Unedited. Because editing this would bring no-one any joy.

The Lobster

Inside my skin a lobster is tearing me apart
his red-boiled pincers clasp the ventricle of my heart
His nefarious wishes are carried by radio waves
direct to my brain, and however depraved
they seem, I am obliged
to follow the will of the lobster that rules my life.

((Author's Note:  This one was written after an especially painful break-up a few years back, and so it doesn't really capture my feelings on the subject as they are now ... but as a poem, I still like it.))

Oubliette

 

If he could, he’d shed his skin, for every memory

of her touch itches on it, like poison ivy.  He’d fold it up,

hide it in the box in the back of the closet where he keeps all her letters,

and everything else she left him with in two long, wasted years.

 

The box isn’t there, not really.  She stole it, and everything in it,

and a lot of things he never got the chance to store away there. 

He’s become a puzzle with missing pieces.  All their secret vocabulary,

Every laughing photograph, every thoughtless impulse towards trust.

 

He wonders what it is that still tastes so bitter about it all,

What regret lingers like dark chocolate on his tongue.

Even if he knew it would be useless to say it out loud.

She wouldn’t listen even if she was still there.

I've stopped reading my old friendslist. I've stopped logging in to my old journal. I'm not actually done there yet; before finalizing this move I have to finish typing and posting the rough draft of my first novel over there. Already, though, I'm thinking differently about what and how I read, or post, or comment. I have friends who have switched or renamed blogs half a dozen times in the eight years since I came to LJ, but this is a first for me. I felt that I needed to construct a different headspace in which to interact with the Internet (or at least, the blogosphere), and I was right.

In part, it's a question of priorities. A lot of the posts on my old journal were friendslocked, filtered, or privatized, because they were talking about things I didn't want to share with everyone. My old journal was an intimate personal space. This journal is more of a cubicle, or a roll-top desk. There may be the occasional extraneous newspaper clipping or family photo giving insight into who I am and what I'm doing offline, but it's first and foremost a space for me to work in. It's a place to present myself publicly as a writer, to post and discuss my fiction, or literature, philosophy, and pop culture in ways that are relevant to writing fiction. It's a place to practice, criticize, and dissect. Hopefully, it's a place to network with other friendly and like-minded writers (who am I kidding, you don't actually need to be like-minded, so long as you're friendly!).

It's a kind of change I've thought about before. I've talked about the slow process of looking back and realizing, after the fact, that a watershed moment in life has come and gone, and that archiving what I've said in the past, here on LJ, is a lot like preserving that past self - like examining a shed skin.

Thinking about it that way lead to what I think is one of my better efforts at poetry, and I think I'm going to end my virgin* post here with that.

*well, to me at least, it does feel realistically clumsy...


( Metamorphosis )