Tag: journal

The Walls We Are Inside

goodbye-6tz-prints

For the man who doesn’t need me,

I am a million wanting hands growing from stones

too hard

and impenetrable to sprout

anything at all.

Against me, an ocean.

–cold.

–grey.

It is a mirror

unconcerned with the self I want to see

–always

I am facing the wrong direction

and so is he.

Sometimes,

I am an open mouth

wrinkling for lack of moisture and he is the whale’s tail

fanning warm, salty air against my tongue.

It is then, that wet and dry are the same to a wanting body

and survival

is in a difference I refuse to know.

If only I could sink beneath the water

where his eyes are.

Would I know him then?

-Angie Hoover

Art: Goodbye by Michael Harford

Excerpt 2 from A Woman Made Cold

She was as beautiful as he had remembered even with 10 years of life painted onto her expression.

Their eyes met and it sent a shock right through her. She was as beautiful as he had remembered even with 10 years of life painted onto her expression. She towered over him- a statuesque beauty. Her hair had been blonde when she was a girl but it had faded to a mousy brown since the birth of her son.  He was just as fat and disheveled as she’d expected but she couldn’t help but see him as the strapping young buck he once was.

Excerpt from “A Woman Made Cold” Original Short Story

by Angie Hoover-Hillhouse

Unrecorded Song

the bitter kiss of compromise

stained your lips and stole your voice

you’re a stranger I’m a ghost

and i can’t reach through all your noise

I’d float through all our clouds of smoke

That’s if I felt I had a choice 

Every morning I feel older

dark nights crawl, and warm days race

you’re so black and I’m too blue

our bed is such a lonely place 

Every day we wake up dry

in fields too brown for rain to save

sleep in weeds until we die

sleep in weeds until we die

.

Time will bury girls and boys

paint their minds then blow away

I was bright and you were new

I was a poem yesterday

now cut my skin or kiss my mouth

The notes I sing are always gray 

and every time you looked at me

My eyes were hard

My eyes were drained

My eyes were nothing much

 My Eyes by Angie Hoover-Hillhouse

This song is about my relationship with my first live-in boyfriend after we grew tired of each other. I just remember scrubbing plates in our kitchen thinking, everything in my life is losing color but at least I can look out the window while it happens. Years after we broke up, I started  working on an album and wanted to capture that feeling in a song., but the chords I wrote felt very repetitive and didn’t really capture the mood accurately, so I scrapped the project.

Untitled Sketch drawn while listening to Kid A

by Angie Hoover-Hillhouse