Lab

Normal girls don’t think like that. In a moment alone with a guy she finds cute, she can only think of two possibilities: making out with him or declaring her turbulent affections. Either way, it is a score! She decides to try to tame it down a little, wait for the minutes to sift through. She watches the clock drains the idle hours and eyes his movements against the reflecting glare of the windowpane. He seems too busy to ever bother with her presence or to ever notice the masculine jerks of her movements. It takes a good deal of effort for him to pay her attention and when he does, he only asks her to write this or that thing down so they’d finish earlier. She nods quietly. She supposes that he’s probably wanting her to test the bars, that it’s just his style, being slow. But style didn't seem to dominate the scene about him. Why is he being so motherfucking daft anyway? Can’t he see she wants him? She skims his face in the shadow, wishing she’d seen him steal a furtive glance at her. But nothing he ever does points to anything. She goes on studying him, unsure anymore where the world is heading, her intentions standing sharp-edged in the gray cast area of the room. He never speaks for so long as the moment lasts.

The answer is clear; the feeling is not mutual.

You're Over

I’ve been calling from Pluto these last few days;
Strangely, you put off lifting the receiver.
Busted vows you gave me
Didn’t even nearly hit it.
The words I used to find so important;
I no longer hear them now
In simultaneity with your honest, beating heart.
I don’t ask you to pay me in spades,
I don’t ask you to give this disappointment a name;
For there is only one name I can give it and
That is the epistemology of your identity.
I talk to you and I sigh and hesitate;
You answer me and you seem to
Delight in my clouded resolution.
I try to warm up to you once again
But you yank the tip of your skirts
From my clutch and huddle yourself the other way.
The chains have gone rusty now;
And it hurts to think that
Shiny new is a dream that ends as soon as it begins.
I don’t believe in reconciliation in totality;
I only recognize the uncooperative gestures of our reality.
The stars have refused sending answers my way;
So now I know you for what you’ve been all along,
A moon. A figure without its own light,
Basking in my glimmer for so long as it enjoys my welcome.
I bored you eventually as evidenced by your
Arrogance even when you heard my tears fall down on the ground.
Thus came to view our link’s quick fall from grace;
I should have known that the lies you forced on me
Would only leave me with the same feeling had you told the truth.

Movie Date

For some reasons unexplained, he didn’t touch her. They were in the cinema. She was the hot chick of the season, flavor of the year, goddess of a select few pretty faces. And he was an ordinary type of nice guy, in most senses a constant lover boy. And then, inside, nothing happened. He just stared at the screen, half absorbed in the movie, Beach, and half absorbed in the cheese popcorn. She started leaning her head on his shoulder so as to hint that she wanted something new to happen but each time a strand of her hair came to his sleeve, he’d pull away and away. She had been expecting for him to make out with her in their seats, to take that road which secret swains often take when alone. Dude, that was the chance! But as the film tore through and through, the stiller he got, the more bored she became, the less the possibility of kissing appeared. It seemed unlikely that he’d put the make on her as the credits rolled down; by then, he’d start snoring. And he did. She wanted to terrorize him by getting her hand under his pants. She has started spidering her fingers on his denim pants, tiptoeing around his hormones; after all, there’s only so much two hands can accomplish in a situation like this. She started tickling his belly and found the shallow pierced well, which she started caressing. He then roused in an instant, jabbed her fingers away in a way a spanked child would. He iced himself, bouncing away in his velvet cushion. He looked vulnerable, violated, like a baby that only has a ballpoint pen as a protection against a full grown wolf. It took every bit of her strength to understand what was raging on his mind. Particularly, this question declared war inside her: Why in the first place did he ask her out? And why in the world did he seem as glad as hell when she accepted? She wanted to bawl and demand logic from him. She glared at him continuously only to evince a faint guilty smile on his face. Then, without caution, she stood up and walked out of the theater. She only learned she was selling herself short to this guy. He wasn’t worth her one hour’s time. She’d dump him the very next day.

For James

This stab of confusion is driving you away from yourself.
The red ribbon, more than one year old,
Reminds you of her idea of a date,
And effaces your concept of fairness.
Why do you persist in her smile?
Each time she beguiles you
You forget what I’ve told you
Over the ember-brown glasses of hoofing horses.
Didn’t you say yes?
But then again, you may not even remember
How, a long time ago,
You used to revel in the unclaimed territories of your heart,
Illusions spreading pretty thin,
My words piercing right through the shaft of your frontline
As you scuttled in and out of your morbid jigsaw work.
In the end, didn’t you always tell me that
My logic rocked?
Didn’t I always prevail upon
Describing to you how sick your blush was?
Even when you magicked a bouquet of roses
Out of a layer of clumped napkins,
I was whiffed away by your lines,
Envying the very structure of your personal romance.
I think I’m stuck in one blow.
I just realized that whatever antic you flash,
I’d have to respect your baseless decision.

Insomnia

The last time you made me shiver,
You imprisoned me within the circles of your fire
As Life itself fell asleep on me.
I boggled my ears for silence,
Couldn't rest my mind in repose
And lay there,
Interrupted by my own breathing
And consuming my tired brains and cells.
I tumbled once again,
Waking up to the new shout of your regime.
I'm not on your mind;
I'm only a part of your
Decrescendo.

Obsession

I don’t see the need to tell me apart from you,
Not especially when each time I waste a glance your way
I could feel your fingers poking at my poor ticker,
Squeezing it tight until the clock screams
To remind you that you’ve already bled me dry
While I hold on with bated breath.

I suppose that’s just one of your shallow agendas;
I suppose it’s something you and I can’t quite stop.
I suppose you get bored doing this;
I suppose I’m just refusing to read that shameless annoyance on your face.

I wonder if you’re aware that I kissed your picture on my monitor.
You didn’t kiss me back;
The only vestige of my operative affection was your blurred face.

You should know that you used to be my background,
You used to twirl around in that rainbow of technical wonder,
Accusing me of all the things I used to want to do to you
Just by grinning, winking, dragging me to sinister seduction.
Once in a while I would absentmindedly make a sketch
Of your face, often times making it prettier than it already is.

Damn, I have a feeling you want to murder me quite easily,
Quickly and silently down to my last squeal.
There’s no need to remind you though that
You can accomplish the task with just one word;
For one time I finally took notice that
You broke my heart just by saying “Hello”.

Needless to say, you scraped away the chunkiest bit of my labored respiration. Still.

Pals

Adrianne doesn’t need to ask herself anymore why she’s always lost for words when she deals with HER problems. What SHE calls problems in the first place don’t need dealing with. Adrianne sincerely thinks that the best way out of it is to simply ignore these problems. They probably are not what most can consider problems anyway and who knows, these problems may vanish altogether after that, vanish like they never were, which in all senses was quite the case. But SHE just doesn’t get it. SHE keeps on neglecting HER friendship with Adrianne as much as she can help it. Adrianne doesn’t ask for too much. She just wants HER to stop bullshitting her. Adrianne doesn’t care for much if they don’t talk at all for a period of one year so long as SHE doesn’t lie to her. That’s basically all she asks for. But as is the frequent circumstance, Adrianne is perpetually the victim of HER pointless raves, less-than-interesting worries and the like. Adrianne often catches herself asking: Is she a moron or what? Why is she being pathetic? Adrianne would run these things over head as though the longer she ponders on them, the closer she gets to the real answer.

In truth, there is no real answer. There is no real answer to the un-precipitated scenes of reddish blow-outs. You strip down HER words to the bare, make it sound like some track from the next galaxy, make HER say it in another mode of vocals; it’s still the same. Lies. Lies that never change color. Lies that know no variety. Lies that are weak and lame and preposterous to the ear. Lies that produce just this one feedback: Ignore. More importantly, it isn’t up to Adrianne to decide whether or not SHE deserves the help she gets. As far as things go, SHE’s become too far removed from the world that they’d have to rent some space shuttle from NASA to get HER feet back on planet Earth again. But that’s about as much as anyone can do for HER. For all the world knows, she’s quite gone. Vapor. Fart. Monsoon. Like the things that never leave a single small trail behind.

Adrianne has stopped calling her back. She now thinks of HER as though she’s someone who’s been murdered and as though she learned about HER death through the TV news. In fact, as Adrianne watches the newest hit soap on Channel 2, she realizes, bit by bit, that she’s watching HER life. HER life would restart tomorrow at the same time, would continue that day after that, and after that and so forth. God knows when it’s going to end. Depending on Adrianne’s preference, she’s going to see it and HER life would go on, as tumultuous as before, as bland and retarded as ever.

Rock Star

A stolen hesitation
Down the lounge of my favorite hotel
Streaming lights, mega pictures
Rainbow carpets spiralling on my mind.
Breaching rules, fuck the constitution
I'd love to see my properties mangled,
I'd love to see your face thrown out the window
With the bottle caps and purple marks
And crystal greens smashing on the pavement.
Metal strings poking at my thorny brain,
Come whisk me away to your inebrietion.
I want you to screech under my command
While putting the needle on my table
And smoking pipes after dawn

Dreamless

They say that when one makes decisons based on his personal desires, the peices of his dream threaten to fall apart. And when he pursues his pleasures further, the dream breaks into even smaller parts. The pieces will scatter and land on different places, each as far from the other as the next, the distance between being entirely immeasurable. The owner of the dream will wander afterwards on an uncertain journey. The further he goes from his origin, the smaller the possibility of regrouping the pieces of the dream becomes. These peices are of course like objects with their own will. Seeing that they have been abandoned, they would retreat farther and farther away. It is not known if they behave in such manner to punish their master. Others hate to think that they are innately full of vengeance and of course, people would go through any lengths to defend their dreams. Some say that these pieces are like caged animals, bitter in their captivity, that upon the merest hint of being unwanted they would lash forth, fighting with their lives to escape. But one thing is certain; dreams should be bound from head to foot. They should be locked behind the narrowest lair, one which allows for no breathing space; they should be suffocated at most times so that when the owner opens the cell, they would be too weak to ever make movements. And upon the sight of open space, they would cower away to where they came from like agoraphobics. They would come tumbling back to their masters, like old times.

A Stick to do the Trick

A beautiful girl of about fifteen sat quietly in the living room. On the table in front of her was a half finished pack of Marlboro Lites. Drag after drag, exhalations after inhalations, she went on sucking the stick between her fingers, her image continuously obscured by the white puffs floating around her head. There were lines on her young face seemingly freshly painted, like two minutes ago they weren't there. She swung her head back then, rather slowly, creating a soft thud once it fell in contact with the back of the chair. She turned the TV on and found an old movie starring Alec Guinness. After a while, she decided to stare out the window, where apparently the happenings were much more interesting.

The phone rang just then. The rings echoed through the hall leading to the bedroom. Three rings came and went before she picked it up. A strained voice rose up from the other end, its familiarity peacefully cracking open. It was her boyfriend's mother in an escalated state of frenzy. And judging from her stutters, she was also trembling. The girl tried to calm her down but each time she offered a soothing phrase, she would begin muttering in incoherent snatches. It wasn't until somebody from the other end came to the rescue that the mother's hysterics subsided and her intentions for phoning brought to the limelight.

"He's dead." No wonder she was in such a tizzy.

She put the phone down. All afternon she'd been biding her time, awfully waiting for something out of this world, something entirely enchanting, to happen. She had been a little naive to expect to hear of the world's ending and a little too arrogant. Disappointed then that what'd come to her fell short of global destruction, she glided her way to her bedroom. Inside, the sunlight crawled to her bed, like a swarm of locusts on a field. She hustled herself onto it, refusing to cry, to surrender, to break down and get lost. Then she clicked her lighter open and picked up from where she left off.

Disbanded, Rejoined

A stranger’s shadow following you around is far odder than a cat’s mid-afternoon mating call. Even as Noel has stated it, the shadow of the man she saw dead that afternoon trails her to the CR. The corpse, probably on with its morgue business, can’t seem to detect any difference. It lay on the steel operating table as though it were merely an object of study, never moving. Noel then washes her face on the sink. In the mirror the silhouette of a bald, bloodless paunchy man stands behind her, its focus elsewhere as if deliberating the wonder that is the marbled bathroom floor. Noel gives the mirror a splash so as to blur it. Since she’s turned the light on she’s begun treating the shadow with more caution. She has borne witness to the defining of its outline, like it’s asserting its presence with both the living and imaginary. What if it just jumps on her? What if it strangles her own shadow and evicts it? What if that happens, would she be forever doomed with a fat shadow until something worse comes along? She cuts her train of thought just then on account of an even weirder happening. Something in the shadow’s head part cracks into a liquid-ish, whitish orange shape. Noel is immediately reminded of the rain drops and their appearance once they tumble on the ground. Its mouth is trembling or clearer yet, melting. It’s crying, no doubt. But why does no sound come out? Noel watches as it moves frantically. All this time she never turns to face it; instead, she pertinently and unblinkingly watches it through the mirror. Then as if to synchronize its silent weeping, a soft smattering of sobs finally issues forth. A female voice, it is, but as Noel again consults the image in the mirror, she sees herself quite calm. Then, in the wake of her emotional clamor, she discovers that tears have since begun a long fall unto the sink. She closes her eyes and listens to her inconsolable cries as she and the shadow of the man she saw die become one.