Monsters
By Billy | January 20, 2010
I fell for the lie of a world where control
was something i held in my hand
i know i will die
if i give up my soul
and let things exist as they’re planned
i fell for the sparkling of choices
and chose to ignore what was coming
i swallowed the barking and voices
i choked hard but just kept on humming
if monsters and demons have ever existed
i know very well on who’s enlisted
and the company bell told thirteen times
the clang was so clear and ironically clean
when compared to the world who had so lost her sheen
where the new had been being now are sights not worth seeing
they are shabby
and cold
and crumbling
when the mudslide subsided
i’d been left divided
insane
and old
and mumbling
there’s a bottle of lightning
under your bed
and you’re thinking it might be
thunder instead
while the difference is real
you’re not going to feel
the difference
if you are dead
Topics: poetry | Comments Off on Monsters
The Fires had Just Started: Part 3
By Billy | January 11, 2010
Soot.
Everywhere.
My pants, my hands, my face, her bed skirt, that enigmatic little box. My fingerprints made smudgy little guilty eggs wherever I roamed that day. She was in enough of a tiff for some reason that she think to make me bathe, I am always so manic after a fire, I couldn’t let myself simmer in the washroom. Not today. Not with the one, solitary, lonely thing in the house, with a lock (and certainly a key) waiting to be liberated.
I still loathed the vulnerability I’d come to feel outside, but found comfort and distraction sitting in my room. biding my time. Thinking of ways to open that box. Thinking of when to open that box. Thinking of where to open that box.
Mania is something I’m not accustomed to. Mania in the midst of lethargy is unexpected, welcomed, overpowering, exhausting.
I woke up around noon the next day. My walls were covered with sooty fingerprints. My face stung. My body ached. I awoke on my floor, with my floor rug lazily covering the lower half of my achy body. I must have passed out. I should maybe clean these walls.
Hannah Nathan. She is a river of forgiveness and patience. I emerged from my sun room to find her preparing a sandwich for me. “I was juss’a bout to wake you up, mister. Long night, indeed?” She asked, but she really told. Half way through my sandwich I realized she was talking about her more than about me.
Mrs. Nathan’s box was perhaps the most focused on thing in the history of everything. I neither ate nor breathed without it on my mind. It sat waiting, nestled under the spare blankets beneath her creaky bed.
I pretended to busy myself with cleaning the soot off my walls while waiting for the right moment. It came shortly after our eerily silent afternoon tea. While she cooked supper, I would tried to open it.
By the time she came in to tell me about supper’s readiness, I had practically set up camp on her bedroom floor. My multi-purpose pocketknife lay discarded to my side, many of the tools bent or broken, a spoon I had taken from the drawer sat precariously on the edge of the bed, bent fully in half. I had nearly opened it when I realized, to my horror, that she was standing in the doorway, watching me fiddle with her treasure chest in the dying sunlight of her solitary bedroom window. The box was small enough for me to consume it in a full fledged bear hug, which I did promptly and began to run, hoping to slip right past her.
I was caught red handed, I was bad, I was confused. I don’t know why I obsessed about that box, I don’t know what I was holding at the time, I don’t know where I was intending on going with it, but I knew I wanted in. She seized me in a furious moment of desperation. I think it was her elbow that found my face, perhaps her hip bone. We piled on top of each other, the three of us. We fought like bandits. I don’t know where I was clawing at, I don’t know how I was held down, I don’t know what struck me where… I don’t think anything in the world would have stopped me from fighting her. Nothing in the world but the sound of the contents of that box breaking apart and kissing each other with the haunting beautiful jingle of entropy in action. I closed my eyes and thought, nay, wished I had died.
————-
more later.
Topics: Works of Fiction | Comments Off on The Fires had Just Started: Part 3
Lucy and I
By Billy | January 9, 2010
The following is the exact text of a paper I wrote for a psychology class last semester. The assignment was to write about a part of my life that affected my total development. I wrote about the girl whom I’m having lunch with in 45 minutes.
Lucy and I
I will call her Lucy in this paper. A year ago, I would have used her full name as if to say, “That’s her! Everyone look at this one. She’s the one to blame. Everyone should know what she’s done and therefore who she really is.” Lucy it is. We did it to each other, Lucy and I, and we did it to ourselves.
Lucy and I became, “Lucy and I,” on May 7, 2003. That progressed quickly into, LUCY AND I (look at us, everyone!) and then on into LUCYANDI. LUCYANDI were inseparable. LUCYANDI were dependent. LUCYANDI were confused. We were a single unit and we were definitely, definitely, definitely in love.
LUCYANDI knew we were in love pretty quickly. Nobody else could really comprehend our transcendent experiences, but that was ok, we could just look to each other, rely on each other, grow with each other. Nobody else understood. My friends would take me aside, literally 3 on 1, my back against the wall and say, “this isn’t the Billy we used to know. YOUANDLUCY have got to straighten some stuff out.” They couldn’t understand. My parents’ critiques of us were expected. “We miss you at home and haven’t seen you for days; you always look so tired and grumpy.” They couldn’t understand; what would my parents know about love?
You’re probably wondering at this point what I knew about love by this time. Well, I knew a lot, thankyouverymuch. I knew that love was patient and kind; this meant that when she’d strike me, it was my chance to prove myself — it was my chance to be her rock. Love didn’t envy, so it was easy for me to close my eyes during entire movies because the girls on the screen might make me envious of the guys near them. Love doesn’t boast, and isn’t proud, so I found ways to belittle my accomplishments, even in my own head. She was to be exulted and I would work behind the scenes.
Imagine you take every thing that has ever been said of love, all the powerful, whimsical, inflated, inspirational things that have ever been recorded. Now distort them to fit the selfish mould of a lost human looking for a bit of validation, and that’s what sort of love I was in. I took everything Paul of Tarsus wrote about love and completely misconstrued it to exclude every human being who wasn’t Lucy. I made Romeo and Juliet look admirable. I made up my mind and I stuck to it.
I have given so much attention to what our relationship was and why it existed to try and answer the question, “why?” that I can’t help but still ask myself, and that I have such inadequate answers for when asked by friends and family. Why did you stay in it? Because it was the loving thing to do. Beyond that, the introduction to my relationship with Lucy should contextualize why the story affects me so much to this day.
Four years is a long time. Four years is longer than most commitments I’ve ever made. I was a high school student for four years, but only for 1/4th of the day, 5/7ths of the week, and 3/4ths of the year. LUCYANDI were a full time deal. I was her boyfriend for the entire four years. (We literally broke up 4 years to the day after we started). Four years is a long time.
At the beginning of this past summer, I was eating dinner at a local soup kitchen and was approached by a woman who claimed to be a gypsy and that she could read palms. “You are not who you say you are. I know your name,” she said to me. I was more than a little perplexed and felt my privacy had been invaded as she seized my arm, felt my palm, and counted the most obvious scars on my arms. “You… I will call you Phoenix.” She spoke it with such conviction; I didn’t know how to respond at the time. I am thankful now, though, because she has given me a very helpful metaphor for me to rely on.
LUCYANDI is the ashes out of which this bird has grown.
I am taking the opportunity to use this assignment to reflect on the events in my past collectively known as LUCYANDI. How has LUCYANDI impacted the person I am today? In what ways has it affected my total development?
“Impacted the person I am today…”
I’ll warrant we should examine who “the person I am today” actually is while we look at the things that got him there. The person I am today is, as every person is every day, dynamic and changing. What is true about this today will not be true on another day, perhaps. Perhaps it will change in the next hour.
The person I am today is a person who is not willing to settle any longer for the thought of stasis. When Lucy and I were LUCYANDI, we stayed in a vacuum. Human beings grown and develop with interactions with other human beings. These interactions were lacking, especially on my end. For months of my freshman year of college, I lived (unbeknownst to my parents, her two roommates, or her parents) in her room — and often bathroom — in her apartment. I washed myself with water from the sink at 5 AM and snuck out of the apartment before her roommates were awake to take notice of my living there. I would frequently come home and stay in the bathroom with the lights off until everyone could be assumed asleep and there was no worry of a roommate walking in without knocking and seeing me there.
Lucy was uncomfortable with me talking or interacting with females. There were certain people whom she had given me a green light to talk to, but otherwise I limited my contact with people, especially girls, to virtually nothing. I remember coming to her house at the end of the day and reporting exactly how many times I had looked at, spoken to, or acknowledged another girl throughout the day and receiving a decently powered punch or a slap for each infraction.
Lucy did her best to keep me to herself. Whether done consciously for this reason or not, the seclusion I found myself in stunted our growth as people. For the four years I dated Lucy, which were exponentially oppressive as time passed, I didn’t challenge myself with the views of other people that I should have been in contact with. I didn’t learn to assimilate with the lifestyle of a random roommate who would have been my dorm roommate. During my freshman year of college, I didn’t meet hall mates from other states, cultures, religious backgrounds, sexual orientations, and education levels. As a direct response to the seclusion I experienced during the last two or three years of LUCYANDI, I now appreciate the variety life has to offer to a degree I don’t know if I ever would have reached otherwise.
Lucy hurt me. She was nearly the death of me many times over. I feel like the entire LUCYANDI event was a huge hurricane that came and swept through my emotional state of being. Everything was tested and nearly everything came down. After the storm settled, I was left with only the foundations of my house. Everything beyond the basics was in shambles or on the brink.
My sense of personal worth, first and foremost, had been obliterated. For years after the relationship I would ask myself, “What did I do to deserve what I got?” rather than telling myself, “I didn’t deserve to be beaten and controlled.” I have finally begun to see and feel the difference, but for most of the aftermath, I let her words and actions sink in. I was beaten, put into seclusion, starved, and belittled because there was surely something wrong with me, I thought, and that needed to be addressed.
My concept of self worth needed to be reconstructed in an entirely new fashion. My simple log-cabin-style home just didn’t make sense any more and I needed to design a structure more reliable and capable of enduring stress, should another hurricane sweep through. I needed to make sense of a world where people who tried to do the right thing would get broken down for their intentions.
I am a person today with a well defined opinion about the world and the way she operates. I have developed strong beliefs regarding human nature, right and wrong, cause and effect, determinism, and grace. These beliefs are the result of the introspection induced and demanded by experiences connected with LUCYANDI. I began developing many of them while hiding in her bathroom during my freshman year.
Because of Lucy, in many ways, I actually consider myself a human (a term that now carries a lot of implications). I hadn’t really considered things too much before the hurricane, and now I have refined opinions about it. Before I had just let things be. I didn’t think about my rights, my needs, or my comfort levels. Now I am conscious all the time of what I deserve as a human and what other people around me deserve as humans, too.
Because of Lucy, I am pretty good at knowing when I’m out of my comfort zone and standing up about it. I have abandoned conversations, asked people to watch their word choices, ended relationships, started dialogs with my parents, and in turn learned to be more sensitive to other people’s particular triggers and discomforts. That’s not to say I’m awesome at expressing my discomfort appropriately, as I am often on the defensive too readily, waging battles against people who aren’t actually fighting with me.
After my relationship with Lucy, I felt weak, useless, undeserving, bad (wicked), and hurt. The hardest of these to grow from has been the last one: hurt. Feeling weak and useless is a response to my position of relative powerlessness in life for many years. Undeserving and bad come from constant physical and emotional abuse. I can sit down with these and remind myself that I am strong, that I can accomplish things, that I do have goodness in me.
Being hurt is different. To feel hurt, there’s nothing I can or should really do about that. I should feel hurt. I spent two years post-LUCYANDI ignoring the fact that I was hurting. One day my friend held my by the arms and told me, “It’s okay to be hurting.” Those were some of the most important words I was ever told. I am learning these days to be hurt and to just let that be. I am learning to be alone and carry weights by myself, rather than growing restless by myself and sharing my load with every human I know. I am learning that it’s OK to be hurt and that pain isn’t always deserved.
The person I am today is one who thinks about why he’s doing things. He constantly questions his motives and whether it falls into accordance with things he’s comfortable with. He’s terrified of stepping into more pitfalls like Lucy, and is trying to balance the feeling of “I made a horrible mistake for four years,” with “as long as we choose to grow from things, they aren’t mistakes.” The person I have grown into being is a person with relentless hope, the type that of hope that exists only after you lose everything. The person I have developed into is one that sees things in a broader sense. My ego was smashed to pieces and while rebuilding it, I had a chance to see the world more objectively than the first time I set things up. This time I had a better perspective. The person I was when LUCYANDI broke up was carrying a lot of facts and not very much sense of it. I had to sit down and think about how the world works, where my source of validation and happiness came from, who was in control of my life and emotions, and what I wanted my life to shape up to be.
LUCYANDI played an intimate and vital role in my personal development. Lucy was a refining fire for me — the most painful and confusing refinement I’ve ever experienced. Nonetheless, I gained insight and found many foundational things to rely on. I have found who I am and want to be as a result of being forced into so many roles in the past. I still ache and mourn for missed opportunities, I often close my eyes during movie scenes involving domestic abuse, and I still feel wicked from time to time…
I am thankful that I am where I am now, and I can almost say that I am thankful that I got here the way I did. Regardless of how I feel about it, Lucy is huge in who I am today.
Topics: Nonfiction, This is my life | 1 Comment »
Things Fall Apart, in Time.
By Billy | January 8, 2010
The glass prison had been smashed, long before the hands knew how. They hung there lamely waiting for the hour to change. One should never throw stones when living in a glass house, but perhaps throwing ones self through the walls and getting the hell out of there as fast as possible is acceptable. If you move fast enough, the deadly jewels will neither harm nor notice you on their way down.
So was his escape plan, with a face set in stone. How many years had he been counting, how long had he stared blankly waiting for this moment. He taught me a lesson about survival.
Nobody does.
His body ached and creaked agonizingly. His heart seemed to have stopped beating years before. His chest cavity was an empty room, filled with heavy weights, also waiting for their chance to be cut free.
Entropy always happens, sometimes it strikes like a cheetah.
With a silent smile, he relaxed his face for the first time in his life. My grandfather sighed his last sigh and let go.
I had let that clock sit there in the hall for ages, never thinking to maintain it, never thinking it wanted to be wound. The springs had rusted, the windings stayed tense. The hands all hung lifeless at 6:30.5. I never thought the housing would give way, I never imagined that potential would actualize. I thought someone had broken in through a window that night, but only found that someone had broken out. I examined the gore and put him to rest on the sidewalk. It’s trash day, anyway.
Topics: Uncategorized, Utterly Random | Comments Off on Things Fall Apart, in Time.
Standing in the Hurricane
By Billy | January 6, 2010
Your weaknesses are your strongest points; your greatest potential for growth, learning, understanding, and to spread knowledge. The universe has a great ability to manifest the perfect storm for you. Your perfect storm. Maybe you should run from it and wait for four more tornadoes to show up, or maybe you should just brace yourself and charge in there. Maybe the winds will strip you naked and smash you. Maybe you’ll feel shamed. Maybe you’ll get broken bones and scars.
(Probably)
Sometimes you have nothing left but to raise your head and scream back at the lightning. Sometimes you have to look like a fool. Sometimes you will be a fool.
(Probably not)
Surviving the storm might leave you more emotionally than physically shaken. The whole reason for running was that you were scared for your physical life, but your body got over it much more quickly than your mind. Chew on that.
I’m going to go out today with a quote spoken to Bart Simpson. I love that the quote itself is contextless enough to stand on it’s own and be relevant to most of life.
“Let me start by saying… Good for you, son!
It’s always good to see young people taking an interest in danger. Now a lot of people are going to be telling you you’re crazy
and maybe they’re right. But the fact of the matter is:
Bones heal, chicks dig scars, and The United States of America has the best doctor-to-daredevil ratio in the world!”
If you’re capable of reading this post, you can 1) read. 2)find a computer someplace, 3)have the spare time to read a blog post.
I’ll warrant any death-defying stunt you engage in will likely not permanently destroy your life. Rather, it will likely enhance your life beyond your imaginations.
We’re all running from something. Stop.
Topics: This is my life | Comments Off on Standing in the Hurricane
Step Towards Peace: 1
By Billy | January 5, 2010
Drink tea.
Drink coffee, drink milk, drink water, drink juice, drink viper blood. It doesn’t really matter. Drink something. Really drink something.
You have 24 hours tomorrow, that’s 1,440 minutes. I promise you that you can find 10 minutes in there to do nothing but sip, smell, taste, feel, swallow, and smile. It’s not that we don’t have time for doing stuff we probably should, it’s that we choose to not make time. Not choosing to do something is a choice.
Put your hands on the cup, feel the temperature. Put your lips to the brim of the cup but do not sip. Just smell. Exhale and feel the temperature. Think about a time in your life that you’ve tasted the taste you’re about to experience. Think about the number of people in the world that have the exact same liquid in their cup. Think about the plants, people, animals, energy, and time that brought about your ability to drink. (You’re cup was made by someone or something, your tea leaves were grown, harvested, carried, packaged, etc., your viper blood came from a viper who had a family…)
Smile. Smile because the universe works.
Smile because you have told yourself you’re not allowed to frown or worry during your milk-drinking-time.
Sip. Sip however deeply your body wants you to. Let your drink sit in your mouth, taste it, feel the cool or heat against your tongue. What do your teeth feel like at that moment? Someone else in the world is swallowing the same drink as you.
Smile. Smile because you are never alone.
Put your cup down. This is sipping time. You are protected from the supposed evils in the universe while you are drinking your juice. Inhale. Inhale again. Inhale once more. Hopefully by the third or fourth time, you’ll actually be breathing. Have you ever really breathed? It’s the best.
Smile. Smile because your body works.
Drink again.
This time, be greedy. Take a deep swig, forget to savor every molecule. Indulge in it.
Smile. Smile because you are free.
There is infinite potential in your cup. The Brownian motion in your drink is ineffably complex. Chaos is reacting to your infinitesimally small actions between and during sips. You are the Causer of everything in the future — near and far from you. You are the Effect of that same infinite. In this very cup is everything. You are experiencing complete unity, and you will never fully appreciate it. You are swirling through existence as the exhale of God. You are drowning in your own Buddha nature. You are. You BE. You be.
Enjoy your beer for as long or as little as you see fit. Allow peace to sit on the floor with you. Welcome happiness to your your table.
Smile. Smile because you are alive.
Smile because you are loved jealously. (Trust me)
Smile because you can.
Topics: Philosophy, This is my life | 1 Comment »
Graffiti on the Wall.
By Billy | January 5, 2010
Don’t be afraid to be afraid.
Topics: Utterly Random | Comments Off on Graffiti on the Wall.
The Fires had Just Started: Part 2
By Billy | January 4, 2010
Fire burns, and fire hurts. Miss Hannah told me about God’s fire in the Moses’s book of exodus. God’s fire didn’t consume anything. There wasn’t even smoke.
My fire made smoke, and noise, and heat, and light. It was difficult to be mad at fire… the beauty it poured out. My fire did consume.
She told me the fire was easy to forgive because of how similar I was to it. She wanted to watch us grow and spread our light everywhere, even if it caused a snatch or two along the way. I can see the similarities, as everything I touch seems to turn to ash. Dark and useless. Spent.
I stayed alone for a long time after that first fire. I was ashamed and more than a little scared to do more wrong, but I genuinely didn’t feel like I wanted to go out anymore. When I once felt compelled to venture as far as I could in a single day, I now felt like sipping tea and sweeping floors. While I once wandered into enchanted castles and adventured with fairies, I explored Miss Hannah’s basement and garage. The cool air in her own home pleased me more than all the outdoor air for a while. Her home began to feel like my home. Her family began to feel like my family.
We became effective cohabitants. We cleaned, danced, spoke, set tables, and fought with the precision, practice, and pride of a marvelous pair of ballet dancers. Everything flowed so naturally that I forget when we first established the complex rituals we engaged in. The only forced things between us seemed to be the hugs and when she’d ask me about my past. She was an beautifully paged, open book. I was a reader, ready to soak her in. (My book was closed for her)
The second fire happened in the crawlspace one day while I was helping with spring cleaning. As the smoke poured out of the little square in the wall, Miss Hannah started screaming like I’ve never heard before. She wasn’t angry, she was scared. Miss Hannah has never showed me fear at all. She defied logic with the speed at which she came into the crawlspace.
“Thanks for getting me out of there, Miss Hannah, but I don’t think it was such an emergency that you needed to push me out so roughly,” I said amidst childish chuckling.
She was still in the space even when I had finished my laughter and speaking. I began to get worried. I thought she might be trying to make me feel bad, perhaps playing a trick on me. As I peered in, through the smoke which had thinned out, what I first thought were embers remaining on the dirt turned out to be her eyes, getting closer… quickly!
Hannah slammed her body into mine as she threw one foot in front of the other and ran upstairs with a small wooden box in her arms. I followed her cautiously and peered into her cracked bedroom door. She walked manically, speaking in hushed tones to herself as she turned on the water in the shower. Once I heard her get into the shower, I walked in and found that smoky little wooden box under her bed. It was slightly charred and very, very much locked.
————
more later
Topics: Works of Fiction | Comments Off on The Fires had Just Started: Part 2
My Autobiography. My Body
By Billy | January 2, 2010
It’s tougher, it’s darker, it stands up above.
They’re shamefilled neglections of infinite love.
They itch and they scream and they catch every seam
and they live with me
grow with me
ache with me
long with me
like confused distant memories
of probably-dream.
And I can’t say I’m proud, regretful, or pleased
when I look at the remnants of quilt that I’ve teased.
I just sit, maybe sigh, maybe wish back my life.
Or for glue for the pieces that I made with this knife.
–
These marks are a part of me.
These marks are apart of me.
They are not mine.
They are a part of the perfect design.
–
On the other side
of that glass
is a boy
with a mask
and a knife
that he thinks is a toy.
There’s a past and an ache
and some nights spent awake.
And he’s watched you
and loved you
and the choices you make.
In his eyes
you see tired
and frightened
and flame.
In his body
there’s a strength
and an age
and a name.
–
Topics: poetry | 1 Comment »
My bones are shaking.
By Billy | December 28, 2009
If you haven’t ever gotten to the point where you think you might explode, maybe you haven’t put in enough effort. If you’re comfortable with the way things are, perhaps you haven’t looked at the way things really are. If you think you’re doing everything you can, you should probably be pressing on.
Why aren’t you trembling with loving rage? How can you be satiated with this but not with that? How can you remain still?
Maybe this is just my opinion, but maybe there’s more to do still. Maybe I want your help. Maybe I need it.
Topics: Nonfiction, This is my life, Utterly Random | Comments Off on My bones are shaking.
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