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You sat next to me,
Taking his spot.
Blanketing him in darkness
Like the first blizzard every Winter.
Covering him so completely.

Day after day,
I watched you steal him from me,
Coercing him further into your darkest recesses
Whispering into his ears,
Telling him alternately to be silent and lash out.

Strategically, methodically even,
You covered his eyes with your corners,
So he could not see me reaching out to him.
And stuffed your loose strings into his ears,
So he could not hear me calling his name in the darkness.

You led him along your destructive, devouring road,
Toward the place blacker than the night sky
And more unfathomable than the depths of the ocean.
How or why he followed you,
I do not know.

I may never know,
May always be left wondering who you were,
Wondering where he went,
Wondering what this shadow is that’s left behind
Staring at me with empty eyes.

The Dangers of Gardening

Wes and I went out gardening today. By that I mean Wes grabbed my plastic tea pitcher he uses for watering the plants, the miracle grow, and the insecticide and headed out to “the garden.” And I followed.

Our “garden” consists of four plants: three different kinds of tomato plants that I can’t name and a cucumber plant. We used to have a squash plant. It died. Don’t know what happened.

Wes went to the water hose, filled up the pitcher, mixed in the miracle grow and began the watering of our “garden.” I followed swinging my arms gaily, tromping through the too tall grass, and braving the swarms of gnats that have taken up residence in the air around “the garden.”

Wes waters the leaves and the soil around one plant and heads back to the watering hose to refill my tea pitcher with the pink lemonade looking mixture that we hope will soon turn our plants into giant stalks leading up into the clouds. I follow, walking slowly and deliberately through the jungle, also known as, our backyard.

On the trip back to “the garden,” I ascertain that the swarms of gnats are out to get me and start flailing my arms at them in an attempt to thwart their oncoming attack. Of course no one else can see the gnats, so the woman across the street looks at me like I’m crazy. Then she resumes digging in her huge garden that reflects her expertise in such matters.

Wes asks me if we should dig in the soil a little bit to get it loosened up. Per his mother’s suggestion, I respond in the affirmative feeling like I know something about gardening even if I’m not an expert like Old Lady Green Thumb across the road. I venture slowly into the cobweb-infested basement to retrieve the dirt-covered spade that sits neatly on a cracked wooden door.

My mission accomplished, I venture back out into the wilderness and deposit aforementioned spade on the ground in front of “the garden.” Wes is sitting on the ground stirring the dirt with his hands that are now completely covered in wet soil. He asks me to pick some of the weedy grass out from around the cucumber plant. I bend over, pulling my black sundress tightly to my ass, so no one will see up it, and grab a few handfuls of stringy looking green stuff that may or may not actually be weeds. After commenting to Wes that I just didn’t know how much of this grass to pull up, desperately hoping to get out of pulling up anymore seeing as my hands are now dirty, Wes tells me to pull up a little more.

I stand there staring at my flip-flops, continuously lifting my feet up from the itch of the grassy ground, and fight off the gnat attack that is wreaking havoc on my back at this point. Note to self: either don’t wear a sundress and flip-flops while gardening or get a big NASA space suit that will keep me protected from all unwanted invasions before gardening again.

Upon Wes’ completion of aforementioned gardening tasks, I flee inside the protection of our house fearing the fly buzzing around my head is going to nosedive into my ear and lay eggs that will hatch during the night while I sleep.

“The garden” is watered. My muffins have cooled. There are no more bugs to lay eggs inside my head. Whew! Gardening is dangerous work. Time to enjoy a straight from the box home made blueberry muffin. Thank God I made it in alive to enjoy them.

Announcement to All Who Come Into Contact With Me Today

The sign on my forehead should say this:

Today I woke up ornery, and my shoulder's hurting, because I slept funny. I'm pretty hormonal, for no reason in particular. If I were you, I would stay away. I don't feel like sharing my toys; so don't ask to use anything I have. And because I'm hormonal, I could lash out at you at any moment. If you must come near me, make sure you have cheese, a box of tissues, and a sappy movie in your hand, because all will be needed for you to survive your encounter with me while I'm in this heightened hormonal state. Basically, just let me munch out and watch girly love stories on Lifetime tv, because that's your best chance of survival.

No, you haven’t done anything wrong, but that doesn’t matter. Everything you do will be wrong and everything you touch will somehow need cleaning or moving back into place or just generally touched up after your presence has been vanquished from this darkened temple dedicated solely to my womanly needs.

What did you say? No, I don’t need any light other than the mesmerizing, tear-inducing glow coming from my friend, the only one who’s on my side today, the television. I don’t know why you’ve, all of a sudden, grown so demanding of me but I can’t do anything for you today as I am fastidiously attending to my womanly hormones that are wreaking their havoc on my brain and my heart.

I am also extremely busy lying with the heating pad on my stomach and my back, in turn, because both ache as if in remembrance of the child I have not born for you yet. I’m greatly looking forward to carrying the watermelon around that will be caused by you and your sperm. I can hear you now, “Go guys. Swim faster.” It will be fun. You carry around the bowling ball then.

Why am I hostile today you ask? Let’s see. Could it be because I switched my birth control recently? Yes, you knew that. We have been talking about it for months because, as you know, switching my birth control really fucks with my body.

I’m sorry. Surely I misheard you, because you would not have said, “So, it’s like you ate an apple today instead of a banana.” I cannot express to you how so not like that it is!

Maybe you should just send the dog in. She is always welcome. She’s good at drying my tears. She knows how to love on me the way I need to be loved on. Take lessons!

I’m getting back to my movie now. It always gets me. I can’t believe Shelby dies! I can’t even handle it when they go to her funeral. I need to be alone.

Left or Right?

I am Tara Tiffany Tyler. Yes, my mom did that to me. And yes, my dad let her.
Left or Right? Left leads to California and sunny beaches and anonymity. Right leads to Virginia and home and the realities of Mom and Dad. If I head to California, I never have to deal with this past again. No one will know me, and I can start fresh. If I go home, I will have to face the fact that Mom and Dad are both gone now. I will walk in their house, and Dad won’t be there to ask me how the new car’s running and if my breaks are squeaking. Mom won’t be there to give me a hug that I only half embrace, like we always do it. California sounds pretty freaking good to me!
I wage this silent war within me. I’m sitting at the stop sign with my left blinker on. I turn right. After hours and days of waging war and second-guessing I pull into the driveway. It’s strikes me as uncomfortably familiar. I reach for the key I still have on my key ring even though I haven’t lived here in years. I put it in the lock only to find the door already unlocked. Again, uncomfortably familiar. The lump in my throat is the size of a cantaloupe.
I walk in and jump, startled by their presence. Jennifer sits at the table and asks about the drive. Chelsea gets up and hugs me, but I embrace it wholeheartedly. Mom and Dad are here. I bust out laughing, as do the other two. We are three and have always been three. We just used to have two old geezers to guide us along by their craziness. I pull up a chair. Jennifer gets the booze. Chelsea gets the photo albums. Tonight, the only reality we face is the past one we have lived together.

P.S.

Let’s take a moment to enjoy the irony here. I wrote a blog post about the greatest loves in my life, and I got laid off last week. Life must not be too bad.

My Life's Greatest Loves

My first great love was a girl. She had blondish, whitish hair with huge brown eyes that lit up the room when she walked in. Everyone was magnetized by the love she shared freely. No one could resist her charm. In fact, when I was very young, she and I would compete for attention from all in the room. Some days I won. Other days she would nuzzle up to someone and that would be the end of that. She was theirs for the rest of the day and vice versa. The minute they stopped lovin’ on her, she would look up at them with those bright brown eyes pleading for just a little more. That’s all it would take. However, there were some days when all we needed was the love we had for each other, so I’d saddle up and ride her on a tour of the house, my small white feet a stark contrast to the orange 70’s shag carpet. My first great love was our cocker spaniel named Buffy.
Consuming and producing language are the next two great loves of my life. As a child, I spent days and weeks ravenously devouring every book I could get my hands on. This lifestyle of quiet corners and solitary afternoons allowed me to make some great friends and live in completely different worlds for days on end. Stephen King and R. L. Stine were my best friends growing up. Night after night I lie awake with the lamp on, covers up to my chin, reveling in the thrill of feeling terrified. The ghastly images these two men create haunt me in my dreams, yet I slumber peacefully, feeding off the electricity pulsing from every word on every page.
I have had many friends over the years, some of my best friends including Charles Dickens, William Faulkner, and Chuck Palahniuk. Dickens immediately draws you into his world. It’s not drastic or jarring, but when you’re in, you’re in, and there’s no getting out until Dickens releases you. Faulkner and I are friends, first because he’s Southern and second because he writes really fucked up shit. If you’ve read him, you know my description is accurate. I follow him willingly along his long and winding path leading into the darkest depths of the South. I carefully navigate my way around the world he creates looking over my shoulder and around every corner waiting to run into Popeye but petrified of it him in the same breath.
Palahniuk is a beast all on his own. Like Faulkner, he writes about the most fucked up and depraved parts of humanity. His writing style is innovative, which draws readers in and illuminates the perversion in us all.
At this point in my life, I’m producing more than I ever have. I feel like the breath of life has infused my soul with every terrifying image I have ever read. These images stare at me reminding me to keep writing in search of the deepest, darkest part of my imagination that hasn’t been let out of it’s cell yet. As I saturate my pages with the most evil characters that hide in the obscure shadows of my creativity, I shudder at the mere memory of the terror that consumes the mind and body when reading some of these artists. I raise my mint julip and salute my friends that have disturbed and tormented even the toughest of minds.

Explanation of “The Modern Gyre”


I want to provide anyone who reads this with some of my inspirations, an explanation of my meaning and really, just an idea of where this piece came from. Here goes…
My original references to the word “gyre”:
• Yeats and Eliot
• I read both in a 20th Century Lit class studying, among other things, modernism and postmodernism including some of the ideas of fragmentation within modernism.
Another place I should have known this word from:
• Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”- I am fascinated by the movie Alice in Wonderland, particularly a 1980’s tv version that ends with Alice meeting the Jabberwocky.The focus and main theme of the poem is the chaos existing within society today. It is present in my own neighborhood as gas prices and unemployment rates rise again. I know numerous people that have lost their jobs due to the recession, as have I. Additionally, I’m one of the starving artists of the world, trying to make it as a creative, which becomes more and more difficult as the recession continues to affect the economy. As the economy slows, people cut their extra expenditures greatly, and these extra expenses include creative services.
The Poem’s Conception:
I started writing this poem a month or so ago when Wes and I were out on a photo shoot. He was shooting some friends in front of a Nashville sign painted on a building downtown. I was inspired by his creativity, so I started pacing back and forth jotting down lines on our water bill. My creativity is more important than our water bill, right? Pacing is one of my creative tricks. Somehow walking back and forth gets the creative juices flowing and the words pour out of my brain.
Breaking it down:
The first section is meant to convey this sense of chaos and fear of darkness, fear of the unknown. As our country begins a recession, there are some that fear it will be like The Great Depression. There are many financial experts, political science experts, and everyday people that fear the direction our country is going. Fear of the unknown drives the trepidation we all feel as we tighten our purse strings. We are now uncertain about our future and our continued success in the global economy.
Another of my inspirations for this first stanza is the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. As you can tell by the second line in the first stanza, I am referencing the scene in which the children and their families board the colorful but eerie boat headed into the dark tunnel. Willy Wonka sings his strange song about how there’s no way to know where they’re going, fires of Hell are glowing, and the rowers keep on rowing. While this is another of my favorite films, the lyrics of this song reflect feelings brought on by the recession…in a literary sort of way. There is no way of knowing where our country will stand after the recession. Economists try to predict based on history and previous trends, but they are only putting together educated guesses. As previously mentioned, Gene Wilder says, the fires of hell are glowing. I’m sure some of the religious fanatics, doomsdayers, and writers out there could see how our recession is similar to Biblical ideas. We reap what we sow, and we will have to pay for harming the environment and holding monetary possessions in such high esteem.
The next sections remind us of how quickly life changes, especially in today’s uncertain times. We go from children enjoying everything around us to a very large, very complicated world. War, national debt, and huge amounts of money going to bail out “big business” all contribute to the complexity and delicacy of our current national and global economic situation. This world is much different than the one in which I grew up. There’s a constant buzz of uncertainty as younger generations learn how to adapt and struggles to survive in this rapidly changing economy. When we are young, we’re told to go to college, get a degree, and that will get us a job. These rules don’t necessarily apply anymore. Getting a degree is no longer a free pass to finding a job. As a Generation X-er who is now an adult and dealing with these realities, it can be a hard does of truth to swallow. The promised land of employment after college no longer exists. The rules of the game are different now, and beginning a career is very challenging.
The last sections of the poem are a reminder and warning to us all. We must be cautious and make better and smarter decisions than ever before. We all must recognize the dangers and instability in our society, so we can prevent the situation from getting worse leading to another depression and so we can actively contribute to the stabilization of the world’s economy. If we don’t act now, as with any situation, things will get worse.
Another aspect of being responsible members of the world is monitoring what we fill our bodies and minds with. While it is crucial that we all stay educated on the world around us, we must be careful not to overfill our minds with the ills of the world. For me, sometimes enough is enough. Some days I’ve simply seen enough of the fighting around the world and don’t need to watch any more news to fully understand reality and be spurred to action.
The Bottom Line:
We must be shrewd with our decisions these days. Otherwise, because of our own mistakes, we will fall…governments will crash, “Global Super Power” status will change hands, and the world may be unrecognizable when the dust settles. Then where will we be?