2023 VMAs has me riled up

Lana Del Ray just won best alternative at the VMAs and I'm mad enough to throw hands. I have very strong opinions that essentially boil down to: alternative pop will always win against just plain ol' alt, and is also kind of an oxymoron if you think about it. Alt pop being an alternative kind of pop is not the problem, it's that it's still pop. It should be in the pop category, not alternative. Jesus, you would think they'd give bands like Paramore and Fall Out Boy a chance to win for fucking once. But pop always wins, I guess.

forgotten under beds

I can't stop what I can't understand. We'll do what we thing we're meant to, meanwhile dreaming of half-lit fires and impulses that would send us home in boxes. It's always better to be more vague. I am a reflection now, a master of showing people what they want to see and being mistaken as see-through. I can't stop what I...

Sometimes you should put up a fight. Stop rolling over, we fight like dogs at the pound, wire mesh restraining our bared teeth and teary bites. Is it better on the other side? This is always a joke, and always still a cry for help.

I want to run away from home, walk a million miles, never cry again, dissapear inside a city that will never know my name. Become one with the masses, climb out onto my roof, hanging halfway out the window. Don't want to join the graveyard littered with ladybug corpses, forgotten under beds and in boxes. I don't want to lose you. I don't want you to forget me. We've never even met.

sea-struck

We're taking the power. Misery is power. So many wars, so little time. Failure's not really, only practice for something better. Hate to let things go to waste, go to waste on a nothing page. I'm mourning you, but you're still here. Inventing, inventing gravity. Pass the bear on the way by, get eaten by bear, eat the bear. Buried under wrong tombstones. Neurodiversion (I'll show you a meltdown). Fangs are for tigers.

How she says "I have a kid who..." like a deficit. I'm aware I don't have all the whole parts, defunct but not willing to go back to the factory; last chance price markdown, all sales final. This isn't just interest, this is possession. Crawling into other people's bodies like I'll fit better in someone else's skin. Curse earth sea disco. Sea-struck wind-blown boy, all alone on the shore as a storm rages above him. Salt-soaked down to his bones. "If I awoke from a dream, I would wish it was all a lie" and I would wish I couldn't lie. Create a truth serum that works, a cheat for self-control I don't have. Misery is (will)power.

hear the world in a mist or spell (Not Otranto)

 I’ve given up on trying to understand what poems mean from the author’s perspective, because sometimes it feels like my brain doesn’t work like that. I’m much better at reading lines and molding them into my own perspectives. Poetry from rephrasing other people’s words. Transformative work, I guess you could call it.

Otranto by Barbara Guest is interesting.

Now understand that I don’t know what it means at all, only what it can mean through my lens. I only understand the italicized lines in my own way. I take snippets and I don’t care for the whole. Otranto is a place in Italy.

The ghost in their nostrils like a memory of a smell that makes you ache and puts tension in your head. They only see the moon as it wanes away. Never say nothing can’t ever mean anything. 

Words burnt if they quickened. Faster out of mouths, tongues causing friction to catch on fire. The ship means something to create a bridge of worlds, take him somewhere new (or anywhere at all). Hear the world in a mist or spell, under a spell of faraway. The shared bitterness on skin, between teeth, salty tears, sweet smiles, bitter ink. Mosaics cracked still seem untouched. 

Borrowed sky asks for seeking direction, I’m directionless, pointing north in my sleep and every other way when awake. 

In smoke, in print, in dark. In print on fire, burning words and lighting up the night. Here’s something for “transformative”. Learn from invaders who crave it, how to burn something holy.

Armored wrens, soaring so heavy, falling so weightless. Beak-mark arrows to the heart. 

Night through a screen, eyes burning from light after the sun goes down. Can’t close my eyes, can’t sleep though the heavy pull of unconsciousness draws me closer. Always on the edge. Ghosts they store, then bring it out of hiding. More than a few still sleep in the closet. 

Watch as the towers bend to one another, heads bowed as if speaking, structure creaking, drawing into some cosmic pull. Much like sleep, only more destruction.

Drag a carcass over a blunt road like a roadkill animal. A funeral pyre for a body-less soul, they will never find it. On a ship somewhere, covered in mist. Maybe a killing’s taken place.

Whatever this is, it is not Otranto.