some dec. words

i never knew how easy it would be
to become an affectation,
tit for tat

do you notice how carefully
i am half an expert and half a fool

i worry my truest self might be in
the moments when my rage escapes.
i realize now that the toe was broken
and that you should not brutally kick
moving vehicles,
even if they are driven by total bitches.

i walked on it for blocks
with a poker face, ashamed
like i always am of anger,
though not of being angry
which is just comedy
like everything

i get too angry at strangers
when they are inconsiderate,
or cruel, i think that is the thing
i get most angry about.

___

i did not eat lamb as a child,
but i do now.
it feels more honest to eat pigs,
they are more like us, with sturdy
recognizable bones. how familiar,
and appropriate

when i was a child i ate beef
and spaghetti. the dogs ate
hollow bird bones. one day
i wore a lime-green gold glitter tiger sweatshirt
and ran accidentally into the electric fence,
it made a black line on the tiger
and a red line on me
__

i can't seem to write without swerving embarrassingly down tributaries of mental anguish. i want my writing to be more like a joke but it spills out of me all flowery and sensory and earnest, and it only wants to re-hash every heart-break and deep slips into abysses from which i emerged scarred and sharp-eyed.

i never could separate the poeming from my selfness, and this is where i have struggled most in the academic/professional/social poetry world. i am not claiming to be unique, this sounds pretty normal now that i type it. i do the writing like this because it's how i come out, it's the frequency i vibrate to. i'm not so great. i want to try and i want to want to try.

i need to keep increasing my vocabulary. these wet december days make my existence dementedly crepuscular. i actually think i am pretty strong/nice/good to be around. i have always liked feeling strong. i have always had very strong legs for kicking soccer balls but i am just now learning how to punch. i am doing push-ups. i want to be stronger. i want to be faster. i want to be smaller. a modern machine.

i want to be embettered. most of my inner monologue is literally self-abuse and i am trying to say nicer things to myself. i should probably stop trying to explain myself. i think maybe i have a fetish where i like to assume other people are interested in me explaining myself. i want to get on planes that take me across the world and back. i want to be friends. i want to know how to make friends when i can't seem to act unless invited. i want to write poems that make you love me, and make you feel loved. i want to maintain enough flaws to never feel paved-over. i want to think/feel like an animal.

miss attribution learns how to let go

what did you learn about cells
how did your burns heal
why does it all doppler

close your eyes and
take a tour of every place you've lived

don't be afraid
of me or anything

at land, soldier

it's always a shore
where you find yourself
borne here maybe

bury half my head in
lukewarm gray sand while
snuffling blind sea mammals
nudge my sides, whisker the flesh
of my hips, rush salty wet air
in my exposed blue blinking eye

i could thrash til i burrow under,
soak, logged, and with this pressure
be ushered away as bits,
as grains in wee mandibles

i could just begin with i love,
i could just let these gulls take my eyes
and i could climb, could say
remember the first time you broke
along the fault lines, called it art,
could feel a fear of cold

call an eagle down to carry me,
bring me dinner, feed me meat,
you could ring my bell, bell,
my belly knows its grip;
i'm tired of throwing it up,
my guts all fluttering sore tatters

a bluff, i fold,
this is just a demonstrative iteration,
a dualness and hunger that chugs along
like dawns, warms my ice teeth,
quells my eruption some

here on this mountain
i have always been
your smiling oracle,
beseeching, seek me

can't fight this sensation any-more

descending into my dark winter,
uncertain whether this cave's ghosts are too powerful.
there is a screaming high and tight on the wind again
& i get demon dreams, i get hard cognitive dissonance hall-o-mirrors;
i get blusters that won't subside til they blast and gnaw.
i'm gonna try to be nice, i know you're trying to be nice,
this isn't because i don't love
everything, or know what
is, i mean should be real

whoever said

ed. -- turns out this was my 666th blog post, good job me!

placing

it took me a while to learn
i never could settle in
a city that goes on so far
i can't know its edges

admit that you're still
waiting on that second childhood
while forever shaking hands with

this new you, forgetting
names, i'm so bad, with names,
so bad with these new mes

see i thought my magic was
stronger, see each way leads
to the same sick silly eruption

it is hard enough to know one place fully,
putting my mouth to each alley way,
pulling hungry lungs of the
soft brown honeyed smoke

Animation

I found an amazing website of animation sketches that I am going to share here out of guilt for not producing any writing lately.*

I wish I had the patience for my talents. I mean this in the least self-fellating way possible; everyone has talents.** I always felt like a fraud because I have all of this intelligent fire in me and this general skillset of things I'm decent at*** and you're supposed to have a "passion," something that you know, you can't not do.

Sometimes everything I do feels like a parlour trick, like I am very well-trained, enough to be very pleasing in certain ways but lacking something essential behind it all that would propel me to true success. I do not wish to simply ease through life with minimal discomfort (or I do) but no passion grips me, or many do, fleetingly, small sucker fish, silky tentacles.

The animation slides are fun, I do love me some animation. Seeing the intricate skill and work behind films I absorbed as a child is especially engaging. The character design process is, I think, informative on a different level; It's intriguing to see the movement of the character affecting the entire persona, and it makes me consider both my own body language and a larger literacy of "intent" being informed by each subtle movement. Aladdin wouldn't react to something frightening by leaning back and yelping with wide eyes, he would crouch quickly forward and assess the situation, because he is always in control. Ariel's movements are fluid, but her timing reflects her perky impatience and impulsiveness in every head-turn and fin-swish.

Keep a clear line of action. Consider your character.

*Most of my job is composing meticulous email communications and long legal brief letters about software engineers and by the end of the day I'm usually just honestly sick to death of word processing.

**I grew up constantly being told how smart I was and how I could do anything, but suffered the usual mental crisis of puberty and after that decided to firmly browbeat myself into believing I was extremely average in every way. It was how I came to see myself by high school: My hair was brown, my weight was not thin but not obese, I was from the very middle of the U.S.A., I drank a lot of mountain dew, average. I think this may be some kind of partial factor which mired me in an insecurity-fugue that is still ongoing. In retrospect I feel as though I was trying to wring myself of the waves of mental highs and lows that had begun to toss me, and to snuff the anxiety over the potential of catastrophic life-failure and general life-confusion. I mostly feel though that it was an attempt to control my personal image of my physical self, which was overtaken by the comments/leers/awkward makeouts of boys/men when I grew fantastic tits in 6th grade. Averageness was safety, and an excuse to recede into self-comfort instead of striving. Or whatever.
The point is I regret not being ballsier about my ambition. I don't know if it's how I was trained to be or if it's in my nature or if I fucked it up by the above paragraph or what.

***I take great comfort in being decent at things.