I have this dream where they stay out too late and he spills my organs onto the morning papers. Don’t worry your pretty head; the walls cannot be white if they aren’t there. No rest for the wicked, but where do the ill-fated lie? There’s no one home to write the light out of my eyes and this cemetery setting lacks plot.

Boys will be boys, and sometimes boys will catch frogs by the lake and skin them alive with their father’s pocket knives. Sometimes little girls are hiding in the grass and can never look at frogs again without retching.

Wow. I just hit what I feel is a pretty big Tumblr follower milestone. Hello to everyone new and old! I’m proud to be on your dashboards.

This era is far too common.

Dusk the messenger sets sail,
navigating evening skies
in orange tones, under veil;
a signal still, to lovers’ eyes.

And her sighs, they echo through
empty courtyards, summer haze,
naming stars and calling you
each breath a lover’s phrase.

In dusk’s wake comes night’s blind
a cloak of secrets and its fleet:
stars with names, stars aligned
and the lovers, they will meet.

I miss all of you.

I cannot stomach it
this hunger
this waltz with fireworks,
severed hands clasped
and tip toeing merrily
‘round the triggers
begging on chrome knees
to be pulled.

Will I always think of you in May?

I’m proud to share with you a roughish draft of the prologue of my novel Fame’s Child (which is a bleh working title for now) if you would care to read it. It is not the average teenage drama, but the story of a girl staging her own way to the spotlight beginning with the set that is her small town country high school.

Prologue

Allyson Leer / ENG3U / Ms. Taylor / September 13, 2013

Assignment 1: Myself, My Passions, My Future

Angels made from shattered diamonds; the glittery, glamorous, and grotesque. A lifestyle that leaves the impression of perfection on the surface and emerges as royally fucked beneath. Whispers and articles full of lies and exaggerations, spicy poses and paragraphs of charity. How much is true? What can we believe? Who will ever know? The beauty of it all, as bittersweet as the golden starlet’s implants or suave Mr. Pinstripe Suit’s affair, is that we never will know.

The career of the celebrity species, male or female, almost mirrors the life of a nobody; us lesser beings. When we are born, we step into the limelight and shine until we go out of style. It is here we fade, become irrelevant to even those who claim to love us, and disappear, only to be remembered through photographs and a name on a tombstone. These are the so-called marks we leave behind.

But no celebrity leaves behind such trivial imprints. They are immortalized by the true and terrible stories of their lives, and their contributions to stage, screen, music, or the thriving social scene. They come into this world as human, ordinary and flawed, but die as someone who may or may not have done something special, no matter how awful it was.

They are like us - plagued by humanity - and yet they are not so confined to this hindering, tortuous skin. They are much more.

And this is why you may find me with my head stuck in an overwrought, trashy tabloid magazine, fixed on the hottest couple at the award show, the newcomer with a fresh sound, or the scandalous DUI queen from the big screen. This is why I worship them. They may as well be Gods.

As for me? I am a lesser being. I take no real shame in this fact. And while I am content with observing and am genuinely honoured to walk on the same ground as these luminaries, I can also honestly state that I was once unintentionally a part of them.

Children always see their own world as normal, never able to look beyond what they have and what they are initially taught by their parents or whomever happens to be first. They never know how privileged they are or that they might be missing something, until someone bluntly points it out, or they open their eyes for the first real time.

When I was a little girl I thought my life and my family were normal. I didn’t have friends my own age, not too unlike my current self, and so I naturally assumed all children traveled the world with their parents. I assumed it was commonplace to have no steady home, to be on a bus in Los Angeles one week then move along to a hotel in Paris, and Tokyo not long after. I thought the world was just a playground to be explored.

In a way, it feels like life has stopped in place since our adventures ended. Or perhaps not stopped, but shoved aside to make room for this temporary turn of events. When I lie in bed and try to empty my mind, most nights a recurring thought steals me away and leads me down a familiar path. ”Will I wake up in Madrid tomorrow? Berlin? Cairo for a change of pace? Will mom or dad wake me?” Sometimes if I can’t sleep, I will entertain these thoughts and believe myself into peace. When morning comes, only the alarm wakes me. In the mirror I notice I’m exactly where I was the day before. Never progressing or declining.

Mom never let me read magazines. Too much bad news, she said and was right. For a child as young as I was in our nomadic days, magazines and even newspapers were the gateway out of fairy tales and the comfort of mother’s lap, straight into the welcoming hell of real life.

The day I crossed over, I realized how much there was to hate her for. Hypocrisy, as trendy and in as it is advertised to be, can never quite be worn fashionably on the people one knows personally.

Mom didn’t want me to be a God. So she shielded me, deprived me. For this, I am no longer bitter. I realize now that she, like myself, tasted only second-hand fame. She was only slightly less ordinary than myself at the time, and miles behind dad who shone in the flashing camera and colourful stage lights. I can excuse her actions and be the stronger woman.

With both now long gone, I stand today as only myself. And yet, though I am honoured to be alive and live in such a special, exciting place as this earth is, and as privileged as I am and always have been, there is something numbing and plebeian about this life I lead. Am I foolish to hold dearly onto nostalgia when perhaps I am destined to follow this course? Or can I somehow - in spite of where time has led me or what it has taken from me - find my way back?

I forgot how much I love developing a novel.

I may be MIA for quite awhile. Err, more so than usual. Somehow I’ve accidentally become nocturnal again, so things are a bit off. But most of my brainpower is being spent on fleshing out my novel and/or screenplay. So, sorry.

Analog brother
(teacher, critic,
unattainable friend)
folds spindly limbs to seek
abandoned thoughts,
quietly unhappy here
forgetting he is loved.

No one thinks to find you
hidden beneath a veil
of winters in foreign lands
where there are mounds of earth
and graves for peacocks,
sisters with golden hair
splayed over broken necks.

Summer is on her back again,
always too damn hot
for these old hands.

Was it dirt or blood
that stained them
this ugly copper?

There are too many things I want to write about you and no thread to sew them together.