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sj-sullivan
sj-sullivan
21 y.o writer living in Small Town, Missouri. Finishing up a BA in Sociology. Hoping to move somewhere with life soon. Loves cats and Karl Marx. Likes to flirt. Loves to drink. Lives to understand.
The underside of a tongue and the bruised Protruding veins from around the beaten eye. The hissing, sissing, kissing radiator releasing Steam heat like screaming tea kettle ready For release and cream or sugar. The trickle of water in a bowl and claws landing right into the small of the back. I live in these places between light and flowers, dust and staples, flight and hours, rust and maple. I am amber, but not solid, Flaming, but not hot, Sunrise never Sundays. Feet always cold. Ex-smoker over sleeper, always wishing for the reimbursements. Now weaper, but never weaker, just a weeker trying To see deeper, but never the keeper, just the reaper. it's okay to get used to it. like Starting the bath cold and pouring boiling water from stove top kettles and pots until You notice the warmth, but the heat never Hurts. or Maybe jumping in all at once, and skipping The ladder all together is the best approach.
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Jan 4, 2017
Jan 4, 2017 at 7:53 PM UTC
Cold Feet
What's an amygdala and its relationship to the olfactory? Probably the part of myself that makes my heart flutter and the air move differently through my lungs when I smell the warmth of chlorine in the air from the indoor swimming pool. Or the truth of the man made time machine when I smell gold dial soap and I'm suddenly in Michigan. The combination of fear and cleanliness, with a dusting of hymnal music and the fragility of its pages. A psychologist at the University of Oxford labeled an ambiguous Brie-like scent as either "cheddar cheese" or "body odor". Even better, walking through the apartment complex in the dead of winter, following the trails of drier sheets being spit from vent burrowed within the bricks. The winter evening settles down with smell of steaks in passageways that seeps into the wallpaper and stinks up the breakfast room until Easter. What an amazing thing, the fragility of time as it averts itself in the face of smell.
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Nov 1, 2016
Nov 1, 2016 at 2:26 AM UTC
A Poem with a Line from T.S. Eliot
A drop of water hits the corner of My face, shockingly A reminder of all things good and how to breath. I'm in love with the feeling of Sharing A light through the trees It shines Of the constant reminder Of who you are And what You want
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Nov 1, 2016
Nov 1, 2016 at 2:25 AM UTC
The World Can't Stop Spinning and it's Raining
I knew you were in love with her from the sounds of your feet, chasing her down the stairs at 11:15pm on a Tuesday night. No one who has hate in their heart chases anyone down the stairs anymore. Not since they were kids, at least. When the risk of falling face first, chin hitting each step on the way down, wasn't enough to keep you from sliding down them, your vessel, an old plastic laundry basket packed with couch cushions. Diving for loose change to shell out like lint from the laundromat to buy another pack of cigarettes from the circle K that never asked for your ID. Play it again: the circle shall not be broken or will remain unbroken, or how many times have you listened to it by now. it is 7am. Your favorite record, you found in your late fathers storage unit, in a place where you were hoping to find a friend.
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Nov 1, 2016
Nov 1, 2016 at 2:24 AM UTC
Fair Ophelia,
the spider web, broken to solitary strings, clings fast to the antennae of my suv withstanding winds, and tunnels, and turns, and dives all the way home. 4 dead bats, huddled in the corner built into the trap between the new and old roof. not meticulously placed. proof that even the smallest of creature understands death, and the fear of leaving earth alone. you tell me i need to be alone to grow, to be independent. but how do I accumulate all the years ive spent alone in the company of others to prove that i already have? i will never stop loving you, but your caution has petrified me into a state of uncertainty: too fearful to make my own mistakes because you say you've made them before. i want to be fragmented light. trailing downward on a wooden stair case, separating each step with absence and shadow. always to return technicolor atop the next. you fear the darkness more than i. i will step into it, arms stretched forward, probing the air for familiarity, if you'd only let me try.
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Nov 1, 2016
Nov 1, 2016 at 2:15 AM UTC
Revelations @ St. Louis, MO
I am screaming I haven't stopped screaming I don't know how to express the fact That I can't stop screaming. Screaming in ways like sweating armpits Chafing thighs, itchy under-boob. In ways like waiting in lines and for Conversations to end. For feelings you can't source, that You just can't shake. Screaming in ways like an ache in the Lung or chest or heart and dry eyes for How much I love you. In ways like the strain Of muscles for words just beyond the tip of the tongue. The strain of laughs when Nothing runs through your mind. This will never be a love poem because I am Not in love. And never have been. This is a proclamation of the indescribable Feeling of feeling. Like trying to look at your entire life from one point. Impossible to do. Just like the universe, absent of a birds eye, focal point. The only way to see its entirety. It's complexity, is through the patch work Picture stitch of the infinity of stars. Would it be to cheesy to say that you are the infinity of stars? No, You are the finity of stars in the infinity of light.
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Nov 1, 2016
Nov 1, 2016 at 2:14 AM UTC
Marry Me In 1999
A wind mill sliced through the air in complete silence. Energy travels near, but won't travel far, land locking itself to what it already knows. Screaming. Bright. Rigid. Slime. With a hint of basil. Just reach out and taste it, as the warmth of it's rotations engulfs you. Maxwell Edison is stuck in the Pentagon and no one is going to save him. I can't hear you over the sound of the wind mills. But I don't need to hear your voice to listen to you anymore. "It's been a minute." You said, to me with the breeze messing up your tawny hair. You dip but I never would dive, because I'm afraid of breaking my neck. My questions remain unanswered. Must we know our names today? The reigning king of time and space showed me that I can make the clock tick faster and the days move slower. So I'd spend my nights flying through the mesosphere looking for lost breaths. Oh, joy joy, he would say when watching trails of smoke and cloud accumulate in the sky. I will never stop this ride. It will never end and I will never come back down to earth. My ever spinning song for you is stuck on repeat. I will end the night and the day to create the space of nothing where we have been all along. "Laissez les bons temps roulez" exclaimed the taxi cab meter, hiking up prices that made our wallets weep. No one is going to save you.
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Nov 1, 2016
Nov 1, 2016 at 2:14 AM UTC
Midterm
I'm in the current review of everything right now. When my lungs have told me *enough already* and I taste of foul consequences that seep into taste buds. The walls were gushing water, as they often seemed to do, and I always lay on my side, left leg crossed over right. Nothing irregular. The tinge, spark, of pain from a resting avocado, I can feel it in the tip of my thumb. The right one. You were supposed to be soft, and full of the good fats. I can't look at a cupola without seeing "SEWN". But I guess that's just what happens when someone intercepts your point of view.
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Feb 13, 2016
Feb 13, 2016 at 1:51 AM UTC
I found an avocado atop a cupola.
I don't believe in reality right now. The walls littered with literature of one night's sobbing onto the carbon copy- Machine out of order due to ******** and coffee spills. That wasn't supposed to rhyme and I'm glad it didn't but the meter of this poem is to irregular breathing and jostling doors on hinges influenced by the pressures of windows opening and closing. You were a goddess up there. In the chair that you loved and learned to hate 3 months later. It pulls you down deeper into your own personal- Help me understand your A.M. radio beauty. Was it recorded then, or is he making it now?
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Feb 13, 2016
Feb 13, 2016 at 1:47 AM UTC
A.M. Radio Beauty
a poem for Ben I remember sitting with you in a small field when the air was sweet and comfortable. An air that draped itself upon your skin to shield it from a breeze. The field, wasn't really a field. But an inevitably guilty attempt to cover up the shame of the town's aging lines. It was adjacent to a bank, and I played with the crumbling dried up dirt under the bench that you sat on I read you a poem here. You called me confessional. I don't remember what we were doing there. It is easiest to lose the time when you can feel it moving forward, but looking back has different laws in physics. Back, then, in the relation to now drags slowly behind the future. Progression. For now it is cold and I tread carefully, through ice glazed parking lots, but I can remember you in the warmth. And you can still find me in the snow.
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Feb 13, 2016
Feb 13, 2016 at 1:45 AM UTC
A Poem for Friend I