ROMance

What a day...

I woke up at 7:00 and rushed out the door to get to school before 7:30 (an obscene hour, if you ask me). Thankfully the girls I take with me found other ways to get there, but I still feel... well, dumb. I didn't even turn on my alarm, for heaven's sakes!

It's been a helter-skelter kind of day.

My brain is helter-skelter, too.

On one of the blogs I follow, the main topic of late has been the author's adventures through an online relationship. Ten posts long, so far, and apparently there's more. :O

Now this is, mind, a seventeen-year-old, in-the-thick-of-puberty-and-high-school take on things, but the only online "dating" experiences I've ever had were bad ones, as in a guy said he loved me and turned out to be a creeper, so I blocked him and moved on.

But can it really work? (eHarmony says it can, but you can't trust corporations these days.)

I find it hard to believe that you can really truly fall in love with someone over the internet. I can see how you could find someone of interest or someone you might like to take on a date, but love? I don't believe in it. There's something so intrinsically cold and unfeeling about internet relationships. I enjoy you, my readers, and all your jokes and feedback, but I could never see myself falling in love like that (especially not the ladies. Heavens, no).

But I do see the appeal. I like to think of my blog as "concentrated Alexa: all the opinions with half the obnoxious." My real-world friends can probably attest to this, except they all comment via Google Buzz rather than on my actual blog (I'm telling you, you guys are missing out by doing so. Just sayin'). So boys who would usually be repelled by my loud and wonderfully annoying personality might find me super appealing, attractive, and insightful (if I do say so myself) on my blog.

So, being the poet that I am, I wrote a poem expressing my feelings with more than a little alliteration. Admittedly, my favorite part of this poem is the title. Aren't I just... just so clever? You don't have to answer. I already know I am. }:)

ROMance

I don’t believe in love at first site.
I cannot discern personality from pixels,
Character from characters,
Or status from stat messages.
I find nothing exciting in email,
Attractive in AIM,
Or fun in Facebook.
I do not believe in e-harmony—
Or e-chemistry—
But,
Then again,
It’s never happened to me.

What about you, readers? Will you have an internet marriage, or a traditional courting experience? Do you use the internet for laughs, or finding your soulmate? Or flirting, for that matter? (Like those weird Zoosk commercials. Honestly, who actually does that?)

Death is Unfair

Yesterday I had to bury my guinea pigs.

I got a call from my mom right as I was beginning another day at band camp. When she told me that my piggies had died during the night, I couldn't help myself. I bawled. I cried. I couldn't get control of myself, so I went home.

Seeing their little bodies sprawled out in their cage cut my heart in half.

...

I'm crying too hard. I can't see the screen. I'll finish this later.



I was up until an obscene hour last night crying on and off. Jeez, I'm such a wreck. It doesn't help that I'm just emotionally drained from marching band. Normally I come home from marching band, crash on the couch, and watch TV with a piggie. Now I don't know what I'll do.

I thought a lot about her. Her name was Reeses. She was chocolate brown with patches of black and orange, and her hair was swirly. We bought her and her sister, KitKat, in a rural area. The previous owners bred guinea pigs partly for fun, partly for money, and partly by mistake (that's what happens when you put boy and girl guinea pigs in the same cage), and they charged us ten dollars for each of them. They're worth more than a million dollars to me.

On the ride home, my sister and held them in our arms because we didn't have a cage for them yet. She peed on me in the car, all over my shirt and on the seat belt. That was a recurring theme for the four years we owned them. Guinea pigs have very small bladders.

She loved to eat lettuce, and she licked my fingers when she wanted more. When we let them run around in the grass, they ate like lawnmowers and hid in the chives plant. In the winter when it was too cold for them to live outside under our porch, they stayed in my room or in my sister's. When I read books in bed I took one or the other out and let them crawl under the sheets or nibble the pages. Reeses once ate the corner of a library book, plastic cover and all.

We always called them dumb, not to be mean, but they were actually pretty smart. Reeses figured out that if I held out my hand to her, she should climb onto my arm and then she would be brought back to her cage. KitKat learned that if she jumped up on the roof of their little house, we might give her a treat.

They were usually nice to each other, but KitKat made it very apparent that she was in charge. Even though we had two water bottles for them to drink out of, Reeses always let KitKat drink and eat first. When they ran around in the grass, KitKat led the way, and Reeses followed with her nose practically shoved up KitKat's wee bum. Sometimes they fought, as sisters do, and they would nip hair off each other's bums. We affectionately called Reeses "baldy" as she had three or four large bald spots as a result of these little spats. But even so, it was obvious they loved and cared about each other. Even in death they were close, though KitKat had kicked Reeses out of their little house to die.

KitKat always had something to say, but Reeses was content to sit quietly in my lap and resorted to violence (biting me) when she had an opinion to state. She loved being held and stroked, and she purred like a little motor when she was happy.


I don't know if I'll be able to have another piggie. I leave for college in a year, and I probably won't be able to have a pet there. My parents are... reluctant. Piggies are stinky little critters, even if you clean their cage twice a week, and my mom isn't a fan of that.

Death isn't fair. If we had left them under the porch when our lawn got fertilized, KitKat and Reeses would still be alive. It was my sister's month to take care of them, and I want to blame her. I want to blame her so much. But I can't. I wonder, does she think about them as much as I do? Does she cry in the shower, at night, at lunch, in bed, like I do?

We buried them on Friday at 10:15 am in a Boutique shoebox lined with a handtowel we had used when we gave them baths. I pulled their cold, stiff bodies from the cage. It felt wrong. It felt... unnatural. Reeses didn't move, didn't struggle, didn't protest as she usually did. Her eyes were open, her beautiful, melted-chocolate eyes.

My sister put them in the hole my dad dug in the corner of our backyard. I hate that grave. I hate it.

Death isn't fair.

KitKat, Reeses... I love you. I love you so much. I know you're in a better place now, but I wish I could cuddle you one more time, just one more time.

Death

isn't

fair.

The Man of My Dreams Is a Tree?!

In other news: I'm feeling a little better, all. Inspiration has once again sprung forth, and I also couldn't wait to share what I've been working on the past few days.

I realized that the reason I was feeling so yucky about blogging was that I had a set schedule that was putting way too much on my plate. Hence I have decided to throw out the whole posting schedule, and am now going to post once or twice a week.

Now that I've got my head back together, here are some things to look forward to:

• More poetry: Poems on internet love (I'm making fun of people who have asked to date me on the internet and stuff like that), fish, and my soulful aversion to prose.
• Stories: Chapter-by-chapter postings of unfinished novellas, including a story about a puddle and another about a society of maneaters.
• Short Stories: Including a seven-year-old comatose mother of two, a blank-slate-child, and today's story of my dream-boy (he's also a tree).
• More Features: As promised, EAL's feature will be posted tomorrow! Also remember that I am always looking for other poets, prosets, and artists. :)
• More Art: Including a tree-man (for today) and a tree-woman (for later), broken eyes, birds and bird-people, and watercolors.

For today, I have a piece I wrote based off a dream I had two nights ago.

Have you ever had a dream in which you meet someone of the... opposite gender... and somehow yo know that you're completely in love and you'll never find anyone else like them in real life? That's the kind of dream I had last night, except the man of my dreams was part tree.

Can I say, WUT.

But it's true, and now I find myself condemned to search my entire life for a man who's also a tree so we can get married and have little tree-babies.

Crap.

Anyways, I couldn't help but use this as a bit of inspiration leverage. I assume you'd like to see what this dreamboy looks like? Well, here he is:

He's still a bit of a work in progress. Those are the flat colors, and later on I'll add  shade and dimension and probably a background. He has bark for skin, his eyes are ice-blue, and his hair shines pale-green in the sunlight. Do I know too much about this non-existent man? Um... Yes. Yes I do.

So there he is. One big hunk of woody hotness. He was really fun to draw, especially since I almost never draw men. When I started putting bark on his face, my sister was like "Why are you giving him a freaky skin disease?" I've learned that to avoid earning snarky comments from my family, I need to draw (and write) in privacy.

So aside from the characters in my dream (him, me, and some other dude (I think he was part bird, and he might have been funny, also)), the plot went something like this: I fell in love with a tree-man, and then some army marched by and I told him to hide and pretend he was a tree.

Goodness, I'm original, telling a tree-man to pretend to be a tree. I promise the story I'm writing is a little less obvious. Here, I'll even prove it. I've only written one little bit of a scene because writing in chronological order depresses, bores, and bores me. It's boring. So here's a little excerpt from my dream-turned-novella:

Something caught my eye—a movement apart from the rhythmic motion of the tree limbs swaying overhead and the wind swirling below. It was a seedling, and I would never have picked it out from the undergrowth were it not for the alarming rate at which it was growing. Such things were normal occurrences due to the State-of-Things, but even this was a bit of an oddity. Within seconds as I watched, the tiny sprout of green became a sapling, and the sapling a tree, with innumerable branches and leaves as green as emerald. And while certainly I was surprised to see a tree do such a thing, I was not prepared for what it did then.

As the rate of its growth slowed (by then the trunk was probably too large for me to wrap my arms around), the rough bark just above my eye level shifted, swirling to form some shape, a pattern. As I stepped closer, the image came into focus: it was a face, round and soft like a baby, but hewn out of wood. I staggered backwards, startled.  As I did the face shifted again, its features becoming harder, more refined. I stared, unable to tear my eyes away from this spectacle, as the face in the tree grew quickly older, the lips becoming thinner, the cheekbones more pronounced. Its eyes remained closed through all of this, as though the being were asleep, or perhaps dead.

Despite my fear and shock, somehow I was drawn to this strange creature, as though someone had tied a string to my heart and was slowly pulling me in. Without any thought I reached out my arm and gently ran my fingers across the surface of the bark, tracing the outline of the jaw, the brow. As I passed my fingers over those closed eyes, they opened, and suddenly I was staring into ice-blue eyes as real as any human’s.

I shrieked, jerking my hand back, yet those piercing eyes never left mine. I stood frozen, waiting for the apparition to pass, or for me to wake up from whatever dream this was. When neither happened, I again cautiously reached out my hand.

Suddenly, the rushing stopped. The face closed its eyes, and I could swear I felt the tree take a single sighing breath.

“Lisbeth?” he said, as it was apparent that the voice belonged to a man. My name was spoken accompanied by whistling leaves and water, as though the entirety of nature was saying it in unison.

“Yes?” I answered, finding my tongue able to speak.

“Help us?” He made it sound like a question, but I knew it was a command more than anything else.

His eyes opened again, shining so brightly it felt as though I was staring into the sun. I staggered back, released from my paralysis, shielding my eyes. The rush of the wind again filled my ears, a shrill cacophony of rustling leaves and shrieking voices, desperate and, it seemed, in pain.

I squinted through the light, trying to discern what was happening. To my amazement, the tree was not growing as it had before; rather, it was returning to a smaller state, the immense trunk growing steadily smaller and strangely misshapen. The towering branches fell, landing on the ground around me, as though sheared off; the roots tore themselves up and shrank back. And the face… I would have expected him to be in pain, but he was… smiling.

At last the transformation was complete, and before me stood a man, his skin gnarly and wooden like the bark of a tree. Leaves sprouted from his face, parting his wind-blown hair away from those mesmerizing eyes. Like snake’s eyes, I realized. You can’t look away.

He reached out a hand for me, his fingers thin and decorated by budding leaves. Every movement was filled with grace, yet there was a sinewy power behind those bark-covered limbs. Before he could take hold of me, though, he was on the ground, his eyes rolled up in the back of his head.

All I could think was, What in I’Soul’s name just happened?

Suggestions? Confusion? Constructive criticism? Let me know. c:

Lawnmowing, Love, and Lilacs

Today was my last day of school before summer starts! It's about time, too. :P

Ah ha, another lawnmower poem. It's an inspirational thing, mowing the lawn, is it not? This poem's even about plants! Coincidence? I think not! I wrote this on Saturday and edited Sunday and Monday to make it the best it could be.

This is partly inspired by my boyfriend--yes, I said it: my boyfriend--who is a microbiology genius. Most the things he talks to me about go in one ear and out the other. He's working on curing cancer, and I think his team is close. Did I mention he's just about to graduate high school? Yes. And he's curing cancer.

Anyways, loosely inspired by him. He's very sweet, and he would never mistreat me in any way. The only similarity is the scientific-ness of this poem. What can I say? Relationships make for great poetry, even if it's a little exaggerated.

Are you in a relationship? Is it an... INSPIRING one? Do tell.

Summer Bloom

Suspend me, saint-like, from the ceiling,

Strung up beside garlic and spice.

I bet I'll look nice when you move from this shack to a lab,

And you can study me all you want, but I won't change.

It's strange how you said you wanted me,

Only to pluck me from my roots so I could die before your eyes.

But I'd rather be dried than condemned to formaldehyde,

Watching dandelions go to seed while you read medical journals

And observe my body decaying inside a jar.

I know where they are.

When their petals began to wilt, you pumped them full of preservatives,

Injected dyes so you wouldn't have to see them decompose,

A daisy;

A rose;

Locked in the dusty corners of your memory,

A sickening surprise for me to find as I search your mind,

Looking for the "Why's."

I only bloomed so you could tell me I was pretty,

And when you found me I told you I couldn't last forever.

You thought you were so clever,

Hanging me like Peter from the rafters,

Sealing letters, making charts,

Calling up forbidden arts.

And I know you're trying, but

I'm

still

dying,

And all your efforts just won't work.

By the time you find a cure to mortality,

I'll have gone to seed,

And I'll teach my posterity to laugh

At the silly charts and stupid graphs

You made to save your garden of hearts.

A summer flower made to bloom in spring,

I'll leave you to wonder if you did something

Wrong,

Because I can't bear to watch, with my dried-out eyes,

As the could-have-been seed

slowly

dies.

The Archives: Disgusting Sappy Love Poetry

I have to post these before I forget.

(sigh) And this is the embarrassing part of being a writer: love poetry.

Once upon a time I was not in love with boys, and then suddenly I was. It was kind of scary. I had this weird crush for some reason on this kid (he shall remain unnamed...), and I had this... shrine-like collection of things I made about him. Namely, two comic strips, a bunch of pictures, and two poems.

The only thing I can share without dying of embarrassment is the poetry.

And you know, the funny thing is that now I look back and can hardly believe I liked him. He was kind of... icky.

Anyways, these are two nursery-rhyme-type love poems of disgusting sickly sweetness. The first one is from me to him, and the second from him to me. And... I wrote them both. Can I say desperate?

Dear Moon,
You are the moon, and I'm just a star,
You don't know me, but I know who you are.
I wish to give you my deepest love,
For now I will simply gaze from above.
But you are the moon, and I'm just a star,
And all I can do is watch from afar.
I'm not near as pretty as others, it's true,
But someday I'll shine just as brightly as you.

Love,
A Star

Dear Star,

I am the moon, and you are a star,

You don't think I see, but I know who you are.

I know you are looking at me from up there,

Did you really think that I just didn't care?

I love you, I love you, I love you, my dear,

And with me around you have no need to fear.

You are one of many, but just watch and see,

You are the star who most matters to me

.I promise to cherish and to hold you tight,

Together our glory will surpass the night.

I love you, I love you, a thousand times more,

The heavens will sing with our ev'ning amor.

Come closer, my darling, my beautiful friend,

Come dance with me, and our joy will not end.

Love,

The Moon