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RILEY Jan 2014
I met a girl who couldn’t keep eye contact for more than three seconds;
She puts her palms in front of her face
A bit higher than her nose
So she could see you through her fingers,
So that
Her voice
A bit dim,
Can bounce on the walls she now builds
And reflects back to her,
Giving her time to rethink her words
Over and over and over and over
Until she makes sure that
Every type of person surrounding her
Would not blow bombs under her white sheets
Destroy her heart,
And shatter her soul,
Till she has no strength to carry her hands
And hold her palms as barriers for her protection.
I met a girl with red brown hair,
She had two thin lines of blue under her eyes
Because oceans could draw attention
To their beauty,
And under beauty
Lies her mess,
The doors could open a gate way to the fire that’s inside
While she only reveals sparkles
In the split seconds between every word
That she rambles on,
Because if she stopped talking
It would be silent enough
For her to listen to her inner voice,
And her inner voice is never pleased.
I met a girl with a wide smile and a sense of humor,
But she apologizes after every joke
And freezes after every laughter,
Thinking of how many mistakes she might have made
Thinking of how to fix them
Thinking if anybody noticed
No one ever did.
I met a girl with a silent giggle,
Her bangs strategically lie over her eyes
To cover the curvature of her emotions,
The lines she creates on her forehead
And inside her mind,
The shy lyrics that she sings alone
Swaying her body to a jimmy Hendrix
That broke her security systems
And unchained her
Till it was possible to move.
I met a girl,
Who knows a lot more than she needs to
Who works a lot more than she has to
Who loves a lot more than possible;
She lifts up the world around her
So she can forget how far down she lies,
She runs away from herself
To hide under buses and trains
Making sure everything was okay;
Everything is not okay.
I met a girl,
And she was called confidence
I met a girl,
And she was called insecurity
I met a girl,
Who was called social consciousness;
I met a girl
Who was called society
And that girl was a killer.
RILEY Jan 2014
As I walk down the street
That looks nothing but normal,
With pedestrians walking on the sides
Mothers calling sons after school,
Teenagers writing their dreams with sweat pants and converse shoes
Trotting down the pathways with their personalities
Compressed in their back packs;
I like to play a game called
“What’s behind the steering wheel?”
A bomb;
A wired representation of defeat
An open gate to oblivion,
A flower with pedals of fire
Pollen of political tyranny
With ignorant humans for bees
That “spread the word”.
“What’s behind the steering wheel?”
A kid reading a book
Forgetting the world outside
For the worlds in fairy tales
Seem real;
And as soon as his eyes start rolling
He envisions himself a leader of a striking army
A great protector of truth,
Or even a little girl dancing her way into the forest;
Busy being a child
She never thought about the monsters waiting on the other side;
And all those characters are despised,
In a world where innocence is put aside
Where dreams are confiscated
Like phones in elementary schools,
Where minds only follow
And hearts are black;
In a world,
Where reading a book becomes a threat
Only terminated by something louder than life
But nothing is louder than words.
“What’s behind the steering wheel?”
Afraid tyrants,
Calculating their reign
In seconds
And seconds are all they leave us
Before we leave us,
Before we start making martyrs of our names
And memorials of our pictures,
Before we write elegies
Before we write poems of anger
Before we cry down our thoughts
Screaming the names of those we lost;
Afraid that one day,
No one will remember those names
Afraid,
That one day,
Our name would be among them.
Ow martyrs who left us a world to fix
Our hands are tired of typing,
Our eyes are drowning
For the more we write down your names on our souls
The heavier are our tears;
Our thoughts are crumbling
Into posts and statuses
But who are we posting for, if all of you are dead?
Ow martyrs who left us with more spaces to cover
We cannot cover all this by ourselves.
Our trials are self-destructing,
Our memories are filled with images of you
Hoping that our memories stay memories
As we revolute towards our future.
Our flowers are wilting,
Our candles are too close to burning out
We have read all the prayers that we know
And as the journey prolongs
I ask myself…
“What now?”
Our rage is dormant,
Our eyes are open as we observe
The post traumatic epilepsies the world is coming about,
Our minds,
Once fooled
Are now base lines for our attacks;
Our hearts are filled with images of you
In an open chamber
Easy to access
For one day
All these images will appear on the surface of us
And that is the day we avenge you

Ow martyrs who left us,
You left us with a world to fix and a nation to create.
RILEY Dec 2013
To the young lady that tends to lose her track;
Your eyes are not for tears,
Your eyes are to open portals for my thoughts
To transcend their limitations
And step into your worlds of wonder.
Your face is not to frown,
It is for the people like me
To find the clarity they once lost,
The warmth they crave,
And just the glow they need to light their way into a better perhaps.
Your hands are not for clutching,
Not for
Creating wide spaces to cover the diameter of your face;
Your hands, are to wave in between threads of air that
Hold my love and send it to you;
Your fingers are to unleash the senses
Of those whos bodies are numb
Those who have never experienced your touch.
Your soul is never for anger
Your hatred is untrue
Your energy lies within
You just have to extract it.
You are not to cry,
You are to set free torrents of emotions
Trapped inside a cage with golden bars
A brunette with beautiful wide eyes;
You are not to breakdown
You are to dissect your existence and reshape it
To better represent
Your essence.
You are the gem that loses its spark
When the dust becomes so heavy on your soul
Until it starts burning your eyes;
But shake the dust.
Shake the dust and rise
Be the young lady I know you keep inside, the young lady I love.
Be the savior,
For you do not want saving
Be the hero,
For strength is dormant in between your eye lashes
Be the elevating voice,
That rescues us from our pits
Be the young lady I know you keep inside, the young lady I love.
RILEY Dec 2013
No one can love you the way that I do.
I can,
Decipher the codes on your finger nails
Never painted
Because you can be beautiful without it.
I can,
Make you laugh
When you’re too close to crying
And you have no energy left
To lift you back up.
I can make heaters out of my hands
When you are cold,
And lyrics out of my love
Because no one can love
You the way that I do.
I can make you feel comfortable enough
Until you realize
That you should’ve felt insecure.
I can, give you promises
That will cut parts of my heart
And I will keep them
Because I like my new heart
Even better that way;
I can talk to you.
I can talk to you.
I can talk to you until we run out of water
And fresh juice
To nourish our mouths
And even then, I would still have more to give,
I can talk to you
At midnights and early mornings
Until our eyes
Are but seeds
Watered by the burning droplets of rain
Over the oceans of emotion over flowing between us.
I can listen to you,
I can hear your words
Like your heart was tapping
On my inner soul
And my heart opens the door
And tells you
“I know what you mean”
I can listen,
To the silence in your eyes
As they speak to me
I can listen,
To the depth of your soul
I can listen to that burning fire of yours.
That vividness.
That rage.
That triumph
That fervor
That love
That pride,
That vulnerability,
That, and all that aside
No one can love you
The way that I do.
RILEY Dec 2013
To the Days I Felt Safe:
For those who
Tie knots around their necks,
With words they once heard
Sound fancy enough they choke upon their diction
You do not belong.
For those
Whos hands wave
And voices shiver,
To cover the emptiness of their words
You do not belong.
For those who-
Sit in corners
And draw airplane in their minds,
And create universes
So that their little airplane can find
A reason to fly;
And by the end of the day in school
They would learn that,
Black holes are never darker that the pits of our day dreamt creations,
And moons cannot reflect
All the rays of imagination
A little kid dives in,
Each day,
Sitting in corners,
Inspired by the spirals
On the edges of his copybooks
Because what’s in the middle of the page
Was never his concern;
He did not belong.
For those who paint their dreams
Red blue and green
On the back of their veins
While their skin is dead pale
You do not belong.
For those who find difficulties reading,
And find haven in short words
And in pauses after sentences
And in deaths after paragraphs,
And find heaven when no text book is open
You do not belong.
For those who can love
Hard enough to call it love
You do not belong-
I do not belong.
For those who are tired of their deafening surroundings,
The fruitless noises
Of teenagers who forgot how to think,
Their voices that shatter
Like ultra-violet rays
Hitting ozone layers;
Who are tired of loved ones that fail to realize,
That the beauty of their souls
Rises and falls
Twists and turns
And burns to the core of my heart,
Till it bleeds
Verses of spoken word poetry
Of words unspoken,
You do not belong.
And belonging is relative
And death- is partial,
For social circles squeezed too tight
That it’s too hard to breathe,
And our egos grew too wide
We forgot who we really are
Although we’re full of ourselves.
But our imagination; takes us away
Till we realize
How far we are
From who we could be.
RILEY Nov 2013
What are the reasons for death? Crime, cancer, car crashes? Sickness, sun burn, sarcasm? Gun shots, gas pedals, gaming consoles? What are the reasons for death? What makes death something we don’t experience every other day, like drinking coffee or smoking a cig. What if it is something we experience every day but on certain levels? Think, think, you’re running out of time, partial deaths are coming to you. Partial deaths are coming when she looks at your soul and discovers the flaws and uses them as a tool for hers. Partial deaths, are coming when he decides to return every ounce of care and infatuation of hers with indifference and insensibility of his. Partial deaths? do you think that in the upcoming years were going to have health coverage for that? “YOU NEVER KNOW WHEN IT HITS, MAKE SURE YOURE COVERED WHEN IT DOES manly voice for more information about partial death insurance contact 01000000”. All the zero’s in the world…the round hollows of infinite curvature and as soon as you think you’ve reached the end of your misery you’re going to start all over again and again and again, and again. And again. The partial deaths become more complete, the, heart strokes become heart stabs, the kisses become bites, and everything else is just raised up a notch, and a notch becomes a whole new level like never before. Day dream while you can when you can’t because that’s when we usually get our great ideas; the math class won’t end and it extends, like minutes were lifetime in her eyes as she walks up and down the trail of my thoughts and sideways on the horizon of my vision and inwards through my heart back flipping on my arteries and summersaulting on my veins leading her way to destroy my brains. My brains, that sounds odd. It sounds odd because I never located it really, at least not its functional capabilities because it is definitely not what I use to think. I think through a blank page that provokes me till I write, I think through  staring screens and flickering lines, I think through a round table that affectionately carries my black coffee, I think through my black coffee, I think through pink Floyd playing in my ears and the other voices that are not mine.  I think there for I am, but the more that I think the more I realize what I am not.
RILEY Nov 2013
I apologize if my eyes,
Tend to wander into your worlds.
Penetrating the walls you’ve built,
To get a sneak peek into your last nights
And next years
And what are you doing todays.
I apologize,
If my ears air-waved into your waving dictions,
Dropping tones,
Dimming voices,
Dictating the peace you want yourself to attain
Through the side conversations
And the cocktail effects
Attending, to what you’re not aware of.
And I wasn’t aware that you are going to treat me that way;
I gave you my heart over dinner
Last night; under the table your family was sitting on-
As we put on our decorous smiles
And threw our shy giggles;
Cracking up with strong inner laughter within,
Because the same
Lost, upset, wild
Shoot first ask later couple
Are pretending to blush over “grown up” jokes
Made by our fathers
To test our inner surfaces;
I gave you my heart over dinner last night,
And that was
THE last night;
Because my heart and yours
Stopped exercising their vividness
On a Tuesday morning.
They, stopped writing musicals of us,
For my heart was executed
And yours got shattered-
Nowhere to be found;
Martyred in between the lines of a political message
They wrote with your blood
Forgetting about mine,
They carved their letters
With the nymph in a black sweater;
And the river that she used to own,
Took her away
Before anyone can see,
The disfigured goddess now list in the sea
Of blood-of my thoughts and reflections.
My voice,
Now layered into dissimilar tones;
The lowest, is the one I use to constantly pray for you
And the highest is for me to scream for your fallen eyes.
I stand steady
Against the tidal waves
And write on the walls
The poetry I kept inside,
The walls you’ve built;
The walls everyone builds
And I try to penetrate
To get a sneak peek
Of their last night’s
And next year’s
And what are you doing today’s.
Because my walls are destroyed
My pillars are demolished
My life is but a living memory of hers,
And my eyes are nothing but thieves,
Staring their way to steel the words
From the faces in the crowd
In order to write something
That can get me to forget
That I am mourning;
That in my head plays a sad guitar,
With a silent base
And a lost drum beat.
I apologize for writing this,
For letting your eyes conquer these papers
For letting your ears hear those words.
I apologize for feeling the urge to apologize
But that’s what I grew up on
And no one can seem to get rid of their bad habits…
Here's to the fallen martyrs of our mistakes.
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