Emo-tive

Red and black like blood and night, with a tree growing in between. Cut my chords and sever my heart. We'll bleed ourselves until we're through.

You've got to love that.
Either way, that's society these days. That's culure. That's our generation's apparent vindetta against the world. We just want to bleed and scream and be left alone in a dark room full of night.

And we want to all pretend like we're the only ones.

We want to paint post-modern portraits of naked men in naked rooms with four naked walls telling us how sad his little naked world must be. We want to dream in roses with thorns and black high-top converse shoes, torn in at least three places.

Aren't we all so unique?

-RK

an epigram for you

[just, not a very good one...]
-------
without water, turning living things black
without fire, lying stagnant on the ground

bright and burning
calm and flowing

passion, starving
freedom, longing

without water, burning everything to ash
without fire, drowning the living out

bright and starving
calm and longing

passion, burning
freedom, flowing

death bringing without the other
life giving when brought together

flame and raindrop
flash and falling

flame and raindrop
wind and blowing

-RLL (c)2005

Blegh. You know what I'm going to ask you...Critique, please

Here's a willow for your thoughts

After a long and confusing road, you aren't with us anymore.
After a lifetime where you never seemed to mind not knowing all the steps, you aren't near us anymore.

"Don't mourn," you would have simpered with a smile. As if your voice is somehow there again...

But still, we're selfish things.
...too ignorant to celebrate, too impractical to cry.

Miscelaneous gaps in all the time spent together. But you were there, watching over us slowly growing you in your living room, in your kitchen, in your front yard catching cold-blooded things, in your orange groves full of beautiful, wonderful, magical things. Groves and possibilities that seemed to go on forever when we were younger.

In the end, I bet double or nothing, you'll remember it all too.
I'd bet double or nothing.

"Try to understand." We try, but we're just too human today. Try to harbor the emptiness in the raindrops from these stormy, lonely eyes. Try to hold the showers and lightning and thunder back from tearing worlds apart.
But we're just too human...

Okay, fair enough - we won't cry. Not too much. Just, give us a little while to put our humanness, our weakness, our selfishness away. Give us a little space to pack all those memories away in safe, neat little boxes - like the ones you kept the games in. Bottle them in neat little bottles like the ones you kept fresh the orange juice in.

And when it's said and done, there'll be a celebration. With people laughing and everyone sharing and all of us knowing that, for a while, we were blessed. That you were always the beautiful, graceful grandmother not so many of us were so blessed as to really have.

But all the same, be patient with us sentient still time-bound beings. Even though you're safe and warm and protected now...

We still long. We still shiver. We still weep.

-RLL

[For all the warm, eternal memories she left with us]
Grandma Marge - December 11, 2005

"I don't need anything."

[disclaimer: this post, an excercise in antithesis, contains the mild use of strong language]

Here. There's a little circle for you to stay inside of. Here's little round glass walls that'll keep you in, now. Here's a little fire in the middle to keep you warm at night, and a TV so you can watch all your favourite shows. Here's a cozy little couch, but be mindful cuz it's made of glass. And there, against that little alcove over to your right, there's your kitchen with jars and jars of glass food. Oh, yes, and don't forget that when you get bored, you'll have to break the little round glass walls to get out - because we didn't think you'd want a door...

"Thanks. For your consideration. For you planning. For the time it must have taken you to figure all this out. It feels so nice to think that you thought of me. To think you, in your riches and your high esteemed status, thought of nothing-little me. It really is amazing.
So here's a toast to you.

Cheers, darlin'.

"Oh, and when you leave, can you turn off the light switch? I forgot to tell you that I can't reach it from here - not without breaking my precious little glass sphere. But you spent oh so much time on it, and I'd be terribly fretful if I ruined it. If I ruined the little freak show you like to come and enjoy. If I ruined the little parties you like to throw, just so you can come and laugh or weep or make your jest over me.

"It's all really so okay. I don't mind. I've got my little glass globe of existence to keep me going. I've got my glass table and my glass sheets on my glass bed that I sleep in at night. And I've got that glass telephone that doesn't even call you.

"Don't ruin it for me.
I'm so fucking happy."

-RK

--but maybe, you already do.

Nine years old in the corner of a pink room, wondering if everyone has already gone, trying desperately to force out agonized tears so they'll feel sorry if they have

It's '91 and there's a bumble-bee ring awaiting my approval at the end of a silly faked ceremony that would be nothing more than the sound of amused laughter in fifteen years

1997, riding on the winding, slow path down to Hana - sitting in the center console of the front seat because the three of us couldn't get along, and a waterfall that makes it all somehow better

"Today is a horrible, no good, very bad day." Shivering uncontrollably in the rickety brown office chair because they don't seem real - the words on the screen - as tears struggle to find their way to expression

Late for fireworks and somehow a sweat-drenched head finds an equally sweaty shoulder; uncomfortably, uneasy at first, but the acceptance makes the embaressment less, makes the action somehow easier

Weary and blank inside, stumbling with suppressed desperation to the only place of safety, and blaring the sounds of "Armageddon" because it feels like it ought to be

A car lot. The year is 2004 and the worst time of life is just about to begin

A plane ride back to unknown fears in a place that ought to be home. Soon, January 1, 2005 and the hellish year will be over

It seems like the year's gone nowhere, but now it's April 1. It should have felt worse somehow, and yet, it doesn't

Weather Vane, or Winchester - whichever you prefer. A fork digging a rift in a table that the owner wouldn't like defaced, and a discussion that seems all too obvious

August. Chicago in the late Autumn, when the leaves are beginning to change. A warm spot left on a matress and the jingle of unknown metal tags in a little ziplock baggie. Sun and moon, light and dark, day and night

A week of lonely solitude and radio-silence from the other end of the line, no matter how the connection is failingly attempted, but not made

Bioluminescence on the tips of a beautiful black velvet sea. Tents that get too close to the ocean, and a mote that'd get dug with an axe-head because a shovel is lacking

A four hour conversation on the state of racisim in America today. Debates on God and the place of murder and whether Robin is right about Anarchy or not

Words like truth and hope and faith strung together on a necklace, bound up in a ring, and laced over the sweet white frosting of a soon-to-be wedding cake.

Concepts like need, love, want
Words like balance, match, equal
Things like then, now, always

-RK