Dreams of Shrines

I am walking down a hallway in the house that I have never been down before. It is creaky and dusty. I open a red wood door. the roof is slanted, there are cobwebs dusting down from the ceiling. My perception of time slows to a crawl. I see a rat trap. A rat walks over it a few times, sniffing, not touching the trigger. At the last second, his toe brushes against the right spot and his neck is trapped inside. I look up and away, trying to escape the sight briefly. My grandfather's name is on the wall. The rest of the room is dark and unused. This area is bright and well kept. His name is hung from those strings you can get that usually say "Happy Birthday" or "Congratulations". There are some objects on a low shelf against the wall. I think one of them is a box, but I can't remember what the other things are. I begin to clean the rest of the room. When I look up from my broom, I am cleaning something much bigger. I can't remember what happened after that.

Frustrations Exposed in Dreaming

I am a man in this dream, a doctor. Another doctor needs my help in order to make a man's death appear to be of natural causes. I am laying on a small hill, amoung a stand of autumn trees. Down the slope a short distance is a lake, large enough to have its own waves. There are three people swimming in this lake, a man and two women, a blonde and a thin brunette. Observing them, I pick up a brilliant red leaf, which has two holes in it. I let it rest on my face, and it contours to me, becomes the most beautiful and elegant mask. Through this mask I watch as the brunette swims further and further out, desperate and frantic almost in her motions, popping to the surface to take the briefest of breaths. The man is chasing her, he is more clumsy. He is getting tired. The blonde watches, smiling at me out of the corner of her eye. The man begins to drown, and the brunette leaves him. I am frozen in observance by the mask, it is a window behind which I am trapped. I retreat to my room. I become the brunette. The man I was is my lover. We are very in love. The blonde is trying to seduce my man. I come home and find her sleeping on our couch. She claims it is hers, that this is her home, not mine. I drag her from the room to the hallway by her hair. I smash her face into the concrete over and over again, feeling in myself the frustration of the man at the blondes psychotic obsession with him, and my own anger at her presumptions of the two of us. Her head bounces up and down on the concrete, I am mashing her face into mush, using her hair as leverage, smashing until my arms are so tired that I am forced to wake up.

More than love could be.

When we come together

It's more

Than just the physical world

That we greet each other in

We are transcendent

One being in two bodies

The right hand clasping the left

The fingers of our energies interlaced

We are a fork in the universe

A divergent place

Two rivers

Flowing into one.

A Life Well Lived

This post is to honor my great aunt Alice C. Whitcombe, who passed away recently. She lived a long life, full of friends and family whom she cared deeply about, often more than herself. She passed away in my family's home, and will be remembered always for her caring contributions to the lives of everyone she was close to.

another poetry bomb

I am an emotional blockage

A crushed block of scrap metal

Waiting for the thick crunch of a shutter to release me

I feel myself pressing eagerly against floodgates

Yet terrified;

What if, behind that wall, there is nothing?

Could I be that could steel wall in itself?

My rusted spots crusting up under someone's fingernails

Inching deep down into the soft skin I once had

I am the feeling of looking down

Dizzying heights with water and rock below

No gentle arms can catch me from these heights

Is there truly only emptiness in the in between?

Lacking even the sweet caress of wind

As we make the final plummet

We have but to trust our eyelids to be our wings

Our lashes must flutter closed

Our lungs empty

Before we hit the ground

______________

I'm in love with the moon in the day

With the way the sun moves across your face

The sound of your voice is like birds in the sky

It draws my attention to things upon high

I'm in love with the stars in your smile;

How you hold my hand, I feel like a child

From inside your arms everything's tame

And the woes of the world might as well be a game

I'm in love with the caress of your palm

It fills up my heart with the deepest felt calm

You've saved me from searching through Love's muddy trenches

So we might sit with each other on much safer benches

__________________________________

We stalk together

through the forest

Two deer

testing the depth of the leaves

the height of the ferns

the stretch of our legs

as we jump.

We fly together

amidst the grass

Two birds

letting cool breezes

mingle our feathers

As we tease each other to new heights.

__________________

Each time I draw in a breath

I inhale the water of our love

It floods my nostrils

Passes through my mouth

Over my tongue

Love for you bloats my lungs

Blossoms through my capillaries

It latches onto my blood

Fills my heart

Holds it in that fluid grip

Floating in your sea of Love

I am saturated

Immersed in Happiness

Every drifting strand of my hair

Flutters contentedly amidst its waves.

Spoons

Like two spoons

We lock together

Cradled, we are a matching set

Like silver

Our love glints in the dark

Shining, we are twin stars

So close together

That we appear

As one.

You're sweet as pie

But the devil in your eye

Is lookin me up and down

Like I'm ripe for the pickin'

There's a wicked cry

I'm keepin' locked inside

Only you've got the key

So come let it out

When these apples fall

You'll try to catch them all

But in your hands

They catch alight

Essay on Beatrice as Death, Religion, and Love. Dante's La Vita Nuova

Brittanie Jones

Eng 333

Friday, October 8, 2010

In Dante’s La Vita Nuova, we can see the culmination and further evolution of a century and a half of the troubadour tradition. Medieval concepts of women are very standardized by this time; a woman of nobility is idolized, a love triangle is formed between the Lord, his lady, and the poet. The poet worships her, yet there is no socially acceptable direct contact beyond his words. He speaks to her through this screen of language, through the veil of his song. Dante escalates this practice of courtly love, warping the troubadour voice to new heights of idealized emotion. Through his use of language, he deifies Beatrice, his lady. He fluidly melds her with and then separates her from the god of Love, religion, and with his own emotions, while pushing her away from himself and toward the ethereal; even as she lives and breathes and walks before him. This spiritual, ephemeral character is created out of Beatrice in order to further lift her above Dante. He alludes to her death throughout the text, knowing that the only way to surpass the true hopelessness of unrequited love is to love a woman who has passed into the heavens. Only from that point can Beatrice truly become a mythology unto herself.

He begins describing her in the narrative as a young girl; however she is dressed in “a subdued crimson”, the color of blood, even as he falls in love at first sight. When he chances by her a second time, and subsequently dreams of her, again she is covered in “a blood red cloth”. Afterwards, Love feeds Beatrice Dante’s flaming heart, almost in the way one would offer a sacrifice to a deity, and surely it references death in that one cannot survive without one’s own heart. A more direct allusion follows this event; the God Amor rises up into heaven with Beatrice in his arms, causing Dante agony, which we can relate to his later state of un-assuage-able grief. Later in the text, he connects this fantasy of Beatrice with death yet again, through his description of the death of a young woman. The woman has been seen at times with Beatrice; however his cross connections between Beatrice and death are on a slippery slope from this point, with each example intensifying that desire to truly push her beyond his reach. The whole second stanza of the sonnet about the young woman’s death is directly parallel to his initial description in prose of his fantasy of Beatrice with the god of Love.

1.

His joy was changed to the bitterest of weeping. As he wept, the woman took shelter in his arms and I thought he arose toward the sky, holding her.

2.

Hear what respect and reverence that Love paid

To her as he shed his hot tears of regret

over the lovely corpse. Then, looking high

over his head to that fixed point in the sky

in which he noble soul was already set

He groaned his salute to that ever-cheerful

maid.

In both excerpts, Love weeps bitterly over a woman, and then she ascends into the sky. Although Dante clearly delineates one woman from the other, by using the same descriptive language in both segments, he inextricably links the two women together through both Love and through Death, which are, along with Beatrice, the very heart of this work.

As I said before, the instances linking Beatrice and Death snowball as the piece goes on. Beatrice’s father dies, and Dante’s description of their relationship binds them tightly together: “Death is painful to friends who are left behind, and there is no closer friendship than that which obtains between a good father and a good child. That lady was good in the highest degree, and her father, as many rightly believed, was also extremely good.”

By using the same word to describe both Beatrice’s father and Beatrice herself, they become linked as family and also as, ideologically, one and the same being. Section XXII also shows Beatrice’s own reflection of the god of Love, because she “is crying so heartbrokenly that anyone seeing her would die of pity,” in much the same way that Love himself weeps over her and over the dead woman on the street as they ascend to heaven.

In Section XXIII, Dante can no longer dance around his fantasy of Beatrice’s death. While contemplating the shortness and fragility of his own life, he thinks, “Even the most noble Beatrice will have to die one day.” He then has a vision of her dying while he is violently ill, in his dream a friend tells him, “Do you not yet know? Your wonderful lady has departed from this life.” Much like when he envisions the god of Love carrying Beatrice to heaven, in this fantasy he pictures her as a cloud, pushed to heaven by angels. In the sonnet, he even becomes more literal, almost demanding, “I thought in how few days or months or years/ my lady, too, must die”

As Dante’s ideal woman, Beatrice is scripted with language that alludes to, not only Death, but also a long tradition of medieval femininity, and a certain spiritual ephemerality. She is a white, glowing presence, and Dante is drawn like a moth to a flame. Beyond all else she is distant from him, and he seeks to press that distance to its limit, even as his desire for her eats away at him. He torments himself with his love for her, a one sided love that exists in a triangle between he, his “God of Love” figure, and his idealized conception of Beatrice as the ultimate woman. He continually describes her as noble; she is grace, gentle, and sweet, glorious, the Queen of Virtue, pure, faithful, and full of piety.

How modest, how genteel my lady seems

as she strolls, unself-concious, along the street

They are mute, as people sometimes are in

dreams,

and avert their eyes, as if the dazzling beams

from hers would blind them. Still, it is a sweet

kind of discomfort. It’s hardly a conceit

to say she is angelic for her head gleams

as if with a halo. And radiating from

her person, there is a quiet and delight,

inexplicable but undeniable too.

Anyone who has seen her knows it’s true,

And that for an instant all the world seems right,

One sighs in joy as they do in Elysium.

This reflects on more than the long troubadour tradition which predates Dante’s work. Rather than just being the unattainable ideal, the lady to a lord who stands in the way, she is more of an angelic being on Earth, a messenger of what awaits in paradise, or Elysium in this example. Beatrice is rendered untouchable, un-viewable even before her death, through the divinity of her existence in life. Far past the unattainable in the human sense of the word, he claims her to be not only angelic, but an actual angel, a divine presence, which he claims that heaven desires: “Our only lack in heaven is her fair/and splendid presence”.

In many ways, Beatrice’s presence in La Vita Nuova is ghostly as well. It is inconsequential to Dante, insofar as the vague way in which she exists, whether she is alive or dead. She is a spirit, a concept, which wafts from the real world and into his mind, permeating all his thoughts while never physically making contact. When Dante does get near her in the physical world, he becomes faint, physically affected, almost spooked by seeing the corporeal manifestation of his internal fantasies; he loses control of himself completely. This is exemplified in the text when his friend takes him, unknowingly, to view all the pretty ladies of the court and he accidentally comes upon Beatrice in close proximity. He claims he “was at the very precipice of life, beyond which one cannot pass with the expectation of coming back”, thereby equating the sudden viewing of her with a near-death experience.

Much like humanity’s inability to look upon the face of the divine, Dante cannot look directly at Beatrice. He must look at her through crowds (“She was walking between two gentlewomen”), through “screens” of other women (“making that gentlewoman a screen behind which I could conceal the truth”), through his thoughts (“my soul was entirely occupied by thoughts of that noblest of ladies”). She is the clear river which Dante claims brings joy to the dejected pilgrim (Love), in which she is Love and the water all at once; water, like love, can surround one, but it is ungraspable. Much like the deified Love himself, she is also fluid in her character. At times Dante fuses the two such as when he speculates: “Love and the noble heart? But there is no/difference between them”. Love, as a character, also points this out when he states, “If you took the trouble to think about it seriously, the lady Beatrice could be called Love, because of her resemblance to me.”

After Beatrice’s death, she is elevated into almost a higher position in Dante’s mind than the god of Love had held during her life. Whereas Love had been his deity, his religion to which he deferred, after her death, Beatrice becomes infused with the spirit of this god of love, and with religion itself. At first he does not admit that what happened was death, he refers to it as her being “summoned” by the Lord. By not giving her up to the literality of death, he erases his previous conception of her being carried there by Love, and elevates her to spirituality by allowing her to make the journey to heaven alone.

In a later sonnet, he describes her powerfully as:

when my lady traded her corporeal

existence to make her way

to a better one in that Elysium

she richly deserved. And radiating from

her loveliness a sacred beauty shines

to add its light to heaven’s glory. There

the angels beat their wings in rarefied air,

grateful for her presence that refines

and enhances their collective holiness

eternally blessed with perfect joyfulness.

Clearly she has been incorporated into his life in a spiritual way. She trades for her place in heaven, rather than being forced there by death. The angels themselves are grateful for her, and she enhances their holiness. Through her death, he is now able to elevate her to the heights that he dreamt of, she has become his perfect mythos, and from the high heavens she can now be truly worshipped. He even goes so far as to preach this religious idea of her to passing pilgrims towards the end of the work:

O pilgrims who walk lost in thought, do you

know where you are? The street? The house you

are near?

You must have come from somewhere far from

here,

not to be shedding tears as most of us do.

This is a city of sorrows in which there are few

songs and little laughter. Gloomy, severe

we are in deep mourning. The atmosphere

is like that of a church’s darkest pew.

If you would pause in your travels, I could tell

the story my sighing heart reiterates

day and night, and you would weep with us.

We have lost the source of our blessings, for the

fates

have taken our Beatrice, our nonpareil

the memory of whom is glorious.

In the final words of La Vita Nuova, Dante claims of Beatrice that he will “say of her what has never been said of any woman.” At the last word, he pushes this woman of his fantasies well beyond anything that had been imagined by the troubadours of the century past. Although Beatrice is technically the medieval ideal of what a woman should be, Dante pushes his courtly love for her and her perfection into new extremities. He elevates her beyond the ideal unto a religious status with his combination of prose and poetry, not only honoring her in his own time, but allowing her to truly live on forever through the myth he created for her.

Inca Modern Culture Essay

Brittanie Jones

October 5^th 2010

ANTH 263 Fall 2010

To be an Inca in modern Peru is to be a patchwork quilt of identities. From the seat of the old Incan Empire, in Cusco, radiating outwards like the beams of the sun that granted life to the Inca’s crops and herds; there are many peoples who call upon the old kingdom in describing their heritage and parts of their current way of life.

Incan heritage in Peru is seen, as it has been since the Spanish invasion, through two different lenses. One view is through the eye of the everyday Andean: the farmer, with his llamas, his potatoes, his family, and the intricate interconnected social structure of his village (Allen 2002). The other is seen through the perspective of the upper class, the mestizos, who have light skin and not only look down openly upon the natives, but exploit their heritage openly in the marketing of Inca tourism within the city of Cuzco (Silverman 2007 and Silverman 2008). Cuzco itself is a city of layered identity, much like the Andean people (Allen 2002). The Incas built their Cuzco, the navel of their empire, upon an existing site (Wikipedia 2010), and, in turn, the Spanish constructed their colonial one on top of Incan walls (Isbell Lectures).

Outside the sprawling tourist trap of Cuzco, it is easier to get an idea of how the Incas, or the indigenous peoples the Incas ruled over, may have lived. All throughout the hard-to-reach mountains of Peru, people still carry on with aspects of their lives in the same manner as farmers hundreds of years ago. This can be attributed to how well adapt the agricultural, and consequently, the spiritual practices of the Andean people are to the environments around them; their culture is tailored impeccably to the ranges they inhabit. They are respectful and take care to share with every notable object around them, from the great mountain ranges, the Tirakuna, right down to the Pachamama, the mother earth beneath their feet. They are completely interconnected with their environment, trapped in cycles of owing, much like in their own social connections, which are a web of give and take. (Allen 2002)

The majority of the Andean environment consists of the highlands, the coastlands, valleys and the tropical rainforests of modern Peru and Ecuador. The Incan Empire included both the highest mountain and the driest desert in the world (Isbell Lectures). The variety of climates, elevations, and water availability allowed for a system of irrigation and terracing to develop and flourish in these areas. Also, a wide variety of plants were domesticated and used, with different vegetation types adapting for the various temperatures and elevations traversed by the Andeans. The level of botanical diversity in the Andes helps protect crops from disease and pestilence, which can decimate millions of dollars of crops in countries where monocultures are prevalent. (Pollan 2006) Both in the past and today, Andean people maintain and utilize an extended territory. Their crops may be at one low elevation, yet they will graze their herds of llama and alpaca at a much higher one, on the puna, where only excellent grazing forage for the camilids grows and thrives. The Andeans are extremely mobile and utilize every available resource they have access to as fully as possible. (Isbell lectures 2010)

Because of the cool temperatures of the Andes, both in Inca times and today, woven materials are highly valued. Llamas and alpacas produce an incredibly touchable yarn, which is spun by hand and woven or knitted into garments of varying quality. Sheep’s wool is also incorporated, as introduced by the Spaniards. In Inca times, women paid their taxes to the empire in woven materials, and the finest textiles were considered more valuable than gold. This tradition continues into the current day, deeply embedded and intertwined with the spiritual practices of the native peoples of the Andes. (Allen, Kitty 2002)

Modern descendants of the Incas may choose to include their heritage in their everyday life on various levels. Some are immersed in farming practice and ritual that has a nearly unbroken continuum from the time of Incan conquest, whereas other, usually younger, generations tend to fight against their traditional obligations in favor of a more westernized lifestyle. This pattern is seen again and again in places where native cultures overlap with European invaders. Social stratification and rampant racism play a crucial part in urging the younger generations of Andean natives to sever ties with their rich cultural heritage. The pressures of social stratification came to a boiling point in the early 1980s, when Abimael Guzmán, a university professor at San Cristóbal of Huamanga University, organized an internal conflict that rocked Peru for the next two decades. (in-class documentary) Although the upper class was kept in the dark until attacks on the capital escalated, every Peruvian has been touched by the violence of the Sendero Luminoso in some way. Most affected, however, were the indigenous peoples in the rural countryside. The rebels hid among these towns, committing heinous acts of violence against the very villages they had been born in. Simultaneously, their presence in these villages drew the military into those areas. Most military personnel did not know Quechua, the native language (that they were not taught any is another signifier of the deep rift between social classes in Peru), and therefore they couldn’t determine which townspeople were rebel and which were innocent civilians. Many brutal extrajudicial killings resulted from both this careless occupation by the senderistas and the military’s casual disregard for the lives of citizens in these rural communities. (in class documentary)

After this brutal conflict, many Peruvians still chose the path of forgetfulness. Even though a council was formed to seek out and publicize the truth of what happened during the internal conflict, many chose to blame the senderistas in full for the outbreak of rebellion. A monument called The Eye that Cries, erected to honor the memory of all the lives lost in the conflict, was the source of a heated debate, the belief that rebel names didn’t belong in the monument was widespread, and caused the piece to be fenced off from the public. (Drinot 2006) It is hard to blame the Peruvians for wanting to forget such terrible events. Humanity as a whole has a history of selectively forgetting, such as the United States’ own brutal relationship of exploitation and betrayal of American Indians. (Brown 1970)

The rebellion of the Sendero Luminoso is not the only past violence that Peruvians chose to sweep under the rug. Tensions and racism still persists, remnants from as far back as the invasion of the Spanish Conquistadors in the mid-1500s. The attempt to destroy native cultures was a part of Spain’s own brand of slash and burn New World domination. First, indigenous peoples were weakened by disease, which blanketed the landscape long before the arrival of troops. Then, any scholars and priests would be disposed of. Puppet emperors were set into place, and before long the Spanish empire was comfortably seated at the head of a new territory. Papal decree that the indigenous peoples were human, had souls, and must be converted, was long to take effect, and although Catholicism is interwoven into the beliefs of the native peoples, there still exists a substantial rift between classes and races. (web reading, Spanish encomiendas)

Despite the concerted efforts of the conquistadors to eradicate Incan culture in the Andes, the languages and practices of the rural people exist in a continuum from ancient times. By studying the ethnography of these peoples, using first hand Spanish Colonial accounts, and piecing together evidence from archeological sites, ideas of what everyday life in Inca civilization would have been like. The people of the Andes seamlessly integrate ancient ideologies with Spanish colonial ones, and, in spite of the pressures of racism and violence, manage to cling to an identity as unique and fascinating as the environment they inhabit.

Cited Works

Brown, Dee

1970 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee New York: Holt, Rineheart and Winston

Allen, Katherine

2002 The Hold Life Has: Coca and Cultural Identity in an Andean Community. Smithsonian Institute

Pollan, Michael

2006 The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. The Penguin Press

Silverman, Helaine

2007 Contemporary Museum Practice in Cusco, Peru. In Archaeology and Capitalism. From Ethics to Politics, edited by Philip Duke and Yannis Hamilakis, pp. 195-212. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek.

2008 Mayor Daniel Estrada and the Plaza De Armas of Cuzco, Peru. Heritage management, volume 1 issue 2 181-217

Drinot, Paulo

2009 For whom the eye cries: memory, monumentality, and the ontologies of violence

in peru. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 18: 1, 15 — 32

Sandweiss, Daniel H. and James B. Richardson III

2008 Central Andean Environments. In Handbook of South American Archaeology, edited by Helaine Silverman and William H. Isbell, pp. 93-104. Springer Science & Business Media, LLC, New York.

From the Web:

Spanish Administration and Encomienda

Brittanie Jones

September 26, 2010

Response to The Women Troubadours

As I read through the poems, I found it hard to grasp the full poetic impact of the words, due to the very literal translation. When I attempted to read through the originals, I found that not having a background in anything, excepting Spanish, made them less than helpful for sleuthing out any of what I felt the translations lacked.

Aside from my issues with the translation, I found a vein of commonality embedded in the work. Because these poems are the only examples of troubadourism that I have read, however, I wasn’t able to determine if the commonality was a theme of the troubadour tradition, an expression common to the women of the era, or a coincidence.

These women seem to take their power in life through courtly love. They seem to not be able to have a choice in choosing their own husbands, yet the way these poems are worded it seems as though they have control in accepting or denying a lover. They play to the medieval ideal of being weak and needing the men, however in some examples its evident that they are still able to end the relationship.

I still find it difficult to make any judgments about the poetry without a broader spectrum of work to choose from. It’s hard to compare and contrast amongst these 23 poems.

Avalanche of Love

Evolutionary Novelty.

Is our love

an evolution?

Through ages of beings

Holding each other in the black

Ape hands laced together

For the first time

Stars shining in the dark eyes of our ancestors

Young chimps climbing trees and dreaming of that strangeness

Growing up into our time

Is the collapsing warmth brewing in my chest

Descendant from another era?

Millenia ago, did hominins lock lips and arms and hands in the dark

Just like we do?

**

Looking in your eyes, I believe that you love me as much as you say.

**

Anchor

I'm tying down memories to you

Anchoring simple things

(Dogs barking

Mac and Cheese

Sweaters

The cold)

Firmly to your hand

Replacing all my past pain

With the way my fingers stretch

Trying to cup your palm

The way my nails feel

Dragging over your back

The way my heart feels

When I try to say

How much I love you.

**

Pinned

You are the pin that fixes my spinning world

A hand hold on a mountain face

An island in a sea of blank faces

If I can hold you

The waves don't feel as hard

If I can whisper my fears

Into the shell of your ear

Than maybe you can filter out

All the poison inside me

Let the putrid oil of pain leak out

Refresh my inner workings with the clean wash

Of your love

You can take me apart

See all my pieces

Put them back together

Around you.

**

Integrated Systems

My skin burns

Feels you across stretches of road

My flesh pulled over that distance

My veins plugged into your heart like powerlines

And yours into mine

Together

Lightening strikes us

Fuses us

Like this

Even apart

We cannot become disentangled

I feel your fingers in mine always

My hair against your face

Your arms around me

Lips always connected

Speaking into each others minds

Our dreams and wishes

Memories

Forge them into one past

So we can make

One future.

Forever

What does the beginning of forever feel like?

How do you know that something good will last into the endless twists and turns, the eagle dance of fate and time plunging forever from the sky?

Its carved into trees, abbreviated, grown over. Your initials next to mine, smiling back at the sun against decades of its rays.

How can I even hope for it?

What does forever feel like?

The beginning of love, those seeds, pressed into the folds of you, pinched in and watered, nurtured. Love is painful. Those seeds expand inside me, digging deeper, stretching towards the outside until I am encased in its branches. The tree is growing out towards the sunshine of our love.

Forever starts painfully slow. Those tree rings are growing around us, so fast at first, our sapling clenches our hearts together, molding them. I can't tell one from the other now.

Apart from you feels like forever. I am an unfinished puzzle aching to be solved. Pieces of you wrap around me and meld with me and when I breathe your breathe I could be thinking your thoughts and you could be thinking mine.

Its been forever since I had a sign that two souls could be made for each other. I flash back to all those wrong choices, those people I jammed myself against, those ill fitted keys that ground and sliced up my insides until I had no tears left, only blood.

It felt like forever, I was walking through hell and projecting love onto those who didn't love me, not as much as you, or maybe even at all. Remembering that is my hell, and you make me remember, because you fold me up into blankets and kisses and bites and heaven. I never knew good, so there was no way of regretting the bad. And yet all that bad lets me appreciate just how good you are.

I just want you into forever. I would take the heart out of my chest and let you keep it safe. We could protect each other's hearts in our locked rib cages. I would never let anyone touch it or look at it, hidden safe inside the tight sheets of my skin. Forever until we step down together into the unknown and that unknown will have to take us together.

Show me what forever feels like. I can make it there if you're holding my hand.

stain my insides with your coffee colored verses

though I think those kinds of words are purposeless

i'm breathing mold and choking

gasping hard against the knowing

i was wrong

pour your oily words back down my throat

the attention stops me thinking that I'm broke

not broken down by money but just

weighted down by years and years of

mistakes losses faking smiles and tears and laughter genuine and false

i'll go back to singing songs of ignorance

you'll go back to what you were the time before

lets just forget about those times

and i'll kick back and drink some wine

hopefully someday it'll be a joke.

All I have left is a ghost of you.

You are a dream burned under my skin.

Your outline, dancing, seared behind my eyelids.

I'm waiting for the sands of time to scrub the pain of these vivid memories from my mind.

Touching, touching, touching.

Fire is in my chest right where I've inked it.

I'm burning in these chains of memory

Trapped in the time we had

Fighting through the muddy present

But all I have left is that ghost of you

Your phantom caress burned into my skin

A glowing outline, breathing, branded into my eyelids.

I'm laying in the desert of time waiting for a sandstorm to blast this pain away.

Please, make me forget.

That happiness is the mother of misery.

chatroulette project pt 2

Exploring interactions

So I've taken an interest in the chatroulette phenomenon. It sparks a weird curiosity in me. I just need to know. Who are you? What does it take to make you laugh? What does your face look like behind your penis?

I'm compiling a data base of screenshots. Might try to title by location when relevant.

What is a Hero?

The fallen hero lay dejected, the side of his face pressed into the gritty mud, rain gathering in the shell of his upturned ear. It almost drowned out the sounds of laughter. His closed eyes could shut out the pointed fingers, the disappointed stares, but the sounds of disapproval still permeated him.

"This is a shit show." He confirmed out loud, pushing himself away from the ground and standing up to face his losses. He turned to face his companion, who was handcuffing a black and blue villain to a nearby lamp-post. The kid seemed sparkling and young and masculine to him, despite the rain and cold and the blood on his vinyl costume. Yet again, stealing the show from him, so nonchalant, as if this was how it was meant to be.

The kid turned back to him, flashing a dazzling smile, so unaware of how humiliating it was to be a hero who was shown up by his side-kick. He was still so caught up in that Daddy-be-proud-of-me attitude. He hadn't a clue that his leaps and bounds and successes were slowly killing the self esteem of a once-king crime buster.

"What's a shit show, Pops?" The man shook his head, reaching up with his leather-clad hand to wipe the street grit out of his eyes.

"Nothing. Nothing at all. Good job, Kid. You did good." He would praise him forever, no matter how badly it made him feel. Every time he felt like he could just wring the kid's neck for showing him up, every time he wanted to trip him to take out the villain first, he would think back to the day the child showed up on his doorstep. All big blue eyes and small hands and tiny pouting mouth, reaching up at him with a scribbled note tagged on his shirt, You know what this is about.

And he had known. And he had taken the kid in and hugged him and apologized to him for his entire life. He'd given the kid everything, and now his everything was fading with it. Even heroes make mistakes. The difference between the hero and the bad guy is: A hero will do everything to fix mistakes. A bad guy just keeps on making more.

Even so, he didn't know how much longer he could keep up. This dapper young guy was out-running him, out-jumping him, out-thinking him, and certainly, cumulatively, out-heroing him. Though it would kill him either way, the hero thought that maybe it was the right time to leave some money on the table and walk out the door... Again. Maybe go into a more laid-back line of work. Maybe hedge funds.

They got into the car, took the low jack off the wheel, and headed home. The man made an effort to listen in on the kid's excited babbling. Twenty years old and the kid still babbled like a ten year old, on and on and on. He must've got that from his mother. Not that he knew much about what she was like. Just one night of giving in and following that grateful would-be Jane Doe home, one time where he'd let himself fall into that fantasy of damsel in distress... What did it get him? A god damn glory hog of a son.

Once safety tucked away in the confines of his den, the hero surrendered himself to the depth and darkness of his thoughts. His footsteps thumped dully against the soft shag of the same brown on darker brown 70s retro funk vomit carpet he'd had since his glory days. The fake wood panel walls were papered in clippings, from The Times, The Gotham, The Onion even. Parody, wasn't that the highest form of flattery?

The kid knew every line from every article, these walls were his bible. How could the hero possibly escape from the clutches of this mess? The ink spun spiderwebs around him, binding him to this stagnant, steadily declining piss-pot of a life. He couldn't just walk away from this. It would have to be something more extreme.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

"How... Could... This... Happen....?!" Iridescent gloves the color of spilt oil pinched the soft spandex of the Hero's empty mask, rolled it over and over, disbelieving, grasping at the object like one holds a hand in a dream. The kid shivered on his knees. It was warm, hot even, inside the form-fitted safety-yellow spandex, but the cold was from inside. It was the same cold as every time his mother looked at him like an accident, the same cold as standing before that closed front door after she'd urged him out of her 1988 powder blue Subaru. Even before his father was his Pops, even when he'd been an anonymous sperm donor in the dark young corner of his life, he had never, ever felt this cold lonely abandonment.

No signs of struggle, no body, no prints, no nothing. Nothing but shredded pieces of bone and brain and blood slicing the thin fabric of the mask from the inside, cutting into the kid's fingers as his loose devastated grip tightened into fists around it. Tears pressed out of his eyes and traced hot red itching marks down the inside of his mask, the salt burning his skin in some strange reaction to the chemicals in the vinyl hugging his face.

He couldn't have gone like this... A bullet to the face, his body carried off, the mask left behind like a mocking note, something callous and gaudy. That couldn't be it. His father. His hero, his idol, gone! The kid just couldn't take it. He didn't even know what his body was doing at that moment, but his reaction to the emotional pain coursing through his veins was surprisingly physical. An absolute roar was ripping its way up the dark chasm of his throat, filling the air with the kind of sound that strikes even the happiest soul with the deepest empathy. He was pounding his bleeding hands into the dirt, into the blood spots, mashing them into mud that covered the Hero's mask, which he still clutched in his vice grip. He couldn't see, he couldn't hear, he couldn't feel, he could only think. Pops, Pops, Pops, Pops! Over and over, deep into the dark, the echoing name in his mind rolling through the cold lonely expanse between the earth and the night sky.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

A deep contented sigh practically oozed out of the hero's... Out of Rick's mouth as he melted into his beach-side lounge chair. Condensation from the margarita glass dribbled over the back of his hand; The sensation felt like a relaxing caress against his tired bones. Everything fell together so perfectly, someone up there had to be looking out for him again. The old luck, given back to him now that he'd gone solo. The pig's skull had burst perfectly with the bullet, left behind just enough to look like the end. Then finding perfectly priced tickets on priceline... Escape to Greece, those alabaster beaches where he could soak up the sun and plot his next move. Or he could never move again. It wouldn't matter. Not one bit. Not to him, not to these other civilians. Not to the kid...

His brow wrinkled. Of course he felt guilty. He wasn't some kind of heartless animal. But there comes a time in every young sidekick's life where he would have to either be kicked out of the nest or be forever relegated to the side car. Rick was positive that the kid was not a side car type of guy. He was a front liner. A solo artist just like his Pops.

Another, less content, sigh rolled out of him and the wind of it ruffled his linen shirt. Maybe he would write a book. Memoirs of a Dead Vigilante. Or something equally as melodramatic.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

She was found with her head split open against the kitchen sink, her hands gloved in pink rubber and dripping still with bubbles from the sink. Martha was a low woman, and was generally known not to keep a good house. She had been fitted with the gloves, in addition to a pair of black pumps and a flowered apron. Carved into the drywall with the sharp edge of a broken plate, a message startled police investigators.

"MOTHER WHAT HAS BEEN DONE?"

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Two weeks into Rick's rambling through Greece and her surrounding islands, he found himself stopping small crimes. Tripping would-be muggers at the opportune moment, spinning women into that creepy-old man flirty dance while simultaneously pivoting away from a would-be pick-pocket, even briefly directing traffic at a broken stop light. He couldn't believe himself. A small scale hero. It felt good to do the little things, but it was almost masturbatory when those around him didn't understand they were being saved.

Week three was different. He found that a woman was following him. Hugging the corners and watching him save old women's purses and intervene in bar fights. He was flattered. Week four he sat down at a table for two and she joined him. Proposed that he team up with her. Said that he would be a natural bid for her sidekick. He swallowed an amused smile and agreed. He certainly wouldn't mind following a woman like that up a ladder.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The kid had become a brute. His Hero, his Hero, he would find him inside the skins of the low-lifers, the dregs, the homeless under bridges, the prostitutes at their corners, the milling junkies in their cockroach houses, he would split them open every night and find the mask of his father in his hands, staring at him, laughing, laughing at him.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Rick thought she was beautiful. He would follow her to the ends of the earth, hanging back, holding back while holding doors and checking his punches so she could give the last blow. He was the sidekick now, it didn't matter if he was shown up. In fact his job hinged on it. He loved that Valkyrie smile she got when blood splattered over her cheek, or when a tooth bounced against pavement, or when a blackguard turned blue and sputtered choked notes of truth that would save lives. He forgot about the kid. He was second in their team but number one in her heart.

It wasn't until he rolled over one morning, almost a year later, dingy from the sweat of their work and their sex and their old bedsheets that he even thought about that first mistake of his. A casually tossed aside newspaper trumpeted up at him, Lightening Kid, Gone Berserk in America! His heart stopped. She rolled over, one arm coiling over the cold feeling in the pit of his stomach as her auburn hair cascaded over his taunt shoulder. She asked him a meaningless question that he didn't hear. Then she spied the headline, making a brilliant exclamation.

"This could be our biggest job yet! I'm booking our flight." He was in stunned silence over the entire ocean. She thought the tension singing under his skin was his way of steeling himself for the battle ahead. He was too broken to protest anything she said. Guilt was pouring over him like a waterfall. Everyone makes mistakes. But heroes always fix their mistakes. Bad guys make more. Bad guys make more mistakes. How many mistakes could he have made before the kid got like this? How many mistakes can one person recover from? He was a bad guy. He wasn't a hero and he never had been. He was a bad guy. Bad guys were selfish, and their selfishness hurt and destroyed others.

She gripped his hand, steeling herself for battle.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The kid laid on his back, staring up at his ceiling. The Hero stared back down at him, empty eye holes stapling the mask to the flaking plaster. His hand dropped to the floor below his bare mattress, gripping the dirty brown on darker brown 70s retro funk vomit carpet from the Hero's glory days. The newspaper clippings of his bible fluttered in the breeze of a creaking window fan, one remaining blade determinately pressing a few pitiful breaths of fresh air into the fetid stench of the room.

"I'm doing good, right Pops? Getting the bad guys. They all deserve to die for what they took from us. I'm putting them in the ground. Its for the greater good. You know Pops? I'm doing good, its for you, and its GOOD."

An awful laugh barked out from the mouth slit of the Hero's mask, the black gap widening and closing with the horrid sound. The kid pressed his hands to his ears and cried. He rolled over and his side and curled his knees into his chest and roared his sorrow into the reverberating box of the room. Mother what have you done...?

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

"You're quiet. What's the matter?"

"Nothing..."

"Are you sick? The plane food was pretty terrible, but you still should've eaten. You're pale. I need you strong for this."

"I'm not hungry."

"Maybe I should go this one alone. I couldn't bear it if I forced you into this when you weren't tip-top and something happened. "

He nodded, once. She expected him to fight, and the ease of him giving in made her angry. She stormed off through the city.

He turned down the familiar streets, teetered through those rough and low places, searching. Where was the kid? There had to be a way to save him. To wash the blood from his hands, to open the door again and take the note off his shirt, the note he himself had written in his old mask and in pig's brains.

It was almost too easy to find him. Too easy and too heartbreaking. The safety yellow vinyl was as dingy as a pair of sanitation worker cover-alls. Blood to the elbow and to the knee. Fresh splatters across his chest. His bare hands prying open the sternum of some poor junkie caught unawares.

"Christ, Michael..." He couldn't stop himself from speaking. The kid's head snapped around like a wolf, rage melting instantly into a heartbreaking mix of waking nightmares and dreams melded and come true.

"Did I do Good, Pops?"

Rick was crying, he couldn't see but he held his arms out and the kid charged into them and smeared the warm blood all along his front and oh God the smell was terrible. There was a stiff jerk that he thought was the kid, a crazy convulsion. He looked down and for some reason the insanity was fading from the kid's eyes. He was smiling, that same look he gave when the Hero first opened the door and crumpled the note on his shirt and picked him up and held the kid for the first time. Then there was blood bubbling, coughing up from the corners of his mouth.

"You did good, Kid." And he knew, he saw her over the kid's shoulder, the righteous Valkyrie slaying her companion's attacker. Why else would her man have his arms wrapped around a dirty villain, but to hold him for her blade?

They locked eyes and confusion clouded her face. She pulled the blade back and ran. Rick had never looked at her like that before. No one she had saved had ever looked at her with that pure look of horror written in their eyes.

The Hero lowered his fallen son to the ground, sat down, pulled the kid into his lap and cradled his face as the kids lips whispered up at him.

"It's alright, I know they were bad. You don't have to do it anymore. I'm letting you rest, you can close your eyes and rest now. I'm so sorry. My whole life, I've been so sorry. You didn't deserve this. I'm sorry."

The kid's shaky hand reached up, tracing the shape of the Hero's mask with a gore-covered fingertip. "It's ok... Pops. You always came... Back to save... me."

And the kid was gone again, brought into the world and taken out of it by a woman who thought she knew best. Rick didn't even know what his body was doing at that moment, but his reaction to the emotional pain coursing through his veins was surprisingly physical. An absolute roar was ripping its way up the dark chasm of his throat, filling the air with the kind of sound that strikes even the happiest soul with the deepest empathy.

He wasn't anyone's Hero anymore. He wasn't Rick. He wasn't even a man. He was just another bad guy. A bad guy filling the world with mistakes.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++