Two-headed Poem

(To explain the title, love, I once read that when writing a poem, it can emerge as two intertwined poems, and you must then work to separate them from each other. I haven't actually experienced this phenomenon much, there have been a couple cases, but this is the first that seemed distinctly so. As it is, I decided that I'd break that rule, I'd let this poem stay siamese-twin, and try to further twist and weave it, and so I did; what you shall read presently, is two-headed, dualistic, two concepts in my head right now that seem to play off of each other, separate but entirely related.)








I.
Mmm,

The complexities of language, 

Crashing waves beneath floating papers, 

Cobwebs and spindly plants.

II.

The refinement of her expressions,

Intricate and infinite; 

A testament that everything communicates; 

It is we who must choose to listen.

III.

Looking beyond, between, underneath, 

All of the winding tendrils around written words, how wondrous, 

More wondrous still, how you can nearly read her thoughts 

from the positioning of her eyebrows and ears. 

IV.

They all have different voices, 

You know, 

Mountain peak and ocean depth, 

Short bark and long drawl, lilting or singsong. 

And their voices are no different, loud quiet infinite--

Like ours 

Character Sketch

He smokes smarties and swears like a sailor.
Dark, dark eyes under a mop of blond hair,
insolent swagger even though he's not yet old enough for a learner's permit.
Thinks he knows all the girls, but they haven't even started looking at him.

Takes pride in petty, childish theft; silly boy, don't you know you won't ever have to grow up?


Even under all of this crustiness, he says please and thank you
with sincere gratitude,
Pure heart under pretentious bluster,
pretty song flowing from a clogged stream bed. 

Perfect Harmony, But I Can't See The Moments They Choose Not To Reveal

Look at them:
they're so pretty.
Seem to know where they're going,
but maybe it's nothing but an oily surface
that reflects back light.

Look at their dance:
intricate and simple steps.
Seem to know what they're doing,
but maybe it's a pattern that's all made up
only in their heads, and maybe that's perfectly wonderful.

Look at them sing:
all the words fit together, rhyme and reason.
Not a note out of place,
but I guess I still haven't learned to properly improvise,
and there is music underneath that which I can hear. 

Seasonal Affective Disorder maybe? But that too would feel like theft and misalignment. None of it matters anyway.

So basically, it feels like almost nothing I'm doing with my life lately is actually getting me anywhere. Don't know where it is I hope to go, exactly, but I'm feeling terribly stagnant and impotent.
I don't feel like I'm really learning anything well.

What do I have to give to people? Life as connection and network; but I don't know how to do that really. I'm not really woven into life, I don't really feel like I fit; I am jangling, dissonant.
I keep skipping days, or rather, living through them as through a dream, something to get me somewhere else I already am. I don't know... Can't really explain. And I guess that's what I figure my purpose is, explain the unexplainable, but does it even matter? Even if it matters not to anyone else, is it enough that it seems to matter to me?
I'm getting nowhere, and yeah, it feels like I ought to be getting somewhere, but I don't know how. I've got suspicions, but not much more than that, and I don't want to look at them too hard.
Trapped and stuck in all of these things I thought I didn't have to deal with anymore, or even yet. Somebody keeps saying that it is so easy to get out of it all, to move past it all, but here I am, futile and strung up.
Maybe I keep looking outside of myself too much, but I learn from the patterns of others. I'm kinda lost, and maybe it's just the weather, but I don't know. I'm so quick to adopt the things in others that I think fit in me, but I still feel like that's a little invalid, a little untrue. I'm so colorless, it seems, but that doesn't sound true either. Looks like I'm looking for truth, even though I thought I'd decided against that long ago. I decided to search for love and compassion rather than truth. Truth is so subjective.
Chasing my own tail and spinning off after the tails of others.
I don't really believe in this world, I guess that's why I don't fit. Where do I fit? It doesn't seem like I really fit here anymore, but even that is transitory.
Nothing's the right color. But that doesn't seem to matter either. I feel so autistic. But nobody believes that either, and probably they're right. Yeah, still stuck halfway between my feelings and others' sayings. So many dang directions...
Isn't it weird that you can live in your own body and head 24 hours a day, and still you don't understand yourself entirely? You don't know where everything inside you comes from or why? But it never works for me to just surf over it all, I have to experience it, dips and crescendos. I'm so torn still, still don't know why. Still don't know why. Thought I was getting closer, and maybe I am, but I really don't know. It's like nothing I do matters, and in one way, I don't care, but in another, it's driving me nuts. Sometimes I wonder if I'm one of those nineteen to twenty-one year olds who's going to spiral off into nothing in a fantastic display of insanity, but even that is nothing but idle curiosity, though I admit I have a morbid and self-effacing side I don't like to indulge often but still it comes up, all self-satisfied and smug every once in a while. Sometimes it's kinda perversely pleasurable to stare into the void, eyes wide and glittering.
Is it possible to be objective about oneself? I guess that's something I'm trying to figure out, but even that annoys my sometimes. I don't like being removed from myself and my feelings. I kinda have a tendency, it seems, to run away from that which makes me uncomfortable, but something always yanks me back, and now I am tiredly resigned to just going through whatever it is I have to. 

Between the ears

Tiny person walks -

breeze of thought swaying, swirling;
tightrope within skull



(When it will not do
to wax lengthy,
Haiku)

Hands

The last time I ate pomegranate,
I stained one bead on my wooden bracelet pink.
Later, I took it off, so i could better hold your hands
and tickle you.
Somehow my sister got a hold of it,
twirling it in her hands and stretching the elastic.
You took it from her, stretched it over your hand,
(almost the same size as mine)
and you held it out to me.
I slipped my hand through,
A perfect space within a circle of fingers
and cup of palm.

2nd Draft of "Oh gods alive", better flow

Oh gods alive,
      the beauty and sadness of all...
The heady soup of my nature,
        Earth and sky,
        stone and ether,
made from each other,
The figure eight of eternity;
Don't you see?

Perfect imperfection,
              I can feel it deep
              deep swirling in my head,
              my ribcage;
that universe of universes
        and song-filled black hole
        just the depth, the depth of it-
Counter-clockwise
                as energy goes, a black hole,
But perhaps in name only,
       could a black hole accept, create,
       or give back rapture?

       Heady head,
       grounded heart,
       deep gut.
Ha, I am matrix,
Woven weaving
Twined, my dear,
Nothing but something
               sculpted around other things,
To see, you must confront
      what seems like emptiness,
      but never ever is.
God is empty space
         that we try to put form and substance to,
Then missing the point entirely:
Masked and cloaked and idolized,
               Perhaps we do the same to ourselves...

I worship
  the all in, 

everything:
        I want to swallow, and have swallowed the sun,

        And I have been swallowed in return

Excavation

Isn't it weird? This year is almost over, I have less than a month left to be eighteen, even though I'm still seventeen and mostly four and seven and sometimes forty. But this year, this strange, interesting, beautiful, bounteous, change-filled and growth-laden year, it's almost all over, vapor slipping through my fingers once again. The years are getting shorter, the ratio of year to years lived becoming more and more unequal.
Four years upon this blog, sculpted and shaped and forgotten and remembered...

Did you know that words don't stick? It seems like they used to, but now they often don't, and I can't figure out why. Perpetually perplexed, haha. (She smiles wryly) We'll pretend that we are perfectly comfortable in ourselves in this world, shoved against everything far too tightly. But there's space, right?
There's space inside. and sometimes, far too much space outside, a different angle on everything. Too many questions and not enough answers.
Re-pacing every fixed point in my past life, re-treading the old dirt paths of experience. Oh I am here again, and this is what I did then. This is now, here I am now, again (breath floating off into the spiral extended from heart). The ghosts of the past sliding by, more translucent every go around, but still there, ethereal as they are. Now is nothing but an old sheet thrown over an invisible shape, though. But whenever I say "so it is", never again will it be. That's why words won't stick; in their way, they are solid, implastic; strange as that sounds, but the way words are formed-- casting butterflies in concrete so that movement and flight crash dead to the ground.
To say that I am contradiction is to give out only a small amount of information, but if someone caught that and held it and looked at it long and hard, they would see the universe swirling in every hole, and they would, I think, understand at some point.
Woven tightly around self and time and every discovery in people and other nouns. Wound tightly and loosely around the years, even as they slip by, evading every grasp. Grasp loosely, I suppose, and they will comply, tattooing my skin and heart as they wave farewell from the edge of void and eternity. 

Spiral Galaxy

Supernova without purpose,
     empty energy expelled into further emptiness.
In the midst;
Ecstasy.
Afterwards, nothing (             )

Casting off the shell,
 underneath raw and electric--
biological meta-crisis, to thieve from another's mouth.

Hm now, how now,
How much was the universe edited before
it came to be,
was released unbridled in all of its fury,
    chaos,
beauty and order?
Or was she, he, they,
    am edited at all?

Meaninglessly meaningful
 wonderings,
 all that seems human,
 sent out naked and barely born,
or cultivated with immense care,
 it makes no difference.
Who is it they're trying to reach?

Behind my words, no thing.

Objectivity,
       god,
       life.
Sputter and fizzle away into line and space

Whirligig (Words ain't comin' terder)