Poll in the side-bar...

*big scared eyes*

... help me?

love,
Caroline

psstt: workshop emilea's poem below.

another one

A morning of careless chatter,
Bright smiles, and knowing looks
Bring a twinge of lightness to the
Atmosphere.

A dream of striped air balloons
Billowing into the sky almost
Breaks the perception of an indifferent
Attitude.

An after thought:
Barely seeing each other would
Burden me. So perhaps your
Absence would be best.

         ...

Although:
Blundering through life
Befuddling you with rejection
Also seems rather absurd.


Do you see the pattern? i wanted to make fun of rhyming schemes...anyways. thoughts?

emilea

i really, really hope the holidays aren't like this

but i'm pesimistic currenlty. and i might have good reason to be. i don't know. i'll just see how it all works out. but until then, i wrote this. it's an experiement with prose poetry. let me know what you think (like you always do, *smile*).


It got cold way too fast. The short sweetness of he season is being blown away. Not like I would have had the opportunity to enjoy it anyway. The bustling of awkward relatives thourh gour open doors occupies thoughts, vacuums, and soapy water weeks in advance.

I made tomato soup the other day, but didn't watch and stir. It boiled over with a hiss, like forgotten family. an ovverflow of overcooked turkye and bad, sparkled sweaters comes to the front door. One can fake a smile for only so long, so soon they rush out into cold Christmas wind, and I'm left to enjoy tea in an empty kitchen, leftovers rotting in the refridgerator.

i really hope my thanksgiving is like this. i don't think it will be. and just so everyone knows, because i love to celebrate birthdays but often need reminding, my birthday is this friday. just a dropped note would be fine. i love you guys so much. miss you,

emilea

inside a leather wallet

I could have put something pathetic up here. Something...less embarrassing than all the others, and I think is actually sort of decent, if not crap. Instead I'm going with something completely different.


my fingers frantically dig through piles
and piles of old memories. There is a ticket
stub I kept from visiting my aunt, the
picture of my old best friend. Finally
my fingers grip the tired
leather of a familiar wallet.

Inside, there is a photograph, slightly
torn just below her hand, and raised from when
I wrote on the back in fury, my
pencil gouging lines into your eyes.

My trembling hands hesitate on the clasp,
suddenly unsure of how to snap it
open. When they do, there's an overwhelming
odor of rust and the scent of being
trapped in a closet for years. I can't

remember why I know the photo so well
or why, when I slip it out of it's home, that it
rests so well on my warm palm.
I think the texture has changed in seven
years, the surface a little less rough, a little
more glossy.

It's one of those professionally taken photos,
with the cloudy blue background and the cheap
smiles that cost far less than their forged copies,
the antiques that don't exist anymore.


all right then.
Heather

caroline is pathetic, you say? read for comfirmation.

At nine-thirty pm on a Friday, I close my eyes and mourn
the loss of losing sleep- the memory of a July
spent staying up to smile at the mirror, just
practicing; lucid dreams of might-have-beens;
staring down the clock at 11:10. I weep

in rememberance of distraction
I try a million ways to trick myself back into it: listen
to the same sweet song, track four on repeat;
never return Blockbuster's Pride and Predjudice.
I steal, beg and borrow glaces at the boy-next-
desk until his movements are committed to memory
timed beating of fingertips and slide of his feet.
Soon, I know him too well.

Drifting to sleep at nine-thirty-eight, I forget
my usual worries for fear of an existence spent
on half-hearted math class lust
distracted only by Mr. Darcy.

---------------------
really not sure about this.
assure me?

The Essay

 I had my fantastic English teacher review this so i don't make ridiculous errors. but tell me what you really think. what you reallyreallyreally think. not like you never do. but still. this is supposed to be giving a "flavor" of who i am, and if my voice isn't in this, or it doesn't reflect me, then i reallyreally need to know. much love everyone!

I can understand why someone would comment that we as a society are "owned by our objects". If we see a BMW and a Corvette parked in the driveway of a very large house downtown, we can generally guess what they make in a year and how many hours a week they put in. There are now entire thirty minute shows dedicated to sorting through a pack-rats collection of dust, laundry, and Elvis bobble-heads. However, I've come to learn, as I'm sure many before me have, that the smallest things mean the most. It's what seem the most insignificant that has the most meaning and the most moving stories.

I've always kept my birthday cards, ever since I was five. I would stick them into the corners of my mirror so I could see who remembered my birthday and the funny sayings. Recently, I've begun downsizing my room. I decided that my bulging drawers of clotehs and the pounds of paper and trinkets needed to be sorted through and given to people who could use them. In the process of cleaning out my bedside table, I found a birthday card. It was lavender and in a cursive script said "Happy Birthday Most Beautiful Granddaughter". I opened it up and saw that in the bottom left hand corner were the weak, barely legible signatures of my mom's parents. That was the last birthday card I received from my graundmother.

She died in March. He was in the hospital for her lungs, and she was going to be released in the next day or so. Granny was always in and out of hospitals for check-ups and a couple of procedures here and there. My family and I were never really worried that she would leave us in the near future. However, one morning my mom and dad got a call at about four in the morning, and so they rushed out of the house to Tuomey Hospital in Sumter south Carolina. A couple of hours alter, I received the call that she had passed.

It's been a strange experience, dealing with this kind of grief. As most people who have lost anyone who meanting something will tell you, it's not as simple as the five step cycle. when I started going through my things in July, I thought I had come to peace with it and moved on with my life. Granny wasn't mentioned as much, and wen she was, there was always a good story and a smile. Then I found the card in the very back of my bedside table. In the card it said "We love you, and we are so proud of what you have become, and what you are becoming." I cried.  I t was something Granny would say to me a lot. whenever I told her that I aced my math final, or that I was accepted into the Academy program, she would always tell me how proud she was.

My room is still in the process of being cleaned out. My drawers are a lot easier to pull out with far less shirts in them. My desk is neater and easier to dust every week than it has been for a long time. The fifty or so birthday card collection I had is in the recycling plant, except that card. That card is tacked above my desk, where I cansee it if I'm about to give up on studying for a test, editing a short story, or working on a research paper. "We love you, and we are so proud of what you have become, and what you are becoming."

It keeps me going.

Thoughts? I was typing this from my manuscript, so there may be some typos that aren't on the actual paper. the computer wouldn't let me copy without shutting down the internet. yes, it was annoying.

alrighty. well. happy friday everyone, and much love,
: - ) emilea

a poem inspired by the ink stains on my hands, written about the ink stains on some fictional boy's hands. (?)

these ink stains seem ancient:
close my eyes and I can see you, a thousand years ago
dipping a feather quill into an ink pot, scrawling
your every sloppy sentence and waiting for the words to dry.
You'd stare, marvel over their vulnerability

how they're not quite permanent.
You would try to be careful with them,
the edges of your fingers twitching
ready to give under the pressure of half-formed
phrases, stanzas. The lines in your head are always irresistable

in the end. Your hand would fall, leaning into wet ink
on yellow pages, and I'd watch you
write until every letter was impossibly
indecipherable to any eyes but yours.

When you handed me the pages,
though, I would smile, say
it's beautiful, because
it always is.

I know you, down to the crinkling of your eyelids,
the bend in your hair; how you're slow to smile, quick
to laugh. You close your eyes when you are angry
worried that a glimpse of your surroundings might make you snap.

You never cross out a single word when you write
and it comforts me to think
that without backspace keys or erasers,
you would stay the same.

There's a pattern of darkness here that could be
a fingerprint, if it didn't extend you your sleeves,
elbow deep. I hold your hands in mine: I could trace
these marks even with my eyes closed, till I memorize
the soft friction of ink stains over calluses, until I know
your hands by heart.


------------------------------------------------------------
um...
okay.
so, i think it gets very off-topic and that it may be confusing
and that it's kind of lame. And bad. And... um... eck. I like some lines. But I'm very very bewildered by what I have just written, my little third-first-attempt at a poem. So, tell me. What you don't like, and *hopefully* a word or two that you do.

finite.