10/19

Watching my ticking pocket-watch.

It’s going too slow, I’m going mad. Not quite eight yet, can’t take my drugs and bask in their effects. Drinking Captain Eli’s, reading Jane Eyre, wishing I had a real beer, that I knew what the French ladies were saying — that’d be true gorgeousness.

Impossibilities, I’m crippled under hundreds of pages of text — for what reason? What’s the expectation anyway? My hands are trembling, my jaw is jerking, I want to scream confessions into the open air and onto deaf ears. I pretend play that I’m in a cafe snapping my fingers to the heartbeat of expression — no more apprehension, depression, or falling behind the imaginary pack.

Cliff Bar, too much sweet in my mouth. Just swallow the pills.

Smoking, 17 Years Old

The darkness molested by the
pollution of city lights and
street lamps blazing through the
summer night hung low over
the pond — we called it the
puddle — and there we sat,
near the edge of the murk, in such
stark contrast to the relative
order around us, illuminated in
sharp blacks and whites like in
those old movies.
Cigarettes hung loosely from our
lips, smoke poured and streamed
into a poisonous plume,
in a smooth and sophisticated way –
as we fancied ourselves to be –
silently pondering the existential and poetical,
smoking cigarettes at seventeen.

A dream during twilight

She bears a burden that chills her heart,
takes away the aches and pains,
slows the rhythm of life to the minimal
pulse excited only by alcohol and running
away from fear, fear of solutions to what seem like
indelible problems yet are as evanescent
and fleeting as fireflies.
Her body becomes colder and her frozen breaths
can’t sustain her for much longer.
Her warm appearance is unlike that which lies within;
while perhaps thoughtful, calm and capable of true
acts of humanity and love, she is as broken and twisted trees,
mangled not of their own accord,
yet still holding with a firm grip on to the power of life
through each brittle winter that howls and roars to claim.
It will take a year of working,
a year of sun, fertile rains and the
loving being of all that is, but she who
once stumbled in the frigid dark and
grasped blindly for a hand to hold
onto may know herself as herself,
alive and empowered –
nothing trivial, not any more.

A Little Audacity

I am sleeping lightly upon a leather loveseat covered in blankets. In my dream, I am laying awake looking at my cellphone as it vibrates and rings in its little melody. Suddenly, I irk awake and look to my phone. Nothing. Seconds later, it rings. In the passage of one afternoon, this happens three times.

It is a few days earlier. As I cross the mighty Androscoggin river, I look to my left and wonder about the fate of the old Cowlan mill building. Contracts have fallen through and that historic landmark, now gutted, silent, and looming simply exists to uphold its own history — an icon of sorts for all the memories of the textile past. I know that it will not make it. Today, an inferno raged inside of the building and within the span of two hours destroyed all that was left. Floors caved in, walls collapsed into the river, the entire place came thundering down. Over 150 years of history was enveloped in fire, each year screaming as it died, sending fireballs and cinders from the building all over downtown Lewiston.

I pick up my pen, put it to the page, and then it falls over, leaving a sploch of black ink on the page. I am drugged with hopes of my condition improving, yet I have vomited almost everyday, and even water makes my stomach churn. I sit back, weakened by persistent fatigue, and imagine off into another place while my muscles lose their tone, while my body softens and my strength is undermined. I sit with a patch over one eye, too dizzy even to stand.

It is audacity that gets me through this. Boldness shielding an inner determination that strengthens my core, enlivens my willpower, envokes a sort of rage against all that is holding me back. My soul infuses with the whole of my body and I can conquer any obstacles that are presented. A little audacity is what keeps me alive through times when even reading is a challenge.

Each breath. Stronger.

Hrafn

http://tylernoyes.wordpress.com/

Gladsheim Boulevard

The old house is

juxtaposed upon a cliff

near rushing ocean waves.

The angry froth looks like

foamy mouthwash,

bursting inwards onto rocks

with the transcendent tides.

It’s a cape with rotting siding

that was white one year,

dead one hundred later.

Wood, broken window panes

and chips of old glass

smother the sinking floor.

The sea breeze shakes and

rattles the struggling structure,

makes the house a wind tunnel,

that with its howling blast

flutters the curtains like ghosts.

Its shattered windows

become lost and lonely eyes.

Gray skies and bouts of rain

pound the pouting house,

stir up a storm and swell the sea

like a boiling iron kettle.

The old house loses shingles,

shutters, and oaken doors.

The eyeless face gazes

out through the summer,

winter, autumn, and spring.

Its family is relinquished,

and in only one more dawn

the storm surge will

founder its foundation

and float it away.