To know you

Get to that place

Where no one else can go.

To visit you there

Hold your feelings

Side by side

Fight for our lives.

Be a little less

Empty inside.

Can't cure our broken bits

Will still come up short

As we tally our hits

Wronged by the miss.

But in an instant

Hope finds an instance

Meet your eyes

No words

As our Souls reflect.

My wish

That solid Truth

You have me

And I have you.

Around us

The Universe swarms

Vast is the darkness

Cold and unknown.

But never again

Will we be unfound

And alone.

My heart performs a tune so few may hear,

A quiet violin whispering passionately in the ear.

The trees sing along but even they are distant,

Myself, alone, the only thing that’s consistent.

The piano keys quicken, giving way to the night,

As the stars lay dying, falling from light,

and darkness beckons me forward in fright.

The harp strikes harshly showing all that’s infected,

Harmonizing a tune of what’s self-neglected,

Myself, the cause for what self-abandoning affected.

As the silence falls, encapsulating my soul,

I collapse under the weight of my own black hole.

I try to see the shadows that make me whole,

But with each thump of the bass, my demons rush forward.

Left all alone, panicked, and cornered,

Myself, exposing how I feel tortured.

Deeper I dig into an eternal abyss,

Listening for the lessons of all that‘s amiss.

The symphony mellows, the thundering dismissed.

Myself, the conductor, of all I remiss.

With each epiphany that I unearth,

Alone is the place I learn my worth,

Accept myself, and with it rebirth.

There was no breast from which to suckle

There was no hand to pat my back

There was no counting during hide-and-seek

Of playdates and parties I did not speak

There was no aisle to walk down

No hand for me to hold

At breakfast and at super

My heart grew hard and cold

In daylight and in darkness

My own breath sounds filled my ears

At twilight and at sunset

At the solitude I cursed

And when the end of life drew near

Reflection my only goal

I looked in the rearview mirror

Dark and Empty met my eyes

Relationships I had not known

I had wasted all my time

When at the pearly gates I stood

I knocked but no one answered

The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost

Were nowhere to be found

Through eternity I would venture

Unescorted in the clouds

my deepest happiness

and ice pangs of dread

come when I solitary

cuts both ways sharp

deft skilled incising

my split slit spirit

comfort found best

in my own company

yet

that very enjoyment

for too many decades

having pushed away

strong arms needed

to pull haul wrench

me from my own pit

is deceptive

as that (by-my-self)

is inaccurate

the 'we,' dispossessed

and self, associative

at best ...

my mind's

so far gone

I cannot begin

to say how long

or how come,

save the distance

between my

and self

has become

protracted,

and when it

happened

well

I'd

also like to know

and that thought

will not leave me

(alone)

06.27.2024

Alone challenge @dctezcan

Alone,

that's all I feel.

An empty pit of loneliness

stretched out before a meal.

Yet,

I cannot eat.

I stare and stare at the delicious feast

but I know it is not for me.

It is for others,

those that have never starved.

Those that live their lives

in the glamour of a bar.

It's not for me,

I tell myself its ok.

It's ok that I can't tell anyone

what I want to say.

Its ok

that my first language doesn't feel like my own,

Its ok

that those who want to hurt me

call me home

Its ok

I can't communicate

without shaking my hands.

Its ok

that I relate to the villain

and never really have a plan.

I hope its ok to be different,

to be lost in a crowd,

to know you're alone

no matter how many people are around.

I hope its ok

to feel what I feel

because I have finally convinced myself

that every single part of it

is real.

The alone nights, seeing things beyond the stars.

The days when I don't want to think about it anymore!

Those times where I don't want anything but to go to bed,

but I sit there

and stare

at a screen

instead......

Those days where I wake up and everything is pain, when I stay silent and just wait for the end of the day. I don't tell a soul, what happens in my mind. All the shattered glass and figments inside. Everything is breaking in the eclipse of time. Moment to moment reality unwinds. Everything dwindles into decline. I sit alone now, as I have many times before. Slowly going insane from the inventions of war.

Not only,

but Also

We are

all In,

at this

Poker Table.

And point

Blank,

it's all

the Same

Alone

A/one

We are

all assured

the House

will win!

Whoever deals

or what Card

is played,

what extra Ace

is slipped, or

Mortal bet

is placed:

We're all in

till the End

and it's All

the same

One Table

turning, crackling

and All is one

all One and

the same,

a Conjunction

We throw

hands up

or we throw

Our hand in

It's all the Same

It's all and None

Much like

"apart"

but with

earned Scar,

a Slash for where

we Fought,

for a Way

Out from,

Draw back.

A silent voice falls on inattentive ears:

Pleas for recognition of her persisting pain.

No one hears her cries,

Though she stands directly before them.

No one notices the crystal tears

Bleeding incessantly out her eyes,

As though a veil has chosen

To eternally enshroud her from existence.

A silent voice calls out to the wind,

Echoing a soundless symphony

Of sharply woven tears.

But only the reflections of her own misery

Echo back to counter her tune,

The winds failing to respond in kind.

A silent voice murmurs a muted prayer

And waits without expectation

For the noiseless abyss to take her in.

But even the insatiable vacuum

Ceases to open its maw in comforting hunger.

And so she withdraws herself into her cocoon

And gently closes her lips:

Perhaps she is inexorably fated

To suffer alone in ceaseless silence.

Alone? Alone is the bite of fiery tongues upon the pink flesh of intestines. That thing that's defined as "the gut."

Alone is closed doors and closed, shuttered expressions,

Alone is the disdain those stupid idiots don't bother to hide anyway about anything.

About my waist, about my voice, about my likes, about the desire to just... talk. I don't know how, not really.

I just, wanted to say what I liked.

I shouldn't-- I don't deserve to be judged!

I'm not wrong.

I'm not useless.

You ARE!

You are Unabled and dumb and mean.

And no one wants mean people, the mean people stink!

Alone is screaming at nothing.

Alone is turning your insides to ice and ceding your affections-- cast off-- completely useless. Dangerous.

Alone is the fact, the grim knowledge that the world is made of liars and "teasers," who don't care who gets hurt.

What poor girl might take their "dates" seriously.

You can't trust.

You can't love.

People are ugly.

I tell myself in the mirror, ugly and fat as I am. A lumpy, lard thing.

And no, I don't believe I hated others because I hated myself.

I hated others since all I ever heard, were spears across a crumbling, already fragile self-worth.

And self-awareness, that I know I'm a freak.

I was alone, apart.

Alone is unable to see colors and light, unable to find beauty and being angry all the time at everyone you see on the TV.

You think the worst when your lonely.

And when the first hand finally deigns to take a chance on you-- is when rose exploded across my eyes.

There’s a scene in Little Miss Sunshine, where the little girl presents her brother with a color blindness test. His dream is to be a pilot. However, he fails the test - and that means he can’t be a pilot. It was his biggest dream, getting out of hellish, mindless suburbia. He runs off, and after a long period of self-imposed silence, finally screams into the arid air of the desert. It is a powerful scene and a testament to the true power of a dream - and being very deeply alone in it.

Similarly, I applied for an MFA in Writing recently. A comment on my last post reflected that I could have added to it, elaborated more on it.

So here’s the movie of my rejection:

No, I didn't scream into the arid air of a desert. Instead, I took it in stride, waxed philosophical, as only a writer can.

There’s a scene later on in Little Miss Sunshine, towards the end, where the uncle, who had slit his wrists over unrequited love, yells off a pier, into the ocean, in front of the brother who can‘t be a pilot. He says, after a long rant about someone: “All those years of his suffering were worth it, because it made him who he was.”

When I got my rejection for the MFA in Writing, I didn’t slit my wrists, or break weeks of silence. I squinted at my little phone screen, where my rejection sat in front of me. And I thought: fuck ’em. I’m good without an MFA.

Queue the moody movie music.

I live in a coastal city in Northern California. The day I got rejected, I walked down to my city’s pier, near the boardwalk. I watched the sea lions and felt the salt breeze. I thought: I’ll be OK.

I think the hardest part about being a writer is existing alone, in silence. It’s just like a self-imposed silence, and when I hit “publish”, I scream into the arid air of a desert.

I become one with potential failure.

I’m not sure if my years of suffering “make me who I am.” But right now? I’m trying to figure out how a rejection letter will be a part of my story. And how I can best write about it. How it will fit into the screenplay of my life.

My final thoughts? That I think I’m an adequate writer, able to pass the test to make me an official one. But maybe there is no test, maybe it’s more important than that. Maybe I’m blind, not color blind, but I have existed in that moment - in the movie, the brother‘s eyes flash quickly when he realizes he’s failed, and can’t be a pilot. I too have now had a moment where I was totally alone to process, in a single “frame” of my life (if it were cinematic, which it’s not), that I am not able to achieve my dream.

So, alone on the pier of my coastal California city, I was left alone to process my failure. But it’s not that, at all. It‘s going to be a scene, perhaps part of a future masterwork I will be able to call mine, and mine alone.

I took a picture of the ocean and saved it to my little phone, the little screen capturing a vastness I cannot fully comprehend - just like when the movie-goer watches the uncle speak philosophically about failure, we can relate to it, without fully understanding why, its vastness.

Like in the movie, I realized life is messy, and I am ready to move on - perhaps alone, as I always am in my writing, but stronger for having failed. Stronger for having tried, for being blind but now able to see beyond it.