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February 3rd, 2010
12:13 am
I am the laziest person alive. I have no motivation. I have no goals (except the one, but does that really count? I don't think it counts).
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February 2nd, 2010
11:08 pm - I hate John Locke
Why is that annoying old douche the star of the show?
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January 25th, 2010
10:46 am
Disgust! I can't even shake my fist. In times like this I have no respect for any of us or our contrivances (like this!). Not even shutting my eyes prevents me from seeing through all of us.
You are a simp! You stand accused.
I spit on wistfulness. Spit spit spit.
I spit on your assessments of yourself and others.
After some forty-odd days of self-effacement, I'm here to remind you that you grossly underestimate me, that you aren't equipped to estimate me at all, that I am confusing you with someone else...
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01:40 am
I can't sleep and I'm in a rotten, merciless, fault-finding mood. Tomorrow's going to suck.
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January 20th, 2010
01:37 am
But it isn't POSSIBLE to wake up at 8 in the morning. It just isn't possible!
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January 17th, 2010
01:20 am
being can't be refused
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December 27th, 2009
04:10 am
Dear Santa Claus,
So you're done with the toy deliveries, are you? Perhaps you wouldn't mind swinging by my apartment with some cold medicine, then. I promise to love Christmas forever if you pour some Nyquil down my throat immediately.
-Cherie
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December 22nd, 2009
06:26 pm - i forgot
My anti-depressant...and I take a high dose...causes loss of depression, weight, and memory.
One of these is becoming a problem.
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December 21st, 2009
05:58 am
Would one reverse a course toward the place she was originally going or toward the place she'll be going instead?
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December 20th, 2009
10:54 pm
I need to rein in my errors. Intentionality is where it's at.
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December 13th, 2009
10:55 pm - aaaaagggggh
I can't stop EATING.
Today I had, in this order:
Cereal
Ice Cream
Candy
Ice Cream
Chips
Ice Cream
Wontons
Ice Cream
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December 9th, 2009
04:44 am - im Küche
to be sick, to be dark,
the sickness and darkness need no summoning,
somewhere on the expansive scales of justice
lay the kafka of poets,
were she a poet,
dreaming up images of mutilation and bodily expurgation.
but a heavy, ovarian kafka,
tipping the scale
with a million fat,
unfit to be honored with hand and tongue removal.
morbid martha,
living alone,
afraid to order pizza and be raped by the delivery guy.
roll the bitty butterball into a deflating bath;
we will all gather our most reliable kitchen knives
and cut away her extra flesh pound by pound
then force her to tie a frilly apron around her exposed innards
and properly preserve her excess
in mason jars, with suction.
a perfect cake is a balance of structure and fat -
the structure provided by eggs and the fat consisting of sugar and butter or lard -
and kathy kafka makes the best blood cakes
with honey and a cream cheese icing that never dries or cracks.
her unworthy hands turn flour concoctions first into a coarse sand
and then into a fine sand
with their built-in ability to estimate ratios
while hiding from bad memories
behind the electric mixer.
shameless cookie-eater
with scorned wrists
has dull knives
and little vision,
ever fantasizing about
hand amputation.
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03:55 am
Always the next door.
four four four four four four four four
cavernous hall and holiest water,
and the harp player
pew for a park bench
the sound of brick sliding across brick,
discomfort of nail splinter,
eyelash removal,
the less light of winter.
sharpest of harp strings
slid between fingers
pressed face
a dust floor,
the knelt knees
the second taste of the same vodka,
spinning stained glass
hymnal headrest
chunky wet hair
the cross walk across you,
with the acolyte, seriouser and seriouser.
twinkle of liquid notes
the confessor lifts your puke-smeared face
explaining the brokenness of
things other than hearts,
you contrast your present condition
with warming up and scraping the car on a bitter morning
when gloves fail the fingers
and the sputtering engine is suggestive of the car's eventual death.
that's all the more cessation,
cases of aftermarket Freud, those bottles clanging in
sharper turns and stops.
The drunk and cleansing?
forgery!
any laughable stab at passing
a character off as an author
flopped as miserably as The First Third,
is that the priest's mother?
waving from the choir loft,
or old Ireland,
or the Amtrak station,
but love doesn't so much depart
on seafaring vessels anymore,
the vomit crusts,
and you can always compare yourself to someone like Robert Pinsky
should you become disappointed in yourself.
in the aftermath of some uncountable amount of swigging
(and amounts aren't counted)
all the people from the neighborhood are
lined up in the aisle
and genuflect with hands on the
stone floor before them
until two by two the confessor cuts off their hands,
throwing all the lopped partial carcasses
into a giant vat under the feet of
plastic Christ,
for an axe soup.
the hundred issuing spouts
slide across a blood-slippery floor
in the direction of the eucharist
to receive the body
into their mouths,
a ceremony for which their tongues must be cut out,
and you can see the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe
emerging from the bloodbath
that seeps into the pages of the hymnal
that was under your head.
you see a door to the west,
and the pathway to the south is blocked.
by the pew there is a lantern.
the confessor seems to have a note in his pocket.
you are carrying a canteen, a rope, and a rune.
the next level of the labyrinth is not visible from where you sit.
the red-running soccer moms,
eyes crinkled in appreciation,
watch the priest snap photos
of their nude little girls.
this is a priest who solves tricky math problems in his dreams.
faces in the axe soup, sipping
the septuagesima feast,
souls released.
you cleanse yourself at their unperturbed feet,
crust for crust.
you wonder at your chances of eventually being sainted,
using your hands to wring the blood and chunks from your hair
and volunteering yourself to be the official stirrer of the
boiling vat of hands.
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December 6th, 2009
03:25 pm
Coming Soon:
Why I Hate Christmas, A Short Essay by Cherie Braden
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02:25 am - letter to the new guy
Baby,
there are hands
holding backwards into before
and holding yours
ten years ago will decay somewhere
between our mouths and your memory
as forty years ago drifted by mine,
and my grandfather is a great grandfather now,
in the same place where i last saw him,
lowered -
we were all there -
but i only remember myself, crying,
and our neighbor who wore some sort of pacemaker,
who told me they had to check her heart
because her daughter's stopped short,
her daughter who was there with us
just like your great grandfather.
stories light for the listener
can be heavy for the teller,
and one thing you should know
is that weight can only ever be comprehended
in bearing it.
by the time you become inquisitive
we won't even all remember
what a hard year this was.
by then i'll remember how i'm crying right now
only because i'm writing it down,
so, just as a reminder,
it's because i'm thinking about how much we'll all love you
and about all the people who would have loved you but aren't here anymore
and about what they all must have felt when we were all born,
which i never knew until now.
the way i've felt that all we had was each other - my mother, brother, sisters, and grandfather -
well, i guess it'll probably be similar for you eventually...
aunts and uncles seem farther from you as you get older,
while your mother never does.
your mother,
my sister, whom i know in a different way than you will ever know her.
but who is all yours.
always take care of your mother.
and try not to make her cry.
because she deserves for the man she makes
to be better than the man who helped make her.
which means you kind of have a job here in this world -
not to sacrifice yourself to your mother, no,
but to love her, not only for what she sacrifices of herself to you,
but for the self she keeps,
and for what she has been,
and for what she has felt and seen.
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