Worthless Trash

It's me, DOD, Night Strider, Foul Fountain of Flies and pinoybigloser. Herein, you'll find some of my works that are based on the crappy reality I put up with on a daily basis. All in all there are 147 titles under this heading. Most of them defy classification--not to mention, are royally screwed--so I just categorize them under short story; they're probably drabbles but what the fucking hell. There are a couple of fanfictions here but those are also pointless, hence their destination, this trash bin (yeah, this is how I use time in general). Click on any of the following:

Chance (prose)
Leaving (prose)

All Along (poetry)

Verbal Decrescendo (prose)

The Chair (prose)

Backlash (prose)
Pavements (prose)
Hardbound: for Ray (poetry)
Hades's Ballad (prose)
Ready to be Reminded (prose)
Remembering (poetry)
His Name Was Jeff (drabble)
Unpardoned (drabble)
My Lover in Ashes (For Layne) (poetry)
Speedball Lament (poetry)
Eclipse (prose)
2009 (poetry)
For Layne, Ode to 1996 (Eulogy)
Of Faelivrin and Gwindor (fanfiction)
Drabble in Fruits (fanfiction)
Cancelled (short story)
The Rope around your Neck (short story)
Psychology Unrewarded (poetry)
Dream in a Nutshell (poetry)
Schizo(short story)
Uni (poetry)
Insomnia (poetry)
The Last Pleasant Day of His Life (prose)
For James (poetry)
Space (Poetry)
Mockery (Poetry)
Dialogues in the Air (play)
Disbanded, Rejoined (short story)
Divine Reproof (short story)
Pals (short story)
The Sides to a Coin (short story)
Obsession (poetry)
Alcohol Therapy (short story)
Fallen Hair (poetry)
Loosened Chains (poetry)
'Night (poetry)
Rock Star (poetry)
A Stick to do the Trick (short story)
Dying (short story)
Dreamless (poetry)
A Virgin's Frailty (short story)
Over Lines and Oceans (short story)
Afflatus (short story)
Weighing Scale (short story)
Common Misconceptions of a Broken Heart (short story)
A Decade Ago (poetry)
A Song (poetry)
I Give you One Option (poetry)
An Alternate Theory on Existence (short story)
Psychosexual Gratification (short story)
The Pagan God of Music (epistolary; panegyric)
Sobriety Declined (poetry)
Not Much (poetry)
A Photograph of Beyond (poetry)
Doppelganger (poetry)
A Poem Bordering on Crap (poetry)
A Peek into an Otherwise Vanishing Time (short story)
Tondo (poetry)
The Hole on the Roof (poetry)
A Bygone Time (short story)
Illusion (short story)
A Representation of a Representation (poetry)
The Lonely Perpetrator and the Harbinger of Murder (short story)
Juvenile Admiration (epistolary)
Childless (short story)
Her Heartbreak (short story)
An Emo Story (introspective prose)
My Teenage Fantasy (parody/fanfic)
Underage Adultery (short story)
Water Shroud (short story)
For CC (poetry)
For Eddie (Prose)
At Your Mercy (poetry)
Dusted (short story)
The House They Built (short story)
Beating the Dawn (Prose)
The Matron (short story)
You're So Special (poetry)
Listen Only to me (poetry)
Disdain (poetry)
Jealousy (poetry)
Firstborn (short story)
Buzzes and Words (poetry)
Maternal Anxiety (short story)
Get a Job (short story: companion piece to Breadwinner)
Seventeen (short story)
Breadwinner (short story)
Vengeance (short story)
For Me? (epistolary)
Matters of Deception (short story)
Never Again (short story)
Humiliation (short story)
Told You So (short story)
One Short Summer (poetry)
Smoke Gets in your Guts (poetry)
Coward (short story)
A Yarn of Sleeplessness (short story)
Supernatural (short story)
Reunited for a Blink (short story)
Paradox of Rock: A Decade of Ignorance and Bliss (essay)
Incubus (short story)
Piece of Cake (short story)
A Force to Reckon with (short story)
Care for a Shot? (short story)
The Cave (short story)
Chat Love (short story)
Bring Me (short story)
A Hard Binge (short story)
Dear Eddie: A Tribute to Pearl Jam (short story)
Sanguine Stream (poetry)
You Frustrate me (poetry)
A Mere Rhetoric (short story)
The Coldness of your Bed (short story)
A Prose to You (short story)
Truth for Thought (short story)
One of Us (short story)
Tit for Tat (short story)
Sick of Self-worship (short story)
Curse (poetry)
Bounds of Civility (short story)
Hierarchy (short story)
Tonight (short story)
Disclosure (short story)
The End (poetry)
The Order of Things (short story)
For Arthur (poetry)
Rope Bind (short story)
Homecoming (short story)
Last Sorrow (short story)
Suicide Brunette: For Michael (poetry)
No Recompense: For Chris O. (poetry)
Would You?: For N.O. (poetry)
Enter the World of Incarceration (short story)
Ugly (poetry)
Glass Splinters (short story)
Cheese (short story)
Powerless (short story)
Trade (short story)
Hot Cement (short story)
Lab (short story)
Movie Date (short story)
You're Over (poetry)

On Waiting

She would never know how long she waited for him. The days never really turned to weeks and the summer was a part of her that didn't grow big enough to extend to any other organ inside her. Instead, when she saw them together those warm, sweaty days just altogether froze. But they were the kind of frozen that stays in the basement where only once in a long while she would accidentally stumble into one of them and not feel a sliver of sadness.  The kind that would see neither thaw nor exits. She never truly forgot both of them, but she never remembered them for longer than a few minutes either.

Yet, if you thumb through her journals dating back six years to the present, there was always a faint silhouette of what appeared to be hope in the background, so grotesquely blurred by a conflagration of other separate emotions that it simply was just not there most of the time. But she had been waiting all those years.

Missed

Of the few times he had stood behind her, only once did he actually address her. She couldn't remember if it was a shrug, an answer to a question she had unconsciously muttered to herself, or simply a mistake in hearing resulting from too much hope on her part. Whatever it was, when she turned to look, his gaze was forward, through her, leaving no evidence of his acknowledgement of her. It didn't feel anything, at least not enough to make an impression akin to pain. When the summer was over, she had dismissed all thoughts of him, partially successfully, until he made himself known with just a one short simple sentence. Had she known, had she asked, maybe things would have turned out a little more differently. But it was the advent of May, and he was in love, and she was entrenched in something far more profound, like herself.

Chance

He had thought, many times, of the things they could do together had the summer been longer. He dared imagine being free, out of love, and beginning to fall for a girl he believed he had everything in common with. It wasn't just the numbers on the sheets that caught his attention; it was the way she dusted herself off the floor after a collision that would have sent others crying back to the bleachers. She was far from strong at that, but her drive—which she clearly mistook for talent—had made him question his faith on more than just one occasion. Then he would look back at the girl he loved and lose all memories of ever thinking of her.

In her mind she had cursed over a thousand times his happiness. The summer had been shorter than enough, and she wondered if this was because she was enjoying it way too much. Maybe she did, but she probably had no right to. Besides, the image of a beautiful girl on the other side had threatened what little pleasure she could get from being on the same mile radius with him. A fragment of a second, a minute, an hour, she wasn't sure how long she had then to study his oblivion. In those moments there was nothing more apparent than the quiet exultations he tried so hard to conceal as a result of being so deeply in love. Sometimes, when she was alone and not submerged in homework, she dared to wish making love to him—the same way the girl certainly had.

Leaving

He steps back into her world, feeling the ancient dust rise and fall about his soles. The old scent retreats weakly to the wall where the graying paint is flecked with something other than a mistake. Its traces, too, were instantly gone in an urgency more alive than themselves. His hello was familiar when he murmurs it, even when the letters that form it are barely apart.

Her response shatters the silence. Not so much because its curtness is another beginning as it is really just a finality. In a moment, she is padding back to her corner where she can watch him and not change. Maybe there, the last chain that links them together can hold. The silence returns, but not to his head.

As he sighs, he draws unto him the knowledge he fears. She is worse than gone, worse than if she screamed back then and tossed him back to the shores. She accepts him, but her acceptance is without thought. She sees him, but only sees him as one of the scars she's long done nursing.

Oh, the years. When he thinks about what he remembers he thinks about the laps she was willing to run with him. In those days it was so much easier to look back, because looking back meant seeing her rope her way around the field. Even if she'd lulled herself far away into the oval, there was ever that one last breath they'd share together once the day was over. In hindsight, the last of that might have been in one of those distant runs.

He can watch her too if he chooses. Perhaps if he looks long enough she'll throw a glance his way and show him a flicker of the old recognition. Then of course, she'll merge back inside her force field, thickened by the passage of years, just as her mind abandons all that she can think of about him. Who knows in what name she prays for him now.

All Along

I push you back into the dying embers of my girlhood,

hands firm against the fightless surface of your chest.

What was then so dearly proclaimed

now beat faint echoes in my head,

repeating waves only recognizable

by the habits of an old memory.

I have held each drifting piece of you for fifteen years.

The frenzy slowly became mechanical,

and then coarse, and then finally earnest.

If I failed to keep you together,

I only knew it to be a fleeting instant of rebellion,

where, shortly, I was slapped by the bursting fury

of guilt so unabashedly my own.

I am back and I knew I would be.

At your feet, the words cling

just as constantly as I have to you.

For Kevin Garnett (duh)

Verbal Decrescendo

She left the words she knew how to say in July. She did it one at a time, one random word after the next, in the midst of a startlingly intellectual atmosphere made a thousand times more intense by solitude. Her struggle was a unique specimen, a hissing, clawing fierce little thing out of its cage. It charged and railed and scratched against what it knew not rather than fended for itself the only way it knew out in the dark. Finally in one last desperate assault it flailed weakly with the one word left in its body, choking, until it bled to death in the gutters leading down, down below.

Her songs were the first to go, their rhythm vibrating away to oblivion in a prolonged motion of descrescendo. The strums of the guitar all at once drowned in an orchestra of dissonance as the melodies long marked in memory abandoned their posts, sometimes in groups, most times individually and disappeared to nowhere. Soon after she began halting in the middle of speeches and conversations, in private monologues, in leisure reading when alone, even, in whispers in the dark. Books were a blur all of a sudden, fiction fumbling for space in what was left of her literacy. Staggering, her vowels battled for their identities but soon started confusing them with the others'. It was not long after--having insured their defeat--that they dragged the consonants into the war, who lost, I suppose, much more than the fluidity they needed to slip off the tongue and roll over. She stammered then, punctuated more than ever, all attempts at words constituting sounds that were not sounds and then, CRASH.

Right in front of her, a feast took place. The Blackhole of all things said, read, heard, and written consumed the last of its meals. Its menu were none other than the words she recognized as her own.