And on the final note for my final piece, a random thought I wrote down in Brit Lit class:
Green, though not the color of your eyes, makes me sad. Will this longing ever go away? What am I longing for? Something that doesn’t exist – and has never existed. You are where you have always been.
Nothing here [in Virginia] reminds me of you in the way everything in Georgia did. Why must I explore with words what can only be understood with the heart?
Flyleaf – Red Sam
Here I stand
Empty hands
Wishing my wrists were bleeding
To stop the pain from the beatings
There you stood
Holding me
Waiting for me to notice you
But who are you
You are the truth (you are the truth)
Out screaming these lies
You are the truth (you are the truth)
Saving my life
The warmth of your embrace
Melts my frostbitten spirit
You speak the truth and I hear it
The words are I love you
And I have to be leaving you
But who are you
You are the truth (you are the truth)
Out screaming these lies
You are the truth (you are the truth)
Saving my life
My hands are open
And you are filling them
Hands in the air
In the air, in the air, in the air
And I worship
And I worship
And I worship
And I worship
You are the truth (you are the truth)
Out screaming these lies
You are the truth (you are the truth)
Saving my life.
This relates, also, to the last piece I wrote for class and I listened to the acoustic version, which is far better than the original, on repeat. This one worked out as inspiration for my piece because it speaks of the individual in question “being the truth” and leading the speaker to “the truth”, even as the love interest is “out screaming these lies”.
I believe that they wrote this one about God and how Christianity is out “screaming these lies” – the church being far more interested in promoting its own personal agenda than upholding the ideals of Christ – but it works well to represent an individual too, yes?
So I’ve got quite a few songs that inspired my last piece I did for class which, incidentally, is also the one I submitted for my portfolio.
Flyleaf – Sorrow
Sometimes life seems the quiet
Empty paralyzing silence
Like the moonless dark
Meant to make me strong
Familiar breath of my old lies
Change the color in my eyes
Soon he will perforate the fabric of the peaceful by and by
Sorrow lasts through this night
I’ll take this piece of you
And hope for all eternity
For just one second I felt whole
As you flew right through me
Left alone with only reflections of the memory
To face the ugly girl that’s smothering me
Sitting closer than my pain
He knew each tear before it came
Soon He will perforate the fabric of the peaceful by and by
Sorrow last through this night
I’ll take this piece of You
And hope for all eternity
For just one second I felt whole
As You flew right through me
And we kiss each other one more time
And sing this lie that’s halfway mine
The sword is slicing through the question
So I won’t be fooled by his angel light
Sorrow lasts through this night
I’ll take this piece of you
And hope for all eternity
For just one second I felt whole
As you flew right through me
And up into the stars
Sorrow Comes.
This one inspires me because the person that my piece was about “knows each tear before it comes”, and yet he seems to “perforate the fabric of the peaceful by and by”, thus bringing “sorrow”. I listened to this one over and over while I was writing some of the final drafts of the piece.
I will love you like pine.
Roots will never suck dry,
wind will never weather
and worry.
Needles proud, unchanging –
evergreen.
But the beauty of
Autumn
will never be
Ours.
Sometimes I worry myself. Why? Well, anyone who knows me well enough to have read my writing – and I don’t mean the writing I do for class, I mean the writing which is an extension of my self – knows that I put everything I am into my work. It’s like a fever that ravages and consumes my entire body. I cannot eat, sleep, or think about anything outside of the burning, barely contained within the membranes of my complex gray matter, until the piece I am working on at the moment is complete. When I am finished, I feel spent, as if I have run about ten miles without stopping or slowing my pace.
During these fevers, filled with delusions in the form of words that literally dance before my eyes like well-trained circus monkeys, I generally come up with something brilliant – even insightful – which completely dazzles me when I snap out of the rush that comes from writing. It’s akin to a wild roller-coaster ride in which I am in the very front seat – given to the illusion that I’m running the show. But it’s not me who’s running the show: it’s the invisible conductor in my brain, who controls the switches. So when I finally come to myself – or as close to reality as I ever get – and I read what I have written, I only vaguely remember writing it. I am always completely amazed that anything intelligent or interesting could come from my brain, which I generally think of as broken on some nondescript level and in such a way that it cannot be repaired.
All I can eat or drink during these spasms of transcendent thought is Earl Gray tea, preferably Twinings. It reminds me of my father, when I was a young girl, before he lost all sense of himself or his place in the world and conceded himself to be everyone’s lost left-sock, forever buried among the fuzz-bunnies that populate the space beneath our beds. In those days he drank Earl Gray as if it were his petroleum-based fuel, always while smoking his worn, wooden pipe filled with the smell of tobacco and cherry. He was always filled with the same keenness, the same sharp and biting wit that I sometimes find I use. It makes me sad, and it makes me wonder. Will I lose myself, too? Or is writing my way of finding myself, of trying to discover my way to not be the left sock, after all?
So, I’m thinking that people are probably going to wonder, “why the bizarre blog name?”, and so I figured I would answer that question up front..
I write poetry. Bad poetry. It’s a reference to one of my poems and, simply to torture you on some academic and nondescript level, I am going to repost it here. (It’s already on my private blog, like most of my bad poetry.)
Hope?
What is Hope?
I harbor none,
nor choose to.
Everything I have
I would give you,
down to the last kiss
of my dying breath,
the last dime in my
lint-filled pocket.
And
So it will remain.
I admit defeat:
the white flag of
Marlboro cigarettes
and Ambien tablets,
streaked with
Caffeine Rush
Orange
My last will and
Testament.
You were never
my regret,
nor could you
Ever be.
It is not within my
grasp or fathom
to regret
A relationship of
such joy,
even when brief and
Speckled
with tears only you
Can ever make me
Cry.
I will kill my own
heart,
One Moment
at a time,
One Step
at a time.
Glance down, count
sidewalk cracks
But
DO
NOT
Feel.
I do not know if
it is you I have
Failed
or myself.
What of myself?
There is no self
not defined
by you.
Would you wish it
Otherwise?
It is not me to
give you less than
Everything.
I concede.
I do not mind being
a mirror for reflecting
the wishes of others
If it preserves the
simplest aspect
of You.
You have always deserved
More
than I have to give
Anyway.
Bleed Surrender 