Cross My Heart and Hope to Write

INCLUDING ORIGINAL POETRY, SHORT STORIES, ESSAYS, AND NOVELLAS, ALONGSIDE ARTWORK AND PHOTOGRAPHY
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Thursday, September 29, 2011

UPDATE: 30 Second Film

Hello again! This is very important, so I will cut to the chase. A friend of mine is studying to be a director. He recently cast me in a very short film he made for a video contest powered by zooppa.com and hosted by matchingdonors.com. (I'm the zombie with the monologue). The winner gets to intern with 20th Century Fox. We are currently at position number 4, which means we only need a few more votes to win. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE VOTE!!! You can vote using multiple emails. Just create an account by clicking "log in and vote" on the right hand side, it can be canceled at any time. And, of course, enjoy the video. (Make sure to move the quality bar up to 5 before submitting):

Don't Donate Your Organs to Zombies

UPDATE: The video is now on YouTube. Here's the link:

Don't Donate Your Organs to Zombies

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

The Hands Series

Woo! My, my, my, has it been a few tumultuous weeks since my last update. I hope you all weren't fretting I may have fallen into a time rift and was lost beyond the ramparts of this dimension. Hardly! In fact, I was on a feverish quest to find my misplaced laptop and along with it the better of my work. Yes, my poetry, my stories, my photos, my novel, all of it was almost lost. Thanks to the grace of God, a kind hearted, honest young gentleman retrieved the device and ensured its safe return to me. For those few days, however, I felt as though the foundation of my life, the very purpose of this existence, had been squandered.  
But the past is but a point of reference for the present. As I touched on earlier in my Stretch Marks post, there is an addition poetic series I have been working on called The Hands Series. The series consists of poems dedicated to the hand's of musicians (though I'm considering expanding this premise to include artists and other craftsmen).
I was inspired after attending an Eric Whitacre concert in Manhattan. I sat relatively close - close enough that I could keenly watch the motions of his hands as he conducted the choir. I was fascinated by the fluid, smokey movements of his dexterous phalanges. I immediately felt compelled to write about them. Then, as my mind was bubbling, I pondered the hands of other artists and: The series was born.
So here is the first in the series, The Conductor's Hands. The rest are soon to come. In addition, since I have not yet posted anything regarding my art, I have included a small sketch - a prelude to what is soon to come.


The Conductor’s Hands

The conductor’s hands,
Roiling like smoke, 
Lead a formless pack
Of hellhounds and turtledoves,
Rising and falling
Like cities and mountains,
Following the steady hands
As they whisk away emotions
And squander breaths.
We watch intimately
Each digit like a ballerina,
The wrists dragging the palms away
Screaming,
To cut the air into perfect
Bight sized pieces
That we gobble up
Into our ears
Starvingly. 

Sunday, September 4, 2011

Ermeneglossia

"Ermeneglossia" is defined as "the interpretation of tongues" by American anthropologist L. Carlyle May in his 1956 essay, A Survey of Glossolalia and Related Phenomena in None-Christian Religions. It entails the deciphering of jumbled, incoherent, cryptic annunciations emitted by an individual in an induced state by a religious layperson (a sorcerer, a shaman, a priest, etc.). It is presently the title of a short story I had written quite some years ago.

It is written from the first person perspective and concerns the misfortune of a man who awakes to find himself trapped in an incredibly small stone space with no recollection of who he is, where he is, and how he got there. His voice-box has been removed and he suckles from a drizzle of water as it runs down the wall from a crack in the ceiling for sustenance. After several days of examination, finding only petty artifacts, he retreats into wallowing as he contemplates his plight. To his relief, however, he hears a faint rapping coming from the wall of his confinements. In excitement, he attempts to contact the faceless entity through a small hole in the wall by his feet, only to be met with a greater horror.

Please enjoy the excerpt and let me know if you care to read the rest.

Ermeneglossia

Excruciated, trying still desperately to call out, to convene with the stranger, I could only make out one feature of him at a time: a nostril, an eyebrow, a lip. I whispered, but all I could make out from the thumper were muffled groans and grunts. I put my mouth directly in front of the hole, but received the same reply.
   It hurt too much to continue, so I stopped and swallowed a chunk of what I assumed to be my own tissue. I could hear the stranger on the other side continue to murmur and garble. Inquiring, I pressed my eye to the opening again and saw blackness, then I felt a moist, hot, foul-smelling gust lollop over my cornea and cause me to shut my eye swiftly to tear, and back away.
   Rubbing it and opening it again, I looked through and saw the beam of light once more on the other side of the gap. I saw the gentleman lean back and throw his opened mouth into the light as I continued to hear him gargling. The beam shot through his missing and broken teeth, and into the cavity, allowing effortless view to his tonsils. But where I expected to find a flicking, anxious tongue, as a line of drool rolled down his unshaven chin and neck, I saw only a bloody, knotted mass, sown up tight with blackish string, encrusted in a thick coating of uncontrollable mucus, a stale wound where his tongue used to be. It filled my gullet with contortions, shooting pains up my back and over my shoulders that bleated from my spine.
   I was overcome with coughing, the most painful, harshest coughing fit I had ever known, and I couldn’t stop because of the pain, but I pleaded for it to for the very same reason. Horrified, I began to whimper once more.