Warm Brainwater

aaaaagggggh

2009-12-14T03:55:52Z

I can't stop EATING.

Today I had, in this order:
Cereal
Ice Cream
Candy
Ice Cream
Chips
Ice Cream
Wontons
Ice Cream

im Küche

2009-12-09T09:44:36Z

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.

cheryllayne @ 2009-12-09T03:55:00

2009-12-09T08:55:14Z

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.

cheryllayne @ 2009-12-06T15:25:00

2009-12-06T20:25:27Z

Coming Soon:

Why I Hate Christmas, A Short Essay by Cherie Braden

letter to the new guy

2009-12-06T07:25:31Z

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.

no place to fall dead

2009-12-04T07:05:22Z

Carolina wrote something, which reminded me about the whole writing-things thing, so here I am writing.
Tomorrow my sister is going into labor (induced), and if all goes well (oh, please, please, please let it go well) she will be a mother and I will be an aunt.
It's too bad she isn't having a girl. I'm allowed to say this because I'm just the aunt, and it's not like my gender preference is going to fuck the kid up or anything. But if she were having a girl, the girl wouldn't grow up to be a man...that's the main thing.
Still, maybe I can make a reader and a writer out of him? I mean, actually, the point of making him into a reader and writer isn't for the sake of those things, but so that he'll think about things, and maybe have an early understanding of all the different types of sadness. I think maybe the most important thing to understand to be a good person is sadness. You can call it other things...pain, suffering, loneliness...all these are wrapped up in sadness.
Anyway, I don't know if I'll ever have the privilege of babysitting. But if I do I will do my best to introduce him to the world the way I see it. That's not just me, right? Wouldn't that be your inclination?
Relationship stuff: months and months and months have gone by, and I am more deeply in love every day, and I have no complaints. What I always thought was "love" was this baseless feeling being weighed down by all sorts of awful things. I "loved" people who were awful to me because of the moments when they'd be nice. I "loved" people for some imaginary golden middle to their dark, sadistic hearts. I was swimming upstream the whole time...or hugging cacti, for another metaphor. But Jamie loves me the same way I love him...meaning he's GOOD to me. And when we do things that bother each other, we work them out...I always thought those sorts of things just built and built and built until eventually they'd explode, but it doesn't have to be that way. I can actually TRUST him. Completely. Every time I've ever "loved" anyone, I've pretty much had to sleep with one eye open. But now with Jamie I see that a relationship can be a sanctuary and a source of comfort rather than a source of worry and terror. I really think nobody could possibly ask for anything more. Besides which he is just so fucking awesome all around.
Uhhh...Jamie, if you read this, I hope I'm not embarrassing you. I'm a little embarrassed myself at being so preoccupied with this topic...I mean, not embarrassed to feel like I do, but there's this nagging thought that I'm supposed to be thinking of "my art" when "writing" instead of this personal humdrum (I mean, not humdrum to us, but humdrum to everyone else?).
And then I start thinking about how simple-minded I am, but I always do that...I'm one-note that way...that is, to reiterate, again, and again, I have a simple mind.
Too many hangups.
Looks like I didn't get anywhere writing. Maybe next time.

cheryllayne @ 2009-11-25T14:34:00

2009-11-25T19:34:44Z

revisiting my childhood crush on Dwayne Wayne

cheryllayne @ 2009-11-23T02:21:00

2009-11-23T07:21:51Z

Can't sleep. FICS won't work. No ambition. Don't care. Need a good book that I'm motivated to read not out of a sense of duty but out of genuine absorption. Not even my perfect boyfriend and my perfect apartment (they really are...) can pull me out of this abysmal new nihilism. Need religion. Sense of purpose. Doesn't even have to be some kind of universally or absolutely important purpose...it could be as simple as being really passionate about watering some plant every day (I could live for that plant) or achieving some silly weight goal. As long as this new purpose doesn't require me to be good at anything or improve at anything, it's a candidate purpose. It also can't involve any expectations. I'll water that plant as long as it doesn't expect me to and no one else expects me to. Something more interesting than suicide fantasies, please? I got bored with those.

cheryllayne @ 2009-11-19T19:58:00

2009-11-20T00:58:16Z

"You know, all powerful women, at some point, are going to branch over into sorcery and witchcraft and magic potions." - Dale Grote

cheryllayne @ 2009-11-17T21:41:00

2009-11-18T02:41:17Z

Dear Racist Anonymous Commenter,

Please. No more comments. Wouldn't heeding my wish here fall under your personal doctrine of white solidarity? I'm tired of being creeped out when I log into livejournal.

Thanks,

Cherie

cheryllayne @ 2009-11-16T00:13:00

2009-11-16T05:13:10Z

Something happened, and it completely killed my ambition. I just don't care about school anymore. At all.

cheryllayne @ 2009-11-14T17:57:00

2009-11-14T22:57:22Z

re: b.c.h. what's the world coming to??

if loose lips sink ships, what do loose bowels sink? vowels?

I make I make I make amazing honey cake, honey.

Would I rather be a 100-pound college drop-out or a 130-pound college graduate? It's a difficult question. A shallow shallow question. From a shallow shallow gal.

And Foucault. And sex. And repression.

I miss my absent friends.

nausea ad nauseam

2009-11-13T07:24:43Z

the body in pain
the straining of tendons
the ache of old breaks
when it rains.

the silly things we say
wrapped up in our old brains, shivering
to escape -
the weather changes
and I can't wait to be
somewhere else.

what do you do with the good memories
of the bad people,
where do you put those?

remove the failure and the stomach
and the failure.

the latex and the illusion of longevity
(curiously perduring in
my wits are about me)

leaning off the edge of my bed we see
into a four-post abyss, posts on end,
parading impaled heads of the once-loved now-dead
and the never-loved feckless,
and the faceless in their infinite possibility,
at unplotted coordinates
in one of several possible futures.

leaning back in from the outer walls of Eden #142
(yet another reproduction of Eden),
the vacant exsanguinate (n.)
glares stinging regrets
at her older jolly rancher breasts, leaking
imaginary liquid puddlously with a cocktail of other milks,
like the freed blood.

her wet hair spreads gooey,
the warm white children leave her
mother-face and run as loving fingers
around the mother's neck
(to linger there)

the shell adjusts herself in the puddle,
knees up and calloused heels water-logged,
watching the candied syrups pour from her and
out over the barriers that separate us
from the fallen angels, dressed all in their
earthly names with which they
once influenced us, open mouths up to catch the
waste,
but the love gush
is ash, and dust,
as it departs its magic in the garden.
I silently remind myself to sew shut my eyes
to oblivion
and gather strength from the easy resolution that I won't be leaving this bed first,
and even an optimism that whispers I just won't be leaving this bed.

(especially not right this second, because my sleeping pill kicked in and turned off my brain. goodnight, nurse).

cheryllayne @ 2009-11-07T01:08:00

2009-11-07T06:08:29Z

I'm developing a bad late-night cheese habit.

cheryllayne @ 2009-11-05T03:52:00

2009-11-05T08:52:27Z

I can't sleep.

cheryllayne @ 2009-11-04T22:21:00

2009-11-05T03:23:36Z

What sucks is being depressed with a refrigerator full of tempting beers and a body full of infection a.k.a. a strict disciplinarian making you sit in the corner and not drink beer.

thirty

2009-11-05T03:14:04Z

In "celebration" of thirty long years of hating myself,
I resolve,
or whatever,
to write shamelessly and fearlessly and without a fuck to give,
and this in the year that an informed (a reliable) source said to me,
"And you will never make poetry your bitch."

(What I'm saying is, he was right, and by mentioning it I'm also saying

With what style! I will fail to prove otherwise)

Thirty years
On perverted earth,
Or birthed by my mother,
Or splattered across the cement,
I went
and came
and went
and didn't do all that much of anything,
as I'm sure that for the next thirty years I
won't do all that much of anything,
and I didn't learn
all that much of anything.

I look back
On a long, largely unmemorable life,
and wonder what percentage of that time was spent
either feeling sorry for myself or making it easy for
other people to feel sorry for me.
Besides that, I can't think of much summary besides
(CENSORED),
And what does that say about me?
Except I'm insecure and crave attention
And tote around a lot of amplified emptiness

My kidneys popped
the cork of a champagne they call
oxycodone and auld lang syned for awhile,
with some streamers and a self-pity headache,
before swallowing

And who gives a god damn about editing.
I can't stress enough how much of a joykill it has been
for the past eight years or so
knowing that 99% of the drivel I drivel isn't worth the energy it takes to press the buttons on the keyboard,
and any snooty literatus would find maybe one good line
in six pages of my penned performance,
my weak stage and set of a one-woman show
in which I'm hardly propping myself up.

people only read the work of a hack
they want to shack up with,
and that's factual, it's apparent
by the end of the first act
(I mean, it takes much less time than that
to understand she's just hacking,
but the author herself spent a good few years
thinking her one or two absorbed readers maybe wanted to shack up with her language
and not her. but let's let bygones be bygones.)

Percocet, dear,
where's the remote?
reach up into my unsolvable tired mindfuck
and turn on the television,
something really numbing, please,
and while you're up there would you mind slaughtering all my brainchildren?
I tried my best to abort them like I did the ones in my uterus,
but you can't pay $400 and get that done at the Carolina Center for Women.

Confidence, C. Braden,
That's what you need,
A belief that your words and thoughts and deeds are worthwhile.
You can construct clever things,
you can,
if you can manage to refrain from preemptively deconstructing them long enough to believe your own two hands.
You've been operating on praise for far too long,
which means you've hardly been operational, because you definitely don't get enough praise to sustain you,
not like you used to,
but everyone praises children.

I kicked a little godling
with a 50-cent toy crane
and I whispered to the godling
something whimperingly maudlin
and in the mawkish pause that followed
the wee godlet, gee,
guffawed at me and
hollowed out the whole negation of the universe
with some sickening nectar of
sweet agitation
with the American Atheists and me.

Godling! God Feeling! I will you to wee.
A sterile piss substance,
The gildedest of showers, the giltest of waste
of your that-being powers, and,
frowning down into your phallus for hours,
when-it unyielding the volume of trickle
you'd expected to falling-from-you see,
admit sentimentally some admissionary thing
that will make me feel I have overpowered you
(in proving to you that the glue
that holds your vain Hope together
is a cheap universalist apoxy that
has proven unresilient when eroded
by postmodernism and the two-of-spades
trumping power of vanity).

So there. So what.
I suppose I always thought
there'd be some additional lesson -
to be revealed by age and wisdom -
beyond my mother's initial and repeated
"Life isn't fair."

But that's it, and that's all,
It was just a bit confusing
Being born on a Monday,
somewhat pretty,

And being coddled by my elders into thinking
I was worth something.

cheryllayne @ 2009-11-02T20:52:00

2009-11-03T01:53:09Z

I support the mixing of metaphors in certain circles.

cheryllayne @ 2009-11-02T00:26:00

2009-11-02T06:32:36Z

Woken with an understatement would be a start.
For the light-hearted, for the light-hearted
For the dimly light of Living Through
of Having Lived Through
with all its unexpected
headcases, courtcases, uppercases,
its removable with teeth or pliers faceplate
pried off by a number of misincorporated asides
next to dead-end multi-colored wires either fried or not utilized by this unequipped edition
with its words fall like cheap and tiny vacuumable scraps
inappropriately not at all shaped by their originating brainwater.

Evenings of the hold your wist, your sigh, into this barleywine night, you've never drunk it,
were no setup for the realer, the rarer nostalgia felt by us the broken.
Squawking two tones into our locally grown natural theology,
split tones into the openness of a sensory-deprived
cosmological anomaly the collapsing universe
burst by its eardrums bent by its joints snapped by its similarity
to the fingers of others many of whom
strike outward and lonely into the thriller dark expanse of manliness
aggression
with a mind to personal universe expansion to fill already full corners
with cum but we grow speechy here, in a glitch of crossed wires,
a jaw-jerk, a simulacrum of everything's a perversion even before it started being

a thing I think about often
in the sped up or slowed down of a day's worth of footsteps from room to room and task to task
with a clarity paling whatever the facts are or whatever fear-explaining summary of events could never do them justice
where in ten years the feeling a throat constricted gazing over the Christmas turducken
in five minutes remembering six hands grabbing bare legs and panties
hour upon hour repeating a cold shiver of disgust at what can't be purged from
the brain's myelinated amber samples, the dickensian dwarf star
that is the self downtrodden, pukingly tortured by
the never-dying voices,
rattling around in the white and gray matter,
of not one not four something like eight attackers all granted
by the fates a voicebox for producing perpetual sounds
with which to pursue my escapee memories on behalf of the furies.

laughable inquest into the what is it innocent cavorting
of a drunken sailor aside and replaced by the investigations
of the genuinely sympathetic still fails to locate a trace
arche-writing included
or for that matter anything but a deeply foundational metaphysics
the metaphysics of centuries of saints and rapists.
the devastatingly altered might say
there's nothing worse than a permanent tattoo you have to look at
that's in plain view with neither mirrors nor periscopes to assist in the seeing.
but in the grand scheme of things isn't it pretty to know you are the original breach that creates language,
really an unfortunate test-dummy or guinea pig crushed under the wheels of an ever-evolving natural justice.

calamity jane

2009-10-28T23:01:04Z

my friends page is empty.
dead dead dead livejournal.

Everything I imagine happens.

cheryllayne @ 2009-10-14T01:04:00

2009-10-14T06:03:51Z

When I'm alone at night, my imagination comes up with all sorts of awfulness, and I am afraid. I check the locks again and again. I stay in my bedroom with the door shut, but every so often I walk through the apartment turning on all the lights to make sure no one is there. Every little noise makes me start, and I just have to check again. It's scary to think that there's just one door between me and everything outside. Everything. Whenever I put money away, I picture someone threatening me and asking me where it is. My U.S. dollars.

it started with art criticism

2009-10-14T01:27:01Z

a narcissist and a hypochondriac

cheryllayne @ 2009-09-15T23:05:00

2009-09-16T03:10:48Z

manual labor siphons the brain's allotment of energy
and i have an extensive neural network of coffee-making (and -selling) knowledge

cheryllayne @ 2009-09-07T23:02:00

2009-09-08T03:05:03Z

I don't know who I am anymore. I feel like my Self has been obliterated. I am a Stranger.

cheryllayne @ 2009-08-23T04:55:00

2009-08-23T08:55:30Z

No audience? No matter.

And I'll sleep the sleep of the innocent.