website / poetry / time
website
i deleted this entire website and started over. this is an action i take in many domains of life. i always overcomplicate everything and get frustrated. too much entropy. too many details. i want everything to be simple and perfect and exactly where it's supposed to me.
this is about as simple as it can get. just html boilerplate and some p's and an h1 and some 2's and 3's. no stylesheets for now. behold the glory of unstyled html. (it's been 7 months since i worked on this website and i forgot all the css calls.)
this is my problem in all things really -- let me lay out everything perfectly so all my resources are exactly where i need them and it's pretty and organized and color-coded. but then i don't know the best way to do that b/c i haven't used the thing, and i continue to not use the thing b/c i'm not actually using it, i'm just organizing it and setting it up.
poetry
i've been reading a lot of fanfiction lately.
i mean, that statement is true most of the year but i've really been leaning into it then b/c the fact that i'm now disabled has really become apparent to me in recent months and i've, accidentally and without meaning to, become obsessed with supernatural (2005) and boy howdy is there a lot of fan fic and the nice thing about getting into a massive 2-decade long fandom is that there's infinite fics and the very best ones have already bubbled right to the top.
so the other day i read 'and this, your living kiss' by opal-bullets and it meant a lot to me and i think it made me understand poetry for the first time in my life.
i get frustrated and disinterested when the meaning of something isn't plainly obvious, i'm not one to ponder a mystery or to chew on a piece of abstract language, and so therefore poetry has never been super interesting to me. i like music, lyrics, nice words with rhythm and melody, but i've never found it in written poetry before.
this fic pre-supposes that dean winchester is a poet who publishes under a pseudonym and he stops writing and then he takes a poetry class with dr. castiel novak who is a literature professor at a fancy pants new england college and helps dean rediscover his inspiration for writing and he's actually castiel's favorite poet but neither of them realize that at first, and they fall in love, etc.
i find talking about fic embarrassing, i spend so much of my time reading it, and i love it, but i carry it like a dark and shameful secret. but the people who write fanfic are the same people who write original fiction, which is to say, they do it for different reasons and they produce work in a wide variety of styles, genres, qualities, and relevance as works of art.
this one is the kind of thing that i will tag in my calibre ebook library #highBrowLiterature (tongue in cheek). it's really lovely. and i think it taught me to appreciate poetry.
this is a poem written by opal-bullets which was in fiction written by dean. i hope the author does not mind that i re-posted it here. on the infitesimal chance that anyone who cares even sees this, please email me if you'd like me to take it down.
Nights in Pink Satin
I met her at a bar in New Mexico
I'm nineteen. The ID I made
Makes me a man (age 21)
And I want a beer though I'm a boy
And don't know what I want.
But she does.
Yes, she does.“I live nearby.” Her lips are pink.
And I think: I’m a man, she sees it
And she can’t resist.
I’m cocky and offer an hour,
The bartender laughs,
Interjects “Minutes.”
My face goes pink and I see red—
But she grabs my head and gives me a kiss.
She gets pink on my lips.Her place is draped in veils, bedroom dark red
As a womb. (Am I a boy? No—)
Leather jackets hit the floor, and more,
Boots and jeans and my boxers, blue.
Her matching lingerie is pink.
Who’d think beneath her denim
Against her skin she wore such pretty satin?
Then I’m on my knees, hands on her hips
I pull down her panties, my lips half on
The elastic trim, trailing after satin,
“Teach me,” I beg
And she grabs my head and leads me to where
She’s pink.But the night doesn’t end there.
She builds me up, tears me down (not
A boy, not yet a man) takes everything
I give, gives me what I like
And when I’m soft, and sated,
She hands me satin.
“I’m a man!” I push them away but don’t make it
Very far, “Boy, you don’t know who you are”
And she knows what I like, so I let her
Hand me pink panties.My legs are long but her hips are
Wide, she wasn’t too far off
Thinking they’d be my size, and she slides
Them up and drags at the hair
Inverted image
From the night’s start. They are so soft
And satiny and I kinda like it.
Yes, I like it!Holy the night in pink satin!
Holy the panties, holy the pink on cock, holy the woman
Straddling the man, making him man!
Holy the blush! Holy the scratches!
Holy the lacy bras and lipstick traces in bars!
Holy the man who knows to wear satin!
Holy the kink and revelation!
Holy the pink!The next morning, a kiss on the cheek.
“You’re a man,” she says, “I’m a
Man,” I agree, because there are many ways to be a
Man, even ones that Kansas can’t understand,
And so what if I ain’t the world’s most masculine man?
I know what I am.
What I love about fanfiction is you can find beautiful, poignant, deep works of prose that examine all different aspects of the human condition. But they use fandom IP as a frame to build off of. And if my fickle brain were trying to read a book about some random characters I've never heard of, then it will go "who are these people i don't give a shit" and i won't be able to read the book. But if it's about characters I've already gotten to know -- like dean winchester & castiel & arthur lester & john doe & johnathan sims & martin blackwood & majima goro & kazuma kiryu & arthur morgan & charles smith etc -- & those characters are going to get freaky at some point in the story then i can trick my brain into reading the thoughtful, reflective prose and get everything out of it that i would if i were reading it and it wasn't also about shipping.
and honestly i think that's why the poetry hit home because it was about a blorbo, about a one-off line that dean says half as a homophobic joke and the fandom just took it and ran with it. but despite that it's still a nice poem about like gender and sexuality
time
i don't know how time passes so quickly. i blink and suddenly i've been clocked in to my job for 4 hours. i am working from home today because my boss told me that they're doing construction at the office building and it's horrible. wfh is always a relief because it means i don't have to go out in public, don't have to go to the office, but also it means i'm probably not gonna get shit done.