Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

krisis

Krisis has been creating Crushing Krisis since 2000, writing songs since 1996, and reading comics since 1991. He is a Customer Success and Digital Brand Strategy executive, serial organizer, parent, and feminist, among other things. Based in Philly through 2017, he now resides in Wellington, NZ.

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Under the cover of my sacred blue checkered blanket i was wishing for wind, with my face pressed up against my square back window. My bed had been migrating towards it for over a week now; it’s a curious obsession i have, staring into my neighbor’s windows. I think i am jealous of him because i want to watch him but he does not want to watch me. Tonight my bed moved altogether, so that he could see as much of me as i can of him. I was looking to trade lives: my nights for his.


I tempt him. I play guitar in front of the window as soon as the roommates leave in the morning, half-naked, thrashing and strumming loud enough for him to hear. I flicker my string of lights on and off at night while feigning sleep to see if he looks my way. I sit, postured, on my wooden stool, glaring at my broken webpage.

At first he would slip me into sleep with his idle routine and the way he lazily cuddled with his dog, but lately he has been keeping me awake. Tonight i was lying there wishing for wind and rain because i wanted to hear the sound of it pressing in on my room, unable to enter, and i didn’t care if it would make my spying any harder. It was just past four when i got what i said i wanted, with a tiny tinkling of drops on the pane. I found myself unthinkingly focusing past them to see his yellow light and blue walls.


At five he turned over and looked right at me; i had thought he had fallen asleep with his lights on. I self-consciously flicked the lights on and stood up, suddenly naked and vulnerable in the harsh florescence of my bedroom. Maybe i don’t like the tables turned as much as i thought i would. Up out of my bed, i slid on a tee-shirt and stalked over to my kitchen stool to check my email, and he turned back over.

I’m starting to realize that no one wants you to put on a show; they just want to see what you would do if they weren’t there.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/7262320/

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So, if you couldn’t tell from those two (very non-lyric) pieces, i spent my weekend intermittently curled up with my collection of Sylvia Plath poems. Lately just about anything i’ve read has impacted upon my writing pretty clearly, and Plath’s ability to gently turn the obscure into the common as well as the other way around is something that makes her my favourite non-lyrical poet by far.

Of course, i didn’t spend the entire 60 hours that i classify as ‘weekend’ curled up with a book and some bottled emotions; my sitting on the floor of the fourth row of the strange auditorium at Shippensburg with a notepad on my lap furiously copying down Plath poems while the fraternity people chirped away endlessly was probably the last thing i intended to talk about upon my return. In fact, i had written a pen-and-paper blog just minutes before then, but reading it now it doesn’t seem to be saying anything at all.


It would be one thing if i were to write you my Bell Jar, but i haven’t read that in nearly a year. Instead you are stuck with poetry, dancing around the things i wasn’t planning to say anyhow. I’m obtuse like that, i suppose.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/7260104/

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Simple Refrain

(or, Upon Reading ‘Ella Mason and Her Eleven Cats’)
I have learned to keep my secrets like Ella and her eleven cats,
As if shuttered against hurricane season and a gossiping ear.
People make queries that disregard the gender of the spinster created.
Though only words, for no good reason my answer takes forever
Because nothing is secret that is already heard.

I wrote a letter to Miss Sylvia in the shape of a song
While i was locked out of my house. My front step was a podium,
My pen a Pandora box. How could she have known that
I had just spent another sleepless night, ready to explode
A razor’s edge away from my fears?
Because nothing is secret that is already heard.

When i set that one down on paper
I was pretending my thoughts were clouds that fade away.
But i have found that if i keep them bottled up they distill down
To a simple refrain.

I’ve never really owned 11 of anything — maybe more
Or less, though. I can surely count my secrets on less than
Ten fingers and just one toe, but i’d rather just send them
Back Home.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/7259939/

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Atlas

(after Plath’s Edge)

The mind is sleeping.
A mighty

Giant stands in quiet surrender,
The air of spartan arrangement

Is crisp in the curves of her muscles,
Her bare

Shoulders are claiming:
We will not topple over, i know.

Two gaping spaces stretched strangley silent
Each one in

A state of crumble, emptied.
She still holds

Her torch to light the same sky
Of steely jagged mountain majesties

stiff and resisting the
winds of change, cold of winter seeping in.

Her set lips reveal nothing,
Visage fixed on endless clouds beyond.

She is weary of the weight.
Her brow furrows, green.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2001/11/7259676/