Stillen Gedenken
(Still Remembrance)
Grieving the Living
Silence, a reckoning you brought and demanded, detonated to implode and deny a bond so wondrously created at your birth. I'll lament your choice to remove yourself from my world while missing your face, your joy, and your light for all of my existence. Daring to hang by a gossamer thread of hope, I'll navigate through this life, through days of longing for you amid depths of emptiness. I'll cry in the darkest nights, grieving the absence of you, my dear child, for evermore....until I breathe no more......and then from my desolate grave.
Hanging by Threads
I made my bed and I slept in it.
I insisted on a thread count of 500, at least. And none of that two-ply stuff. I felt I deserved it. I wanted the finer things in life, and I achieved them per every square inch. I slept well. As I slept on, day after day, year after year, and epiphany after epiphany, I self-educated on the important things in life between my nights of respite.
However, I lost thread count over the years.
It happens: the wear-and-tear of living. Nothing lasts. You can only hope to replace the deterioration with something else—perhaps something intangible but invaluable.
It came to be that I willingly shared my bed with another. More wear and tear. But invitation softens the blows. Yet, the thread count continued its attrition. To my shame, she wasn't the only one I had shared my bed with, although she was the one I wanted to keep in it. Alas, the others drove her away. Whether they left on their own or were sent away, they each held a thread as they walked away from me. And she—the one—clutched a handful as she left. The thread count continued to lower.
Each lesson in my life has cost me my threads. Remembering the threads I now miss dearly has become my new self-education.
Each cleansing of the soiling that you allow in your bed continues the threads' disappearing. More like evaporating in a whiff, actually, because they leave an odor when they leave the weave. It can be a malodorous parting gift.
I began my life warm and cozy in luxurious bedding with an extravagant thread count. I lived my life like I had all the threads in the world. And now I recline, toward the end of my life, in the threadbare reality of the mistakes I've made.
My once warm and cozy bed has become cold, stark, and lonely. My thread count days are long over, and I curse those who have woven their own lives comfortably with the threads they've taken from me.
I take inventory on my life by counting the threads I have left. Per square inch. What's left suffices only as a shroud.
A bad fit.
If you peel back his skin, you will see that his veins are threadbare and fraying. Worn has become worn out, and used is overused and used up. He has no more originality in him. The grey trousers and beige shirts have taken that from him. Bled it from him.
One sweet girl, wearing a floral reef braided into her hair, tried to offer her light, to reignite what was once his soul. She saw love in his eyes, oblivious to the fact that he merely mirrored her own. He burned through her; consuming her light until she reached up with blackened fingers and flinched as her flowers withered away. She tore them from her crown, finally seeing the grotesque mimicry of her reflection in his empty void.
When she leaves, the demons and dark things move in, as if pulled into a vacuum. The little pink pills don’t save him, nor do the thick white ones or white/blue capsules. Time fails to heal his wounds, and his veins continue to fray. He becomes nothing, except a shambling man, trying to hold himself together by a thread.
The Thread-Breaker
Face nestled between supple flesh, looking up at me with those blue eyes. Your fingertips digging into the backs of my thighs, hunger driving you deeper. A flick of your tongue, and I cannot look away, you've got me hypnotized. Your lips devour me, from the inside and out, like I'm being cannibalized. I feel my stomach start tightening, like there's a thread inside, tied to the back of my bellybutton- one more flick and it's going to break. Tremors erupt in my thighs and I see stars in my eyes, knuckles turning white but I'm floating through the air like static in a television. You're looking up at me with that wicked glint in your eyes, watching me come undone.
Hang On
(Loosely translated from a Sikh fable)
The disciple asked the Guru: O Wise One, how do I enjoy life to the fullest?
The Guru opened his eyes and smiled: Let me ask you a question. How long do you believe you have before you die?
The disciple, a young man in his early twenties, replied: Two, or three, decades at least.
The Guru offered: Try something shorter.
Then the Guru closed his eyes. The disciple pondered the Guru's suggestion, and said: A few years, at least.
The Guru repeated: Try something shorter.
A few months?
Shorter.
Days?
Shorter.
The disciple was worried. Did the Guru know his fate?
Hours?
Shorter.
Minutes, perhaps?
The Guru opened his eyes and said: My child, there is no guarantee that we may exhale the last breath just inhaled. We all hang by a thread.
This made the disciple sad and he asked, almost in a whisper: Does this mean there is no meaning to life? How can one enjoy Life if we're always in the shadow of Death.
The Guru laughed for the first time and replied: On the contrary, this should make you always be present in the moment, and enjoy every breath to its fullest.
Needle Spun
Twisting the fibers,
dangling down over a background of haze;
of hues of browns and beige.
She hangs,
head falling back,
one leg bent and toes pointed down as she twists right and
racks layers of cotton beneath her hand.
Twisting around, until it all comes undone.
Falling down, fabric floats like white blossom petals.
She hits the stage, coming to a halting stop against the wood grain covered floor.
The threads pulls taught,
dragging her up.
Ankles,
Hands.
All bound by tiny cotton weaves.
Three spun fibers,
make her dance though it cannot make her sing.
Watch her dance against the warming wood stage.
Hanging by the thread.
My marionette,
poor thing.
She's always been nearly dead.
By a Thread
“The tread that you take only serves insomuch as to awaken you from the stuff of dreams,” said the cohort on her left.
And he did seem to be dreaming, she noticed, with his closed eyes moving rapidly like the stinging flies that darted along the flowing river of song.
Nip, nip, nip, they bit as they impelled the rhythms of the beat that tried to repeat the melody and inspire the choral chords of the chorus longing in her ears.
Oh, how she longed to finish her sweet song. The one that told of the blue highways the width of two horse’s asses winding for miles and miles along the changing countryside and the muddy white vehicle the brothers drove to reach their unknown destination.
One brother sat in the driver’s seat clutching the steering wheel in one hand, right foot ready to brake from cruise control as he drove, using his free hand to crack open roasted, unsalted peanuts and toss the tasty legumes into his mouth, brewed yellow tea in the spill proof cup between his legs.
Although he did his best to dispose of his nut-munching detritus in a hard plastic container in the cup holder on the side, bits of broken shells and flakes of red nut skin surrounded him and settled into the car like Pig-Pen in the comic strip Peanuts by Charles Schulz.
The other brother did his best to laugh at the mess his elder sibling made and carefully sliced horseradish cheese onto a paper towel and prepped a bag of tart cherries for consumption by them both as Bob Dylan played on the stereo.
If she could only get the beat and the lyrics right, she knew her song would be a hit. The tale was such a classic, of two now retired brothers traveling cross-country to visit the remainder of their family back East where they had both been born, along thousands of miles of lanes and roads almost exactly the same width the ancient Romans had built over two millennia before.
How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?
How many seas must a white dove sail before she sleeps in the sand?
Yes, and how many times must the cannonballs fly before they’re forever banned?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind. The answer is blowin’ in the wind.
The thread by which she and her cohorts in the international songwriting seminar hung was a slender one involving both curiosity and creativity, and she wouldn’t have it any other way.
She began humming the melody that had just come to her. Yes, that just might work.
Kiss the rain
A random Friday night featuring a lonely boy
No?
What I meant to say is, I’m that lonely boy
Scared
Abandoned
Deprived
I was barely 17 when I decided that I needed to up my game
And by doing that, I had to give up my morals
Scary, is it not?
But what happens when I’m materialized & deprived of what I did in order to give up?
Product Of
So you don't have Mommy issues? That's cool, I also don't scream into pillows over minor issues. The shattering realization that you weren't good enough for something, or someone, and it didn't end in a car, or at school, or at a party. It happened right in front of you, with blood rushing to your ears, your heart, your stomach, your fists hitting something but you're too blind with rage to see what it is this time around. The point is you connected with something, and it resisted the punishment.
When I lose a follower I feel like you do. What is she talking about, this white girl with trash metaphors and bad similes? I wrote something stupid and then deleted it. You know Dominos, or those Russian dolls that are a copy of a copy of a copy? That's my posts, my life, my bleary eyes looking into a mirror at myself. This is Fight Club, and our lives are ending one minute at a goddamn time. It's almost like I have to deal with it or something. Who am I?
I used to walk alone at night, looking at the stars. I thought fate was written in them, until I learned that I'm responsible for that, too. No one and nothing will save you. I spent Covid locked in my room, writing for myself, too alone to know what it means to be a part of something bigger than myself. I stood in line outside of the grocery store while a bouncer called people in, one by one, a copy of a copy of a copy, a government conspiracy, or someone on a power trip. What's the difference?
There's something beautiful about water. I'm an air sign, but I love the ocean. Lakes, ponds, creeks, rivers. There's something timeless about them, the wind running over them like the comforting, guiding hand I almost had but then was born and was told to be quiet, unseen, unflinching as life washed over me.
Are you still reading? The point is, I'm hanging on by a thread. It's so easy to write this shit because, like cursing, this stuff just pours out of me, a broken container for something they don't sell anymore. I'm Blockbuster, or Filenes. I'm the opposite of McDonald's, with a cult following. I get told in parking lots things on the phone I wouldn't tell my worst enemy, or maybe that's me, sitting in my car, eating a Big Mac and contemplating existence with early 2000's music playing.
Goodbye. I'm not here for long. Wait - aren't I supposed to be saving for retirement? Whats' that, living a long life that you spent wanting more of?
I hope if you're out there, reading this on the internet, you are least have something to hold onto, someone worth fighting for. That you're happy to read what I write. You don't know me, but when you see, or think of something sometimes, you put the pieces together, and I'm the finished product.