Old flame

A little something I pounded out today, not terribly creative, nor was there much thought put into it, but I ended up liking it 🙂

Old flame

Still here, old flame?

So long it’s been

since I poked you

Let the sparks course

Tasted heat and

sensation and

pain-ripped passion

As you ignite

sense memory

of warmer days

and bittered tongues

Skin so flayed from

that salsa dance

we simmered to

in nights yearning

Till I doused you

(or you did me?)

with tears so wet

and salty sweet

I thought for sure

the sparks were out

 

But here all this

time, weren’t you?

Waiting for one

more candle to

come and handle

your slick red hips

swaying breathless

Watch them sweat to

keep you contained

But then, I look

and see no one

Nothing but moths

dead at the touch

were they? Or were

you just waiting

for me all this

time, to poke you

just like before?

 

Let me oblige

sweet, sweet old flame

You’re burning bright

and brilliant

and beautiful

…poetry’s never been a strong point for me, but darn if I don’t have fun doing it.

A number of old flames have come back into my life. One that springs immediately to mind is peanut butter. I used to love, love, LOVE peanut butter as a kid. Back when I always brought packed lunch to school, there was a period when I brought nothing but peanut butter sandwiches.

Literally NOTHING but peanut butter sandwiches, for, oh, probably four years (grade 5 to first year high school). It wasn’t the best habit, and I don’t know why I did it. Probably because I was lazy to think of anything else.

That’s why, when I finally cut out the peanut butter, I stayed away from it for seven years. It’s been a long time, but now I am again regularly eating peanut butter, and I love it. It’s not the healthiest thing in the world but it sure serves as a nice way to appease almost any kind of craving you might get for far worse things. And it’s also a great stomach-filler after  a night of drinking.

Another old flame is Tarot cards. I’ll probably write more about these later on, but I was inspired over Christmas to play around with the Vertigo deck again. What attracts me most to Tarot isn’t the so-called ability to tell the future – which it most presumably isn’t really supposed to be, as it’s more correctly meant to represent compass points for choices – but the exercise of interpretation. Reading a spread of cards is telling a story. For me that’s all there is to it.

The Vertigo tarot is a highly stylized deck illustrated by Dave McKean, and while in his typical style the images are pretty obtuse, they’re powerful and can stand close examination thanks to all the detail he layers in. His image of The Chariot is one of the strangest interpretations I’ve seen; the chariot itself is practically absent, and we see just the head of a skeletal horse with an unidentified driver. But it’s rife with things you can take from it, like the strange inclusion of a shrouded moon in the background. A card traditionally associated with power and triumph suddenly takes on an air of vulnerability and mystique. I really should talk more about more cards in the deck in a later post.

I read a few people over the break, the first readings I’d done in years with hardly any practice or brushing up. Some went well, others I struggled with, and a select few genuinely surprised and excited me with how closely the cards randomly drawn into the spread fit the posed questions. It also helps that I’ve delved a lot more into Astrology since then, and can add what I know of the planets and the zodiac to their associated cards (the Vertigo deck provides the associations).

…but in the end I’m slipping away from the point. What made me write the poem at the top of the post isn’t peanut butter or the Tarot. It’s someone I ran into today, someone I hadn’t seen in a while.

Desire’s a funny thing; little flirtations mean nothing, you think, especially the ones you don’t really intend to follow through on. For guys, a lot of the flirting naturally comes from our end…yet most of the time we don’t even give it much thought. We do it just ’cause. But it’s done nonetheless, it’s out there and enacted. And then one day…it hits us. “I remember you.” And only then does what was merely in the air become manifest.

~ the diarrhea of self ~

I don’t hear anyone use the word “diarrhea” anymore. “Well yeah. That’s kid’s stuff. We’re adults now, graagh, we use grown-up words like horsefucker and shithole, since they make us sound more sophisticated, god knows how.”

Seriously, though, it’s funny how diarrhea was one of those words that I used to throw around a lot when I was maybe, uh, six years old? Five? I knew exactly what it meant at the time, too. My friends and I,  we all did, and we all enjoyed using it for crude jokes. We comfortably compensated our lack of the word “shit” with a medical condition derived from Greek. Then again, we were the Jurassic Park generation that had no problem memorizing scientific dinosaur names (to this day I can flawlessly spell “Pachycephalosaurus” – and that’s beyond Microsoft spellcheck).

But to use diarrhea in everyday conversation is crude, yes. It’s never a pleasant word; it’s no joking matter, either, being the second most common cause of infant deaths worldwide. Wikipedia told me that. You know what else Wikipedia tells me? That the Greek term “diarrhea” means “flowing through”.

I’m not much of a blog person. There are many blogs I appreciate – theme blogs, character/humor blogs, informative blogs, or blogs of both famous and non-famous people who just have a lot of worthwhile stuff to say. But I’m not much of a blog person. I don’t go out of my way to look for blogs, and I’m often lazy to try new recommended ones – usually just sticking in my comfort zone with those I know. Often I think, “man, most blogs are full of shit (and I’m sure all who use the internet have had that exact thought at least once). Diary? Try diarrhea.” *rimshot*

And on the writing end? Similar sentiment. I’ll tell you right now a few things I expect this blog to be – infrequent, inconsistent, oft-abandoned. But I’ll work on it. I hope I will. I need to write more; the first step of writing, cliche as it sounds, really is just finding it in you to put your words out there. Write your first draft with your heart, rewrite with your head, says William Forrester. Punch the damn keys and you’re the man now, dog.

Writers blog because it gets the words flowing through. Oh, you see what I did thar?

The other day, I was annotating a story I’d written – a disgustingly conceited self-congratulatory hobby, but at the same time justifiable, since as proud as we are of the many little references and inspirations we can so cleverly hack into our work, if we don’t keep track then we’ll forget some of them. Still, there’s quite a bit of patting-yourself-on-the-back involved, and so I named it sincerely “the diarrhea of self-annotation”. I thought of how much fun it was to use the word diarrhea as a substitute for diary, and thought, “yeah, so since I’m a hack I’ll call my blog this”.

Now I quite like the title, and the more I think about it, the more I think it’s actually something I’ll have to work to live up to. I need to realize myself on the page more often, need to get the ideas and thoughts and sentences and images flowing, or I’ll never really be good at this writing thing.

And if none of that is accomplished, I’ll just erase this entry and define this site by the title’s more negative connotation towards blogging. But I hope that’s not the case. There’s tons of stuff out there I could write.

Like 600 words defending my use of “diarrhea”.