No light in the mornings

Somehow myself survived the Night
And entered with the Day —
That it be saved the Saved suffice
Without the Formula.

Henceforth I take my living place
As one commuted led —
A Candidate for Morning Chance
But dated with the Dead.

-- Emily Dickinson

I had a dream that I was going to be canonized as a saint, but I had to refuse because I didn't like the idea of my image being made into an ikon to be kissed by filthy priests.

Sometimes I wake up and I feel so tired, as if I can't believe that we're all alive, that humans even exist on this little planet, making music, cheating others, living in buildings, being presumptuous all the time. What an insane accident! Humans are so stupid!!!

But then I finally wake up, get out of my drowsy mode, get hungry, and forget all about it. I think this poem by Miss Dickinson embodies what I am thinking about here (I found it by searching for "survived the night", because that phrase seemed to be analogous to what I was feeling), though she does it much more beautifully, and with a phrasing that I don't completely understand at the moment....

Whispered to Me

Trees sprout leaves in the spring &

flowers release their sweet fragrance &

blood streams into the river --

blood spouting from the wound

of a young doe felled by a cougar.

The cougar bites into the flesh

biting, biting, his teeth dripping red. 

[I was trying here to write a poem that could be translated into any language, because every important word would have its voice in every language bred from the earth. I called it "Whispered to Me" because I heard some of the lines whispered to me by an oak tree while I was taking a walk in the woods near my town]

Father's Wizdum

No se importa; se falta el "porqué?"

  (The violence of life, coded, singular, combinatory

  a stupefying colloquium, like bells on high,

  sentences made bleak with casuistry.)

[My father said the first line to me in Spanish, translated as "It does not matter; the "why?" is missing". My (internal) response is the next three lines. The last line I think means to say that any sentence can be made to sound horrible and absurd if one tries to reason with it, spend too much time with it, making it a key to the universe. I think flux is necessary for joy.... eternity is a banal concept, invented by religious pricks.]

My Sister's Marriage Ring (White Hempen Strands in the Moonlight)

Blood douses etchings snug in a carbuncle of ecstasy, with vague hemoglobin blanchings uncolouring the snow-scene. 

[I wrote this on the tongue of my shoe (I had a pen with me but no paper) after watching my sister fight with her fiancée and throw her engagement ring in the snow. The three of us had gone on a small trip to town up in the mountains where it snows. They started to fight on our way back to the car after dinner. Of course, I thought it would be quick, so I went inside the car and let them resolve whatever issue they were having without my ear being keen to it. They must have been fighting for over half an hour - it just kept getting worse until she finally threw the ring and I thought "Oh.... shit...." and wrote the above sentence. There were ropes hanging from a nearby house for rent that make up the imagery of the other half of the title (for some reason I felt like those ropes represented their love better than the engagement ring did, even though the ring was the symbol that they were most emotionally invested in).

To conclude - I had to call our mother to come pick us up. It was his car. They talk to one another no longer.]

Something Besides Me

I've suffered all this and what has come of it?

Nothing, Nothing, Nothing, Nothing

I tried to flay away

into an abyss like death

and it was all Nothing

Every ache bones inside me - I cannot think

Nothing takes away the pain of days.

Plain things look like nothing magical

a hole in the well where empty innocence flails.

A pain like something, a pain like everything

Nada Nada Nada to this

A politic reversal, stoned heart perennial

Nada to accompany the harvest soleil.

It smells so bad over here, it smells

so much like nothing happened.

Harbor Prayer

My skirts just brushing the surface of the water, waiting for the tide to rise, to rise at least to my stomach (so said the witch), and the moonlight gleaming all the while. I've poured the libations, recited incantations, tossed the awkwardly scrawled runes into the water, and all the while I'm praying to Artemis for signs of something exceptional, something to blazon these ill-aching and leaden days, something to invigorate the seeds germinal of any lust aspirational, anything lofty enough to escape this burdened lot, this face-painting harlotry, where one feels only surface-timbres, where only shadows show and no love subsists:

"Like the painting of a sorrow
A face without a heart."

And everything all calumny everywhere, everything foul that harrows and weighs down seems to stick, while all good is all seeming and show-play. The cruelest mockery is of someone that promises the smallest trifle and delivers not even that.

And the tide does reach my belly, and the hours have passed, and I have shivered with cold as the witch foretold ---- and nothing showing. Artemis is out on her hunt after all.... or else she had to defend her chastity (again) against that surly phallo-maniacal pantheon and she has no time to care for the pleas of this sad drab whose chastity is the least guarded thing about her....

And where the saving light? Where the deliverance in this haggard dock, stinking of fish and roaring betimes with the rumble of a drunken sailor's snore? Moon goddess! Dainty huntress of the night! Where are you? Stars glimmering in the sky (as she said), moon in full radiance (so spoke the witch), tide at its highest point (the hag said it was necessary), and.... Nothing. Nothing portending heights immutable, no ideal to carry beyond damned days and hours of a whore's life. The water is a cold, cold surface gleaming.

It is my own fault; only the desperate or stupid consult prophets (I must have been a little of both)! These mountebank soothsayers who see into the future not so clearly as they see that gross human absence amalgamate, that common vacancy in life that breeds such stubborn ennui, disillusionment immense enough to perpetually fabricate new illusions.... A great drought of the soul here withal.... the well-spring of life has been stopped.... dank residue in the pipes.... heaven on a holiday.... all that bile that I've been spewing all the while....

Avast! To my room again. I shall have the day for myself tomorrow, at least. That is enough.

Thanks, false prophetess. Thanks, O forgéd counsel! May you ever prosper in your counterfeit conceits and clever promises, unfulfilled and fiberless though they dribble from your imperious lips!

[This is a dramatic monologue by a prostitute named Odessa, set in my fantasy world and written for my fantasy/science fiction writing workshop class where we had to do an exercise on conflict. She had asked a fortune teller/witch to give her some method to escape the life that she loathes but has no apparent means of escaping, and this ritual she describes here - standing in the bay of the harbor while the night tide rises up to her belly (to its highest level, but the fact that it refers to her belly implies the most important fact - that it must rise above her vagina). She prays to Artemis (Diana) the moon goddess, also goddess of the hunt and who often defends her chastity against other gods and mortals, but realizes that no sign giving her an insight into how to find some happiness everlasting is forthcoming - "Nothing portending heights immutable". She decides to go back to home and at least not do her work tomorrow.... the last phrase is an sardonic denunciation of the witch.]