Dear previous flame,
For whatever you may feel, know we are mirrors.
For whatever insecurity you may look to cure, through searching hard and unsubtle in the profile I choose to share,
Know that I’m a shadow, searching hard through a shared room that was yours before it was mine—
Looking for any sign of superiority, a crack in the impenetrable armor I built for you.
I know you’re my reflection on the outside looking in.
You’re his past but my potential future and the empathy I feel runs deeper than the credit you’d dare give me.
The truth is I see you in every girl who could remotely fit your description, despite knowing your exact image.
You are not a threat, but a curiosity nonetheless.
Because after all, any record broken is only as good as above second place.
Feb 14, 2019
Feb 14, 2019 at 1:02 AM UTC
He offered a watery beer,
with a **** green half moon shoved in the can.
It tasted odd and was paid for
With the promise of conversation.
—The unspoken trade agreement that nothing is free.
Though strange he wasn’t a stranger and I thought (and there’s the problem)
See I thought I could gleam
A litmus test of jealousy,
After all you were there with me,
When he asked to buy me the drink.
But you were water,
A perfect neutrality that betrayed,
the indifference I’d been ignoring.
Feb 18, 2018
Feb 18, 2018 at 2:06 PM UTC
Brown jacket, chase it up the rocks.
Afraid to slip on the moss and fly without wings down the side.
Or is it lichen?
There's the sea, or bay or ocean.
It's salty, that's certain from the taste of the air.
Back down the hill through wet trees.
Everything is wet.
It's misting ice.
And radiating grey.
Chase the jacket, don't get lost.
Chase the
Wet haird and feeling wild, thoughts are finally scattered
and it feels like we're alive.
Feb 16, 2018
Feb 16, 2018 at 10:09 PM UTC
I am overly kind to people who don’t need it.
I’ve been walked on while I roll myself out like a carpet—
so other’s feet don’t get wet.
With a complete disregard for the fact,
that I’ll soak myself to the bone in the process.
Dec 29, 2017
Dec 29, 2017 at 2:12 AM UTC
Forget Portland and Austin and Santa Cruz.
Those famously strange places,
where the tourists gawk at local weirdos.
Here is not there.
Here is the place of advice such as:
“When life gives you meatballs put a wig on a dog.”
—True story.
Here is the place where:
“With all good things in life you just have to wipe the bird **** off.”
The place where steel and marble Confederate ghosts,
watch the wealthy renovate their westward homes along a cobblestone road.
Where paintings are propped to rot up in alleys,
and buzzing twenty-somethings on their way back from a show,
shake it and tilt it and carry it home.
—Gilded frame and all.
This is the place of painted concrete where walls are canvases,
and red bricks pop out of the ground,
the tree roots poking through to trip you.
Here’s where the People’s Beer comes from Milwaukee,
but we replaced the R in ribbon with here,
and sell it by the caseload when it rains and when it’s Tuesday.
Where young people go to find themselves getting lost becoming someone else,
remixing history to not admit naivety,
before they’ve been sandpapered through experience.
—To a core.
This is an ink-stained but not splattered place.
Where lines are careful, permanent and abundant,
and on Fridays can cost 13 bucks.
Here is the place where people roam like that restaurant rabbit:
listless and nomadic and stuck.
Where there’s a wild streak in its heart that follows the tracks,
and cuts the city in half.
This is the place that Carvers itself out into cultures,
and you can be from the Bottom,
or proud to be a Rat.
Here is where you night-drive over the bridge,
see the skyline and feel restlessly content.
Here is home.
—For now.
Nov 14, 2017
Nov 14, 2017 at 12:50 AM UTC
Gaia slammed the door and threw her phone across the room.
Her lover Humanity has done it again--
and again, and again.
That broken mess of a love with so much baggage,
it makes the raunchiest Olympians look like Astrea.
All night out, and Humanity ruins and disappoints,
once more.
Gaia screams into a pillow of earth in frustration.
Uranus thinks she's melodramatic,
But how can the Sky sympathize with the Earth?
And how in turn can the Earth fall so wholeheartedly,
for a destroyer?
Who once more in turn, tries in vain, but will never
understand the complexity of it's own round habitat-lover.
So Gaia is left confused and hurt, though Humanity swears,
it never meant to hurt her; break her into pieces,
and turn from a collective of voices to Narcissus himself.
She sighs.
Perhaps next week will be different?
The texts between the two so hit or miss and fickle,
Only Fates could read what lies behind the tension.
An Aletia moth flits in and out the window,
and suddenly the butterfly poster on Gaia's wall feels pathetic.
An imitation of her own work.
Perhaps next week will be different?
Perhaps Zeus will vow celibacy,
perhaps the sky will fall into the sea,
and we'll all be mercifully crushed in between.
But what crushes is reality, and as Gaia falls asleep,
the phone lights up.
Humanity: "Drinks again next Thursday?"
The same empty connection repeated ceaselessly.
One generation on to the next until the last.
And of course Pandora's curse,
keeps Gaia suffering through them all.
May 4, 2017
May 4, 2017 at 12:03 AM UTC
"So, what do you do for fun?"
Oh, I write ****** poems in my spare time
that I intend to one day read
but know I'll never stomach
the bravery
required to re-evalutate my own work.
Casually composing garbage and wasting perfectly good paper.
Feb 21, 2016
Feb 21, 2016 at 9:29 PM UTC
As a ginger, I'm inclined to say fox. I've always had an affinity for those cunning, red canines.
But if it's just for a day then perhaps something a bit more adventurous. I suppose I would choose to be a cheetah.
Fastest land animal in the world, agile, and speckled.
Nobody messes with a cheetah. Not because they’re so hulking or intimidating— just more fascinating than terrifying.
We travelled to South Africa once, my family and I. As a tribe we chased wild creatures down with cameras in jeeps in a raucous yet hushed thrill.
The cheetah was one of the few animals that eluded us. Perhaps having never seen one up close is partially what draws me to them.
Mysterious, as well as evasive, with an "I don't give a **** attitude.
They only eat every so often because catching food is such a feat. When they do hunt however, it's one of the most spectacular things in the natural world.
It's why places that sell tv's show footage of cheetahs running in slow motion over and over on a dizzying loop; demonstrating how clear the pixels are in the plasmas. It's mesmerizing.
Their feet move too fast and fly over the dirt, honed in on whatever poor gazelle or kudu they're after. If you're a cheetah that is your body, your thin bones, your rapid heart and beating paws that make you move in such a blur.
To be a cheetah for a day is feeling and knowing the difference between machine and muscle. Humans have found ways to fly, and people regularly move faster than a top speed of 75mph.
But how sublime it would be!
To be solely and purely responsible for that unparalleled speed just for one day.
Feb 16, 2016
Feb 16, 2016 at 6:18 PM UTC
There was a little blue book,
with red ribbons that pulsed between pages,
And black and purple ink that ran amok across blank paper.
Little-blue was filled with poetry,
It flowed freely from the mind onto parchment,
So naturally that it was like respirating. Vital.
Happy poems about the radiating sun,
The changing of the seasons and nature,
And of course about love. Above all about love.
Then something shifted, as these things tend to do.
And Little-blue lost its pull and comfort.
Ribbons tattered, ink distorted and splashed.
Somewhere between a city and a starry sky,
Little-blue was tossed out and left,
Maybe for someone new, or perhaps just to rot.
Oct 23, 2015
Oct 23, 2015 at 11:21 PM UTC
I don’t want you back.
Instead:
Give me back every compliment ever given,
Every whispered time I uttered that four lettered word,
And meant it.
Give me back the hours together doing nothing but enjoying each other’s company.
I want those instead.
Because if I had them back…
Then maybe I’d be willing to give them,
to someone else.
But you have them.
You have them all.
Oct 23, 2015
Oct 23, 2015 at 11:11 PM UTC