Title Optional

Booming, bassy shouts rip through the panelling,
And I think I hear a body hit the floor through the ceiling above–
My intended and his father.
After, he walks me home part way, then I lumber on alone.
I’m wearing yesterday’s rumpled clothes.
I smell like cat piss and look like a burnout with my hair uncombed and pale face red around the eyes.
The rail road tracks offer more seclusion, so I continue on there, following them homeward.
There are tangles of morning glories among the ruddy rocks and rotting wood, and I’m careful not to crush a single one with my clumsy boots.
The air smells like fennel, and the asphalt of the road seethes heat in the cool drizzle.
I could press myself to it, and it would be warm like a mother’s bosom.
The asphalt is empty;
The carnival week packed up gone overnight.
Every terrible thing inside of me condenses to a tangible, potent poison in my stomach.
Self-hatred and worry like black ink on my insides. I feel it undulating in my guts–
Every contraction of my muscles oozing it around,
Blood stagnant and numbing, like in a Vicodin near-overdose,
Like it’s last summer and I’m a hundred pounds, lying dazed and near-suffocated against the door frame.
The feeling that of almost just existing is addicting.
My loose shirt does not cover my stomach completely; I’ve near outgrown it.
Abdomen mostly flat, but with a slight curve to it,
Growing more and more nervous about what’s on the inside;
Reddish brown bleeding like the ruddy rail road rocks–
Implantation bleeding?
A baby boy with jet-black hair floating in amniotic worry-poison.
The tracks curve to the right, down a tunnel overgrown,
So I stick to the hedges beside the ally beside the tracks;
Avoid small-town-everyone-knows-you.
The road to home is longest.
I wish I could see the atoms in the tree bark,
The electrons in the atoms in the tree bark;
I nearly reach out and stroke the surface,
But my fingers twist around themselves,
Back to my side,
Staying inconspicuous.
I exhale, then exhale again,
As if I could exhale inwardly,
Exhale my lungs from themselves, and the rest would follow;
My lungs would swallow me up and spirit me away.
If I broke through the stifling air barrier,
There would be world a beyond it?
I tumble in through the bedroom window;
All is vacant but for the dog and dust motes.

-Atl Coaxoch

Lollapalooza and Other Madness

I’m all registered for my senior year of high school now. I’m hoping it’s slightly less eventful than last year, and I won’t be spending a week of it, er, ‘institutionalized’. I’m meditating for better mental health this time around. 🙂

I had the wonderful opportunity of attending Lollapalooza, all-expense-paid, in Chicago yesterday with my lovely cousin and aunt. We saw ten different bands, including Florence + The Machine, who are my cousin’s favourite, and we saw The Jezabels walking down Michigan Avenue while at Panera Bread for breakfast. I had a blast. My cousin was a bit uncomfortable with all the half naked college kids toking to their favorite alternative bands, which I found funny. I feel like I should drop him off with my friends in the Main Street apartments for a few hours to desensitize him to soft drug use. Maybe he wouldn’t chastise me any more (ahahaha, yeah right). I really enjoyed Nadastrom (I’d never heard them before) and was bummed I missed out on Of Monsters and Men, but they played at the same time as Florence.

I love music, but I’ve dropped out of choir for this year. My director is a distasteful woman who killed any shred of self-esteem I’d managed to cling to. I’m hoping to find a way to still take vocal jazz instruction this year, and I’ll still have my fill of music between band and flag corps (I’m a corps captain this year~).

I’ve talked to my fiancé about the both of us going for all three days of Lolla next year, considering I’ll be moving to Chicago for college, hopefully at Roosevelt, which is right across from Grant Park where it takes place.
He informed me that he bought us tickets to see Amanda Palmer at the Metro in November for our anniversary and that his father now knows we’re engaged. I wasn’t expecting the second one. I’ve been seventeen for five months, and he’s one month short of seventeen. We’ve been engaged for 9 months. We didn’t want our parents to separate us, thinking we were too young, so we kept it a secret. Mom thinks my engagement ring is a very fancy sort of promise ring. I wouldn’t have gotten engaged to just any guy or girl I’d dated this young, but my fiancé and I had already been best friends for years. We used to sleep over at each others’ houses, and it was a brother-sister sort of relationship before the hospital. He kept me alive, and I’m forever grateful.
I was pleasantly surprised that his father approved, considering he’s generally very old-fashioned and seems to think we can’t grasp the consequences of our actions most of the time. I can get along with him well enough, it’s just a bit difficult.
I honestly wish I could tell my own parents with the same outcome.

I feel like I really only rambled today.

-Atl Coaxoch

Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost

“Busy. Bodies rushing in and out, did you know Cheney is full of reptile blood,
and driven by the mind of an Incan child abandoned on a mountain
300 years ago? A child spitting up
lizard blood, freezing to death in a stone shrine,
now can you grasp Cheney’s infantile wrath?
Bush’s secret is his tiny tail, leathery, about 3 inches,
like the tip of a Komodo Dragon’s tail–
note how he is always heavily guarded from behind,
for if some joker pulls his tail, a long yellow forked tongue will spurt from
his face–
very few humans are pure human, most are occupied by
bizarre creature combines, the dead and the extinct pack the air
unseen from a senses-five perspective.”

Clayton Eshleman writes of bizarre creature combines in his poem Nocturnal Veils which is included in his 2006 collection of poems “an alchemist with one eye on fire” (another segment of which I’ve listed under Lifting the Veil). I think of the part evolution has played in my existence; the form I take, the way I think. I think of past lives as animals not descended from primates. These ‘creature combines’ melded together into human beings. Our animal parts don’t all match up quite right, do they? It’s what makes us human, I think.

What is inside of me?

Sometimes I stop and sense my blood and the things which swirl inside of it. I see myself a big, stalking cat. My nails are kept long, and I’m as territorial as they come. I feel the urge to pounce and bite and rip things apart with my teeth. I slink about, feeling a phantom presence of sleek, muscular body mass. I sense the primal essence in moments of competition and passion; the intense, competitive urge to run faster than the person next to me, the satisfaction of biting my lover’s neck and dragging my fingernails down his bare shoulder blades and over his hips. The thrill of overcoming; the primal urge to dominate.
We are human and everything besides.

I meditated today. I didn’t intend to, but I became trapped in Terry’s house after entering to use the restroom and not being able to exit due to a bad storm that had hit suddenly. Everyone else was trapped inside the garage, so I had the house to myself. I took off my shoes and made myself cozy on one of his cushy armchairs, feet straight out in front of me and head reclined on the backrest. I focused on my breathing, and the rain and wind battering the windows slipped away. The pulsing purple behind my eyes brightened to grey, then white. When the white gave way, I was standing on a lake. It turned from deep purple to navy blue over and over as raindrops splashed the surface, and from the depths floated up an Egyptian sarcophagus. It hadn’t quite reached the surface when Terry burst into the kitchen and scared the shit out of me, though. I would have liked to have seen what was inside. Even if it would have frightened me, I would still liked to have looked.

I am human. What are you?

— Atl Coaxoch