2008

Cordially Invited

the ability to see beauty defines us

appreciation in perspective defines our own beauty

i allow myself to honor those with my love

only when i find an admiration for the way their mind works

to crack a smile when i hear your thoughts

is my loudest, physical act of my love for you

verbalization of the mechanics of your brain

subtle, slow, whispered expressions of your opinions

even in screaming frustration

acts as a leaking of who you are

and the drips of the stuff your soul is made of

provokes my desire to crawl into your head

live to be deafened by the shouting connections in your mind

more simply, in the desirable process of getting to know you

you assist me in getting to know myself

break me, break my walls, break my foundation

i depend on you and you and you

to stretch and grip my malleable form

within you demands my motivation

help me peel my faults

and layer me with what you will

let me decide what to keep

drag me, walk me, carry me

to where you are

"expression" beckons criticism

"cordially invited" is understanding

ideas and thoughts, i am grateful for you to share

drive me to comprehend

and not to comprehend at all

i live to feel your words

i live to feel them shape me

8/4/2008 oldie

A Handshake, a Fist

i believe. 

i believe in the muck, sweat, and grit

of a youth trying to find any truth

or validity in whatever desires

they suffer from. 

whomever

whatever it is

that causes desire to feel like suffering

acts as the foundation

of the emptiness of our world. 

we are all bound and connected to this. 

yet we will always be strangers,

bound together

in a questioning, furrowed brow

of righteousness in our motivation. 

trying is a statement of belief

driven by boredom, panic, pursuit, life, and relief. 

the boat that holds us

as we consider our weight and each other’s

mindfully balancing, mindlessly cooperating

treading lightly in each shift

treading disturbances in ripples along our drift

the same boat we are all in

the boat is empty, if we are not happy

someone find me

tell me what to do

tell me how to be

i will listen

i will heed

i will crave

give me a goal i can feel, a goal i can conceive. 

a goal more tangible

than these endless, fleshy reams of thought

dank and crowded bindings

sparking synapses in a cat’s cradle

Angst Reeks.

reeks of lemon rubbered naivety. 

the only resolution is found

in a handshake, a fist

a gesture of beckoning

aimless direction, but direction nevertheless

finding comfort in a handshake, in a fist

let it find me

tell me what to do

how to be

i will listen

i will heed

i will embrace it. 

treasuring a faceless future

tracing your form of shapes, shaping me

i welcome you and greet me.  

It is the eve of my lacuna

Atrophied down to chiffon cartilage. 

I am a ghost

Or even the empty chair housing  a spirit. 

It was a fair trade. 

He clings to me like a child to his mother’s waist

His face pressed to my hollows

His is the kind that possesses. 

Soon, my shape in the doorway will be gravel

Weighted by his fever

I am drained of all invention

Having been masticated by every mouth

We are the glint of my long, black hair

Fanned out like his breath across my back

His is the petrichor, which yields me. 

I may have always played the dilettante

But I made use of my butterfly net

Among the blades

A tribute to the one who has pacified me.  

Poem Spring Semester 2009

Settling Crowd

- Maggie Mendoza

Standing as a series of silk screened tshirts

A legion of expressionless lemurs curiously staring

Into their barricades of mirrors

Hooking their thumbs and anchoring their elbows

In gingham printed looms round with a wailing child

Standing without a hint of difference from the next

Handshakes pregnant with doubt

Words uttered timid and mimicked

Every One becoming a crowd

The air is bland and odorless

I want them to wreak, to balloon

Flesh out their matter

Into something more tangible than

Crevassed hips traced onto thin opaque vellum

I hear them as mere echoes, sweet reverb

These ghosts drip from saturation

Dyed under a heavy current

Floating balsa, ruined and useless, settling. .

Like Atlas

This is a short story that is still in it's rough stages, but participating in a reading of it was a fantastic experience. I'd love some feedback.

Like Atlas

In between the frustrated bellows of smoke leaving his lungs, the sound of her blood dripping onto the rosewood floors could be heard. Stooped, like Atlas, Marshall sat nervously puffing away at his fourth cigarette in half an hour, flicking ash against the cold brick wall in front of him. His eyes were wide and unfocused, as the expanse of his mind was limited to one thought, “how could it have gotten this far?”

Lighting another cigarette, he suddenly grasped the curtains shut, with a flourish. He had shut out all the orange, afternoon light that was beaming in through the wall of windows, after reflecting off of the metal and asphalt rooftops of Gramercy. Without the light, he could barely make out her silhouette lying lifeless on the bed sheets, her long, light brown hair covering her face and leaving only the glimmer of her glazed over eyes beneath it. And as he stared at her, he knew that he could love her now, now that she was quiet.

He felt heavy, walking toward her Macbook, the adrenaline had passed, leaving him exhausted as his fingers trembled as he opened the laptop. The glare illuminated his face, and his eyes adjusted to her desktop picture of the resort where they had stayed in Bohol, Philippines. After a few minutes of staring at the screen, he decided to wash his hands again.

The bathroom only had a sliver of window, but it seemed to be a portal in which all the noise of NYU students bantering, taxi horns, charming hooligans rapping, hipsters droning boredom into cell phones, and the squeaking deluxe baby strollers rolling across the pavement would filter through and reverb against the tiled walls and giant, porcelain bathtub. Marshall violently scrubbed, without looking once at the mirror. His eyes still stared at the two razorblades sitting on the drain long after the soap ran off of his hands.

As he let the cold water run over his olive skin, he wondered what she had wanted him to do for her next. Of course, he had to call the police, but there was something tugging at the back of his mind. Marshall walked out of the bathroom, and into her enormous living room, where the walls of mirrors centered on him, willing his eyes to look upon his reflection. Running his fingers through his unkempt, raven hair, down to the scar at the base of his neck, he traced the rubbery tissue out of habit. She had put out her clove cigarette on him as he was heaving into the cool toilet of an anonymous hotel room, jarring him before he had been able to pass out into his own vomit. Breath thick with vermouth and tobacco, she had whispered into his ear, “so you will always think of me.” As if, even if she hadn’t branded him as her own, he could ever stop thinking of her. She was forever in his mind, and he breathed her in everyday from the moment he met her.

The crinkling of paper in his pocket as his body shifted, stirred him from the memory, bringing him to the present, bringing him to what he had let happen. “What if she had wanted to live?”, he wondered aloud. And, as the waters began to pool in his eyes, he quickly blinked them away as if they stung. Shaking his head back and forth, he pulled out the piece of paper from his pocket. Marshall unraveled it gently, pulling at the corners as if they were the wings of the butterflies he used to torture as a child. He smoothed the creases and left the grainy sheet on the suede couch and sat beside it as he lit another Marlboro Red.

Upon seeing her heavy, slanted handwriting, her shrill voice came into his head, as he remembered one of the many nights they spent arguing outside of a nameless Lower East Side hole in the wall. “Marshall, I’m so sick of your fucking face looking at me like that. Like, you’re ashamed. Am I embarrassing you?! I should be the one fucking embarrassed to be seen with you.” The familiar words shot through him, filling up and smoothing out the folds in his slouched torso. She was haunting him already. “Slumming it with an art school drop out who can’t even score me some decent fucking coke.” The outcome of the night weighed heavily on the coke. If it was decent fucking coke, they could have a decent night, sometimes having sex after fighting and drinking and dancing, sometimes waking up to her crying and slamming the bathroom door in his face in the morning. If it hadn’t been decent coke, it would be an endless stream of tears, and the endless effort for Marshall to talk her out of jumping off of the FDR Drive overpass.

He felt the patterns of up-brushed paisley on her silk coat draped on the arm of the couch, and smelled her familiar scent.

I Haven't Been Blogging Because I've Been Writing

It's a shocker I know... not to blog and actually write, but now I have time on my hands and how I miss this world! And, how I love to be up at 4:00 AM when my Poetry Portfolio is due at 5:00 PM today, but I am purposefully procrastinating by blogging, it's very odd. Anyway, I plan to at least write on here a little bit in the journal sense, but primarily share my writing as it is plentiful and dogeared, as well as strewn across my bed and desk under jerky wrappers and diet coke cans. For now I shall share some recents!

1. Unemployed for the first time in 6 years (Don't worry, I hated my job)

2. Today, I thought of my friend Ana Maria or Nani as I like to call her, and found out through various social networks... ok, ok, FACEBOOK AND VIMEO!!! Anyway, I found out she won two awards at the Dusty Awards for Best Director and Outstanding Achievement in Film. And, Kevin Kline presented them to her!! It's like when you haven't heard from people in awhile and you hear how good they're doing you obviously are happy for them. But this is beyond good! The point of mentioning this was that I went to her web portfolio and under music videos there is a music video of me that she shot years ago called Quince Anos for a band. And let's say I never thought it would surface.

3. So, on this spurt of looking into my friend's creative progresses (and I don't mean friends I see everyday but friends I haven't even talked to in years), I decide to look at ALL of David Hochbaum's blogs. Well, I'll be honest, not all, but a good many, enough to keep me from doing my portfolio. And I stumble upon one done two years ago that I didn't see before and it was a thank you to everyone for making his show at Corey Helford Gallery possible. He had thanked me. I can't explain the progress that hes made and all the things he has done, the unbelievable works, the success and the impact meeting David has had on my life. He knew me just when I started writing, when I discovered art.

4. I flew some falcons in Vermont. Yah, that's right. I went hiking with a hawk. Two actually. Do it.

So, people and friends... I should probably do my work.

monologue female early 20s

Saturday March 29, 2008

Monologue – Female, mid 20’s.

I am unsure. Wholly and surely, I am unsure. About everything. I am unsure of myself, my opinions, people’s perception of me, fabrications of my self-perception, everything. I used to know myself. I think I may or may not have been aware of what constitutes knowing oneself and will have just assumed I did. I would like that bliss again because being unsure is weak and makes you think of excuses – “its okay to feel this way, its healthy, its normal, everyone goes through this” – And, what are you really thinking? Everyone does go through this, but that doesn’t change the uncertainty of your own mind. Uncertainty of your whole being defines nothing about who you are, only who you aren’t. He is not what you are looking for. Why can’t you bring yourself to believe that, Carrie? He drips of perfection in the most mediocre of means and will worship you till no end. You don’t see what he sees. You don’t see yourself in his eyes. It is beyond trying to make it work, you are unsure of him and that is enough.

I don’t want to see myself in my own eyes nor anyone else’s. I’m suffering from uncertainty to hide from any truths and boring truces I have with myself. Blissful ignorance makes me the dusty static of insignificance wasting in a world full of better things.