The Neon Zee

Evil Plan TM

Evil Plan (tm)!, A Guide

    Your objective is simple: Widespread Misery.

    Your motive is complex: Love (Yes, it works)

 

 Stage One

    To begin

you must first devour a chosen one. Any will do.

There’ve been a few this century.

 

This will cause disturbance in the force.

Aghast with loss, the people will ask, Where does she come from? And why does she look so good wearing the skin of another human?

 

the element of surprise is your friend.

    Stage Two

    Next, you must poison the moon.

And you will run your operation from an obsidian citadel— a mysterious place of unrivaled dark glory, a laboratory for toxin mixing, for venom concoctions. And by the light of the sickening moon, star gazers and lovers fall into catatonic trance. Your countless hordes of mutant race will run rampant with your bidding, picking off the sitting ducks, those impractical Romantics.

And everything will be fantastically ugly without their dreaming.

            Stage Three

    Finally, you must enforce a 1984 police state. Your name shall become synonymous with blood, and no man will ever again dare refuse to be your prom date. Everyone will bow before your mystical abilities, and the world will have no choice but to make you their new goddess.

1

Every dance will be yours.

You will never take another biology test.

 

I don't remember what a life without poetry is like. It occurs to me that most people walk around without a constant single minded compulsion.

Poetry was not a very big part of my life in fourth grade. But in second and third it was. and thats it. fourth grade.

 

Similarly, I forgot that there is a life outside of the fluctuations of worry, anxiety and mania.

I forgot that there is a life that is not riddled with the constant terror that something will go horribly wrong.

I took everything for granted. but that is usually the case with good things obviously.

The past three weeks have been wrought by this fear that everybody I love is going to die and leave me so I need to tell them I love them as much as possible like how screaming "I DO BELIEVE IN FAIRIES I DO I DO" brings tinkerbell back to life.

 

I DO BELIEVE IN LOVE i do i do!?

 

i pray for you Chiba prefecture.

for all of Japan.

 

for everybody who is suffering. 

Missing in Anonymity

 

Missing in Anonymity

for Kelly Fedderson, for David Blackett's family, for Sister Wolf, for Sarah 

 

I looked for you in every valley,
and each became  filled with mountain
at all ends. I looked in the water,
swam the Pacific and the Rio Grande, but only found islands,
isolated, pan-caked between moon and ocean, flat land that had never considered cities
let alone human beings or even the deep wrenching sift of sorrow.

 

Imagine me at night without the thrumming of your big dreams. I dwelt in a sorrow
that burrowed neatly in those forever rolling valleys
where I had once searched for you. In my hollow body, I built labyrinths of city,
wishing one of the rooms of one of the buildings contained you. I stacked mountains
to conduct the search from highest elevation. High up, I became a speck of island
in outer space, and as they say, on Mars, there was never any water

 

And perhaps I could not survive without water
but could without love, dining alone, parched upon the taste of sorrow.
I relearned the contours of Poplar trees, their whispering— forced myself to taste island
fruits, but still could not remember the precise and exquisite valleys
of your lips, the twisted vines in your shoulders or the mountainous
anxiety with which you avoided the hectic life of the city.

 

But I am a city-person. I live for the loneliness of cities
and I loved for you like one in a desert, chasing the mirage of water:
your feminine shins, fat earlobes, the ravenous foreboding of your mountains.
This must be how I lost you. I stared straight at you and the shimmering of your sorrow
vanished. This is where I starve for you now, parched in the desert valleys,
mouth stuffed by wind with dust. My eyes become large as deserted islands,

 

I do not wish to see the isolation of waves. I am a string of islands,
they are called eyes, mole, mouth, aorta, elbows, knee joint, cities
of me, severed by volcanic quakes and eruption. around me, valleys
were  hidden, covered by ocean or filled with tears, flooded by salt water.
Like alice, I could swim, I could search ship wrecks and reefs for a key, but the sorrow
kept changing into ether, into fire, into rock. It was like mountains.

 

It as made of too many substances. It could not be unlocked. Like mountains,
I could only mine it, dig and dig into the beach sands that ring my islands
until striking gold or water or rock or sorrow.
I still miss you only because I stopped missing my beloved city.
It was too busy there, too vertical, too vertigo, and I don’t need water
anymore as it now floods the emptiness of the valleys.

 

I lost your sorrow in the mirage of water
as I died. On the mountain, the valleys
looked like cities and the cities were saddest, sadder even, than the wasted islands.

 

 

a title seems futile, along with everything else I could (or might not) possibly do (think)

 

 

For all men kill the thing they love

Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.

Philipians 2:12-16

 

And to kill everything beautiful

Is the precursor

For this world that refuses to hold its pieces.

 

We’ve come to spin on an axle that is 4 degrees off kilter.

This is an earth that throws itself into quakes,

A trembling earth that has reached capacity.

 

Too much sorrow, too many bodies, too many, too many, too many painfully

quaking bodies refusing

the soft touch of each other.

 

And it seems the tree fingers that once held the mud and the rock are shriveling,

attacked at the weakest point, the trunk, and it was enough.

and the canyons  betray what we already know:

trembling,  our trembling earth.

the streams of tears tear deeper and deeper,

cut wrinkles of accidentally layered rainbows,

                                                                                patterns of collapse.

 

Accident. Coincidence. Miracle?

These are the words we made to keep the living going.

 

Age, unknown. origin unknown or known too well,  or both,

the massive animal, grief, lies prone,

arms spread like Christ.

 

And in his arms, we lust for postmortem as the dumb and

dead saints lust for lust

those forever disintegrating martyrs, nothing but boxed and cherished bones,

smoldering in their catacombs.

 

life is a sacrifice that anyone could make, but most choose to keep,

seeking forever and it’s gift of grief-  animal thing,

the animal grief.

 

We meet him with eyes closed.

shake his paw.

And the fur between the caked pads is mangy,

his claws, chipped to stubs, roots of red-hard-raw midnight scab.

 

We learn that he does not, cannot, scratch or slice us,

But gores with blunt tips as we collapse into

the blubbery amoeba of his chest—

the cradle of desperation, his arms.

 

In the embrace of beast,

                We are nothing and

we are an entanglement

of guts encased in skin, a slumped homo-erectus,

Only skeletons and only the loam and lace spider marrow

forgetting what body feels like.  forgotten

 

in the dark

mire of bestial musk and sweat and clumps of fur.

 

with eyes like that,

we only see only

the blurred thrumming,

 

Only we, the grieving living,

sacrificed sacrifice

hold each other with eyes closed.

 

sometimes holding is enough to inspire our laboring.

But it grows tired. And more tired. and we kiss. We caress our birdclaw wrinkles,

We save the sleepy seeds and we nightmare and we wake

And we kiss

And one day

 

We stop.

 

And it is the weariness  or an accident that dictates

                                                how ending finally stops.

Accidents. Coincidence.

 

Miracle?

 

the belly of coincidence holds coincide,

The word we made together over time

 begins with co, and inside, contains an incidence,

we bear together, the living,

and once dust,

we mingle together,

the sod for roots,

a layer of color

for the rivers to unearth,

                                                secret

                                                                trembling of miracles

 

OUR SHANGHAI (for monika)

Our Shanghai

 

The place where we grew up no longer exists. 

In the 20's it was "The Paris of the East,"

but we recall a more austere place.

 

here is xintiandi:

here are the bullet holes in the bridge at xintiandi,

here is the second tallest building in the world

where once an absurd fun house mansion stood.

legend told the mansion was built for the sick daughter of a rich man,

her recurrent dream, the blueprint for its mad dimensions.

 

here is the Pearl T.V. tower:

here are the purple and blue iridescent hexagonal domes of the tower,

magenta pink nipple dome at its top, 

it is shabby and dwarfed now,

though five years ago, the most famous attraction. 

 

here is The Bund,

still it wraps itself like a mama snake round

few remaining scrap bungalows, the Yuyuan trading market,

wraps itself around the new buildings, even, as they crop up like untreated shingles

upon the tired skin of this sinking city,

tallest of all sinking cities.

 

Aluminum shack peasant shanties went down

and sepia toned monsters went up and up and up,

disappearing into the dishwater gray smog,

springing up and up until they were the tallest in the world, 

but empty.

 

we were once guests to this hungry, humming Gotham, 

voyeurs to its history: 

a culture that swallowed itself,

vomiting the red, red

blood of the east and calling it "revolution." 

 

in a place that never existed

my first kiss tasted of breakfast dumpling and MSG. 

lasted 10 seconds.

 

then I woke up

a thousand years old.

 

Shanghai was gone,

vanished entirely in the gray smog that crept off the ocean, into its streets,

 

the sunken city, sinking, sinking into

its forgotten wrinkles. 

 

fashion party

THIS is exactly how i wanted to dress in tenth grade. and the purple/blue jewel tone is my current color appetite.

this sort of reminds me of what somebody would wear to a ball held in Santa Fe...

if the first image posted is representative of my dream outfit in tenth grade...this is how i hope to dress 10 years from now.

 

I miss you already

listen to the music coming from the distant balconies and tell everyone you love that you love them as often as possible.

 

and i can't think of any other solutions other than HOLD ON TO/FOR DEAR LIFE. 

The Importance of Ritual

 

In the morning you will wake up half dead

And remain so for hours.

 

You will do regular things. 

make coffee and tell jokes about the erratic weather. 

 

Your hand will shake wildly as you pour the coffee grounds

into the filter. You spill it. You clean it. You forget you made it. 

 

You will dunk graham crackers into the coffee once you remember it’s made.

They will fall into the coffee and liquefy but remain graham cracker shaped. 

It will be disgusting. You will drink only half of the cup. 

 

Class will end. 

You run out. 

 

You will take a walk to the quirky coffee place downtown—

the one that sells cinnamon chocolate.

 

You will buy more coffee and a piece of chocolate, sipping and 

chewing slowly. The afternoon light will drag,

 

clinging to the day like the fringe of levi cut offs,  a cool, distinctive shredding.

 And you occasionally lose 

 

track of what you’re doing.

but you will remember abruptly

(Oh, I am drinking coffee. and walking.)

 

You will go to the library and pretend to read.  that won’t last very long.  

and eventually the time for dinner comes. 

 

But eventually is never enough

So you will eat at 5:30. (Early bird special 

for those who won’t make it much longer.) 

 

And the only thing you remember about that day

Is its refrain,

 

He is dead. 

He is dead.

 

He is dead.