All the ghosts / who never sinned
Are gossiping up in heaven again
They say Michael has been visiting Lucifer’s wings again
They say it’s the anniversary / it’s a spring ritual
From when Michael cast off his own dark parts
And Lucifer abandoned his angel wings
-
The grave / in modern day / is now half lit by the Denny’s open sign
Buzzing like neon only half the lights are broken
And Michael himself
Is half shadowed by his cigarette / he tells himself he’s not sinning
Because this drug isn’t against the law / and he can’t ever **** himself
-
The drag pulls at the place humans have hearts
And it hurts like a flaming sword
His hand hasn’t stopped shaking / by the time he breathes all the tar out
He breathes out again and again / like there might still be smoke in his lungs
And is he wrong?
-
All the humans / who were sinning when lucifer fell
Were gossiping on earth
And Michael’s hearing the story again / through the ***** Denny’s window
Some kid who lives off / ego / drugs / and subreddit pages
Tells another around a mouthful of pancakes
“When Lucifer fell he cried and his tears scared his face,”
And Michael who couldn’t watch then / doesn’t know if this rumor is true now
And the other kid in the booth / thinks the boy is a philosophical genius
Just grins around his own pancakes and drugs / says “everything tastes like chalk.”
-
Michael’s stuck on asphalt
Digging his toes hard into his shoes and / his whole foot lays flat pushing into the ground
But he wants to take his own head off
To let it spin away
Or maybe he just needs to lose pieces of himself / let the roses blooming beneath the skin
Cut away at the bone until he’s bleeding enough to be mortal
And sit with the two kids who don’t know themselves
Apr 22, 2018
Apr 22, 2018 at 2:30 PM UTC
Pineapple makes the roof of my mouth itch / and the tips of my fingers to blush pink / offset by the sparkle sticking juice / these are the kinds of things / reminding me of poolsides /
I can’t leave the way / sunwaves on pavement on skin / sinking into the meat of my body / and under my eyelids / that sigh closed / to the red glow lid / feeling / there’s a twisting shape of my hips / as they flutter in dance / I want to ignore everything but the night sounds / and whisper of lips on iced drinks
I ask myself to leave the patios of mid summer / to check the curtains that slap / and I know what kind of person I need to be / and the sounds of music from another room / spilled like sticky pineapple on your hand / you’re finding you / don’t really want to wash off that other you off / it’s just only these kinds of dreams / making these kinds of noises
Apr 10, 2018
Apr 10, 2018 at 6:51 PM UTC
There are certain hours / when we deteriorate / our mouths go hot and / the acid lining our organs finally start to burn / the bone / I wish the hours that wearied me the most / were in the middle of the night / all the black ickyness which sticks to me / and drags on the ground behind / wouldn’t clash with the geometric sun beams / but it’s the late noon sun / dull and filtered / and my meds wearing off //
Instead of being made of matter / I wish I could evaporate myself out / into a water vapor room / with all the warmth trapped in / I like the way that it almost looks like a hazy beauty queen evening / with dreams of perfectly pinked skin //
But instead I center myself around that spot where my ribs push into my stomach / I’m a creature of humanity / deteriorating into the soil //
I want to write a poem where I’m a bluejay / or maybe I just want to be a bluejay / I’ll sing while i fly for no reason at all / all matter and air / maybe i feel some need to escape / but mostly I think blue is a pretty color / and I want to make something pretty //
Apr 10, 2018
Apr 10, 2018 at 6:49 PM UTC
My mother forgot to put a varnish on me / when she made me / I can imagine how vivid I’d be / if way back when I was eight / I’d noticed that sepias weren’t the right colors / on a child’s mind //
Now I’m slamming into sixteen / the way an addict is supposed to hit a wall / no longer sliding into the high / but scratching at the furthest point / sometimes the sadness has nowhere to go / and it just ripples along each nerve / from the inside out //
Like today / I sat for five hours for an exam / to qualify for things I don’t want to do / in support of institutions that make me sick / and the only movement was my pencil / the rest of my blood stopped flowing / and I got so cold / like today I sat with something in my throat / and just my arms shaking / while my mother told me about boy strung up on barb wire fencing //
But both of those things still pull at the bone on my back / where wings could be / where I could have found happiness if I’d just tried / the way a body feels with the absence of heat / ******* out all the good things / I know lay under those clothes / and the way //
I count quarters every night / and sweat at the laundromat / I wish these things could be solved by just feeling about them / have you ever pushed your emotions because you knew you weren’t feeling them hard enough / so you asked your throat to constrict a little more / the fuzz of your tense shoulders to ride your skin a little more / it’s like if I pay attention to myself I can think with less clarity / and maybe if I push with my thumb on all the things that make me tick / I won’t tick anymore //
Apr 10, 2018
Apr 10, 2018 at 6:45 PM UTC
Here is how we turn our youth / into a bachicc bath / of everything except our own blood /
taking all the things we should love / to make us good and right / if we could be like the sunrise that forgot the midday heat / but we turn them / jokes that don’t sound quite like sadness / no bitter overripe emotion / because it’s all about the fun / running through the asphodels /
next make promises to no one but yourself / the only promise made is / never written down / kept as guilty experiments / the promise of consistency / but none of us are made of substance / and breaking is our vice / because you have to slither in and out of the unbearable child / your mother doesn’t even know she has /
that’s the third thing / you turn everyone else around you / into sidebar players / who cannot see the stage / this way you won’t be quite so guilty about the sacrifice / that isn’t even what your gods ever wanted / all foul blooded and human taint /
there is no *** in the forest anymore / early adolescent memories created wild so barbaric / it’s thrown up three times and the taste / on teeth is so disgusting / it can’t help smiling like a victor still in the ring / so far past survival it could be a metaphor / for the humanity you’ve got to get rid of / this is how we forget our old selves / in the time between someone new / it’s gory / laughing to no tempo
Feb 19, 2018
Feb 19, 2018 at 7:52 PM UTC
my jaws crave to gnaw / but i’m terrified of the bite / terrified what it will mean to us / so i’m sinking my teeth into my own arm / knowing this is how someone will find me one day / with the white of my tooth scraping at the white of my bone /
my teeth - crooked spaced out teeth - drip blood marrow / and gold / when i pull them out / it feels like ******* all the bad blood out / leeching out my overgrown veins / and you call it ichor / like i’m some sort of god / like i’m some sort of god to you / and it makes me ache i could be that to someone / to you /
people like me better when i’m nice / adjective adjective adjective of all the ways i’m better do nothing but mix cocktails of hurt / i’ve seen it in the eyes of girls just waiting to go home / people like me when i’m nice / just enough to make them smile with their teeth - straight white teeth /
and i like me better when i’m nice / call it human nature but i’m still naming it teenage mistakes while i’m here / trying to make my smile straight on camera when my lips are tilted just so / what angle makes me sweetest / my teeth the goldest /
Sep 26, 2017
Sep 26, 2017 at 11:09 PM UTC
See, it’s probably all explained in the metaphor of my dreams, where I’ve changed into something sweeter or perhaps alluring / I’m a rat trap poison with the promise of sugar cane stuck on teeth and I’m so scared at the movements of my body and the woman behind them but I can’t help the daydreams looking to go back /
See, right now i’m just trying to walk slow unsteady steps of an overgrown colt / With no one to lean on, I cannot afford to fall / I must stumble down the path of childhood the way I stutter over these words / I can’t help it when I let Mama down on Sundays, it’s not my fault I don’t know which traps to set for myself and which fences to build / I want to get stuck inside the small backyard of my mind, it seems easier than running and losing myself to the leaning grasses of fields and fields of possibilities whose flowers are too wild for me to grow /
See, I’m terrified in the way of night terrors with too vivid quicksand filling my mouth and hindering screams in a dry drown - no - / In the way of teenage hormone cocktails rising up sternums to build bile and anxiety and hearts tap against the walls of their cage trying to ask ‘how much more adrenaline do you need?’ Or maybe not even that, but I can say in the least poetic way possible I’m scared to be the teen angst poet
See, because I can’t tell if I’m as raw as the girl with the night terror past / I believe like a rooted subconscious habit that one day I’ll burn my poems the way I’ve burned every single one of my diaries, trying to destroy evidence of the crime I was a person I cannot bear to be anymore / Trying to delete the way my voice sounded when scrawled across an inkskinned page the way others delete texts from phone contacts they can’t bare to see rather than heal with the closure of a final phone call, the long lasting 1 hour and 20 minutes one / I’ll backspace all my poems letter by letter then delete my / docs but even in this - this untrained untested unsure dream - I want to mean something /
See, I even have a list to prove my whims don’t last /
ONE
I no longer feel homesickness twisting my belly and making my nose pull back in a defensive snarl when the scent of downy detergent on suave body wash rises off clothes / I can’t even regret the loss of my spreading back muscles laid upon a bed in a room that I called mine and the closing of curtains when I thought that meant safe / When I thought that meant I didn’t have to think and I thought that meant just me and my distracted mind / Just the occasional hand missing air and ear missing words I swear should have been whispered just a decibel too loud and drift down the hall / And a yellow dog too, of course /
TWO
When my brain is heavy with haze but light with thought I just want to read poetry written by greater poets, cry in all the right places and laugh when the I look up, and remember the ways sunbeams fall through blinds and mosquito screens instead of the stifle of a closed window and a sun that heats a fevered curtain /
Today I’m reading poetry to the tune of a severe thunderstorm warning eating chinese delivery I wasn’t home to eat the night before / I’d lie if I said I was ready to enjoy the way the rain tinkered down my tin shed roof and draw love poems from the awe of a wrathful sky, I’ll just let my bones rest instead /
THREE
For every animate person that hasn’t even ******* me twice over yet, a metaphor poetically describes the beauty of my sore body ache in inanimate terms / I’ve learned them in the essays for books I’ve never read but now I’m writing poems for a life I haven’t really seen yet / I fake the different colors for red if it makes me sound pretty, let me imagine love that explodes vermillion and anger spills slow sweet cherry while ignoring the red regret of the veins in my eyelids during too late mornings / With too late alarms blinking dull red to remind the chipping bitten away red of nails flying to meet deadlines of slow written poems /
FOUR
My head used to lean against the thrumming window of my family’s biggest car until my teeth felt weird without the constant friction and my temple shot me off center / I think we all counted the seconds between lightning and thunder just to know how far off the storm was even when it pounded sheets across the thin layer of metal between itself and me / I just liked to know / It’s just too hot air meeting cold streams but I don’t think my peeling sunburnt skin will meet cool long fingers anytime soon / While the goddess of the sky and the goddess of the sea may meet to bruise purple, kisses in the clouds this car ride is the journey of a small small girl touching her own / I can’t tell if I’m as raw as the girl with the night terror, small fingers to her own shaking mouth and learning how not to bite /
If I made this a poem my metaphor would run back to the dying leaves / I wish I knew what Autumn time will do to me / If I will still reach for the summer sun or miss the rain sheet falling storms - that’s a habit I can’t remember /
Sep 26, 2017
Sep 26, 2017 at 2:48 PM UTC