Tag Archives: prose

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22 June, 2013

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fiction, prose, writing

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Cracked Teapots from Paris

Broken teacup by oxecotton (deviantART)

Chipped China
JCD Kerwin

She sighs in the darkness, speaks breathless, makes promises she cannot keep. He stares at ceiling fan blades and watches his thoughts disappear within the summer air. She says forever; he knows she will not stay.

Clinking tea cups at a small Paris café: memories of a Parisian rendezvous where he fell, captivated, and became lost in her. They are yesterday’s ghost. She has forgotten; he tries to throw the photographs away.

Her lips are dry. They don’t taste the same. She replaces lace to cold skin and whispers promises of tomorrows that will never come. He listens to the door shut and tries to forget cafés.

(June, 2013)

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18 June, 2013

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fiction, prose, writing

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Neverland Seas

Seashells by Ira K

Into the Dark Sea
JCD Kerwin

Ira was a man I once knew who wore seashells in his hair. He smoked cigars until the vapors clouded around his dread-locked head, and he told once-upon-a-times to us town kids. Ira believed the stars were really fireflies. “They’re the brave ones that done flown too high. Got stuck up there and now they shine all night,” he said.

Ira was a man I knew who made a boat and sailed across the sea. “I’ll see you ‘round now,” he said to me. He was a magic man on a paper ship, off to find a neverland of our dreams. “If you are good, I’ll send for you someday.”

I watch fireflies now and wait. He left seashells on his porch. I kick them into rain puddles.

(June, 2013)

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11 June, 2013

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fiction, prose, writing

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It’s Raining Likely and my Batman Clock is Broken

What? It is. Needs a new battery. I digress.

Phony
JCD Kerwin

He quotes passages from Catcher in the Rye and calls himself Holden at midnights when he’s drunk his head too full of bourbon. He acts tough to hide his self-inflicted wounds, but he’s afraid the world sees right through him. His zealousness convinces him to hit on the older girls, but then he thinks of her and all the ways he hurt her. Sometimes he curses to himself because he doesn’t like remembering the mistakes he made.

He goes to the bar to find reasons for all the things he never did or shouldn’t have done. But the only things he finds are empty beer bottles and girls that will never be her.

He can’t smile when he spies himself in the mirror behind the bar; he can’t face his own reflection without cringing. He wants to gouge out his eyes so he doesn’t have to see, because the face in the mirror just can’t be his.
What he’d give to rewind time.

He’d take it all back and throw himself in the fire he started between them. He’d give up giving into the world and disappear with her. Now he tries to find that place to hide because he doesn’t want to be anywhere now that she’s gone. He can’t remember what it feels like to belong.

He scoffs as he wonders why he cares so much. No one cares this much. He’s not supposed to care. But he does, and it’s why he plays the same songs ten times in a row, hoping the eleventh is when he’ll have an epiphany. It’s why he drinks coffee in the park, wondering if drinking her favorite pick-me-up will call her back.

He tried to get her back, but he’s not a valiant knight; he’s just like the other ego-driven anti-heroes who call themselves “Caulfield” when they’re too full of self-pity to realize they’ve lost.

He might never find the answers he needs, and probably won’t find a way to be with or without her. If she came back, though, he knows they’d be all right. He’d say sorry and she’d forgive him. There’d be no more pretending and no more drinking in bars. There’d be no more Holden at midnights; she’d call him Brian at noon again.

(Dec., 2011)

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9 April, 2013

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determination, fiction, poetry, prose, storyteller, The Novel that Will Get Me Published, writing

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Happy as a Chondestes grammacus

Hey, I did it. I finished The Novel that Will Get Me Published. It was kind of surprising, actually. Finished is around midnight, Monday morning this week. When I realized I was done, I just kind of stared at my computer screen for a while. I think the shock has worn of now…I think. Hey, come on, the thing took me eight years to write–but I did most of it in the past year. And now it’s done.  The first book I wrote in a year; the second in five years. (Those ones suck. I don’t want to talk about those.) But this one is weird. It’s different. It’s…special. Aww. No, seriously, it is.

Now I can’t look at it for a couple days. But then I’ll go back and read it. Then I’ll start editing. I already know who I’d like to send it to for critiquing. Then after that: some more editing! Then it’ll be time to put together publishing packages [which I remember so fondly]. (Oh, look how excited I am! I’m already thinking of everything I get to do next! I’m happy as a lark. A darling lark!… ‘the hell kinda bird is a lark anyway?)

In honor, I suppose this poem is appropriate:

Scriveners
JCD Kerwin

My pen writes
in a different way
each time I hold it,
as if to say,
“They’re not done yet.”

(December, 2011)

And my break’s over. Stay off drugs, kids.

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28 November, 2012

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Tick Tick Organic Bird Machine

Because sometimes even nice dinosaurs need to roar.

Paradoxodynamo
JCD Kerwin

I am suspended. [I have suspended time.] I can move the pieces of the universe around with my fingers and feel the earth ripple beneath my toes. The world is slow-moving and the freeze frame rotoscope turns around me. I can feel the planet breathe.

I am organic machine. I’m flying in and out of your aviaries like a mechanical bird with a ticking heart—nickel-sized—ready to fit inside your pocket. I have no particular place to go, but I want to hide from the everyones of the world. Let me bury my head in the sand. Let me tick away in the dunes.

Let me dream, invisible.

I am ten thousand voices screaming directions to a mannequin. I close my eyes because when I open them I might finally be real. Do you ever fall asleep at night, wondering what pills you have to take to wake up normal? Do you ever look in puddles and spy dogs you weren’t really meant to be? I laugh over coffee as Irish blue hues say it’s all because I’m a writer. You can act like different people when you’re a writer. You can write fifty different ways when you fuck words all day, having had a bittersweet love affair with them for years. It’s okay to be so many people, then.

But it’s not me to be them. “It’s not me,” I want to say to that Irish grin. “Don’t you see? I smile three ways and you think it’s okay because you love who I am inside. But sometimes I don’t know who I am, so how could you?” (They just smile, but I don’t think they can smile wide enough to save me anymore. I might need shock therapy instead.)

I fade, sometimes. I drown out existence with methodic reverberations. I run with my eyes closed. (If you listen with your eyes open, you suffocate.) So I walk around the city, holding out my hands. I hope if I touch so many ghosts, I might start to feel their heartbeats through my fingertips. Maybe I’ll start to feel connected to the same oxygen-breathing creatures I walked forth from murky waters with, once upon a Mesozoic time.

If God were here he’d laugh with me, I think. I’d buy him a drink and he’d flip quarters into shot glasses while telling me I’m right: It really is a big fucking joke. He’d tell me to have a laugh and to suck down my Jack before it gets old. Then we’d throw crumbs to the pigeons and he’d cry when the taxi cabs and buses run them over. He’d pick up the bloody messes and eat the carcasses, making them whole again in his form. And I’d stare while he’d put a pair of Oakley’s over his without-a-color eyes, kiss my forehead, and light up a cigarette for the way back to Heaven. He’d give me a thumbs-up, tell me I’m a moron and that it’s all okay, and I’d believe him.

I scream, voiceless. I make a billion mirrors shatter because I hate to see myself in their reflection. I’d rather stand myself atop pedestals in my dreams, and follow voices of gods superseding fairytales my mother sewed into my pockets when my eyes were full of stars. They tell me I am dynamite. So I’ll let loose the vibrant chromaticity burning inside of me and it will set the skies on fire. I’ll make the Aurora Borealis explode in the chaos saturation of my soul.

But I’m not dreaming in the cosmos; I’m stuck in grey raindrops, and that’s okay. I’ll just grab a five dollar fedora that some old man wore in some other life and follow my Chucks to wherever I’m supposed to go. I can’t be certain about anything, but maybe when I finally decide to stop thinking, the stars won’t seem so damn far away.

Nov., 2011, rev. July, Nov 2012