Pendulums in Bombay NY by marisol diaz

"I have all the time in the world...just because this is problematic now doesn't mean it will be later," said the mouse in a most serious and unabashed manner.

"Maybe when that body that houses your spirit is mature enough to reciprocate, you will come around and see me for the first time as what I really am."

Young Lady Amberdine looked off into the distance, blithely ignoring the mouse. Mice seemed to be everywhere around the kitchen these days, especially around the hearth. Maybe its getting too cold outside. Her eyes only trailed back to the little mouse because she noticed his cryptic little hand gestures. Amberdine excused the distracting little mouse and his peculiar movements for some sort of self-cleaning ritual and deliberately returned to her daily preoccupations. In her reverie she thought, 'Maybe my animal is a whiptail lizard- a whole civilization of females that reproduce by cloning themselves and no males are necessary or existent?'

Early that morning, Amberdine came face to face with her toad-of-a-bully cousin, a boy for whom the words 'insolent' and 'crude' must have been invented for. He and his snake-eyed mother, Amberdine's aunt Evol, were visiting for the weekend. In what seemed like the only dose of energy this boy had all morning, he wickedly pulled at Amberdine's hair undoing the complex arrangement her ladies had just spent hours on. Whipping across the table he also stole her precious locket. The locket had been sitting on the table where Amberdine had toiled cutting small images to place inside.

However, the locket had been returned to her bedside. How was a mystery to Amberdine since she had purposefully locked her bedroom door after the fiend had attacked her. She tied the key around a ribbon that she hung under her dress, around her waist. The last time she checked it was still there.

Of Course, Amberdine would have no way of knowing it had been the little mouse who had rescued the locket. The little mouse saw the boy-toad running out to the field with the locket where he attempted to burn and bury it. Amberdine also had no way of knowing that her salacious cousin was deathly afraid of mice. As the boy-toad bent down to the ground to dig up a hole of dirt, the little mouse came storming towards the boy's reptilian nose with the sheer bravery of a nobleman and he bore his teeth down onto a wad of the boy's flesh.

All young Lady Amberdine knew was that someone had entered her locked room to return the locket. She deduced that her boy-toad cousin was simply too stupid to figure out how to enter her locked room. Instead, she was convinced it must have been her Aunt Evol. This aunt had such a malign ghastly look of sour death to her contorted features that it took Amberdine some courage to face her about the locket.
Sure enough Aunt Evol was shocked and aghast with the accusations about her innocently demure, weak and wounded son. In a flash, she threatened to banish Amberdine from the family inheritance, but not before she turned her into the ANIMAL she truly was. This of course is how we get to why Amberdine was day-dreaming about whiptail lizards and how of course the little mouse (who really wasn't a mouse at all) came to be a mouse with a collection of pendulums.

You see, not really being a mouse, the tiny critter was deeply in love with Amberdine. He knew that his 10th pendulum would break Aunt Evol's spell on his unfortunate life. And if you didn't already know, pendulum's became a symbol of the time he had to wait to profess his love to Amberdine, only four more to go.

title: This Use To Be My Living Room, photo from On Dying Series by marisol diaz

I was born in the pandemonium of urban blood clots, but somehow I escaped. I've traveled much since then, through the arteries and veins of this rural heartland and I have to tell you that I've seen the decay. Sometimes its slow and benign, yet too often its malignant and devastating. Like the rings around a cut tree's trunk I can see the years of this state's life spiraling before me. And I am but an earnest microcosm of its day. I sit around your brittle, chafing, chipping brick and peel a layer of a earthy flesh back to see the ache. I wonder why all political repairs have been cosmetic when cosmetics are the most short-lived, insignificant aspects of living, to the blind.

"yeah" you say "but it's the seeing who are misled, who are ingenuinely reactive, who are truly blind."

I sit and contemplate your words. All I know is the saddest thing about all those homes dying and business's closing are that new hearts, dreams and passions are not moving in their place, instead those structures are sitting there, rotting, leaving the land marred with memories that like stains are impenetrably residual.

untitled by marisol diaz

That callous reality sets in every day around 4pm.
She makes her living by constantly admonishing
my imagination.
Persistent in trying to rid you of my possibility.
I sit alone in the car, driving lost and entertaining my fabrications,
weaving one thread across the other.
Creating a whole world of fictitious opportunities when...I've come to a stop
and she comes striding in, slamming the passenger door with that
smug glower

Sometimes she looks like laughing children,
an unlocked chain on a door,
or a spinning wedding band,
other times she looks like my best friend.
Still she's there to cut the tether
The feelings are nothing but frustration and mockingly all self-imposed.
Ridiculous really for reality to interfere with what is not and
what will never be.
Still I'm hopeful that the world I create in my dreams one day,
somehow, have something,
a touch, a path, a response or a resonance to do with
my waking day.

Excerpt from my art house sketchbook (see my blog for more images and details)

Trust is the battleground to an epic war that is never won.
In the end the sole soldier standing is me. I can only trust who I am, what kind of human I am in this flux-filled simmering world and sometimes...since my manimal heart reminds me reason doesn't automatically stand to beat the impulse of my nature...I can't even trust that. Is it morality that guides us or law, permissions, fashion and popularity? Trust is a step, that as I climb, might one day not be there - its a bud that upon neglect might one day be curled onto itself with rot...but out of noble-rot comes the sweetest wine. Perhaps trust is the ultimate weapon against my daily fool.

ling ling love heart by marisol diaz

The feather fan is candid...wink, wink...
The impulse for false salutations is irresistible...psst,pssst...
as the hello is really a reason to touch...ooohhh,aaaahh...
yet the risk of touching is tantamount to a fear of avalanches that never cease...crush, crush, crash...go the little beats of my heart.

sketchbook page by marisol diaz

down fell my unzipped, jilted and beaten armor
the air pressure exuding from your mouth is about to crumple the metal into shivered, penalized tin
illicit because we shouldn't always get what we want - too many ruins are erected
left in the amber light is naked flesh, palpitating heart and one single raw nerve.

La Sirena sketch by marisol diaz

There were days that I felt collided into each other. I would lay on my back in a state of sloth like paralysis and I stared at the ceiling. Layers of my vision overlapped in transparent stacks, shifting constantly. The mattress became placenta and the room a maternal womb. I struggled to imagine the possibility of ever being able to get up again. It felt as though air was leaving me. When I could, I strained to turn my gaze towards the window I was in awe of how quickly the sun rose and set and rose again. It was painful to imagine sitting up. It wasn't until the day I heard the lock rattle and his sweet whistle, that beads of sweat tumbled down my brow and puddled over my lip, beckoning me to move again.

I needed to know what was happening to me, to hear him calling made my entire body ache all over. What had he done to me? How had he done this to me? He immobilized me in order to need him, and I was captured in the net. Is this what had happened to Lily? Had she disappeared not fled? He was all I had and so I had to get up.

"I have the key, I can unlock you from this place all you have to do is say the word." He spoke in sonar as I stood there unsteady staring, trying to place the phonetic beats of his words.
"Where is Lily?"
"What's the difference, where she is?"
He reached his hand through the gate swiping tears of sweat off my forehead coldly. He pressed his head tightly up against the bars.
"Did she really matter that much to you? I can make it so that you can see her again, if you let me take you out of here."
I couldn't make out my emotions, relieved for his arrival yet terrified down to my bones of him. I tried to talk but words began to fail me...my lips felt fused together muted into a frown.
"Tell me to open the gate and I'll show you what happened to your friend."
I used one hand to steady myself and other hand with its shaking fingers to part my lips. I was done fighting.
"Open the gate."

He slipped the iron key through the weathered lock and eased it into action so swiftly that I thought the lock must have had a soul. I thought quickly of my room and my mind fell on the flower...I would most likely never see her again. Somehow I knew that.

"I didn't want her to suffer, sometimes the girls can suffer much too much and it makes the transition that much harder."
My eyes began to roll towards the back of my head and the sounds of his words began to turn into images, flashes of Lily. I saw it all. They were in a body of water, entwined like lovers, she was excited, joyful and unaware, they swam underwater resurfacing to kiss, the intimacy between them was like sour gummy bears, and then the pulse happened, a flash of dark determination, and I felt her buckle up tense, I saw him grab her head with both of his huge hands and hold her wailing body under water, I felt her kick and jut like a wild horse, when I realized her air was gone, everything went still and I opened my eyes to face him.

On Growing An Ocean's Tale Self-Portrait

Lily was desperate. Time had lapsed in a painfully slow way. Even my bud seemed to halt all growth. I couldn't tell you how many days passed during what felt like no time at all. I began to feel restless my self, though I was still adamant on never ordering a key. Our hosts became more reclusive and began to simply leave the meals, even dinner simply sitting on the table for us. Lily took to pacing. She spent what felt like hours holding onto the gate staring out to the open, often empty road. Thats when the dreams started.

There was nothing around me only a haze of hot air. I could feel my bare feet sinking and recognized the sand's texture embracing my toes. In every direction there was only sand. I began to feel thirst as though I were a plant in desperate need of hydration, my emerald skin, shriveling into itself seeking moisture. Finally with no sound emanating from my throat I would start to cry just to gain liquid for breadth and challenge the dehydration. Thats when I saw the sirens emerging all around from the golden glittering sand and as ridiculous as it sounds they danced like Salome. Each looked so unique and so utterly brilliant like light splitting through a faceted jewel. They introduced themselves to me. I can't remember any of their names but one, the one who said she didn't arrive like the others, like me. She said she traveled to be here, willingly, knowingly and at peace. Her name was Tamara. That was when I would wake up with my hands wrapped around my throat gasping for air.