| Subject: More from Isabel |
Author:
Holly
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Date Posted: 15:46:24 03/04/01 Sun
In reply to:
Holly
's message, "Isabel" on 15:40:43 03/04/01 Sun
Poem
Tuesday, 25-Apr-00 12:15:51
152.3.120.40 writes:
Love has a smell of lust under
pupils dilate
pores release
what line between mind and body exists
dissolves as I taste your lips
and feel the callous of your palm
as you hold my breast
gently
Free will?
The body objects
Where is choice? Can you not feel?
Warm -- his breath
Across your cheek
His weight
Ah. . .
I cannot resist
Sweet futility.
Love has a smell of lust under
And therein lies its glory --
It finds the animal within the spirit
and sets it
irrevocably
free.
Is.
_______
Izzy's vignettes
Wednesday, 13-Dec-00 00:22:11
38.32.9.95 writes:
Three Vignettes
Friday, 02-Jul-1999 16:39:13
152.3.249.171 writes:
Three Vignettes
(c) L.P. 1999
I don’t write poetry. I tried. But though I love poetry, I hear my thoughts in prose. The problem is that finishing prose
takes a long time, and I am impatient. So I am posting these little sections, parts for things that I haven’t finished yet.
Let me know what you think.
----------------------------
I promised something nice. But I don’t do nice. This is something else. I don’t know what you would call it.
“Touch”
She awoke to the feel of kisses on her arm, then stretched and smiled, raising her eyes to meet his. She reached out her
hand and brushed her fingers along his face and down his neck to where a pulse beat raggedly. He held her gaze and
was as still as stone.
She smiled again. He looked fierce and infinitely vulnerable. The contrast brought home to her what he had risked that
night.
She moved her hand down and undid a button on his shirt. And another. And another. The only sound in the room was
the rustle of a hand on cotton, and his hoarse breathing. As she finished the buttons and opened his shirt, sliding it down
his shoulders, he tensed as if ready to spring.
His scars glowed in the disappearing light. She touched them lightly. One just below his left shoulder. One on his right
side. His bicep. His wrist. Crimes against nature and soft skin. Each with its own history. Tangible memory.
So tangible.
She traced each scar with her forefinger, then followed with her mouth. She heard his indrawn breath and felt him flinch
beneath her.
Starting from the center of each hurt, she moved in ever increasing circles, slowly, carefully, each kiss carefully placed.
Deliberate. Each wound received attention, kindness. None were neglected. None were forgotten. She took her time,
until the lines that she drew around each merged into a complicated pattern with its own design -- one that
encompassed scar and fresh skin, memory and this moment. With each touch, she brought the past into the present,
where it lost its sway and became, again, only a part of the whole.
She took his body as her own and gave it back to him, transformed. His breath caught as he realized she was offering a
lesson.
He had known punishment and atonement. But with her lips and her fingertips, he felt the balm of absolution.
She taught the art of forgiveness.
When she was done, she lifted her head and looked in his eyes, surprised to find them welled with tears. He pulled her
to him roughly, lay his head on her shoulder, and rocked with her on the bed.
------------------------------------------------------------------
“Lassitude”
There was a song on the radio a few years back, a boy now dead was singing about how he felt following a difficult
breakup.
He said that mostly he just slept.
Unlike most songs about such things, that boy spoke a truth. You know how to tell whether someone has been
depressed or suicidal? Ask them about the lassitude.
It has been days since I’ve been out of my apartment. It feels like years since I felt the spark of need to do or see or be
anywhere else. My thoughts speak to each other, the only company they keep.
At the moment, I am lying on my side on the floor of my living room. My fingers twine in the shag of a carpet that has
long since seen better days. My arm is bent under my cheek, asleep. One ankle hanging down over the other, my toe
dipping to barely kiss the floor.
I lie at the bottom of an ocean. What else could be causing the pressure that holds me here when I long to move, if only
to settle into stillness more comfortably? The air, like water, flows in and out of my mouth, creating currents that I feel
through the hair on my arm, the rustle of the linen of the pillow beneath my head.
I drift in and out of sleep. All it takes is the closing of my eyes. My breathing settles and I float free. I dream of
sleeping. I know for sure that I am dreaming only by the change in setting.
Outside the sun shines, pouring its energy into the living world I have tried absorbing that energy into my own tissues,
but to no avail. And, once burned, twice shy, I have taken to closing the shades against the light.
My living room exists in a twilight at odds with the honey stillness of the summer afternoon.
---------------------------------------------
This one is the beginning of a story.
“Stormy Weather”
Kenny is a walking, talking hurricane.
His last sweep through town had resulted in three marriage separarations, one divorce, two kids running away, and no
less than five sudden career shifts. Everyone’s favorite little brother and all around good guy. Wouldn’t hurt a fly, that
Kenny. Funny how the winds of change seemed to reach 100 miles an hour in his direct vicinity.
Of course, no one put two and two together except me. And who was going to listen to the local troublemaker? The
first person I tried to tell this to accused me of being jealous. The second, of plain old lying. I got the message soon
enough -- and kept my mouth shut from then on.
It ate at me though. I know what it’s like to have your life turned upside down in the blink of an eye, and whatever
these folks had done to me over the years, they didn’t deserve that. So when I heard tell that Kenny was on his way
home again, I started to keep watch, trying to see where the fault lines lay that his visits inevitably set to rumbling. I
thought I could be the Kenny early warning system -- let people know what they might be in for.
It’s okay. You can laugh. It was kind of a stupid idea. You can’t protect people from their own mistakes, no matter
how much you’d like to. You would think that I would have realized that, given my history. But I had to learn all over
again.
Anyway, before I was so enlightened, I did my best to stop the hurricane. I paid more attention to the conversations at
the counter, trying to hear what was going on in people’s lives so that I could see potential problems. I don’t usually do
that, really listen when people chatter at me -- it’s hard enough staying on your feet with a semi-pleasant expression on
your face when you work the long shift. But this is a small town, and everyone comes through my place regularly, so I
figured that would be the easiest way to get the lay of the land.
I had three likely possibilities scouted by the time Kenny hit town.
First, the Whittiers’ daughter Anna was just about due for a major teen rebellion. She was the right age, and she had
hung around with Kenny on his last visit. Also, her father told me that she had recently chopped all her hair off in an
attempt to look more like her hero, Ani DiFranco. Sounded to me like her mom needed to put those masking tape Xs
on her windows.
Second, the White’s had had a nasty fight at the Saturday dance at the VFW about his drinking and her attention to
their cute waiter, who also happened to be their weekend babysitter. Easy enough to see a fault line there, running right
down between the two of them.
Third, Jamie Bowens was just passed over for a promotion at work. He came in Friday morning and ordered bacon
and eggs, which he had not had since the doctor warned him about his high cholesterol the previous year. Kind of
glared at me when I pointed that out. Now Jamie is not one to talk, but he chattered my ear off about the
no-good-sonofabitch who got the job and raise that he had been working for for three goddamn years. Just about
blistered my ears, and I’m not one to be squeamish about language. When he walked out after eating some apple pie
ala mode, I put him down on the list too.
These folks were like those flimsy little beach houses in Florida that got knocked down flat every fall.
. . .
unfinished. . .
-------------------------------------------
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