Lovely Penguin

if life sucks right now (particularly because it’s midterm time) remind yourself at least you’re not driving this for a living.

Technorati Tags: picture, car, inspiration, funny, life

So if you ever wonder what it feels like to be a sorority girl, I can’t tell you. I can tell you this. I realize that I’m running with semantic scissors right now. So email me if you have a question. I don’t want to ruin the mood.
by marie gordon
My body has deceived me
It raised me like its own
Like I was a woman

It turned my stomach inside
And here I lay out contents…

There is a beating hallway
It tunnels into where I live
It’s pushing and I walk
Accelerated by its current

Through this sweaty place
There are big ugly fish
But there are silicone bears
Too

Then there are the deer
Oh, the deer
Then there’s the skunks
Nothing more to say

Except the most bothersome
Tiresome and sickly little moth
It’s propagating
Fluttering about like a worthy ant

This is what the lions hate
They don’t hate the deer
That feed them
Or the skunks, which give them
A lesson to teach the kids

They hate that moth
Its soft little buttery wings
That are dusty and smooth
They slip under doorways

They feed off your plants
Without you even knowing
That’s the problem
They must be surveilled

This is a hallway
I live on it to
Pretend to be a mockery
Of self-denying feminine agency

The truth is
I can’t tell yet
If I’m here to kill the lion
Or shake the dust off
Onto his wiggly nose

Technorati Tags: hierarchy, poem, poems, poetry, writing, college, Duke, dormitorial, animal kingdom

by marie gordon

This is a story about
selling People for money
About women, maybe me
I suspect though not just me

I put Me in this coffin
not because you wanted that
that would be too sadistic
I did it because it worked

Or it did work at the time
Coffins are snuggly and warm
I enjoyed warmness inside
The darkness felt comforting

I let them bury me down
I let the dirt fall on top
Didn’t say a word to them
Didn’t worry about price

They plasticated me white
I signed up for the program
I put my self on the stand
For the auction to embalm

Lucky for me souls don’t sell
Not as well as beauty does
Or even intelligence
Not as much as toes and legs

This body was once leased out
I’ll have you know I’m worth eyes
Ears and mouth and lips combined
I’m worth sadness and misery

When the bet doesn’t pay off
There is this circle I love
To play jump-rope with and trip
Over and over I draw

Lines won’t do me any good
Once I’ve accepted that
The commodity of me
I must banish it for life

Until convenient moments
When I snag the sticky line
Just enough to feel worthless
To know that I still have worth

It was never worth my time
To plunge headfirst into trade
If I’m stuck here like a sloth
For me that life is okay

Technorati Tags: commodity, poem, poetry, marie, gordon, women, feminism, traffic in women, writing

Mouse lemurs are some of the most adorable animals ever. Thus, I decided to do this semi-artsy photoshop of one.

Technorati Tags: lemur, mouse lemur, photo, photoshop, marie, artsy

by marie gordon

i’m sly but not slippery
i will catch you
and before i let you go
i’ll let you suffer

silence passive reader squashed
i’ll show you real words
if you’ll shut up now
here comes my genius meaning

and if you cannot get it
well that is your fault
so i’ll squash your pansy eyes
into a critique

come, soft and pretty readers
to these humble lines
masochistically subject
yourself unto my genius

I’ll slinky down your dull stairs
And flow out your mouth
And even if you digest
My words you swallowed

Indeed I’ve penetrated
Because you have read
Be still, my silent reader
Bleed out my vial words

Technorati Tags: poem, poetry, dominatrix, poetic, writing, reading

This is a poem that I derived the idea for a long time ago. Really, it’s still in the works. Let me know what you think.

by marie gordon
Ringing
Knocking
Footsteps
Coming

I’m not here
Go away
At my door
Cruel prowlers

Wrong girl, wrong time
I’m not ready
You’re mistaken
Come back later

Rope around my neck
I’m not a woman
I am just a child
You think that I’ve ‘grown’

You think I’m a woman
There must be some mistake
I’m just a baby
Still, please unhook this leash

Drag me away to the world
Push me to domestic love
I’ll still be in Neverland
You’ll scold me because I failed

Of course
I won’t say
I told you so
I’m just a baby
You’ll be back, I say,
There must be some mistake

Technorati Tags: kidnapping, poem, poetry, writing, feminism

somewhere, at some point someone said to me “that’s the way the cookie crumbles”. Regardless of the obscure chain of meaning in this phrase, i like it because what it signifies to me is something completely separate from the words on the page…if you know what I mean. If this simplifies anything for some of my readers, I have written this poem as a reaction to my horrifying experiences thus far in literary theory class.

by marie Gordon

I didn’t used to write
As if I were afraid
I trickled down metaphors
I rhymed like a chirper
And smiled with every
Syllable and pun
I packed into my lines
Which never really were mine

I took meaning
On hangers
Kept its colors bright
No bleaching pedagogy
Stifled the signified

So sick and sinful
So sweet and sublime
How I used to write
With such sickening rhymes

As if I were
Singing a song
Pretending like
Words were little notes
To pitter-patter down
Always too lightly,
Meaning

Wasn’t it grand
Playing a piano
That was never so great
Because the notes
Will never match

Maybe it was only
Grand
Because I told myself
I was signifying
Like a champ

Sweet
Fiery
Chariots
Whisk me away
For the love of God
from this Derridian oven

Technorati Tags: postmodern, postmodernism, writing, poetry, poem, style, cookies, milk, crumbling

this is a really strange photo, needless to say.

“I have: but I do not get, and when I fancied I had gotten anything, I found I did not.”- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Technorati Tags: postmodern, postmoderism, photo, photography, abstract, art, computer, literary, genre

by marie gordon

There are these tiny moments when I seem to inherit, through some strange mental process, a blip of nostalgia. It can never be inherently serious nostalgia. Inevitably, these little mental clippings come from some imaginary storehouse of the lowest-common denominator of memories in my brain. Usually they stay locked up. They remain in their closet, or wherever it is they go, until an all too inconvenient moment for me. They are comedy and they are tragedy. My only source of sanity and insanity.
I have a short series of these anti-climactic stories. They are entirely unrelated.
Story 1- Carnegie Mellon
Senior year of high school. I received my acceptance letter from Duke in December. It is March now.
I sat behind Matt in calculus class watching him pull out his deck of cards from his backpack while sharing with me the list of schools who recently sent him rejection letters. At the time, I was praying for Matt on a regular basis, hopefully to fight the mechanical cruelty of the college selection process which had been crushing Matt’s hopes and dreams for the past two weeks of our lives.
Matt was a genius. Still is. I was always jealous of his innate ability to score above a 1500 on the SAT on his first try without studying rigorously. His piano skills far exceeded mine. His grades spoke for themselves, as did his numerous AP exam scores.
But somehow, someway, while I coveted my one-and-only acceptance letter from the one-and-only school I applied to, Matt’s list of rejection letters were piling up as was my heartfelt sympathy. Matt and I went way back. Middle school buds, the whole bit.
There I was playing war with Matt, feeling guilty for the acceptance letter which I kept tucked away in my backpack in case of any sudden travesties which might obliterate my self-esteem. Matt was down on his luck. It had gotten to the point where he required multiple daily hugs. As we reveled over Matt’s troubles, a sudden climate change must have occurred without our noticing. I looked around and realized the entire rest of the room was silent except for us.
We shoved the cards to the side of my desk and grabbed our notebooks. Playtime was over, apparently—or just taking a short hiatus. I grabbed my snack from my bookbag to entertain myself while listening to the lecture,
As I shoveled Captain Crunch into my mouth, Matt surreptitiously whispered something in my direction. What?? I asked. I couldn’t hear him at all when he whispered. As the words rolled out of Matt’s mouth, I felt a crunchberry lodging itself into my lung. “I got into Carnegie Mellon.” I wanted to scream. Carnegie Mellon Compsci is the best compsci school in the world. But I couldn’t. I had a fuckin crunchberry lodged in my lungs and I was doubled-over, hee-hawing like a donkey. Fuck. I gasped. And Matt hit my back with his fist. The crunchberry dislodged and I gasped for air before I screamed to everyone that Matt got into Carnegie Mellon Compsci. The class clapped, as is customary for the dorky and semi-mechanically-intellectual crowd in AP classes, to congratulate one-another on their accomplishments.
I tasted the crunchberry for the rest of the hour every time I breathed in deep. I still had crunchberry dust in my lungs. But that was ok. It reminded me of the moment when Matt found out he got off the dreaded waitlist and got in.
Matt is at Carnegie Mellon now and I am at Duke. Needless to stay, as always, neither of us have a life.

Technorati Tags: triology, part1, story, short, writing, modern, anticlimactic, prose, fiction, nonfiction, stories