di
American
When I was a child I use to wish I could be a poet. / I would sit up at night and "study," / Memorizing the dictionary to bolster (Websters Pg. 142) my lexicon (Oxford Pg. 468) of applicable (New English Pg. 56) words. / Or I'd try and tie my tongue in twists to taste the untouched tenor of my tone. / / Now I am a poet, / and I wish I could be a child.
I cut my pennies in half to toss them down the wishing well,
It only takes half a wish to get me started.
Sometimes I am a table.
A flat surface on which people pile their extra ****
Today I came home,
If that word still means anything.
Mar 16, 2013
Mar 16, 2013 at 10:35 PM UTC
I reassemble,
The wind flows backwards to your hands,
I am returning from whatever version of “beyond” you choose to believe,
Each particle caring a manifest blessing back with it.
Perhaps tears flow up your face, retracing the progression of grief down your cheek.
Or maybe I was an awful at the end and in rewind you whisper “dead is ***** old that god thank.”
But either way that is the past… or the future,
It isn’t prudent to examine such distinctions now
It’s movement not direction that matters.
My form is re-forged by fire,
My bones smoothing in the heat
My flesh hardens from liquid to coalesce around my uncooking muscles,
And still I rewind,
Personality and character drifting through the cobweb wrinkles of my skin,
Till somewhere in the dynamo of my body my heart finally beats its last *** ba”… and then it’s second to last.
How strange is a life lived backwards?
Would words taste different in my mouth, have new meaning in rewind,
Would I find satanic messages in my everyday phrases or just speak in nonsense, a string of “a-blah-blah” that takes too long to be made sense of.
How different would my actions be?
My hands could peel away bruises, unbreak eggs, and **** insults out of the air
Yet who would be responsible for these miracles,
Some dreadful foreword version of myself.
Mar 16, 2013
Mar 16, 2013 at 10:30 PM UTC
In the glass each day,
I meet myself waking,
Together we watch,
Both I and my mirror self.
Till one of us turns to leave.
Mar 16, 2013
Mar 16, 2013 at 10:28 PM UTC
Today the radio’s tell me what to write.
They demand my attention,
Screaming tragedy,
And new growth.
Talking to children who speak of fear and loss,
But are really just quoting the tears in their parents eyes
Because their own abstract grief has long since been eclipsed
By schoolyard heartbreak, that is infinitely more rooted in their reality.
Today the TV tells me exactly where my mind should be.
So I follow that course, but end up somewhere I cannot even picture.
Maybe it’s because I still don’t really understand what happened
Any better than I did at seven.
And other people my age seem to know so much more,
But I kinda think their just pretending
I mean they talk of the architectural faults and induced implosion
But they can never tell me how it feels to burn and crumble.
9/11/11
Today the radio’s tell me what to write.
They demand my attention,
Screaming tragedy,
And new growth.
Talking to children who speak of fear and loss,
But are really just quoting the tears in their parents eyes
Because their own abstract grief has long since been eclipsed
By schoolyard heartbreak, that is infinitely more rooted in their reality.
Today the TV tells me exactly where my mind should be.
So I follow that course, but end up somewhere I cannot even picture.
Maybe it’s because I still don’t really understand what happened
Any better than I did at seven.
And other people my age seem to know so much more,
But I kinda think their just pretending
I mean they talk of the architectural faults and induced implosion
But they can never tell me how it feels to burn and crumble.
Mar 16, 2013
Mar 16, 2013 at 10:26 PM UTC
I will leave,
You will close your eyes and I will vanish.
Call me Houdini,
I will escape from this,
Snap the manacles of your ignorance,
Unwind each sentence of apathy you’ve wrapped around me.
I will take the gag of society out of my mouth
And I will speak the words you are so afraid of hearing.
You thought they were too heavy for me to bear,
But I will make my tongue a wrecking ball
Smash through your delusions
And not even turn to see if you’ve escaped the wreckage.
Call me a monster,
I am one
Now.
Feb 5, 2012
Feb 5, 2012 at 11:55 PM UTC
Each morning as I brush my teeth I crack open my skull and allow the world to gorge on my brain.
I lay my thoughts on a table and watch as people dawning forks and knives pick through the vittles of my mind.
They dive in with the blind enthusiasm of a fat man near lunch time passing a McDonalds,
With no care to the actual contents of their mouths just the meaningless relief of being full again.
And each day they devour my ideas with the entitled right a kid feels towards cake on his birthday,
Not grateful just sure that by being born he deserves this.
And the soup **** in me wonders,
Maybe if they crawled to me in defeat, an anorexic succumbing to the lure of chocolate,
Or with genuine interest, a food critic sampling the gourmet fare,
I would be happy…
Or feel a little less used.
I mean most days I just want to feed myself and I don’t know how my brain turned into a free soup kitchen.
And I guess I just have to choose whether or not to hand my ideas out like bagged lunches or can them up with preserves.
But I cannot decide because it doesn’t make sense.
They resent the hand that feeds them,
But feel robbed of human rights if denied a meal.
And no one really cares about the cook anyway.
Yet each morning I brush my teeth and crack open my skull, wondering if today it will make me feel a little more full.
Jan 22, 2012
Jan 22, 2012 at 2:00 AM UTC
I remember when I use to have sunflowers instead of hair and butterflies were always landing on my head as if I was their own mobile home.
I never went to the barber but our landscaper would take his shears out whenever he came over and prune me, and I would sell the sunflowers at the end of our driveway out of a cardboard box stand. One buck a bunch.
Instead of shampoo I used fertilizer mixed in with the water I would sprinkle on my head each night from the tin watering can I kept under the sink.
In the summer I would lay in the sun to photosynthesize,
And I would leave home with a crown jungle of green stem and yellow peddle,
My personalized jungle.
In the winter I went bald,
Except maybe some brown droopy stems with wilting flowers that would shed their peddles whenever I got flustered, or laughed too hard, or cried.
When I was 14 I got tired of boys pulling out my hair to ask a girl to prom.
So one night I plucked out each blossom, one by one,
Until my arms were full and my head was bare.
I sat down and picked out each peddle, one by one,
“He loves me” “He loves me not.”
The sunflowers never grew back after that,
Whatever part of me made them grow was gone,
I no longer have the seeds.
And now I sometimes sit in gardens,
And wonder if the bees recognize me.
Jan 22, 2012
Jan 22, 2012 at 1:38 AM UTC
My mama's eyes say " these are lean times,"
But when she speaks there is no shame,
we will make do.
Yet there is the shadow of fear in the set of her mouth.
It is a fear I might almost understand.
She is afraid, not that we will lose what we have,
but that someday,
I will ask for more,
more to see,
more to read,
more to learn,
more to feel,
more to dream about,
and hope for,
and she will have to be the one to say no, "these are lean times."
Dec 2, 2011
Dec 2, 2011 at 12:50 AM UTC
I listen to my parents try and indoctrinate my brother with their beliefs,
And I listen to him fail to find the words to express that he too has ideas and thoughts and values,
he too has things he wants and needs and dreams about.
I see the frustration of being old enough to love but not old enough to control
and I listen to him fight till his eyes are red rimmed and his voice is spent because that is what he can give to his cause,
to whatever he chooses to stand up to.
And I don’t agree with him, because I don’t see heaven on a computer screen, but I do see heaven and I know what I see is worth fighting for and he knows that too.
So when he slams the door to his room and screams because he still hasn’t found the words and is being to question whether they exist
I listen to my parents lament his addiction, his obsession, his passion and wonder what they truly want,
because who are they to judge what should be of value to his life.
and the reasons they spit in his face, detachment from reality and consumer products
could describe each book they love me for reading,
each TV show that started out a guilty pleasure but snuck into their daily routine,
and who gets to draw the line.
And maybe that's what parenting is, drawing unwanted lines,
but the fact still remains that he cannot find his voice to fight the logic he sees holes in.
and I wonder again what they want,
for him to be filled with the words they use,
the ideas they value,
the dreams they choose
Because then they should buy a parrot.
Because they need to realize that his anger, angst, and rebellion
is just a search for expression.
and as I listen to my parents try and indoctrinate my brother
I pray that he won’t be the convert,
because as ugly as heresy can seem,
God forbid the day he stops standing up for what he believes in.
Nov 28, 2011
Nov 28, 2011 at 10:11 AM UTC
I fill my soul, my heart, my head,
And then try, through my fingers,
To tame it, calm it, dilute it.
To take the raw and make it something less agonizing,
To hold, to clutch to myself, to weave into my skin,
I build a fire and hope it won’t burn all the way through me, and the floor as well.
There are the times when I revel in the glow.
And there are times when I consign myself to be nothing more than a pillar of ash,
Easily swept away by a passing brezze.
Yet to cease,
Is to unweave my core,
To let holes stretch,
Till I am more void then girl.
To never feel a blue so mesmerizing that its very existents taunts me to catch it on paper,
Never spend hours trapping butterfly wings on the tip of my pen.
Never see the subtle moments where life is gut wrenchingly, woefully, utterly, complete,
That fraction of a second where the sun breaks the clouds into a sea of many facetted pillars of amaranth , so tangible I second guess their existence, and turning back see that the sun has sunken beyond the horizon.
The instant where a man and his dog glance up in perfect unison, a single being with six legs, four eyes, and one heart.
A first flash of scarlet upon jade, the cherries hang ripe and inviting, tiny globes flashing from behind their leafy bower, as of yet untouched by bird or clumsy human hand.
And so I write.
Nov 26, 2011
Nov 26, 2011 at 2:35 AM UTC