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Kitt Nov 7
You do not get to come to me, brimming with guilt
Once you’ve driven your gleaming knife in up to the hilt,
And preach the virtue of silver, the art of the deal
You did what you did. Sit in it, however badly you feel.

I only hope that when, one day, you look down in shame,
And find in your belly that gleaming blade,
That no one does you the indignity of telling you,
"We survived before. You'll survive this too."
Kitt Aug 21
I didn't see it coming;
I expected nothing else.
Thirteen years old, hiding behind the rules
so I didn’t have to face
that shortcoming, that missing piece.

Once I had accepted limitation as
the sublime:
something that would come in time.
The constraints, then, gave it meaning,
deciding who says what.
Syntax is rules, and rules are limitations.
Without them, we are-- what?

But in time I came to want it,
that freedom to--
I traded "pressure to not" for "pressure to do".
Peering through the rhetoric,
I ventured into the upper reaches, and
I came apart.
There was nothing to hold me together
in this elevator, its yellowed walls crumbling away.

“Not all freedom is good. You can have terrible freedom.”
Was it the mother or the Aunt that said this?
Or Friedrich “entsetzliche Freiheit”--

Ah, Schiller.
What of the Mrs? Did she have freedom
in her husband, in Richard F.?
More freedom in the
(****-and-) (ball-and-) chains
than in the haze of youth?
The most, then, (it can be presumed)
from her departures: first to Alaska,
then even farther north, from where none return.

As freedom dissolved into expectation,
itself now another limitation, I wondered.
Which had it worse:
the woman (machine) outside the yellowing elevator walls,
or the girl (ghost) pacing within?
“We talk about freedom the same way we talk about art... like it is a statement of quality rather than a description. Art doesn’t mean good or bad. Art only means art. It can be terrible and still be art. Freedom can be good or bad too. There can be terrible freedom.”
Joseph Fink, 2018

“Moira was like an elevator with open sides. She made us dizzy. Already we were losing the taste for freedom, already we were finding these walls secure. In the upper reaches of the atmosphere you’d come apart, you’d vaporize, there would be no pressure holding you together.”
Margaret Atwood, 1985

"The morally cultivated man, and only he, is wholly free. Either he is superior to nature as a force, or he is at one with her. Nothing that she can do to him is violence because before it reaches him it has already become his own action."
Friedrich Schiller, circa 1801

"Mrs "Richard F. Schiller" died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest."
Vladimir Nabokov, 1955

“I don't like to look out of the windows even--there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did?”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1892
Kitt Jun 20
I cannot say if things are worse
Than times that went before
For I saw not that bygone world
Nor what they did endure

Where once their sight was short,
Now it's growing nearer
Starter homes that once held court
Go "green" like silver mirrors.

Elixirless were garden hoses
Plastic cups, no holy grail beneath their noses
Now all you have left are pictures
That time has robbed of hue
I study them now, and try to suppose it
The complexion hides no trace of youth:
Just spoiled cream and rotting roses
A foul-odored truth.

The trade was fair when young were the eyes
That fixed upon that crest, their prize
Now turned white with cataracts,
Still they **** it dry
And turn to bottles for babes set aside,
Begging pity for the old and blind
And anyone too far gone to toil.
"It shall be hard time," or so they cry,
"Served beneath the soil."

It's hard time indeed, that which is served
Beneath the ravaged soil;
So tell me:
Can a head that sold me, the undeserved,
Anoint itself with motor oil?
Kitt Mar 8
be not afraid as you sink into the void
for it holds no danger to you now.
the darkness that threatened is your enemy
no more.
out from the void comes a sparkling light
you have made it. you have done the impossible
and now you may rest.
Kitt Jan 31
i never wanted you
to drown yourself in me,
the rain woman.
drip, drip, drop.

i warned you, once upon a time
to don your heaviest boots:
rubber soles to save your soul.
drip, drip, drop.

i am lightning, burning cold
i am thunder, rolling bold
i am a sigh of agitation:
a hurricane, a summer rain
the cool wet mud, a conflagration.

i am a natural disaster
but your lips are cracked and dry
so you saw in me an oasis
drip, drip, drop.

i wanted to see the desert watered
but i never wanted you
to drown yourself in me.
Kitt Jan 18
don't eat the green ones,
for they bring upon sudden rain
that slicks the roads on a Q....t night

don't touch the yellow ones,
for they cause mechanisms to fail
upending lives in a matter of a moment

and for God's sake, don't taste the red ones,
for they are laced with poison
far deadlier than cyanide smoke.

hold tight to your coin, the one whose year
adds to thirteen. perhaps it will save you
from the danger of counting to three.

make no plans following your shift
for the gods of fortune do not favor the prepared
nor those who stitch their patches on too soon

you'll come to loathe the moon,
her face, shown in full, driving mad the insecure
and away the rolling lights.

no boots off until midnight,
lest you be called impertinent, and proven so
by the savior bell's ironic sense of humor

follow these rules to survive.
question not why they are told, for it is better
to wonder in safety
than to tempt the unfair Lady known as Luck.
Kitt Dec 2023
Safe inside a bubble made of steel and glass
Sparkling with raindrops in the night’s lights
Warmth like bed, soft as a summer’s sigh wrapped in darkness
Words depart with the hitching breaths and racing hearts
Secret messages conveyed in the dew
A child’s finger-painted mural, pointing to where it hurts
The bottle inside is shaken near to combustion
The fences that have such good neighbors made
Crumble into soapy heaps
Suddenly there is no air, no breaths at all
Only the caress of a cheek, the whisper of a name
In one stolen moment, a secret yearning is given form
And outside the rain falls heavy and cool,
Promising respite from the confusion swirling inside,
The gift of the sky washing away any uncertainty.
But none comes. Outside the storm rages the same as within.
Soon the sun will rise, and perhaps
all will be made clear in the light of morning.
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