Buffy Plays With Demons

“Stay beautiful — but don’t stay down underground too long. Don’t turn into a mole or a worm or a root or a stone. Come on out into the sunlight. Breathe in trees. Knock out mountains. Commune with snakes and be the very hero of birds. Don’t forget to poke your head up and blink — think. Walk all around. Swim upstream. Don’t forget to fly.”

“The woman you were when you left them. The silhouette sorting through your garbage, in search of aluminum cans and credit cards. The man who jumped in front of your car and the man who thought he had pushed him. The jealous husband. Clarence Thomas’ first wife. The minister who built harpsichords and molested you, again and again. The mother who cannot taste her milk. Your grandmother’s image of herself. Sammy Davis, Jr. Your children. The children you knew would die as sacrifice. The man who wears headphones and operates the ride. The child running into the fire, for protection. The reprieved. The stoic who embraces his weakness. The woman you swear you have become.”

“I do not want to stand beside you at the feast; You eat of rot. Or walk beside you; your pace is not my pace. To follow you or be with you I lose. I’ll turn back to my roots, making my own way through fields you’ll never know. Singing my own songs to a different tune, shouting my own hallelujahs.”

“I am a tornado child. I come like a swirl of black and darken up your day; I whip it all into my womb, lift you and your things, carry you to where you’ve never been, and maybe, if I feel good, I might bring you back, all warm and scared, heart humming wild like a bird after early sudden flight. I am a tornado child. I tremble at the elements. When thunder rolls my womb trembles, remembering the tweak of contractions that tightened to a wail when my mother pushed me out into the black of a tornado night. I am a tornado child, you can tell us from far, by the crazy of our hair; couldn’t tame it if we tried. Even now I tie a bandanna to silence the din of anarchy in these coir-thick plaits. I am a tornado child born in the whirl of clouds; the center crumbled, then I came. My lovers know the blast of my chaotic giving; they tremble at the whip of my supple thighs; you cross me at your peril, I swallow light when the warm of anger lashes me into a spin, the pine trees bend to me swept in my gyrations. I am a tornado child. When the spirit takes my head, I hurtle into the vacuum of white sheets billowing and paint a swirl of color, streaked with my many songs.”

it is all blood and breaking, blood and breaking, the thing drops out of its box squalling into the light. they are both squalling, animal and cage. her bars lie wet, open and empty and she has made herself again out of flesh out of dictionaries, she is always emptying and it is all the same wound the same blood the same breaking

“Some men have not learned that heartwounds as deep as a woman’s need for love do not respond to phoney curatives of roses, sweetened words and make-up passion in scented rooms. They do not heal themselves with the passing of time which erases time only but not pain and the memory of pain. Let untreated heartwounds become sores — scabs — scars — ugly reminders of flawed love. Some men believe woman were born to endure — to understand — to forgive — to be irrational in all things. It is that way, they tell us, with the pull of the moon. They will not learn, perhaps cannot learn, that a woman’s heart damaged by multiple wounds beats faintly and then not at all.”

bronzerider:

fearandloathinginmybasement:

You should take better care of your things
Your scratched CD’s, dirty wings
Your goddamn soul, sick in its bed
Traded for pride & a big fat head
I wanna fuck off, as suggested by you
Slither to Seattle for a summer or two
Paint with smoke & smoke alone
Call nowhere & absolutely no one my home
Not to escape, but to unglue
This city from the bottom of my shoe
If I don’t run now, I won’t get away from you.

“In search of the desert witch, the shamaness — forget the archetypes, forget the dark and lithic profile, do not scan the clouds massed on the horizon, violet and green, for her icon; do not pursue the ready-made abstraction, do not peer for symbols. So long as you want her faceless, without smell or voice, so long as she does not squat to urinate, or scratch herself, so long as she does not snore beneath her blanket or grimace as she grasps the stone-cold grinding stone at dawn — so long as she does not have her own peculiar face, slightly wall-eyed or with a streak of topaz lightning in the blackness of one eye, so long as she does not limp — so long as you try to simplify her meaning — so long as she merely symbolizes power — she is kept helpless and conventional, her true power routed backward into the past, we cannot touch or name her and, barred from participation by those who need her, she stifles in unspeakable loneliness.”

“i need to know their names those women i would have walked with jauntily the way men go in groups swinging their arms, and the ones those sweating women whom i would have joined after a hard game to chew the fat what would we have called each other laughing joking into our beer? where are my gangs, my teams, my mislaid sisters? all the women who could have known me, where in the world are their names?”

“There is a khan’s daughter who steps on in a swinging manner and has the marks of twenty tigers — who steps on in a graceful manner and has the marks of thirty tigers — who steps on in a elegant manner and has the marks of forty tigers — who steps on in a delicate manner and has the marks of fifty tigers.”

“you know some people got a lot of nerve — sometimes, i don’t believe the things i see and hear. Have you met the woman who’s shocked by 2 women kissing & in the same breath tells you that she’s pregnant? BUT GAYS SHOULDN’T BE BLATANT. Or this straight couple sits next to you in a movie & you can’t hear the dialogue ‘cause of the sound effects. BUT GAYS SHOULDN’T BE BLATANT. And the woman in your office spends your entire lunch hour talking about her new bikini drawers & how much her husband likes them BUT GAYS SHOULDN’T BE BLATANT. Or the “hip” chick in your class, rattling a mile a minute — while you’re trying to get stoned in the john about the camping trip she took with her musical boyfriend. BUT GAYS SHOULDN’T BE BLATANT. You go in a public bathroom and all over the walls there’s John loves Mary, Janice digs Richard, Pepe loves Delores, etc. etc. BUT GAYS SHOULDN’T BE BLATANT. Or you go to an amusement park & there’s a tunnel of love & pictures of straights painted on the front & grinning couples coming in and out. BUT GAYS SHOULDN’T BE BLATANT. Fact is, blatant heterosexuals are all over the place. Supermarkets, movies, on your job, in church, in books, on television every day and night, every place — even in gay bars. & they want gay men & women to go hide in the closets — So to you straight folks i say — Sure, i’ll go if you go too, but i’m polite — so — after you.”

“They choke cities like snowstorms on the morning train, I flip through my Ebony, marveling at the bargain basement prices for reams of straightened hair and bleaches for the skin. Next to me, skinny pink fingers rest upon a briefcase shiver a bit under my scrutiny. Leaving the tunnel, we hurtle into hurting sun. An icy brush paints the buildings with shine, fat spirals of snow become blankets, and Boston stops breathing. It is my habit to count them. So I search the damp, chilled length of the train car and look for their candle flames of hair, the circles of blood at their cheeks, that curt dismissing glare reserved for the common, the wrinkled, the black. I remember striving for that breathlessness, toddling my five-year-old black butt around with a dull gray mophead covering my nappy hair, wishing myself golden. Pressing down hard with my carnation pink Crayola, I filled faces in coloring books, rubbed the waxy stick across the back of my hand until the skin broke. When my mop hair became an annoyance to my mother, who always seemed to be mopping, I hid beneath my father’s white shirt, the sleeves hanging down on either side of my head, the coolest white light pigtails. I practiced kissing, because to be blonde and white meant to be kissed, and my fat lips slimmed around words like “delightful” and “darling.” I hurt myself with my own beauty. When I was white, my name was Donna. My teeth were perfect; I was always out of breath. In first grade, my blonde teacher hugged me to her because I was the first in my class to read, and I thought the rush would kill me. I wanted her to swallow me, to be my mother, to be the first fire moving in my breast. But when she pried me away, her cool blue eyes shining with righteousness and too much touch, I saw how much she wanted to wash. She was not my mother, the singing Alabama woman who shook me to sleep and fed me from her fingers. I could not have been blacker than I was at that moment. My name is Patricia Ann. Even crayons fail me now — I can find no color darker, more beautiful, than I am. This train car grows tense with me. I pulse, steady my eyes, shake the snow from my short black hair, and suddenly I am surrounded by snarling madonnas demanding that I explain my treachery.”