4.03.2009
Quick request
VOTE.
3.31.2009
Re-writing in progress
Hopefully that turns out all right. I hope your writing is coming along as well, and be sure to join me in Script Frenzy! (See below.) I really look forward to pumping something out in a short time and maybe getting my overall writing confidence up from finishing something. Hope to see you there with me.
Script Frenzy
For those of you who don't get it, this kind of deadline-driven pressure removes the ability to overthink and overedit your work, which makes it hard to move forward. You can't stop to think about how shitty your first draft it, because you have to use that time to write.
I did this same kind of thing for my first novel (which I mentioned in my first post) for National Novel Writer's Month. If you feel like joining up and competing with me, go to:
www.scriptfrenzy.org (it's the same group that does www.nanowrimo.org).
When you get there, go to search and look for me, Hudak-Budak. I'll gladly befriend anyone who would like to write with me.
Good luck, and happy writing!
3.28.2009
Dream Over
Dream Over
Candles sitting sentinel over quiet lives,
lighting just enough to let us know
the other is still there. A quick flicker
and you ask, “Why ponder life?
Why give it the satisfaction of keeping us down?”
“What I don’t know about you could fill worlds,” I say.
“But what I do,” I say, “could fill my heart.”
“Don’t talk to me in poems,” she tells me.
“In fact, don’t talk to me at all. Let’s just sit.
Let’s just sit and enjoy the moment.
Enjoy the darkness and the patterns
the candles show on the walls.
Let’s just enjoy each other—we never
do that anymore.”
I give in to her—I always do
and she knows I always will. Or does she realize
this simple power she has over me?
I do as she says and watch the candlelight
make faces and sentient beings out of
the patters in the wallpaper. Wallpaper
I should have taken down or painted over years ago,
but she likes it, claims it gives the room
an old-fashioned feel I should be able to appreciate.
She doesn’t think I enjoy her as much as I do—
I can tell. She doesn’t know that I could write poems
about her hair, her smile, her scent, her soft body
as it looks in the moonlight, covered in sweat,
her breathing heavy after I’ve just taken her,
the sheets like waves around her formal outline,
and her hair in a mild disarray. She doesn’t know
that I have.
I smell the candles—lavender and cinnamon and
one called “fresh laundry”—all scents that she’s picked out
and that meander together in a domestic feast.
A thick vine of smoke crawls into the air
and she grabs a pair of scissors to clip the cinnamon wick.
“Don’t,” I say. “I like to watch the smoke.”
“Quiet,” she says. “Keep quiet. Keep quiet.”
3.26.2009
Dance
Dance
The dreams I see script two of us
as I take your hand
and offer a dance through the cool spring breeze.
The treetops bow to us,
boughs giving permission
and offering to reach our misgivings
to an unknown heaven,
fun and fancy-free
as we jovially waltz
amongst our kindred sapling souls.
The full-bloom leaves now cheer us on
with a quiet murmur
as the warm wind blows our hair back.
Our faces unhidden,
the look in your eyes drives me
to spin faster as we dance dangerously
on the brink of sickness,
our stomaches telling us to slow ourselves
even as we push harder on
to a point from which we know
we can never turn back.
And so the leaves tire of our waltz,
a waltz which we slow
to a slow shuffle through the fallen piles.
The fallen voyeurs beg our ceasing
with a cold crackle and a crisp death-rattle
as we forge forever on,
heedless of their warnings
of a frozen future buried deep within our hearts.
We feel the cool wind begin to blow,
see it banish our fallen nay-sayers
as we stubbornly carry on that which we know
is doomed to crawl until it stops.
We remember the warmer weather,
the trees applauding their approval,
and we ignore the desolate landscape
growing among us.
There is only you and I.
What to become of this but unabashéd snowfall?
An innocence muffling our steps and begging us retreat.
Slowing us to nothing but two shivering bodies
unable to heat the other and wondering.
This long embrace, grown tired and awkward,
neither remembering how to lead with steps
that always seem one step ahead and out of our grasp.
The naked trees no longer can support
those misgivings they once held up as a sacred offering.
They are handed back to us gently but firmly,
cutting us with their brittle claws and slowing our final steps.
Buckling our minds with renewed doubt
as to where our feet can possibly take us next.
I can see your eyes again as the wind calms itself
and I can see there is no longer you and I.
Just you.
Just I.
3.24.2009
Promise
Promise
1.
This smooth park bench,
wood worn through years of service
is now an afternoon home,
now mine through an unspoken agreement
with squirrels and pigeons—
the quiet keepers of a natural life—
who allow me my one obsession.
A pack of cigarettes on the bench
and a notebook on my lap—
I have allowed myself these two
barriers between her and I.
Handheld distractions to hide behind
to feign interest as she walks by.
Her child walks ahead, examining leaves
and reporting his findings to her.
She smiles and my heart smiles with her.
I throw words on the page,
meaningless streams flowing
of their own accord as she nears,
concentrating more on our
overly comfortable repartee—
niceties that would be more at home
spoken in a bed next to each other
whispered as we slowly fall asleep.
"Hello, Jeremiah," she says as she approaches.
Is this even my name? I have forgotten myself
in her. Whatever name I give her will be mine
as she speaks it. I smile and nod her
a good afternoon as I do every time, my voice
caught, trapped and afraid of her.
But it will not be able to hide for long.
Standing over me, her dominance will draw it out.
"How is the writing coming along?"
I look at the page, worthless words in her presence,
and cover it with a shy hand.
"The usual," I tell her. "I don't think
there's much inspiration left in the park."
Outside of you.
Leaves rattle around our feet and the wind—
the wind, another friend for which I am grateful—
lifts her hair in waves of dark night ocean
(an ocean I would die to swim in)
as she examines our surroundings.
"You're probably right," she tells me.
"This is a dying park. A dying city, really.
So much could happen here and never does."
A metaphor for the two of us,
but is that how she means it?
I look to her eyes for a sign
but she is looking off around the park,
finding evidence to support her statement.
I look then to her child for a recognition,
knowing no one else close to her to go to.
Our eyes meet and he tugs his mother's sleeve
in the frantically gentle way lovemaking would require.
This is her time to go, and I am bid farewell.
I retreat as I watch her to one of my own hideaways,
a cool cigarette—the only thing able to guard me
as the notebook rests uselessly on my lap.
2.
A week now since I have left the apartment.
The city bears down on me with dying breath
I can no longer help but notice.
I have given up on my daily obsession
of watching her in the park,
of exchanging our few words
and going about our afternoons—
her mind no doubt drifting to other things,
mine stuck with her through sleep and dreams.
My soul, connected to the city since birth,
is dying with it, being crushed
under the weight of a thousand failures
occurring through no fault of my own,
but mine nonetheless. A failure
to be born in a proverbial right place
and right time—a cliché even I can no longer avoid.
A failure to have known her
even seconds before the father.
Seconds. So little time needed
to change lives.
3.
Do you believe in reincarnation
a voice asks me in a dream,
my first dream in weeks barren of her.
Should I
I ask the voice,
itself as disembodied
as I am now disenfranchised.
You will be hers in your next life
the voice tells me.
She appears as I last saw her,
hair askew as the wicked wind
has his way in an afternoon dance
beneath dying trees with aching limbs.
Do I believe this foreign voice
now bringing me promise through
an icy ocean which itself promises only to drown?
To try to find logic in a situation
which requires only the opposite
is yet another promise of failure in this poor city.
I want to walk away, to shrug off
the mad ramblings of the voice of a dream,
but I find myself desperate to hold on
to this place I've come, as unfamiliar
and unknown as I now find myself.
I must make a decision before I leave,
that much is clear to me now,
but the time it will take will see
kings dethroned and empires destroyed
and begun anew. Species will become extinct,
buildings will crumble a hundred times over
as I battle with my mind.
My life to now has lacked this belief,
this empty voice of laden promises
leading me down paths I never
would have seen on my own.
Should this be god? Mine if no one else's.
Who should speak to me in such a way
in dream if not god?
This is the proof of mind I require
and this is the proof I will take.
I leave this place and head to morning.
4.
Too much coffee and too many cigarettes
guide me through early day,
but something must take my mind
from what I heard from a subconscious god.
These indulgences fail to keep my mind
from her or our next life together;
I try to drown myself in these things,
choke myself with every inhalation
because every facet of my dying
brings me closer to her.
To overdo everything to the point of self-destruction
makes me finally hers, a fate I have
gone over in my head a thousand times
in this infantile morning.
I must now make the choice which has been
holding down my thoughts and
clenching at my soul for what seems like
a slow eternity—yet another decision
to take lifetimes to mull over,
to weigh pros and cons and slowly
erode my dreams over.
What better place to mull the decision, then,
but the park where everything was begun—
the bench that sent my life
in an alternating spiral down
through love and pain and
happiness and an ultimate death.
I pass the bench without a thought,
taken by legs I cannot control
through this dying place as
the wind blows tree branches out of my path,
sentinels on either side guarding my way.
My friends the squirrels and pigeons pay
respect as I walk by, lining the path and
chattering their last farewell even
as I cannot look them in the eye.
The park end and the beach begins,
my funeral party leaving me to be,
stopping at the sand and bowing their heads.
This season finds the beach empty
and I continue on, watched but not noticed
as the cold water warns my feet to
turn back and keep me warm.
The message does not make it to my brain,
now determined to be hers at all costs.
It is hard to walk now, my breath coming
ragged with what is at hand—
a climax of inhalations laden with salt
and heavy with panic. Something feral
inside me demands I turn back, now
over my head, but I resist the urge
as the sour ocean pushes at my lungs.
I once built sand castles here as a child
and now I watch my unsteady walls collapse
at the weight of a thousand waves
never ceasing in their mission.
Through the slow rays of light
which make their way through the waves
above me, I can see her making her way to me—
her hair suspended and glistening
and a white robe floating around her.
she smiles and I smile back through
teeth gritted with salt and sand.
I am able, for the first time, to touch
her face and for the first time
life brightens around me. She kisses me
and I am now sure that I am hers.
5.
Another trip to the park to see the leaves
freshly fallen and littering the ground.
There is a beach near here where my mother,
now dawdling behind, took me this summer
to swim and build sandcastles.
The leaves on the ground display a rainbow
of autumn colors; she knows I love this.
What I love more, though, are the piles
she makes me in the front yard,
her love never tiring of building them back up
after I've scattered them jumping, crawling and wrestling.
I ignore her calls for me to be careful
as I run ahead, seeing a squirrel
pack away provisions for the inevitable winter
just around the corner. There are more leaves ahead,
and I must make sure to see them all,
touch them, throw them into the air
to prove I am carefree and to see
where and how they land.
After conducting more experiments,
I turn back to see she has stopped
to talk to a man, a man she stops with frequently.
I make my way over, a strange feeling
creeps up my spine, stirring the wind
and shaking loose frail leaves from frail limbs.
This familiarity takes hold as I see the man
for the first time up close, but this is
far from the first I've known him.
"So much could happen here and never does."
Now the metaphor once thought aimed at me
has become inaccurate—so much has happened here.
Everything has happened here and how,
or in a different now—a now I have seen
through two people. A now I suffer through again.
Is this what my subconscious god—subconscious devil—
had in mind? Is this the love for which
I fought so hard against the sea,
against life, finally giving in to let
this love take over? The heavens' ruse
has taken yet another victim and I now know
the truth about endings and beginnings.
I tug her sleeve—we must go now.
I cannot stay here and look at my
former broken self. We walk.
"What a nice gentleman," she says.
"Perhaps I should ask him to coffee tomorrow."
Unnecessary and impossible, I now know,
for I am truly hers already.That is the poem. I think if I was able to get a female to guest-sing the female parts (and extend them a little bit to make it worth someone's time), it would end up a really dynamic effort. The first step I took is to map out the song titles and use some of the lines in the poem to show where I would kind of break up the whole effort:
1. The Quiet Keepers of a Natural Life
2. So Much Could Happen Here and Never Does Pt. 1 (This is a Dying City)
3. The City Bears Down
4. You Will Be Hers in Your Next Life
5. These Indulgences Fail
6. Through This Dying Place
7. Inhalations Laden with Salt
8. Unsteady Walls Collapse
9. To Swim and Build Sandcastles
10. So Much Could Happen Here and Never Does Pt. 2 (A Now I Have Seen Through Two People)
This is my current project (for about a week). It would really be basically taking the story and re-writing it, since there really is no meter or rhyme or anything that makes a song good. But we'll see what comes of it.
3.23.2009
Slowing down
I think the best idea for me would be for me to switch from first-person to third-person. I find that I've been trying to hard to be in my character's head, to show his thoughts, but his thoughts are just explaining every part of the story away. I think, with the story, if we're outside his head and don't know exactly what he's thinking, it would make for some better twists and turns when he does something we may not expect. In third person, I can bring that about much better; in first person I've found myself trying to do that, but using the character's thoughts to rationalize and foreshadow and explain and everything of that nature.
I'm not really sure how I want to proceed. I want to continue moving forward and not take the time required to go back and edit and change what I've got to third person, but I know I'll have to do that eventually, so why not get it out of the way? I guess if I don't have any updates to the word count for a while, you'll know what I've chosen.
While I get to that, here's a little quote for you: "There is no great writing, only great rewriting." -Justice Brandeis.