I am your mermaid Tangled but blissful

When I grow older, I want a child. And I know what he will look like. He will be my little boy, dark Caribbean skin, glowing from within. He will have long kinky brown hair, that I will back-comb for hours until they form fuzzy swaying caterpillar dreadlocks, that hang to his shoulders. And he will have dark, glowering eyes, and a round, button nose, that I will rub in greeting. His dark wide lips will smile slowly, revealing happy gapped teeth. He will have the most perfect toes and fingers, that are continually filling pockets with the treasures of the earth. 

I will teach him to make music, so he can bring emotions into the air, and then my wild little child will run, screaming off into our backyard. I will smile and make cinnamon cookies, and when I'm done, I'll go looking for him, and all I'll hear is the throat songs he will have left trailing behind himself for me. The trail will lead me through a hole in our fence, and into the woods, into the thickest part. And I will be standing there, with a bag of warm cookies, and I will look up, and there he will be, his naked brown body swinging from the rough bark, his miniature clothes piled over the roots at the bottom of the tree. He will sing a taunting monkey song to me, and climb higher. So, barefoot, I will climb myself up up up until I reach him, and we will find the biggest branch there and I will lie upon it on my back, and he will curl up on my stomach, and we will fall asleep, naked monkeys high up on a naked tree bough. 

When the night tickles us awake, his eyes will open, luminescent beacons attached to a body with grasping fingers that pull me down and forwards, back to home, where he will steal the bag of cookies from my open palms and run off to my bed, to warm it for me, and when I come back after retrieving our clothes, he will have eaten all the cookies but one, for me, and there will be crumbs in his hair. I will sing a little song beneath my breath, until it swells larger and larger, and he will get up and dance to it, his little arms akimbo, his hair reaching up and outwards, and he will spin and spin and spin until his eyes will close mid spin, and I will pick up his soft skinny body and deposit him beneath warm patchwork covers. That is what will happen when I grow older.

Title Quote: Elysian Fields, Mermaid

River of Orchids, winding our way Want to walk into London on my hands one day

Roadside Thistle

She leaned over the

roadside, and found

a flower

snipped it gently between

thumbnail and forefinger

raised herself and 

delicately placed it

between the fold of her ear

a curve 

an overlap

a furl

purple petals

pushing against the

edge of pale skin

with the

flower

secured, she sighed

the wind blowing her raven hair

back, away from the 

flower

its bloom     pushing

up for air 

amidst this sea of dark

just a roadside

thistle, purple petals

bloom even when 

there's no one to see

but she saw

the plain beauty of 

an ordinary unique

creation

purple speck

amongst so many other colors.

Title Quote: River of Orchids, XTC

Purple haze all in my eyes Don't know if it's day or night

There was a girl. She must have been around 17 or 18, and she had skin the color of coffee with rich cream mixed in. She had a small nose, which must have been like a button when she was little, but had now grown to a point, giving her whole face a defined manner. Her lips were darker brown than her skin, and she wore no makeup. Her face seemed without a mask. Her eyebrows were pronounced, yet they were soft at the edges, and her eyes were the color of a black cat's at night, sparkling with a secret. The girl's face was made even more vibrant by the scene of her hair behind her. It was wiry, and tightly curled, hanging at different lengths along her shoulders and back. Each ringlet was a different color, one the color of honey when light streams through it, one the color of a dusty antique oakwood cabinet, and one the color of rich amber beer when held up to a window. Her hair was only just held back by a colorful sash, full of lapis lazuli blue, eggplant purple, and a dull ochre, woven with binding silk threads. The sash was wide as a headband at the front, and crinkled thin where it was tied at the back, trailing down to the girl's hips. At the very bottoms dangled little worn brass bells, about three a piece for each end. They must have tinkled like a dream does, if only people would stop to listen.

  The girl was wearing a baby blue cotton shirt, worn at the edges, the sleeves coming down halfway between her shoulder and her elbow, and banded at the bottom, with the tops blooming out slightly. The neckline had been, presumably by her, cut into a ragged V, and there was a symbol, or writing on her shirt, in black, though the way she was twisted there was no hope of deciphering what it said. The bottom of her shirt dipped low in in the front and the back, and the sides were shortened to her hips. The bottoms fell over her skirt, which was a beautiful gypsy piece, hidden with patterned patches, stolen from mandalas and persian curtains. It was a tiered skirt, but it was not the kind where the tier evenly circles around the whole length, it was more each pice for their own, and the effect was of more shingles than anything else. Where the patterns flapped up, you would catch a glimpse of fuchsia silk from a sari, and bits of it trailed and fluttered with he rest of the skirt in ringlets. The hem came to about her calves, but just then, the girl ran over a subway grate, past crowds of people, and because of the breeze, the skirt hovered around her knees, exposing, long, thin legs made for jumping on trampolines and dancing the tango. 

Now, her features had been molded to form a look of defiance, and determination, even though her obligation that she was determined to fulfill was a hard one. Her hair had been blown back momentarily from the breeze, exposing the eye of a peacock feather dangling from each ear, swirling in emerald and the darkest of blues. And now I saw, too, that the girl was clutching a shoulder bag, made of woven hemp the color of beaten straw that was held to her waist. The tip of a book nosed out. Then, the girl continued on her dash past the subway grate, and disappeared in the tumult of people, off to haunt someone else's vision.

Title Quote: Jimi Hendrix, Purple Haze

Sit and listen Sub-let your ideas Till they're broken

Atom


Cataclysmic 
words fall from
our mouths.
To inspire;
breathe in.
There is a waxed scarf
tied at  
my heart 
and hanging 
limp, fulvous 
in my mouth;
breathe in.
Where do the words
I speak behind
these closed lips 
go
when I forget 
to open them?
Speak, and all will be spoken for.
An infant's mutterings
betray the thoughts of
ideas untouched by ideas
the world untouched
by the world.
If one atom
can destroy a city
what can one word
do?




Title Quote: Cantinero, Little Princess

The roots are shooting up through the tool shed

Hey guys, sorry to break my rule already, but this post is not my writing. I just want to alert you to this website called etsy. It is this hosting site where all sorts of people--independent users who create all sorts of independent goods--can put up the stuff they have created and made themselves, and other people browse and buy it, thus supporting people who wouldn't otherwise be able to sell this stuff, and buying handmade items. As you may notice from the sidebar on this blog, I have created an etsy account for myself, LolaBellybutton. I am selling mostly jewelry and felted things, so please check it out! If you have to get a gift for someone, this might be it! Or, you might just see something you want. Tell others about it, too! Thanks, please visit my shop.

Title Quote: Vampire Weekend, Horchata

And all that I knew was the hole in my shoe which Was letting in water

Hungry. Oh, am I ever so hungry. And thirsty, too. I would lick the damp, moldy walls that keep me here, but I already have, hours ago, to no avail. Not a drop of water has soothed my tongue for what feels like days. My stomach has imploded. I must sit here, twisted into a fetal position, to try survive the pain, the hunger. I try not to cry, so as to conserve the little water left inside my dehydrated self. I try to close my eyes, but it is too hard not to look, not to watch. Slowly, my gaze rises and I stare, my lower lip trembling, at the table above. At the food above. My eyes stalk the food, the steaming plates set out with a glorious, gleaming banquet—I will die with the food right there, trapped like a goldfish who has jumped out onto the ground, its nose pressed to its glass bowl filled with water. Mmmm. So thirsty. . . With a last burst of effort, I get up, and run at the table, jumping on it, jumping on the food. The food to make me well again, the food to ease my pain. But yet again, like all the other nights, my fingers only touch hard, immaculate glass, sealed over the feast, my feast. I scrabble to hold on, my dry, brittle tongue presses against the glass, and I fall once more. Desperate, I throw myself again and again at the concrete door. My mind watches my body, is startled to hear a wail, an inhuman wail of the most horrible suffering, and watches as I collapse on the floor, shivering uncontrollably. To be the infant in her mother's arms, to taste the strong milk between my lips, to taste anything, to feel my belly full.

"I'll tell!" I whisper. "I'll tell!" I try to shout. To tell is to get food and water, to tell is to get mercy. I will tell them everything they ever wanted, but for a crust of bread. Why won't they hear me? I'll finally tell, I am hungry. But no one hears. My voice too weak, a thin gossamer thread against iron cables. With one final breath, my voice breaks these cables, informing the world: "I'll tell!" No more breaths are drawn. I feel darkness close in, I succumb, just as I hear the heavy footsteps of my entrapper triumphantly storm into the room. My soul—shriveled as it is—rises and watches as the man comes in with a smug grin on his face that turns to puzzledness as he reaches down to check my pulse. His expression morphs to anger, to rage, to the prize dangling there and now, only just by a hair, lost, as he finds no pulse in my lifeless body. I am much the same in life as in death; shriveled, weak, untelling. Now it is time for him to utter an inhuman scream to tell us "So close, so close!" To make suffer, as he made me. Slowly, I smile, and turn, misting through the glass, to feast on the essence of the sustenance laid on that rough table. Yet I am hungry, oh so hungry.

Title Quote: Traffic, Hole in My Shoe

could you please pull over for a second and breathe?

Behind the Glass (train)

Pulling out of the station

I see each painted face

petulant, expectant, grimacing

joy,

perhaps.

then a blur

each face belongs to

every body

we reach the tunnel

enshrouded by the

darkness of anonymity

our window turns

opaque, and my reflection

stares back at me.

I smile reassuringly at her

she smiles back

behind the glass.

Through wordless

nudge-grunts

my brothers make sure

I know it's our stop;

we are leaving.

I see that

they care

though they isolate their

conversations, boyspeak

one's hand grips

an edge of the door

to hold it 

open if

they were to begin 

to close

lest they separate

us 3.

I step from

the metal box into

a concrete labyrinth

we hurry

and I write this poem

in the back of my head

transforming feelings to pictures to words

on the

way

to school.

Title Quote: Summarum, Sky Falling

as soon as you're born you start dying so you might as well have a good time

Welcome, everyone, to my new blog. You may be wandering moons like me, or you may not. You may have come here after reading my other (main) blog, Potpourri. Or you may not have. Whatever the reason, you are here. And here I am. It's the new year, a time for new beginnings, as well as new endings. Basically, it's a time for change. So here I am, trying something different.
This blog will be dedicated to creative writing, encompassing all things fictional: Fantasies, Short Stories, descriptive flash-fiction, Poems, and the odd semi-fiction (after all, all lies have a grain of truth in them). All of my writing will be in italics, introductions, notes, tangents, etc. will be not be in the opposite of italics.
One more note. The titles of each post are not the titles of the pieces (those are either noted before the piece, or marked as untitled, or just not titled). These titles are quotes from songs, and the artists are credited at the bottom, along with a link to the music (if I can get it). I urge you to listen to it.
And now, without further ado, the first piece to be posted to Wandering Moon (!)

Goodbye

Back when I still worked at our little traveling circus, I knew a guy. Well, I mean not intimately or anything, I didn't even know his name. But after every performance (I tight-rope walked. And ran, and did hand-stands and strewed flowers and anything else imaginable on a high-wire) this man would give me a small scrap of paper, complement my performance, and leave, before I could say anything. And each piece of paper had a word, or two words, on it, sometimes three. Sometimes they were completely random and made no sense, sometimes they were pertaining exactly to the current situation I had gotten myself into, though I really had no idea how he knew what was going on in my life. Somehow, I was never really worried by his presence and his slips of paper. He was just a part of life. Wake up. Go perform. Finish and get paper from the man. Go home, have dinner, and go to sleep to wake up and start all over again in the morning. Though knowing me, my days were fairly less predictable than that. 

The papers sometimes said things like LOOK NEAR. Sometimes, they said things like THE MOUNTAIN-TOP. I took whatever message it was in stride and kept my eyes out for it in the world. But these messages from this man were not the most curious thing about him. It was the tattoo. Now, working at a circus as I did, I had seen my share of strange tattoos. But his was the best one I have seen in all my years. This man was relatively tall, around 6' 4'', and he had light brown tousled hair the color of root beer, though it was graying at the temples. He mostly wore gray, as if to blend in with the background, so only his face stood out. The man had an unusually large nose. It stuck out like a falcon's beak, but rounded. It was not an unpleasant nose, it was just remarkable. But the size of his nose was not the most interesting thing about it. The tattoo was the thing that really stood out. For, you see, on the tip of his nose, crawling up the bridge of it, was a tattoo of a splendid summer sky, with clouds spotting the robin's egg blue background. If looked at on a summer day outside, you could imagine his nose to be slimmer than it was, the tip blending into the summertime. 

I thought he must be such a remarkable man to think up such a usefully ridiculous adornment. It drew me to him, as if the tattoo created an aura that invited intellectuals, people who had had strange lives and were willing to accept most anything that to others seemed oh, so out of place. People like me. So we met, day after day, week after week, unspeaking in our exchange. He would linger, now, and I would catch his eye, but though I was the fearless, daring one to be walking so many feet above the earth each day with no regard to my safety, I could not manage one single word to this man. As I said before, I did not even know his name. And I think that is why I was so drawn to him. With a name, a label, an attachment to this world, he was not as alluring, he was just another wonky admirer, or so I would believe in my tiny mind. But I did not believe this, for he was still an incomprehensible, unknown being to me, our only link a fragile, white thread, just little notes, fluttering as birds might, unseen in the night. And I kept every one of them, those notes. For years after, I puzzled over those 31 little notes, for my mind alone to comprehend, or not. And, as circuses do, after those 31 days, that month of July, I moved on, away, and did not see the man for many years. Many, many years. 

* * * * *

I was so  much more learned, so much older, when I had come across this man again. I had quit the moving and with it the circus, the life no longer being mine. I saw him in a library. It was in Seattle, and the sky was gray and cloudy, a filmy gray gauze veil transposed between the world and my face. Even inside, you could smell the rain. I had checked out a mystery, (my favorites) and had sat down to bury myself in the latest murder, but something caught my eye. I looked up, past the people sitting at my table, to a man. A man who sat but three tables away, a man whose name I didn't even know. And his face, cheekbones sticking proudly out, limp silver hair peeking from under an old-fashioned gray pinstriped fedora, his shoulders bunched up awkwardly, his eyes concentrating intently on his book. And could it be? Could he....be? Never would I have recognized this wizened, lean old man, but for the tattoo on his slightly wrinkled nose. The warm July days of years so far past came filling up my senses. I could hardly gasp but for the surety of it. And I moved my hand, made a gesture as if to rise, to walk over, to greet him. But I found I could not. I found, before me on that table, doubts of my strength, of his memory, of my importance to him. I promised myself that before I or he left, I would go over. I turned my head to my book, but all I saw were the notes, now hidden safely in an engraved wooden box inside of a bright tin box hidden by a portrait of the circus high away in my loft. And I fingered the pages of my book, made as if to rip them out, but what good would that do? So I sat, agonizing, my soul tearing, piece by piece, to drift down and settle at my feet and so weigh them down. And when I opened my eyes once more, the lights outside were dimmed, there was but one man left, sitting at the reading tables. I forced myself up, dragging my body forwards, until I was a table away. And still the man did not look up. I saw his hand moving furiously, I saw the words as if in a dream, but I could not read them. He held no book, but a Journal, a notebook, bound in leather and embossed with dulled silver. The nib of his fountain pen flashed, inviting me closer. I sighed; knowing it would come, it would have to happen. I closed my eyes to gather my thoughts, and readied myself to step forwards. But when I opened them again, they revealed a different scene from when they closed. The man, his glorious sky along with him, had left, swept away like the wind, like a long lost summer's day. I let out my breath, found myself shaking, now. 

Forlornly, I myself prepared to leave. But then a fluttering caught my eye. Paper! He had left a final gift, he knew I was there, he had remembered! Trembling, I reached for the note. The Final Note. Reading it, I felt a relief wash over me, purge my questions, and imagined the man brace his body against the wind as he walked down the street and made his way back to his life. I knew what went on in his head, what went on in mine. I finally understood. And the words were not the understanding, it was the note itself. Carefully carved into the dove white paper was a picture. And it came upon me that for all I didn't know of the man, he did not know of me. We were nameless souls and this note was our name. There was a sun, a bloom of black and white color, and on each ray of light was perfectly inscribed each and every note he had written me, and I knew that this was Life itself. And encircling the sun, having it nestled within it, was a crescent moon, the silver shining out, just as bright as its opposite. And I knew that that was to be the unforgiving, all-encompassing Death for which we all come to at one time. And I understood, that was  our name, that was us. On the other side, in the familiarly strange block letters of every other note, it told me what I already knew. GOODBYE, it said, goodbye. and I knew that the moon shone intensely on that man this night, lighting his tattoo as never before, lifting him up, caressing him to a final slumber. I knew he had come this night for me, that he had always known me all these years, and tonight, it was chosen. That tonight, I, instead of he, had bid a fond farewell.

Title Quote: Cake, Sheep Go to Heaven