Today I walked into Barnes and Noble to buy my summer reading book which just so happens to be super thick and it's 1930s science fiction (kill me now!) Anyways, while we're there, out of curiosity, I asked if they had any John Green books (because everywhere else, they're either sold out or on hold) and they did. The lady brought me to a table. A few of my friends had recommended his works. Scanning the table of books, unsure of what to chose, a guy walks up to me. He looks about my age, maybe a year or so older. He's pretty cute, which is quite the pleasant surprise because usually guys don't talk to me. He says, pointing to The Fault in Our Stars, "I couldn't help but kind of overhear you talking, but I read this and it was amazing." He points at Looking for Alaska. "My girlfriend read this... said it was pretty good." So I say thanks and something awkward like 'I'll have to check it out,' and get The Fault in Our Stars. This small gesture has restored my hope in our generation. The guys in my school are mostly arrogant airheads with no taste in music, in my opinion, anyway. In addition to this experience with a stranger, today, while at a shopping center, I saw a girl wearing a 5 Seconds of Summer shirt, as I had mine on, too. I complimented her and she smiled and said, "Thanks, you too." This small gesture has also restored my hope in our generation. Today I learned that not everyone sucks and that makes me really happy. I guess that if you put yourself out there, ever so slightly, in the right places, you might learn things or make new friends. What if I'd talked to the girl about 5SOS? Or asked the guy about other books he's read? There are so many opportunities every single day to improve the quality of our lives and we pass them up, because they're things that are thought of as small, but can have huge impacts. I believe that if each and everyone of us tried, just a little bit, to talk to strangers, the world would be a better place. Not everyone wants to hurt you. I'm not saying to invite some random person into your house, but to talk to people with common interests, or compliment someone on their shirt. Little things like that, as they did to me, can make someone's day. I walk to my mom with a pile of books. She turns to me and says, "Since when did cute boys talk to you at bookstores?"
He wants me to shut up about before and after, he doesn’t
sleep anymore to throw off a balance
between now and then,
here and later, when it happened in regards to tonight. My mind
works as a clock of who we have become since:
my body only exists in the place of Our Great Divide.
Morning is just sheets of velvet upon a
lover’s breast, to be peeled, to reveal her strawberry scars.
Evening is when I feel her fists inside my skin as if
I am being penetrated by icebergs
and I cry, your cock hasn’t been the same since it happened.
The blood seems to get lost in the train-track
to your veins. In our divide,
I wonder if most of it was passed to her half of your heart
but that thought makes me so sad I remember I am mostly water
whereas there is simply the milk of her curves:
I have the talent
of turning myself inside out when I want to be dead.
She just curdles. I was once the same,
he wants me to shut up about before and after but at least I
can cry on anniversaries without needing a calendar or
rotting the post of my ex-boyfriend’s bed.
Your muddy shoeprints are engraved into the carpets. And at night when I stare at the cracks in my ceiling, your soul is all I feel. All the watermarks on the coffee table remind me of your brown irises. The sky is gray, the ground is cold. In the living room, flowers are sprouting in pots, and his smile flips my frown. He’s growing, taking up space, a mere fraction of the space you hold. I miss your rumbly, sleepy groans, your thighs intertwined with mine. I hope the sun comes out soon, because it’s growing darker in here each day I live without love. I know she makes you happy, and it both makes me laugh and cry to know that. I hope you’ll understand someday just how much I loved you, when it all has faded like smoke into the summer air, and I walk in a white dress to a man who didn’t just rent my house, but bought it. But for now at night I lay with lonely legs and one heartbeat and tears in my eyes as salty and bitter as our handful of goodbyes. I wish you were here, and I wish you’d never come in the first place. Every day I check the weather, and I feed the boiler, and I do my best to stay warm without your body, but it never works. Teeth chatter while I count sheep, and I lie awake wondering why the sparks ever faded and why you can barely say my name anymore. Blood nourishes the organ but not its treasures. Dogs bark and sleep folded in half, inside their little cottages. Where is mine, where is mine? I cover the roof and walls, with their creaks and faults, with convenient and daily tape; it’s holding it all together but isn’t healing it. The sheets are forming ice, and my head is forming thunder and snow. Darling, oh darling, why did you go? I swallow the medicine, I shovel the walkway, but I’m stuck in eternal January, with the front and back doors padlocked. This might just be a dead end street. Nobody wants the house with dirty rugs and splintered ceilings and ruined furniture; house for rent, house for sale. Somebody please just knock on my door. I want to float into the clouds like an angel, rising above it all not like a snow-capped mountain, but a green and grassy hill, rolling and free.
I have never experienced death around me
Not once.
I have yet to go to war,
I haven't even seen an animal get run over
By a speeding oaf trying to get home on time.
Yet, death occurs every second
Almost every second.
Why is it that I have not seen it then?
I should count my blessings and not look in a mirror.
My grandfather definitely saw death.
I called him Pop, he was in World War II,
I wasn't old enough to ask him about such troubles.
Then again, would I ask him about them now?
Would he dare speak the unspeakable
The harshness of war,
The noise all the cacophony,
Buildings, architecture, torn down,
Beautiful cities once covered with life,
The bright colors of Venezia the somber rain of London
Destroyed in an instant.
I don't think I'd have the balls to kill someone,
I question my own loyalty to my country
Would I fight to protect my home,
Or would I hideaway in another country,
Or claim I am a racist?
(I think that only works when you have to do jury duty,
But I think I would try anything, sadly.)
i cant keep on writing for free,
when i am not on the internet,
people talk rubbish about me;
on the streets, and at work.
if i was a swine i would say words like;
i am tired of this,
i cant take it any longer.
i wont let myself be led to hit a lamp-post like;
Kanye West.
i am have no body-guards to command;
drive quick the loose media hounds are out to harass me.
i was raised in the hood-- a tired phrase suckers are accustomed to.
my distress is caused by a lost few,
people who know not how the media world works.
night after night, we text.
she goes first, and it's always
the same story:
'I'm committing suicide,' she'll write,
listing her various reasons for wanting to do so.
of course, I'll try to calm her down.
(it usually works, except when she falls asleep
with her sadness still intact).
she says she has it all figured out,
that she'll register her will online for $25
and pay the Europeans to come pick up
the body.
I can never tell what's real and what's not.
besides, she's very stubborn in her ways
and can't be argued with.
she also claims I'm the only person she's confessed to,
so I suppose that when the phone stops beeping
for a day or two, I'll be the first to know.
I just hope she leaves a note behind
for everyone else.
from Slinking Under The Electric Bulb (2012)
We exist within spheres
Bubbles of perception
Roughly circular ripples of both know knowns and known unkowns
And then there
Right at the edge of these spheres
Just outside the very last shred of our understanding of how the world works
Is how the world really works
I've seen it
Only briefly
And not because I'm smarter or more enlightened than anyone else
But rather because I do better drugs than most
And while my short term memory is fucked
I have managed to bring back an excerpt of my journal
And it reads:
"This world is a process of conflict
A construct begat by the clashing of two equal and opposite forces
One of the forces
Is called Fate
And the other
Is called Choice
And the sum of existence consists of everything that falls in between
And the really fucked up part
Is that we already know this
But life
Has affixed us with blinders that force us to see
Everything
So much so, in fact
That a sense of 'self'
Is considered hedonism in most circles
But the soul
Does not have a default setting
Pain
Is not an illusion
And despite what you may have been told
There is no compelling evidence to suggest that there isn't another world on the other side of my mirror
The are no empty spaces
Only effects that have yet to be caused
There are no reflections on lake shores
That is merely the image of God
I know I am hard to deal with,
the way I word the way I am feeling.
How I tell you I don't want to eat another thing for the rest of my life,
how I tell you I want to die, or slice lines into my skin until I can see blood coming up.
But the way you ignore me after I tell you,
like you are scared of who I am or the way my head works; hurts me
It makes the empty feeling I tell you about more noticeable,
and you promised me on metal swings,
when I heard birds chirping at us,
when I felt the sun slowly soak into my skin,
that you would never hurt me.
There is romance to the bee, sweet honey and flowers. I am a flower. The flower head lady on bathroom stalls of bars, naked, drawn in chalk. I speak not of beauty, and I want nothing sweet. In my dreams I taste the ocean. I am a flower. I need the bee to land on me, to grace me. Because the bee completes a vital part of my life. I am human because I am afraid. Because the bee will sense my fear and it will sting me and it will die. I am a masochist because I want it to sting me. I want it to hurt. I am sorry because I know that I will take something vital away from it. It will leave a sliver of its essence inside of me, that’s just the way the world works. I am afraid of taking that thing on, it is really nothing more than a fragile cone of cells, and my skin will absorb and destroy it before it can pollinate anything as sweet as the flower. All of these things are true, true and beautiful lies. Because I am not a flower. And yes, I want to be stung. And I am not afraid of that pain, in fact I will relish in it. I am not the pretty flower nor the sweet honey. Maybe I am the stinger of the bee. A sharp pang, thorn and swollen flesh, and maybe a bruise that will ache and yellow. There will be anger that blossoms out of fear and the cold clear rush that brings life into every forgotten cell of the body; these are the things that belong to the stung. And who among us does not long to be stung?
I will probably stand you up on end,
the way hair rises for
electricity
uprighted, sure,
though not exactly how it’s supposed to be
I’ll play the current
and you won’t be what you were,
or at least always have been
And whether that changing
and charging between us
is right or wrong
is up for interpretation.
And speaking of interpretations,
you could wind up trying to read my signs
even though they won’t be signs,
unless I make them signs...
like warning signs,
or danger signs,
or maybe the kind of signs on old road posts,
weathered and worn,
and illegible
or maybe the kind of picket signs
that tells you all the ways
from which you can leisurely choose
on some sun dusted road
with your options spread at your eyes
and your feet
and hopefully, your heart
and you could choose whichever direction
that you think you know you want
And my words will most likely make you strain to hear,
though it may be a song you don’t understand,
like those of birds flying together distantly,
whom no matter how you concentrate,
are still a different species,
singing a foreign tongue,
who make you feel
and make you know
with a sadness or determination or both,
that until a melody is made solely for you,
you will always just be dropping eaves
And speaking of dropping,
I could cause a loosened grasp on things
the things you can touch,
and the things you can’t
and the things I can’t
will all be forgotten,
dwarfed,
at least, seconded
by my growing presence in your mind
you might imagine me as an Alice
oh my poor, shrinking wonderland
you didn’t stand a chance.
And it’s possible those things,
you know,
the ones that you let drop,
will clatter to the ground,
from your forgetful, or, unconcerned fingers,
and when they are grounded,
discarded,
leveled,
lowered to my toes,
that I may see a higher view
But, perhaps, just maybe
you’ll find that,
though they fell,
though you let them fall,
that I didn’t let them b r e a k
perhaps you’ll see I will have made for them a haven,
cushioning, cradling and made up of only the softest matter,
six thousand thread count kind of stuff,
likefeather down,
eyelashed cheeks,
inner cloud,
your words,
and my kisses
And when you finally come down from my initial high,
it’s probable that you’ll be so dazed
and dizzied
that you must look at your feet
to make sure that you are still standing
and that is when you will see
that in the moments when you forgot
the importance of your things, that I
did not
And I could not let them
clatter, shatter, smash
and that though they dropped,
because of me,
they are still intact
because of me
and when you see your things,
ones you loved but forgot you loved,
that they are all
unbroken,
is when you will know you can love me
wholly
