codenamewanderlust | Entries tagged with meta

You fly, Butterfly

Soar now on the wind

Never give up, Buttercup

Because you know
You’ll always arrive in style

It's okay to sit still, sweet Daffodil

To take a moment of silence

Just don’t let the fears buzz in your ears

When your own inner power overwhelms you

Go back to the page
Maybe, stop hovering in doorways

Hoping the faeries will mistake you

(For one of their own)

Get high, Honey-bee

Take flight and let the currents guide you

Alight on the air with nary a care

Because you know exactly who you are

And if the most that can ever be said

Is that you sprouted wings and fled

Then let it be said!

Don’t let the stories they tell of you define you

Fly now, little Bird

And let not your worries deprive you

I want to be a message in a bottle

Full of mystery

Sent out into the wilderness

The wild greens and blues

Riding the boundless current

For so long I forget what

it feels like to touch the earth

Until you would delight in finding me

Plucked from the gentle tide

An unexpected surprise

A welcome distraction

And a sense of connection

So fragile you would weep with joy

To read the salt stained words

Tucked inside clouded cerulean

Uncorked

Unraveled

Liberated

Purified

Given sanctuary

Taken to a place

where you feel happy

To be read

curled up in an armchair

Or at a breakfast table

between sips of coffee

Trying to find the meaning

The first and final macguffin

The pot of gold

at the end of the

Mobius-strip rainbow

To be spoken about with reverence

The line between philosophy and poetry
To be brought to life in your imagination

Singularity

She hadn't heard from User51 in weeks. Meta4 kept the burner phone with his last number in it. She had circulated their hashtags on all of the usual places. She’d agreed when he wanted go.

It was only a side quest, he'd said, an easter egg.

She had tried to find her own access point after he hadn't returned. Her only clue was "Apogee." She’d found it on a sticker in the 4th stall of the women’s restroom in the bus station in Someplace, Nevada.

It was like trying to do a jigsaw puzzle while not knowing if you even had all the pieces.

Apogee was also the name on the highest score of the Addams Family pinball machine in Toledo, Nowhere. Above the name GoSting. That was the same night she’d smoked her last joint and solved Time Cube theory but couldn't quite remember it the next day. Stuck with this sense of deja-vu and feeling like a fixed point on a map between her feet and the sky. Above and Below. An exponent in a world of sleeping NPCs.

Do you still believe in it all? U had asked her once when they had retreated into the matrix, found a loophole in the code and stayed for almost a month in an unoccupied cabin in Thisplace, North Carolina. They’d read excerpts of all the books they were each carrying and left them all behind when they left.

U called it poetic terrorism. Like the weekend they stayed in a condo in St.Louis,Somewhere while the rich old couple who owned the place were out of the country. U hacked into the guys on-line gambling account and convinced her it was karma when she won big money on her first try. They only dumped half into their own pay-pal account before U wiped away the rest of their digital footprints.

I was in the honeymoon of my life… Meta hums to herself as she hangs string of lights over a fairly clean mattress she had found and pushed up against a wall in the empty 2nd floor office where she was currently squatting.

She’d also found an old sewing machine in a storage closet and it was on the floor next to an old microwave. The place still had power but no water. She reaches for one of the gallons she carried all the way from the gas station gasping as an automatic reflex makes her rear back, then she laughs at herself and the tiny light bulb of the old sewing machine, the familiar texture of something that could cause her pain. Like tall wiry boys in woolen caps with deep southern accents like caramel dripped on apples.

She’d broken character at least four times now. Picked up the blue handset of each old coin operated telephones she passed by and spoken into the silence: I’d like to speak to User51, please / User51 can you hear me?/ This is Meta4 calling for User51 / I would like to establish a connection / Please!

She dropped dimes and quarters that never came back. Pressed the lever that never caused a dial tone. And one time when she was quite sure she was alone she smashed the receiver against the brassy metal buttons of the numbered keypad repeatedly before hanging it back in it’s cradle, retrieving her pack from the ground and walking away.

___________________

A/N: This is the continuation of an entry I posted last season:

Intersubjectivity

I'm not sure if it stands alone but none of my other ideas for the topic this week came together. I enjoyed revisiting this world anyhow.

On a sunny afternoon

A young witch is cleaning her cauldron

Thinking about unfinished projects

Notice: the sewing machine in it’s case

Notice: the shelf of books waiting to be read

Notice: the typewriter

She’s better than this, she thinks when she has a premonition

Herself; later that night trying to reach a deadline

Plundering her own journals for profound one liners

Sitting on the bed surrounded by so many pocket sized notebooks

Bindings worn thorn, filled with paragraphs of run on sentences

In multicolored ink

This is called procrastinating

She is told

As she cleans the cauldron

To avoid the pen

Doesn't chase the plot bunnies under the bed

Even though words are her addiction

She contemplates fabric and stitches, instead

The half made skirt wrapped up just so

in paper

in a box,

also under the bed

Needles trailing at the end of threads- seems unfinished

She knows she is only digger her soul deeper into karmic debt

by not giving proper action to anything she truly desired

Scraping ashes off cast iron

She sprinkles in a layer of black powder and sweet incense

Always starting over

Always a new beginning

She believes in impossible dreams

Secretly revels in happily ever afters

and loves rainy days

And coffee

And baking magic into cookies

And flying broomsticks

She takes too many pictures of the delightfully ephemeral sky

She collects new words,

like matchsticks waiting to be struck

But who am I kidding?

Because you already know that the SHE in this story is ME

And most of the time

*I*

have the bad habit of writing in first person

And you (yes you)

can hear this bird ~~singing~~ spitting rhymes

Sometimes
Even into a microphone

Up on a stage

But mostly

Only ever when she thinks no one is listening

Because
no one

Ever is

Ever really

Doing anything

Except living in their own story

~~Like most of you reading this~~

~~who have gathered to share this thing we call art~~

You know, how like

the not-so-young-anymore-actually witch in THIS story

got too comfortable living out of boxes
because she grew up mostly on the run

because her mama couldn't always pay the rent

Or how she became an avid reader

As a way to escape reality

Or how cleaning the cauldron becomes a metaphor

And how long it took to write

~~and then rewrite and then decide to share~~

this prose

Or even how I thought about you while writing this

And how I came a long way to be who I am today

But truly who of us hasn't?

~~Before you go think of your favorite color, if everyone who reads this thinks of their color, after awhile we will have manifested a rainbow~~

It had been a pattern for awhile.
As soon as I would make a space exactly right I would suddenly have to move

Take it all down

Start over in some other place with the barest essentials usually

For years this would happen to me over and over

I would find just the right way to arrange the furniture for efficiency of space and energetic flow

Perhaps it’s a nomadic tendency held over from being born poor and having a complicated family history

I got used to living out of boxes

But I couldn't help making any new new living situation my own in some way

I've become sentimentally attached to furniture and cried over thrift store clothing finds I had to leave behind

I have one small steamer style trunk that has followed me somehow

From home to home

Even after a brief stint “on the road”

My friends passed it from closet to basement until I landed on my feet

Books were the hardest to lose

Adopted from curbside free bins
or bought at witchy boutique shops or sidewalk sales

Mémoires and travelogues mostly skimmed

Underlined and highlighted

Out of print novels with enticing covers vying for attention

Coffee table photography books of the strangest homes money could build

And abandoned railway stations

I’d take as many as I could carry when the time inevitably came to choose

I buried my favorites in the bottom of the trunk; read and unread unlike

I’d get somewhere new and begin making it home

Stack books on the floor until I was gifted a night stand by a new roommate

Or that time I found a sturdy wooden desk spray painted silver and purple left for the trash collectors that I carried three grueling blocks all by myself because I didn't have a car

I have two shelves now

That came with the small non-permitted diy back porch room in my grandmother’s home in Florida for I have returned like a boomerang for a third time
This time I got myself a job as a bookstore barista and have acquired more books to add to the ambiance of the room

I took all the books out of the steamer trunk and lined them up by genre, and size

I’ve got a stack of unread library books next to my bed though

Somewhere along the way I gifted myself a kindle paper-white - I treasure it,as a literary gormandizer and minimalist lover of efficiency to me it is magic

but I still can’t turn down a good cover, or the musty scent of old pages

Maybe I will put up more shelves

One of the shelves I can barley reach because the room wasn't originally built for me
I hope to afford just the right folding step stool that could double as a seat to maximize the space

I have put up art on the walls

Made curtains

I recently bought a minty colored folding table to use my gram’s shiny black Singer sewing machine from the 40’s that still stitches like a beast as I sit on the edge of the bed

I call the room the Rainbow Oasis
I am afraid to get it set up exactly right

Full text below audio

Audio Content Warning: there's a string of curse words near the end

Sestina: The Main Character (MC)

This is a story about an MC afflicted with passion.
Who, like the restless needle of a compass,
was forever seeking the Horizon.
< spoiler alert > the ending of this story is already foretold
and is the same for every single being in creation.
It’s been said we’re all just players of some unseen narrator.

A nameless, unknowable, spiteful, narrator
who in the throes of passion
might decide to kill his creation.
So, this MC has a heartbeat like a needle of a spiraling compass.
For as is true for all, inevitably, death has been foretold.
Even for this MC who loves a thing known as, horizon.

They’re forever stupidly longing for that ever distant, damned Horizon.
Yes, damned, is the opinion of this narrator,
Who is actually wondering if there is even a point, if it’s all been foretold?
But I digress and the MC curses the will of my passion
as we drop them on the shore with naught but map and compass.
Do you see, that this MC is a stubborn, monstrous creation?

(I do confess I also find this fixed verse form to be a monstrous creation.)
What would happen if the MC ever reached their figurative horizon?
Perhaps an HEA* is greater than my abilities can compass?
But what good is an MC to a narrator
if they do not have passion?
We must all live with knowing that eventual, ending foretold.

From your very first breath, there being a last has been foretold.
It’s a bargain; the uncanny act of creation.
But back to the MC with all that all-consuming passion.
(Wanting so badly to reach that god damned fucking gosh darn horizon.)
The man who would dare defy the narrator
but is just a feckless wanderer lead by a faulty compass.

There are always dropped stitches and pricked fingers within the compass
of the tapestry woven as it is being foretold.
Does every narrator
hate his creation
for seeking beyond the horizon?
Being able, as the other is not, to fulfill their passion?

In the end the MC lets passion become the compass
and each moment a horizon. The last moment cannot be foretold,
the MC learns, for any man, or his creation, or even a humble narrator.

_{*HEA stands for Happily Ever After}

with much thanks as always to

lolaslaughter for being the best cheerleader a gal could have

Profile

Codename: Wanderlust

February 2020

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
					1	2
3	4	5	6	7	8	9
10	11	12	13	14	15	16
17	18	19	20	21	22	23
24	25	26	27	28	29

Syndicate

Style Credit

Base style: Modular by branchandroot
Theme: Calculated Risks by timeasmymeasure

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Wednesday, 17 September 2025 08:59 am

Sparrow in Saturn R̶e̶t̶u̶r̶n̶i̶n̶g̶ Reborn

"It’s always exciting living in Fraggle Rock. That’s what’s wrong with the place."

Entries tagged with meta

LJIdol / LPF: Week 12: Write Off

LJIdol / LPF: Week 12: MacGuffin

LJIdol / LPF: Week 10: Nadir

LJIdol / LPF: Week 5: Not My First Rodeo

LJIdol / LPF: Week 3: Tsundoku

(no subject)