Sixteen,
drenched feet tread
away from school to
a small pond I call home.
The rain beats against my back,
shoves my head into the water.
Water’s weight
drips from my hair
and shatters my reflection.
Now I am ugly.
Now I am a thousand plastic pieces polluting
this sickened sea and its
seasick schools of fish.
Deprecation drowning their gills and
choking out compliments.
Six pack rings
ring open their stomachs.
Swallowed plastic bags that
drift along the surface.
The surface of the water,
the surface of my face
fake in this plastic shadow
suffocating my gaze.
Vision fading,
my goals disintegrating,
dissociating into a saltwater solution:
one part school,
part parents,
part disappointment
drizzles down my esophagus and
evaporates into tear gas,
tearing my throat open.
Once a bottle so voiceless,
now a riptide of voices
pulling my tears back
to the edge of my eyelids.
The edge of a pond
shut tight under
ice sheets,
skating rinks for their words
worn down by the raindrops.
The rain,
the tears falling from
the clouds in my mind follow
the child melting his way back home,
opening the door to my soul.
Feb 27, 2019
Feb 27, 2019 at 1:21 AM UTC
Ruled paper bleeding
ink scribbles shrieking
open lacerations
into blue and red
arteries.
Veins pulsating curiosity
but cornered by anxiety
assuming that the
dialect I use to write
is ill with idiocracy.
“Idiot” screamed in
bold letters from a
fountain pen,
permanent pollution of
this ocean that I’m drowning in.
Scissor-fanged sharks
circle ‘round the toxicity,
chew my paper submarine,
a vessel crushed beneath the sea.
Vessels to my heart julienned,
cut open during surgery.
They couldn’t pull me from the deep
in time before the flatline
beep.
Dec 20, 2018
Dec 20, 2018 at 2:43 AM UTC
Hello,
Poetry.
I see the
fangs between your lines
snap shut to disguise
wrinkles revealing
traumatic speeches
scribbled without care
yet shouted so scared.
Words scarred and slashed with
swords of
insecurity,
blue and red bars slice
the tale you tried to
save for me,
bleeding out stories
through the tears in these
ruled pages,
pour them in the cups
of the audience
so they relate with.
I take just one sip.
I’m already drunk,
cut out my favorite lines,
pasting phrases to my life,
********** away my pain,
rejected in recycling,
cycling confessions,
crying on my recollections,
sponge away my sorrow tears
and squeeze it on the stages.
Claps of the people
start evaporation and
the sensation serves me
confidence to condensate
the ink off my dissertation.
Final salutation,
spotlights off and
goodbye,
Poetry.
Dec 19, 2018
Dec 19, 2018 at 10:43 PM UTC
My life,
a printed two-sided page,
one side sunrise,
turn it over and you see the bipolar
hidden underneath my sleeves:
self-harm.
Cuts coagulate into chaos and
blood crumbles into cookie crumbs
all over the bathroom floor,
a sugar rush surging me awake towards
my world beyond reality until
I bleed to death,
it’s sunrise again.
I close my shutters
and shudder at the sight of outside.
The heat of the sunlight feels too real.
It burns my paper skin.
Dec 19, 2018
Dec 19, 2018 at 10:35 PM UTC
I can’t sleep because
the rain is knocking on my door again.
I’m knocking on your door again,
shivering in the cold and
crying at your doorstep.
My tears
are raindrops
and you can’t sleep because
the rain is knocking on your door again.
I can’t sleep because
the moonlight is shining on me again.
I’m shining on you again,
drowning in the rain and
gazing through your window,
My eyes
are moonlight
and you can’t sleep because
the moonlight is shining on you again.
I can’t sleep because
the knife is slicing my heart again.
I’m slicing your heart again,
cutting in the bathroom and
thinking of your bedroom.
My knife
is me
and you can’t sleep because
the knife is slicing your heart again.
Dec 19, 2018
Dec 19, 2018 at 10:32 PM UTC
She says we’re ready to take it to the
next level.
A life after the one we have now.
She says she gets lonelier every day that I walk into my room and look at her.
Sometimes it’s a quick,
fearful glance.
As if she reminded me of when my
goldfish died,
parents divorced,
girlfriend broke up with me,
or whatever it was
that made her climb the rafters
a little while ago.
Sometimes it’s a long,
pondering gaze.
Maybe today is the day?
Or will tomorrow be better?
She says she lusts for the texture of the
skin on my neck,
wants to feel me in her arms,
grasp me like there’s no tomorrow.
She says she enjoys the lengthy midnight talks we have when I sit down beside her,
always in the same
old
wooden chair.
She says my friends and family don’t like her.
Whenever I mention her at dinner,
their faces always become more
pale and thinner.
She says she feels bad when I cry,
claiming she can make all my problems vanish forever,
and all I have to do is let her
wrap her arms around me
and hangout with me
for a minute
or an hour.
I tell her I miss the feel of her around my throat.
So I look straight through her and say:
Today is the day,
my friend.
Dec 19, 2018
Dec 19, 2018 at 10:28 PM UTC
I am a boy,
but I wear a bow on my head.
It flows down my shoulders.
I pretend that it’s my hair.
Red hair that shimmers gold in the sunlight,
highlights for society to see,
see a woman trapped in a man’s body.
Or is it a man trapped in a woman’s body?
My body
is all that shows beauty,
but my face is too ugly.
I wrap it in red ribbon,
a mummy cursed by
her own-
his own self image.
Image of red thread dripping down my wrists.
Wrists tied too tightly to a knife wrapped in red,
so I cut them.
Red hair all over the bathroom floor forming
roses next to my deathbed.
Hung above my bed,
the threads of red
hung tightly around my neck,
draped down from the bow I wear at
the top of my head.
Dec 19, 2018
Dec 19, 2018 at 10:26 PM UTC
Custody,
first a checkerboard of red and white squares
trapped between thick black bars.
Days of the week,
prisons,
and I was wrongly convicted.
My fingers reach for help through my metal cage,
yet only receive paper cuts
on the corners of divorce letters.
Letters drowned in blood bleed off the page
and stain my Saturdays and Sundays.
Custody,
now neatly separated into red and white columns,
walls dividing weeks and weekends.
National borders barricade one house from the other.
Two countries clash in a
war waged with
two atomic blasts burning
my culture into ash
white as paper.
Custody,
the absence of red and
the erasure of my father
from the calendar taped to
my mother’s refrigerator,
and I’m frozen in place.
Custody,
a vast snow-white plane:
One step forward,
nothing in my future.
One step backward,
blizzards in my past.
Custody,
ground made of paper so thin,
with every step,
life crumples under my feet.
Dec 19, 2018
Dec 19, 2018 at 5:50 PM UTC