Oh god I want to create 

And I want to live life I 

Want to be bright and fast and streak across the sky on fire

Madly happy

In love 

Laughing 

I want to get out of my own skin 

I want to burn away my bones 

And supernova my heart

Explosion of emotion 

I want to wrap myself in the cords of vulnerability and affection 

Honest to goodness 

I want to smile with firelight in my eyes 

No more polite grins

Stretched thin, 

Blue

And empty. 

I want to unfold my wings 

And take off, 

See the whole world in true clarity 

And heart breaking color. 

What am I? 

Nothing. 

What will anyone remember? 

What does anyone remember now? 

A lunatic,

Crazed, perhaps? 

She tore down the mirror with hand-tipped claws.

A /mono/ possibly, /Mona/

Up the tree, a little tipped in the brain, 

Simple. 

Or even a red star burning out, 

Terrible and sublime (sub-lime) for a while, 

But in the end, 

Quite disappointing. 

I really am nothing that is thought of me, 

Only a hollow voice and a thirsty ego. 

A little too eager to please, 

But soul-dehydrating fearful of 

Falling short of all of your expectations. 

I would like to see with eyes unclouded 

Clearly, truly

At my best, 

I am lucky, 

a star smiled gently upon me 

But really I'm just mediocre 

Ochre

Ocre

Nothing at all 

But a small heart 

Trying to grow through the cracks 

In the sidewalk 

Towards a sun 

A billion miles away. 

Egomaniac

If I am left to my own devices for too long
The world whirls out of focus,
I lose my balance

My mind
my mind chatters away,
Digging a hole to hide in

No reason why,
Only that I am paranoid,
and a narcissist,
and I'm not entirely sure I am lovable,
deserve to be loved
at the same time that I believe
Everyone should love me. 

Feck

Damn everything.

I'm listening to Leonard Cohen, I read the New Yorker article about his death this morning.

I drank jasmine tea, understeeped while eating oatmeal and reading "Walk Two Moons".

This thesis won't write itself, but there are other things calling, other things neglected in the neglecting of it.

Leonard's muse. My muse, I don't really have a muse, but I have a twinkle star that won't come to my fingers, eludes my veins.

Deeply feeling, do you suppose? Or just a twisted column, kinked towards the bottom?

Damn everything with a fork and spoon, my life will probably sputter out, ghost promises and cobweb hopes.

The Cripple of Inishmaan, brutal and sweet and cruel, feeds some of this, perhaps. Bitter.

All of the words that 

Want to come out of me 

Have already been said before 

Redundancies and cliches 

Slithering from my typing fingers 

A hollow voice repeating, chirruping anxiously. 

It's just that 

I want to love-

want to be loved.

But I become a hurricane if I see 

A drizzle.

Instead of a fairytale mermaid, 

Languidly brushing her hair on the rocks,

I am a siren, and my song is sublime and terrible. 

Galadriel when tempted by the ring, 

Perhaps a thing of ugliness and repulsion-

When all I want is to be by your side, 

And have you at mine. 

But really, I am none of those things 

I am a girl, ordinary, awkward.

At a point in time where my life 

Has intersected yours 

And I hear a song from your heart that I like, 

I am drawn to the light in your eyes. 

Maybe this is nothing, or maybe it is everything. 

All I ask is:

Can we walk together a little while? 

Why is my heart a 

Black hole? My mind a windy 

field of barley. 

I am not so sad 

As the waterfall world, but 

I want to wail. 

Final for Intaglio Printmaking!

Love Song to Inertia

The main focus of  “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock” is the tension of inertia. Throughout the poem, Prufrock poises upon the edge of taking action or formulating an opinion, but time and time again, he backs down and drifts away on his underwhelming train of thought. This inaction is supported by TS Eliot’s use of repetition, imagery, and a nontraditional rhyming pattern. 

            Repetition in the poem helps to tie the stream of consciousness style of writing together, threading the entire thing together and uniting it with repeating questions and echoing lines.  The protagonist of the poem constantly asks, “Do I dare?” (676) about some unnamed action, and never really states whether he dares or not. Prufrock also asks variations of “How should I presume?” (676), somewhat echoing the thought of “Do I dare?” (676). In addition to these almost direct line repetitions, several lines are referenced or shuffled and rewritten at the ends of stanzas. For example, “If one, settling a pillow by her head,/Should say: ‘That is not what I meant at all./That is not it, at all.’” (677) and “If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,/And leaning toward the window, should say:/ ‘That is not it at all,/ That is not what I meant, at all.’” This restructuring of previous lines in the poem is a particularly clever way to retain continuity in an otherwise fractured stream of consciousness piece. 

            The poem’s use of imagery reinforces the theme of stillness and inaction. The first stanza introduces the inaction with the lines “When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherized upon a table;” (675) This line, though strange and dissonant if you think about it too hard, immediately conveys a feeling of lethargy and inactivity. The reader is thus prepared for a long, dreamlike collection of images and phrases that slowly build and then contract throughout the poem like the deep, passive breathing of a tranquilized patient. This sleepy image is reinforced throughout the poem, with lines like “And seeing it was a soft October night,/[the fog] curled once about the house and fell asleep” (675), and  “If one, settling a pillow beside her head,” (677). The poem’s theme of inaction is conveyed with sleepy and dreamlike imagery.

           Finally, the use of rhyme in the poem imitates the feeling of thought, bouncing up and down then trailing off. Throughout the poem, the pattern of rhyme bounces from line to line, then falls dead before being picked up again.  There is no constant abab pattern of rhyme; more often than not the pattern is aabbcaa, or aabacdefe. The rhyming flits about at its own discretion, rhyming some lines, then not others, and then rhyming two lines in a row. Both rhyming and non-rhyming lines carry the poem forward and create pauses after stanzas. An erratic thought process, or a state of dreaming are brought to mind by the pattern of rhyming, further conveying a feeling of inaction. 

            The poem “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock” seems to mainly focus on a feeling of inertia, while the protagonist leads up to and down from the question of “Do I dare?”. Prufrock never comes to a decision, merely allowing his thoughts to trail off. He avoids taking action, choosing to stay still at the brink of acting. All of the elements of the poem including its use of imagery, repetition, and rhyme, help to convey the tension and release of inaction.

Abcarian, Richard, Marvin Klotz, and Samuel Cohen. Literature: The Human Experience. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2013. Print. 675-777