Poetic Prose: The Seemingly Nonsensical Logic of My Disquieted Mind

So many thoughts lingering in my mind, at the tip of my tongue, waiting for my lips to form the words that would breathe the sounds to life. I'm living in a mess of indigos and violets, my poetry blurring into my prose. I haven't felt this way about writing in a long time.

How does one convey emotion through images, rather than merely tell?

Perhaps that's precisely what has been troubling me about my writing. I have the paintbrushes, the paints, and the canvas. Perhaps I need to trade in these old specs for a new set of lenses. Maybe I just need to hone my brush strokes. Or maybe...

Maybe I just need to get my hands to stop shaking.

I flip through old diaries, the paper cracked and crisp betwixt my fingers, until I feel peeled and distant from the teenage girl who authored them. I slam each diary shut. I wish for a furnace, but burning these well-worn leaves won't stamp out the invisible imprints that the past has branded in my mind. But that teenage girl, the one who bared her ideas on those personal pages, will forever remain a part of me. She's grown up and she's moved beyond the silly narration of those pages (I can only hope).

I stare at empty pages as my thoughts dance in circles, waiting for my voice to give them weight. Instead, they linger, waiting for an unassuming passerby to catch the barely audible whisper.

So this is my journal of discontent, my heart's manifesto, the seemingly nonsensical logic of my disquieted mind.

Clearly, I still have a lot of figuring out to do. I won't cross my fingers, though. I need to write.

Esc

I think I've grown a little rusty in writing poems. I just hope I can learn a few more tricks and techniques once I take that poetry workshop this semester.

Until then, this is one of the things I have to work with, called "Esc." Feel free to be as honest as you want to be and let me know what you think of it. Writing is a learning process, after all. Thanks!

"Esc"

The never knowing

The moment you shake your leg, tap your foot,

Rake trembling hands through your hair, 

Teeter in your seat

Wonder if the message you sent

Ever reached the inbox

"Delivered," your screen reports

Yet you feel anything but saved

"Delete" you want to press,

But you can’t backtrack to that space

Shifting restlessly

So you go to your bed and lie in it

Sleep, that natural route of circumvention,

When one drinks dreams from that cup called denial

You never authored anything

Your fingers never touched that keyboard

Your prints aren't etched between each binary-embedded word

Each invisible pixel between the spaces of each

Letter you wish you’d never typed

The only thing retracted:

The only thing that ever mattered and meant the world

And even when the sunlight spills through the window and

Hits the speckled eggshell walls of your room

You’re sitting up, listening to your lungs expand and collapse,

Watching the shadows rise and ebb as the

Reasons dance around and around, and

Once again elude you

The Neophyte

Here is the poem I mentioned in the previous post, the one inspired by the music I was listening to the night I first started writing it. After many edits and revisions, I think I've finally got it. The most recent version is the one you see below. I tried to incorporate the use of more concrete images to give the words a life and personality all their own. Hopefully, I accomplished that. 

That's where you come in, dear reader. 

If you're feeling up to it, I'd love to know what you think. Be as constructively critical as you want to be, as I'm thinking of submitting it to a student publication at my college by the end of this month. And now, without further ado...

“The Neophyte”

He thought himself a neophyte intellectual who lacked

The prerequisite pretension

Strumming his fingers through mental chords

Striking up a match,

Shaking jolts through dormant lords,

Inciting the vocal

Fuel of a generation

He played them all with his charisma,

Leaving them breathless,

Leaving them blinded,

Rapt by the rampant drumming and

Wondering after the true charlatan

He struck up a conversation

Summoning up his charm,

His weapon his gentle persuasion

As he blithely blew his game plans

Into the seamless curve of Gale’s ear,

Knowing full well that she’d leave him

Winded, shooting the breeze about

His wounds

Sunk beneath his psyche

She was half-tempted to grab the spade,

Twice-enticed to forge her verbal blade,

Deciding at last to pick up the scalpel

And knit her way through the fibers

Cloaking his core

Unwinding, testing out the theory of

How long until he cracks

And shows her she’s more

Than just a constellation in his rose-tinged sky

But she refrains, restrains

Chooses to smile and feign indifference

To his mad scheming

As her analytical wits crackle with

The spark that started it all,

The spoken verse that struck a chord

And cursed her with the scalding imprint of

His asymmetrical smile

Burned somewhere in the folds of her brain

And all she can think to say was DAMN IT.

Moving in the Middle of the Semester

Hello again.

Life has been crazy lately. For one thing, my family and I moved to a new apartment three blocks away. It's a little stressful right now trying to figure where all our belongings are located. Let me just say that proper labeling goes a long way. My parents didn't do a splendid job of it since the movers were already there taking our furniture out of our old apartment, so we couldn't find most of our stuff until we opened up random boxes and started unpacking things at the new place. It's a little further away from the subway, but I like our new street -- it's quiet enough and quaint enough that you can take a stroll through the neighborhood when you need to clear your head and think. Plus, it's only a block away from the laundromat, so weekend chores shouldn't be as difficult as it was before.

As for school... it's a struggle. Subjects are getting more difficult, and the course requirements are demanding. I have a group project and four research papers due by next month. I just hope I can still keep my head up from drowning in stress. Yet even through the all-nighters and the caffeine-infused study sessions, I'm still willing to embrace the challenges that the future may hold.

I haven't had much time to devote to my novel-writing because school and family has kept me busy, but I did write a poem late one night. It's amazing how music can inspire you to do something creative. While listening to my favorite stations on Pandora radio, I felt that all-too familiar itch to write. Words were rearranging themselves in my head, mixing themselves up with familiar lyrics, and creating new phrases I didn't ever want to forget. So I took another stab at writing a poem. It's a little different from my earlier stuff, but I'm glad that my writing is heading towards a new direction. I like to think it's progress.

I may have to read this book.

For now, I'm still reorganizing and figuring things out in my life. I'm not sure where I'm headed, or what I'm going to end up doing in the next five or ten years. I'm usually a meticulous (and okay, a somewhat neurotic) planner, but right now, it feels so good to just close my eyes and take a deep breath as I look out my new window at the calm autumn evening.

I kind of wish the rest of the country felt the same way. There's been a lot of unrest lately, what with the OWS movement going on in Manhattan and the upcoming presidential election next year. If only the world took a moment to stop spinning so fast... maybe people would see things with a better perspective instead of constantly taking sides in gray situations. There's always a side to every story; we cannot always presume to know everything. The best we can do is just, for once, learn to listen to each other and try to be understanding.

Of course, that's just the optimist in me talking. The pessimist in me just heaves a sigh and shakes her head. Oh well...

Until the next post, dear friends.

This is yours truly,
J.Day

Something to Alight -- My Personal Semantic

I know I've mentioned time and again that I would post something I've written, and yet have failed to do so on a number of occasions. So instead of merely mentioning it, I've decided to post a poem that I've been working on since I was sixteen. I wrote it about four years ago for a self-portrait project in my English class when I was still a junior in high school. I'm currently using it as a device in the novel that I'm working on, so it's undergone some major changes from the original version.

It probably still needs some reworking and improvement, so I'd love to hear any comments about it if you have any. I don't really have an official title for it now, but in the meantime I've been calling it "Something to Alight -- My Personal Semantic."

Here goes nothing...

Something to Alight -- My Personal Semantic

I am a bottle with a secret message inside
Floating and drifting away, hoping someone finds me
in the tumult of the tides.

I am a thorny flower beginning to bloom,
Fazed by the beauty of the rest of the garden,
Struggling to stand up straight and
Not wilt too soon.

I am an open book, my pages a chronicle in the making.
But most fail to read between the lines for
The invisible ink fools those who
Think they've read the whole story.

Try to define its words like the sages.
I dare you to confine me within these pages,
To capture the essence, the nonsense verse of my personal semantic,
My abstraction.

Go on, I dare you. Rip me apart. Break me open.
Burn the script and bury its spine in sand.
All you’ll get are blisters in your hands.

All you’ll ever find are the fractions
Of the savage boom-boom within this
Cage that’s rusted over with the
Brown-red residue of shadow and shame.

I blunt my words until they hurt
More than the sharpest sword
Severing skin and searing sinew,
Shattering my walls as I linger,
Waiting, withering, wanting

Something to alight.

As I scream aloud to breathe anew,
My heart and mind ablaze
Flickering bright white and blue.

I am fed with oxygen
My life renewed.

Poetry: the Worthwhile Struggle of Tangled Words and Images

It's been 5 hours since I've agonized over the introductory paragraph to my paper for my Asian American Women Writers class. I know what I want to write, but the words keep getting tangled up in my mind. Caffeine at 1AM probably wasn't such a good idea, especially if you're writing an essay on strictly defining what's personal and what's political within a particular poem. In the end, the poem is always the function of the personal intersecting with the political. If I made your head ache with this ramble, you can probably get a gist of why it's been bothering me (in which case, I should say I'm sorry?). On the other hand, difficult poems are worth every circle of confusion and wonder.

There's more to poetry than just the appeal of seducing your readers' senses with images of how your “love is an anger is a fire.” You pen these images, but what does that line truly mean? It all comes down to context; a verse constructed with the sole purpose of posing as “deep” and “sophisticated” to others often has the tendency to alarm other people’s bullshit meters. 

If, however, you truly have something more to say beneath the layer of the written text on the page, and if you have sought nuances with syntax and dared to shatter the patterns of cliché with your wit as the scalpel, then perhaps you have penned something worthwhile. A poem should not be the purveyor of pleasure and comfort, but rather the riddle with the persistent aftertaste that confounds and astounds your audience after they’ve eaten your words. An analysis of the poem should not be the regurgitation of its surface content, but rather the hiccup or the burp that subsides after hours of digestion. Poetry is not sexy, nor is it the culmination of praises that leave a lover’s lips, nor the contrived messages of greeting cards expressing exaltations of friendships or the sorry of condolences. Poetry could take one of these forms, but these are not always the case, nor do these forms always convey any real substance or meaning in their messages. If you have always presumed that poetry is a few lines of rhymes with a pretty message inside, then you are sadly mistaken. Poetry is the struggle that may or may not offer the resolution, for it is up to you, the reader, to either question it or find it.

Sometimes, the worthwhile poem is the one that sucks you into that cold whirlpool of confusion, dousing you with more questions than answers. To truly obtain meaning, you have to get lost in order to find yourself. Try reading “Tradition” by Quan Barry or “The State Will Be Served Even By My Hand On These Letters” by Sun Young Shin if you don't believe me.

Flight

Wrote this for my creative writing class...

Flight

On a midnight flight
Out of sight
Lugging baggage,
Remnants of remembrance
Rocking,
Not stopping,
Rocking
Windy turbulence
Howls, growls, scowls.
Pillows plush slowly hush the rushing sleeper
Swimming in sky.
Swaddled in warm wispy white,
Vanilla-drenched dreams drum hushed hums,
Cooing, sweetly soothing,
Steering scorched voices way away.

Skin

As I was researching body art and different cultural perspectives on this topic, the creative spark set my mind aflame. I began thinking of body art as a mark of identity. I wanted to write something about an individual claiming the right to an identity, overcoming suppression and turmoil in order to get it, and finally feeling the freedom and satisfaction that the identity brings. I thought it was some kind of cycle, a metamorphosis that one goes through.

And so, this poem was born:


Skin

'Tis a sin
To alter the skin,
The elders say.

Obey this holy example:
The body is the temple;
The soul the altar.

'Tis a crime
To pillage this shrine.
A savage sacrilege.

The gift of free will
Sits dormant and still,
Shackled by sanctity's sanction.

Yet still you
Want, crave, do
What you will.

Somehow, you escape.
You rape
Your temple.

Penetrate your flesh,
Letting the elements mesh
From the needle.

A piercing, a tattoo.
This taboo
Inflames your soul.

A scar, a mar.
They say you've gone too far.
And so you die.

Hellfire.

Your insides Turn.
Cowardice and malice burning -
Ashes in an urn.

Dust to dust,
But you must
Rise as sinew, shadow, smoke.

Rise, Avian. Emerge.
Brilliance and light take flight on the verge.
Breathe in the breeze.

No longer tame
From shame, from blame,
You shine brighter than the shrine.

'Tis a sin
To alter the skin.
Yet 'tis sin that seeps in the skin.

This truth the elders deny.
You must defy them and purify
The self to save your skin.

Only then shall you win.

Wishful Fishing

Reminisce on a lake of bliss.
Float on by and drift.
Go ahead and make a wish.
Fish for the one true thing
That will give you the wings
To try and fly.

Sit back, relax.
Shutter your eyes,
Pretend to flutter by
Like the butterfly.

But you're no flying fish.
And as you realize this,
You slowly kiss
Your bliss goodbye.

So you fall
And can't recall
The reason
You ever wished
For such a thing
At all.

Keep on fishing, clenching
The net in your fist.
Maybe, just maybe
You'll catch a wish
And not be so wishy-washy
That you captured it.



*Note: Just for the record - At first, I had absolutely no idea what I was writing about in this poem.

"Immersion"

Well, I was looking through my old journals and rereading some of the memories I scribbled furiously when I had some minutes to spare. I found this poem that I wrote for Poetry Slam, a seminar that was hosted at my high school during junior year. It was actually supposed to be performed as a verse, part of a collaboration with the other students' poems to create a whole piece. We were actually supposed to present it at the Winter Talent Show in 2007, but we never got to do it because we never really got to finish it. I guess I'll just treat mine as a separate piece and give it a title of its own like the other poems I've written in the past. This one happens to be about the passion for music and the emotions that it evokes. I tried to add some imagery, alliteration, rhyme, and cadence so that the poem would take on a life of its own, just like a song.

Here it is:

"Immersion"

I revel in the reveries
The lyrical lies and truths tell -
Mesmerizing, drawing me deeper
To dive in and swim under the sea of its spell.
When jubilant and upbeat, I rock and tap my feet
To the sound, laughing away as I spin around.
Yet beware of the ire that could spark,
For it is the fire that burns, consuming my heart.
When broken and caught in misery's pain,
I hum melodies soft-spoken to dry off from the rain.
But I bounce back and find my rhythm once more
Amid the dissonance, knowing one thing for sure:
Life is a song, descending and rising in crescendos,
The pitch either high or low.
Immerse myself in the music, twirling and dancing in the flow.

Playing Pretend

Late afternoon, given sunny azure skies and imagination
Instead of nap time, we would play pretend.
We were the knights who tried to quell
The wicked witch who conjured a spell.
She turned into a dragon, macabre and massive
Like the monster in the closet: darkness and death awaited us
Breathing hot flames of rage down our backs and
Roaring. Then we pierced its heart with our plastic swords
And vanquished her. We thought the fiendish beast would be no more.
Other times we would pretend we were pirates lost on the high seas
Aboard a rickety cardboard ship, hunting for hidden piles of jewels.
We sailed away and drifted down the endless abyss
Wondering where we would land, hoping to find a sea of sand.
We would spot a star sparkling from afar and make a wish.
We would fly to Neverland and meet Peter Pan
Living in a world of make believe with not a care about tomorrow.

We were adventurers venturing into the unknown.
But our flights of fantasies were fleeting,
Our skies now a cold, gray slate.
No time for games, but we still play pretend.
We still wear masks and masquerade
Around with the face of pretty poise
When faced with the pressure of reality’s rash noise.

"One step at a time; there's no need to rush..."

If my life was a television show, then "One Step at a Time" by Jordin Sparks would be my theme song. It's so catchy and uplifting, comforting me when I feel lonely.

I kept thinking about how I'm going to get through the years to come: Will I make friends, and not just mere acquaintances? Or will I end up falling into silence?

I mean, I met and talked to new people inside and outside of class. But after a while it becomes so awkward between us when we run out of words to say or a reason to say something. It's like there's a thread of tight silence dangling in the air, begging to be cut, but left to linger. When a group of us would hang out during a free period, it eventually becomes so plain to see that people would break off into their own little conversations, as though they're in a little clique of their own. Obviously, you're more likely to talk to someone who has something in common with you or that you knew before. Earlier this week when we went out for lunch with a group of people from our classes, Priscilla and I were literally sitting in the middle of the table as the group then branched off into their own little bubbles - those who live on Long Island or Staten Island, and those who previously knew each other. We both tried to jump into the conversations that were going on, but in the end, we just couldn't really relate to what they were talking about, and we didn't want to sound as though we were forcing ourselves. So instead we just sat there, listening and occasionally exchanging glances when we heard something funny that someone said.

It scares me to think that if Priscilla and I didn't go to the same college, I would have freaked out even more. I mean, I could deal with chilling out by myself for an hour, but any longer than that, I think I'll go crazy. "How do people do it?" I asked Priscilla yesterday. How do people already find a connection with someone only within the span of a couple of weeks in a totally new environment? I felt like an extraterrestrial observing human behavior, and sometimes I'd wonder if I'm socially inept. I kind of wish I wasn't so introverted and could talk to other people with ease and confidence. But as Priscilla and my other friend Liliana pointed out while we were hanging out at Lily's house yesterday, we're still trying to adjust and figure out where we belong. I just want to meet someone with whom I can really connect with, who sparks excitement and spontaniety to the otherwise "chill" demeanor of most people I've met so far. Not that I have anything against them. But I want to meet someone who's quirky, vivacious, and intriguing, who'll make me smile or laugh with their contagious love for life.

Anyway, having said all this, I'm pretty sure that I still need to adjust. It's just hard getting used to the fact that you're adjusting, that you're not yet in that comfort zone you so crave to have back. But I guess it's a matter of hunting for it, of reaching out to find it. If only I wasn't so scared or shy, then maybe I'd actually get somewhere. For now, it seems I can only take my time and go with the flow.

Take things one step at a time.

I wrote the poem below during my 1 hour break before Philosophy today. It's not one of my best, so I'm not sure if it makes sense. Hopefully the metaphor makes it clear. But I still plan to edit it somehow and actually come up with a title.


I am a remnant washed up empty on the shore,
Seemingly hollow and void of value,
Broken and chipped in one jagged corner.
A whisper dwells inside this brittle seashell,
Barely a pulse, barely a beat,
Yet as hallow as a secret unshared.

I remain unnoticed, unseen, and half-buried underneath
Salty sand, seemingly silent,
Waiting, wishing, wondering of my fate
As eternity stretches out above and beyond me.