Summer of Interlochen

We were confined to four invisible walls: nature, creativity, nurturance of ability, and mandatory knee socks. These walls were called Interlochen, Center for the Arts, and within resided a cornucopia of culture, passion, and imagination. We came from all over the world: from Namibia to Iceland, California, Australia... yet despite the differences - as a cabin-mate from Poland turns to me, eyebrow raised, and inquires: "What means pee-pee?" - we shared a common goal. We all possessed a certain drive toward cultivating talent, whether we worked with our hands, our bodies, or our minds. Despite four walls confining us, we gamboled from hall to hall, through the forest, by the lakes, searching for a sense of self, for meaning in our art, for perfection in our work. We had dreams. Big dreams. In a place where everyone was so different, where there existed abound individualism, we were uninhibited. We all possessed that same passion.

Music wafts through the air from morning until night, as if an opus has replaced the singing of the birds. On my way to class, my shoulder bag beats out time against my hip. There are watercolor paints in the grass, and at lunchtime, the musical theatre majors burst into an impromptu performance of Orphan Annie’s "Hard Knock Life." I lie supine in the grass, laptop propped on my stomach. A Macedonian cellist croons in a language that I do not understand. I stare directly into the sun and listen. I am inspired.

Gaia

In the wintertime she sleeps with Toss and Turn,
stirred by nightmares as Cold
     chips away at her face
She squints against the white static
     of crystalline neurosis,
her tears frozen and snatched by Wind
     before reaching the ground.

Reawakened, reinvigorated, revived
     she is in spring
Gasping warm breath to weep in the ecstasy
     of fertility
Her cheeks bloom robust hues as blood
     melts to flow free
Virility and Vigor -- her cobalt eyes widen
     to illuminate her face.

She is lazy with orgasm when summer arrives
her back arched and legs strewn
     across emerald bed sheets
Listless and content with the heat
     of a boiling son
she rolls away.

But autumn is the most beautiful death
     I ever did see --
She screams cold and loud, stripped naked
     in the inferno,
her martyr’s arms ablaze in Citrine, Coquelicot,
     and Magenta;
Then she collapses into infinite slumber
     with a crimson gasp.

august

A piece of you lies with me always
from when I wake to when I sleep;
You are the sweetest smells of the season--
and I close my eyes and sigh...

Wool sweaters in the wintertime,
lavender in the spring;
the august presence of a figurehead
draped in perennial lilacs and memory.

The heart of the house:
All hail the goddess!
And long for her with lonely lips
and aching hands when she is not there.

For when the year has run its course,
whether winter, spring, august, autumn;
You are the sweetest smell my nose has ever tasted;
I close my eyes and sigh.

Eli Winter (otherwise untitled)

I remember walking Eli halfway down the street in the wintertime, my Birkenstock clogs crunching footprints into the snow that was a thickly packed layer of diamonds over the cement. The air smelled different in winter, and that smell alone made me think of my first love and sigh. At midnight the moon hung high and bright, the clouds only a few feet above my head. In the morning before school, I would walk down to meet Eli at her house for carpool, and I would smoke a cigarette on the way, my fingertips magenta and wizened when I could no longer feel them. I would stop before the evergreen at the corner of Eli’s lawn, lest her parents see me from their living room window, and I would stare up at the sky of seven-thirty in the morning. My mind would wander back to my first love, and I would exhale smoke along with my own breath. Those were the days when I still spoke of him in every word I said.

the warrior and the snake

There was a serpent that hissed and danced as the warrior struck him to the earth. Thumbs poised upon his weapon, his feet were parted and planted on the ground as he watched the asp trickle to the grass in fragments that were like droplets of dawn. He smirked as the sensation of victory and relief flooded over him, inhaling the stench of death suspended in the air.

The strands of gold fell cater-corner into the crabgrass blooming at the edge of the lot where litter decayed to dirt. The warrior did not qualm about the murder he was so carelessly committing; he did not think about those who may have watched him in the midst of battle -- he maintained his focus, watching this beast crumble with the majesty of all other myths that had transpired epochs ago.  In his awe, the warrior cocked his head to a slight angle as if to cogitate the meaning of his life and other such questions that asked more of him than knew he had to muster.

Then, in a display of sunset perhaps, the serpent released a final whisper of defeat and was gone, leaving behind only the stench of his demise. The warrior bucked his hips with finality, hands trembling over his weapon as he replaced it behind the button and zipper along the front of his jeans. He looked to her where she sat watching all of this occur, her legs sprawled in a drug-crash around her and her eyes gaping at where his sword of flesh once hung from his grip.

"Wanted to see the show?" he asked, perking just one eyebrow as his zipper whined into place. He smirked then turned and walked away, leaving her there to question the phenomenon she had just witnessed.

alter ego

I searched for the diction, the exact words to convey the dynamic in my head:

I turned to him and said:  "There's another person who lives inside of me.  Those words -- those words I used to think were from God -- are hers, not mine.  She's the one who writes..."

My brow involuntarily chased the other one for comfort in the face of this conundrum.

"... And I think that she's the one who cries too."

The Birth of the Self-Made Man

She filled the grey with green --
She was the rolling hills, the tumbling rocks,
and the tide that licked the beach clean.
Mother Earth, she colored his world --
the saffron, the golden, the crimson blush
of the sun rising behind the eyelids of dreamers.

But not before to him she bestowed
the mallet and the pick;
And along this beach she sent him
with the task to dig beneath the sand

And for his entire lifespan,
there he did remain --
Giving care to muscle and sinew
as he carved himself from clay.

Rumination

Stream of consci'sness --
tuck'd back in Pandora's Box
Ink bleeds catharsis.

The Lighthouse

My beams of light will welcome home
The fisherman from out at sea
To where the scent of salt is sweetest
Along the white-foamed beach

You leave the sky as pink as when
You first teased the sun from sleep
Yet frivolous play subsides to dusk --
It is violet, where red and blue will meet

My splaying rays, your only guide
To the bluff contoured intricately
From the relentlessly undulating waves
That boiled until licking your oars clean

Persephone Touches Down

There once was a myth
that was weaved beneath the rainbow
She thought it was a hero
she had seen standing there

But storm clouds overruled
that sweet, delicious sunset
And he was gone, cross the Atlas
on magic wings with wake of thin air

And she boiled and bubbled
beneath her skin
Because the world he’d abandoned
was far too heavy to bear

Until she met the Knight
that was the rainbow --
And the lands wept
as Mother Nature restored her fair.

Encounter in the Labyrinth

You isolate me
One on one and vis-a-vis
Deep breath, reverie

life advice to my junior cousin begets a quarter life crisis

I am NOT getting old Missy -- your early to mid-20's are where it's at.

you finally shed the highschool bullshit that inevitably follows you halfway through college... and you start hitting those milestones like buying alcohol legally, choosing a spouse, starting to make real money, and tossing around baby names to entertain yourself in traffic. 

Then again, I'm 23 - i just finished college and am taking a year off to "find myself"... old will be when I look back on this year of my life and shake my head at my naively idealistic and overly capricious attempts to change the world. Either that, or old will be when I have changed the world and am laughing about my yuppie years all the way to the bank. 

Is my present youth exemplified by the fact that I still believe in the "OR" part of the scenario? Or by the palpable truth that I wax existentially philosophical about everything?