Derailed

Test tomorrow. Three weeks to look at the study guide and I've lost it without even taking a peek. Why? Because I sit at home, on my lazy backside, singing and dancing and prancing without a care in the world. And I'm writing and typing with the clickity clack like a train down the tracks  

from my thoughts 

to my heart 

to the page. 

Derailed. 

And all of this art. It's like some sort of anarchy, a rebellion blazing throughout the souls of the lost and the sad and the broken and wounded and everyone forgettable crying out to the world that they want to be seen but they yell to the ears that never listen. And they don't know it quite yet but we can't forget the souls born from art because they are the chaos that pieces together society, the same society that is unravelling because those forgettable people are only forgettable in the way that they forget their purpose: to be remembered. So they fall silent and bow down before the tears that the world can never see because everything's 

                                        slipping 

                                                                                                             and tilting

                                                                   and whirling away

into a void of apathy, a kind of chaos that only art heals, but nobody believes in themselves and with that kind of pain why should life be worth living when nobody cares? 

But it is. 

 If only you'd ignore the rain on your window and wipe away your tears for just a moment, just a second, just long enough to

 pick up a brush or

                              run onto stage or 

                                                          let out that cry from your heart known as a song that touches                                                                        people in a way that nothing ever can. 

        Inspiration could fix this nation where everything seems lost because despite the cliches and quotes and everything that the universe is rolling its eyes at, one really is all that the world needs to fix it. But here we sit. 

Quietly,

waiting, 

searching for something much bigger than that paper we lost. 

No.

We're searching for each other, for someone who cares, someone who isn't so quiet in their mind. We all search for the second half of our soul because we know ours isn't complete, that's why we all feel so broken, because we have a path laid out, we have a fate, some sort of destiny that people laugh at now because they don't see that they'll wish they hadn't laughed in the years to come. And all of these puzzle pieces I'm putting together, hoping to see the painting, are all distractions. My thoughts wander until 

my mind is

derailed.

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I just joined this blog and have absolutely no idea what I'm doing, so advice would be very appreciated! 

Church Bells

I can’t breathe 

      I just can’t        don’t ask why

and there’s that burning ache in my my stomach

that won’t go away no matter how much I feed it. 

It’s like I’m hungry but not for food. 

Stress claws at me, invisible and unseen,

sweet wine flows down my throat 

and honeyed sun warms my skin. 

This moment, this time I will be okay

here and now. 

if I don’t leave.

I need, I need, I need,

but what

a broken clock

brim over with stinging salt 

and my voice deserts me

It was stolen by a 

wretched human thing that lives in my throat and squeezes tight.

I reject your reality and substitute my own. 

My own, get out! You can’t add your rules 

to MY reality.

My response is tears,

always ever tears. 

What was the question?

No, stop I’m behind I can’t see over the hill

I’m scared. 

Wait, Help me!

give me a hand, or something to hold on to. 

Church bells toil in the distance,

dong

dong

dong

dong

dong

ding

dong 

gone

done.

I'm not quite sure if I like this or if I want to cut parts of it. 

Singing, Signing

So this is my Lindenburg mimic that we did earlier.  Not sure about all of the images, and I think I need a better title, but other than that I think its ok.

The hand that pulls from the spider den, the hand

that gathers grasses and oil, that drops its pen

to grope for shattered glass.  The hands covered in old

worked skin, but squishy with baby fat

under the calluses.  The hands, dark and soft,

dimpled in blond freckles.   The lithe hands,

the hands with a squareness in the wrist, a dexterity

born in years of pounding.  A regained satin in the fingertips.

A thumb red and swelling.  Here’s a mud-stained hand, a

pricked hand, a hand nobbled and broken with dreaming,

a hand caught between the door and the flame—stuck with

the scarring. The hands that throw coins, and palm coins,

hands that sting and retreat from the signing.

We pass hand to hand, our lives

written on our finger pads.  Sweat.

This hand is hard, crumpled like pages in a writer’s trash bin,

fingers dancing in a rattle-word twitch.

Object Poem? (I am bad at names)

The book is me, where it jumps from queer to strange with a

ragged, ruined range in between, where the Rs have been ripped from their roost like

me, the me who must go, who must fly the nest, me, the me from R to R,

ripped from my roots, my refuge, my refuse I cannot run from and will not run to.

R to R like the reticent roar I am, I am that ragged, ruined, range removed from

right where it should be, roaming the rooms at the rear of the wrong place,

roaming a roost that is not my refuge, but roundabout ramblings.

I am not the robber, I am the robbed, reeling from the rooted requirement

that I do not rob, but reap, reap before the reaper, wrapped in his raven robe,

reaps me, wrapped in my wrinkled, ratted raiment. But the reaper robs, too,

round and round, reaps robbers and rulers, readily relinquishing rues to the regulars who remain.

But I am not a robber and I am not a reaper and I am not a regular. I will relinquish my rues

to the ethereal rift and realize the right in the light and the dark in the night,

if right is really there in that ream of spritely spite: red regurgitations, roiling and riled,

ripped from the vile, as the heads roll ruby clean above the rasping of rampant rats.

You can rip the roots and rest them in repose, but they remain,

and the ragged, ruined range remains. From R to R you can rend and spur it out,

but it is still there, retching, but resplendent, for all your rites of normality.

The womb from which it is rutted, rounded, and ringed remains,

and from that womb will birth again.

Are you ready?

Confessions of an actress

Sometimes reality blurs and I pretend that the man acting like he loves me really does. But eventually I have to face reality again with nothing but a fading memory of what I have yet to grasp.

A kiss is just a kiss to many, but on stage it is an experience and an expression of emotion with no guilt or fear or ugliness attached. It is without consequence. 

To be a million and just one. 

We live life separately, marry younger divorce more are more judged than any other group anywhere and yet we feel deeper and have more

An actress can listen to a song, and see a forest. Can look at a blank corner, and see a ship carrying her lover away. 

Who is more alive? Me or you? 

Tell me the play will never end. It is hard. I hate the people I work with hours at a time. But I love them too. 

Tell me the play will never end and that there will always be another for it fills a vast emptiness I did not know I had.

Tell me the play will never end and that the real world will not exist again.

Tell me the play will never end.

Every part I play is a piece of me and every piece of me is in the part I play. 

I am faceless. I am everything you don’t see and aren’t looking for. 

Theater is not meant to be comfortable,

I will bare my soul but not my face not my head God forgive me but I will not drop my beauty 

A wall I didn’t know I had 

Is this what if feels like? 

Insecurity?

I never understood…

The lights go down and the night settles in. 

It is ended. 

But is it really? 

The play goes on forever a living being in a different guise. 

I am an actress I live for an audience, a people, a time, that I am not a part of … 

But really I am every part. 

It is the moments in between that count. 

The world is my stage and in between scenes I am still learning my lines.

Love Letter

I wrote poems about you once. 

It started with trading candy one halloween at a party I wasn’t meant to be at.

You were nice to me. 

Then we became friends started a team together. 

Played in the rain, and snow, and grass, and sun and desert and well everywhere.

People thought we were more than we were when we weren’t.

They would make up stories about it.

I wanted to be..... But I was scared and young and immature. 

I changed direction 

to follow you..... But you ignored me. 

I loved you anyway though because that direction was one of the best decisions I ever made.

It became complicated and I started writing.

About you. 

first in my diary.... to figure things out

my feelings, why you didn’t like me anymore. 

Its not a feat to make it into my diary,

everything does. But you have whole pages. 

you share them with the other half of your soul. 

That didn’t work so I started to write you into my stories. 

There you didn’t have your on again off again attitude.

our relationship wasn’t in my head. 

You show up in my dreams.... But never in the way you are supposed too.

Finally I turned to poetry.

You see it was in my head.

You never really cared right and I was left aching. 

You left me for another woman.... so many other women. 

I never could understand what it was about me that you continually rejected. 

I’m very good at changing you know. 

I could fix it if you told me what it is.

I knew I needed to leave. 

But I couldn’t do it. 

So I used to write poetry about you and secretly hope we would kiss one day. 

Now we have and there is a whole in the world where I went when you dropped me. 

I still write poetry about you sometimes. 

I guess that is what this is. 

But really it’s goodbye. 

probably the thousandth time I have said goodbye. 

I burned that good-bye, drowned it, folded it into a thousand tiny folds 

but really only eight because you can’t fold a piece of paper more than eight times. 

anyway goodbye..... hopefully it works this time. 

I used to write poetry about you. 

I’m trying not to anymore.  

Remembrances

I remember the day you applauded me               for doing what everyone else was doing 

I remember the moment you trusted me with the opportunity to shine

I remember when I realized you had inspired a love in me before I knew what you were doing

I have the pictures of my laugh hair thrown back       careless     safe.

I remember the frustration leading up to the day you took those pictures

I remember the crushing weight of being less

I remember wondering Do I deserve this?

I remember explaining over and over I can’t leave him you don’t understand         love 

I remember defending you and the moment when I knew It was destroying me

I remember the veil that fell from my beautiful world when you left me     alone

I don’t remember all of the faces I have told I was leaving you.

I’m still here because I have that picture I want to have that happiness I want to remember again

I am here waiting for the day you will       applaud me again             or even just smile at me 

I am here you saw me once believed in me once I was not alone

Here

Still here 

but the memories of old are fading under the weight of now.

RESENTMENT 

Is so much heavier 

Than joy.

This Black Box

This one is really old (and I suspect you will either know exactly what I'm talking about always, or it will sound like gibberish), but in the interest of getting new things up on this blog... (Also, if you want more to read, I might subtly point to my longer story...)

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This little Black Box is a little Black Hole;
it's dark as dark and cold as cold.
It sucks you in and you never want out;
it's dark as dark and cold as cold
but you can hide in the nooks of the tree's white folds
till the lights come out and you love
to see what you hate.

A strange kind of man lives in this funny little box,
with his hoods and his bards and bears and queer white maggots.
He makes this box a little black hole
that's dark as dark and cold as cold.
He makes you love to see what you hate,
to be happy because you're sad
with the music and dancing and laughs and screams;
it's strange as strange and free as free.

In this house of string with its roof of net
and the floating tables where birds go to die,
with the music of the 30s and 50s and now,
with buckets on our heads and masks of snow,
with the bodies of babies and the poodles of stone,
where we made a wastrel into a noble ass,
and fought and fell in love and laughed
and died, we all take our chance
to remind ourselves just who we are
as we lose ourselves for one last time,
then we take ourselves off and mourn our loss.

This little Black Box is a little Black Spot;
it's darker than dark and colder than cold
and with this strange kind of man we're left all alone.

The Princess

Another poem for the faaaaiiiiiiry Taaaaale collection! This is actually an older poem of mine, but I recently edited it and cut it down (Mrs. Button, are you proud of me? ARE YOU PROUD OF ME?? MOM??? ARE YOU PROUD OF ME MOM?! MAAAAAAAMMMM??!)

P.S. Sleep is for the weak.
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The Princess

By Kathy Reynolds

 I have news for you.

I am not a princess. There is no

Pink gown, there is no tiara. I wear

Torn-up jeans and my cap turned

Backwards. I am not innocent. I

Am not naïve. I am not stupid. I

Believe in monsters: in horrible

Things. I have flaws. I bleed. I

Scar. I am ugly.

I am not the princess of this story.

I am the monster.
And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Say You Like Colors

Dear love, The flowers are not alive, and the vase

is leaking water. It’s a malfunction of me, I know.

Her fingertips leave rust in their wake.

But he doesn’t follow her anymore when

she goes to bed. Say you’re at midnight

poetry reading. Say you love her but

so does he. Say she only smiles for your

wristband-covered waist. Say you have

marks up and down your spine from brown

nights with her. Fondle the top button

of your shirt, but rip off your tie first.

Some nights, you leave before she’s done

handling you. In an old library book,

you remember a found, unsent love letter

to a forgotten mistress from three years before.

            Your cards always came up Devil or Death

            and you’d pretend you had been with

something wise instead. I think I

was supposed to forgive you for that.

You allow yourself to breathe sometimes.

Say you go home alone tonight. Say you

can no longer look at yourself without

imagining her fingers rubbing you. Say you

say you love her but are now unconvinced.

Say it was all just about her rusty hands

and backwards smile. Grab the top of your

knees, covered in khaki fabric and clench hard.

Pretend she’s only thinking of you when her lips

caress the microphone as she speaks. Pretend she

isn’t all dark and black and murk and stuck.

            The marks from you painting

me have still not washed off.

But I can’t focus when I drop bits of brick

colored dead metal when I take a step

out of bed in the mornings.

Say you like how you have to scrub under

your nails when she lets you go.

Say you let her sleep on your chest because

what’s underneath is already lockup.

Say it was for the secrecy. But the secret’s out.

Dear love, I meant to kill the flowers.

I'm not sure about the indented parts... Also this was just a drabble I wrote at like 3:45 am on one of my insomnia nights so if it sucks, I won't be offended. But yeah, let me know.