Spilled Ink

Open Letter To Those Who Signed Petition To Secede From Union

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 18:34:10 -0500

By Bill Dixon

Dear Crybabies,

Recently, your guy lost a presidential election. I know, I know— total bummer. So, being the American patriot that you are, you have signed a petition compelling your state to secede from the United States.

So let me understand, your boyfriend wasn’t picked to be captain of the high school football team so now you’re going to quit the cheerleading squad in protest. Or maybe it’s more akin to your eighth birthday when you asked for that pony and instead your parents got you a puppy so you folded your arms with tears running down your cheeks as the rubber banded “Birthday Girl” hat atop your head surreptitiously inched from 12:00 to 3:00 with each stomp of your foot as you declared in one trembling breath that you had “the worst mommy and daddy ever! I don’t wanna have a burfday anymore!” Whatever the case may be, it’s very patriotic of you.

The irony is that a large portion of you who signed the petition— because you’re so tired of government spending—actually live in states completely subsidized by federal (evil) dollars.

States receiving the most federal funding per tax dollar paid:
1. New Mexico: $2.63
2. West Virginia: $2.57
3. Mississippi: $2.47
4. District of Colombia: $2.41
5. Hawaii: $2.38
6. Alabama: $2.03
7. Alaska: $1.93
8. Montana: $1.92
9. South Carolina: $1.92
10. Maine: $1.78

New Mexico, reigning king of “dude…can you spot me?”, should be careful about all this secession talk. With no army, no money, a 46% Hispanic population and sharing a border with a country that has a lot more of all the things I just mentioned, the name New Mexico would be eerily appropriate. You’ll be using the peso for currency before the next season of Storage Wars ends.

But most of your secession signatures— since last count, over 85,000—have come from the great state of Texas. This makes a little more sense. Texas is a big income state with a very distinct people and culture. If you don’t buy that, think about this: If you’re wearing cowboy boots and a cowboy hat in New York City, you’re wearing a costume. If you’re wearing the same thing in Texas, it’s Tuesday.

That being said, I think you should go for it. Seriously, maybe secession is the best thing for you. My only concern is how much work it’s going to be to remove all those uber patriotic “I love America” bumper stickers, laminates, car window graphics, tattoos, wallpaper, ceilingpaper, underwear, coffee mugs, coffins, diaphragms, heart stents, etc., from your everything. That’s going to be a long Sunday. Also, having Skee Ball Champion & Certified Manchild Rick Perry as your commander-in-chief should give you pause. But maybe you’re looking forward to your declaration of independence being signed in magic marker— different strokes.

No matter what happens, Mommy and Daddy want you to know we understand. You’ve made your point. You wanted a pony, you got a puppy, now you want to be homeless. We get it— Don’t Mess with Texas. But if I’m being honest, it feels more like “Come on guys, don’t mess with Texas. Seriously, they’re very emotional right now.” Now straighten your “Birthday Girl” hat and wipe the tears from your face because you look like a fucking idiot.

Love Always,

Bill

theredsun: It’s so heartbreaking when you think about devastation. In Breezy Point, a fire ripped...

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 10:04:02 -0400

theredsun:

It’s so heartbreaking when you think about devastation.

In Breezy Point, a fire ripped through 100 homes, and as I watched old women and young children and even a newlywed couple sob into the camera lens, I listened to the echo of my ear drums. Sometimes, we are so preoccupied with our own problems that we forget millions of people per day are suffering from rape, displacement, fire damage, or abuse. It’s staggering to see the statistics.

This girl I know broke her foot trying to escape her home as it filled with rain water and ocean salt and debris. This guy I know watched New York City go dark with a soaking wet cigarette and his phone, alone. Another guy, a photographer, spent the night helping homeless people find shelter and snapping photographs of Coney Island seconds before it was almost destroyed. I huddled in the corner of a room while a tree fell on my parents house, helpless and without power.

And I wonder, honestly, who is worse off. At face value, probably the girl with the broken foot. But that was her summer house. Her own home is safe and sound, with only a broken lightbulb and an Aston Martin with a dent in it. Does that change your opinion? Or do you still feel the same?

"inertia" by s.jones

Sun, 28 Oct 2012 15:50:21 -0400

revsjones:

Set me free
Or love me
Hold on to me
Or let me go
Clinging
Grasping
Reaching out
To the ghost of you
Lingering
So close
Yet so far away
I soothe you
But I feel painfully free
You move me
Yet you stay religiously.
-s.jones

Mosaic

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 15:12:03 -0400

paradigmpoet:

I dreamed you were
Counting my ribs through
The layers of my clothes,
As if the
Fragile longitudes
Surrounding my heart were
Not strong enough,
As if you knew
It took so many
Breakings
For me to be
Here,
Stilled,
Just for
This moment.

There are
So many bruised
Midnights
In the course of
A lifetime,
So many lonely streets,
Rain slicked,
Outside my door,
So many mosaics
Of me
Spread,
Tooth to tendon,
Belly to bone,
The bulging compass of
My arteries cut,
Poured,
Strung across
Miles I’ve traveled, like
A red rubber road
To lead me home.

And each time I
Break I
Grow
Sharper,
Like a trauma
Remembered
In total recall,
No buffer of
Amnesiac haze to
Block the carnage
Jostling the
Blooms of my organs
On their stems like
Blighted roses
In a gale,
Nudging me
Gently
To fly apart
At the seams.

And I do this with
Poise,
With the grace of
One who knows
The shipwreck like
The veins in her legs,
One who knows there is
Air to breathe
Somewhere in
The swiftwater currents
Of this catastrophe.
A surface waits
To break on
Atmosphere,
Wide open,
Horizon to
Glorious horizon.

I can taste this
Freedom,
Like the tang of
Metal
In my mouth.
I dream it like
Forgiveness
Unfettered.
I hold it like
An ocean
Tamed.

I look gently
Into the
Abyss
Of you,
Waiting
For me to throw
My drowned pieces,
Sodden but
Recovered,
Into you for
Safekeeping.
But there is
Evidence enough
Of my survival
Here
In the eye of
The storm.

I want to tell you
These splinters are
All I know of
Bodies and
Hearts,
Incongruous to
The life I was
Promised.

I want to tell you
I am not a victim,
Not a lamb
Being led
To an altar
Of vanities.

I want to tell you
I don’t care to be
Saved.

I care to be
Whole.

Are you Hispanic or Latino? What is your race?

Sun, 21 Oct 2012 16:19:30 -0400

inatoms:

The first job application I ever filled out was for Zabar’s on 80th and Broadway. I felt confident that I had it. The manager, a stout middle-aged man with boyish curls and bitten fingernails, had complimented me on my skirt and so I was given a clipboard and asked to take a seat to the right, not the left. I jotted down all of my information - name, age, address, martial status - with someone else’s chewed pen and blushed when I checked off NO on question 9. Have you ever been convicted of a crime? It was only a cheap lipstick and it was on sale for Christ’s sake.

10. Are you Hispanic or Latino? What is your race?

I paused. I thought about my mother’s tapas and my father leaning against the Berlin wall and how much my younger brother hated his name. ”They called me a habibi,” he once sobbed against my mother’s breast. I spoke Spanish, but grew up listening to The Cure and Depeche Mode. I was born just a couple of blocks down in St. Lukes, but so was my friend, Jason, and no one called him American - they called him black, so what was I and what did it matter?

I never got the job nor did I find his advances appealing and I sometimes wonder if it had anything to do with the fact that I left it empty. I chose nothing for question 10 and perhaps it was reason enough for him to think I wasn’t anything more than just a blow job behind his cluttered desk, but I walked out of there feeling more human than I ever had before. I wasn’t Hispanic. I wasn’t White. I wasn’t Black or anything in between. I was just sixteen.

Where Have All the Editors Gone?

Sun, 21 Oct 2012 08:55:15 -0400

jayarrarr:

Okay — Tyler Knott’s last post has over 1,000 notes. If this doesn’t get more than that, we know what’s wrong with this so-called Tumblr Writing Community. Wake the fuck up and make your voice known. We’re here. If you actually care about this, make it known. This is a numbers game — not for me, for you.

jayarrarr:

I pay attention to things, I do. And I actually don’t care how you feel about features: whether you love them or hate them, think they’re important or think they’re stupid, wish you had more or wish you had less. This isn’t about that.

This is about the fact that there are 27 tag editors of poetry and prose. That means each day we should be entertained with a maximum of 270 new features. Okay, sure, people have lives and aren’t always on tumblr to burn all their features. But there should be at least 100 or so features in any given day, which is less than half the maximum, but it is a duty of sorts for which there is no compensation beyond whatever delight you get from featuring someone, so I’m being lenient. Are there 100 features in a day? No. In point of fact, having reviewed the features over the past few days — there are seldom more than 12 or so — and 9 or 10 of them are mine.

There’s a reason I’m Top Editor, see — the party line is that the pieces I promote are those “most liked and reblogged” by tumblr users — but the reality is that the pieces I promote are basically the only ones there are.

I went through the past 30 features on poetry and prose. The past 30 features shouldn’t be the last 3 days or so, but they are. The reality is that the 30th feature, where I stopped, was dated October 18th. Within the past 30 poetry features, I’ve featured 24 of them — the other 6 pieces were promoted by one of 26 other editors. Prose is just as bad: I’ve featured 23 of the past 30 featured pieces. On any given day, I’m responsible for around 80% of the pieces featured under the poetry and prose tags.

There are thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands, of writing blogs on Tumblr. I’m not saying that every one of them is filled with feature-caliber work, whatever that may be — but Tumblr is doing that extensive writing community a disservice by maintaining inactive editors, some of whom have even deactivated (albeit improperly), despite that many active tumblr writers have directly indicated an interest in being a tag editor. There are many who would love to have the ability to share unknown writers with others — give them a chance. I’d love some competition.

shesanargonaut: I don’t know how to write down all the beautiful things in my head anymore. It’s...

Sat, 20 Oct 2012 21:16:15 -0400

shesanargonaut:

I don’t know how to write down all the beautiful things in my head anymore. It’s like I exhaled them all and have suddenly forgotten how to breathe in.

Dissection

Sat, 20 Oct 2012 21:05:57 -0400

girlvswhale:

If you dig up a tree
to see how deep it grows,
you sever the backbone
from which Spring and Fall explode.

If you remove the heart
to see how fast it beats
you fracture the connection
between my love and yours.

happymonk: I envy the windthat embraces the flowerand makes it shakebut does not cling to it.

Sat, 20 Oct 2012 20:48:59 -0400

happymonk:

I envy the wind
that embraces the flower
and makes it shake
but does not cling to it.

crleverette: Poisoned words are a cancer, spreading further and further, eating away at humanity. A...

Sat, 20 Oct 2012 00:25:52 -0400

crleverette:

Poisoned words are
a cancer,
spreading further
and further,
eating away at humanity.

A ruined name,
a vacant heart…

Rumors of war.
Wars of rumor.

(The tongue kills)

Quit Fooling Yourself, You're Still a Child

Sat, 20 Oct 2012 00:21:11 -0400

autumndragonfly:

You still sit alone at the base of the only willow tree in the city, immersed in the world you’ve never quite learned how to deplete while everyone else hurries by, minds in briefcases and hearts in heels. Only you hold your soul in your hands, eyes shining with delight at the thought that it has remained in tacked over all these years.

When your autumn chilled fingers caress the pieces you’ve handed away so naively to people who always shook you off like rust, you knit yourself a scarf with your brows because this winter will be a merciless one. You’ve chipped yourself for every person who has come and sat beside you, under the weeping branches, to watch your fascination with the pacifically exquisite river.

The man with unnaturally warm hands kept a piece of you in the back pocket of his worn jeans, but you’ve never quite learned how to untie the sandbags from your larynx and hold on to the fleeting words that you know will clear away the cobwebs forming in the corners of his eyes. You aren’t certain if he’s lost you in between his travel though.

You left a corner of yourself in the coat’s breast pocket of a boy eleven stars away. Somehow, you always turn away in shame and flood the ravines of his beige cashmere sweater with your salty tears. You’re beautiful when you cry, where the last words you heard him speak. You wonder if he dropped you in the empty rabbit fields and never looked back.

You gifted the morsel of a girl a piece of yourself when she sat beside you and said, your words are louder than the screaming trees. She taught you how to read the bones of the murdered trees you use as paper, but you never realized she would walk into the river after she trampled merrily over your mind. Perhaps you’ve sunk to the bottom of the river with her body or you’re hung beside her in the stars. You’ll never know.

You’ll always sit alone at the base of the willow tree, eyes gazing over the New York skyline and the glimmering river, welcoming anyone who stops for a moment to sit with you. But somehow, you’ll quite never know how to be the selfish child on the playground.

Untitled

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 22:34:38 -0400

pajamaswag:

Memories, memories, play on the lids,
A smile, three words, and kisses forbid,
Happiness based upon nothing but lies,
Memories, nightmares that play in the eyes.

Waking and sleeping the pain never fades,
Rememberance always, no hope for escape,
A heart that was true fell for one that was not,
And the heart that was true, it never forgot.

For the one that was true the memories play,
but for the unfailful the remembrance fades,
So where is the justice for one that is haunted,
By nightmares of memories they never wanted?

jambu2525: And I told her, my cigarette burning my lips to get the words out, “you’ll never have...

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 17:40:18 -0400

jambu2525:

And I told her, my cigarette burning my lips to get the words out, “you’ll never have another chance to run away with someone who’s as wrong for you as I am.”

Solitary Confinement

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 16:18:46 -0400

desdaily:

It’s safe to say I’m awfully tired
of these rollercoaster rides
of ups and downs, sudden rage,
and relentless glass tides

Chloroform lullabies are
heard in lazy afternoons
along with compelling breaths to
dance alone in my adynamic room

books are for dreamers

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 14:14:46 -0400

virginiasinthelighthouse:

Greater wonders have been seen
Than words caught in bounded books.

A thousand golden gleams
In a single hidden look.

And calls of undead lovers
In the chasm of a heart;

To capture just these wonders
Would tear page and spine apart.

fitzarr: True love requires more than being in love. It’s true, I’m afraid. Being in love is...

Sun, 30 Sep 2012 23:10:57 -0400

fitzarr:

True love requires more than being in love.

It’s true, I’m afraid. Being in love is infatuation. It is a brightly coloured cacophony of flowers, whose fragrant feelings blind and confound. It is a melding of desire into physical form. It is two saplings who glimpse each other and stretch their blossom laden-branches towards one another in a desperate need to know connection.

True love is realising that when all your blossom has fallen to the ground and not even leaves hide your truths from one another, that you have somehow entwined your roots, and are one flourishing tree.

unbearablysharp: You – the hole in my life raft the un-opening parachute the incomplete first aid...

Sun, 30 Sep 2012 21:55:17 -0400

unbearablysharp:

You –

the hole
in my life raft

the un-opening
parachute

the incomplete
first aid kit

the blocked
emergency exit

the silent
smoke alarm
(batteries stolen
to use in remotes,
torches, sex toys)

You –

the blatant
disregard for
safety

the accidental
overdose

the death
of me.

listen.

Sun, 30 Sep 2012 10:26:24 -0400

shermeanuhh:

the hearts you break
collectively hum like a choir
of sirens behind you
warning you
that if you don’t change the boy you are
the man you’ll become
won’t know love
the way he’ll know regret

I turn 22 tomorrow.

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 20:32:27 -0400

unknownconstellation:

What a stupid, worthless age. At least at 21 I could buy beer, but I’d already been doing that for three years anyway (the benefits of being 6’ 1” and having a beard since age 17).

What do you do with 22? Nothing, legally speaking. It’s the first time since 11 that my age is a palindrome, so I guess that’s something. This would have been the age when I graduated from college, had I not taken time off after I realized that college, when you get right down to it, is pretty silly. This isn’t a knock at education by any means- put a bunch of twenty-somethings in an enclosed space with a burned-out professor and it’s not really a recipe for inspiring moments. More like paper after paper and then sex, maybe (usually not).

Come to think of it, I don’t even remember the last time I really did anything for my birthday. Something special, I mean, like a big party. Last year, I just got shitfaced drinking wine, and watched Mystery Science Theater 3000 until I fell asleep on my friend’s floor. I woke up hungover, had to go to class, and that’s when it hit me: birthdays are a celebration of aging.

We shouldn’t celebrate aging. Aging kills people, dagnabbit. We don’t pop the Champagne when someone steps on a rusty nail, do we? Can’t remember the last kegger I attended in celebration of a kidney infection, either.

Ah, but I’m just being silly. Birthdays are special, I guess, in the way that equipment is speical to MMO players. It changes your numbers, makes them bigger, more imposing, makes you look like you have more experience than you really do. I just don’t feel any different, physically anyway. I’ve always said that my mind ages faster than my body. I’m not saying I get smarter faster, I’m saying there are days when I think that by 25, I’ll be yelling at the neighbor kids to get the fuck off my lawn. What causes it? Frustration, I think. I don’t have direction- in my writing, in life in general. And racking up another year just makes me feel like I’ve missed the mark yet again. S.E. Hinton was published at 16. Alexander the Great conquered half the world when he was just a bit older than I am. And here is Devin Louis, the eldest Michelson boy, sitting at a laptop, drinking bad coffee, typing with two fingers very slowly because he never paid any attention to the typing lessons at school. Thinking, smoking, and worrying too much.

But I don’t want to depress anybody. After all, I was born on a Wednesday, and you know what they say about Wednesday’s child. You don’t? Oh, well allow me to tell you:

Wednesday’s child is full of woe. That’s in a poem about birthdays. All the other days got bright and sunny things, about how they are happy, or generous, but Wednesday gets totally fucked. Mother Goose, you’re a filthy whore.

So, I’m in a reflective mood, in case you couldn’t tell. I don’t even know why I’ve written this much, seeing as I’m really not all that interesting. I’ve already said too much, so to close, I’ll just say that I’m going to just…continue. That’s good. I’m just going to continue. Tomorrow, I’ll go to work (I need money), then later eat cake, then go to sleep, and then it’ll be just like it always is. I’ll be here, writing things, and sometimes people will read them. Who knows? Tomorrow may be the start of a great adventure.

Hopefully it’s to Japan. Have you tried octopus? It’s really good.

wakingmoments: Sometimes when my neighbor showers I think it is raining outside that is when I miss...

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 11:54:35 -0400

wakingmoments:

Sometimes when my neighbor showers I think it is raining outside that is when I miss you the most. Because I can remember a girl who looked her best during a storm but now you’re gone to a land where the sun’s always shining and somehow I think you may be dulled out there. Come back to us where the sky gets moody and often gray. Come back where you are that sometimes light on the darkest days. I need you.