I have swallowed so much of other's blood that I have forgotten that I have bled, too.
With the world shuffling past,
I have became transfixed with the movements of my idols,
forgetting that my feet have left footprints that have, will, and always be buried under the sedimentary memories that I waited to smother me.
Sometimes I can feel my body buckle under the weight of all the dreams I've dared to dreamt.
Under the moon and on top of the world,
I understand that I am inbetween and will always be.
Oct 9, 2015
Oct 9, 2015 at 11:31 PM UTC
Tortured people tell themselves the past never happened.
They sit and reminisce about memories that they created.
Their hands are brown and worn down,
looking like a sibling of the ground that will eventually be a tomb for their bodies.
The teeth are fake and so are the smiles.
Hair falls off like rusty leaves brushed by a breeze, warning of the death of winter.
Limbs turn into string, ******* hang, and guts grow; like pregnant, stray cats.
Whenever they die, their houses will be eaten by their children, and not even a piece of gristle or a picture frame will be left.
The house will be nothing but a sun-dried ribcage:
a discarded postcard with the address marked out.
The children will sit and talk of their parents, repressing the abuse and the inability to meet expectations.
The children will work in sterile cubicles, thankful that their hands will not be stamped by calluses, yet knowing their fathers would not approve.
The children will open up the dust-blanketed boxes and stare at old family pictures, not able to recognize the people who smile and have perfect posture.
The children will lay in bed with their spouses and say, to no one in particular,
'Why was it never enough?
What did I do?
Was it me?'
The children will be tortured by these words,
by lives that weren't in technicolor,
by the paranoia of being tolerated instead of liked,
by the anxiety that a paid-off house
and nice car couldn't alleviate,
by themselves.
The children will retire and will have realized that they worked their entire lives just to enjoy ten years.
Their hair follicles will let go of strands and locks,
like a dandelion being stripped by the wind.
The enamel on their teeth will corrode and, before long, they will be thankful for the sensitivity of their teeth because the coldness of senior-citizen-discounted ice cream will be one of the few things they will be able to feel, let alone put a genuine smile on their face.
They will sit on their recliners, stare at their keyboard-kissed fingers and tell themselves the past never happened.
Because that's what tortured people do.
Aug 27, 2015
Aug 27, 2015 at 10:19 AM UTC
Old men fascinated by teen *****
and the hues harnessed by high school hips,
I ask you to look at something corrupted:
yourself, this town, this world.
The town's lumber supplier has died
and daughters fight over dollars.
Greasy haired women, wearing denim,
smoking menthols and bruised with cheap make-up,
stand on fractured sidewalks.
I walk, wearing a Native American-ized fleece,
the Chippewa crush their cigarettes
and blink like lizards at me
because I wear bastardization,
but wash it.
Half the town smokes,
and if you ask the pastor,
the whole town smokes
because everyone's going to hell.
All the girls read John Green
and flip the pages because it's a cheaper escape than a bus ticket.
Plato said that everything changes
and nothing stands still;
these people will suffer,
their bodies will break down,
and they will die --
but what never changes is their hope
in eventual death.
What cannot change is my hope
in something more.
Aug 23, 2015
Aug 23, 2015 at 3:29 PM UTC
The sky looks like cigarette ashes in a puddle of milk,
and I, almost 22, am unsatisfied that I have not won a Pulitzer.
And I, on the borderline of delusion and confidence, am unsatisfied I am not crazy or cocky enough to submit to The New Yorker.
I hear the voices of the pastors,
telling me that God heals all.
They say 'He' is the only absolute.
The people raise their hands towards the water-stained ceiling,
as if He'll push his arms through the copper-colored scabs and save them.
Grabbing their wrists and cooing,
I am the remedy to the anxiety of death.
I am six foot one and French, Irish, Cherokee,
some sort of Anglo-Saxon,
and a lost **** in a drowning garden.
I think about all those who had to ****
in order to make my cheekbones,
eyebrows, lips, and ****
I think about how I'm good at *** and bad when it comes to forgiving too easily.
I wonder how I can sweat on another body,
but only feel naked when I have to be myself.
I watch the elderly chant words:
****** ****** **** and Half-Breed.
I study if their dry lips reflect the hate in their eyes.
Not all are like this,
but I am surrounded by tables of them,
as I pretend to be Christian,
just to get ahead.
I don't speak,
just sit like an unfilled bubble,
waiting to be marked out by graphite.
I feel like a **********
I wish I had a Pulitzer.
The sky looks like a stretched grape,
covered in kisses of ******
And I, white American conformist,
am unsatisfied
that I have succumbed to the American Dream.
I wish I had a Pulitzer,
I wish I had my mom and dad.
Aug 16, 2015
Aug 16, 2015 at 3:16 PM UTC
Well, we were the History club rejects,
focusing on the effects
of being us
instead of in a book.
Two college drop-outs,
calling in shout-outs
to our friends,
hoping that it affected
how we looked.
Our dads would sleep in,
and our moms were crying
until a quarter past noon --
and we knew
if we didn't start trying,
that would be us, soon.
We were the starving artists,
painting fruit we couldn't afford.
Hoping each brushstroke of an artichoke
would be fruitful to our wallet,
or at least strike a chord.
Two love-loss orphans,
dreaming of morphing
into something or someone else.
But they told us
to remove that fluff
from our head
and put it on the shelves.
We were the film club fanatics,
studying the dynamics
of how to be a pretend person.
We wanted to be
a Wes Anderson flick,
but we were never any thing
other than who we were
and that's what made us sick.
And I swear I miss the desperation:
I'm nostalgic for yesterday's conversations.
Aug 11, 2015
Aug 11, 2015 at 6:18 PM UTC
His dog chased her
through the woods.
The rifle can **** from
three-hundred yards.
Watch her leap logs
and sidestep
sticks grabbing
at her shoulders.
There are three Gods
in the woods,
behind any tree.
No one is as ruled
as the lawless.
No one is as sedated
as the frenzied.
Sympathy couldn't be
measured in screams,
but measured
in her breaths.
Beyond the
honeydew horizon,
the senseless cease.
The half-life of eyes:
her only escape.
Where the tree-trunks
are furnished by the
candied corpses.
Her feet chomp at the
prostituted ground.
She will die, here,
whether she lives
or not.
For what is stolen,
stays.
Apr 7, 2015
Apr 7, 2015 at 8:27 PM UTC
In flashes,
her face dances
on top of a
broomstick body.
She refills
coffee cups and
her stomach with
butter pecan ice cream
and lovers' saliva.
But her lovers are
strangers
and her mouth is a
place
where secrets are locked
behind smoke stained teeth.
In flashes,
her ambitions escape
into the jet black night.
Cigarettes dropping like
sputtering fruit flies.
A size seven New Balance
buries a Marlboro corpse,
burning out like the light
in her kiwi eyes.
She returns to the diner.
What echoes reign free.
Apr 7, 2015
Apr 7, 2015 at 2:55 PM UTC
It was four o'clock in the morning. Robert wondered why his name was Robert. He decided to get rid of the "Bert" because it was the name of a Sesame Street character or the name of a ********* in Tempe, Arizona. Then again, he thought, "Hey, just Rob makes me sound like I change tires for a living or that I work out at a gym that discriminates fat people and blacks." Rob or Robert took a second to evaluate his last thought and if thinking "and blacks" made him a racist person.
Robert sat on a bench and wondered if the woman beside him was expecting Forest Gump-esque wisdom.
Robert thought of a friend he had in grade eight, named Alexander. He thought of how Alexander had a glass eye. Robert wondered how Alexander had a glass eye but could not remember or did not know why Alexander had a glass eye. Robert, then, concluded that sometimes he will not know something and how that is okay because most people don't know anything--it's a collection of approximates that stay in our heads, he thought. Robert asked himself if his last thought made him intelligent or dumb and pretentious. Robert decided that he did not know. How meta, he thought. Robert, then, decided to stop using the word "meta" so much, because it made him feel like a professor with bitterness and something to prove.
Robert watched his sister struggle with an eating disorder. She was in a hospital bed, with an IV in her arm. Robert did not know if he would struggle with anything as hard as his sister struggled with anorexia. Robert, then, had intense but fleeting anger at every person that bragged about being anorexic or made it seem cool.
Robert sat on his toilet and wondered what his true identity was and what his true nature was. He wondered what was inherent and what was synthetic. Robert, then, wondered if a synthetic personality was inherent. Robert asked himself if he was a good person. He wasn't sure if sitting on the toilet, in his grandmother's house, and ************ to interracial ebony teen **** on his iPhone, made him a good person or not. His concerns soon past, though, as soon as Lauren started to **** the pizza guy's white ****
Robert walked down the street and was contemplating some of the issues that plagued his porn-infested mind, while he was on the toilet. Robert saw a girl running from a guy. Robert asked himself if he was a hero or inherently good. Robert, then, concluded that he was inherently a coward, since he did nothing and hoped that somebody else would save her.
Robert didn't meet a girl and knew that no one would write prose about his meeting a girl and their mutual love for one another. Robert was eating a steak sub, while thinking this.
Robert returned to the hospital, to pick up his sister. On the way home, his sister talked about how attractive her nurse was. Robert asked, "What did he look like?" His sister, then, said, "It wasn't a he. My nurse was a girl." Robert was okay with his sister being attracted to girls, but hoped that she didn't get more than him or more attractive girls than him, because, for some reason, that would make him feel insecure. Robert decided to stop eating so many steak subs and to work out. Robert asked his sister if she wanted to get steak subs. She said, "sure".
Robert was working out in his basement. He heard the sound of retching, upstairs. Robert followed the sound of the vomiting and opened a bathroom door. He saw his sister stick her finger down her throat. He said to his sister, "That isn't anorexia." His sister said, "I know. There's a lot you don't know about me." Robert said, "I'm sorry."
Apr 5, 2015
Apr 5, 2015 at 11:24 AM UTC
I remember
when growing up
was desired.
We swung our lungs
upwards,
towards the sky,
so we could steal
the air of the
universe's river.
I'd call you on
my parents' red landline.
You'd call me on
a broken cordless phone.
Your father would yell
and I could hear your mother
knock over things
as she was either
running, hiding, or
fighting back.
You don't exist.
You're a figment of my
imagination.
You're a poem,
but I want you to be
a memory that is real
to substitute the ones
I wish were fake.
You don't exist.
Your name is not
Kimberly or June.
Your ears aren't pierced.
We never played games
or shared deep thoughts.
We never talked about
running the **** away.
We didn't grow up together.
We aren't close.
You were never born.
You are just a phantom
stemmed by an unoriginal
imagination. imagination.
imagination. imagination.
But I want you to be real.
Please exist beyond my mind.
In my head,
you confided in me.
In my head,
I wasn't so ******* alone
from ages 6 to 16.
In my head,
you're a phone call away.
I don't want to write a poem
to communicate to you.
Be born. Be born. Be born.
I have so much
I want to share.
I want you to meet
my girlfriend Rachel.
I want you to hear
about how everything
is going well, for once.
Be born. Be born.
Be born. Be born.
Apr 3, 2015
Apr 3, 2015 at 6:57 PM UTC
The girl and I
were tickled by sea foam,
our ankles wrapped in
diamond studded leeches--
We are the
yellow-bellied ********
in a porcelain nest of water.
Our running is stunted.
Our heels are bouncing
off the beach-face
and we are distracted
by the butterflies
because they look like
flowers floating before
the orange
and purple bled sky.
The girl and I
are in love,
but we laugh at feelings.
There's a polished
wrecking ball
swinging between our
chewed lips.
And we agree
love is for tin birds
in a flame cage.
Apr 2, 2015
Apr 2, 2015 at 11:34 AM UTC