Looking into the window of the abandoned house next door 
i see
that the
old lady was doing laundry when
(i don’t know why)
 she up and moved to the nursing home, 3 doors down
on the other side of the street.
She has a better ocean view now
the sea and her eye 
dance together
breathe salt and sway
look away
from the house
that she left
with the dirty socks inside
that she wonders about
every so often

Labels: By Ana

the other night, a moth was drawn to the light of my window
and a spider's web was stretched across her porthole to paradise
the sky was black
and the moth was the color of clay
her struggle was brilliant
i closed the blinds
and her paradise was lost

Labels: By Ana

(AKA serious social statement gone awry)

you are so young
so doomed
so beautiful
this era becomes you,
graceful and writhing
you dance and sway and your hips are bony and your purple eyeshadow makes you look like you're magical.
you are tempted and give in and regret nothing.

you babble romances and inspire songs
and then believe every word of them.
you make me i wish i didn't know any better so i could believe them too

i think
you are too skinny
but when you kiss me
i taste eden sprouting on the tip of your tongue
it's from the fruit of knowledge you hid in your purse when you hopped eden's fence and ran away and almost got busted by the security camera.
(but i think AID's is just God getting back at you...
you know what they say about running from the law.)

Labels: By Ana

I step out of bed and my glasses affirm that I can’t see worth a damn anymore without them, and that with them it is 3:58. And the carpet affirms that my feet sleep more persistently than me. I trudge into the living room with drowsy unanswered compulsion and this line’s running through my head from a poem written by my pseudo-intellectual college buddy: “I would stay up all night if all night I could write something beautiful.” And this line just keeps running through my head. Persistent as my feet covered with hair and sleep that yanks at nerve endings and twists them into knots that come undone and fall away and leave my feet trudging down basement stairs, barely sidestepping asbestos and not having as much luck with the dust. And I’m coughing and dreary but compelled to stop and think awhile atop boxes filled with 57 years of unexamined shit. I suddenly remember a dream that inexplicably reminds me of old happy movies, of John Wanyne, and Fred Estaire and Ginger Rogers. And then I remember what I’m there for. Somehow my typewriter finds my lap. Somehow there’s still paper in it, and somehow there is light enough to see by. It filters through oceans of dust and I am just a fish in the vastness. The line from the poem is audible for miles, and I think it is ancient like the light of stars that through the bends of space, is lost for generations. I answer it. The first words in my mind are on the paper and they are re-arranging themselves into coherent lovely phrases. Then sentences. Then paragraphs. And I can’t help but notice how eloquent I’ve become. My feet are cold and white and lonely for eachother, but I notice they are awake. And satisfied. And so am I.
I go back to bed.
Every night repeats itself in my dimly lit basement. I notice plots and sub-plots unfolding on yellow paper. In the yellow light. I have to buy more paper. There are stacks of it, now, next to the old avocado-green kitchen chair that I write in. In a year, there is a stack of papers high enough to qualify for the term, “book”. I secretly call it a book in head.
And my feet have never been more satisfied.

Labels: By Ana