feelings are boring, kissing is awesome

i'm jealous.
of something i don't understand.
i think it's a four letter word,
prefaced by years, neigh
millenia of severe hatred,
something i also don't understand.
because when i see your hands
reach towards each other
in the television illuminated night
my bitterness breaks in comparison
to something so beautiful.

take that split second still longer,
and it makes me feel like an outsider.
i wish i could comprehend the abstract,
rationalize it all,
so that when i see you with each other
my mind fascinates with each individual
facet the oddity of you all.
how rare, how bizarre, how amazing
that despite fear, there is still this thing.

i wonder why you two couldn't feel for me that way which makes
me stay to watch you uncomfortably,
but eventually
forces me to leave,
slamming doors as i go.
and while that time ticks on, i ask
why couldn't anyone feel that way about me?

but you two,
with two eyes
so transfixed
jump start
my dull existence.
go with god.

Chemistry is Sexy

Hot & Heavy w/ Lab Equipment
ENGL 217 Elora Apantaku November 12, 2007

I reach for you, top shelf, behind locked glass doors,
You were crafted in Italy, I can tell, when I heat you and you don’t shatter to shards.
I should’ve grabbed the sparklighter in the drawer, but we’re doing chemicals: phenolphthalein—
C-twenty, H-fourteen, O-how I stare through goggled eyes across granite, “God you’re gorgeous”.
The stimulus snaps facial capillaries, face proposing a pinkish hue
like the sodium hydroxide solution we’re mixing when the pH goes past 8.2

Do you taste like what you are, (slowly turning to water as we mix?)
Or what you look like? (the pomegranate of potassium permanganate)
I won’t know much else, when the labs are completed and due, than silver nitrate,
photography dust, etched blue these hands trying to measure every OH- within you.

ONLY WORDS

Nothing I say is interesting enough to repeat

I see faces full of disinterest wherever I go, but I know still

I don’t need words to make me complete.

I store useless knowledge and hand them out as treats

For example: “did you know a whale in a day can eat a gigaton of krill?”

Nothing I say is interesting enough to repeat…

Babbling and moaning meaningless meter, I excrete

Tasteless tales which renders silenced listeners to pray for my lips to remain… still,

Yet I don’t need words to make me complete.

Talk, insensible, renders my words an intangible, repetitive bleat.

When finally I reveal quintessential veracity, your reluctant mind instills

“Nothing she says is interesting enough to repeat”

A word, after all, is only air rising through the larynx and there are ways to cheat

Language: A slight arousal of the eyebrows, a pinch of the lips, a stare that decimates like a falling anvil.

I don’t need words to make me complete.

It would be best if I was a mute, or discreet,

So that the focus was me, and not the plethora of words fit for a land fill

Nothing I say is interesting enough to repeat

But I don’t need words to make me complete.

this is a villanelle. it carries a patter of only two rhymes, and is marked by its alternating refrain, which appears initially in the first and third lines of the opening tercet.

Author's Preface

The purpose of a preface, supposedly, is to set about reasons for writing a book and thanking individuals who may have assisted in the writing process. I will set about doing both of these things, and hopefully complete this mission.

Firstly let me say that what you're about to start reading is, or at least should be, something new and novel. My eighth grade english teacher always told us that if you were going to invest the energy to make a comment in class, you'd better bring up something new and novel. I don't think I even knew what novel meant in eighth grade, but oh well. I also didn't know what diabetes was, how to flirt, or how to derive differential equations.

I didn't want to set about writing something that would be dull. The best books in my mind are always the ones that are interesting enough to keep you reading, but at the same time, intellectual enough for you to walk away feeling like you've learned something. Most books that I've read have morals (are you listening whoever wrote The Stranger?). Eww Camus. I also felt that there was something seriously missing in society today. Maybe it is the reaction of the minority against the majority, but I honestly felt that people should be different, and I guess, more like me, despite how lame or controlling or creepy that sounds. I knew writing a book wouldn't change this per se, but I wanted to attempt to put out in display another way that people can live their lives. I wouldn't say that there is anything truly odd about me. If you were to know me, you'd know that I'm normal, seemingly so. But there are a lot of little things about me that makes it difficult for me, it seems, at times, to connect with other people in the world.

So now we must approach the book, and what it attempts to look at. The title, may or may not be, a little misleading. This is not a love story, although one could read it that way. It is much more about me, an individual, struggling with understanding herself. People always say it is much harder to know yourself than to know others. This novel attempts to catalogue as much as I know about myself. There is a lot of love in this book, but there are different types of love. Part of my struggle is understanding the differences.

You could read this story as an autobiography. But it is slightly fictionalized. I don't think I could write an interesting story without adding some small dose of lies. This book is all about me and my freshmen year at a small liberal arts school. I have to confront a lot of issues that I could barely approach in high school. Most of the characters I introduce are heavily based on or are real people (although names have been changed).

The book has many layers to it, because I feel that reading should be entertaining, and with the introduction of television and the internet it has been further compromised as a form of entertainment. Enjoy the comic strip sections, the random definitions, the drawings, and the art. If you are not completely satisfied, well, I'd say you'd get your money back, but I won't risk it.
I would like to thanks all the people I met and got to know from living with them, day and night. Some people are much more central to the development of intellectual issues, some people are more important for plot, but everyone I mention serves their part in telling my story. My parents were integral for this book's development. My mom and dad both aspire to write books, and I've spent an entire life thinking about the importance of written words. Without them to set an example, I would have lived with all of this inside of me, building/creating tension.

Get ready to enjoy. Let me just finish by saying, thank you for reading this, and if there's anything I can do for you, just ask.

Moon Shadow

The sun
darkens.
It,
a yellow colored
swaying,
second-hand guitar.
She laughs
two rivers
of silver starlight.
Breathing,
I know you are alright.
Each morning
my heart hands
rattle the clouds,
the moon.

Hibiscus

This is a flower.
From central America.
It is orange,
like the sun, early in the morning,
or late at night.
It is wrapped with the husk of
a coconut tree's protective material.
But still, it is orange,
which symbolizes vitality
with endurance.
Violence.
Beautiful, gorgeous violence.

Midday at Frank's (censored)

Midday at Frank’s

My body is awash in coke’s carbonated syrup bubbles…

So this is the feeling that predominates when one does something questionable.

Yesterday I woke up, singing and dancing in ecstacy,

Ignorance is bliss, and it has a beat.

Today I greeted the sunrise sans a sleepy smile—

I couldn’t get up on my own feet.

Yesterday’s night found me playing like a high school girl,

Underneath your fluorescent light, as oppressive to my eyes as today’s grilled chicken was to my tongue,

My words were charred; the regurgitation of my agitated mind.

I entreated you to a smoothie at the Coop,

A shake down the road at trans fat central,

Grab a cappuccino at the Starbucks fifty miles away,

But elevated levels of sugar in my blood made me blind,

I couldn’t read you.

French fries wouldn’t win you over,

You want enlightenment, but not the buddha’s belly.

All is understood.

When rainbow sherbet is done melting, it leaves a peachy liquid mess in my Edy’s cup.

When I am done melting, I’ll leave a mess, but it won’t be well contained.

I sit, waiting, for the night you’ll tell me something,

And I’ll be able to read you like a menu.

Now I sit in confusion, with my brightly colored fiesta dish ware spread out in front of me like a map,

making smiley faces out of today’s lunch.

Prince + Leopard + Pumps + Sims

Prince is screeching over the radio again,
And I promised myself that this week is going to be different—
Each day will be filled with just as much
Spite, spunk, and sexiness as each one of his seven inch pumps.

And maybe with the new leopard print silk cami,
And a few spells from the pagan in room 103,
I’ll achieve this instantaneous wish,
Which will vanish tomorrow morning when I wake up
And crawl towards my laptop
With its glowing energy consuming
screen, and I lose myself to the Sims.

Because honestly,
I’m not real enough to enjoy plantations of carnations,
Llamas in pajamas,
The gleam of slowly melting ice cream,
Or the design of sunshine,
Bleeding through the oak canopies,
And crash landing on the side walk,
As I jive in my light blue nike soakers
To class across the way.

So maybe it’s best I play with the make-believe,
Because as we speak the quad is a battlefield, bleeding soldiers everywhere,
my dorm room is submerged underwater, and mermaids are offering free strawberry daquiri’s,
And I’ve been unanimously appointed empress of the world.

Ode to a Raven's Feather

This esoteric thing, clinging
Tentatively to blades of grass,
But not to life, which it denies,
And which life denied it always;
This cryptic dark raven’s feather,
Fragile and velvet to the touch,
Like a cheap dress from the nineties,
You, raven’s feather have seen it
Seen it all through your avian,
Your master, though not anymore.

Now you are light and unrestrained,
And in this quest you have succumbed
To this—messy and wild, like the
Idled drawings of a toddler.
How crazed at nature’s mistreatment
A caregiver who cannot care,
You were scared in the long black nights,
Though nothing would try to harm you
Ominous as you are, like death.
The crows laugh at you for you are
A poor lost soul, swimming in Styx.
Free? You may be but do not feel.
Fighting for what never will be,
Negotiation back into
A home, at last, again, once more
But this is a substance free dream
A play written by a demon.
Because you were not made to last.

And as you lie here on the ground
You make to scream but there’s no sound.

Raven's Feather

ENGL 217: Poetry

Raven's Feather

here lies the discarded raven's feather, tossed out
for all purposes useless, like clipped toe nails,
lightly resting on a sea of short grasses,
protected, wavering on a bed of lucky clovers.
sharply, quickly graduated from the purest avian white
to the blackest black as decreed by humanity.

shattered feather shaft, exploded from its raven home.
the wind picked it up to rest here-
mussed and wild, the effects of poor upkeep,
each feather string like a poorly moussed hair.

but this black feather is not desolation's symbol;
here a little black fly walks up, down,
traversing on a journey in its new home.

in this way the breakdown is the preservation,
as the fly lives a day on vacation.

HELLO! I AM A HYPOGLYCEMIC ZOMBIE CRAVING SAUSAGE EGG MCMUFFINS!!

I think I'll start posting more, since college really IS boring. So much free time... *sigh*. Anyway, I'll talk about this (and by this, I mean yesterday's) morning, since it was scary...

HELLO! I AM A HYPOGLYCEMIC ZOMBIE CRAVING SAUSAGE EGG MCMUFFINS!!

If you didn't know, I have diabetes. It is a rather fun illness, in that I get to scare people with my needles. I usually wake up in the morning a little low, meaning I need sugar, right away, or I will eventually slip into a coma, start shaking, and eventually, die. This morning, however, I woke up lower than low, and was sent stumbling out the door to find breakfast. Why I didn't simply buy a coke or a powerade from the vending machines is beyond me. I believe my blood sugar was so incredibly low, that my brain couldn't compute it, and so went about making me do things that I didn't actually want to do.

To save you from a boring account of EVERYTHING I can remember, I will simply state my morning as such: Twenty minutes after getting into my car, I arrived back at the freshmen parking lot with a sausage egg mcmuffin (why sausage? I don't even like sausage!) and a large sprite.

Honestly, I don't remember coming or going, just walking back up the hill, talking to myself (How the hell did I get a sausage egg mcmuffin?! I hate sausage egg mcmuffins! How am I still alive anyway?!), and pondering if perhaps the only reason God keeps me alive is to send me on crazy hypoglycemic quests.

Language

Introduction to Creative Writing: Poetry
...try to recall a very early experience you had reading or hearing language that interested or excited or confused or enlightened you. Now write about that experience, trying to describe what about the text got to you and why.

When I was younger, I assumed that all languages were the same. When I heard people speak different languages, my explanation for that was simply that they knew more words than I did, and one day, I would know what they were saying. My best friend, for the last nine years, is South Korean. I enjoy listening in on her conversations with her mom, carried out completely in Korean, listening to the way they talk, holding onto syllables longer than you hold onto English words, making it sounds like they were perpetually whining. But it lilted more, it had more texture, it went farther than the flatness of my own language.

After school one day in the sixth grade, I went over to my friend’s apartment. She had recently gotten into reading manga, small, overpriced, anime graphic novels. Spread out around her were multitudes of little books. She was reading them when I came in, and so excited was she about them that she dragged me over to the couch to show me them. She flipped through the books, telling me the general plot, “All of them are in a band together”, and noting some of her funnier observations. “All the guys look like girls!” she giggled, “especially this one” she said pointing to a drawing of what looked exactly like a woman. Soon her enthusiasm became my own, and I wanted to read manga, too. Only one problem stood between us sharing a hobby. I couldn’t read Korean.

I told her that, and she looked at me for a second. “Oh, it’s okay”, she said, but I couldn’t remember how hard it was to learn how to read when I was little, and I imagined it would be quite difficult. I told her this, but she rebutted, “It’s not that hard, I learned how to read in like a month, it wasn’t that bad”. I looked at her skeptically. She pointed to a series of symbols, and sounded them out. She looked back at me like it must’ve been the easiest thing in the world. “Cool,” I said, because I was now convinced, more than ever, that I could learn Korean in a couple of weeks. There are twenty-six letters in English, and I figured there couldn’t be many more sounds in Korean. And for the next couple minutes we trekked on through pages of, to me, indecipherable symbols and anime drawings.

And then, like an elephant walking into a room, or a piano dropping out of a building, it occurred to me that something was terribly wrong. Even if I learned how to pronounce the letters, I would still never understand what I was saying. My hopes plummeted, and I told my friend. She thought about it for a second, and started laughing at our momentary lack of comprehension. Still, I was determined to be able to read the Korean alphabet, but even this hope dissipated when I found myself unable to escape the embarrassment of thinking that learning a language could be accomplished within a month.

There are relatively few differences between languages if one simply listens to sounds, made by vowels and consonants. That is why, listening to a different language, I sometimes hear something similar to an English word and get excited. But there are millions of differing combinations which create the vast vocabularies of individual languages. While I listen to my friend talk to her mom, I may quietly admire the beauty of a foreign language, but must have the final piece, understanding, denied to me.