its the speed that gets me going
the sharper tool that makes me slurr
i jump out of your mouth half torn
hear my mother as she swore
who wants to question
make my answers
arms a wide sword
i can barley see the end ready for the ice to melt the cord
here we go again
its my half made lend
i give you out my number
and you fall back, a half fake tumble
who wants to treat me a treat
who wants to create another speech
im done with the lines no ones sitting around waiting to cry
its a sad as ever but its been one hell of a winter
i cant forget the doors
wide closed shut
my eyes melting backwards
my lids teathered heavy
lets get it together
make it remember
who wants to be that old mans tether
ive never been deader then the time you all strung me out
hanging on one last string
it was always his line
cant blame em cant restrain em i know whose fault to question whose mind to calm and lessen
momma when its all done id swear ill make it all back
give you something nice to hang up on your rack
daddys in the kitchen cookin up my lesson
pouring whiskey in the sores
screaming never again am i gonna help you win the war
so promise me my man
you’ll remember me a lamb
not some dead old plan
i know i was supposed to be some other kind of reason
not in someones pill case broken side torn lesion
but i messed up that last time
showed my younger brother where it was all at
cant even tell you how much that makes my stomach react
im sorry bout the distance
sorry you had to wait untill my mind could restore
all the years i fought
the truth of the world.
Wimpering cowards
the cat naps ploy
We went into start a war
Let the leak from the levees poor
we forget to hear the questions
Ready to let em lean
Learn to get it finished
by pushing in my mans speed
my actions leave em consorted
My words no longer torn
not sure where the uncertainty is from
not sure if time permits my taunts
I want a day where I can swallow
I day short of pain or painful soars
No longer want to breach no longer ready to throw in my broken splens
not sure if their watching not ready to hear the trembling screams
my minds wide open
My stomach nearly torn in two
who cares any
more of yesterdays crys
the terror that comes back each moment I hear someone speak
It sure as hell can be different but anything brings him near
ready for this new war to leave me ready for my new scorn to steer me
Know there are no answers no way to justify my mind
can no longer blame it on the acid
I know i was never too quick
can’t begin to begin to wipe away
the uncleared
nothing will ever be dusted not with this old steam.
something is happening
somethings pulling near
there a tension near
a brief smile to the chaotic sky’s means.
for sall, on your one year:
sad song, the last dance
no one ever knew our patterns would expanse
and its hard
when we took shards, and looked down at our scars
lost, feeling we were so avant-garde
who ever knew, we were so greatly overdue
we passed through
one more tattoo,
on the pinbacks
they all just said relax
so here comes ol’ jacks
we were always blacked out, lying in the cracks
there were no plans, nothing ever grand
no one ever knew the band
a nice heart
a found calorie chart
closed off , tied off,
Looking almost superimposed
but we both supposed
you and i
that this was just one page
our rib cage, sticking out in a rebelled rage
but there was no stage,
not even at the legal age, lets never forget
the cold sweats
(yet neither of us left with regrets)
me on lafayette
you, well in some dorm kitchenette
forget it girls, this was not all that picturesque
but you, see I love you, and above, who knew,
you’d see this view.
- jungle cat
I’ve never been so lost. I’ve never been so happy. I always thought, knowing, finding answers would make me feel at ease; I’d find comfort in having the unknown be unveiled. Yet when I’m asked probing questions about my life decisions, or its proceedings ( when are you going to college? Are you coming back to NY? Aren’t you tired of not doing much with your life?) I’m fine not knowing the answers. I’m ok, shrugging, and smiling, and saying I don’t know. If you’d asked me those questions about a year ago, I would have had some long life plan ready to vomit all over you when sparked. On any given day, it would be completely different in nature, sometimes so dissimilar that someone would never know it came from the same mind, same being. Probably because I was always shifting, always changing and masking myself, thinking that the more faces I tried on the more chances I’d have to figure out which fit. Maybe logical, but not successful. It wasn’t until I came down and let myself be raw, let myself experience feeling that I had blocked out for years, uncrossed my arms, and realize who I was starting to become. However different my ideals of what my life would look like in the upcoming years, money was always weighed into the equation, crafting my very own get rich scheme. Today I don’t know where I’m going, or where I want to be, but when I shut my eyes, I see a farm or some small austere house in the middle of the country: a chair, a desk, a camera, a dog, and a truck in the backyard. Simple. But the road to get there isn’t set out, there is no map. But I’m thankful there’s not. If I knew which way to turn, where to place my footing, I wouldn’t be human. I wouldn’t be a twenty year old girl. If anyone has told you that at my age that they knew exactly what would come of tomorrow they’d be lying, to you, and themselves. No one really knows, John can say ‘yes I’m going to be doctor,’ or Bethany ‘yes I’m going to be an anthropologist.‘ But do we really grasp, and concede and listen to our inner most selves, what that even is? We are always in growth, always in an interim, and I think that the more I let myself be and just live I’ll find what I’m truly looking for, and in that come to find myself. 
if you look at generations and what defined them, what trends, what social and politic ideologies were present, you see a sense of camaraderie, a kind of community fighting for a cause. For the beats in the sixties they set out on the road, during a time of extreme masculinity; they wanted to write free based un-edited, just stream of consciousness, thus in there minds connecting to a form spirituality. But in all generations sometimes a message is lost, you loose sense in what “we are all fighting for” and are left with the clothing, and music: people become merely posers. They no longer know why they are wearing berets and drinking coffee, but know its “cool.” Kerouac often discussed how he felt the message of spirituality was completely lost in most arenas, and left readers with an excuse to be senselessly wild. My generation is taking place during political and economic turmoil, where a sense of freedom is most expressed via myspace of facebook, and is more interested in conforming to a pre-informed sense of cool and self-centeredness rather then finding their own niche. As with most generations finding this is often a direction of great intent, but intellectualism is lost here beneath a cloud of vintage t-shirts adorned with bands names no one has ever heard of, and smoking lucky strike filters which aren’t even sold in the us today. But all of this has come before us, the hipster is no more original then the poser, who they regard with so much disgust and look down upon for their lack of perspective. But its as if they too lack this understanding, rejecting the term hipster all together, saying they themselves are different. Yet walking down aster place or through the meat packing district, no one is any different, some sport trends from the punk scene with out the knowledge base of what the punk scene was even about, and wearing urban outfitters which is a corporate run company with a republican c.e.o, which is what they are supposedly rebelling from. But fighting against something for the shear act of being different or unique never gets us anywhere. When I was fourteen, like most girls my age, I was consumed with fear of who I was and who I wanted to be. With no want or need to find that for myself, I spent years taking on other peoples personas, wearing facades hoping that one day I’ll just be me, whatever that was. I’m confused by people my age who don’t know about the bp oil spill, or what Palestine is, but would rather talk about what the situation did on jersey shore last night. But is this any different then say the beat generation, are we all that different? I think we are. There is always a subculture of people in any generation who have lost the understanding of why they are doing or acting a certain way. But here, I feel like the subculture has absorbed the mainstream. No one knows why kurt cobain was so groundbreaking or why they hate the bush administration. People here have such strong opinions but yet lack any knowledge to back it up; they say their liberal but don’t know why. Hipsters by definition are supposed to disregard confirmatory, yet they all act and dress the same. I wake up in the morning not knowing why I love band of horses, or why my frye boots and borrowed scarves make feel so comforted. And I’m no different. Ok yes I know what and where Palestine is, but I love and am interested in things, people, and places, and am not sure of why, I just do. We all just do, we don’t experiment with our own identities, we just pick and choose others to try on; we wear punk clothing and think we’re different but we’re all just the same. One day I hope to wake up and see bands of people hitting the streets in protest of a social or political norm, but until that day I’ll keep wearing my skinny jeans, in solemn oath that I am different and we will make this all change. 
I so rarely know what I’m doing.
Some days, I feel almost blessed; I wake up on time, I slip into clothes that make me feel young and thin and particularly myself, I make the right phone calls, I talk the right way, and my relationships curve and sway with natural, mathematical, warm-blooded precision and grace. I feel right. And I can believe that each tiny, boring thing I do — wiping up the spilled coffee grounds on the kitchen counter, loving the animal sprint to the bus — is a tiny, boring, but essential step up the long ladder to transcendence.
But most of the time it’s not like that at all. I don’t know what to do; I don’t know how to conduct myself. I can’t tell if my actions are essentially right or essentially wrong, if I’m holding my friends accountable or being a nosy bitch, if I’m slacking off at work or pacing myself. From a great distance — the distance of months or years, or the distance of another mind — it’s so easy to see the trajectory of a life. From the inside, though, for me, it’s totally fucking impossible.
I feel so off. Everything bothers me.
The people on the 70 seem grotesque, subhuman: I watch them, and I’m disgusted by their mangled speech and dirty faces, the paper bags of fast food they root around in as the bus lurches and the stink of animal fat mixes with the smell of shit and urine and cigarette smoke.
The woman sitting in front of me at a meeting has a faded Confederate flag tattooed between her shoulderblades.
My phone is dead again.
The music on the radio is so sad I want to die, but instead I think about all the things I tore apart with my burned sweaty nicotine-stained fingers and I eat a pint of ice cream and smoke five cigarettes and hate my noncompliant, lumpen self.
I want to move through my life surefootedly, with compassion and intelligence and wit and good humor. Tonight, though, I feel as though I don’t, still, know how.
Everything seems insurmountable. Unattainable, impossible?? I think about the last six months before I made in down here. They say memories hold scents, and as murky and at points clear and visual my memories are, there is indescribable smell and I can truly taste it: cigarette stained hands, half smoked joints, melted spit stained pills, licked tabs, old cheap red wine, vodka stained jeans, my noses perpetually running. The air that would blow in to the cabin early when max left, before the sun even rose. Waking up freezing uncomfortably sober, looking for part of cigarette any of last nights smoked resin. Knowing that I was to cold to build a fire that I never learned how to build in new york. My mom tried to show me, but nothing she ever taught me seemed to stick. I rebelled from nothing, turned into a vast arena that when I could maybe think partially clearly, come up for a gasp of air, I’d run back into the abyss, because the misery and loneliness was incredibly painful, and a cheap fleeting high would tamper it and soothe it. Temporally yes, but I never thought id live very long, my life seemed to be very condensed, I started young, so surely it would all end young. Is that why getting pregnant made sense? With a boy I barely new, in a town I now considered home, no finances, no security and surely no sanity. All I wanted was escape, but from what? i never knew what love looked like, never understood it for sure. My mom was overbearing codependent but soothing and quite loving, but my dad was more distant more critical, but both were definitely love. Maybe neither expressed in a way I thought love looked like, but where the boys any different? And being sober, I looked back on the last six months, which were engulfed in fear, and see behaviors, see what I thought were decisions based on some form of deranged survival, and yet these decisions still come back into play today. I have ambitions, goals per say, but although I try to concede to my utmost self to follow through, I can’t, mostly I can’t even begin. Staying clean is simple in some ways, not all ways, but becoming more of habit each day. I know the steps, the outline, know where a drink etc leads. But there isn’t a group or a road map to how to do life, not cheat sheet, no real twelve steps. My identity is always staggering, one day I’m a writer, another a lonely waitress. Either way what’s next? I seem to sometimes punish myself with behaviors, other times see a distinctive pattern and continue to act upon it. I walk into a room needing all eyes on me, getting jealous and fearful when they turn away. Like my life is only a play and to close the curtains would mean sheer failure. And when they turn away they can’t possibly care. I just want to wake up and know, who I am or better yet who I want to be, and then have god send me the spark notes.
I’m going to try to quit smoking again, starting Monday. I think this actually might be harder than quitting drinking or drugs; if I drink again, my life will be in shambles, I’ll be emotionally destroyed and spiritually dead and maybe even physically dead, but if I smoke again, nothing that bad is going to happen. I might, possibly — probably — die in forty or fifty years from something slow and painful and smoking-related, but I’m certainly not going to die tomorrow.
On the other hand, what better time than now to start being the person I want to be?
And to not have lungs that look like that? (As a side note, when I was sixteen and my mom figured out I was smoking, she’d put pictures like that on my plate at breakfast and set them as my desktop background. I think she was trying to destroy the idea that cigarettes = cool.)
Plus, how wonderful would it be to be totally free from substances, from dependence on something chemical to take me through my day? If I pray for it, maybe God will remove my obsession with smoking just as he removed my obsession with drink. I know, anyway, that this time, I want to really give it a try.
