Nighttime Jewels

Don't get your fingers smashed when your window of opportunity closes.

Surgeon Generals' Warnings

She kept whispering about the sociological implications of fucking around in somebody else's' room, incessant rambling about facts and concepts and theories which slid right off his ears. He wished she'd just shut up already and let him kiss her, but as she kept readjusting her classes and lecturing him about how it was so so so so wrong to do anything in a room not his own, he became bored, anxious, fidgety and frustrated. The way the computer monitors' light ricocheted off her nose ring made him all the more frustrated. God, why can't she just shut up? Kiss me. Kiss me. Anywhere. Take my hand. It's a room. Just a room. A room that was occupied by other people before the current owner. A room that was occupied by other people before the previous owner.

What does it matter that it's not his room, the place where he lays his head down every night? It's a revolving door, emptiness erased in every year by a set of different people. 

She kept talking and he started to fade. He yawned and closed his eyes. 

The Letter

Dusk arrived with nonchalant murkiness, the wind blowing discarded paper cups and plastic bags all about the street. Sitting near the window, waiting for the world to move, for it to shake, for the monotony of wind and change to manifest into something MORE, something... 

He couldn't quite figure out what it was. This unknown beckoning pulsated deep within him, making him tremble, turning his fingers white as bone as he clutched the rosary dear to his heart.

Less then two hours ago he had dropped the gallon of milk, and it splattered all over the linoleum floor, all over his feet, cascading towards the carpet, and retreating underneath the refrigerator. It was his only response, the only thing his body could muster upon his arrival into the kitchen.

Wrapped in wax paper and written on beige stationery was a two fold note, with elegant handwriting scrawled across each page, front and back. It began with 

"I think I love you, but now..."

He had smiled upon discovering the note, chalking it up to another romantic gesture, one in a series of acts which weighed heavy in his heart. Acts of love that made him flush, and made his heart swell, and flood with admonishment.

But then he kept reading. And then the tears came, and kept coming.

Two hours later, he couldn't move from the window. Re-reading everything over in his head, hearing her speak those words, it tore at him. Had he done anything right? 

He felt like he was decent, and loving, and caring, but the note brought light to his shortcomings. It took too long for him to be accepting, to admire, to be enamored. She cursed her tongue for putting this blame on him, but she couldn't mince words, or deny facts. She felt stupid, she felt weak. She felt at shame for being so caring and not having it reciprocated. She was tired of vesting all her faith and hope into the notion that one day he would feel as strongly as she did. She tired of praying for legitimacy. She left her copy of the key in the paper, wrapped up so delicate.

Now he was alone. 

All alone.

michelle

the overwhelming aura of cliche-
ripped from manifestos and dictionaries
and other writings in an attempt
a attempt to deride me and chalk my feelings up to nothing more then
gaudy, tacky, lifeless meaning
but,
I LOVE you. you. your sleeping body
rising gently with each breath

like the most magnificent sunrise
the sun attempting to broach the horizon and flood it with it's
red and orange and blood-tinged hues
but my words are wrestled from my lips
the words that say

I love you.

your skin, your scent, your touch... the way the sun hits your hair every night
the way you believe in nothing
but us.

the way you light up my heart, and turn my love into indescribable splendor.

310 #3

"big bright sky"


He entered in through the side door, in a decidedly hurried pace, more then likely as a means to escape the rain-whipped winds. He was a curious man; mid sixties, grey hair, grey mustache, the development of the old age manifested in his distorted paunch. This was a guy who had a wife and 3 kids and 8 grandkids, but also a guy who masturbated entirely way too much. His days each began with a quick silencing of his erection in quiet confidence of his showers tight-lipped bubble, an ironic ascetic touch to a man not yet convinced that his best years were over.
He hears voices. His knees quiver, and his heart beats faster, faster, fastest.
He knew no one should be in the building, but it was Spring Break and maybe he could get lucky. He followed the ethereal calling, to the second floor. Another side door, but he doesn't care for silence much and whips the door open.
He's right in front of an apartment. His ears are burning with the sounds of two other voices in the building. They were in front of him! Well, behind the door actually. But still. His knees are shaking, and his hands began their beautiful metamorphosis from appendages to greasy, clammy stumps. He rubbed them together, already soaked to the bone from all the sweat.
His ear pressed to the door, the feeling of victory washing over him. He could hear them, they were having a conversation. Two men. Sounded in the early twenties. Yummy, yummy bros. Another quiver. He licked his lips and wiped his brow. They were talking and carrying on per usual, and he was on the other side, looking in the peephole and pressing his ear to the door. The two friends without the faintest idea. This excited him.
In a lot of ways.

The griminess of his hands were the best reflection of the man as a whole.

the sage

CREATIVE WRITING THEME OF 2010: (drumroll please) -

mediocre fiction at it's finest

"Three blacks came up in the place. With guns. Of course. And they gave their fucking presence away before they even got in, motherfuckers blaring their rap music in their shitty ass car, fuckin; sounding like a fucking sheet of metal being hit with like a hammer, because of all the bass. Sounds so bad, and I hate to say it, but where we live those type of people don't ever come from down town to these parts. These are all college apartments; sometime one of 'em might be a delivery driver, or sometimes a bunch of fucking highschoolers drive from down there to the campus part.

So,  it's real fucked up that these dudes did that. I like black people but damn man. Shot up just the apartment, and for a fucking original xbox and 4 double a batteries. Didn't hurt Renold but stole his shit. Heard the dickhead didn't even put up a fight. That passive little shit. Drank all of the fucking bear to"

- Terry

(2009)

By far the most creative note I've gotten from my roommate as to why he couldn't pay his half of the rent this month. Why he couldn't just tell me he spent all of his money on weed and a few new shirts was beyond me. It's not like I don't ever know. He spelled "beer" as "bear"

Idiot.

310 #2

The cigarette corpses littered the streets. The stale smell of tobacco leaking out of these ancient carcasses, petrified and tranquil among the canvas of concrete. Blanketing the highways, mixing in with the decrepit leaves and trash that blemished the skin of the city.

Three blocks away from the epicenter of this mausoleum was a man crying alone, lamenting over the shit-luck route his life decided to embark on. Instead of letting it run its course, he wept. For misfortune, for luck, for lack of... everything. The suns' relinquishing of it's duties to make way for the reign of Luna coinciding with the man's' incessant bleating concerning fairness, and equality.

The city moaned along at night, creaking and bleeding for an audience of none. The cigarettes that strangled the roads were witnesses of no importance, as they could not speak, they could not recant the nights of filth and gluttony that was so commonplace. Alone they sat, to be moved only on days of wind and rain, washed away to locations unknown. 

More and more cigarettes joined the burial ground.

Elsewhere in town, more and more coffee was spilled down drains, more and more tears staining faces, more and more hearts incinerated and broken into nothingness. This constant was the sum of life and it's vague idiosyncrasies.  So many people unhappy and living with strife. 

And more and more cigarettes joined the burial ground.

310 #1

it sounds like -
a summer night out there, with you. the cacophonous roar of traffic
all around us, knocking from afar
washed up
on the shores of your neighborhood

devour'd

The stale...

stench of tobacco, of smoke

wafted through the floorboards, a portrait

of failings and shattered promises

framed in the reflection of guilt soiled recollection.

A whisper, a prayer.

The division of labor

between 

heart and soul

the fleeting sense of 

satisfaction.

WRAPPED up in porcelain strength lies. Organization and

struggles; 

dully aware of the heartache that incinerates my mouth.

Grasping for the right words to feel, the right emotions to say, the spotlight on the revolution

inspired

by the seamless transition from heartbreak to sorrow, from

fulfillment

to hollow clamoring.