Homeless

Maybe I've been lying to myself about being okay.
I mean, maybe I am really happy. But maybe I am happy without being okay and I'm just trying so hard to be happy that I didn't notice that I'm not fine.
So many things around me are out of my control. I hate them. But I face them pacifically. Calmly. I still don't understand from where this calm attitude stems. Am I so numb, so impervious that I automatically shut down any violent reaction ?
Maybe that's been my problem all along.
Believing my Zen attitude is appropriate for every situation.
Is it ?
I don't know.
I'm confused. I have a headache. A clump in my throat. And I am not feeling fine.
Maybe it's selfish, yeah. They say I should be grateful for the life I have.
But I don't have to have cancer to have my pain acknowledged.
I just want to go away. Leave, far from here. This is not a home. It will never be.

Lately, I've had my tears flowing easily. I'm surprised: I haven't cried on my deceased mother's birthday. Yet, now the tears fight their way through so easily. Now I feel so suffocated that I don't bear the thought of staying alone in my room, talking to nobody. I, who loves her regular bit of alone-time. I don't turn off the Internet. I'm afraid of turning off the music. I look outside the window and yearn to go out. But I stay inside. On my own.

Where is the strength I used to pride myself in ?
Where is the sunshine that you've all told me radiated from me?
It's a cloud-stricken sky in there and I don't know how to blow into my chest and make it right.

"Home is where all your attempts to escape cease."

I wrote this last night when he tugged at my heartstrings (One of Many Poems to Come)

Bang bang
You shot me down

Kill me more, darling.
Under your touch,
Vivaldi's Four Seasons pierce my veins
Play me, play me
Like the fiddle you enchanted me with
On that spring day in April
When even butterflies came to listen to us
Play me, play me
Like the Blood Violin you dream of
Play me, play me
Like all those melodies in that magical head of yours

Bang Bang

Kill me more.
I crave this sweet little death,
The songs that escape your lips at 2 am
I crave to hide in your hair
To put you to sleep
and wake up at 4 am
to your face bathed in starlight,
wondering
how lucky I am to see you like this.

Bang Bang

Bonfires
Plane Crashes
Bullets,
all in my heart
because of you.

Inject yourself into my system
Be the syringe
Be the scalpel
the knife
my death
my perdition
drag me down to the nine circles of hell.

“I have come to lead you to the
other shore; into eternal darkness; into fire and into ice.”

I burn for you,
in you,
Lucifer,
immolate me
burn me
I am your Lilith.
Lucifer,
waltz with me
tha dance of the devil

I am your Blood Violin.
Play me, play me
until I'm molten steel
until I am but embers.

I wrote this eight weeks ago when I killed the past (The Last Poem Wasted on You)

Lustreless
but lustful,
your hands grazed me
and I
– fool that I am –
bloomed under your touch.

Spirals and whirls cloud our skies now.
What wouldn't I give
to give you eyes
without bleeding pupils.

Extinguished, anguished, relinquished
I shed nothing
I will walk into the chaos
but my free spirit will guide me
Please proceed,
your indifference is a mere scratch.

(c) Jean-Francois Painchaud

Memento Vitae I

With your beard in my neck,
supernovas in my belly
and constellations of your fingertips
across my bodyscape,
the storms of life
seem like a gentle breeze.

Swept away into the lugubrious part of the woods
A tenor resounds, echoes, a voice so strong
The evenstar calls me
and I find my way back
to the clearing.
The sunlight crashes through the leafwork onto your face
I found my way back
to you,
my tenor.

 Laer lín matha faeren.

When night falls and the elves sing
and the fireflies swarm around us
Our feet are anchored to the grass
Our hearts to each other
and our heads reach Orion.

My evenstar,
Your anchor never rusts
Your arms are my haven
I set sail into you
This is my home.

Never estranged, never misplaced
We sing the song of the elves
We sleep on the grass
Petrichor, hedgehogs and moonlight
This is my home.

Meleth nín
You are my home.

Meleth nín
Le melithon anuir.

Of Vengeful Mermaids, Venice and a Rising Sea: Interview with Angela Rega, author of "The Return of Melusine"

A morbidly beautiful tale of strong-willed mermaids, a journey towards finding oneself and a crumbling city

Angela Rega

On May 1st, the anthology Fae Visions of the Meditarranean, edited by Valeria Vitale and Djibril al-Ayad, was published by Futurefire.net Publishing. I am excited to share with you an interview I conducted with one of my fellow authors, Angela Rega. Angela's story "The Return of Melusine" is the exciting tale of a mermaid's struggle to acknowledge her true nature and make the right choices. The name choice for Angela's protagonist is a very interesting one: Melusine is actually a figure of European folklore. She is a feminine spirit of fresh water in a spring or river and is usually depicted as a serpent or fish from the waist down.  In this interview, we will delve more into the author's world and also understand where her inspiration springs from.

Angela Rega is a belly dancing school librarian with a passion for folklore, fairy tales and furry creatures. She was raised in a multi-lingual household where nobody finished a sentence in the same language and still struggles with syntax. She keeps a small website here: angierega.webs.com.

What inflamed your passion for writing ?

Angela: As a child I spent more time with my grandmother than anyone else and she was an avid storyteller. There was a story for every experience, every lesson and for entertainment. Everything was a narrative.

Later on, I discovered the written word. I had an amazing teacher in primary school who read us The Hobbit and The Egypt Game and I was hooked. Reading stories became an escape. Then writing them I realised I could create my own getaways or explorations. I can’t imagine not writing now.

What fascinates you about fantastic, mythic and folklore fiction?

Angela: Magic. Wonder. Discovery. Possibility. Metamorphosis. These are evident in the fantastic, the mythic and the folkloric. I think to be able to escape into these stories knowing I will experience one or all of these elements excites me.  If stories were a fluid body of water, the mythic and folkloric serve as a well from which I draw from.

 "Reading stories became an escape. Then writing them I realised I could create my own getaways or explorations. I can’t imagine not writing now."

Artwork by Justin Gedak  http://www.justingedak.com/

What inspired you to write your story?

Angela: My parents were migrants from Sicily and Southern Italy. I grew up with a reverence for the sea and the mythic that it contains. My grandmother told me stories of the Cyclops of Acitrezza and the mermaids of the Straits of Messina. These tales are old and can be traced back as early as Homer’s The Odyssey.

In my twenties I visited Venice and fell in love with this sinking water city. Completely. In. Love. I read about the Doges of Venice who, once a year would take a trip in a gilded barge to the open sea and there they would toss a wedding ring into the ocean to symbolise the marriage of the city to the sea. I thought…what if…what if….there were mermaids collecting the rings and now with the Doges long gone and Venice sinking they were waiting to claim the water city as their own?

On a deeper level, it is a story about identity and duality and in particular how these translate in relationships.  Mermaid stories often have this theme present. How much of ourselves do we give? How much is too much? Can you deny your true nature? This is why stories of sirens have always fascinated me. It is something I think we can all struggle with – there is a bit of mer creature in all of us.

"On a deeper level, it is a story about identity and duality and in particular how these translate in relationships.  Mermaid stories often have this theme present. How much of ourselves do we give?" 

Was there a specific song, album or artist that helped you with your writing process?

Angela: I love listening to music – particularly while I’m writing. I love writing to ambient music by artists such as Steve Roach and Brian Eno and I also like listening to cello and violin or the operatic sounds of Callas and Tebaldi – my two favourite opera singers.

If you could meet any author, alive or dead, which one would you choose and why ? 

Angela: Argh! Just one? I cannot limit myself to one…maybe two…no…let’s settle for three because I have enough room for four chairs around my small table in my Lilliputian apartment. If I could meet any author alive or dead they would be: Italo Calvino, Haruki Muraki and Jeanette Winterson.

 "If stories were a fluid body of water, the mythic and folkloric serve as a well from which I draw from."

Fae Visions of the Meditarranean is available in both print and electronic formats. Here are some useful links if you want to purchase the book or if you're simply interested in following updates from the Future Fire Press:
Amazon
Future Fire Press Blog

Reviews:

Goodreads
Publishers Weekly Review 

Strength

When shooting stars fall
We celebrate the death of light
With a fingertip raised towards the sky
Or a wish upon the lips.
When the light died in your eyes
I celebrated it
By pouring oil
Into my flame.

I swore my light would never be extinguished.

Nocturnal Streams of Unconsciousness IV

Astray, ablaze, aloof
We wander the earth
The twists of this world coiled around our indecisiveness
curling up in the crevices of doubt and wanderlust
Between our ribs perches a hunger
While our brains only feed us the distilled
Quaff from the poison, bitter soul
and die a thousand deaths
Young soul, you are a phoenix
and cyanide is nothing against
the pair of wings that rip through your back
Beautiful soul, the doors of the stars are ajar
Now go and burn yourself to death.

Les ombres valsent autour de nous à jamais.

Reach for the starry gates
Again, memento mori.
Swing swing swing yourself up into the fragments of time
and reach for the explosives in the air
for the goosebumps on her skin
for the orgasms in the atoms of the universe
let the black holes devour you
and come back with bruises and scars
that Gaïa will lick
and you will heal and enchant and enthrall
again.
Memento mori.
Go and burn yourself to death
You are made to set yourself ablaze
Smoke seeping through your lungs
and ashes on your tongue
Memento mori.
Go and immolate yourself,
burn burn burn,
you
precious
human.

Image credit: http://lover-and-the-wild.deviantart.com

My First Thought On the Eve of Aid Was You

She lies enclosed in wood
Wrapped in warm brown earth
As the chants resound from every wall
And happiness melts into hearts
Lugubrious silence melts into me
In this house that is not my home
Grains of dirt embrace her bones
and mine.

Under hot suns
Cold moons
Shadowless skies
Wind-swept and crusty stonework
It is not she who lies there
Only her collagen and calcium
Soaked in grief and nostalgia
that I've been pouring over the epitaph
for years.

Is she holding hands with the stars?
Does she float through nothingness?
Is her home of never explored materia?
Feet anchored, oscillating gaze
I sense her presence.

Oleanders and pine
Paint that has gone grey
and withering grass
are your company

Would that I could be the poison of the Oleander
The bucket of white paint
The drops of dew dripping from the pines
The sap of their trunks
Or leaves of grass sprouting over you

Would that my soul could leap to you
Just to see your smile and kiss your forehead
Like I did on that last day
Except your forehead would be warm again
And not hard and stone cold
Would that I could know where you are
I hope you're better off than I
Maybe happier
I hope you can see me
In that case, I will try to smile at the sky every day
Even though the cakes I make will never contain your touch again.


"I am stretched on your grave and will lie there forever
With your hands held in mine I'll be sure we'd not sever."
Dead Can Dance

From Tumblr.

I cannot/can.

"I feel the urge to write poetry about you
      Yet, I cannot and it pierces me.
I cannot because I haven't inhaled your scent yet
     Nor traced your blue veins popping out here and there
Nor have I felt the pores of your skin emit something
     I can't quite recall
I cannot because I haven't seen your 3 am frowns
      nor your laughter as it breaks through my grim mornings
Nor have I listened to your fingers enchant the air
      to make the dust cry in the evening hours
Just before you'd put me to sleep.
Just before you'd put us to sleep.

I feel the urge to write a few lines to you
       Writing. Which I haven't been able to do in a while
The words are fleeting
       Just like you
One moment you're an eternity
       and then again, you're but a wing's flutter
I cannot write because I am wary and weary
       I cannot write unless you write me too.

Fuck poetry.
I feel the urge to hold you at 3 am with your frown and your brokenness
to trace your veins up to your chin and hold it up
Up
because I wouldn't want you to shoegaze
but look at the stars above you, a place where you belong
I want to recognize what your pores emit and know it's more than just coincidence
or destiny or whatever people would call this.
This is not just some word in a dictionary. Or in any book.
We're writing each other on a sheet of crumbled paper. And the ink is not smudgy.
And I am not wordless, I am not weary, I am not wary
But consciously awake
While your ink becomes my blood
While you bleed worlds into me
While you inject yourself
Special K.

I want to inhale your scent and know it's the safest place to be
I'll be your laughter through grim mornings
and the melody that plays along to your tunes
a perfect arrangement of instruments.
I'll be the bass to your guitar
Or vice-versa, whatever we want.
And sometimes I'll sing you lullabies
Just before you put me to sleep.
Just before you put us to sleep.

I feel the urge to write poetry about you
      Suddenly I can and it still pierces me."

(c)

Carry Your Coffin and I'll Carry Mine.

You're the anti-depressant that depresses me

The Lithium injected to make me mad

I wish I could bleed you out of my system

But there is no cure to this curse

You're the hearse that I willingly chose

to lead me to the altar

which was but a gloomy forest.

And at the altar

which was dark green pines and obscure oaks 

You put a crown of dead forget-me-nots

on my trembling head

And at the altar

I held out my pumping blue veins

Cut my veins to mix our blood

under the sight of the Gods

as I saw you step back in horror

My blood dripped down on the moss-covered stones

Scarlet rivers

Pastel blue tears

Monochromatic silence.

A few steps ahead of me I watch you walk away

Only to turn around and cheer me on

The moment I seem to catch up, 

A few steps ahead of me I watch you walk away

I carry a coffin behind me, following you down to the stream

Take my hand and drown me, I would not care

As long as you take my frozen hand, frostbitten and bleeding

From the ropes of the weight I am carrying

Sir, would you please help me carry this burden?

my voice cracks 

My lady, follow me you say

and fool that I am, I do.

A few steps ahead of me I watch you walk away

and fool that I am, I am still dragging on and on.

and fool that I am, I still think we'll reach the hollow of an oak

Where we'd spend the night of the Winter solstice

Wrapped up in each other

Where you'd hold me in your arms and say

"Stay."

and tell me how much you wanted me to carry your coffin too.

(The title is inspired from Tiamat's song title "Carry Your Cross and I'll Carry Mine")

(c) http://grauenart.deviantart.com