six word novel

flowers: bloom! beautiful! die in vase.

favorite food? mexican. ever sick? si.

stay out of the well. sharks.

6 words: equals my attention span

hemingway's

stay

i wasn't ready
until i collected all the perfected moments
like a hand
then i laid them all out
and still lost

dark completeness

puzzle piece clouds
this is a hard one again
all bright white, slowly fitting
one by one covering up all the blue
last piece where is it
there right there in front of the sun
darkness now
and the puzzle is complete

t-50

i have been having problems with leaving every book unfinished
i hate the unrequited required need to wrap everything up
dot every eye, square every circle, tie a bow on top
but i have every end untied
i read your fiction or otherwise
but the biggest fiction of all is that it ends
and every stone has been turned over and cleaned and painted pink
and at that point i can no longer relate, can not maintain focus or appreciation
so i will continue to leave the last 50 pages alone
maybe when i am a squared circle i will get it

but maybe that's why people read
part of the whole fantasy world appeal
it's not even a happy ending that's appealing--just an ending!

The new and constant degeneration

When I am thinking about something new that I haven’t given much thought to before, I like to think of it in terms to the history of the world. Like, when was the first time ____ happened? And who made ___ happen and why? How did ___ travel around the world and become so globally accepted? How has ____ evolved? The weird thing is, mostly when I think of ____ in terms of these questions, this is the graph that pops into my head:


Now, I recognize that this graph is not to scale, but I really feel like the world was pretty stable about pretty much everything until half a century ago-ish, and then things are really changing. But what I think has changed the MOST is communication. And although it’s something I’ve thought about before and a lot, here are my questions.

Like, when was the first time communication happened? Easy: Seventh day of the world existing. Who made communication happen and why? Adam, so God could tell him the rules and they could hang out together, and also with Eve. How did communication travel around the world and become so globally accepted? Well, it’s kind of important, even ants need to do it. How has communication evolved? And here’s the kicker.

In the history of time from the beginning of the world on, there were two main types of communication: Talking and Writing. People go door to door, visit their neighbors, bring some bread, write some letters. But the telegram, to the telephone, to email, instant messaging, text messaging, and so on, have all popularized as of relatively late, and the majority of evolutions have created an entirely new system of communication.

So no one is writing love letters and spraying perfume on it, instead people are sending poorly punctuated emails and not even bothering to sign their names. And no one is stopping by for a visit to check up, but instead a text message “how r u?” And now the worst of all is social network websites, where you don’t even need to talk to someone to catch up with them, just look at the pictures they have posted and what someone else is writing on their wall. I would like to see someone from the past come to the future of right now. They would probably say, “This is weird, is no one friends with each other?” Because this is what they would see: people walking around by themselves with either headphones in or talking into their cell phones or typing messages in their phones, sitting at black boxes and typing furiously, but man would it look ridiculous to the time traveler.

Something I also think about when thinking about the above graph, is how most things that have changed are relatively so new, that we can’t be totally sure about the eventual effects of this speedy evolution. The varying types of communication today are pretty spectacular, but how much are there going to hurt us in the long run? Are the relationships we have with every other person going to become more weak and superficial? Are we going to rely on emails and text messages to maintain friendships? And as the generations go on, will technology allow communication to become even more impersonal? What will communication eventually degenerate to? And as all languages evolve, the English words will become shorter and shorter because no one wants to type in all the letters to spell w-h-a-t-e-v-e-r word is t-o-o l-o-n-g into their phones. And people need to keep the cell phone conversations to a minimum because they’re out of minutes again! so they will just briefly say what they need to in short grunts and hang up.

But maybe our expectations for communication just have to be lower. We should just accept that now we can say so much more in so many less words using much more resourceful means. People would probably roll their eyes at the inefficiency of a love letter these days anyway. But maybe we should just be careful. Maybe we could start bringing our neighbors bread again. Even though it is probably also not as good as pre-mid-1900’s bread.

[cinquains]

Coat: on
I hate mornings
I see my breath; I’m ice
When class is over, the sun’s up
Coat: off

Pebbles
What would you do?
Drop them? Throw them? Skip them?
Maybe don’t pick them up at all
Dirt hands

Pictures
People posing
Big smiles and bright flash
Everyone looks so happy here!
Cheesy

You wear
That nice blue shirt
I’ll just wear something else
OK fine, we’ll just match again
Mirror

Crosswords
Daily scrabble
And of course sudoku
No wonder homework takes so long
Sidetracked

taj memoir

The scene is too much to take in with only our five senses. We stand at the entrance in a daze, the white marble glistening in the morning sun, the red mosques on either side framing it, the gardens and streams gently leading up to steps, up to the most beautiful mausoleum built. We inch towards it, take our shoes off, press our hands against the ever-cold marble. Intricate flower designs cover the thinner marble slabs, allowing new color to sparkle through, and Islamic writing frames the doorways. The interior is dark and cold but filled with carvings and bird droppings, and side-by-side tombs sit in the eerie white dimness.

And we walked outside it, around it, away from it. We looked at it for a long time and then gave its marble a kiss because we didn’t know how else to treat it, because it taught about love and sadness and pride and eternity. And we put our shoes back on. And when we talked about the Taj Mahal we lowered our voices a little. And we marveled at how something so beautiful and perfect could be created by a selfish ruler with imperfect love. And we couldn’t help but feel the magic then, and still now, because we saw a piece of eternity and a piece of real beauty and maybe even a piece of love.

global poisoning

In the year 20-something-something, it is more polluted than all the years before it. Combined? No, but exponentially the pollution has gotten worse and worse. And in the following year, if people are still here to create it, there will be even more pollution.

The lives that people are living are more important than being alive. The gas guzzling cars and the endless intake of meat and the need to stifle every resource and replace it with some kind of cement economy has become the collective and solely acceptable way of life. Even Al Gore has stopped running for president, and even the EU citizens have stopped driving Smartcars because what’s the use, everyone knows they are so ugly and there’s no point in efficiency because of how the entire else world is contributing.

The governments realized the dangers last. Also they realized that they had caused the problems in the first place with lack of policy and lack of paying attention, but by then it was too late to rewind, but not too soon change! The governments started warning people about the dangers of pollution, over-harvesting, outlasting our resources. No one listened because they had white buds in their ears. So they started putting public announcements on the pre-digested television shows but people would fast-forward through the carefully worded messages.

So the governments started putting up fliers on the front doors of every house in every city in every country in every language. “Please recycle cardboard, glass, and plastics!” one would say and another, “Turn off your light bulbs when you leave the house, Please!” But no one moved and the clouds got blacker so the governments started saying made the signs louder until “Stop spraying chemicals on your small farm patch, people eat the fish and they all have cancer!” And finally a flier on fire engine red paper, “Carbon monoxide is a silent, undetectable, instant killer. Carbon monoxide is coming out of your exhaust pipe! There’s nothing you can do pretty much!” And people tore it off the door and looked down at it, and looked up at the four SUV’s idling in the driveway, and then looked up the road to the continually flowing exhaust from all the cars in the neighborhood and all the cars they had ever seen. They collectively held their breath as long as they could and exhaled and exhaled every good intention to be a model citizen. And the entire planet lived like they were dying and subconsciously waited for the world to end and they waited by speeding it up by driving bigger cars more and simultaneously running the furnace and the air conditioning and letting the lawn mower and the beached boat in the driveway run. And the world impatiently waited for the collective poisoning of the entire population by carbon monoxide.

scratch

Pregnant with dreams and empty with thoughts
Happy with nonsense but filled up with loss
Scratching out days on my prison cell wall
One step forward, two back, and fall