MORE SELECTIONS
Eyes
There are two photographs on the shelf - two photographs, three people.
The one on the right is me, me and him, me in a long plum-colored dress,
with elegant black gloves that come up to my elbows and actually wearing
heels, my arm curled around him the way things ought to be, him in his
suit, all small and out of focus. It's the only pic I have of him, he
doesn't photograph well, and the scale is so small I can't see his deep
green eyes. The other picture is just a face, a beautiful shot of a
handsome face, face a little wrong but they nearly caught the eyes
right, this once, capturing the unnerving power of that beautiful blue.
I suppose, come to think of it, that it means something that those are
my photographs, just the way things are, that I never had a pic of the
three of us together.
It is all so complex, so mixed up in my mind, that I can never get the
thoughts out to where I wish things were. I think each of them thinks I
wish something that I don't, but I don't know how to say what I mean,
the words all get tangled up like the poem I wrote so long ago.
It was a good poem, and it seems worth the thinking of, so I think of
it, reciting it over in my mind, carefully placing out the words and
trying not to think of anything else, becaues thinking of anything else
brings me the watching eyes, and I really don't feel like dealing with
those.
And that brings me around to remembering the first time I told him that
poem, I was sitting in the car, and we were talking about things, and I
was watching him, trying to catch his reactions, trying to meet his
green eyes but afraid to do so. I could never figure out then what was
going on behind those eyes....
And then I wonder, as I sometimes do, when I think of eyes what do I
think? (There are two photographs on my shelf. Two.) And if I let my
mind wander, I get them (Green eyes, blue eyes, blue eyes, green eyes?)
wandering through my senses, and if I let go a little more, I start to
dream. And the hair that I dream is always blond, but is it the long and
silksmooth this time or the curls, slightly wiry, that I twist around my
fingers, hair just grown out enough to curl....
There are the two of them settled in my mind, shifting around each other
in their meanings, in intensity, so like so unalike so very much every
thing and all nothing, confused in my heart and my mind's unclear eye.
Two of them, and I look at them with the deep brown eyes that I assume
are my inner eyes, since I cannot use the outer ones just now, and I see
so much - so much that is almost so rea l that I can reach out to touch,
if only I could place myself into my own inner vision. Two of them, and
the feelings are so twisted to me that there are times that they flow
together in my mind, and my heart gets twisted and hung from the gibbet
it make s between my logics and my loves.
Consciously, I try to segregate, to think one rather than the other,
without letting anything sneak in to surprise me. But it seems the
harder I try, the more my mind will slip, green eyes blue eyes silk or
curls what does it matter anyway in a half-killed dream that doesn't
quite appear when I wake, and that I can never remember after I've
slept? My mind needs reasons, reasons to think of that one over the
other, reasons to keep it all separate, sorted, unconfuse d.
I can think out plain facts. I can think out plain memories. I can even,
when my soul is sober, think out the wishes I have and put them in a
place where they nearly can touch upon words, nearly make it through the
barrier between the subconscious and the spoken word. But only nearly.
As it is, my mind haunts me with fleeting images and meanings that never
mean anything but the death of a dream (blue eyes, green eyes) or the
continuance of a reality.
The words are nowhere that they fit. How can I say the words, green
eyes, or blue for that matter, and express what they mean? They are
nothing but words that seem to fall short of the truth behind them, the
pains and the joys that matter in the world that is green eyes blue eyes
curls or silken put a twist on the meanings of everything and shape them
around until you've tormented the words into saying what you mean.
And now I twist the ring on my finger, as if that were a reason for any
of it, and fight to keep my eyes awake. I twist the ring on my finger,
but my mind shows me the pendant that is still around my neck, for all
that the chain is rubbing my skin black, and asks me why.
Why? I say back to it. I try to drive my thoughts to new channels, pure
ones, green eyes, green eyes and curls, but the blue reappears, and I
have to ask why. I do not want a dead dream haunting me. I can have
happiness that sinks me into green eyes without the corpse of a fantasy
lying bloody in my thinking, thinking of blue eyes. I try to conjure
that up and it all tells me no.
No.
Why?
Why should you choose that one and not the other?
One lives. One lives, but not for me. It was not my choice even if it
was my fault. I will not spoil the true dream with the loss of another.
Neither of them is here, what does it matter who you think of?
I think, a long time, now. True, that when I can truly look into eyes,
green blue whatever the hell eyes are eyes but those are so beautiful,
when I can do that the ot her fades away, a sort of dull nagging whine
at the back of the mind, blue green curls and silk, whichever is not
real at the moment wobbles into a portrait on the wall of my mind,
resting there for a time.
And neither is real now.
One is less real than the other, but neither is real. That is the
reality of most of my days, my nights - a dream is a dream, but living
means schedules and classes, time and books. Love has no place in
reality just now, for all that the ring on my finger should make it
real. There is nothing here but what my mind summons up, netherworld
ghosts perhaps or the magician's rabbit (ta-dah and here's what we have
for you to think about now) that prop themselves up against the backs of
my eyes and touch all my thinking with gold - gold in hair, gold in the
gifts that I thought I had been given, a gentle touch or a smile that
could send my heart, melted, down into a puddle in my left foot.
The reality is devoid of dreams for now. I have a ring on my finger, a
ring that is a promise to green eyes and curls and a hope of a heart
forever unbroken. That nearly makes a dream real, I suppose, that and
memories, but it is only a ring, only a ring no matter what else it
brings to it. (And yet I remember now as if it were true lying in his
arms, my head on his chest, in the warm safe shivering happiness that
such things bring. And he laid one hand on the curve of my stomach,
resting it there, and I laid one of mine upon his, and there was a
promise made, a promise that I do think of sometimes when I feel like
dreaming and seeing what will come despite the hurt. The dreams of times
like that have no pain to them. Sometimes I think I prefer that.)
But then blue eyes shoulder their way into my dreamings, and touch me
with the wildness of all that that was, and the rememberings, and the
power, and I might say that sometimes I like that if it weren't for the
hurting. And then memories come.
I had been listening to his music, lying and watching the music happen,
blue eyes flashing power as his slender hands beat sound out of a Strat
and the dog watched. He finished, and I reached up to brush the
silk-soft gold from his face, and we spoke in hushed tones, nervous
ones, letting the last vibrations of the music hum in our minds as we
made our way up to his room.
His eyes held half the fear that mine did, I think, though I could not
see my own, though he was not my first, beautful blue eyes full of love
and fear exhilaration lust gentle wild blue with stormy touch of grey
that came with the passion and after full of joy, pleasure, happy loves
as I curled against him, in his arms my head on his chest his silken
gold brushing my forehead as he kissed me.
"Heya handsome," I said, and he used to answer, "Hello, beautiful,"
and
even though I din't quite believe him it made me shiver. (Now he will
still say "Yes dear," but it isn't the same as it used to be -
it is
more a force of habit and the affection due friends than what it used to
be or what I feel it ought to be sometime again if I don't destroy
everything that matters, well, not everything but half....)
And after, three of us, we went bowling, full of life as we two were and
the third, green eyes, loving to tease us both as we laughed, fresh in
our newly shared knowledge and still half-aware of each other the way
lovers often are, especially new lovers, ones who had just traded a part
of their souls, the way a friend of mine told me later after he was
gone.
(She said that being someone's lover means you give that person a little
bit of your soul, and that stays forever - and I can feel it, a little
piece of stormy blue wild eyes that looks out from the depths of me from
the place I made to keep it safe.
And now I have to wonder if he feels those quiet brown deep dark eyes
watching him the way I used to do. I wonder if it makes him nervous.)
And the remembering ends, and shifts into a new remembering, a
conversation I had once, talking about blue eyes to green, and trying to
figure everything out. Back then I knew where I wished the dream would
go, and he saw that the dream mattered and let me have it, before I
looked into blue eyes that were in tormented and heard a voice that said
"I don't remember how to love you anymore," and I had to tear
my eyes
from those blue ones, bury them in my arms and cry until they melted
away in pain, eyes running down my face and making my head scream the
same agony as my heart.
So now what is reality? I ask bitterly, because if blue eyes only come
true again in dreaming then I want to dream, because in dreaming green
eyes are as true as they are when I am alive, and reality as it sits
hurts too much, every time I wake up from dreaming of blue eyes making
me have to deal with the fact that they aren't real, that they won't be
real, because somewhere I did something wrong enough to make those eyes
forget looking into mine and loving me. The dreams that come of green
eyes are not enough to sop up the pain, and I keep them separated
anyway, because they do not deserve to be soaked in the hurt, green eyes
do not need to see the depth behind the brown.
And so I drop the subject of reality, because I don't feel like thinking
about the pain. I let my mind wander into half-formed images (a silken
wisp of hair trailing over blue eyes laced with grey, laughing eyes
because their owner knows how adorable I find it when he peers down at
me like that) of (curled up against one, warm, happy, curling fingers
through hair and occasionally tugging it when it tangles around them,
looking over and catching sleep-muzzed green brownflecked content)
things that I've seen often enough that the pictures are half-engraved
on my eyes.
A smile, a gentle caress across the cheek flickers into a teasing brush
across the nose, a lopsided smile that deserves a kiss wanders across a
pair of faces and I remember now being held (head against his shoulder
no resting on his chest make a decision why can't you decide on anything
because I can't decide) and safe from the pain.
Now it comes in, the hurt, and I can't drive it away no matter how many
flat portraits I call up because they're only pictures and they're just
not real. The little part of my heart that calls half of them cries out,
now, and gives me no more portraits, only tears, because it will see no
new portraits, nothing but the same old photographs to be pored over and
smiled at until the ink runs blurry and they wear out like a cheap tape.
I want to be able to choose, pick out the memories without the pain, or,
if I can't do that, pick the eyes that don't have the hurting in them,
but I cannot. The heart will not be manhandled around that way, and I
hurt. I wrestle the pain with a sort of grave patience, and wish
sometimes above all else that it would fade, while clinging to it as the
last thing I was given.
Slowly, slowly, I reassert myself, my mind, and open my eyes. Green. I
make myself think of green and curls, and twist the ring on my finger
until the rest of the dreaming stops hurting and I can let my heart be
free again.
Back to the main Book.
http://www.watson.org/~darkhawk/Book/eyes.html
darkhawk@fledge.watson.org
Imagine that the colour of your eyes effected what your
saw. So blue
eyes saw the same thing differently to brown eyes and green eyes saw it
differently too. They would all see basically the same view, but with
differences, unique to each. The design could effect what they saw: Make
an error and blue eyes wouldn't be able to see half of what you printed
but brown eyes could see all of it and green eyes most of it.
Think how it really is. Apart from the partially sighted and the blind
you can pretty much guarantee that anything you print on paper will be
the same for everyone.
Now look at browsers. Netscape Navigator is blue eyes, MS Internet
Explorer is brown eyes and Lynx is green eyes. Everybody sees web pages
slightly differently - they're running different resolutions, monitor
sizes, operating systems etc. All I can be sure of is that you'll see
this text and the links. That makes design pretty hard.
I'm really into the cross-platform nature of the Net. Which is my pages
are a bit more sparse than the jazzier Shockwaved sites. Why? Because I
know that 99% of people viewing my site will be able to see all the
content reliably. You can get to anything with text links here. Some
sites have image maps as the only thing on their first page. How does a
text-only browser user get around that?
I know most people can roughly see what I'm making but I can't exactly
define a design. This makes laying out pages extremely hard and designs
pretty limited. What people have come up with is amazing.
Imagine what we could achieve if HTML had the same flexibility as paper!
http://www.j-dom.demon.co.uk/030397/tek.htm
jeep@j-dom.demon.co.uk
The
Mulder/Krycek Romantics Association
"Green Eyes"
Green Eyes
by Pamela Rush
Reflecting in the mirror is,
A shining pair of eyes.
The green of them reflecting back,
A hundred thousand lies.
There are questions in her head,
Of her life's one great cost,
Although she knows what she has gained,
She knows not what she's lost.
"Who am I?" She says to the face,
Reflected in the glass,
A dance girl for a mindless slug,
A woman with no past?
She sees herself in her mind's eye,
Object of Jabba's drool,
All the while she danced and twirled,
Under Palpatine's rule.
Would she have led a normal life,
Not swallowed by the dark,
A peaceful woman left alone,
Without the Emperor's mark.
Green eyes stare into the glass,
Right back those green eyes stare,
As red-gold hair surrounds the face,
The pain reflected there.
Her mind is full of what she's face,
Heart hollow as a tomb,
Sometimes she thinks that she can sense,
Her own impending doom.
A flash of light strikes through her soul,
Bright flashing in the dark,
The warmth of it grows in her heart,
A fire from one small spark.
A Jedi Knight has shown her home,
And what she really knows,
The darkness disappears in her,
As the spark's light grows.
She sees the spark of light in her,
Surrounding one bright thought,
She knows the life she's brought to him,
She now knows what she's got.
With the light abounding here,
Around and in her soul,
The friends around her help the light,
To widen and to grow.
Mara turns away from there,
Her own reflecting eyes,
The change has been remarkable,
She takes down her disguise.
The End
http://www.fanfix.com/stories/poetry/new/green.txt
GuriX@fanfix.com
Date: Fri, 5 May 95 13:28:05 WST
Reply to: Cameron Newham <cam@pf.adied.oz.au>
Subject: Green Eyed Blonde
@GREEN EYED BLONDE - DM
Her unquestionable love
No one better could understand.
Truth waiting to strike from above
condemned by my own hand.
The questioning silence
her eyes filled with confusion.
Hesitation admitting compliance
Feelings undergoing diffusion.
How could I have hurt
what I loved so much?
How could I have hurt
someone so trusting?
Watching for understanding
in her eyes so green.
The uncomfortable moment
our eyes do not meet.
A question of lust
my failure complete.
You look to me now
your eyes filled with tears.
Your forgiveness shines through
highlighting my self-fear.
How could I have hurt
what I loved so much?
How could I have hurt
someone so trusting?
Watching for understanding
in your eyes so green.
http://www.depeche.mode.net/parody/green.eyed.blonde.txt