the.heathen.&.the.martyr pt.1

I.
What am I?
A martyr with no cause
Separate my bones
Part the cracks and refill with resin
The sulfurous dust
Ejected from a god I never saw--
The sacred and profane carefully labeled
In little orbs of light
It seems the willingness towards-
Crucifixion-
Could get me held high on only stained wood
And coloured glass
... I'd be on display
But silent.
Saviours cannot bleed for their cause
If they lack blood--
I cannot siphon feeling
If I lack the thinnest skin
Footsteps tread like barbed wire
And handshakes move like words
Even my loudest scream
Could not faze the smallest cloud
So tell me darling...
How can god hear?

.miss.

What makes you so important all of a sudden?
You pretty little poseur, your words running like you ran so many months ago from everything you held dear... or so you told us.
You act so big and speak so small, tossing your hips like a pinup doll
Don't hold back, or if you do, don't announce it like a weakness lined in the same lipstick with which you trace your bones
Fragile boy, porcelain puppet, your actions don't move any more mountains than my pity
Makes you halt your stomping steps, deceptively fierce up and down this city
I've seen your vulnerability
I've seen your tears
I've seen your bones break and your empires fall
Step it up honey, you can't fool them all

Credit: Douglas Thompson for photography

cure.for.snow

Nothing can touch her now. The bitterness she once felt vanish crept back into her eyes last night. How dare they. Look at her... now she wants to pluck out her skin again until its raw and bleeding like the plastic knives and safety pins of her angsty over-dramatic past. "Look at me", she used to try to tell the world, "I hurt. I fucking hurt". Now there isn't any tracery, no attention deprived, kohl-lined eyes to stare pleadingly into to eyes of others. She had to realise, one day, one doesn't have to be unique to hurt, to feel pain. Its not something set aside for painfully thin 15 year olds who kiss boys&girls and inhale ragweed like oxygen. They parody their own lives while giving it away for a pitiful glance, a bottle of White Horse, or teased and twisted platinum hair, bleached as white as God. Her name used to be Nothing. She had no Ghost, no Zillah, no Molochai... no youth.
The emphasis of pain converts it to something else, an art, something beautiful. Look outside, she is looking at the snow now, she can't cry, no she can't. She wants to one day, to let it all out, but she can't. She knows how to feel... but not how to paint her silver and blue on this lost winter night.

love.like.home.sick

"Don't second guess me darling", she says. Strands of broken ribbon and tic-tacs are all that is left of the past year and there is nothing she can do, no, now she is pacing, look what you've done. Each heavy heartstring tied to the pink plastic of her flip-flops, staining the already rosy floors with sighs. She feels integrated, she feels objectified, she feels like she'll never feel home again, never feel your fingers tug beneath her skin, and churn her stomach into oblivion.
Normal. She feels normal. Stepping it off her elevation, and watching her breathing catch in her throat on rewind.
Its so hard to get used to him becoming a mere aspect of her day, instead of the being entire day itself
She is still feverish with the love sickness empathy syndrome... so far beyond her comprehension... but she liked it better when the feeling was mutual like the pavement outside is warmly receiving the rain like an old friend, like a feather dream, like a cushioned grave... like home.
She wants to go home.

"It's their world, outside, that they could set on fire
She wants to jump off cliffs while holding on to you
...Well go ahead, you're love sick"

Credits: Mat Devine for song lyrics

.burn.

I want to be invisible today. I would be a mischievous dreamer and meld together strings of clouds so that I may descend safely from my visions, finally landing with a soft disturbance among the long grass. I'd tie together bundles of hay and set them alight, drawing with the imprints left on my eyes by the white heat in the darker autumn twilights. I'd twirl them around like a hellishly fascinating baton dancer, with maroon flavoured lips and innocent cotton candy eyes. Pretending to be a lost gypsy child I could roll down hills without the ever present fear of grass stains ruining the fabric I sewed with broken fingers. Their crooked bones grab at my hair when I am asleep and put strange dreams of strange women in my strange mind.
They never leave my side.
Will you ever leave my side?
Draw me with embers and leave me to dance here, in this wonderland. Creaky floorboards do me no justice and high airy ceilings leave me feeling to small. The little adult girl I'd kill to take care of is making me taller than what I actually am&uncomfortable&out of place&terribly... terribly... ugly.
"But at least I'm still lit", I tell the ashes each day. "You may be beautiful, but I am alive"

.sleep.

Muscles are tense and cheeks are pale. She sang a shallow lullaby (over & over) trying to lull herself to sleep. Slumber is a distant acquisition, and she paced discontently in her room, wearing away the nihlistic, groaning floorboards with each restless step.
"Lovers burned and took their revenge
The lion sails tonight..."
Her voice shook more and more with each word:
"Once consumed and turned to ash
In its cold blue light"
The words turned her mind over in their disturbingly harmonious hands until she finally sank into the depths of her own self, and lay still.
When she awoke, she was relieved to know where she was, in her room. the familiarity curved her lips into a smile and she opened her window. The sun was out and it was raining. Perfect. She hummed and she blinked, until she noticed the tips of her toes were singed. Then, she cried.

"Only a lover lost burns in GhostFire"

Credits: Tiger Army for song lyrics

thank.ful

Human nature. Something in which I have had more skepticism than faith, but nevertheless, it never ceases to amaze me. Brittle bones and unstable tissue walking around, making entirely different worlds with each other... humanity is a beautiful thing. The complexity of each different feeling is astounding if one stops to think about it. What nerves, what cells prompt us to act as we do? Me personally, most people would describe me as a shy girl, one who covers her face with hair and perplexity. I suppose I have dabbled in illicit activity to earn a reputation otherwise, but with this Starting Over Point, I feel i have some leeway to personify myself as I am. it doesn't matter to me how many foreign grains and dusts line my arteries, how much smoke lines my lungs... how much guilt and shame still lingers from past experiences.

Forgive my descent into these matters, it just never fails to amaze me how much other people think of me than I think of myself. Its not that I am lacking esteem or pride (I have plenty of both), I just realise exactly who I am, and why I am that way.

The point I am trying to make, is that humans are painfully aware of themselves too, and of their mortality. Each day, our cells die off, one day, we will all lie still.

But yet we can still promise each other forever when we know we won't always be here... and we can still say "I love you" when we see dead skin decorating our eyes. Thats what I love about being human... its what I am thankful for.

a.simple.god

Today, a young woman wrote a letter to God, but all she could think about was how many stamps were necessary in order for him to receive it. She went back to her room and picked out the three most colourful stamps she could find. Every time her grandmother sent her a package, she soaked the cardboard box until the stamps peeled off and then kept them in a little tin box. Whenever she thought of her grandmother and of Iran, she thought of mountains and mosques, both of equal splendour, bustling marketplaces which smell like kabob and sabzi, and rustling skirts sweeping the streets while women donning brightly coloured scarves carried children, bread, or fruit from one place to the other. She thought if one were to hover above the ground, they would seem like tropical birds skimming the surface of a desert, leaving clouds of dust behind them.
She stuck the stamps on the envelope with glue stick and smoothed the corners so that the perforations would not tear. "He will like this", she said. Her small room smelled of saffron; her grandmother had sent her some in a little packet covered with florescent Farsi lettering, advertising the vendor. She inhaled deeply, and smiled. The bracelet Grandmother Mehri had sent her reflected a curse sent by a pair of evil eyes whose host stumbled past her window. The young woman didn't notice. After she finally sealed the letter, she placed it on the pillow of her cot, grabbed her schoolbag, locked her door and left for her French class.
When she returned from class not even an hour later, the letter was gone. The young girl smiled knowingly and sat down to commence with her studies.
It seems that Allah likes saffron and pretty stamps after all.

.needles.

I have never been afraid of needles, not since I was young. The syringes of my youth interrupted my veins so much, that I never thought anything of them. I even sat with a mild sense of fascination at every pinprick. It was, after all, most of what I had known. I had often wondered what my parents would have thought if they knew what my sister Lilly used to do to me. They were both absent since before I can recall. Lilly once told me that I poisoned them, but then again, Lilly was always saying things like that. Most people now tell me she was mad. I think she was the best kind of martyr, always trying to save me from my natural, unholy nature.
When I was six years old, I had a nightmare. I woke up screaming like a banshee, streaked with sweat and with hot bedsheets twisted around my smallish body like a cocoon. She was eleven at the time, but calmly walked into my room with the somber, disciplined stride of an old madame. She slapped me across the face, which only worsened my agitated state and then sat on the edge of my bed and pinned my arms down. My face was red and swollen, spit was trickling out of my mouth, and yet my Lilly whispered, "You poor, beautiful child" before continuing with her "standard procedure". Both of our parents had been dead or otherwise absent for only a short time, but Lilly knew what to do.
The mahogany armoire had three little drawers at the bottom, my sister went to the last one and retrieved the syringe. I could still see a bit of dried blood on the tip of the needle from last time, but the terror I felt from my nightmare prevented me from noticing until Lilly wiped the tip of it on the hem of her skirt. She marched to the small shrine near the fireplace and filled the syringe with blessed water (brought about by the local friar, who took pity on 'poor poor orphans' such as us). Lilly shook her head and her dark curls brushed the pale contours of her face. "You would think that God would take pity on such an unfortunate creature", she said. Lilly had repeated this like a mantra, ever since she had been left to take care of me. "Hold still child". I felt the tip of the needle nudge against my temple. I tried to hold still, but the fear hadn't left me yet. The pressure form the needle was taken away and Lilly backhanded me again, snapping my neck backwards. "Don't you understand?" her voice was shaking and her face was turning an ominous shade of crimson. I wanted to cry even more... she was only trying to help me. "I need to do this to you. I need to make you *smack* all *smack* better!" She stopped screaming, pushed me roughly into my pillow, and shoved the needle through the thin layer of skin covering my left temple.
After that, there was only darkness.

I awoke two days later but my vision never returned and neither did my dear dear sister, my Lilly. People told me she went mad and killed herself but suicide is a sin and I know for a fact, Lilly did not sin.
She had tried to cleanse herself like she cleansed me, and she misaligned the needle and holy water had flooded her frontal lobe and cerebellum. She had died with grace and purity.
She died a saint.
Now, I live for Lilly... purging myself of sin, so that when I die, I can join her up in heaven. People invaded our house, and when they found me they took me away, but i still keep my needles, her needles, our needles. The dried blood wiped away on my skirt, I purify my mind, and the darkness becomes brighter and brighter and brighter each time...
Soon... I will be as white as God.

Credits: Sami Ollanketo for photography

times.of.flight

Are we climbing up or down? It is hard to differentiate the ladder from clouds, the clouds from smoke, the smoke from aching eyes, and eyes from flashing lights, searching for any minuscule remnant of reason one may come upon during these times.
These are the times of flight.
When open-tongued words leap from mouth to mouth, polluting the silence with a constant hum, like the protest of a dirty engine suffocating itself with diesel fuel and lonely songs played with accompaniment from static and the situation of being In The Middle Of Nowhere.
The rustling of maps makes me want to draw my own and leave this town. If I make the map, I'll always know where I'm going. I'll draw it in expensive ink and razzle-dazzle rose crayola crayon so I can obnoxiously unfold it all over an anonymous cafe table and pretend I am from another country and I'm trying to find San Francisco but somehow ended up in Harlem.
I will pretend to be Russian, blond and tall
If you are tall enough, you don't need ladders unless you want to get your hands dirty. Personally, I know my fingers get along with dirt very well. They say that beauty is only as deep as your nails can dig... but there are only so many colours one can wear with bones.

Credits: Taylor Williams for photography

small.world

They were running, trying to ward off the remaining coolness of that spring evening, hiding behind slides and ricocheting off swing sets, trying not to get caught. Being "it" was the my guiltiest pleasure as a child. It gave me a sense of power, having my classmates flee before me...
It was different for them, though. They had long passed the age at which it was possible for such a game to invoke such a mad rush of accomplishment. Her palm brushed the aged leather of his jacket just as he turned around and caught a few loose strands of her hair between his fingertips, and lifted them off into the air again, careful not to hurt his companion. She darted in between the swings, giggled madly as the chipper wind skidded across her rosy cheeks. This girl, this wide-eyed brown-haired girl, she loved this man-child. She always thought his eyes were twins with hers. Together, she knew they could be four beautiful eyes, two fragile skulls, and twenty intertwining fingers.
They lay in the grass and created personalities for the passing clouds and the strolling leaves leftover from the previous autumn, breezing jealously past their taller, more verdant counterparts.
He picked up a leaf and cupped it in his hands, delicately, so as not to crumble the poor thing and held it out to the April breeze. It was swiftly lifted up into the firmament and disappeared from their view.
"You know", he said, "We just altered the course of that leaf's existence. Wherever it will end up now, it will be because of us".
The girl thought for a minute and asked, "Well, does it really matter? The leaf died last autumn when it fell off the tree." The boy sat up and cupped the girl's cold face in his hands.
"One day, we are all going to die, but it doesn't mean we are all going to cease to matter. That leaf is dead, but it changed us in a way... we are sitting here now... underneath the sky, with remnants of what was one a life in our hands" He lay back down and stared at the sky. The girl felt really really small.
"Hold my hand", she begged.
The boy slipped his hand through hers and she felt the callouses grazing his thin fingers while they watched the sun go down.
They stayed like that forever.