Latest Posts by jean-elle-writing - Page 6
What would she know about me? Me and the outsiders never spoken but a few words to each other.
She knows enough to ask for you by name. Your real name.
Who is this girl anyway?
She didn’t say. Just go talk to her and get her out of here. I don’t like her sniffing around the den like this.
If you don’t know her name can you at least tell me what she looks like?
She was a mousy little fuck, insisting I don’t take a message and she talk directly to you. Brown ratty hair, looked sick. Real puffy face.
Oh my god.
What?
It’s the girl from last week. The one I, almost robbed.
You’ve got to be kidding me.
I’ll take care of it.
Take care of it.
I just said that I would!
I mean it. I do not want to see her here again.
You won’t!
The stars will not judge me. They knew me before I was an atom of an idea, and they brought me here to this moment now, in something I cannot imagine as anything else but an act of love.
Everything is fine.
Do you actually believe that or do you just want to believe it?
Is there a difference?
'Sunrise Water Nymphs' by Arthur Prince Spear, (1879 - 1959).
That is what they don’t understand. They think some external pressure is destroying me but it has always been myself. Only my finger tips know where on my belly is tender and bruised enough to burrow into.
It is easy to be liked, far too easy. I have never been so liked as when I looked in the mirror and saw nothing.
What is there to do but wait for everything to come crashing down in a sudden cold splendor, and remove the sand from beneath my feet.
I seldom love those I admire. What is there to hold in the greats? Achievement sits on the shelf while a lover rests under my bed covers, I cannot converse with trophies though their gold sheens are beautiful, they are empty things. I need a mess, I need something to fill my aching hands so full I could never hope to grasp it all. Keep me busy, keep me warm. That is all I ask of the one I love.
I thought the world decayed as I grew old. My weary eyes grazed easily against its pointed cruelties, and I wondered how so much could fall so fast. But it was always that way. I was too young to see it as it was and now I am too old to see it as it can be.
Algae bloomed on the face of the lake at summer’s height, like zits in bundles of thick and slimy green. The siren that dwelt deep in the lake’s toes could not bear the warm swampiness, it drove her mad. Not only that, but her sailor girl, her shining beacon of hope for food had wounded her in her escape. She felt rotten, her gash festered in hot white patches. No food, no beauty, no cold deep blue lake water to retreat to. All that was left for her was a walk. To find the sailor girl and give her what was coming to her.
She paws at the gentle glade’s hair, and twirls the green betwixt her fingers. Nothing tastes sweeter than the dew procured there, nothing hurts more than having to leave it.
The philosopher in my life, who speaks in thoughts and sits in inaction which he poses as an intellectual buffer. It is far easier to sit in living rooms and bore holes in the minds of grandparents with perpetual conversations than enact a plan. Set the bird free from the cage, and see if it flies, I say. But no, he sits and prunes the feathers of his ideas, endlessly and all the days on. For if he never sets his pondering in motion, he will never have to face that his bird is not living, and that which never lives never flies.
Facism is a blade we carry, we are born with it in our hands. We are all capable of using it, rallying behind it, bleeding our brothers and sisters with its tip. It is up to us to drop it, to refuse violence against our fellow man, and to instead offer an open palm. An opportunity for peace, and prosperity without the boot of a dictator on the neck of a people.
Why is it light is thought of as good and dark as evil? As if the shadows sewn to our heels want anything more than to be like us.
I feel pressure to act not as a person, but as woman. To fill every void left by our absence, too little leaders of us, too little comedians of us, too little scientists of us; am I meant to choose what loss to make up for with just my one life?
The Dog’s Way
I do wish I could be gentle with myself. I really do. But my way is the dog’s way, anything I don’t like on me I chew up and swallow. I carry everything I hate in my gut because it is all I have to take. And I cannot bear to live hungry.
They say a burnt child loves the fire; a drowned woman, too, loves the sea. And even more so the siren that dragged her to the bottom of it.
It’s easier to make fun of something than to try it in earnest. How many non-artists laugh at novices, and fear to even look at their instrument, dull pencils neglected in their drawers yearning really for paper.
In defense of the comic, whose characters are foolish but whose mind is not. I see her brilliance in the whites of the audience’s smiles, in the wit and the quickness of her responses. I know many serious men with the mask of intelligence hiding a simple and plain nature. I find the opposite quite riveting.
-Confessions of a Ticket Sales Clerk
Why do I crave love so much that I lie to get it. I dawn facades to taste sugar with a tongue that is not mine. Is it still sweet? Is anything truly my own?
Maybe I am not good enough for most things, and I am meant only to look at all I want and yearn so deeply that my body begins to die.
There is something so magical about the bus boy’s dish cart. Coffee cups with cold wet sugar resting on their rims, plates with forks neatly splayed out on their porcelain cheeks, saucers holding old tea bags like newborn babes. Such a security in knowing the meal is done, and carried away, and nobody can take the conversations over your dinner table with them.
In twilight hours, when her day’s thoughts drift heavenly with the receding tide, and fears and doubts rescind, she thinks of her. Her head wet from the sea dampening her pant legs, resting in her lap as a black pearl. She runs her fingers through her short black hair and wonders how it rises underwater, if she could ever see it for herself without drowning. Salt and iron prick her nose. The siren opens her eyes and the moment she looks at her with a tenderness so palpable, her image disappears. Her lap lay empty. The sailor girl’s mind too shy to peer at even the idea of her so flagrantly. She hears the creaking of the floor boards, and inhales the lantern oil burning, and is brought back to dry reality. Skin itching for the sand in the ocean shallow.
The AI’s weakness, hands. The closer it gets to the tips of humanity’s fingers, our very identity, the more it fumbles and struggles to execute. As if it knows not that it cannot but that it should not paint for us while we toil in mundane repetitive tasks.
Man is turning itself into machine’s workhorse. Fools with knowledge become not wisemen, just more efficient fools.
Create as you would breath, constantly, to live and not to impress. It’s there in your vital honesty you’ll find what it is you’re seeking, there sitting softly in your calloused hands.
With so many before me and so many after me, I feel I owe humanity something. Something I don’t know how to find or how to deliver, but that I search for, always.
Unable to find love on land, and told she was unappetizing by her siren of the sea, the sailor girl sought out a lake to mope around in. In the water she so loved and away from the aching salty tide at her ankles, she found respite. But another dwelled in the muck of the lake’s bottom, and rose to meet her. A fresh water siren. Friendly as spit, with water’s wake that tasted of sugar and blood, she invited the sailor girl in. Her hair was red and curled, like a devil’s smile. White freckles sat on her face frankly, like table salt.
She reached out to the girl, and began to braid her long blonde hair, dragging her deeper into the water as she did, with a smile full of teeth.
The sailor girl slides down her boat’s rope the hour after sunset and awaits her black haired siren on the far end of the beach. She fusses with her hair. Tries to part it differently, and then differently again to no avail. She kneels on the shore to get a glimpse of herself under the budding moonlight on the still ocean water. A pair of eyes stays on her, gently raking over her battered, poorly patched clothes. She never was one for sewing. The sea called her. It always called her, to what she didn’t know. Suddenly, the pair of big black eyes in the water rose like fishing bobbins in her reflection, and startled her.
“How long have you been there?” She asked.
The siren smiled coyly, and held a finger up, telling her to hold on a moment.
She disappeared under the water and bobbed back up with something in her hand.
“What’s that?”
The siren rubbed the sand off of it with her thumbs, and held it up. A small abalone hair brush.
Art by alayne
Sirens often eat out of hatred, not love. So when the sailor girl asked the siren if she found her appetizing, she shook her head with a tight lipped grin. The human took it as rejection, her eyes falling to her hands and picking at the callouses she found unsightly, not understanding she had just shown her affection for her. That hiding one’s teeth was a gentle act of favor the merfolk used.