Craving Poetry

There are certain things we will each always crave, whether we know it or not. I find myself constantly craving poetry.

 Writing has always been my primary tool for creative expression. Ever since I discovered the spiral notebook at age 5, I became attached. I wrote and wrote and wrote and soon enough, my writing became me. I felt that I could write, therefore I could be. Suddenly, I learned that I could write to change, and even transform.

 A Nietzschean urge kept speaking up inside, to destroy and rebuild all my own preconceptions. To excavate and analyze the artifacts of my mind, things that had been accumulated unknowingly. Even when working in design studio in architecture school, I explored my conceptual ideas initially with words, in a pragmatic way. Words turned into paragraphs and paragraphs began to give form to visual and spatial experiences, which then sparked my initial design concept.

 I will always crave poetry. Writing and reading it. I lust it, I want to be a part of it. No matter how streamlined and routine my life becomes, I need poetic ventilation (as I like to call it) to satisfy my inner need to jump around and yell like a Banshee. Poetic ventilation helps to bend and exercise the mind - to get me out of my comfort zone and thinking about the things that are deep-rooted, subdued and often too categorical.

There are no limits but there is also no mercy – just me staring into the vastness and complexity of life that inspires me to put words to paper daily.  I’m just a girl who knows that no amount of writing for an audience (or doing anything for an audience for that matter) will ever give me the same satisfaction as those sixteen words that don't mean a whole lot to anyone else but mean absolutely everything in the world to me. X Chris

Quakes

by Christina Issa

Slight nudges are like modest quakes

Empty cavities reveal the stretch of

A porous and lighter existence

Joni on her side but still

She feels adrift

Light nips at her fingertips and

Daylight shakes off her moody weight

Withered tomorrows signal for

The night to drench her

Only momentarily

She hasn't seen a thing yet but

Roads have not been so friendly

Passer-by's and their evil eyes

Pierce a thin veil and cull

Her overgrown weeds

Clouded by fantasy

She is

Sleeping wide awake

Only woken up by the

Most modest quakes

Valentine's Day: Don't Over Think It

stoic seas

nowhere to go and nothing to say

I can't remember the last time I felt this way

somewhat euphoric and somewhat defeating

deep in my mind i'm always retreating

into fractures i sink endlessly

grafting myself onto tumultuous seas

grayness engulfs me - i think i can swim

then i remember i don't think anything

silence resonates under crashing waves

hollow like a pair of wooden claves

nowhere to go and nothing to say

I can't remember the last time i felt this way

Gull

Watercolor on 8.5 x 11 bristol 

pencils, down

Original mixed-media drawings. All of these were drawn from still life props.

Pencil 

Pencil and Charcoal 

Pencil and Charcoal

Conté Crayon

Huntington Beach

Image overlays done with my Nikon D3000 

White Lines

white lines
make us nervous
white lines
unnerve us,
where do we draw the line?
we are only 25

the logic of our design
floats freely between two minds,
not within these lines
that are either black or white

darling;

would you rather be a sketch?
an undefined etch
blood without its stream
flows but what does it mean?

but let's not complicate;

a heart does not lie
and we are here until we die
that is neither wrong nor right
this is neither black nor white

if we only
learn to comprehend,
without words we cannot misunderstand
(with our eyes we can exchange)

white lines draw the end
silence is our only friend

Anaïs Nin

“I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic-in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself.”

—

Anaïs Nin

Perfect Death

somewhere between her foul mouth and genitalia

a life dying to take her first breath

raging impurity of oceania gives birth to a perfect death

imbued with wisdoms of the waves

waiting for a wilting love

the irony is what she craves

kills her more than life above

the dirt ground choking under her feet

diminishing sky in her lover's eyes

chasing life is as futile as the quest for truth

and the arrival of death holds no surprise

event horizon

infinitely dense content overload resulting in a near-brain implosion
thank you internets.

firefly

unexpected firefly flickering his light

tangos with the shadows and dances with the night

nocturnal creature swiftly roams looking for a mate

marks the dark as his home, such a lonely wait 

he saunters onwards on this journey

humming a single man's free will

an anomaly between the trees
in his heart so still

Love is a Parallax, by Sylvia Plath

Perspective betrays with its dichotomy:
train tracks always meet, not here, but only
in the impossible mind's eye;
horizons beat a retreat as we embark
on sophist seas to overtake that mark
where wave pretends to drench real sky.

Well then, if we agree, it is not odd
that one man's devil is another's god
or that the solar spectrum is
a multitude of shaded grays; suspense
on the quicksands of ambivalence
is our life's whole nemesis.

So we could rave on, darling, you and I,
until the stars tick out a lullaby
about each cosmic pro and con;
nothing changes, for all the blazing of
our drastic jargon, but clock hands that move
implacably from twelve to one.

We raise our arguments like sitting ducks
to knock them down with logic or with luck
and contradict ourselves for fun;
the waitress holds our coats and we put on
the raw wind like a scarf; love is a faun
who insists his playmates run.

Now you, my intellectual leprechaun,
would have me swallow the entire sun
like an enormous oyster, down
the ocean in one gulp: you say a mark
of comet hara-kiri through the dark
should inflame the sleeping town.

So kiss: the drunks upon the curb and dames
in dubious doorways forget their monday names,
caper with candles in their heads;
the leaves applaud, and santa claus flies in
scattering candy from a zeppelin,
playing his prodigal charades.

The moon leans down to took; the tilting fish
in the rare river wink and laugh; we lavish
blessings right and left and cry
hello, and then hello again in deaf
churchyard ears until the starlit stiff
graves all carol in reply.

Now kiss again: till our strict father leans
to call for curtain on our thousand scenes;
brazen actors mock at him,
multiply pink harlequins and sing
in gay ventriloquy from wing to wing
while footlights flare and houselights dim.

Tell now, we taunq where black or white begins
and separate the flutes from violins:
the algebra of absolutes
explodes in a kaleidoscope of shapes
that jar, while each polemic jackanapes
joins his enemies' recruits.

The paradox is that 'the play's the thing':
though prima donna pouts and critic stings,
there burns throughout the line of words,
the cultivated act, a fierce brief fusion
which dreamers call real, and realists, illusion:
an insight like the flight of birds:

Arrows that lacerate the sky, while knowing
the secret of their ecstasy's in going;
some day, moving, one will drop,
and, dropping, die, to trace a wound that heals
only to reopen as flesh congeals:
cycling phoenix never stops.

So we shall walk barefoot on walnut shells
of withered worlds, and stamp out puny hells
and heavens till the spirits squeak
surrender: to build our bed as high as jack's
bold beanstalk; lie and love till sharp scythe hacks
away our rationed days and weeks.

Then jet the blue tent topple, stars rain down,
and god or void appall us till we drown
in our own tears: today we start
to pay the piper with each breath, yet love
knows not of death nor calculus above
the simple sum of heart plus heart.

unsung

sounds will not suffice to say 

how much it is we swim

in melodies of blue and gray

dancing on a whim

silently, we know no chords

but silence knows us better

anxious for what is stored

beneath this quiet tremor 

words have failed us many times

but harmonies prevail 

in a sea of crisp white noise
electric rhymes set sail 

what is an & sir?

what is an & sir?
would you dare say
is it the way home sir?
or is it where I stay?

what is an & sir?
would you ever claim
that it brings us together sir?
or will it make us stray?

what is an & sir?
is it more-or-less?
is it a sound argument sir?
or is it truth-less?

you want an & sir?
are you looking for it here?
I'm sorry sir- I don't have the answer
I don't have it my dear.

wake up

it's so simple
as you say
even when we sleep
waves carry us away

while bringing us closer
in a spiritual way
better in dreams
is our trembling fate

saves us from tempest
earthly desires
the waves travel between us
while pushing us higher

wake up
on the crest of this ocean
we are the tides of our passion
a microcosm of heat
energy everlasting

belong

where are you purple flower?
you are a natural, lonely pose

an endless stamen
between shameless petals,
your saccharine nectarie shows

your moon peeps
from behind rocky boulders,
settles above smoky peaks
shrugging his lonely shoulders

lights up the night
the search for you is all he knows

and he never seems to wait for us,
he just goes and goes,
stealing all of our time
warping the days into nights,
flashing a guiltless glow

spinning circles around the earth,
tranquility is for the weak of heart (this he also knows)
in the dark his madness empowered
searching for his purple prose

in white

white walls
white walls
white waiting-welcome walls
we were there, do you remember?
wearing our beat-up overalls

white paint
white paint
a dripping monologue
we had a dance, do you remember?
waltzing in and out of dialogue

white words
white words
careful, special scenes
we had no tapes, do you remember?
just our fragile memories

navy blue

she rises clear above the range as
a silent moment brakes and
we focus on her flight

moving slowly, dressed in a strange

disguise of fog as

she changes in the night

your shadowed face is plain and as
predictable as her movements

shifting in and out of sight

the only color i see is navy blue,

swimming between me and you
turning quiet moments bright

sitting thigh-to-thigh

I glance your waning eyes

filled with sudden might

pressing your head against mine,

our eyes locked tight

a sweet kiss revealed

beneath her pale moonlight

copy-cat

i make things that look like things that other people make
i am an artist
i am inspired
but i am also a trembling fake
what would it look like if I was not among the rest?
would i be uninspired and irrelevant
or would i be at my very best?