For Science!

So, there is probably a very good, or at least very paranoid reason, that I have never before posted this poem online. I may censor this to my flist if I ever remember what it is. In the meantime, take a skinny-dip in my soul.

Title: Fly With Me
Rating: G
Warnings: I feel this way a lot.

( Dive in )

T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

MISTAH KURTZ -- HE DEAD.
A penny for the Old Guy

I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us--if at all--not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer--

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
and avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
and the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

This is Song, by John Donne:

Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.

If thou be'st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till age snow white hairs on thee,
Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me,
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And swear,
No where
Lives a woman true and fair.

If thou find'st one, let me know,
Such a pilgrimage were sweet;
Yet do not, I would not go,
Though at next door we might meet,
Though she were true, when you met her,
And last, till you write your letter,
Yet she
Will be
False, ere I come, to two, or three.

Read Howl's Moving Castle. Yes, the book version, not the still-excellent Studio Ghibli movie version.

In other news, my religion has a blessing for seeing rainbows. I think about how stupid so much of the stuff I do is, and then I think about that. And that makes it better.

I have weird dreams. Last night, I had two of them.

One: some form of weird non-sexual shower bonding. Like, when you are very young and your parent lets you take showers with them sometimes? It was like that, only with my BF. Not sexual at all. We were just happened to be taking a shower in the same shower. It segued (I’m not quite sure how, think dream-logic) into having Invader Zim stuck in the ceiling and us spraying him with the shower water, which took care of him as in “The Wettening.” Then Dib showed up, and we sprayed him, which only got him vaguely annoyed, and carted Zim off. I distinctly remember him saying, “Okay, now we’ll go do the Labyrinth.” Yes, that Labyrinth. The sense was that they were paranormal investigators together but I’m still not sure why Zim was in the ceiling.

Freud would say that it means I need to get laid, which I already knew.

Interlude: I sleep with the window open, because between about nine and about four AM it’s cooler than inside the house. A policeman went by. I mean, a policeman with sirens on and lights flashing went by. I checked the clock. This was a 3.23 AM. I rolled over and went back to sleep.

Two: some form of weird meshing between my life and DP, with a hint of insanity and some bits of dreams from weeks ago thrown in. The basic plot was that me (Danny) went insane and kidnapped Sam and Tucker, where “kidnapped” means “put in one of Vlad’s underground bunkers to keep them safe.” Said bunker looks a lot like the basement corrosion lab if someone had taken the space and put a grocery store inside. Vlad was, for some reason, dead. I mean, permanently. So my brother (who was also Jazz, don’t ask) starts hitting me upside the head while there’s a police investigation going on in my house (which was neither my house nor FentonWorks) because they were last seen there.

Anyway, after a while Tucker figures out how to send a message detailing his position using only an old 70’s TV set, my cover gets blown, I’m flying around my neighborhood. I love flight dreams, BTW, even if I really suck at flying pretty much as a rule. It takes effort for me to stay in the air, even in a dream . . . it’s about this point in the dream where it shifted from Me-as-Danny to Danny-as-me, and he’s much better at the flying and I was just sort of piggybacking along for the ride. Whee!

But he’s no good at long-term planning, so instead of cutting and running like he ought to, he went back to the bunker and walked straight into a trap. Shit happened. Sam and Tucker were royally pissed, MW and Dad (who were also Maddie and Jack) started poking around Vlad’s stuff without ever realizing it was Vlad’s stuff. Somehow, they formed the impression that he’d been some kind of Q to my Bond, a notion of which I did not disabuse them, because Vlad had apparently died horribly and I didn’t want to ruin their memories of him.

I was poked at. Some kind of scientific research lab/shopping mall was built in and around the lab, because of all the cool stuff that it would take years to figure out (part of the reason Sam and Tucker were there and not anywhere else) and Dad figured out how to use some shoes that walk on air. I, or rather Danny, was a celebrity but of the infamous variety, even though I had done nothing wrong. Aside from, y’know, kidnapping some people, but they didn’t press charges. So I was at a T-shirt stand posing for some photos (don’t ask, I don’t know either) and . . .

The alarm went off. The alarm goes off at 6 AM, which means that the entire dream took place between the hours of 3 and 6 AM. Ah dream-time, how I love you.

Now I have the weird urge to write shits, so I’ma take a stab at this poem.

I want to take until my soul
the world, and make her whole;
and remind her there
to love and care
and stand up, and believe, and know.
I want to take unto my sun
the heart, and all of cold. And burn away
those dead remains
the bones of time

This is as far as I got before the poem turned into some weird form of creation story. It’s still not the half-sleeping poem, but it captures the right emotions, I think. I wish I could remember the original, though.

The next bit tried to be a part of that, but it’s really something separate and complete and unique to itself, so I’m posting it too. It can be made better by reading a book called Six Moon Dance.

With life:
an oven, a crematorium,
an incubator, until she can hatch, reborn,
a phoenix of her own ashes.
I want to fly on wings of hope
and bright, through
endless black aeons, while around me
suns burst into life, flare briefly, die
singing, until I reach
a young place, an oasis
of fire and toxicity and new time
there to wait, wait, sleeping
until children walk my wings again
and wake them, and kill me, and power,
and give to me for the
long, lonely, universal flight
to become another egg.

So, now I'm going to sandblast things >.>

Ninj4!

Aargh. It's not like they couldn't have given me the emails of the chemists in Tox before I did six hours of research and lacha went and found proof that C8s are harmful! I get the impression they wanted the college freshie to tell them something different from the doctors and then say "Whee! The freshman knows more than the Ph.D.s and we can therefore use C8s."

[deep breath] Okay, that's off my chest now.

( Diamond Ring )

I think it's done, but I may edit it. It depends on whether or not it wants to be edited. Constructive criticism always welcome :)