and malicious
Isn’t that fitting? She’s bitter like sour hard candy
Incomplete like peanut butter sandwiches with the crusts cut off
Better things come after suffering is had, her father tells her
While he groans over budgets and turns a blind eye to the injustice around them
There isn't enough money in the world to cure its problems, Jolene, he says
But sometimes she thinks money is the problem
And even if he had money, he wouldn't spend it on anything but whiskey
She’s marching in June and sucking down superiority like cotton candy come July
Her ego needs a boost every once in a while
Red duct tape lining her soles, bleeding sacrificial imprints on every sidewalk crack
She cherishes the stains because at least something will remain when she is gone
Other than a half finished Magnum Opus and a bottle of perfume that smells like home
She still drops daisies at the cathedral, pretends at least someone watches over her
Still visits her mother’s grave every other month, lays down lilies in a clustered heap
Swipes a thin film of battle armor on her cheeks in the morning
Remembers how death is a fickle thing
How it comes for everyone and she doesn’t want to be next
Downward Spiral
You told me just to write. Purge what I have been bottling up. Your thoughts, emotions, pain, happiness, and whatever else flows out of your mind. Right now, I am sitting in this apartment, which feels like an old prison, with DJ. A man who makes my anxiety increase very quickly and my mellow calm instantly. He makes it hard for me to breathe, makes me nervous for whats to come.
He is already in a mood and us being in the same room not talking is only making it worse. He looks at me and says "This is a lot of work, setting up this PS4. Do you think Bug should pick her own username?" I stated, "Whatever you want, I don't care." I knew in the end it did not matter, my opinion, he would do what he wanted to. He called Bug out of bed to get her to choose her username. I think it could have waited till morning.
Being here makes my skin crawl and I must hold back tears. So many memories and reminders of the past years that it is like a constant living flashback. The certain smells that waft through here take me back to the summer when Bug went to Texas and stayed with Mom. Days followed by nights of dope fueled interactions and fights. Mostly fights due to our completely different views on life, someone stole the others dope, and the fact that our memories were not saved exactly how they should have been.
After days and days of no sleep, little food, and minimal human interaction your mind starts to turn on reality. You start with little pieces of a story being off, then those little pieces grow into delusions. Delusions make you question whats reality and whats fantasy. You get to a point that you question your sanity. All side effects of the dope.
Due to those side effects our fights got out of control and were mostly over things that never happened or and something that did happen mixed with a crazy delusion. Either way, due to the circumstances they were all battels that had no end, no resolve. Without a resolution the fighting was never truly over. All that unresolved negative emotion between us caused us to never truly heal. We never had the opportunity to process, accept, and forgive. Without the ability to obtain closer I cannot forgive you and allow another chance for us to fall into a downward spiral.
#P2Pchallange #Mindpurge #wordvomit #newbie #downwardspiral
The Rock
The day is new, Zeke, after leaving the breakfast table with his Dad. Zeke said, “Dad, I’d like to show you something.” He went to his bedroom and picked up his backpack and asks his Dad to go to the front porch with him. They both went out on the porch of the old rock ranch house, and Zeke pulled out of his backpack his rock hammer and his sample bag. He set the backpack away from them on the front porch and laid the rock hammer on the floor of the porch, which was a solid concrete slab.
Elvin said, “What do you have there?” Zeke handed him the bag and asked him to open it. Elvin could hardly believe how heavy the sample bag was. Elvin untied the sample bag and saw something wrapped in a nice cloth, and he took the cloth off it. Elvin saw an enormous cube about the size of a Softball and a small cube on the corner about the size of a golf ball. Elvin said, “Where did you get this; did you get it on your backpacking trip to Soap Creek?”
Zeke said, “Yeah, I got it on my trip, I believe it is magnetite or what some people would call lodestone.”
Zeke reaches across and pulls his backpack towards him and opens it up and pulls out his compass. Zeke said, “Watch this!” As he put the compass about 6 inches from his dad’s hands where he was holding the meteorite. Zeke moved back and asked his dad to set it on the ground, and they both move back almost 5 feet before the compass tried to go back to North.
Elvin said, “That’s incredible! What are you going to do with this rock?”
Zeke replied, “I thought I would break off a part of it and put it in my rock collection and study the rest of it. Zeke jokingly said, “It’ll make a great doorstop dad is really heavy.”
Elvin’s response was, “Yeah, I’ll bet!”
Zeke puts on his safety glasses. Elvin always wore glasses, so he wasn’t too concerned about Zeke banging on the rock; he stood back as Zeke took a hard swing at the rock with his rock hammer. And it broke open into four separate pieces and liquid run out of it. Zeke jumped up and ran into his room and grabbed one of the test tubes from the sample table he used to analyze rocks and rushed back and scooped up some rock and liquid in the test tube. As Zeke placed the corked to close off the test tube, he said, “I did not expect that to happen.”
As Zeke and Elvin marveled at the rest of the liquid, it seemed to disappear into thin air from the porch. Zeke then directed his attention to his Dad and said, “Dad, look at the test tube! The liquid in the test tube he was holding disappeared, left small pieces of the rock. Slowly the rest of the liquid just disappeared, left only the remnant of the small pieces of the rock. Which were all cubicles and about the size of a pencil lead? There were a couple pieces that were the size of an eraser or a pencil. Zeke carefully shook the samples in the test tube. The piece of rock rattled against the glass, as if there was never any liquid there at all.
Elvin wide-eyed said to Zeke, “I saw nothing like that in my life.”
Zeke responded, “Neither have I.”
Zeke carefully placed the four larger pieces back into the cloth and then into the sample bag and took it into the house and set it on his lab table. He returned to pick up his rock hammer compass and backpack and took it to the bedroom as Elvin walked back with him. As Zeke placed his backpack by his bed and then placed the test tube into his sample rack. And he wrote a brief note on a sticker and stuck it to the test tube.
Elvin said, “Probably be interesting to go see some other rocks where you got this one.”
Zeke hadn’t told his Dad about the meteorite and how he had to wait all night to cool off so he could pick it up with his gloves and put it in the cold water. Zeke thought maybe the water got in the rock when he put it in the cold water. But why would the water just disappear like that? Zeke thought to himself, this is no ordinary rock it came from heaven.
Elvin said, “Well, could show me where that rock came from someday.”
Heal yourself, the rest will follow
What's its and who's its aplenty.
I changed.
It took a little time,
but now my surroundings are changed too.
I have privacy
for the first time in my life.
I have someone is is looking out for my best interests
Close to me
for the first time in my life.
I have plenty of food
I have a warm bed
A weighted blanket
A nice device
I feel so thankful.
It hurt to leave
my family again
but they were hurting me.
Again.
There is someone in this world
Who supports me.
In a way that changes me
for the better
and gives me hope for my future.
That Thin Line
Opening the window blinds to my living room,
I see a flock of sparrows scatter in fright.
Only a single sparrow remains on the ground,
Unphased by all his friend’s plight.
Giving me one look. Then continues to eat in solitude.
Thinking to himself, “More for me.”
I cannot tell whether that sparrow is a genius or a moron.
Often that thin line is impossible to see.
Planetary Destruction
One small step for man,
One large leap towards ruin,
As we can never stop reaching
For the stars that are not ours.
We aim for civilizations
And planets that are not our own.
Looking for farther and farther solutions
To the problems we face,
To the problems we made.
We harness electricity,
We discover oil,
We destroy our planet
Just to satisfy
Those what-ifs,
Those whispers at the back of our mind.
Just to appease
The curiosity that destroys
What we are working so hard to save.
Blue Beauty
Anyone who knows me knows I’m not lying when I say I listen to just about anything. Almost a year back, I bought a homemade CD at a thrift store for a couple of cents. I still have it stored in a plastic bin among many of my other finds and often keep it near the top. While I’ve yet to stick it into my parents’ old radio, I often pick it up, flipping it around in my hands every time I give my collection a visit. The song names taped to the back always give me a chuckle. On the front of the plastic cover is the name “Mest” written out in purple sharpie that was likely low on ink. On the back is a song listing with the most humorous track name listed on the bottom. This song is called “Fuck the Greyhound bus”. I haven’t heard it yet, but can make an educated guess of what’s in it. It seems like forever since those two days I spent commuting on my own from Gainesville to Jacksonville and back for a metal show. That was the first time I’d hitched a ride on those chaotic but strangely clean blue beauties called Greyhounds. I mean beauties in the most sarcastic sense of course. A bus system with cheap prices is bound to attract some interesting characters. Despite shiny new logos painted on the sides, the commuters are the buses’ true colors. I remember little about my first commute other than that the Jacksonville station was close to the now defunct venue I was attending a concert at. Some months later, I stood at a similar station. I didn’t know if I was in the correct line. A few feet in front of me stood a tall man in a long green trench coat. He had a tightly stuffed hiking backpack and tied to it was a long, intricately carved staff. I stood there mesmerized at it for a while. The staff was stained a dark brown and about as tall as the man himself. Every detail of his figure was so unfitting it almost bothered me. His attire looked like something from a wizard in a fantasy novel, but his young appearance didn’t fit the bill. Another few months down the road, I was in another line, but this time I was outside and in the dark. A few of the drivers had taken my larger bags and stuffed them into the lower compartments. As usual, the Florida air was warm and sticky despite the lack of sun. A dozen people before me stood a man at the doors. He had a small chihuahua tucked under his arm like a football. While I’m not a dog person, I wouldn’t have found this situation unusual if it weren’t because the dog was in the late stages of pregnancy. As the man went up the stairs, the small thing wriggled in his arm with bugged out eyes. It’s swollen belly jiggled back and forth concerningly before it disappeared into the bus. As I waited to enter, I couldn’t stop thinking of the round furry bubble popping like a balloon. Thankfully, no explosions occurred that night. A few months later, I was standing outside a station in Gainesville. This time there were no buses. No people were around except for a man standing a few feet away from me. He kept telling me how he was just released from prison and would sometimes walk a little closer to me. I looked at my phone in frustration as he jabbered on and cursed the dark station for not opening its doors until six. Would then put the phone back in my aviators jacket and clench my hand around a can of pepper spray in the right side pocket. The man would get picked up by who I presumed to be his wife a couple minutes later to my relief. My memories are patterned with events such as these whenever I have the “Mest” CD in my hands. While the old radio is only a few feet away, I always put the tape back. There’s many theories in my head of what the last song would say. Did the folks who made this ever come across a pregnant chihuahua or did they see something far different than some strange characters and a single distressed pet? Perhaps I’ll never know and perhaps I’ll never need to know. Whatever happens, my blue beauty escapades will always stay clear in my mind.
Yeah
Ok let me start. this is the aboslute worst. Blehhhh. Ugh. I try so hard to do what you say. You say no plane. i plan. I plan. I plan. That's what I do. I can't write without a plan. I think before I write. I have the whole thing written out in my head before I start. so I try not to. My story is yeah. Yep that is my story. I wanted to do something creative but guess what, I can't think about it before I do it. right? that is what you meant, right? Maybe not but I hope this is what you wanted. I have not stopped to think. Maybe for a second but yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep it sucks. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. YEAH.