Filed under: 30 Poems in 30 Days, Esme Writes, Poetry | Tags: 10, 30 Poems in 30 Days, Los Angeles, National Poetry Month, Poetry
I stared at a face staring
from an overpass of the 10
at traffic snaking beneath him
for a moment I thought
What if he jumped?
the shadow of the bridge
consuming my car
my eyes darted to
the
sideview
the
rearview
no hooded figure remained
traffic slugged on
I forgot about the momentary terror
and went about my day
(5 of 30 in 30)
Filed under: 30 Poems in 30 Days, Esme Writes, Poetry | Tags: 30 Poems in 30 Days, April, Esme Writes, Homeless, Los Angeles, Poetry
I wanted to explain how I felt
listening to the woman at the
grocery store who was ringing up my
items and speaking about
the overpowering scent of
urine from the man in front of me
in line because she
was trying to help him by telling
him he smelled badly and it was her
own backwards way of caring
but as she told me about all the
available help for people like him
I just felt overwhelmingly uncomfortable.
(2 of 30 in 30)
Filed under: Echo Park, Esme Writes | Tags: Esme Writes, EsmeWrites, Fuck, Los Angeles, Poetry, Truth, words, writing
The silence came from watching the rain seep in
heavy saturation of boxes lain in rain
far too long
soggy paper
futile melted pulpy piles
walls once standing
I had a kingdom at the feet of buildings
I was not allowed to live in.
Shut out cast off
pauper of paperland
outside realms of stone.
I am transient shadows
the nothing between the solid columns
the chill that shakes shoulders uncomfortably.
The silence came and sat between my legs.
Wrapping itself around my shins
half feral tabbies aware of pleasurable petting
purring at human touch even gone
mostly cold mostly mangy.
Huddling shivering shadows
watching walls melt
streaks of ceiling dripping out words
I am unfamiliar with:
Automatic dishwasher.
All I want is an automatic dishwasher to frivolously wash
the cups that accumulate when I drink far too much
All the distraction sanitized and swept away from plumbing I don’t care to understand.
All I want is a goddamn automatic dishwasher.
I’ll trade my kingdom of roadside slop for a 90-day warranty of infinitely sparkling glasses.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Esme Writes, EsmeWrites, free form, London, Los Angeles, Love
There’s been a lot of talk circulating around me about fate
or something that smells vaguely of it…and I don’t know if I believe in fate but I may believe in this fucking path that I am supposed to take, this path that leads somewhere to the point where I do something and it’s all that pivotal movie moment where the climax music is singing all strings and brass and tension so sweet that your tongue hurts.
That Moment.
That moment is whatever and I mean that as a dismissive plea to my heart to stop building all this shit up to that fucking apex.
I am not going to climb Mount Everest. I don’t fucking want to see those trails littered with the grimaces of those who gave up. Those poor souls who got so close and then just…gave their last breaths trying.
I suppose it’s more or less the fact that I am endlessly jealous of their flying leaps however marked with failure they may seem.
This despondence just stems from being in one city for too long, maybe or maybe because this year I have yet to have time to pick up a paintbrush, or get my hands really dirty.
I want to fuck some shit up. Serious shit. I need someone to help me.
And there was this one time, it was spring or close to it, and I met someone who could maybe keep up. It was all maybes and impulsivity and these long stoned drives up the coast where we talked or maybe didn’t and we had the raging ocean in our veins and feet that didn’t sit still and some days that were grey like the ghosts still living in our attic minds and some days were too sunny to allow them to exist.
I maybe thought he had forgotten.
Until we decide to be friends again. Until I remembered how much fun we had dancing together.
He and I had our times in the sun and we got dirty but it wasn’t the type of dirt that was innocent and clean. It took a year to wash away, and those ghosts are maybe still lingering just over our heads.
So now it comes down to just aching for someone who isn’t here, someone who it is insane to love. Someone who isn’t the same as the other one and who maybe will be but I don’t know anything but I just want someone to scream along with me at the top of our voices when we decide one Thursday to approach Everest, with that crazy glint in our eyes.
All this boils down to insanity, I think. Maybe it’s just better to lose your mind.
Filed under: Esme Writes, Little Joy Open Mic | Tags: Dawn, Little Joy Open Mic, Los Angeles, me, Poetry, Reading, Silverlake Lounge Open Mic, the Sea
She is quickened heartbeats.
She’s not quite here, but she’s always looming. She’s all rolling and always near the horizon of that easy release, but not quite.
Los Angeles eases himself into night with a third cocktail and the arms of a chair that long replaced the horizon. Chattering ice cubes slinking in bad whiskey molasses rot, wet dog cushion creaks, and the drowned in piss hiss-sigh of a campfire’s last embers are his partners in crime.
He turned his back to her, so long ago.
Somewhere she is easing her body against his coast, letting go muffled moans and sighs, the salt sweat and old penny taste of blood coagulating, coating her rocky gums.
She still could lay him flat with little breaths that snuck in. Her shadows caught in the click click clicking of the overhead fan and the flies coasting on currents cast from her waves to his cement stoops.
He turned his back to her, so long ago.
He glances my way, looks through, to the streaks on the walls, the places where he remembers damp pressed arms above her open mouth. No more were the heated words from her, his savior, the Sea. The tarnished echoes of newspaper headlines were his map now.
My lips, dried, remember bitter chocolate and coconut night skies of the two lovers, the Sea and Los Angeles. Their kisses, drenched in dirt, smoke and day old red wine’s vinegar.
He sighs deeply, reaches for the television remote.
I could sit on a roof top and beckon Dawn with a few glasses too many and dance that bastard in as he eats away the security blanket that oils the slumped shoulders of Los Angeles.
I could sing at the top of my lungs as I watch Dawn’s desert tongue, all seductive and promising, lap at the breasts of the Sea.
I could wrap myself in someone else, in blankets and arms and words and believe that Dawn will bleach the indiscretions and make permanent the promises.
I could forget the folklore.
I will wake as Los Angeles eases himself from dead floral patterned slipshod arms to a wavering stand, make his way to the window and peer out.
Dawn’s air, touched with dust and dead palms, stale beer, hangover’s vomit; a soldier’s march unrelenting.
Dawn’s spindly fingers prodding Los Angeles’ concrete crusted wounds sends a shiver down my spine.
Los Angeles sighs, runs his hands from the 134 to the 10, smooths over the 101 and the PCH.
He shudders and for a minute he can’t stop coughing. Deep, throat-full and hacking coughs, his lungs wrenching and his face burning.
Dawn is laughing.
For a moment, above the acrid rot sunrise intensity, she is there.
All salt-strewn sweat beads.
All homespun sugar candied almonds.
All baked bread babies.
I watch as Los Angeles recoils from Dawn.
I watch as Los Angeles breathes her in.
I watch as Los Angeles collapses, remembering the unrelenting breath of his Sea, so near and always a half hour away from coming.
Filed under: 30 Poems in 30 Days, Esme Writes | Tags: 2010, 30 Poems in 30 Days, Esme Writes, Los Angeles, Poetry
It’s the start of something I can never take back
it’s undo-able
it’s the thing that happens in dark corners
it’s this, thing
these days that bleed into nights that bleed into days
into the next and the next and the next
the exhaustion of days all repetitive and urgently empty
and all these wants
characterized by demands
without compromise.
Filed under: Esme Writes, Little Joy Open Mic, Poetry | Tags: Esme Writes, Little Joy Open Mic, Los Angeles, lust, Poetry, spoken word, writing
with all the ill-used options we stumble upon and into
we would be surprised if any bore fruit.
we craved those laden boughs though
craved with
tongues and teeth and
eyes and lips and our
eyes bulged from our heads in sheer want.
need
the end all being
if our lips did not touch firm skin
yielding flesh and all the sweetest sticky moments
just under appealing colored surfaces.
we were the manifest of summer’s searching heated fingers.
we were the urgent blast furnace whispers of lust
the searing lightening bolt fingers of
Zeus defiant of the golden chariot sweeping february skies.
even if the temperature dropped we would not have registered.
we measured all in the
quickening beats of hearts
or the number of
pinprick tingles on skin per square inch.
we drew patterns in teethmarks on
methadone skin across
heroine elbows on
cocaine lashes
injected ourselves and others with delicate
drops of blood boiling at the surface
to sink into the
sure blue heat that
cast our images of our
true
lusting
selves
on the walls.
…
Read: Sunday 28 February 2010 Silverlake Lounge Wasted Afternoons Atomic Poetry Open Mic as hosted by the LJOM Refugees.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 2010, Echo Park, Esme Writes, Friends, Grafton Place, Happy New Year, Holidays, Hope, Impromptu, Life, Living The Life, Los Angeles, Love, Music, Passion, Poetry, Take Away Show, Yeasayer
About 4pm on January 31, my roommate and I agreed to host an impromptu New Year’s Party at our little Echo Park place. Some sequence of events prevented our original location from hosting the soiree and since moving into our home we’ve managed to host quiet a few successful little shin-digs.
As we prepared, we wanted to share with our friends the questions that she and I have been asking ourselves lately:
Where have you been?
Where are you now?
Where are you going?
What will you carry with you?
We taped up some paper on our walls and invited our friends to share their own responses with us.
We are so blessed to have friends who wholly accept our quirks, and who participate with their hearts, and also who are all so honestly poetic. The papers are still on our walls.
Here are our answers.
Where have you been?
– I don’t remember my first address in Los Angeles. This is intentional, I think. That place was forgettable.
– To the pit of my stomach, to hell and back to the dark and dreary den of my dreams. Just below rock-bottom. And all the while, still quite lost…
– Everywhere, somewhere, & most places. I have been where I was & where I was is where I’ll always be.
– Infinity~ & beyond…
– Always was which never was which always is.
– Nowhere.
– Everywhere! Anywhere is where you are!
– I’ve been walking in the shadow of my imaginary self.
– There.
– Hate will get you every time.
Where are you now?
– Two solid legs, grounded feet, head to the sky, heart open.
– Home. Atop my two legs. Standing with an open mind and open heart. Living in a West Coast fantasy, following my dreams with passion and vigor. I am here. Now. In the moment. Moving with a forward momentum. I am powerful. I am ready for it all.
– I know now what I knew then but I didn’t know then what I know now.
– In Love.
– On the moon.
– Exactly where I am now….now.
– Juggling happiness.
– Somewhere.
– Here.
– Stepping out of the dark.
– Living in love, living poor as shit, living to really live.
Where are you going?
– Up! Up! Up! and out! All over!!
– To the sky, to the top, with those I love. Onward. Upward. To uncharted territory. To places beyond out wildest dreams.
– Where I am.
– Anywhere that looks nice.
– Anywhere I want to. Stay focused.
– Who knows?! I don’t, but it will be great!!
– Anywhere
– ?
– Into the light.
– Only into good- wherever that is. We have our minds & we have each other.
What will you carry with you?
– I carry with me, all day, the deepest gratitude for the ability to share so much LOVE with those around me.
– Each and every moment. Relished and saved. Love for myself and those wonderful souls in my world. The strength and peace and warmth and love I feel. I carry it all.
– My core star! : – ) Always.
– A hand gun.
– My wallet & my t-shirt. Make it til you crash your U-HAUL.
– My AK-47 in my pocket. Don’t really have a choice anyway.
– An everlasting chord to ring for all eternity. What will it sound like is up to me.
– My rythm.
– Love. Always love.
– Confidence.
The following morning, I remembered this video by a band who has become embedded into our daily lives here in the apartment. I cannot explain to you how much the simplicity of their lyrics makes for completely and hauntingly accurate songs.
This is Yeasayer’s Take Away Show and it’s just the most beautiful way to spend a few minutes.
“It’s a new year, I am glad to be here in the first spring so let’s sing…”
You ain’t never seen nothin’ like this before
Filed under: Esme Writes, Love | Tags: Art, Cancer House, Echo Park, Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros, Evolution of Words, Family, Growing up, Home, Los Angeles, Love, Mid-west, Music, Passion, transformation, Vanaprasta
The definitions of words have been transforming for me lately. More specifically the words “home” and “family”. I understand quite literally the meaning of “going home” especially since it is so close to the holiday season. Home for such a long time lived within the parameters of location, mainly the area in the world where you spend your formative years and develop, maintain memories and establish your identity.
Howell, Michigan earns the distinction of this title for me. Howell was and still is an extremely middle class average mid-western town. Nearly smack-dab in the center of southern Michigan, it was never a terrible place to grow up. Home was also the structure, the nearly 120 year old Victorian house, the Red House on the Corner. For me, as well, I established a deep sense of “home” attachment to Hawaii, and the Pacific Ocean due to spending nearly every summer there.
I would never refer to my dorm room in college as “home”. It was my room or my place or 403 or 115 but never “home”. My houses and apartments were also rarely referred to as “home” as well.
Something happened though, since moving to Los Angeles. I realized my deep cravings for a base, a center, a place of my own, a Home. My first apartment was hardly this and when my room mate and I decided to move we had more than just two bedrooms in mind. We had making a Home effect our decision. We wanted a place that was ours, our Home in Los Angeles. This changed everything.
Once we had a place that was ours, we took ownership of the area we lived in. We started speaking of Echo Park as Home. This then extended to Los Angeles being Home. I unintentionally made Los Angeles, California my new Home by centering myself there in a room in an apartment that is mine. Home is no longer Howell. Yes, I do still say I am going “home” for Christmas, but it is with a slightly anxious tone. I will leave my Home for a week to return to the place I grew up, to see my “family” at “home”.
The word “family” is another word with a mutable definition and one that has very distinctly evolved, especially more apparently since moving to Los Angeles. My parents and brother and even cousins, aunts and uncles have all played various important roles in my development as a Real Person, but to my life here in Los Angeles, they for the most part have no real relevance in my day to day existence. This by no means diminishes the love that I feel for them, or the respect I have for their lives. It does mean that I rarely talk to any of them on a daily basis and ultimately because of the infrequency of interaction their opinions and values now have minimal impact on my life. The “family” of “home” no longer is relevant.
My Family in Los Angeles has extended to the people who I feel a strong sense of identity and support and love from. They are musicians, artists, writers, actors, most of whom face the same daily struggles as I do, and all who are ready and willing to share their life experiences with everyone aound them. It is the desire to re-create the acceptance of the “families” we once knew and extend them further into the community that surrounds us. It is the bonding nature of passion.
Passionate, positive people exponentially expand horizons together, sometimes without realizing it.
Today, despite my intense anger at myself for being hung-the-fuck-over for a majority of the day, was lightened by hearing the Music of Vanaprasta on isgoodradio.com.
Vanaprasta has made a vast difference in my life in Los Angeles. These lovely gents have yet to even approach their one year anniversary as a band and already they have not only produced some beautiful music, but they have also grown and evolved in a mystifying manner. It gives me chills to hear the lyrics of their songs and the chords and beats literally bleed with a passion that is hardly paralleled in Los Angeles. Their passion has attracted a circle of brilliant people who mean the world to me. It’s been such a beautiful thing to feel welcomed into a family that cares so deeply about their art. It’s been a blessing.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about the fact that since the definitions of words can be so easily altered based on life experience, that there must be so many more words that have done so since the past year. “Love” is one, for certain. “Love” since it is such a malleable word and a word that can change in weight depending on situations is such a unique word that continuously ebbs and surges with different meanings from practically the first moment you learn of it’s existence. The “love” that you feel for your parents is not the “love” you feel for your friends or your first crush. My father’s “love” for me is not the same way he “loves” my brother. My “love” for Cape Cod potato chips is not the same as my “love” for garden fresh tomatoes. The manner in which people display “love” differs vastly as well as the words used to express thusly. I know that when my father says “Be Safe” he is saying he Loves me. I flat out tell my brother that I Love him. The Love that I feel for my friends, I express in meals cooked in my Home and in hours spent counseling or just laughing.
Love is easy though. Even with all these varying definitions, it is so easy.
I like the idea of Home being in someone. It’s a scary idea but it’s a beautifully simple idea as well.
If Home = Someone,
and Someone = Love,
then Home = Love.
Edward Sharpe, you might just save the world with your music.
Filed under: Esme Writes, Poemme Fatales | Tags: Esme Writes, Fuck, Honesty, Knives, Little Joy Open Mic, Los Angeles, Poemme Fatales, Sentiment, Truth, Waltzes, words, writing
He always told me:
Avoid political gestures and coughed mock sentiment.
Avoid religious drudgery and spoken gritted tooth lies.
Avoid steel barrels and the nights where alleys are most dangerous.
Avoid flour, sugar, high fructose corn syrup, mascara and limp wrist handshakes.
Avoid simpering smiles and nights burned into oblivion.
Avoid sharpened shards of glass and the fingers they slip from.
We wrote the same lists over and over.
It was always the same the same the same, a residual haunting on fast forward, retracing the same steps and same path repeatedly.
The one two THREE four one two THREE four one two THREE four of quickened high heel pace.
She was always making music with him and I was standing behind a curtain watching through moth-eaten holes.
Then I would sit down and write.
PART TWO OF MY POEMME FATALES PERFORMANCE:
There is an aching that stems
from the lack of creation
The lack of movement
The stagnant air of a city
The blood not flowing through my veins
The sameness
The people
The sameness.
The ideas that swim in the same lukewarm water.
There needs to be a difference and it needs to happen soon. There needs to be something unbroken and re-broken and things need to bleed.
It needs to be more than just papercuts this time.
It needs to be bruises and black eyes and broken bones and it needs to happen swiftly before the concussion sets in and sleep is here.
The distraction the distraction the distraction the distraction the distraction
The words the noise the words
The prying the emptiness of interaction
The sulleness the fleeting moments of nothing and everything
The sadness crept in at night and I didn’t see it coming but I left my window open.
I did that.
I was sleepwalking again. I ended up standing in the street. I was staring south.
All the empty interactions and the years that have taught me what? Taught me to be angry or mostly just deeply dread and fear tomorrow and there are words to mask it but in the end it comes down to my heart beating at night before I go to sleep and the cold chilling fear that I will one day hear it stop.
And I’ve almost killed myself so many times and you would think that taught me to be fearless but it taught me to be more frightened and to treat myself so much more gently.
An illusion of fragility.
Scarves and the swaddling of lies.
He asks me about the scars on my legs and I smile and open my mouth in the same rehearsed monologue.
Something about snow and drunkenness and streets and falling and sleeping.
The sameness.
The sameness.
The scars are with me forever until I hear my heart stop but the lies. These lies don’t have to be my shadows.
These lies. These fucking shadows.
I lie about my numbers to seem more imposing. To seem more experienced.
I get frightened when I don’t talk to someone.
Matching stares.
The broken heartedness of it all scares me.
Once a man stood with me and told me a story of being unable to love.
I am him now.
There are walls around me.
I want to call him and question him because I still have his phone number.
We spoke a month or so ago.
I painted pretty fake horses with my words so thin he could see through them but did not comment on their lack of opacity.
The world keeps spinning.
The walls are still blank.
I haven’t written anything substantial in months and blame it on everything except that I am afraid.
I am afraid.
I don’t know where these words will take me.
I once thought that I could do anything with them.
One day I doubted that.
The next day I played with knives.
Then fire.
Then I got burned.
Then I got quiet.
Then it was silence.
Such silence.
The words stopped coming because I turned them off.
Like the department does when your bill goes red for too long.
When you ignore the red bills for too long.
When the zombies come to gnaw at your legs.
They leave teeth marks.
And you remember an afternoon in the rain. And skin touching skin and impossible conversations.
The moments where I was not there.
Where I can’t remember the things I want to.
Where I was so much more important than sharing
Where I couldn’t share
Where those walls were built and could not be knocked down
And then there was the day where I teased a man I thought was beautiful and it was perfect like a waltz.
Then the music stopped
and because he stopped leading I forgot the steps
and then got embarrassed and then got frustrated
Then got lost then got angry
Then got lost then got angry
Then got lost then got angry
Then got lost then got angry
and the sullen faces still stare at me
I was building a stronger wall and a world behind that wall where I was precious sunny sunning everyone and they admired me for the simple bravery of providing light.
The bravery of being.
People wear sunglasses and complain that it is hot now.
And my head hurts right this moment.
We talked about napping and he is sleeping.
He is my best friend and my moodiness is sharp knives to him.
My selfishness makes me scared and makes me silent.
Makes the words stop.
Like kids playing with a garden hose, kinked between shining hands.
Nothing comes out the end.
Waiting for them to let go.
Waiting for them to let go or for me to let go because the act of just letting things slip through your fingers is not something I do well. The loss.
The never-come-back-adness of it all. The moment where you cannot control it anymore.
Control.
Ha.
Its just a concept. Everyone can fuck a concept up. And when something is based purely on perspective it is sure to get fucked up.
Then the swearing starts. I am sure I can hear my father cringe every time I let a fuck sail flying through the telephone lines to his ears. But at least I let that go.
Fuck.
Esme Writes. 