New Poem - These Streets

On these streets
the bus is my chariot,
the driver my king.
He whisks me down
this bitter city.

A blind girl
on the sidewalk
may never know
how beautiful she is
or who is staring.

But I feel the eyes
scratching at my back
spiraling up my thighs
glaring at my expensive
boots.

On these strips of asphalt and
skin and blood
the eyes of the wandering
attempt a connection
but I am on a mission.

The streets
they know me by name.
I am beautiful...
I am a mangy bitch
in the same utterance.

On these streets
the bus is my chariot,
the driver my king.
He whisks me down
this bitter city.

Poetry - Old and New

Linda

Veiled behind a vowing crepe
You neared death and made him promise
he would marry someone else.

Did envy shadow you at heaven's reception?
a covetous pining that he remain
faithfully and eternally yours?

Or was it abandoned at the door,
A mink coat hung heavy in the foyer
leaving you weightless


Every 28 Days

I hate when people
compare a period
to a blossoming flower
arranged neatly in the hourglass
of their underwear.
It's really more of a goop
of stretching, brilliant...

But it's not disgusting.
It isn't the same as feces
or urine
just passing through
like some tourist headed
to Disneyworld
and missing the smalltown wonder
on the way.

No, periods dwell in depths
pain inside of a girl.
The pain that makes us faint
and hold our stomachs
hunched
in a woman's embrace.


A Prayer for my Father

My baby fingers
cross over the
Blue vein of the cross tattoo
on your wrist--
I cross my heart.


The Poet

You can put her on a pedestal
but you can't keep her there.

When she looks at you
with those kind, shark eyes

and says she loves your work,
You know she is simply alive.

^Written about the poet Julia Kasdorph

The Girls

Oh how the girls hate with their eyes
This one because I once had her man,
And her

because she wants the one I have now.
Oh how the girls hate with their eyes
Not like men hate
with their fists and
pistols.

Girls hate
through smiles and greetings
and their strangling, beautiful eyes.


Thigh Buttons

I sit
with a clock
in my hands
fingering a new button
sewn into the skin of my
high
inner
thigh.

Today it's a blue one.
Thigh button colors
are the richest
on earth; on
my body.
The clock clicks
silently,
tremors of seconds counting;
buttons gone by,
my life gone by.

I say I like the sound,
sound of my pendant
as it falls to my bosom.
My husband's chiding response:
A shiny new button
bleeding crimson on my thigh.

^Most people have trouble understanding this. What are the first things that come to your mind?

Vain Immortal

I.
Science class dissections
destroyed her appetite,
but it didn't take much
to do that.
She never paid her
respectful debt
at funerals. Said
she hated the smell of the dead,
the way they never moved while
she was so very alive.
While she was alive.

II.
She had a lacey voice
and high
like the panic shrill of the killdeer.
Became a backwards Polaroid picture,
fading purple.
People from school can't even remember
her last name.
All that trouble to be popular
and they can't remember.
They won't forget
how he doused her in gasoline
and lit her low-rise jeans;
her tanning bed skin turning
to flaking black firewood
abandoned on an empty beach.

III.
I imagine her
eyelashes whisking away,
Ants tugging them along her cheeks.
Remnants of waterproof mascara
still smudged there--
She hated that.
She seemed to thrive
on piercings and plucked eyebrows.
"It doesn't hurt," she'd assure the mirror,
But I bet it did.
I know she felt it like
she felt the tingle of the flames on her arms
manicured nails melting long
after she had died.
Then she could honestly
and resolutely tell the world,
"It doesn't hurt."

IV.
We paid our respects,
due or not.
Saw the face in the coffin;
the one she'd worked so hard
perfecting
only to look like this in the end.
Extraordinary in life,
no different in death.
Vain immortal
in her forgotten eternity.


The Guilt that Doesn't Follow

Secrets exchanged through
your cherry coke
and her bottled water.
From across the room you're
eyeing her
as you did the night before
from your barstool.
Dancing with her friends
you stalked your gazelle like
a patient hunter.
As you would have her believe,
a gentle hunter.
She giggled her consent
to the poised rifle:
Your welcoming hand.

Now her once-virgin eyes
glance from your face
into her glass.
Her own face flush
with a would-be shame.
Smirking, staring
you scorn her for pretending.
You've never left shame
in any girl; Virgin
or not.


Hitchhiking I

One long, leaning curve
in the road
and we saw it.

We had been hurrying home
on Halloween night,
an eve associated
with nothing good.
So on we rushed
my mom, my siblings, me
until we came to a curve.

One long, leaning curve
in the road
when we saw it.

It was only a girl
(she had long hair)
but then it turned around
and we saw the beard.
So scruffy and patchy
it looked as though
it had been drawn on.

"Not a girl," I whispered
as we prepared to
speed by the thing.
But mother saw its vehicle
broken down.
Deciding then
at the last second
to be the stupid Samaritan.

"It's Halloween," we reminded her.
But to her it was just another night
and this monster
simply in need of
assistance.
So it got in
and we were silent.

"I know it looks weird,"
the creature said,
"but I was going to a party,
I'm supposed to be a man."
"Well you fooled us,"
my idiot little sister
had to say.
And we drove the thing home.


Hitchhiking II

I was a stubborn teenager,
should've listened to my parents.
Too prideful to call for a ride home.
I was out way past my curfew
and I was high
so boldly I thrust out
my thumb
under the fluorescent light
on the street.

He told me he was Jamaican,
but he didn't need to.
The truck smelled like patchouli,
a green, yellow, black
miniature flag adorned
the rear-view mirror.
He wanted to know my age.
14. Naive, young 14.
Thought I knew about the world;
had never heard that accent
in real life before.

He asked me what I would do
if he wanted to rape me
or murder me
and bury me in the park.
My grip on the door handle
tightened.
He said he wasn't going to let me out,
said he wanted to know where I lived
so he could talk to my parents
about letting me thumb rides
from strangers.

But I refused.
Stalker or concerned citizen
I wasn't about to let
my parents know
how right they had been.


Lust

Addicted to the girls across the street
He watches blondes and redheads; clothes are neat.
Inside his bedroom crying at the thought
about the things he does and those he ought.
His wife innocently dreams in bed,
she'll never know the thoughts inside his head.
He knows he only has himself to blame
for all the girls--he never knew their names.
Just one more time, he'll only watch the girls
those treasures in their mom's high-heels and pearls.
For now he'll let the issue go unresolved,
while lives of little girls will soon dissolve.

^We were asked to choose one of the 7 deadly sins in my poetry class. I won't apologize for my disturbed and brutal poetry... I love to write from abandoned perspectives and it's just part of who I am.


If you have read this far, please don't forget to comment. Honesty is always welcome!

Narrative Essay - Reincarnation

I've always sort of been interested in the idea of reincarnation. My whole life I've been having dreams where there are faces and environments of which I have no conscious memory. Logic tells me they are in my memory somewhere, I've just buried them so deep I cannot consciously conjure them whenever I feel like it. So my deepest dreams reveal my deepest buried memories. Or, an even more rational explanation is since dreams are so mysterious, the faces and places I see in them could just be a culmination of a few different familiar memories combining to make something entirely different; something I don't recognize.

OR... and here's where my Romantic side comes in, they could be my unconscious memories from a previous life.

I'm sure I've blogged about this once or twice before somewhere, so I won't bore you with my own dreams and theories.

What I've really been interested in lately is karma and how the idea of reincarnation plays out in the world.

Take the steady human population increase over the history of the world, for example. If reincarnation exists, why are there more and more humans every day? Are ants or some other "insignificant" creatures being killed off and replaced by more humans?

This could make sense, since certain kinds of animals have become endangered. Does it add up? For every death, there must be a new life to take its place. Is the ratio really accurate?

And if humans are killing off whole species of animals, are those animals then being reborn as humans... are they seeking revenge on the humans who destroyed them because they're all of a sudden able to "pick on someone their own size"?? Is that why there's so much war?

Or is karma twisted in a way we can't understand? Maybe being reborn as a human is punishment, rather than the high position many believe it is. Sometimes I look at a dog and envy it's simple, happy life. I wish I could be free of all my responsibility, my conscience, my emotions, my reason.

Of course it would be terrible without them. But if I was ignorant that such things existed, how could I possibly miss them? What I wouldn't know, couldn't hurt me.

Tangent, sorry.

It's an interesting thought. Maybe evil trees or mosquitos are being born into the tragic life of human beings and that is why there are so many. Maybe once they're human and on top of the food chain they don't feel compelled to change their evil ways so they wreak havok on other people, on other nations, on their own families.

Perhaps that is why the population increases as it does. Being reborn as a human may not be the highest honor reincarnation can offer. It could be the lowest.

Movie Review - Lady in the Water

1. I saw two previews for the movie. The first was about 6 months ago and it didn't give me much about the movie. It had beautiful music and a janitor-type character staring into a pool whispering "How many of you are there?" The second preview I saw, which was a bit more recent, seemed to say that the characters weren't sure if the lady in the water was evil or good. Neither preview really had much bearing on the story itself, once I watched the movie... which makes sense since the story went in about 16 different directions.

2. Like me, Shyamalan didn't seem to know where the story was going. This could be because the story line was based on a bedtime story the director used to tell his kids. It definitely resembled a story that was told many different ways and then was made into a movie that incorporated all of its ideas (even though some of them contradicted each other). It might have been better as a bedtime story. I won't say it wasn't suspenseful. But every time you are ready for some amazing twist it just ends up that the bumbling characters in the movie don't really know what they're doing. The suspense wasn't as satisfying as I would have hoped. As much as people hated The Village, I liked it better than this film because it stayed with one basic plot instead of straying all over the place.

3. I enjoyed the anti-war theme and the legend aspect of the movie. It was a clever and moving fairy tale anyone would be enchanted by. The story itself didn't come together entirely... but that's just the writer in me talking. I did love the combination of the legend and the problems in our world today. It was Shyamalan's way of making sense of today by looking at the stories of the past.

4. The part in the end when the monkey creatures finally attack and kill the skrip was a bit too Steven Spielberg for me. Even the music was cheesy at that point, which is saying something because overall I loved the soundtrack.

5. The movie was a little ambitious. The legend of the ladies in the water trying to connect with man and stop the wars on earth was there, but the idea that the writer would see the lady and write a book that a little boy would read and grow up to become president and change the world was a stretch. The movie could've been 6 hours long and probably should have to accomplish all of that. That said, I wanted more at the end. I wanted to see the apartment complex janitor go back to the medical world where he belonged, and I wanted to see the little boy grow up and change the world. I left a gigantic feast starving for something more.

6. Why didn't anyone question the fact that none of this could ever happen in reality? I like putting the supernatural in a real, logical setting, but it was as if the characters in the movie had this kind of thing happen to them every day. On the other hand, all of the characters were strange people, which made their blind belief in the supernatural a little more believable. Shyamalan also explained their simple faith in the legend. Those who were supposed to help the lady in the water would be drawn to one place... so they were somewhat prepared to have something strange occur.

7. As I'm sitting here criticising the movie, I think about the one character who dies in the film; the movie critic. He is the arrogant pessimistic new guy in the building and is painted as the only one who could never believe in such nonsense. This annoyed me... not because I'm doing what Shyamalan obviously hates and picking apart his movie, but because as a writer I don't like when directors or writers shove their own petty aggravations into what could be a beautiful story. Yes, there is such a thing as authorial self-reflexivity, but this was too much. It was distracting and reminded me that the fairy tale was just made up by someone. It was a lapse in the suspension of disbelief.

8. I love Shyamalan's camera angles!!! It's amazing what he chooses to focus on and I could watch this movie again and again to see what he meant by each of them.

9. As a writer, the apparent lack of revision frustrated me. There are a few stories I've told and re-told over the years that have different spins or different endings, but if I ever recorded them they'd be a convuluted mess of different details. That's much of what this movie amounted to to me. The two very different previews show that Shyamalan spent time deciding which details to leave out and which direction the story should follow. I think he should've spent more time. It's too bad it's too late to edit it now.

10. My ranking of the Shyamalan movies I've seen (from best to worst):

The Sixth Sense, The Village, Lady in the Water, Signs

To read more reviews of this movie:

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/lady_in_the_water/

Short Story - The Exotic Bird Store

A woman and a man parked their car in a parking lot on Long Island.

The real purpose of their visit was to purchase some fine snack foods at a nationally known establishment chain; none other than Dunkin Donuts.

But before that planned endeavor their souls were both drawn to a huge, brilliant sign proclaiming a store's vast display of exotic birds.

The woman opened the door and held it for the man. As they entered, a series of high-pitched electric tones announced a new presence in the place. The welcome matched the cacophony of the store. Before the couple could see one bird, they had heard every one of them.

They passed slowly by the Americans at the counter, who merely glanced up from their magazines in what they deemed an appropriate greeting for potential customers. They looked annoyed. Perhaps the noise of the place was getting to them.

They started at the aisle farthest to the right, which is statistically the most popular side to start on. They saw birds one might see in any pet store: cockateels, all sorts of finches, parakeets. They passed by a few brightly adorned parrots, at which the woman exclaimed her disbelief that such brilliance wasn't made by ever-capable man, but by humble nature.

They came to a place in the store where most of the cages held large gray birds. Their sharp eyes stared into the man and the woman until they felt uncomfortable. How socially undeterred were these birds! It was as if every one of them had never been socialized properly. They challenged the humans with staring contests. Or perhaps they simply craved attention. After all, they were such a dull tinge, they certainly couldn't be the favorite amongst the rest of the exotic birds.

The staring began to get to the woman and the man. Flustered, they turned around in their place, trying to avoid those gray, accusing eyes. Finally someone broke the silence.

"Hello."

It was one of them. Attempting to reach the world outside its cage. Extending an invitation to conversation, without having a trainer beg it out of the bird. It went on.

"You see those people at the counter? Yes, the dirty ones reading the toilet. They're evil. This isn't an exotic bird palace you fools! It's a prison! Every bird in this place was a human once! Get out of here now. Us gray ones were once Americans like you..."

But by then the two had walked quickly away. They pretended to be interested in an orange parrot on the left hand side of the store, but they found it drove them insane to be watched... to be prodded by the stares reaching beyond the cage bars.

The noise of the store grew louder. It grew more urgent. They heard screeches of desperate pleas to escape, while others selflessly whistled warnings to the strangers.

The man and the woman rushed for the door. They were relieved to hear the door bell announce their exit... or as some might call it, their narrow escape.

Dunkin Donuts never tasted so good.

Out of mine and into yours

This blog is for me to "publish" my work and get readers' criticism and feedback. In lieu of an actual writers community, this blog and your comments must suffice. Please don't read my blog if you don't intend to comment on what you've read. Thanks!

L. S. Knowles