Return to the Ocean

Seeing you

in movies and memories

or frozen in pictures

doesn’t remind me quite

of your living presence, your

sweet cologne, that which I seek

sniffing, seeking lungfuls

the instant I exit my car, wafting long

on the cool whipping breezes.

I couldn’t quite remember

how silky felt your touch,

how it clung to my skin

for hours after;

nor your turbulent beauty,

the rumble of your voice,

how much you make me want to

dive right in,

melt into you.

Nor could I justly recall

the sweet salty taste of you on my lips,

the tang of plankton and algae.

Being near you, I feel

excited, electrified, awakened,

comforted, re-energized,

at home,

feel my soul

filling with sparkle

and my every fiber of being

with sweet life.

Three and a half years later,

and at last I’ve returned to you.

Re: Orlando

Why does there gotta be

so much negativity

and hate

in this world?

They say that this is the land

of the free; well,

maybe it’s just me

but doesn’t that also imply

freedom from fear?

I understand that maybe

you want to exercise your gun rights,

but is it right

when your righteous struggle

to defend your own rights

makes it far too easy for people

to take away other peoples’ rights,

especially that other one, the

not-so-important,

size-8-font-at-the-foot-of-the-legal-document

right to a little thing called life?

You know, part of those

certain unalienable rights brotherhood,

LIFE, liberty, AND pursuit of happiness? Yeah,

that’s the one.

Why in the world should we

as a country be known for our 173 shootings

in far fewer days of the year, be known for having

statistically the most gun violence in the world?

And why can’t we

just realize for once that this

is all a derivative

from our own messy history?

We don’t discourage

hatred of people who are different,

of women and lgbtq+++ people

and Muslims and Jews

and African Americans and Mexicans

and anyone who desn’t fit

in the straight cis white Christian male

category cultivated

by culture and media, especially

straight cis white Christian males

who are forcing themselves into a false construct.

We encourage this; societally,

even those who don’t fit this category

strive for it every way they can.

Why can’t we

remember to love?

Why does it gotta be

so hard to love? For the love

of life, please,

save us all by helping us learn

to love.

Suddenly–Lack of Time

That ^ title certainly describes the feeling of a summer break: you pace yourself because you know there’s still plenty of time left–until August comes, then the last two weeks and all of a sudden you’re left with thirty things that you’ve got to do and then people come and stay at your house and–

BAM

–you have negative days left.

Important note, before I go on: THIS IS NOT PROCRASTINATING. No, this is MANY UNFORESEEABLE THINGS FILLING UP THE TIME YOU WERE GOING TO DO OTHER THINGS IN. Nor is it poor time management. You really did plan out that time; it just…got filled up by other stuff. a whole two weeks, right? You would have had time. There was a plan.

And then the wild things appeared.

The lesson probably is that you should prepare for the unexpected. Murphy’s law, really; anything that can go wrong will. As if all the things that could go wrong are hanging around someplace with horns on their head, snickering evilly as they plot the best way to derail your delicate plans. But it’s awfully hard to predict random stuff like earthquakes and stock market crashes. (People are trying, but their predictions frequently are wrong themselves)

How are you supposed to defend yourself against all the things that could go wrong? A pointed stick?

Don’t think so.

There are many people who would gladly offer their own advice. Check out eHow or wikihow or one of the many motivational sites on this world wide web. You’ll probably also find many other instances of people venting about reality on their own blogs, too, just like me. ;D

Just…don’t worry about the odds of the apocalypse happening right now, will you?

-Aidyl

Where Are These Words? Text on the Screen and E-Books

Keywords

There is a disconnect

between these words on the screen

and the words that I write

with my fingers,

and the words

that I write

with my mind

and my heart.

There they are,

distant,

unreal,

cyber, just pixels

on a screen

and on and off signals

on a hard drive.

01001100 01101111 01110011 01110100

01101001 01101110

01100100 01101001 01100111 01101001 01110100 01110011

Lost

in digits.

How can simple letters

take up

so much space?

01001100 01101111 01110011 01110100

They are unreal;

they are not real,

though I feel them pumping through my arms

and my hands

and out my dancing fingertips,

feel the tip-tap of fingers on keys like rain

dancing on a tin roof, Riverdance

or Raindance

on a piano,

every step a pitch

on a pitch-black

and white keys. I make them with touch,

textile text,

I feel their shape as I carve them with my motions,

the spring of the key,

the clack–

but they’re frozen

in nothingness. They don’t exist.

What are they now? Where are they?

01001100 01101111 01110011 01110100

Lost.

01001100 01101111 01110011 01110100

Hi again! I’ve missed you, world, and I’m incredibly sorry for not publishing anything since…

…guess it’s June, huh? Sorry. But as time added up and inspiration went down, and I forgot my password… Well, I’m done with that now. Trying to keep a regular post time just didn’t work for me and my schedule. Yes, writers should get used to deadlines; yes, there are other people who have jobs and blogs and keep them both in tip-top shape; I’m capable of giving you a poem every Tuesday, like clockwork; but do I want to? Am I the kind of person who can or would want to do that? Would it be any good? Maybe. But I haven’t had as much fun trying. I’ll keep trying, but I’m done making myself feeling guilty for even typing ‘word’ into the browser (which is part of “wordpress.com”)

Anyway, back to the poem that I wrote.

I strongly dislike writing poetry and other things through the computer. The poem above is an example of how I feel. Give me paper, baby, every time. Paper’s so tactile, so satisfying, so three-dimensional, so easy to read on. Can’t you agree that it’s easier to be able to flip to the part of the book you want, rather than paging through each screen or searching for the section? With our fancy technology, we’ve unbound one of the greatest inventions–the marvelous book–and gone back to the dull old scroll. Reading e-books does not give me so much of a sense of progression as a normal book does. Who else dives into a book, feeling the challenge of a good inch-thick chunk of pages, determined to get far enough into it so that the binding doesn’t crack/tear, and having that same heft at the end, with the beautiful close to the cycle of reading? You can really appreciate how at both the beginning and end of a large book, you struggle with holding it open, and the middle is the part when you’re perfectly happy. Ironically, that’s the aggravating part because you want to finish it and know what happens.

E-books are cool though. You can take a magazine-sized object with you anywhere, yet you have available at your fingertips a whole library of books. They’re mini TARDISes, as Doctor Who fans might have already realized. But when it comes to reading textbooks or cookbooks or anything I’d rather flip through…no. No thanks. Just the novels, please. Those are linear, unlike the two I just mentioned.

Where are these words, though? Unless you’ve decided to print them out, they’re nowhere. They’re binary signals, telling your screen where to light up white and where to light up dark. On and off, the basic language of computers and phones everywhere. 1 and 0. They float in nothingness. (Or else they’re somewhere in Alabama, or Europe, or Asia, or South America, or Africa, or wherever it is that you’ve got that hard copy of this post)

Oh, technology.

You and your nothingness, you.

–Aidyl

NaPoWriMo: Days 29 and 30

Favorite Colors

My favorite color

is that particular shade

when a full moon shines

on marine layer fog,

fragmented blue rainbows,

blue-purple clean-sweet coolness

like the best spring water,

sprinkled

with a dash

of starlight

like labradorite,

alexandrite that opal fire

on a cobalt background.

That color of a dream,

color of home

at nighttime

when you lie in bed

waiting

for sleep to come

while the moon peers in pale

through the window, white like scared

except that it isn’t,

not even at all.

Pre-dawn stillness

of a starry early 5:00 April morning

in the 50s,

temperature-wise,

and only the blue call

of a bluebird

serenading the silence.

Yes, that’s my favorite

color. Now, if only

I could bottle it up

and spray it,

that would be

my favorite scent;

at least, that would be so

if it wasn’t already

that lovely smell of….

Rain On Roof

Rain taps out

Morse code sign language

for calm,

no te preocupas

de nada,

“Don’t you worry about anything,

do not fear,

rest well:

I am watching through this night.”

It’s the last day of NaPoWriMo.

I wish the sun was out so I could watch it set, but only a little. It’s such a lovely evening, all that rain and fog draped over the mountain. It’s wonderful writing weather, except…the month’s over. I can’t believe it. Can you? Already? Oh well. How fitting that these last two poems are filled with nighttime.

Rain at night is beautiful, especially when it’s warm and misty outside, and you hear only rain falling. No, frogs do not count as fog, there’s that extra “r” in there. Extra “r”s are important; they’re the difference between “he” and “her” and “h”, “hee” and “here”. They croak way, way too loudly to be fog. Anyway, heading back to the rain–I think I’ve written about it as many times (or more) than I’ve written about fog. Every poet has a thing that they write about a lot, or that they think they do; some people have cows, I have fog, my old creative writing teacher had eyebrows…you get the point. Whatever your thing is, it inspires you a lot. In fact, that happens to be a prompt that I thought of as I wrote that rain poem: write about what you write about a lot, but try to see it in a way you’ve never seen it before.

Tough, inspiring, and fun.

The first poem is a mini prompt I gave myself: write about a favorite color, but use abstract thoughts that can’t have colors. You know, along the same line as colors of the wind. Hey, the work just as well. Doesn’t everyone agree that love is red or pink or whatever? And that envy is green? Joy yellow? Yet you also know the color of home, family, hatred, sweltering summer days, school…rainy nights during a full moon…things like that. Golden spring mornings. Rich, textured, orangey fall afternoons. Anything and everything that you can see has a brilliant color.

 I’ve hit so many milestones this month, and I’m so glad and grateful to you–my readers–for making that happen. I hit 100 followers on April  th, and got 30 more in far less time than any other 30; I had a new record best day for followers this month; I’ve gotten nice comments from several readers; and this is my 199th post, so if I’d stayed on track I would’ve hit 200 this month, too. Thanks to everyone for supporting my poetry this month! I hope if a prompt I gave inspired any poetry, then you’ll share it with me in the comments.

Happy end of NaPoWriMo!

-Aidyl

NaPoWriMo: Days 27 and 28

More Word Magnets

Sweet repulsive goddess,

delirious with the trudge

of

light blue lathering shadows

like a

sleepy

cry of

lazy diamond whispers,

a soft scream,

shimmering urge

storm-garden gorgeous….

And drunk pink petals

fall by the thousands;

together, they shine

summer.

Inky Hands

I wear my ink-laden hands

with pride

for the words I’ve written;

they are no cause

of shame,

nor

are the inkblots

across the paper

the smears,

the scrawls,

no, for they are all

universal sign of written.

I

am an artist. My fingers

are branded

with creativity, my page

with my thoughts.

I have a pen that tends to be very inky. I’m sure that all hand-write-ers out there have a pen just like it. It writes nicely; it writes smoothly; it smears a little if you don’t let it dry; and when the point is clicked it, it leaks ink everywhere. Into ink-globs all over the tip. Finally, if you try to write with that kind of blob, it makes real, honest-to-God inkblots. Can you imagine? INKBLOTS! Yes, they’re a sign of work well done. That’s one reason why writing with ink is so powerful; when you finish, there’s that sweet smell of pen ink hanging over your notebook. It’s the smell of victory–victory over the blank page. Those little spots of ink all over your hands are nice for the same reason. Yes, I can’t stand how it smears all over everything I touch, but it shows that I’ve handled a pen, that I’ve dared to use permanence. I used to be too afraid of pens. What if I made a mistake, especially if I was doing a math problem? It would be a tangled mess of cross-outs and ink spots where I’d left the pen on the page too long. My words were tentative ghosts, light gray lead floating across the page.

Then I realized that I didn’t really use the eraser much anyway; like I would with a pen, I’d just cross it out and move on.

So I tried using a pen.

It’s like making a pen sketch: scary at first–what if you make a mistake?–but very liberating because those words are bold. They show you’re not afraid to let your ideas free. As I said, boldness is intimidating, but not overly terrifying. All this sort of leads to today’s prompt. When you write, what kind of utensil do you use? Pencil? Mechanical pencil? Pen? Quill? Sharpie? Dry-erase marker? Highlighter (a bit hard to read)? Typewriter? Computer? Dragon (Naturally Speaking)? iPad or other tablet? What do you like about using your medium? What’s your favorite part? How does it contribute to the shape of the words, in your mind? How does it make the words tactile?  Let your writing inspire your writing!

-Aidyl