Ready or Not: I May Never Come

I am covered in a burn-victim’s skin. Dead
casing, blemished tissue on fire, written in bold
letters by repressed molestation. I am mentally
dying to physically let anyone in. My vagina yearns to
be your walk-in closet; a sexual skyscraper, a place to hang
your won battles, your elated moans, your conspicuous yet
tastefully frustrated erection.

I shut off before secretion filled euphoria
clothes your fingers in feminine
moisture, naked sorrows I’ve yet to feel. I’d pay in holy
matrimony and motherhood; a sonnet to be peeled
and publicized in your muscular weaponry.

I wake in dream; as the pulsating of my Labia overheats,
thoughts of you surge sexual twitches
down to my polka-dot sock covered feet
during the movements of my virgin mind’s rapid
eye. Will I ever come round to you and me, fucking? Scratch
that, making love? A pure lady must never
curse, is what mother conditioned this philosophical damsel
to have confidence in.

I’ve been called a couple of things; a whore by those who
never had the chance to lick my fruit, a tease by those who my
qualms of intimacy left under the covers, writhing in pain with
blue-balls, and a bitch by those whose cum
my throat demanded never being fiercely glazed by.
One thing I have yet to be called; a lover of sexual
nature, whose rhythm is flawless in interpretation.

Ready or not, I doubt ever coming close.

I Give Thanks

To everything that was
beautiful and to nothing
that hurt. To that lone pink
Carnation that greets me each
time I sit beside the swamp
the poolman neglects, savoring the
addiction to grandma’s pleasure and
elation: a Marlboro Red. To durable, seclusion
prone, parental disconnect; vital signs
enduring the blank pages invisibly
filled with type B-misunderstood
secrets of a malfunctioning bad
seed, a 17-year-old “daddy’s little girl” before
he set out, exiting off life’s restless stage with his
intrinsic, fatherless frenzy. To certain colors of
a finger-painting precedent: colors that mottle
what my sight visualizes. To relentless arguing
with sixteen and its testosterone-driven flavor
of the month. To the troubles of sleeping; pills
never suited insomnia’s number one case
study. To exhausted daily sunup, I hope
he never explores ruins of brain calculating in
golden mines of cataclysmic dejection of
self. To Springsteen being on fire, I fathom never
understanding and that speaks levels of
inhibited, disturbing capacity. To an Israeli-clad
dessert table missing pies fused with pumpkin, turkeys
never coated in tart, cranberry sauce; We are
not Americans, she says. To having been twenty-one, gone
astray and in marvel of what I would
befall. To today, being twenty-six, heightened without
bookends as my insides fall off the bone; emotional distress
is chief fodder for growth. To occupations which indoctrinate
ironic humility in impassive memorization; To poets who
find necessary arrogance in the seventh
heaven of their recollections. To the life I have
secretly treasured yet candidly lived in
fret, I give thanks.

Speak

“The pen is the tongue of the mind.” -Miguel de Cervantes


Smooth and universal not
racist against cultural hands rough
at times lacking ink, depth and
powerful resignation of one’s
penmanship. An instrument to document
history, no matter the ample truths or
extravagant lies.


I can call you Vic, like my Guatemalan
mother calls him Dabid, Her
nationality you would not comment
on due to your unobtrusive, non-judging
intrinsic quality.

You are like my tongue, engaging
in poetic discourse with paper about
my mind’s habitual condemnation of self


worth, everlasting
scholarship, and the adoption of embracing
uncertain success

With you what lies within can exist
upon earth. Cohesive, raw and
misunderstood. My sweaty grip on
you does not falter, as talent breaking
your ballpoint barrier, and through your
channel of navy blue sustainability, finds epic
sound in requests of literary genius
igniting writer’s block. Personified language
lays upon the sheets of paper you
call home. I am home

and this is how I speak.

You Deserve A Pulitzer Too

I woke to thirteen raging voice messages, twenty-
seven abandoned calls on my part. You just called to tell
me you loved me, thinking you were Wonder with
a voice like no other. You’ve neglected to welcome your
dose of Lithium once again.

I’ve studied Sylvia and Anne, beyond
the grave. I’ve studied you in the flesh, in my dreams, and
in bottles of medication flushed down grandma’s
toilet, Circa 1993. You spoke to god that day. I watched from the
sidelines in my Barbie nightgown and miss-angled
bangs as the freckled paramedic, emulating your Happy Days
crush Richie Cunningham, took you away. Note to self: Never allow
Khaleh Rachel inches near you with scissors in tow.

It was half past ten, waiting in the lobby sleepy-eyed, I laid upright
wrapped in Khaleh Farideh’s warmth. I looked up as she stroked
my curly black hair, a saintly vision in white struck my sight.
I ran to you, your hospital gown smelling of your peculiar
psychosis, your I.V dripping morphine to bore stiff the emotions of
a widowed mind, twenty-one years and counting. You gave me
a bag of rainbow-sprinkled cookies, a pencil topped with a heart
eraser, and a hug. You leaned in and whispered, I‘ll never die. These
voices won’t allow me to.

Lay vibrant and positive upon a garden of selfish
flowers, I say. Warm and youthful nostalgia, life before
becoming the esteemed doctor who fell a casualty to
domestic abuse. Though it still runs through your blood,
the dictator of your marital incarceration is gone. Those
around you arbitrate, knowing nothing. You know
everything. You know the truth, imaginary or not. Fault rests
in their futile judgments, not in your rapturous years.
Memories of you are bullet-proof, calling to my comprehension
your accomplishments, vaccinated from any assassination,
not your illness, despite the anti-mediocre thoughts it inspired.

Women

Of the Iranian confinement, run deficient
on charm, like nearing empty the gas
gauge of a 1987 diesel-powered
Mercedes.

Freedom never flourishes as their aesthetics do, fashionably
too late. They lack formal education, incarcerating
their own precious wills, taken delicate care of
by their prosperous men.

Coco Chanel is the only demure glory that their ignorance,
due to their innate compliance, allows them to abide by; she sparkles
rich dictation. These women, in desire, acquire only
diluted selflessness.

Women of the Iranian confinement carry what they believe
is their god-given prerogative, cheerless to the naked
American eye. In assimilating, bronzer caked on cheeks, number five
dabbed behind the ears; all reminiscent of a rich
housewife belonging to Atlanta.

Freedom is defined by their husband’s platinum checks
on no account necessitating equilibrium.
Stature defines twenty-four karats of gold,
not fourteen and plated.
Warmth is a mink coat, not a husband’s
cheap love.

Women of the Iranian confinement, run
unfilled on civilized emotions,
like the narrow piece of silver on the synthetic
license that defines them, unresponsive
after countless swipes at the local department store.

They live unscathed and naïve as rough creatures
of habit as I sit, resembling one only by
features, writing this poem.

Pop's Little Girl (Revised)

“Hey little girl is your daddy home? Did he go and leave you all alone?”
I’m On Fire -Bruce Springsteen


Little girl, don’t you forget his face.
Close father’s hazel-suffused skylights and lie
still. Split seconds perpetuate aches, somewhere
under flower-hindering soil, not over any battered
indigo rainbows, resilient
from terror.

Spun out for certainty; children books lay upon egg yolk
wooden shelves, lacking in sustenance. Emotional
distress is no fodder for offspring. Peanut butter and jelly,
ceaselessly floating above you. Thunder’s tears water
your not guilty plea of sorrow, to
grow without due consideration.

Tap, on the sunflower seed road to past strawberry
milk wishes, Dorothy’s broken slippers. Slipping,
these moments collapse innocence,
like those fallen to their death after a frightening,
terrorist sparked-reign.
Little girl, he will never define
release. Releasing you from drenched nightmares, home
to his short-lived love,
lost.


Blemished, inevitably you will recoil
time and time again,
into lukewarm thoughts prior to the burning of your bare flesh
before home is recovered, in memory.

Little girl, someday when time arrives in cold
death,
he will find you, well.
Essential wellness, father’s resistance and daughter’s love neither parting,
emerging.

December 23, 2002 (Revised)

There is no dying this
time for you,
mother.

Echoing, my childish existence plunges
en route to a cuttingly saccharine downfall.
Cooking your holiday feast
met its end. My fiasco disrupting senses
of calm on more than one
occasion, though never this savory, enough
for me.

A glistening potion, administered
to fill a life without him. You pushed
and kneaded him, I needed him like
dreidel cookie batter kneads soft
to the touch. Reminiscence aids the ivy, green
with poison. A clear channel of subtle
healing, flowing through plasma releases my
wild, endorphine-inhabiting pleasures.
Yours melted by the smooth gelt
dampened under the weight of no
medical insurance. An indemnity towards health
was not promised as a parting gift, from him
to you. Your child supported less.

A metaphorical death so deep into
its grave, the sting of Miss Morphine
lent my corpse the sole decision
of accepting. A ride upon a halfheartedly
lit miasma, entering the world
of otherworldly itches—unrushed
to any interruption.

A moment murdering this subdued
twinge. Like a vulture possessing candor, she
caressed my aches never remissive towards
my fears.

No clear or crystal chance for parole, not for you or him.

Harsh Remembrances Breed Goodbyes (Unconditional Time 2009 Revision)

Mother gave birth to me, no crib
in sight. Fatherless you, during your birth, and I,
both immersed in doubt. On the verge of twenty-
five, still I wonder where you ended, and
why I began.

Your sly charisma spotted her at In-N-Out,
a tart, cranberry autumn in 1981.
Her Middle Eastern eyebrows arched
so high, she resembled, though subtly darker
and glistening, the Fawcett you fancied on
the crumbling wall of your Israeli barracks.
(You knew you wished she were yours.)
A Toman for your thoughts, a diamond
in your rough Netanya edifice, open to condemning
insults and the ill praise of the overseas brute.
Mother never knew subservience,
until you.

Your free spirit left into the luminous lake
of midnight on March 25, 2002.
Your dollars freed from caged child support—null
and void, you liberated, daughterless brute you.
Simply a sperm donor; poor in possessing any
fervor for love, positively absorbed by
lack of innate fatherly accomplishments.

Your absence ticks, dead and bolted
to the wall; its exhausted influx beats compelling
anger into me, no more living beneath shadows
of a brute's corpse, retaliating in remembrance of what
was never had. What was never had, breeds
along with time; along a deep watchtower I
remain, buoyant in scraps of DNA shallowness.
Shallow respirations that lie unconditionally, producing wounds
of rare healing in abundance.

These bitter remnants of a battered self-awareness wait
for you to bandage them no more. Laying around like the best
crimson crayon, worn down to the nub yet
never destined to see its demise; these replayed,
fragile, onyx emotions find their final stop
at a hault.

I casually breathe in existence,
re-affirmed and harshly exhale your false
stature, as it crumbles beneath
my chest.

Shabe Eshgh هایده

I know I don't hold fast to my roots but in the darkness of dreams, my memory retreats to physical photographs of Iranian heritage wafting through my mother's living room on the corner of Melrose and Hayworth. When I close my eyes I can still feel the ample sting of my parents love embracing all the subsistence that belonged to my ingenuity at the tender age of 4. I recall by heart living my life, walking on clouds rather than eggshells, and bid it a tender farewell. <3

Nelly Furtado - Try

It never gets any easier. It does not fade away with the presence of new time, of a new love, or the loss of an old romance. I remember my time with him and I'll refuse ever a chance to forget it. The smiles were fulfilling, the fights left imprinted aches on my 19 year-old psyche. "That was you baby, this is me baby." All that we did was try, and that in itself was a triumphant feat. Thanks for having been the love of a certain time in my life.

Morning View

You were my reason for not allowing that rusty
blade to perpetuate its impurities upon my
flesh that summer when I turned seventeen, up
on that hill overlooking the horrid valley.
I wished you were there.

I remember driving down Topanga, listening to
Incubus and relishing in the beauty that was, and
remains, your ample comedic and handsome existence.
I’ve never written about you. The ambivalent yet loving
recollections of my father never allowed me to. At this moment, twenty-
six years of whirlwind-winter shackles no longer bind me and I
thank god for that.

I remember digging my sparkling-fuchsia painted toes in the tainted sand, cheering you on in your winning feat as not only Arapahoe High School’s essential quarterback but mine as well, as the freedom from any further bouts of the ironically-comforting deprecation, filling the non-physical element belonging to myself, was graciously granted in your presence.

I remember knocking back caramel fraps in that heat wave which left
our bronzed skin of desire to the fair eye, when we strolled through Third
Street and you bought me an indigenous-inspired anklet, after being star-
struck by Police Academy’s Mahoney. Only you, and your celebratory antics could make me giggle.

I remember the sting of sun-drenched summertime departing; another year of post-marked mail, non of it addressed to me. I, a sixteen-year-old lost in the imbalances of serotonin, sobbed silently in that car ride to the terminal where you said goodbye. I wore that beaded thread like a shield to protect me from the evils of high school and its epic, teenage life-affirming cliques. Because of you, I knew I belonged somewhere.

A decade has passed, tumultuous changes leaving us tested and
frightened. The captor of my youthful yesterdays had suffered two heart
attacks renouncing him a time-bomb waiting to go off at any swift, intangible instant. The mother who brought your matchless subsistence into my life, survived an incapacitating brain aneurysm. He lays comatose, brain dead in all emotions. She loves as she always did and has promise in living no matter the charismatic teeter-tottering of masked hurdles, and I thank god for that.

I always wanted another girl‘s
paradise, until you taught me how
to want my own. Thoughts of you lope through my
head, with powerful memories beyond measure nestled in my character.

I wish now, as I did then, that you were here.

Mi Familia

The Brady Bunch had nothing on The Khankhanian Klan. :)

My Mother's Mother

Here I sit in the outskirts of your paradise, my
fear, my head between my aging hands. I am nearly four annual-
filled miseries away from thirty, and I cannot
smoke these Marlboros fast enough to lay
deep within this lawn, entangled in
your see-through, vein-faced arms.

A year ago, about a leisurely moving quarter
past twelve in the ample, starlit morning, I fell
into a sweet, undisturbed, blue
laziness. A year ago, about an obdurate half
past twelve in the excruciatingly sunlit
afternoon, you blundered at the evening’s impending
moon, and prayed us a fond
valediction.

After my birth, I was diagnosed as emotionally
ill. During your life, I accepted the sentiment of being
rescued. After it, I was prescribed peace in the form of
a pill. I ruminate your essential complexion urgently
through my head; a sovereign foreigner, a human
chimney that could out smoke any man, a barbecuing chicken-
charcoal loving queen, and a powerful woman afflicted
by Alzheimer’s, Dementia, Emphysema, and Asthma.

A tattered snapshot of you, sending
me off to tap the sublime heights of indispensable
youth on a rubber seat, holding on for Crayola-
obsessed life manifested into chains, that reads Kodak in
grey type, housed in a teal-sparked, copper-
made skeleton, remains obligated to all the park
birthday parties you sumptuously hosted. The homeless
and I never went hungry.

You had clothed me in tender pride up until your final
lungful. You fed me Big Macs minus the thousand-
island dressing, bought me bouncing tie-dye balls, and acrylic
paint. I remember your laughter, the dearest
dose to a six-year-old’s despondency, as you’d make me
breakfasts of splendid glory to wake to.

Your body was exhausted of that phenomenally, godly
spirit on a Thursday morning. I now wake to
your license of vocal sound tapped out
at the hub. Frozen, green grape promises waft
through my conscience. Your remains reside in
thoughts of immortality, as the vision of your curls
doused in Alberto V05’s hot oil keep me afloat, while
spun out on your lingering nicotine.

Goodbye Grandma: Sept.10, 2009

It's 12:56 in the morning on September 11,2009, just 12 hours, give or take a
few, into my immortal's spirit having said goodbye to this still yet difficult place. Losing her was something inevitable, yes, but necessary, I claim undeniably false. Even after playing this moment in my mind over and over again, I never thought my worst nightmare would manifest itself into broad daylight anytime soon. I cannot dance with these devils and their significant faces without you.
I hold fast to the courage and force that you, as a mother, instilled within me, as the spirit that surrounds me here today evokes our countless escapades, and I smile reluctantly towards another, yet that flash of an uncreated memory is nowhere in sight and granted, away from my tangible grasp. I realize how lucky I am as your granddaughter to have been blessed with such a piece of divine perpetual bliss upon my childhood. From our Big Mac's minus the Thousand Island dressing, to your remote control freakouts, "Now put on some CNN instead of this Nickelodeon", from you incessantly kissing the policeman's hand that summer when we got pulled over, on the way to your fictitious Disneyland, to that day at the courthouse when you proclaimed you knew English, "but not exactly".
If only the man in the moon would transport me back in time for just another Saturday afternoon in your sweet care, if only....

I am reminded of the toughest moment in my life, as my parents' love fell apart, it
runs rampant in my frightened mind as I lay, trouble dreaming, while you twist, a young, tantalizing, beautiful gypsy in my heart. You were there that tumultuous summer when I lost what I knew to be home, and as the hours beat away in my mind, I wish I were there as your courageous fortitude drifted away and out of what had been home to you. Thank you for saving my life, listening to my fears, and calming my adolescent tears. I will forever remain indebted, and inebriated off the beauty you as a woman, kind and motherly, exemplified within these tarnished moments of my existence. I find it sacred and bittersweet; I was fighting such sadness, refusing to wake into the start of a brand new day, as you took your nap after polishing off what became your last meal. You exhaled into heaven, as I inhaled into living the first day of the rest of my life, without you, unknowingly.

You were the first sunflower that bloomed within my desolate garden that
summer when my mother got sick. You uncompromisingly drove me to the city of hope
that first day of 8th grade, and you, you were my city of hope those latter summer days in and autumn days out. I wonder if I ever returned the persistent favors you granted me, without question, back to you.

I recall being a sleepless child upon one of the many beds in your orphanage.
I remember the smell of your hair, blown out forming beautiful gold ringlets at the ends. I reminisce eating chelo-kabob in your walk-in closet with little Jessica in tow, during family gatherings. I reflect upon meeting you and grandpa at the Northridge mall that simple Saturday with my father, and having pizza for lunch. Oh, how much you loved my father. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for that alone.
I muse over your lavish black, sun-sparked golden dress at Sarah's bat mitzvah, and how mesmerized I was as an eight year old, the way it hung on your regal body...wishing I would grow to be as composed and unyielding as you.
I learn by heart where you would stash all your cigarettes, money, lipstick, and lighter...and no, it was not in a purse.
I keep in mind how you'd give me money on occasion and told me not to tell
grandpa...Sorry grandpa.
I'll never forget how I'd give you and grandpa tests to quiz your knowledge about
whatever the subject, and you'd always get A's, and we'd give grandpa F's to make you
laugh...
Your laugh, the right anecdote for any six-year-olds heartache.

I will never fail to hold on to your simplistic nature when I was in preschool...
you would ask me for directions to get me there on time, even though you knew where
you were going all the while.

If I could talk to you one last time, I'd ask, who else is to take pride in me as I
shoot for the stars? Who else is to drive aimlessly till we find some destination.. .maybe Vegas this time, or back to the meat market? Who else is to yell at grandpa because you sent him out to buy Pepsi and he came back home with a 12-pack of soda cans that had another woman on it (Princess Leah during The Star Wars Craze)...Who else?

Growing up, It was almost as if I only took breaths because it insured yet another
second in your arms. Grandma, I'll commit you to memory each and every time I look up, up at the heavens, and smile goodbye.

Chapter One: August 26, 2010

The classroom clock struck 2:45 pm. I looked over to my left and through the bungalow window spotted her pulling her lighter out of her breast's humble abode and lighting up her infamous Marlboro. She was wearing her black slacks, gold flats, and her hair was highlighted and done up in the style that Farrah Fawcett made famous in the 1970's.

The year was 1993; I was a fourth grader and was desperate to make new friends who would never leave "chia pet" jokes up to their imagination. My grandmother made her way upon school grounds instead of waiting in her car in the unloading children zone, and sat upon a wooden bench besides the handball courts, casually smoking her cigarette. All I thought was, "holy crap, my grandmother must be breaking the LAUSD's number one law...smoking in an institution that houses children 11 years and younger for 7 hours a day."

I was mortified and began praying silently to god in hopes that no one would see her foreign body, a slightly well speaker of english, and perhaps get me into trouble. Bless her heart and the many apprehensive minutes of my youth that have undoubtedly been attributed to her delicate, amorous, godly-like existence.

I have spent many nights during the past year, including the night she died, laying awake around half past two in the morning listening to Simon and Garfunkel's "Bookends". "Long ago it must be, I have a photograph. Preserve your memories, they're all that's left you." I have a photograph of her and my parents on my nightstand. My mother, a starlet of the early 80's stands to her mother's left, and my father stands on my grandmother's right, kissing her rose-stained cheekbone as delight frames her face, and curlers keep her tendrils pinned up, allowing me to admire her beauty some decades later.
I mentioned it at her funeral, and I'll mention it again despite people begging to differ, my eyes never lost sight upon how much she cared for my father. I will appreciate her for that, amongst everything else, till the day I die and am reunited with her.

I remember one night when I was 18 that our family had gathered at her house. She had asked me if I wanted to spend the night, after all I grew up nestling my head upon her chest and sleeping beside her every weekend up until I was about 15, and I remember having said that I'd rather go home. That conversation and the look of faint gloom on her face hits me on random days, at random hours, and the tears stream uncontrollably down my face.
Grandma, I never meant to grow up. I never meant to decline your offer. I never meant to grow out of our bond. I never meant to say no. If I were offered the chance to wake up to the smell of tea, milk and cigarettes wafting through the room, and the sound of her and grandpa conversing over the CNN news reporter, I would without a doubt accept. A breakfast consisting of pouched eggs with tomatoes and raw, white onions on the side has never again hit the spot the way it did each time I woke to her beautiful face and to her distinct smell of Alberto V05 shampoo, rose water and Marlboros.

This past week I began my master's program in English and as I sat in my first class, I smiled at the thought of her. When I was 15, I had told her that I wanted to be a choreographer, and to a 74-year-old foreigner, a "dancer" and a choreographer do not differ much. She said I should pursue it, and a minute later corrected herself. She had thought I meant stripper and said, "Me khai raghas beshee? Khob beshoe, vallee nah vaseh kar. Khoob neest zan een karaho bokoneh." My grandfather changed the subject and pointed to Christiane Amanpour on CNN and said that I soon would be like her, and then grandma smiled. I probably won't make it on TV but I'll make it somewhere, surely not on a pole yet somewhere that would've made her proud.

I don't know what else to say. Her passing was something I could have never prepared for, and I poured my heart's discontent out then. Losing someone you love is like a current you fight from drowning against. Simply put, there is only half of my life's hope that lives beating beside me now. She is gone, and for now thankfully my father still remains. I am at a loss for words. I still cannot imagine what has become of her and there is concrete evidence that lies against this fear, supporting it persistently from this day forth. My father could fall away from my sight tomorrow, and the other half of my hope will die along with him. I find it a delicate impression; my life's happiness began in the arms of the woman who gave birth to my mother, a woman whose happiness began in the arms of the man who will always be responsible for the end of mine, dead or alive.

Margrit Chaman Khankhanian: May 20, 1925 - September 10, 2009
You were my best friend and though I must live now with half of my being intact, I wish you sweet dreams of an epic magnitude, tonight and every night, knowing that you will always be something otherworldly, divine and simply impeccable. I love you always, now and forever.

Hault or Continue: For The Sake of My Sanity

11:33 pm – Sunday, May 23, 2010

I am forcing myself to be something I am not. Something no one around me is, an anomaly of such eccentric sorts. Maybe I am not cut out for this, this writer shtick I have fabricated in my mind and led myself to believe I have the capabilities to execute. I have a drama-infested mind and I can never find the motivation to display the thoughts that shake and rattle my human emotions, upon paper with a pen, pencil or crayon even. I do not have a place where the current of my expressive terminology can find vivacity in its own refuge and where my imagination is not taken prisoner by my insecurities of never becoming a published writer. I wish I could refrain from stating the obvious every time I sit and embark upon a stream of consciousness, but the truth still resides heavily upon my process of infinite contemplation, I am not living in this very moment nor will I be in a second, minute or in an hour from now. I am not one of those children who had a dream of what they wished to become when they were to grow up and followed through with it. I chose to write a daydream that I had one day in 1997, during 3rd period math with Mrs. Silva, down on paper in the seventh grade and I guess I never stopped. This was not my dream. I am not medical school or law school bound. I am Neda, a side-effect of two people in their mid to late twenties entangled in a passionate surge of love-making. I was born C-section because I refused to come out into an impending, atrocious altercation against depression via my mother’s 28-year-old vagina. I should have been aborted, lost half way through the pregnancy, or strangled by the umbilical cord (if that even falls relative to a C-section procedure). Things would’ve been different. I would never have been open to the elements in-conjunction with parental viciousness, or bitter self-deprecation. To those who’ll see this as just a “fishing for compliments” scheme, they may calm down. I am not about to face pessimism and negatively approach this and say that I have nothing to offer to humankind, I am simply stating that I don’t know what it is and even if it breathes days alongside mine. How long must I fight against the sea of my father’s emotionless wave lengths approaching great heights? I hypothesize that his hands never held mine the day I was born, and if I am wrong then for how many hours, and did he ever look at me and realize what responsibilities were placed upon him that day. Bookends, Simon and Garfunkel said it best. It was a moment of innocence and naivety. A moment I shared with the man that was my biggest confidant. I must digress; I preserve his memory in a video photograph from 1987. We were eating lunch, my mother, my father, my uncle and I. I asked for some tomatoes and I needed a knife to cut them with. I was wearing my yellow sweater and a yellow barrette side-swiping my baby hairs to the left. An Ingénue before I was even 4-years-old. I asked for a paper knife and got up to get it from the kitchen and almost knocked the video camera over. In the stillness of nights, as I lie awake, I can still hear my father telling me to be careful just incase the camera should tumble over from its erect positioning and I would get hurt. He loved me. He never stated so, but as soothing as the sound of those wind chimes outside my grandparents home used to be, I just knew. My mother keeps saying that the past is the past, and that the future is a gift, therefore that is why they call it the present. Writing is all I know. Photographs are all I have left. The past is gone and so is the Neda whose father never hesitated to hug her.
Who knows what my childhood aspirations were, I don’t remember, I was too busy chasing that something for just one supplementary, diminutive flash in its company. Who knows what will become of me after I carry out yet another difficult feat and get my graduate degree in English writing. All I know, at this very moment, is either I listen to my mother, leave my heart vacant for the future and stop writing about my father, or I stop living the only way I know how.

Dear Diary

2:04 am – Friday, April 16, 2010

I am tongue-tied and ready, ready to be pulled, tugged, and put aside for safekeeping, for this unyielding escapade is far from pleasant and terribly nudging at my wits end. My childhood dreams do not possess the ability to avenge me from my conniving self and the self-deprecating errors of my ways, nor had they ever. The place inside my heart that remained a valid necessity to my sanity, was torn away today by no one’s fault but my own. I had been blinded by the steep belief that my curiosity, and desire to be loved by none other than her sweetest downfall, would never allow my composure to fall victim to unfathomable destruction. Sunnybrae’s twenty-year windstorm of instilled confusion, hatred and un-infiltrated love blew me away this morning, and blew down my life, hard. These vicious traditions I deliberately place myself within always glisten the moment before they erupt. My breath stops short, my feelings find themselves digging a whole further into my shallow grave, my sleeping patterns find trouble just around the bend, and thoughts of suicide creep up behind me, all along booming in ample sound like flowers blooming upon my grandmother’s heavenly home on a sweltering summer day in Los Angeles, the city of anything but angels in my eyes. These moments, comprised by my foolishness to feel, do not have a name. I do not victimize myself, and I believe that this hurtful and ill astute assumption has only been conjured up due to the perception accounted for through the peripheral vision belonging to that Grade-A bitch. If anything, I have been a fool to let myself fall too far astray from the call of prospering through the divine matter of hardship that God has blessed over me. I have tried endlessly to gauge it, this calamity I have restlessly fed and watered these past 26 years of my life, only to come up short in a pond, created by none other than myself, fueled by masculine ties that tend to rouse the weakness within, killing the strength that I, as a feminine entity, have rights to acquire in this vindictive, double-standard fueled, social order.

12:25 am – Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Lonesome and friendless, I can explain how much it hurts only so much. I live as a byproduct of two eccentric yet predictable imbeciles, though I have spent all my life fearing their individual demises. Am I an intensifying dream or a diminishing luminary? I spend the hours in a day fearing the next, running situations in my head, and opening my heart up to self-deprecating ridicule. Can I ever admit to some of those bad mistakes that I have made? Will I always be the brunt of the jokes that bitches, those I once called friends, continuously tell? I’ve been a lot of things: a best friend to someone prior to high school and its malicious intentions, an ungrateful child, an outspoken granddaughter, a disrespectful teenage daughter, a pawn in my mother’s game of chess and a victim to the abuse of the sperm supporter who impregnated her. I’ve done a lot of things: I cheated on my first love, an overweight fuck who ruined my self-esteem granted I fucked with his first, during my junior year of high school and its malicious intentions, and I kissed a boy that this girl, one whom I have kept in touch with ever since kindergarten, had fallen head over heels for once upon a time…and frankly, I DON’T GIVE A FUCK.
My reveries are executed in an array of sheer lilac and mint pastels. I will live frozen within the continuum process, sleeping in white, breathing at gray and dying in black. I am waiting for my time; vacated, and void in compelled vengeance against anyone. My legs spread out before me welcoming him into my vagina and its moist earth, my womanliness simply intrepid, and my liquid released in the name of love, as the man of my dreams, with thighs that could crack walnuts, wraps me up in its definition for the first, and final intimate instance of this life’s voyage.


12:43 am – Monday, April 26, 2010

Colorblind, you are. Can’t detect the acquisition of your daughters imminent emotional health, it has no innate value to who you are. If it talks and walks it’s good enough to fuck, to you and many other men like you. It’s been almost a decade, and I am no longer your beautiful child. I may have been nothing but a fool to believe that I could ever have been anything that precious, to you. I bit my lip and you detected hurt in my eyes. As I said yes, you proceeded to ramble on and patronize me for feeling hurt at my adult age of twenty-six. Be a man and own up to your own accusations. Your father will never hold you, as mine will never hold me.
Spanish music blared loudly from the kitchen as I walked through the front door tonight, the front door belonging to my Iranian mother. His wife sleeps in my adolescent sanctuary, the place I grieved over the loss of my first love, the place I wrote my first story while mother tried incessantly to get me to complete my homework instead, the place I’d entertain myself with Party of Five on Wednesday nights, and the place where the soundtrack of my life began with The Five Stair Steps the day he announced his impending departure into the vagina of his Salvadorian girlfriend. He sits around and watches Spanish soap operas with her, as delight frames his face in ways more potent than it ever did when he’d watch basketball games with my mother. I’d love to turn his world upside down, if only for a moment.
You caused this infidelity and it has got to be the most difficult hurdle to have to overcome in my life and as miniscule as it seems to others, it has left my body dilapidated, anxiety-ridden, and apprehensive of having inherited your genes and perhaps committing adultery to another. I used to write stories with this appetite for art that was anything but satiable. I resent you for raping me of my ethereal sense of creativity. I wish sleepless nights and comatose mornings plagued you the way they do me, and I wish even more for your father to make you feel worthless when you try in vain to explain the habit forming issues that derive from depression, but wishes, my dear father, don’t come true. They never have and they never will. If you only knew the sting upon my skin each time I realize that my mother and I no longer share the same name. I tried to run away and you caught me that summer day when my mother’s dear sister called the police with assumptions of my ass being beaten. You caught me with a knife in your hand, granted I had a knife in mine, but what father does that? What legitimate father does that? I will sit stumped upon that thought even after my dying day is through. I was 18 and granted I was still to respect my elders, but I was 18, an adult in my own right who deserved respect herself nevertheless. I was defending myself from a man that had impregnated my mother. What was your excuse for assault with a deadly weapon?
I feel like Doogie Howser and Dorothy Jane Torkelson, as I sit here in front of my laptop trying to end another episode with a brilliant line or sentence. The truth is that, though I have never thought highly of my level of intelligence, flashes used to exist in the past where I felt my words leaving impressions upon my heart with magnitude, magnitude that might have impacted humanity someday.
Now, I sigh with a conflicted smile because of you, my dear father, having robbed me of that too.

My 25

1. I come from a place called Sunnybrae Heaven, where Nadia and I never grow up.
2. I idolize Bruce "The Motherf**king Boss" Springsteen.
3. My favorite person this side of the Holy Land goes by the moniker D Money!
4. Just one note could make me float, could make me float away. One note from the song Sir Psycho Sexy wrote could f**k me where I lay.
5. I kind of fell into this English major, and quite possibly may not have any desire to pursue it.
6. Michelle Markowitz compels my fierceness to glow profusely!
7. I am missing someone far away who happens to be related to a couple of dragons.
8. My mother is the world's most beautiful Beauty School Dropout.
9. I miss my papa, sunlit days in and calender nights out.
10. I realize that everything just is, and there's no cause in wasting valuable energy on fighting a battle that I won't ever win.
11. I will challenge anyone to trivia on lovely Anthony Kiedis, and win hands down!
12. Never have I made any friends like the ones I had when I was twelve.
13. Stand By Me is one of my favorite tearjerkers. R.I.P River <3
14. I am no longer the Neda I used to be, and I owe it all to my Israeli experience with Assaf and the f**king geniuses.
15. I will make my mark in four months and prove all who doubt me, utterly wrong.
16. Never, in the past 8 years, have I been genuinely happy.
17.The best feeling ever is taking 2 1/2 uninterrupted hours to write a poem, and being able to say "damn I'm good" about it.
18. I imagine a world like he wanted us to, where possessions do not matter and only sky exists above us.
19. My favorite place in the world relies heavily on how it makes me feel content in my Middle-Eastern skin...
20. I belong in Brooklyn.
21. I have finally blown out that crazy shine that I knew would never let me die.
22. I have more than just an obsession with John Frusciante.
23. I have a good life.
24. I have belief in tomorrow.
25. I do and will continue to embrace uncertainty, wholeheartedly.

Happy 200th Darwin.

“Darwin was an indefatigable chronicler and this is evident in the way that he collected
specimens, in how he documented and drew conclusions, and through his writing,” said
Brighde Mullins, Director of USC’s Master of Professional Writing Program. “All of these
characteristics had an impact on the poets of his day, and the poets that followed.”
(http://college.usc.edu/tcc/poetry.html)

Darwin's theory upon evolution has been taught in schools to us all for centuries, and yet few, including me, have begun to realize how much his undeniably brilliant mind, influenced words and the way they artistically comprise this potent form of art known as Poetry. Poetry is science. We collect pieces and fragments of experience and somehow by the graces we inhabit in within our individual auras as human beings with emotions, we emulate a voice that can speak, and does speak, on the behalf of many. Darwin emulated a voice that many poets, in my opinion, noticed and adopted. "His eyes
fixed on facts and minute details."- Elizabeth Bishop
When I think of it, Mary Oliver prides herself on that very notion with unstinting devotion as
well. “Give me that dark moment, I will carry it everywhere like a mouthful of rain.”


I used to wish for a falling star. It was a November afternoon unlike I had
ever experienced in the fall of 2002.
I sat outside the ugly walls that kept me captive, at an ugly community
college, in the ugly San Fernando Valley.
It must have been the rebellious force dying to be heard, the force that had
been silenced by my abusive father for the prior 18 years of my life. I never wrote
before that moment, and I wrote to remember that moment, not my ambivalence nor my
physical appearance, nothing. Yet, I remember it all, better than anything else I can
recall in the short life I have lived.
Terrified, I sat amidst Ivy and her many emerald coats, her frayed amethyst
arms beaten as badly as my own. November 19th. 3:25 pm. Cranberry sauce and acorn
trimmed tabletops, my first of many without pop, only a week away. Her leaves inviting,
drained of any bitterness or poison.

“Poetry, after all, is not a miracle. It is an effort to formulize individual
moments and the transcending effects of these moments into music that all can use. It is
the song of our species.” –Mary Oliver

It’s something about the freedoms we are open to inhabit while lying in her
garden. The only one to one correspondence that has yet to fail me is with Mother
Nature, her beautiful self. Give up the incessant need to succeed in order to, primarily,
become the bearer of otherworldly possessions. Poetry and the moments that society, as
a whole and amongst its individuals, lives a witness to during its quest for success,
encompasses the otherworldly possessions that we strive for the monetary means to
purchase. One must step away from "materially bound and self-interested lives" in
order for the fluidity of words to bear meaning to them, and step into that world that
existed way before currency, expensive clothing, expensive cars and high stature ever
had its place in a “What You Must Need To Survive In This Cruel World” dictionary.
Poetry is the only material that will never cost a cent, and yet bring one a world of
contentment, granted they believe it. Poetry allows me to say goodbye to a pain that refuses to quit, until I get it right someday. I would rather revisit that pain within the beauty that surrounds me, than spend my hard earned money trying to eradicate it with a sparkly Tiffany bracelet for an hour.

A Silly Little Dream

So, it's 10:35 pm on Tuesday night and Neda, yes I often address myself in the third person, is doing what she was born to do, procrastinating.
Before I start on my paper, you know the one that was due yesterday, I wanted to speak of this dream I had.

Nadia, it was very surreal.
I, of course, have forgotten part of it, but it's worth conjuring up the rest.
I do not know how or why, but my mother, you, my pops, and my Israeli family were all transported back into 10037 Sunnybrae Avenue, yes I include addresses Nadia and who cares if someone harrasses those who live behind its doors nowadays...I'm thinking Nostalgia dammit, so stay with me here.

I relished in all it's beauty and I truly was awake doing so in the rapid eye movement part of my deep slumber. It was unlike any other dream. We were really there Nadia, all of us...No joke.

Nothing had changed. No one had lived there, though subtle ques would explain otherwise, but when do I ever accept the truths behind any matter? exactly.

My chalkboard covered walls were still intact, and my wooden bedframe/shelf from home depot had been employed to keep some guys books off the floor. My bedroom belonged to someone who was a lover of stories, as I am of words. That notion blew my mind. I was awake Nadia, not dreaming.

He had a corkboard placed on the wall besides my cheap golden-rimmed closet, yes I am a jew as is my carpenter of a father, fake gold is what we do. A diploma, from a Florida based graduate school, dated 1981 or 1979, see here is where I will conjure up some element of the beautiful life that I was handed in my moment of true consciousness, I had not been asleep, hung for dear life by my hello kitty thumb tack. A stamp upon it wore the motto "From the State that brought you Nsync" in a pensive shade of navy blue. Nsync...one subtle que that I was not living in 1990 anymore, and perhaps this house was occupied by someone other than the family that left because of some awful decisions on the father's part and the tumultuous reign of chapter 11 having displaced them from beautiful Porcelianville to down right disgusting MiddleEasternville, in a one bedroom shack on Newcastle Avenue in Encino.

My parents room seemed to not be afflicted by the new couple rumored to be residing in this master bedroom. The ugly silver wallpaper and the strategically placed golden leaves upon it had a few tears. I asked my pop why, and he rambled on using carpenter terminology that of course sparked nothing but foreign confusion within me. He made it seem as though someone had lived in it and tore the wallpaper off before they moved out...I refused to believe this nonsense.
My mother open the closet, and a shit load of my toys were concealed in a big white hefty trash bag; my porcelain doll, whose foot broke off and was duck taped by my pops, The Ceramic Surgeon, on the Eve of Easter in 1992 begged desperately to be freed, along with Kelly, Brandon, Donna, Zack, Slater, Jessie, Kapowski not Taylor, Blossom, Joey and Six...the sole inheritors of perfect popularity whose combined plastic limbs, 40 in total, helped allow you and I to escape into this grown up world, imitating everything we had hoped to become.
No one was living there. My belongings moved out with us, I would have never left them behind.

Of course now the rest of my glorious depiction of the past resurfacing, as I have forever...19 years worth of forever, wished for it to do so, has faded into the land of nostalgic obscurity.

I have no idea what prompted me to write this stream of consciousness, but I am glad I did.

I was never the cheerleader that my plastic Kapowski inspired me to be.

I never had a Zack of my own, and the ones I had are only a figment of my imagination now, never to be seen again.

I would give anything to have been able to say goodbye to that place. The place that encompassed all my joy, all my dreams, and especially, all my family.

A silly little dream, though it brought me much pleasure and undeniable closure.

I pray that whoever must live there has taken care of her walls, her secrets and her eternal youth.
What an exquisite sanctuary she offered me during those tempestuous winters between my folks.

An exquisite sanctuary never to be duplicated again; not in death, not in life, nor in a silly little dream.

Crayons Melted in an 84’ Chevrolet

“Long before I am supposed to die, I learn everything I cannot let my adult-self do from my father.” I think this thought out loud day in and day out. I remember the life I once lived, and I remember it all too well. A life lived too well, to the point where living for today seems rather unimportant. It was all too sudden, you know , that feeling you come across when you show up for class and you didn’t know there was going to be a test, and that test is to determine the rest of your otherworldly existence, or what those standardized tests want you to believe as children, that they will be able to deduce. Childhood, it was all too sudden. That hill, riding down it on Sancho’s Skateboard, begging God to build one of these with brakes sometime in the near future, or running down it while mom raced me in her beat up Chevy, you know, the one that Sancho scraped up, leaving her without a true explanation as to why. Oh that hill, she looks younger than I do today.


***

“What is it, you can tell me Neil? Please tell me????” I asked in utter excitement, upon first sight of this awe-inspiring rectangular box donned with electric blue wrapping paper, and orange swirls.
“It’s a pencil sweetheart. Happy 6th Birthday honey, it’s a pencil.” He responded with a smile that is as infectious now as it was then. It’s moments like that that never seem to let be me. “Just leave me alone.” I ask my past daily, and yet nothing is absorbed by her youthful glaze, she didn’t rescue me then and apparently, it seems like she won’t be rescuing me anytime soon. I cannot get past it and find a reason to exist, not sitting around for so long, waiting for Childhood’s phone call. Even if I answer, the pain will only be magnified tenfold, I will never be able to talk to her again.
***

“Give me just one more night, one more night, cause I can’t wait forever.” Sir Phil spoke eloquently in that bar, upon that tiny Toshiba television screen, as Pop and I sat entangled in each other’s arms, relishing in the beauty of Classic American music. I remember those nights when he would make it home barely before the Sunrise; I thought for sure he was Phil, the man himself, since he looked just like him, and what other logical explanation would suffice for a man with a wife and a child rarely being home, other than being on tour? Nevertheless, whatever his reasons were, what I would give to have one more moment in the flesh, with my papa, my own sir Phil.

***


“Let’s go to 7-eleven for some Carrot juice, how about that?” My lovely Aunt’s voice still reverberates deep within my ears. An intangible hold remains clutched upon my heart, each and every time I drive along Parthenia and pass that special source of fodder and delight for both her and I every weekend during those sweet Saturday afternoons of a time past. We’d go for Carrot juice and sure enough I’d con my way into getting a Pina Colada Slurpee and a Chocolate chip cookie instead from her, the family- renowned Dentist we all loved so very much. I remember those Sunday nights with her, as I waited for Mom to come get me from Grandma’s, sitting around, entertained by the labor of releasing Fava beans from their sheltered green hammocks into a colander, alongside Inspector Gadget’s siren and Nickelodeon. It’s moments like that that never seem to let be me. Nowadays, I simply live, holding on to this innate understanding of hope and optimism. They work hand in hand, but they differ entirely and with a high degree of complexity.
***

I was optimistic to go to school that Monday in 1990, with my new set of Crayola crayons, after the weekend where the so called “Pencil” became an orange and blue plastic bike of some sort with training wheels. My mother said to leave my crayons in the car for fear that they might get stolen, I mean after all this wasn’t your measly little box of crayons with the sharpener built in the back, this was a heavy duty, plastic briefcase with each color of the rainbow multiplied by ten different shades, and it had a metal sharpener, not a crappy cardboard boxed one, so of course I concurred and left my crayons with her. I was hopeful to come home that afternoon and find them intact and ready to try my hand at coloring, reasonably, a Picasso inspired piece. Upon my hopefulness, my dismay became clear and apparent when I realized before my zany Middle Eastern mother did, that she had left my crayons on top of the back seat, besides the rear window, for the sun to feast upon them. What was left of the Sun’s lunch was caked into the backseat so rigidly that for the next seven years, it accompanied me to every school function, every family function, and every birthday party, everything until the day the junkyard representative came and took her away.

***

That philosophy of hope and optimism lingers on within me presently. I may hope to see the adorable little girl; with the yellow barrette clipping her bangs aside, again, but hope is something we all have. Hope can come true for some, yes, but is my hope guaranteed? The difference between hope and optimism is that my hope deals with an intangible notion that no one, myself included, can ever reach again, and with a craving like that, then optimism, the kind a sweet child has going to a dinner at Grandpa’s, where all he ever makes is Liver and Onions, is probably light years away from fulfilling what my spirit truly longs for.

What Mother Wore To Her Court-Ordered Separation

Curls in her hair, ringlets of fire; warm, inviting and tight the way his hugs used to be.
Violent femme’s satin stain upon her voluptuous lips, the ones that never missed at enticing his many erections throughout their disorderly 21-year escapade.
Clay dried upon her aging hands, holding the statue of a man, his wife and his daughter,
Still wet and open to destruction.
Her heart, oblivious to pop’s stance and the blows he had meticulously prepared: warm and loose, depicting the everlasting bout with his love for her, feigning complete impotence.

Blinded

Open the crystallized hazel panes affirming your vision; the scene
delivered relies upon the culmination of all your minor endeavors;
a life driven by despair loiters beside in that welcoming field
of youthful paradise, abundant in jade yet weakened
by Rain and her deficiency.

The Mourning of November 24, 1991

The world shook as the sun rose to the loss of musical splendor.
Promiscuous Mercury, gleaming through the hearts of many men and women, was now only a figment of vinyl’s purest imagination.
The white leotard, which hugged his hips tightly at the seams, hangs carefully amongst his eclectic wardrobe, never victim to a crease again.
Zoroastrian’s famous Queen realized that the direction of the wind’s blows mattered; he lost that world, rocked by fat-bottomed girls, more than a little too soon.
Life had lost somebody to love.
Those feminine fingers belonging to the essential diva, metallic black paint never looking better, still play Bohemian Rhapsody
but only to the sold out crowd at Heaven’s gate.

Acorns & Memories

Heart full of indigo
harvests, this fatherless
child knows no gain.
Something breathes indignation
out there,
the past is what she cannot
resist.

Heart drained of
dreams, frozen
Icicles melted by
instances, belonging
to the nights her warm childhood
never ceased to be amazed by.

Rewriting Myself

there used to be something about fear written here
but now there’s a sleepless child, smiling.
there was a father, absentminded and handsome
now there’s hope and a future helping children just around the bend.
here was illustrated a broken home; tattered on the roof, shingles fallen from rain
but now ashes of what once held terror, an unsettling humble abode.

once the ashes of his own absent father, my grandfather resting in ruined peace,
now the memory of my child’s grandfather, living dead upon his or her future arrival.

even when I was young, instances of hope lingering beside me, injured within him,
like when mother sprinkled salt on my tongue, saving my heart any tremble after the next-door neighbor’s dog bit my leg.
now I lie, my wrist bathing in salt, scar tissue colliding with depression.
difficult to conceal; these bracelets nearly reach around, sweater cuffs too itchy.
years ago cutting was foreign; words concealed any pain,
but they evolved, my words are used to express anguish.

I do try, daily practicing goodbyes as I practice lies.
I do try, by asking him to hold his daughter close.
I do try, but I cannot make him love me any more than any less.
as the view into mornings break, I
give up trying; nothing changes.

no, things change—
there used to be something about fear written here.

Seizure of Youth

I felt them frozen, my six-year-old
bones. Mother alone, paste deficient in
bonding a broken home’s foundation,
flats cracked untimely below a former
baby’s crawl. Father desolate, this construction
worker’s belt too tight, water bottle empty as his thirst
rules on a hot summer day. Heaviness; no siblings
to share this pokerfaced nightmare.

Welcome Home

Ask me of my home. I hear it through pillars of regal

humbleness attributed to an innate,

polished wonder. I see how it raised me fatherless without

support. I remember living, one foot grasping

the steady training wheel, as if the bike

ride to childhood occupancy would

never see the fall of its night.

Charlie

if it doesn’t come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don’t do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it for money or
fame,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don’t do it.
if it’s hard work just thinking about doing it,
don’t do it.
if you’re trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.
if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you’re not ready.

don’t be like so many writers,
don’t be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don’t be dull and boring and
pretentious, don’t be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don’t add to that.
don’t do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don’t do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don’t do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.
— Bukowski

Frusciante

The one who lifts me out of my chronic fatigue.
The one who speaks the truths that my past escaped with.
The one who allows me to defy the logic of this corrupt society.
The one who speaks so eloquently, sensually soft to the soul.
The one with the crazy shine that will never let me die...

Defining "Graduate" To Her Father

It makes little difference how many university courses or degrees a person may own. If he cannot use words to move an idea from one point to another, his education is incomplete.
~Norman Cousins

So think what you want, and say what you feel, but once it happens, you better watch what you say to me.
You got that?

It's because of you that it hasn't come to her, and it's because of you that she has met tall hurdles that hindered her along the way, up until now.
You let her be, and without any support, she has fallen behind....
But, it's now time to walk in front of herself, and no longer behind you, or anyone's success you use to make her feel like a failure.
There's a reason she has been put here to succeed, and with all due respect, it is the words she compiles from within that allow her to pull through your bullshit, and come as far as she has, within the path that she has been led to follow.

Shut your trap, and when the time comes, you better be ready to swallow some words, because its the commencement of selfless endurance and esteem that will lead her to great things, not the lack of love and harsh criticism that you have thrown like curve balls to stop her in her tracks all along.
She is determined to give Mrs. Robinson's young fling a run for his money, and don't you ever doubt her once she does.

You got that?
Good. Now just make sure you never forget it.
2009. It's her time to shine Pop, not everyone elses whom you make her feel thoroughly less than.
It'll happen, be assured.


August 21, 2009...3 months and a day after...I told you so.

8.10.09

Epiphanies strike all too sudden sometimes, like impending jealousy when you’ve lived your entire life as “the skinny one” without ever becoming prone to weight consciousness. I had a moment tonight where I realized on the ugly 101 heading towards that picturesque town; the city belonging to studios, that my life’s utter sadness does not depend, and has not depended, upon the miniscule contact with a circle of lessened friends that I have acquired throughout the years after I left that hell hole, which kept me captive for four years of my latter adolescence, but that it depends upon the bitter sweetness that defines itself as sheer melancholy and tactless yet entirely consecrated inner loneliness. It’s 12:41 in the morning, and I could have sworn it was 12:17 but two simple minutes ago. Where does the time go? Where has my life gone? I am but twenty-five years old, and I am simply aging away from adulthood and its validity, insidious and tiresome, slipping through some Casanova’s fatherly fingers.

What It Do, Baby Boo?

1.What was the last thing you put in your mouth? Ghormeh Sabzi, bitches.

2.Where was your profile picture taken? In Pop's victorian-esque looking dining room.

3.Can you play Guitar Hero? Um, can Lars Ulrich play the drums?

4. Name someone who made you laugh today? Perera's sexy ass.(insert giving him an ego boost *here*)

5. What time did you go to bed and why? 1:30 a.m, because Tony Flow was calling in my dreams.

6. If you could move somewhere else, would you? You're talking to Neda here, come on now.

7. Ever been kissed under fireworks? Once, Mr Lee. was his moniker.

8. Which of your friends lives closest to you? Which house? I'm an orphan, remember?

9. Do you believe ex's can be friends? Ask Cool Lenox.

10. How do you feel about Dr Pepper? Gotta love the doctor!

11. When was the last time you cried really hard? Sunday night due to undisclosed information.

12. Who took your profile picture? Pop's big Mac.

13. Who was the last person you took a picture of ? Kiedis baby.

14. Was yesterday better than today? Nope! Going around town on second interviews is no bueno.

15. Can you live a day without TV? Try a year and a half.

16. Are you upset about anything? Tampering with brokeness.

17. Do you think relationships are ever really worth it? Why of course.

18. Are you a bad influence? Me? I don't even know the meaning of the word bad.

19. Night out or night in? either one works.

20. What items could you not go without during the day? a shot of facebook.

21. Who was the last person you visited in the hospital? R.I.P Grandmommy.

Surviving Suddenly

I came across a quote about writing; essentially that it offers society simply nothing if it does not conjure up tears, music or simply a life affirming notion in its process, and it has made me think as I lay in bed after dinner with sweet company tonight, and saying goodbye to lovely Lihi, that my life has already been lived and that no one has the say to state otherwise, unless they feel of my broken, childhood subsistence as it has manifested itself into adulthood.

When I was seventeen, I endured loneliness-prone divorce. My father lived unaware yet like half of a siamese twin, coherent and colorful beside me. I am now twenty-five, and though the lonesome teenager has grown on without me, I still have yet to finalize the disconnect between my parents. Like siamese twins, they lay coherent and colorful beside me, fragile and victimized.

When I met my first love, I was abandoned. When he met me, he was overflowing like my father's Miller Genuine Draft with happiness. Does the end of my forlorn day exist?

Why do resolutions survive like spring's hottest nail polish, and anguished children lay frayed like mother's 25-year-old bellbottoms?

I suppose seventeen will never see twenty-five, and twenty-five will always fall a casualty to it.

Suddenly I have seen, that the secret of living will always play this remembrance of cruel, thus usual punishment upon me, and no one, not even you, can pass judgment upon my dire need to dwell, unless you knew better than me, and as bluntly as I can speak about my emotional state of affairs in life, I can bluntly say that I would agree to put the past to rest if those who have requested that I keep my emotions bottled up, would find it in their right minds to comprehend this bittersweet state of fear that I have been compelled to endure. You don't know shit, until you can honestly say you do. You just do not know, period.

I Believe In You

There's no easy way to go about things like this.

I've tried desperately to calm my tears and fears of the future in regards to what will come of it all, but I am simply stuck.

Many words, synonymous with anger and sadness, have rolled off of my tongue only to echo off my bedroom walls to a silent audience.

Things happen and those in higher places known as authoritative figures twist the truth around with the cold, hard facts yet to be revealed.
My mind remains in a state of dismay and my body has layed in bed, comatose yet with worry. Worry for you, for them, for everyone.

What else can one say when things happen beyond another's immediate control? Nothing. I wish they would say nothing.

You will always be you, away from the portrait that has been painted, and dear to my heart.

I love you, and wish your fragile, brilliant mind some peace in dreams tonight, and forever.

Goodnight Love, sleep tight in sheer comfort knowing that the man above would never put us through anything we cannot handle or prosper through, and from.

Never.

<3

Lingering Fear

I have erased and rewritten the first sentence of this note a few too many times therefore the demonic, soul crushing sting of lacking a tight grasp on yet another cataclysmic wave of creativity has compelled me to have lost count. Writing, I have failed you miserably this past year. The block that you are synonymous with has, since graduation, run away with my desire to color the pages of my notebook with the brilliant course load of mind changing, and thought provoking poetry and short story creating that I grew accustomed to at school. My affair with depression has escalated into the depths of despair that only Elizabeth Wurtzel would know of, and she has documented the world over of the discreet yet wholy subdued pain that only those in our Converse can, with the light that emanates from the heart belonging to the man upstairs, undoubtedly seem to hold the potential to overcome. I wish I were more than just a stray child looking for warmth under her father's crippled wing, ironically balanced by the lack of emotion. I will not pose any questions pertaining to my attachment to the past, instead faithfully I will ponder upon dismissing the relentless anger I hold, which has kept my creativity from flourishing any further. I have painstakingly written his name in the sand that borders my figurative shore, only to watch the sea foam green waves glisten in toxic wonder and abandonment. The cursive I perfected, which lies embedded beneath the grains that lovers in love walk upon, began in the third grade and my intricate lines have yet to be washed away, leaving me muse-less, tarnished, and nothing more or less than a symbol of pure inbred illness; a tantalizing, epic curse which loves the dark and preys upon the essence of those who remain un-forgiven.