Love is like a rainbow of colors that come out more vibrantly when the sun inside of you shines through bad weather. It’s pathetic; fertile optimism, the desire to keep expressing these colors, to keep shining. Like the song, this little light of mine, it has a way of bleeding into the ever-morphing fantasies and never dying. The fantasies come to life from there. The lives coexist in my head. There’s always plenty of room for the realistic optimism and childlike compassion for happy endings. Beginnings can be just as happy. As a rule, the beginnings are always happier, unless you’re at a massage parlor that is. Then beginnings are just awkward.
I didn’t have any hopes or prayers about longevity or making it to any kind of pot of gold with this latest bed buddy, if you can even call him that. He was more like a bed moth; a field bug that thinks your home is a place to lay eggs and chew sweaters. Curiosity claimed the resolvedly unsociable poet in me and I let that curiosity give faulty green lights. Truth was that I was bored with being alone and in boredom, one succumbs to watching moths flutter around lights while coming up with mushy sentiments about hopeless rainbows.

So one Friday night, while nursing the insomnia and laughing at moths trapped in the lamp shade, my phone rang. It was precisely 2 am, closing time, last call for ass. It was this guy Daniel, the mystery blond in my dream journal.
“Who is this?” I demanded.
“Pretend like I’m Layne Staley.” He croaked.
I didn’t want to pretend. I know Layne enough to appreciate other people for who they really are. But I knew who I was talking to now.
“Daniel. How are you?” I asked gently.
I was surprised and amused he had called so late. In unpreparedness, I went with the route of acting like a bubbly twat. Acting; it’s a necessity when dealing with men who think they are God. The realist in me was rolling hapless eyes and thinking of slapping him for not attempting to communicate during daylight hours, prior to the ungodly intrusion. We got the initial quirks out of the way. Daniel rambled on drunk and basically invited himself over to my house for some kind of afterhour’s party. My need to mother and spiritualize misguided men went strangely and smoothly along with his late night impulses. Here’s where the faulty green light begins to flicker. But the more moths the merrier and hell, I was awake anyway.
Less than an hour later, Daniel barged into the house and started to talk all damn loud. His voice isn’t irksomely high pitched but it has a squealing quality to it that reminds me of a cross between brand new brakes and the chirping male cardinals in the back yard. I love those birds. This boy, I don’t know. I shushed his flow of chipper with a sharp hand motion over my mouth, pointed up stairs, and made sternly perturbed eyebrows at him. Aurora was out cold. I reckon a bull horn couldn’t stir her once she’s out, but I shushed him more because my ears were still all sensitive. I soak up everything--every feeling, every sound. I agreed to let him come so I could soak up his uninhibited energy. So I could connect to something besides isolation. It’d been deafly quiet for hours and hours in that house until he rang me. I wanted to see his face up close again. It’s an abstrusely triangular, diamond shaped face, but a scandalous face to say the least. Layne’s face is much rounder and trustworthy, whereas this kid has “sneaky bastard” written all over his forehead.

He managed not to crack any infantile jokes for the first few moments after sloshing through the door. Maybe because he had a three foot bong in his hand and he didn’t want to laugh at his own slapsticks or make any sudden farcical statements that would cause him to lose an already instable grip on his prized smoking device. I strode into the den. He practically skipped. I’d cleaned the white tile floors hours earlier in the day and the entire house still retained the scent of oranges and pine sole. I savored the smell of clean and almost tried to just ignore that he was there for a few seconds. He kept on talking at ninety miles an hour, making selective deafness impossible. I glared at him to let him know I was listening but perplexed by his inability to shut up. Finally he put down that dang bong and wasted no more time in hugging me. For a few blessed seconds of stillness, he stopped talking. It felt natural when he hugged me, when he touched me. I almost resented how much I enjoyed it. Without warning, he lifted me up and started spinning me around like he wanted to take me for a ride on the blond carousel. It thrilled me. I wrapped my legs around him and pressed my nose against his dullard hook of a nose and let my face sweep his face until I gave in and kissed him. I kissed him more to prolong the silence. He ruined it and started apologizing for the foul stench of beer, but I ordered him to shut up and kept on with the kissy face. I love his nose, I have been turbulently aroused by it since the moment I digested its matchless shape. It looks as broken as mine and it’s easy for me to love broken things and broken people. I’m the same sort.
We sat on the couch, sunk in all gooey eyed at each other. His eyes are like blue barrels of beauty. The vibrancy of the blue resides in a cosmic spectrum of its own splendor; I’ve never drank a color quite like it in my life. When I close my eyes, I still see the radioactive hue of his eyes. God must have gone crazy dabbling in cans of light until he found a color perfectly arresting enough to paint on the eyes of that man. He pulled me onto his lap. It was all way too fast, like teenagers in the back of a car. The thrill suddenly vanquished, replaced by valiant logic. I didn’t know anything about Daniel. I just knew his face was scandalous, his eyes were too blue, and I felt like I missed the ship with him once before. The delayed navigation of that ship was the only reason I didn’t punch him in the ribs.
I tried to spark some kind of intelligent conversation, but he extended mindless hands and started grabbing my boobs, making his lewd intentions known. I was so horrified that I gave up trying to speak, my lips turned numb and heavy until I didn’t feel like moving them at all. He kept feeling up my chest. It made me feel all slimy and uncomfortable, like the doctor was checking my breasts for lumps. He made no honest effort to kiss me back and it became more evident that my boobs were just some kind of squishy toy to him, like a dog slobbering on one of those squeaking squirrels. I was so alarmed by his lack of censor, by the absence of the respect filter, that I couldn’t muster a word. My face was torn in taut confusion and bore little sign of life. The joy in my eyes drained out into a green glob of stale gum. I’m pretty sure I choked on it as my throat began to constrict and get scratchy. I studied Daniel carefully and read his thoughts. I was not impressed by his thoughts. He struggled to keep his eyes open, but his hands kept sweeping over my skin like a razor. His skin was like sea foam, delicately white and clinging to the grains of sand on me. I tried looking at his eyes as some kind of courtesy but he didn’t look back at me much. He definitely didn’t look at me like Joshua used to. The strobe thought of Joshua made my stomach erupt into anguish. The anguish rapidly spread to my heart and began to burn like battery acid. I hid it well. I wanted to tell Daniel to stop touching me. I didn’t give a fuck how blue his eyes were. He didn’t give a fuck about who I was, he hated it that I was a single mother and I knew that and it made me feel worthless and depraved of meaningful affection. At least Joshua kissed me like he had a heart. The boy next to me had some kind of heart, but it was like one of those wind-up timers that tick artificially loud, reminding you that it will ultimately stop and ding. And then the timer will grow legs and leave to piss off another unsuspecting person, merely by reminding them that the window of time exists and it brutally stops when the timer says so. In this case that moment unfolds when the blue-eyed boy sleeps of his alcohol, locates his clothes, and stumbles out of my house and onto the next squishy toy. There is no discussion or compromise about it, the timer has the last high-pitched laugh as he’s ignoring the sight of your house in his rear view mirror. Tears and common sense do not stop these kinds of timers. They are oblivious to the people they use, hurt, and harass with that annoying ticking sound. I’m pegging him for a Virgo. My father is a Virgo and I know he didn’t look in the rearview mirror when I was 11 and crying. Dad was more concerned with his middle-aged clock telling him it was time to leave.

Because I felt so puny in the world, in my own house, so malnourished and indignant in missing Joshua, I let Daniel and his ticking arms keep grabbing at me. Part of me wanted to cry and crumble and make a scene in front of him, to demand he leave and let me be, leave me with some kind of celibate order. How could I not care about myself, about my own boundaries? The last thing I wanted was to play the part of the vulnerable woman, but I fit the description perfectly. I was a single mother, famished and forlorn for any kind of positive male interaction, human interaction with other angels in matter. I’d been locked in my writer’s studio for three weeks solid, pounding away on the keyboard in a nerd effort try to distract myself from noticing how much I was decaying inside from the cancer of my own despair. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t know why it was terminal. I was drowning in devastation, reeling in the absence of Joshua. Every time I revisited the memory of kissing Joshua, I burst into trembling tears of liquid love. I cried because I connected to him and I barely connect to my own stubborn self. Daniel seemed like a nice way to find recovery, a way to figure out how to laugh it off instead of crying. For that I’m thankful. But I still think he’s a sneaky bastard with a scandalous face.

Seldom do I acknowledge that I’m similar to everyone on this planet; that I’m made of the same soul substance. I probably have a scandalous face too. Behind it, I don’t admit that I need love like every other person; that I yearn for consistency and serial monogamy. Usually I am too busy trying to offer and provide love to my loved ones to bother with such puritanical projections. But when Joshua was here, the cynical romantic outlook and humane denial changed. I changed. I wasn’t a lone polar bear pawing at the ice of the universe anymore. When he was here, there was no more needing, no more urge to ice fish. I stopped craving a missing piece. It was like the needing never existed, everything was fulfilled. I didn't trade my love for Jesus for loving Joshua, it just enhanced it all so beautifully. Joshua put the salt in the mermaid shaker. Daniel was just putting filler rice in it so it wouldn’t clump up and stop shaking again. Either way, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, but you have to keep sharing your salt and shining through the storms.

My mind shall set me free
When sense affords such luxury
Fragile nerves like broken brains
Weepy heart, death conquered you
Before it came for me

Seeping in the smell of flowers
Even the boldest of bees are few
Never dreamed to buzz
Closer, closer to me
now I'm further, further from you

Half used and wholly abused
Yet never gone to waste
The emptiness I further refuse
but it never says no to me
An old ragged heart is all I have to lose
Once the mind can no longer be used
Some lives are destined for disaster
They say it strikes in threes
Slave to a wicked master
Consumerism won’t let the others be
anymore than you denied the love in me

The mind links the chains of destiny faster
When there are fewer demands than needs
then the personal lists heeds

for ages of angst and teary sighs
i thought I needed a twin soul
Aquarians in crime
but the God in him said no

perhaps I was not as becoming or furl
as the ritual of bouncing into bed
with forgettable girls

When your title is worn
By the judgment of this world
humbleness strikes me
Fanning condemnation behind a friendly face
Slave and master presume in uncaring haste
no man shall ever stay long enough
to master the meekness of me

Another unspoken angel psalm
Held in quiet distaste
loudly, he dismissed the love for common lust
Reserving all judgment until the mind is calm
when one night stands stop being enough
the scales of the body ash to dust
finding love without grace
just a naked sun in my palm
With only one soul to waste

(c) Jessica Robbins 2010

Mermaid's Magic Flower

I annihilated the happiness
It splintered and shattered like glass
A surface broken by the toss of a pearl
Useless wisdom of the world
Hiding heaven’s irreparable theatrics
Deer in fields of present and past

I pleaded with the angel of young girls
To cut my life in half
Displaced mericless hysteria
at last
unpleasing morbid years
How the grayness does swirl
As the solitude gouges and sears, unadorned

No telling laughs, no irony or sass
Abstaining from cookies
Even shorter on cash
Robbed of all joys that conjure childhood
Outgrown but not lost
to the faintness of the past
Once I wore a smile
but those days were too good to last

Just a lonely piece of drift wood
wading in jellyfish feathers
frowning coral
stinging unseasonable weather
loss of all moral
salt in my only soft spot, spots of heather
His eyes, loud rainy eyes of God’s mystery
An undesirable heart blotted by a muse

His drops of flesh, I never knew
But the true power of humility lies here
For like the truth
I could no sooner refuse, only endear
The dearness of his curious stained soul
Gridded and magnetized, pole by pole

In a young dreamer’s look
He drank the wine of old
until we were infused, bound like a book
Two pages representing the whole
Health in sick droll

We were but stray sea kelp really
I merely drifted into him
terrified and confused
soaked up his reluctant help
So many dream side lessons
it was here I experienced true wealth

He learned and urged me to reclaim happiness
Happiness once deemed unlawful
Cast away by first impressions

Some only seeing the awful
So missing goes the hidden beauty mark
Like those alien sailing stars
Floating above dawn chasing fishermen
Manned with clear lines
And a single hook of spark

Steered by limited confessions
On a limitless sea of rolling luck
There he trolled in my doleful innocence
He must have seen it all along
Like an invisible rose
A mermaid’s magic flower
Scentless, but armed with a song


(C) 2010 Jessica Robbins
Peace, blessings, and unconditional love & understanding to all. :)

I am going to abstain from text messaging for an entire year and communicate strictly by means of advanced telepathy. Any man truly worthy of exchanging ideas or love will be able to channel messages directly into my soul and fly into my sleep and seduce me via telepathic dreaming and strategic astral rendezvous. After I have succeeded in wooing even the gayest of men in the dream realm by flaunting my phallic masculine side, then I shall reenter the modernistic nightmare of hyper technological socialization, fully integrated and further educated in the divinatory arts. The risen savior is the perfect combination of masculine and feminine energies, therefore I denounce the appearance of my womanhood and all of my carnal desires; text, virtual, sexual, nutritional or otherwise, and seek only to embrace and honor and love the unity and delicate differences within and of each soul. Being attached to gender, even your own, detracts progress.
A book will be written about these experiences. I will call the book “A Year of Crashing Computers in Favor of Collectively Manifesting the Second Coming of Christ." The book will be encoded with subliminal messages that will summon all of the Atlantean incarnates to meet secretly at bus stops and subway stations across America, and then by using only crystals and telepathy, we will brainwash all of the members of congress and convince president Obama to disband the government. After Obama has stepped down, the former Atlantean leaders will assume a non-profit peaceful assembly (because let’s face it, the Government agencies, police especially are not non-profit) and the Atlanteans will implement new educational strategies aimed at training and educating our children about self-regenerative healing powers and the seven internal spiritual centers so that they may eliminate the need for any type of insurance, outside health care, and deceptive religions. Once the people see they are capable of healing any ailment by invoking the power of the Christ within, they will stop going to doctors and stop believing they are sick at all. They must stop believing in death, death is what grants power to the medical fields, the terrorists, religions, and the like.

After the healing arts have been handed down and people begin to see past the veils of death, then we will proceeds to restore the Mayan and Atlantean systems of time, study, and fair trade. The only way to rid the earth of corruption is to destroy the need for money, and if we engage in more cooperative trading of goods and services rather than taxing and inflating the value of material, land, and gas to satisfy greed, humanity as a whole, may be salvageable because they will return to life under the Law of One. Under the law of one, everyone will love one another as he has loved thee and all debts will be forgiven. It is God’s will that all debts be erased and the only way to bring about a new Earth is to treat all human beings as new life and forgive all of the bad financial judgment. After people stop believing they are owed and entitled to something due to previous debt, they will seek other ways of healthy self-sustainment, which will include greater emphasis on the artistic, literary fields, and organic farming; most crafts of which are free of restraints, conditions, and demands. Because so many women will no longer be working in government and law branches, they will explore sewing their own clothes, shoes, and making homemade beauty products. This will substantially reduce the need for income and spending. They will be encouraged to trade clothes and shoes for food grown by the organic farmers. This will also play a vital role in helping to curb obesity. Lincoln had the power to abolish slavery, we too have the power to abolish unnecessary desires because we are all slaves to our desires.

He’d only been gone for a few days once the nostalgia crept in and began to rape and murder me alive. I didn’t even know what I was nostalgic for, another pet project maybe. A muse that was more committed to me and the completion of my story than himself or his money. But I’d never found such a person, not here anyway. The creative surges were more agonizing than the unrelenting lovesickness. Did I really know him well enough to truly miss him? Or did I just have some kind of compulsion to write about every smidge of emotion he evoked? Where we would have gone or lived together were questions I didn’t want to contemplate. Leaving those question unasked and unanswered made way more sense. The detachment made sense, after he was gone anyway.

Gravitating to him had been an involuntary reflex, much like dreaming. One minute you're ebbed in blackness and the next, a warm face is shining a light in your soul. Opening the door to his light was instinctual somehow. I never let anyone come through that door, hell I rarely tell anyone where I live, let alone encourage them to stay. He roamed here and here I let him make a home next to me for a time. I felt more at home when he was here than I ever had in this damn house alone. Yet, in spite of the romantic wholeness, I wasn’t worried about letting him go. Even if he went for good, he could never take the wholeness with him. So the letting go part came all too easy, it was familiar turf. It was letting him stay and become a touchstone in my life that made me feel ill. Ill and longing for my unpardonable aloof and distant nature. Apart from a nice pair of boobs and free room and board, I had nothing of relevance to offer him. We weren’t necessarily at different places in our lives, but just different enough to make me apprehensive, to exercise passive caution. Meeting him closer to his place on the path would have involved recycling some old beat up lessons that I had no desire to drag out of that plastic blue bin again.
He left on a Monday. The recycling truck came by about an hour later and hauled the rest away. I haven’t seen or spoken to him since.

Betrothed to blackness
A striking face
Blended in a subtle sky
Distance comes with age
Married to emptiness
The color of her cries
Caper Groom, average fish
Swims only to be released
A simple man with unquenchable dreams

As the ink dries
The tattoo finally fades
rotting February night
promises made with grenades
Forever never meant to persist
The children go on strike
Hostages to bitterness
The lights turn off in their eyes

Homes come and go
Cloaked in paternal posh
Still a plan, i know
Flayed out and gutted in sobs
Accessory to falseness
Mommy's obsessed with money and loss
A bride turned stiff
aging only for her own
Fretting in engendered fear
She’d end up all alone

Any day he will leave
Fourteen hours from now
Control will seem free
Daddy’s moving out
Say farewell to solidarity
The split rail rain
Forsaking all clarity
Untaken book of last names
Changeable destiny
On a river of saints
He is floundering
Unlived and unused
8 bedroom house
Held a picture or two
But never a real vow

(c) 2010 Jessica Robbins

 
My latest oil piece in progress...