Maybe that's why they said we just drifted away
the boats of friendship
wood can't handle the water anymore
And breaks
Leaving chips on the shoulders of waters in peoples own lakes
(this is where someone's lake meets the rivers)
and the chips carry on
forever
till someone cleans the water
I have too many chips in my shoulders
I'm a sculpture made of Georgia red clay,
With those chips,
waiting for it to rain so I can fall into pieces on the ground into mud,
waiting for rednecks to have a mud marathon in my own self,
getting them ***** in melted liberalism,
My god,
it's never been so beautiful
to get my hair wet in the rain,
Only this time,
I'm not worried about my curls knotting back up.
Mar 6, 2018
Mar 6, 2018 at 9:11 AM UTC
The subtle cross between intersections, a life of blurriness, through crossed t’s and neatly dotted i’s I removed from the phrase Poetic Form, (trying to spell it without crossing myself back into it).
From lesbianism to manhood,
to cross what being a man means,
I wonder if my own identity is written in pen and everyone wants it typed and edited,
Yet I’ve taken the plastic keys off my computer board and made them into magnets last week,
Setting myself up with stolen magnets stolen blocks,
Putting them in order on my own fridge,
Scrambling them back because there is no order,
They only told you there was so that way you’d sing a song,
But I know now that I can write words, there’s no need for a pre-prescribed song when I’ve written my own,
In my own words.
When I look back and have pages of songs nobody else asked for or decided to write,
When I’m in class and I pocket my songs into stories and my stories under my low grades,
Under my teachers’ requests for MLA format,
I think of that caterpillar I played with in my room when I was six,
And how i thought about how people only wrote about butterflies
And how the caterpillars felt about that,
So when I asked my mother to ask her friend, an author,
If she’d write me into a novel,
Would she ignore me because I was a caterpillar,
Only choosing to open her mouth and write when my story became beautiful and socially acceptable,
When it grew out from the pubescent disliking of itself and stained the sinks of society,
Out of a hot *** of queer and quarantine,
Till the broth of the fluidity of my own being was was down the rabbit hole
Till all that was left was whitewashed spaghetti?
If these songs were anything I could write down again and again,
In pen, ignoring the requests to write neater,
To type faster,
If I put all my work into an envelope I already broke,
Shove it into a mailbox decorated with things people disagree with,
My pages bleeding ink few people can touch without being soaked,
When they ask me what to file me under
I don’t say “minority fiction” anymore
I say file me under “road signs”
At the intersections.
File me under that caterpillar,
In the wheat field,
Next to hydrangeas on the dinner table
A Sunflower in the spring
The harvested Brown Rice,
So when you make me into a meal I didn’t ask for,
I can be at least eaten by the vegans.
Feb 26, 2018
Feb 26, 2018 at 1:44 AM UTC
And when her eyes turned,
brown to blue,
I drowned in them
navigating too far into the oceans
She blamed herself
took matters into her very own
pale
impish
hands
And before they could arrest her,
She buried herself
into the the eyes of her lover,
smudged in soil,
Maybe that's why I loved her.
Feb 14, 2018
Feb 14, 2018 at 1:55 PM UTC
I’ve sat in throngs of people,
between seas and seas,
knowing there’s a small chance
salt gets called by its name
CaCl2 instead.
I’m constantly aware
I am one compound;
full, contradictory,
Knowing people will find
In the ocean of things
More salt as oceans evaporate,
Lifting to clouds,
Till only enough is left for us to swim in.
A little girl,
collects the beautiful things,
the Seashells people always want
—conversation,
joy,
money—
In ziplock bags,
with water and the
handful who can handle it,
And we,
Undesirable
stay in the sea,
Brushing from horizon
to horizon,
until we’re swept up,
Or drown someone.
Feb 9, 2018
Feb 9, 2018 at 6:42 PM UTC
Her laugh made flowers bloom,
popping out of the soil and making my heart grow enough
to where my doctor told me I had a preexisting condition of loving you.
He couldn’t fix me, so he took me to a mechanic to see if I was broken,
If too many screws got loose,
If maybe my problems were caused by me afraid to lose you,
So he twisted me apart, unscrewed me part by part,
But the only thing he found were rusted windshield wipers and hydrangeas on my dashboard.
I told him every time it rained,
I opened my sunroof and let cold drops hit me through my hoodie,
Every time I saw that flower,
I’d take it petal by petal and spread it across the dashboard
so you could always be with me, no matter how far I go.
Dec 7, 2017
Dec 7, 2017 at 6:30 PM UTC
I cried myself to the shower last night.
I used boy shampoo over the arms that I’ve been scratching for hour, four hours spent trying to get the blood I hated so much to come up and sit on my skin like it was their art gallery, hanging on for display.
It never came.
I run water over me burning tears into camouflage,the words of an empty life stung to my head as if the thoughts branded it here on me permanently.
I’ve had nights like this before.
Nights where I put on the loosest pajamas I could find, the ones with ESPN written written as read as the books on my old library shelf. The ones I took when my brother went to work and left me by myself, the ones that made me feel manly, even if I didn’t look like a man.
I wouldn’t put a shirt on.
My chest was bare, not in the way I wanted, but I couldn’t tear off my breast and give them to a girl who wasn’t born with them, I’d just have to stare till my stomach growled and tears streamed down my face, fears of a life unloved and unlived made me put on a loose shirt and tell myself I wasn’t hungry, so instead I thought of you.
You, with your crooked smile when you see me at your doorstep with the sun’s colors draped in a bouquet. I show up in a fox shirt, the one I call lucky, and you count each and every one and you point out how dorky I am.
You, with your back on the mattress of the cheapest apartment we could find, reading love letters I’ve written to your baby sister over the phone, telling her of all my love in the distance of thousands of miles. I try to pretend I can’t hear you from the kitchen as I make you tea, the lemon juice coating it bronze with the color of its juice, your vase holds out bright sprouts of happiness as a centerpiece.
Daisies plague my mind on nights like these. They’re scattered at your funeral & my own on our graves, at the fifty yard mark.
“We’ve been rolling together since we were 25.”
Nights like these remind me that my masterpiece is so far, even if the dasies are so close, so near.
Nov 14, 2017
Nov 14, 2017 at 1:28 PM UTC
"God's really a nice guy
once you get to know
Him,"
they said
after the flood
Sep 21, 2017
Sep 21, 2017 at 8:31 AM UTC
kisses on the floor
fingers in my hair,
praying your mom doesn't walk in.
Aug 26, 2017
Aug 26, 2017 at 8:22 PM UTC
My sun: setting more beautifully than any sky in sunny California,
though I haven’t seen one in so **** long.
I’m starved for your attention, won’t you shine on me a little brighter, babe?
I know you miss the waves when you’re up north; I know you shiver in September
and that it’s too soon, that you should still be able to show off those tan lines but
if you stay here with me I’ll love you like I’m the moon. Let’s not make our love
something that they can only see occasionally. Let's outlast the summer.
Aug 26, 2017
Aug 26, 2017 at 8:17 PM UTC
1.)
I came home from a marching band event, (I'd call it a football game, but in that little tent on the sidelines, the whole football team gathered and watched their 69-0 loss.) I barely ate and went to sleep.
2.)
I scrolled through Pinterest and saved dank depression memes.
3.)
My unofficial girlfriend called me a GIRL and I've died inside.
4.)
I didn't complete that assignment, I just sat there filthy, unshowered, and called it depression, instead of calling my therapist.
Aug 26, 2017
Aug 26, 2017 at 6:45 PM UTC