Angsty Poems and Stuff

Hey, I have some poems I wrote while I was here. Thought I'd post them cause I just figured out where they were. If you were hoping to hear an exciting account of glorious adventures, this is not it. I'll write about that tomorrow. I'll write about fashion shows and then I'll write about being sick in New York for the first time. But tonight I have a paper to write and I just found these things. So, poems.

Her

I felt her presence when I was still a child
Felt her twist felt her push
Move,
Already violent in her prenatal state
I would lie awake nights
As she clawed my stomach walls
My intestines were her sheets
My heart her pillow, sopping with drool
Her mouth already open
Hungry
Gasping
Grasping
Grabbing
I'd moan and she would too
And we'd lie together in agony
But inside me she lay unbirthed
Growing abnormally large and festering
From being kept inside so long
I swallowed her.

I grew, so did she, together bigger
For my niceties her evil
For my timidity her brazenness
I remember the first time
She tasted flesh
She came alive
And oh so painfully
I pushed her out
With shrieks of agony
Then pleasure
She feasted
(We feasted)
She bit, tore, hated, ran
Harder
Grabbed tasted licked bit
Chew
Rip
Mean, hard, lashing
We (SHE) Scream
She gasped, sighed, she satisfied
And I was there
And she at sleep
For the first time since I was a child.

Since she was born
She's come out to feast
A demon I keep sleeping safe at my breast
An infant I silently nurture
Hair flowing frazzled
Her eyes
Wild
Mouth open Sweet teeth dripping
Hard
Hungry eyes
I moan
"She"
And I
I cry for those these teeth
Have sunk into
I'm sorry
I must
I must feed

I must feed
My child.

Lunch

Skinny girls eat their pizza
And we our salads
And envy their bare legs
And their boyfriends in tow

Size matters
For everyone.

Holly Golightly

Dear Blog,

I'm nearly done reading Breakfast at Tiffany's  and I mistakenly believe that I should be Holly Golightly. There's a magnetism that surrounds girls who don't need anyone. They tend to attract everyone. I've fallen under the spell of more than a few of these girls, charming and cool, beautiful to watch. They come and they go, and I always wished I had that charm, that vain self-importance that makes them so beloved and yet so despised by those they leave in their wake.

I've never been like that. I've been too sensitive to others' feelings, too eager for friendship and approval. A starry eyed sparrow wishing to be a swan. I think too hard, I've always been too mature and grounded, and I've never learned how to flirt properly. I hate to bother others. I'm an observer. In truth, I'm the nameless narrator in Breakfast at Tiffany's. I'm the take in the mannerisms of my flippant female amours. I soak. I swash them around in my head and puzzle over them with an indescribable yearning. I am bound to be the documenter, not the documented.

Well, so it is. I cause these poor socialites to be remembered. Without those who remember them, these women would be nothing, forgotten. Even if I am not a main character, I have my importance.

For Ian

Alright, alright. Since Ian wants to know what else happened that night, I'll actually finish my story this time.

SO. The manly new york accent belonged to Raphael (or something), a bouncer at the club. Since I had read so many scathing reviews of the bouncers at Webster Hall, I was surprised he greeted me with such cheeriness.

"I'd be sad to see you have to go home and not have a good time tonight!" he boomed.

"I guess."

"Are you alone?"

"Yes."

*long pause* "...You could still have fun!"

This made me laugh, and since I didn't want to disappoint Raphael, I joined the line to get inside the club. I paid the extraordinarily high amount of money and walked in, X's on both my twenty-year-old hands. I waited in line for the coat check, squashed between a million Belgians who had arrived via limousine. I paid the coat check my last four dollars and was finally ready to dance.

This place was huge, and its main inspiration seemed to be a fun house. The bottom floor had a bar in the middle of it with stages all around (I later learned that these were for strippers. And not just those warm-up-skimpily-dressed dancers they have in all clubs. Legit naked ones with pasties and money in their panties.) A band played on the largest of the stages (for now.) The next floor had popular music blasting in a large open room with lights that flashed a million colors. Bodies bounced, glistening pink, yellow, blue and orange. There was a bar around a corner and some stairs, which lead to a small hallway with piercing yellow spotlights shining on the wooden floor. The hallway lead to a ballroom that must have been three stories high. A DJ on a massive stage blasted electronic music so loudly that I could feel my bones rattling. A huge screen projected swirling lights and the whole room was bright and loud. This was where most people seemed to be at the moment, so I stopped and started to dance along with them.

I noticed a boy in an orange shirt was moving closer to me, but I ignored him until he was right by my side. He locked eyes with me and shouted a request to dance. As any girl knows, a boy in his early twenties who actually asks your permission before grinding up on you is a rarity, so I decided to concede and dance with him. This was a mistake. He glued himself to me so closely that it felt more like we were hugging than dancing. And there has never been a man who has smelled more like a vagina in the history of the world. It took thirty seconds for me to declare a need for the bathroom and retreat back to the lower levels.

The middle level was filling up fast. Kids younger than me sipped beer and clambered over the couches in the far side of the room, dancing. I stayed for a minute on the sidelines and realized that this DJ was quite talented - he mixed up popular songs without completely distorting the music. We were actually able to sing along! I started dancing with a tall, stylish man who, unlike the mangina upstairs, could actually dance. I learned later, when he bought me a water, he was from West Africa and was staying in New York for two months. I forget his name, but I do remember there were a lot of O's in it. He was a nice guy. He walked me home. (Which was more of an annoyance than a help, since he walked so much slower than I did.)

However, there was a point at which Mr. O and I were separated. During this time I was excited to be able to dance by myself, but every five seconds I had to push another guy away from me. They snuck up like crabs on the beach at night. I was not pleased. But the music was great and sometimes I could get in a whole minute of dancing without anyone creeping up behind me.

Once, however, I took a break in the lounge by the bar. I was about to start playing some Angry Birds when someone plopped down beside me and pressed his leg into mine. I looked up. It was Mangina.

"Where'd juu go?" He slurred.

"I had to go to the bathroom."

"Where... what school do you go to?"

"NYU."

"No way! I just... graduated from there! I got a job... in the office!"

"That's nice. I have to go. Nice talking with you."

The best part of the night by far, though, was when I spotted two tiny, buttoned up, white-shirt-black-pleated-pants-wearing Asian men standing in the crowd, ignored by everyone else. And I got them to dance. I locked eyes with them, smiled, and waved at them to dance. They were absolutely terrible dancers, but in the best possible way. We formed one of those circles friends make at eighth grade dances and mimicked each others' dancing. A Persian guy stood off to the side and I motioned for him to join our circle. Soon others joined. Some guy began to try to teach me to swing dance. It was a lot of fun. Then Mr. O found me and joined in, which I guess made Persian Guy jealous, since he kept trying to pull me away from Mr. O. That was when I thought it might be time to go sit down.

While Mr. O was getting me my water, Persian Guy knelt down on the floor beside me.

"Will you dance with me?" He pleaded.

I didn't want to dance anymore. I put on my best sophisticated Audrey Hepburn face. "I'm taking a break right now."

"Please. There are not other girls like you. You are very special. I am not usually on my knees asking girls to dance with me."

"Well, thank you," I said, enjoying the ego boost but unwilling to be manipulated. "But I don't really want to dance right now."

He nodded, and got to his feet. I drank my water and tried to listen to Mr. O's story through the club music and his French West African accent. After that, I felt a wave of fatigue. It was time to go home.

As I left the club, Raphael the Bouncer stopped me.

"Did you have a good time?" He asked.

"Yes, thank you."

"You're leaving early."

"I... have to get up early tomorrow morning. But thank you."

"No, thank you. I'm glad you had a good time. My name's Raphael and I'm always working here."

I smiled and turned toward home.

Creepers be Creepin'

New York has some of the most tenacious creepers I have ever met. Just when you think all the guys near Greenwich village are gay, these guys come crawling out of the woodwork to make the club a sausage fest and dancing impossible.

After listening to the storyteller, I came home, wrote a blog post (as you can tell), and got ready for the night's second event - going to the club.

Ava had told me of a club not far away from where we live, up on 11th street. I felt good, I felt pretty, and I strutted down the street to meet my destiny. The late night bookstore wasn't even able to distract me for more than ten minutes. I was a woman on a mission.

But when I saw the entrance teaming with people, blocking the sidewalk, I was a little unnerved. As I backed up to abort my plan, I heard a smooth New York accent from the exit of the club, the kind you hear in gangster movies.

More later. I'm too tired. Stay tuned.

The Players

It's week three and I still have a sorry lack of friends. Which led me to search for something, anything to do on a Friday night. After perusing the web sites for under 21 nightlife (damn this age - in Hell we're all 20) and finding little to nothing, I, in a last kick of enthusiasm, picked an event from the NYU calendar to attend. It had a vague title - Storytelling at the Provincetown Playhouse: For Love... And the Provincetown. But it had storytelling in it, and I had acquired an appreciation of spoken tales from Governor's School, where Ad, a teacher of unclear sexual orientation (a topic of much discusion amongst the students), had a talent for telling amazing stories about the Civil War and bears.

Anyway, I figured it would be a better way to spend my evening than playing neopets again. And if I didn't get into a club later, I would have at least done something tonight. And who knows? Maybe there would be someone there who would be my friend.

There was no one there to be my friend. Although it was put on by NYU, this storytelling was being performed for a strictly over-40 crowd, with the exception of two kids who played Gameboy Advance for the entire show. So I sat alone, and hoped that this would be more amusing than that time my grandparents took me to see a silent movie about space.

It was. It was fantastic. It was one woman who told stories both made up and real about the very area, the very theatre we were in. She told us about revolutionaries that included Marcel Duchamp climbing to the top of the Washington Square Memorial and declaring Greenwich Village an independent nation. She told us about intellectuals and writers who lived here in the twenties, now mostly remembered by tourists who read the plaques on the older buildings. She read us their poems and she described how they all interacted, and she reminded me of why I came to New York.

This was the New York I dreamed of, where the people who will change the world meet and create their world-changing creations. Where everything is questioned, where everything is dramatic and real and the occurances on one small street can be talked about for hundreds of years to come. It's always been a secret dream of mine to be one of those intellectual writers, to voice thoughts that will echo through distance and time.

I swallowed my timidity - a trait that has been terminal to my social interactions here - and approached the woman (Regina Ress, or so it said on the flier) who was shaking hands and embracing all her friends who had come. When the crowd had subsided, I moved forward and put out my hand. She grasped it so firmly, it was as if within that shake she was holding my entire body.

"I just wanted to say thank you. I might be the only person in this line who doesn't know you, but it really was lovely."

"Thank you." She said with sincerity. "Who are you?"

"Me? I'm nobody."

Ms. Ress was appalled by my apparently ludicrous statement. "You're not nobody!" She exclaimed. "Are you an NYU student? Then you're not nobody! You must be somebody!" This seemed so genuinely meant that I almost burst into tears right in front of the woman with the flaming red hair and the vocal tone echoing back from the first half of the twentieth century.

She was very happy someone had paid attention to the postings on the NYU website and thanked me dearly for coming. As I left my hands were shaking, not just from the warm touch (a thing I miss very much when I have no friends or family around) but because this woman, who knew the stories of the bohemians that changed the world from right here in Greenwich Village, said that I was somebody. Of course it was a throwaway statement. Of course she most likely meant that everyone out there is somebody and nobody is "nobody," as I had claimed to be. But it still made me feel important, like somehow I too could write things that would be remembered and live a life that someday a girl a hundred years from now could dream of. An important, somebody life. As I walked past the boys and girls in their all black going-out outfits with their cigarrettes and laughter, silently sliding through them like a shadow or a ghost, I looked at the lights on the Washington Square memorial, so bright and so warm against the stone cold white. And I paused - just for a moment - with the arch in my eyes - and I was glad.