In honor of the best day of year!

Today is the last day of 2011, and that means another all day Twilight Zone marathon on SciFi (I will not use that god-forsaken "y").

In honor of this blessed day, I submit for your approval a segment of the poetry series I wrote inspired by the work of the incomparable demigod Rod Serling (who would've been 87 this year):

Nightmare at Sea Level

Tonight she travels to the darkest corners
Everything intact except for her
Something isn’t quite right
Her memory ties a bow around the phrase:
“Let me take you home.”
The ribbon snakes down and comes undone by an unseen force
The neatness splashes away
Tonight she goes all the way
Allowing zippers
To converse with buttons
For once to hear the chime of fingernails against her wrist bones
And not push them away

But just out of curiosity,
Let
Me
Take
You
Home

Lights flick on like Polaroid
Gremlins scatter across the planes of her unkempt mind
“Did I do something wrong?”
Did
I
Do
Something
Wrong
She curiously stops her breath
Just to see if she can make this nagging feeling stop
If she were just to scratch at her temple
With the drag of a serrated Zoloft
Leave that as evidence that you should’ve taken the call
It’s not the seat; it’s the airplane
It’s not the memory; it’s the goddamn dream
It’s rubber hands and sandpaper faces
The choke of motor oil on the collar of a shirt softened by time, softened by her breath
As soon as Sun rises, Venus is visible draped in barely visible layers of steam and frost
She is alone in that assurance

“I have to go. You should too.”

She runs her fingers over the bite marks on her shoulder

She tells you she’s sick
Won’t you even allow the possibility?

It's been a long time...

It's been nearly two years? And for all of you who could give a fuck-less:
Yes! I'm still alive. Now continue not giving a shit.
To all of you who might actually care, after a period in 2010 I call my "little vacation" to a certain floor in a certain hospital, I was faced with chronic writer's block, to the point that I thought I might not ever imagine again. Anyone who knows me knows my imagination is my greatest (and only true possession). I had no moment to mourn my loss. I was in a completely different head space. I had had the bandages unfurled from around my broken skull, a mirror handed to me, and to my horror the woman staring back at me had by all accounts and despite her best efforts been...

DOMESTICATED.

I was a poet no more.
But I would do my former self a great disservice if I didn't share with her audience her last thoughts.

Confirmation

Can you patchwork a dream?
Cut balloons and drift down
So that she could confirm herself to him
Make herself so tiny she finally felt the choke of time

How could we walk under all of that pressure?
She thought
So light in a universe of heavies
Too light in a universe of darkness

“I would never not love you.”

She wanted to sew these letters to the air
But her tools did not work
Her tissuey arms could not move
Soft joints no longer flexed

Subject to his magnetism
She went limp in the palm of his hand

He was a glittering bead on her surface
Gently pulling at his surroundings
Her patterns becoming warped reflections on his skin
Climbing and descending into her valleys

Unthreaded seams

“Anticipation”
She had never not seen everything at once
Now everything was as linear as the ribbon that was spiraling away from her as the Time Traveler pulled away at everything.

Consummation

He lifted fingers into the shape of a leafless tree
While his right hand plucked the air like a bluebird nesting
His face cradled by her palm

The sound that came from electric air
Were his tears
Were his first kiss
Were the first time he saw a movie and thought his heroes were performing just for him
Jaw on floor
At magic unfolding so much bigger than he

She could see it all as she looked at him
And began a hymn in a voice
Metallic and soft
Warm and measured
Percussion and string and woodwind
But the sounds were all his own

He placed down the instrument made of lightening
Ran to the solid violin in the corner

He stroked its neck
Cold pegs
Ran his fingers down it strings
And felt heat resonating from its belly
His fingers flinched
As if F-Holes glowed red

He held his bow up to the sunlight
Angular face bisected by the shadow of its curved spine
He concentrated on the sounds around him

Slicing into steel strands,
He allowed a few melodic syllables to escape the strings
Embarrassed though he was seemingly alone

Sound traveled up into his fingers
Down his arm
And into his chest
But his music was nothing close to her voice

Sensing his defeatism
She extended a cottony finger and pressed it to his sternum
Sound echoed from his ribs and flowed back into the instrument and filled the room
He played through the pain

Concentric discs shot from the instrument slicing through his chest
Quaking his lungs
Sending ripples through his breath

The more sound that came
The more clearly he heard her voice
The more D, A, G, then A seared fingertips
The more dust rose from the kiss of bow against strings

Not until she saw his death did she stop
Her voice screeched to a halt
Refused to compose that scene
Removed her fingers from her instrument
So scared for him to be burned alive
But not knowing that's always how he wanted to die

Love at First Sight

The first time she saw him,
She wanted to snatch him up,
Place him in her apron pocket,
Use him somewhere else
Because he didn't quite belong here with us.

Without seeing, he knew there was more.
Wasn't content with what he could taste,
Had a constant thirst for what was underneath.
He acted out by walking backward and spitting at the sky.
Most proud when he kept his own mind guessing.
Pulling at strings just because he could,
Just see what they'd do,
All the rest merely a test you pass by not listening.

Silly Earthlings

We were too blinded to see our own beauty

Escaped the trees to forget the forest

Not aware of this experiment to justify his existence

Abandoned to a corner of space,

But announced that we were the center of it all

She decided to entertain the idea

Appliquéd the aurora Borealis to our quilted sky

A patch she'd been hiding

“Too ugly,” His Majesty once said

So we were perfect for her gifts

A weak race

He'd grown bored with us

Focused on the next perfection

She made us feel lucky to be alive

Every flourish she added

Perfected us into a unique algorithm

Increasing our obsolescence

Only still breathing and unrecycled because we’d been forgotten

But we were being admired by at least one higher being

She dubbed us, “tiny blue spot.”

Marveled at how much we could hate

When we looked all the same from a billion yards away

She cared that we didn't kill each other

Fingers crossed

Gripped by our mundane dreams

Feeble attempts at sending signals

So we didn't feel so alone

All the pretty dots

Brief blinks

Snap shots

She could've fell in love with each one of us

A monolith of a super computer in flesh

But there was one

Not content to be considered with the rest

She dubbed he, “The Time Traveller”

And if she would've fluttered a silken lash, she would've missed him

Love at First Site

The full moon shattered like a crystal ball
While he was trying to dial home

The night went dark
And we were none the wiser
Just called it a new moon
While she found the proper replacement,
"Perhaps a button will do?"

She fastened this piece to our sky with phosphorous thread
It flickered a bit catching the Sun's glow
And her eyes, two zipper flys, filled with delight at the sight of a frozen creation
Filled with life
Movement
She squinted in time to see the ping of the Paleozoic
She hushed and hid as she watched one of us leap to the moon
Still attached by needle and thread
She peaked back dodging dots sailing beyond their ripple in the sheet

She felt more than pride
Something like a word she hadn't sewn yet
Doubt?
Where did she hear such a concept?
Had she already learned it from watching us?

She reduced to timidity hadn't the heart to secure the moon
Just left it dangling from a thread
"It's more 'beautiful' that way?"