aabbccaa

Sometimes thoughts are best expressed
when rhyme and meter are addressed.
It's as if the constraints provide
the mind with something to subside
the need for tinkering as in prose
to get the words to expose
the meaning that is suppressed
in the formlessness of context.

who am i?

Sometimes you just want to stick it to The Man. Motivations are unclear, but here we are, dressed in criminal black, holding up the lobby in a posh hotel. I'm not sure who we are. I'm not sure who I am, but I'm there with the best intentions. I want to stick it to The Man.

I step outside and keep walking until I can see the top of the building. The penthouse suite built on stilts seems to hover above the roof of the hotel. I reason that if The Man is anywhere he is in that penthouse. So I grab it. I grab the penthouse with my telekinetic powers and rip it off its stilts. It's too late when I notice the suite is built in the shape of a cruciform. I've already dropped the penthouse, caving in the roof, and the evil that the cross had sealed therewithin the hotel begins to spill out. A hoard of contorted humanoid forms erupt from the torn roof and descend the walls of the glass building like a swarm of spiders.

I run into the lobby of the hotel, and inside it is thick with miasma. The glittering gilt and clean lines are gone, replaced by oil slick swirls of nauseating color. I try to navigate the building that has now lost all sense of spacial reason, where doors lead to rooms with more doors.

I don't know what I'm looking for, but I am stopped when I reach a room where the rest of my team has gathered. Standing in a circle facing the center of the room, no one bats an eyelash when I join. They continue to argue as they had been doing before my arrival. Everyone is shouting irrationally, and it is overwhelming. Through the din I hear strings of coherent words, but the statement "my birthday is June 31st" catches in my mind. Because from what I know about my teammates, all of their birthdays are June 31st, which I just realize is odd and statistically improbable. Heck, even my birthday is June 31st.

But my birthday isn't June 31st: my birthday is July 21st.

My vision frighteningly warps in the nauseating smog of colors to panoramically encompass all the faces of my teammates at once. My mind begins to drown in the cacophonous noise.

"You're not real!" I shout, adding to the noise, trying to maintain my rational mind by giving a voice to my thoughts. There is no such thing as June 31st. "You're not real!" I shout repeatedly. This can't be real.

My perspective nauseously shifts again bringing my point of view outside my own body. I look down on the circle of shouting people from slightly behind and above my own head. I can see the short crop of my mousy brown hair. I can see my body is tense as I continue to try and shout over the others. But that body is that of a thirty-something, handsome, white man. My birthday is July 21st not June 31st. I am a twenty-five-year-old, Asian female. I am not who I am.

"We're not real," I whisper, and the room suddenly becomes quiet as everyone shuts up and snaps their heads. They turn their gazes upon me, upon the spot above my white male corporal form, with wide frightened eyes.

What does letting life happen look like?

My first instinct as a sound bite-loving, modern female, master of the hyperbole, is to say "a hot mess," but that's not exactly true.

It looks more like an untamed rosebush in summer. Its spindly branches droop in every direction lacking the sturdiness and form of a rosebush attentively pruned with purpose. Consequently, the blooms aren't as impressive either. I'm looking at it wondering if it's not too late to start pruning it now, but my inherent apprehension toward deferred gratification has me wary about sacrificing the already existing buds and blooms. After all, no one can argue against the fact that a rose is a rose.

2 & 5

There's something I realized while turning twenty-five:
I've lived about a fourth of my life
and that's if I estimate generously,
but it is honestly a quarter of a century.
At five more than twenty and five less than thirty
I don't think I'm allowed to consider myself,
seriously,
anything less than an adult.

Creating Meaning from Randomness

An exercise in creating meaning from randomness.

1. Generate a random number, n, from 1 to 8 using the True Random Number Generator.
2. Retrieve n number of words using the Random Word Generator.
3. Write something using those words.

< the list >

#. YYYYMMDD: word(s)

20130502: comic, earth, enzyme, pill, bird, square

A Casual Sestina to the Benefits

Of course there is always something absolutely comic
about how two people meet, two out of seven billion on Earth.
The Internet has been my alternative reaction route: my catalytic enzyme.

Crane Fly

On a summer night when it's warm enough to keep the windows open, I let the night air waft in from places both near and far: places that I'll probably never have the occasion to visit. Air that's been curling through the apartment of my impossibly handsome next-door neighbor, smelling of tobacco smoke and the heady perfume of his latest sexual conquest, momentarily decorates my chaste apartment with the undertones of a well-enjoyed life.

Through the open window, a particularly playful breeze accentuated by the post-coital chitterings of the couple next-door blows a crane fly into my apartment. Despite its menacing form the crane fly is an innocuous creature made mostly of negative space. The wind tickles the wings of the less than adroit flyer causing the insect to tumble in the air. I wonder how such a beast with such lovely, elegant limbs can be so graceless. When the crane fly escapes the current and regains its bearings, it flutters to the far wall and clings to the uneven paint with with quivering legs.

The cat and I stare at the fly on the wall with differing intentions. Unlike the cat, I know that the crane fly has spent the majority of its life in its formative years as a grotesque grub, a lawn pest gorging itself underground on grass roots, and it emerged fairly recently as this harmlessly delicate creature. I know that it will only live long enough in its adult form to mate, and amidst the subtle scent of sex I wonder if it has done so already. The cat, having stared long enough, leaps up to bat the bug with a swift paw. The crane fly narrowly escapes and takes to the air like a feather on the wind. In a bit of panic, I stand up to rescue it from the cat and certain doom. So with as much dexterity granted to a human female I attempt to capture the fluttering bug between my cupped hands, but my heart sinks when my left meets my right.

My small hands failed to wrap around the entirety of the creature. I see a part of a crumpled wing and the end of a thin leg poking out between the seal of my hands. I open my hands to find the crane fly alive and shuddering, skittering on my open palm. Despite my good intentions the crane fly is as good as dead: some things are just fragile like that. It beats its mangled wings and goes nowhere.

The cat looks up at me with wide eyes of approval and gently paws my knee expectantly. I drop the crane fly, and it floats down to meet its swift deliverance. I watch as the cat snacks on the delicate morsel, and when I start to hear the escalating sounds of round two from next-door, I close the window.